Wanna hold my turkey? It weighs slightly less than the total amount of weight I’ve lost. Holy shit!
(My turkey is thirteen and a half pounds. I’ve lost almost fourteen now. Who wants some white meat?)
Happy Thanksgiving!
Forty days and ANTM nights
America’s Next Top Model watch: Man, we sure hope all the remaining contestants sneak up on Melrose’s bed in the middle of the night to whack her with bars of soap wrapped in towels. That is all I will say about her. Remember, it was just a bad dream, skinny girl!
I’ll admit that I don’t really love any of the girls this season as much as I love the completely freakish challenges the show’s been putting them through. How can you not be in awe of the terrible, demented collective genius that decided to cast the twins as “Anorexia” and “Bulimia” in a theme photo shoot? That made a girl dress up as Stedman Graham? I was disappointed when Megan was eliminated, not just because of her looks, but because she’d survived a tragic plane crash when she was a little kid, and over and over she’d get called on to recite the story of her amazing ordeal. And okay, this is awful, but I was secretly hoping the show’s art directors would come up with some kind of plane-crash -themed photo shoot where she’d have to pose extra bravely while partially pinned under a chunk of fuselage. Really, the show is that good! I mean bad! But then again, they’ve gone and fired Dan and the other writers, so who knows how it’s all going to turn out.
This Thing I’m Doing is just past the 40 day mark, and as of tomorrow it’ll be six weeks. I don’t know if I mentioned that we’re shooting for a hundred days of This Thing, where we weigh ourselves every two weeks. (And yes, this is totally borrowed from Celebrity Fit Club, God help us. What can I say—that Tina Yothers, she spoke to me, even though I never watched her show when she was a kid.) Anyway, Day 100 hits in late January, right around the time when—usually—it finally occurs to me that the holidays are over and I really ought to make a few twitchy, vaguely fitness-related movements as soon as I can dig myself out of the cozy nest I’ve built from fried Thai noodles. But I’m counting on things being different this year.
I feel, honestly, sort of sneaky about doing it this way. Mostly sneaky in a good way, but there’s a twinge of incredulity there, too. Maybe it’s because I’m such an unrepentant dork when it comes to the holidays. But if I don’t make sugar cookies this year, will a gang of Rankin-Bass characters come to my house to kick my ass? Probably not, right? Okay, then!
Wednesday by the numbers
1. There is a college English class somewhere that has I’m Not the New Me as this week’s assigned reading. The instructor is letting me read the student responses on their class blog, and let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a group of eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds discuss your love life from five years ago.
2. Chris and I saw a movie at the Music Box last week, and about an hour after we left I realized my wallet wasn’t in my purse, so we went back to the theatre to look for it where we’d been sitting. Which was a little hard since the next show had started already, and it was dark, and I had to guess which row we’d sat in and then crawl around patting the floor like Helen Keller, Custodian. And was it really so hard for you to comprehend that I was looking for something, O Thursday night Music Box patrons watching loudQUIETloud? Because it was pretty niceSHITTYnice how you couldn’t be bothered to reach down and check the floor around you for the thing I was looking for. I know it was asking a lot for you to miss five seconds of Pixies concert footage and all the highly important plot points and expository dialogue that came with it, but for fuck’s sake. I did manage to find my wallet, no thanks to the girl whose indifferent Fluevogs were resting against it the whole time.
3. This morning we had a substitute instructor for our fancy “Lifting Weights to the Beat of Hateful Pop Remixes” class. Usually I don’t care either way, but today I actually missed the squeaky and totally unintelligible instructions our regular instructor gives while doing the final abdominal exercises. She says, “Nggh hnn urnnnuh-nun errk! And errk! Nurr heen! Heen! Hnnrk errn grnt to four! Grnnk!” I know the routine, so it’s not a problem, but really, it’s like being drunk-dialed by a Fraggle.
4. Here is an informative letter from a very kind veterinarian named Bob Groskin in response to my last NY Times piece. He breaks my heart a little by pointing out that I might have been able to find a vet to save Bootsy. But then he helpfully suggests other humane ways I could have killed him. I did read about the clove oil in my research and in retrospect I wish I had looked a little harder to find it. LISTEN TO DR. BOB, PEOPLE.
5. Today is Day 36 of This Thing I’m Doing, and I’m still planning on writing more about it. We went to Michigan for the weekend, where I sullied my innocence with a few Swedish meatballs and some Chinese food, but somehow I managed not to return to my old life of crime and fried cheese.
6. I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the first time ever, and despite all my quasi-vegan ambition, I am totally going to cook a turkey. I’ll let you know how it goes.
