Archive for the 'An ass the size of Rhode Island' Category

Activity Points

May 21, 2008 | Filed under: An ass the size of Rhode Island

“Weight Watchers can kiss the fattest part of my ass” - Jen Lancaster

Things that should have a Weight Watchers Activity Points Value:

1)    Getting undressed then redressed while upacking a suitcase while going through security in under 47 seconds.

2)    Running through a terminal then back to the beginning with heart rate increased upon realizing that your boarding pass is at security then running back through the terminal.

3)    Chasing after a plane.

4)    Lifting a laptop bag and 30lbs of camera equipment into the overhead compartment. (Think of your deltoids!)

5)    With the laptop bag, 30lbs of camera equipment on one shoulder and an oversized hobo bag on the other shoulder along with 40lbs of clothing and shoes in a large suitcase, chase after a MARC train in a station with an inoperable elevator. First run up a flight of stairs, across an enclosed bridge then down a flight of stairs behind an 80 year old man who seems to think that catching a train means walking slowly and deliberately like the train is going to sit there and give him an engraved invitation to take his damn time. Reach the train platform to see the train pull away. Then run back up the same flight of stairs you just came down, run back across the enclosed bridge, back down the next flight, tap your foot and bite your cuticles while waiting in line (an easy 150 calories burned). Oh! The train comes in three minutes! Run up a flight of stairs, back across the enclosed bridge then down a flight of stairs to the train and drag your possessions to a seat at the end of the last car and hoist your 40lbs suitcase to the overhead rack. Seriously, y’all an easy 350 calories burned.

And this morning? I’m currently sitting in bed and it feels like 897 tiny men are poking my upper back with fire pokers. Then after the poking they are kicking their tiny feet along my neck. It feels glorious. Also my ass is still fat. But soon my arms are going to be all “Welcome to the Gun Show.”

In praise of breathing

April 2, 2008 | Filed under: An ass the size of Rhode Island

“I really don’t think I need buns of steel.  I’d be happy with buns of cinnamon.”  ~Ellen DeGeneres

So the other evening I’m sitting around in some jeans – which isn’t anything out of the ordinary but it’s always a good time when I’m wearing pants – when I noticed that when I first bought the pants covering my ass they could barely do their job given that they were a tad too small. And by ‘too small’ I mean that I couldn’t breathe in them and sitting in them required an act of God. Getting up from a sitting position to a standing position required holding of the belt loops with one hand and the button with the other because I thought that maybe the button would fly off and permanently blind a five year old boy. Then I would be that girl with the wide ass whose button seriously harmed some child, BUT! I would be able to breathe. Lesson for all the children out there: Sometimes you must suffer for another person’s happiness or another person’s ability to move oxygen throughout their body.

I bring up the pants because I am spending several of the next few days cuddling with a person who last saw me when my pants were so tight that blood circulation was briefly halted. I think she’ll be excited to see me because a) I still have all of my appendages and b) The extreme tightness around my waist did not cause the top half of my body to spontaneously fall off and go rolling down some stairs.

Seriously people, I was sitting in these pants just yesterday and I was like Whoa! Breathing while wearing jeans. What will they think of next? And now that these jeans are a tad too big, my new party trick is too remove them without unbuttoning or unzipping them. And since I have apparently turned into a 13-year-old boy, I might have to get drunk off of half a Smirnoff Ice and then go around mooning people.  Then I’ll leave a note in someone’s locker before homeroom that says “Will you go out with me? Circle YES or NO” and decide the rest of my future with a rousing game of MASH.

Today’s lesson: Sometimes pain is necessary if you ever hope to wear your favorite dress again

March 21, 2008 | Filed under: An ass the size of Rhode Island

“Pain of mind is worse than pain of body” - Latin Proverb

If several fires erupted at every single scale manufacturer throughout the world, I am pretty sure that it would be ok, as I would still have a mother who knows and notices my weight every single time she lays eyes on me. And she doesn’t do it in an obnoxious way but if we have lunch together after such an instance she’ll grill me on what I’ve been doing and tell me that I’ve lost a ton of weight. Something I do not blame her for since the better part of November and December, I spent looking like a blow fish.

I am one of those unfortunate people who gains weight in my middle. And then it slowly creeps north and south and then my boobs look awesome. But my face looks puffy. I feel puffy. And I’m also sure that if someone tossed me into the Hudson I would be buoyant. So let’s try that experiment later. It’s really hard to complain though when a) I still can buy all the frilly dresses I damn well please b) Gap has provided me with an ample supply of trapeze blazers for these occasions and c) My cleavage looks phenomenal. So I tend to go through these I look like a giant hot air balloon moments, knowing that it will pass and maybe McDonalds should stop making such tasty fries. Maybe they’re the problem. Not me.

