Somehow, without doing more than being poor and a little more conscious of my eating, I've lost 20 lbs in about 2 months. I can't tell a difference beyond not feeling so bloated, but I weighed today and it was there in splendiferous digital. Given that I'm bleeding like a stuck pig, it'll probably drop more, although that'll just be temporary water weight.
I'm beginning to wonder if Liz' diet is somehow affecting me in some weird law of similarity (and yes, for those who can't tell, I'm joking). She once asked someone to shoot her if she ever weighed as much as I did (this was when we both weighed less, and no, that part isn't joking, but was an actual quote). She's the one obsessively counting everything and plotting it on her blog, and yet I've lost without doing anything short of eating more consciously. Some sort of strange kismet, I ask?
Okay, I know this is a bit petty on my part, but it was an extremely hurtful comment at the time, and so there is some small part of me that's happy that I've lost more than she has without really trying. On the other hand, I'm glad she's eating healthy and exercising and doing stuff she should, and it only reminds me that I do need to continue to work on things myself, not to be skinny, just to be healthy. One of the things that bonded us originally (because goodness knows it wasn't our winning personalities, which were both rather toxic at the time) was our struggles with weight and body image. Some part of me is still curious about how she's doing, which is why I occasionally check up on her, I suppose.
In terms of my own weight, I already feel quite a bit better. I've noticed, though, that for me, scrimping and getting to the point where my life is ruled by numbers only makes it harder; rather, when I feel better about myself, I lose weight. You know the saying, 'don't change your body, change your mind'. It just happens. I feel better, I don't eat as much (although I'm mostly over emotional eating) and exercise more. I feel so much better emotionally and mentally than I did a year or two ago, even with all the challenges the layoff brought. Now that I'm living life more fully, I'm really starting to deal with some of the physical pain and issues I've managed to ignore for some time. The good thing about dissociating from emotional pain is that you tend to ignore your body's ills, too. The bad thing is that they don't go away...you just stick your fingers in your ears, say 'la, la, la' and it gets worse because it's not taken care of. But in the long run, I think I'm feeling better because, well, I'm an upbeat kind of person. I know there will be high and low points in life, just like the ocean, and that's okay. I hope things will improve, but it's not going to change how I feel about my own capabilities.
Still, it's funny how luck runs. I've always tended to have weirdly bad luck. Liz has amazingly good luck, she's said so herself. She's even wished she could send me some of hers. I really wonder what we've done in past lives that set that up. But on the other hand, she's the one of all of us who wound up as an 'academic' fresh out of undergraduate classes in so far as she's working for a university, has faculty status, and even teaches classes in web design. She was the one who wasn't really all that interested in an academic career, whereas I always expected to do it and have pursued it for twenty years, and yet in the end, I realise it's not what I want. I used the academic world to hide from the world outside. Now I'm actually enjoying being away from the bureaucracy of the university. I might someday return to the university, but my true enjoyment there has always been as a learner. I do plenty of teaching one on one as a librarian, and I enjoy that far more than the dreams of writing my name with a 'Dr.' in front of it on a chalkboard gave me. Right now I have applications in that could put me right into the academic world I trained for and tried to enter for years--and the position is even in archives--but I also have prospects at a public library, and I have to admit, having worked now for some time in the health sciences, I'd probably prefer the public library experience at this point, especially given my interest in information literacy, intellectual freedom, and democracy.
Who knew?
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