Two Weeks to Final Weigh-In

Previous Weight: 163
Current Weight: Keeping It A Secret

So I've thought about it, and I've decided not to share my progress during this month on my own before the final weigh in.

I will share my struggles and triumphs, however, considering that's what this blog is for, after all. First, the struggles (because I want to end on a high note): I have been uncontrollably ravenous lately. I attribute this to the feasts spurred by Easter and my nonexistent self composure. It also doesn't help that my grandmother, who retired from the Oakdale, Calif., Hershey plant more than a decade ago, always sends boxes and boxes of Hershey chocolate to my home for any given holiday. People, I moved 3,000 miles away from the woman in the hopes of getting away from all that chocolate. But rather than avoiding Grandma's chocolate, my move actually made the situation worse. Now she sends me more chocolate than she would have normally, because, according to her logic, I'm so far away and who knows how long I'll have to go between chocolate shipments.

Another problem is that I have no freaking control. On Saturday, I shopped Publix for something good and fresh and healthy to cook for Easter dinner -- I eyeballed the hams and the lamb shanks and the fried chicken and walked away from them all (the Harbison Publix has the best fried chicken I've ever tasted in my entire life, by the way; I don't really care for fried chicken all much, and before you die-hard Southerners gasp at my lack of good taste, consider that I do hail from the West Coast where usually the only fried food available comes from KFC). I also checked out the fish -- but Publix isn't known for having the freshest or cheapest fish -- and eventually settled on a couple of whole chickens. I figured I could roast a couple of birds, grill some green beans or snap peas and bake a baguette and be done with it.

And that's what I did. But here's where it gets embarrassing, not to mention disturbing. On Sunday, we ate dinner and lounged a bit before I jumped into the pile of dirty dishes, and as I was scraping pans and rinsing plates, there it was -- that chicken carcass just sitting there staring at me with all that leftover chicken meat. Anyone who has ever had to put away the leftover turkey after Thanksgiving will know what I'm talking about. For some unholy, disgusting reason, bird carcasses are wonderful things to gnaw on after supper, even though after fowl feasts of this nature, you're usually stuffed to the , well tailfeathers, I guess.

Just so you can get a mental picture of what happened (I'm totally laying myself out for ridicule here), something similar happened a few years ago. In my teens, after high school before I went back to college, I moonlighted as a number of things to make ends meet -- web designer, legal assistant, phlebotomist, waitress -- and housecleaner (OK, maid). One of my first jobs (I think I was 15 or 16) was cleaning my grandmother's neighbor's house. She had a herniated disc in her back and could move around -- and cook -- but little else. I'd clean her house and she'd make me lunch. She was a good cook. She'd leave cakes out on her kitchen counter for me to hunk a slice off for a snack after work and let me nibble on the candy she kept in little glass jars all around her house. Anyway, one day she baked a chicken for lunch. We sat out on her covered porch and ate chicken and sipped iced tea (FYI, there's no such thing as sweet tea in California). After lunch I went back to work, and was also given the task of cleaning up the kitchen.

And there it was. That damn carcass. The house was dead silent. My grandma's neighbor was supposed to be napping in her bedroom. Supposedly, I had the house, and more importantly, the kitchen, to myself. So I started nibbling. And picking. And gobbling. At first, I'd just take a quick bite between spritzes of Endust and Windex. Finally, I put down my cleaning supplies and set to cleaning up the carcass.

And that's when Grandma's Neighbor walked in on me. She caught me mid-motion, hand halfway between the bird and my mouth, chicken piece dangling from greasy fingers. She looked at me for a long moment, silent as the house, and then, finally, she said, "Honey? Are you still hungry?"

I couldn't say anything. I just shook my head and put the chicken down. After she left me alone, I threw the carcass in the trash, and for years after, I refused to bake chickens in my own home because it reminded me of how embarrassing it was to be caught eating the disgusting remains of a dead animal in somebody else's kitchen.

So here I was, 15 years later, no baked chicken-rule thrown out the window, meaty carcass sitting there on my counter looking at me. At this point, the story gets fairly anticlimactic. Yes, I picked at the damn carcass. Yes, I was ashamed, having learned nothing from past mistakes (or present loads of weight-induced food guilt).

It's been rough going the last couple of weeks, because incidents like this one have been the norm rather than the exception, thanks in part to a box full of Hershey Symphony bars (350 calories a piece), and in part to a false sense of security since there haven't been an weekly weigh-ins scaring the crap out of me (and thus motivating me to exercise and starve myself) Tuesday afternoons.

But that leads me to the good news, or just something I'm proud of anyway. I've started early morning walks (yay!). It's not as much fun as I remember. I used to love to walk and used to live in a downtown area in the Sierra foothills where I could walk to everything: the grocery store, the post office, the video rental store (remember those?). But I'm so out of shape now that it's taking every last bit of will power I've got to get my ass moving. I'm doing it, though, and that's why I'm proud of myself.

The ridiculous thing is why I'm doing it. I've been getting up at 6 a.m. for the last couple of weeks out of necessity, and now that I'm used to waking up at the ass-crack of dawn, I can actually make use of my mornings by exercising. Why was I waking up at 6 a.m., you ask? To take my 13-year-old to his community service job, of course. (He was assigned 30 hours of dumping trash cans at the city parks thanks to his little brush with the law a few months ago.) But hell, at least I've turned something ridiculously depressing into something useful.

In the end, I won't win this competition. But I can't deny that's it's taught me a lot about myself, about my family, about how I interact in the world. What's winning compared to that priceless information?