During a particularly rough few weeks between November and December, weeks when I looked like I was hiding a beach ball under my shirt, I read about the Master Cleanse courtesy of Melissa. It wasn’t a ‘weight’ thing that led me to take notice as much as it was I could just feel vegetable oil coming out of my pores and several weeks of eating out at not the finest dining establishments was starting to make me feel generally icky. I’ll digress to be all After School Special-like, but it is rarely a weight issue and more about how I feel so blargh. It’s that I feel bloated and puffy and I’d really like for someone to stick me with a pin and then I’ll pop, type feeling. Anyway, I followed Melissa’s experiences and on December 26th after weeks of piling on the carbohydrates and Blue Moons I started because I really just wanted to get that shit out. I’ll spare you the gory details about a good salt water flush (It works!) and say that after 10 days, I escaped feeling refreshed, several pounds lighter, and with an aversion to sea salt. In fact, just yesterday I opened a cabinet to get out a spice, noticed the sea salt canister and gagged. But other than that minor setback, it was superb.

I felt better, like a feather (named Heather) and then several weeks later, my ever-sober, holistic, Kripalu loving roommate, mentioned something about a detox. And I being the ever-drunk, bloated, lemming that I am decided to follow. It was 21 days going gluten, egg, dairy, sugar and caffeine-free. It was surprisingly EASY. The caffeine part almost killed me dead and I thought of all the things I would rather be doing than having a constant pounding headache, like, say, watching clowns run around the room, but other than that, it’s amazing the amount of enlightenment that comes when you spend weeks staring at the back of food packages. Also, my survival is not determined by the number of burritos I can shove into my mouth. I did this for three weeks - and have continued to do so - which brings us to yesterday when my mother was staring at me slack jawed because I had the audacity to ask for brown rice in my paella for Easter and I would not be enjoying macaroni and cheese unless she was using soy cheese and gluten free pasta. And now friends and family are all how do you eat? And I’m all, do I really look like a person who would allow herself to starve?!? Uh. No. Let’s just say russet and sweet potatoes are my new best friends and I have a bit of a ‘thing’ for cabbage.

Speaking of my lemming status and the crazy shit I will do to make myself less circular: I was going to tell you about boot camp. Group exercise with a drill sergeant, three days a week at 5:15 AM. But it’s 7 AM and I’ve been up for three hours and I’m pretty sure that if I sit with my weight supported on my arm much longer, then it will fall off. Then you will have no more prose from me! Then what will you do? If this all sounds painful and torturous though it really isn’t and like I said I feel better which was half of my goal. The other half being that I look forward to the day when I can wear my white summer dress with pockets(!!) without looking like I’m smuggling a 32 week old fetus around in my uterus. The end.

Off the wagon

October 5, 2007 | Filed under: An ass the size of Rhode Island

 First and foremost, your delurking skills make me want to cry and treat you all to some Gewürztraminer.

“A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.”  ~A.A. Milne

For the most part I both pride and chide myself for being a creature of habit. I like my routine and feel comfortable knowing that each day will pretty much be the same as the last. Which makes me entirely predictable and fairly boring. There were months during which one could set their clock to my Saturday mornings, for every Saturday at 11 AM I could be found perusing the frozen food section of the Trader Joe’s in Georgetown picking out prime pieces of organic free range Alaskan wild salmon and debating between Macaroni and Cheese and a frozen vegetable bowl.

Given my routine nature, I had predictably had a quasi-schedule each day that always started off with going to the gym between 5:15 and 6:00 AM. Sundays were a double dose of a run at 3:15 and then spinning at 5 PM.  Then home to shower and eat the aforementioned salmon, prepare my lunch, which usually included peas, for the following morning and then Desperate Housewives with a glass of Pinot Noir and bed.

And then I moved.

This whole moving shit – from my mother’s house to my new apartment and subsequent life of luxury in the Southwest cattle call, put a wrench into my nice life filled with eating my weight in cantaloupe and a daily trip to the gym. This whole moving shit, has turned me into a person who eats when she has time and hasn’t visited a grocery store in something like seven or eight weeks. The gym? The gym is that place with the weights and the cardio equipment and where I once emerged victorious after a long run with an ass you could bounce a quarter off of. There was routine and structure and I knew what workouts would be done on which days. I rarely ate French fries and burritos were a treat. Even my whole meticulous nature of recording everything that went into my mouth has been replaced by a growing fondness for anything with a Hershey’s chocolate logo emblazoned on it.

As of right now my burrito to gym ratio is roughly 475 to 1.

While I normally wouldn’t dwell on such a thing, I find myself getting soft in areas that were once fairly compact. I’m long past some illusion of perfection in a size six, given that it is virtually impossible for me to achieve such without shaving off large amounts of bone. And thankfully I am in complete proportion and when I gain weight back it starts off at the top (which explains why someone can now throw quarters down my cleavage if they so desired) and then goes down. So despite my ever present hankering for a vegetarian bbq “chicken” burrito, I can still fit into my pants and then remove them without unbuttoning, which is surely a good sign.

Despite that I still feel…I don’t know…funny. Possibly because I’m full of potatoes in various forms instead of the once ubiquitous omega-3’s. I just feel ’squishy’ in a way that’s making me itch for a 45 minute session on an elliptical and an abdominal workout that makes me feel like someone just punched me with brass knuckles in my obliques. I have fallen off the workout wagon and right now, instead of craving more Parmesan truffle French fries, I’m craving getting up at 5:30 in the morning and having sweat pouring out of every orifice.  I’m craving salmon and peas and cauliflower and a big ass salad covered in balsamic vinegar.

I’m currently on a plane to Los Angeles for a mini-holiday where I will not mention work or congress or Washington, DC or veto. I will probably eat a disgusting amount of carbohydrates and subsequently feel bad about it. I’m putting this in writing in order to hold myself to my oft ambiguous and lofty promises; upon my return I am rejoining my gym. I’m going to eat an excessive amount of peas (I really, really like peas) and in six weeks, I’ll once again be able to comfortably visit Anthropologie without feeling like my ass will knock over a display of cashmere hoodies.

Butter

August 8, 2007 | Filed under: An ass the size of Rhode Island

“WW is the cure for all that ails you. Including psoriasis.” – Kris Likey

Every week, for the past three months, I have diligently gone upstairs to my mother’s scale on Thursday mornings at 7 AM after my workout but before my shower. If I’m not home, I don’t weigh myself, usually because there’s no scale in the hotel or because I’m anal retentive and really don’t want to see that I’ve suddenly gained 14 lbs in two days because of a stray filet-o-fish that found it’s way down my gullet.

When I returned home from Chicago, I went back to my normal workout routine and weigh – in. Y’all, I thought I broke the damn scale. I weighed myself not once, not twice, but four separate times, each showing the same low weight. I sat back and realized that it might be because for an entire weekend, I ate nothing. Everything I ingested was a grape in its ever popular liquefied and fermented form. So I was pleasantly surprised and went on my merry, fiber ingesting ways.

I don’t really obsess about my weight. I’ve gotten to the point where I get excited when my mother asks me why my pants are falling off my ass, thus making me look like a little boy. I smile and say that I forgot my belt and then continue with my tra la la of not ripping another pair of far too small jeans while getting into the car or something. I shop at Forever 21 and the Nordstrom Junior’s department, so really, I feel like there’s nothing to really worry about. Which is a far, far cry from the tumultuous years of 1995 – 2001. Those were not what I would call my finer moments in body image, possibly because I was between the ages of 12 and 17 and possibly because my classmates started the really fantastic trend of referring to me as “Butter”.

I’ve never said the latter out loud because I still go back to that very hurt feeling even though this was a seventh grade thing and even though – in a very strange turn of events – the person who originally started this, died three years ago, I still find the word hard to say and to hear. Even in it’s most incredulous use. I found out later that ‘they’ called me “Butter” because for me to get through the door would require a stick of butter around the frame.

Hardy fucking har har. Now I can laugh, because my lord, weren’t they some clever motherfuckers and I’m sure I can list off the prodigious successes of those that took to calling me that really great name including failing out of high school, failing out of community college and a stint at Friday’s. I hope they are all really proud of themselves. I’m sure their parents are.

But really! I’m not bitter (Fuckers). I’m just letting go of things in the past because it’s time and because my ass is actually smaller now than it was in High School and because I SHOP IN THE JUNIOR’S SECTION. Something I totally missed between the ages of 13 and 18. I’ve gotten past the need to be a size 6 because I would look disgustingly emaciated and there’s nothing hotter than a girl with no ass with her collar bone jutting out. So let me relish in these victories, enjoy my liquid grapes and make a little trip to Anthropologie because I totally deserve another cute dress with pockets.