In my shoes
A couple of you have pointed out that This Thing I’m Doing sounds a little like the Weight Watchers Core Program, where you eat only heartbreakingly sensible whole foods and don’t have to count any POINTSâ„¢ because your metabolism is just too bored to even bother turning it into fat. Or something like that. So I can sort of understand if This Thing sounds awful because it sounds like Core, because who the hell wants to be on Core? It’s like the Weight Watchers short bus. It’s the orthopedic shoes of WW, really, and you stomp around sadly mumbling “me no allowed to eat bread” while everyone else at the WW party is on the other plan, wearing their sexy Flexy high heels and telling stories about their fabulous lives where they get to eat daring little portions of cheese and flirty slivers of cake every day, woohoo! And you wonder how everyone else can stand to wear those POINTy little shoes, because you never got used to how they felt no matter how hard you tried.
Okay, so that’s another weird analogy for how I felt the last time I did WW a bit over a year ago.
I also never really took to Core because the recipes were pretty awful. To be honest, a lot of the dishes in that Eat to Live book are kind of brutal, too, with things like Raisin Coleslaw and Anti-Cancer Soup (oh, let me pound my spoon with anticipation), and if making those had been my first experience with This Thing, I don’t know how it would have turned out. Chris had the book to begin with, and he’d found a couple of recipes that didn’t make you want to pound your fingers flat with a twenty-eight-ounce can of beans. But like I said, I like how it’s going so far. More later.
This thing I'm doing
…is why I lost the seven pounds last month. I guess some of it is due to the swimming and the walking and this class I’m taking at the gym, all of which are technically part of This Thing in the broader sense of its thingness. But that’s all stuff I’ve done before, whereas This Thing I’m Doing is different, for me, at least. This Thing I’m Doing is a vegan diet.
Well, it’s vegan in the sense that there’s no meat and no dairy. I really should call it something else, though, since I’m not concerned with avoiding various animal-product ingredients like gelatin and honey (because I guess I don’t care enough about the poor horsies and the bumbly bees). I’ll also allow myself something with meat or dairy once in a while. So it’s a cheatin’ kind of vegan. It’s cheagan.
Mostly, though, it’s eating a ton of vegetables and limiting everything else, like bread and starchy stuff and nuts. It’s based on this book and this plan. And yes, I know exactly how dour and dull and totally unlubricated it seems. But somehow, it’s not really like that. Somehow, I like it.
And I like better than Weight Watchers. I know for an awful lot of you who read this site, WW works for you; it just wasn’t working for me anymore. The reasons probably have more to do with me than with the plan. For me, doing WW was like having a crazy mother; a well-intentioned but obsessive and inconsistent and maybe even drunk mother. (Yes, I know that watching Mommie Dearest the other night probably made me think up this analogy.) But really, some days I’d be all, “WW Mommy, may I have some cake?” And she’d be half-passed out on the couch and she’d go, “Sure, shweetie.” But then other days she’d freak out and make me do all these bizarre chores, and I’d be like, “But WW Mommy, I don’t want to count out and line up all the Cheerios in the box,” and she’d scream that if I didn’t do it I wouldn’t be a good little girl, and it was all my fault for eating that cake. You know? Well, maybe you don’t, and that’s okay. But with me and This Thing I’m Doing, every day is pretty much the same. And I know the kind of inner mom that comes with This Thing is sort of boring and you probably wouldn’t want to come over to my house after school, so to speak, but I’m a lot less nuts now. Right now This Thing feels better than pretending I can have it all, which is what I did in the past.
That said, it’s a LOT of work, like a shitload of cooking and planning and shopping. It would be even harder if there weren’t several really good produce stores nearby and on my way home from work. Chris and I are doing it together, which helps a lot, and our fridge and freezer and pantry are vast expanses of nutritional no-fun-at-all. And we love it, perversely.
The only thing I’ve been counting is days. Today is Day 24 of doing This Thing, which puts it in perspective a little, because after the first week it’s easy to delude myself into thinking that I’ve been doing it long enough to have completely rearranged my DNA. Uh, no. And I weigh myself again next week. I’ll tell you how it goes.
OhNoMoBlo
Can I do NaBloPoMo without actually having to call it that? What if I pretend it actually stands for Narcoleptic Bloated Post-Modernism and just write lots of coy footnotes instead of blog posts? Or, better, what if I actually just post a little more often than I have in the past couple of weeks? Okay then!
I’m sorry that my Halloween costumes are getting more obscure every year. Last year I was a VC Andrews character, to the delight of approximately six people. This year Chris and I went as Raymond and Connie Marble, which I’m sure appealed only to the four people who have seen Pink Flamingos, or at least the two people who do not deeply resent us for reminding them that they have seen Pink Flamingos. Maybe next year I will dress up as a mumbled song lyric for a band nobody has heard of. (Well, nobody except Chris.)
We were thinking of going out again in costume last night, but we were waylaid by exhuastion and a surprise airing of Mommie Dearest on the Oxygen Network. Oh my God: I forgot about this freaking movie. I watched it constantly on HBO from the time I was about eleven to, I don’t know, the time my brain went soft and mushy just like the slab of rare prime rib little Christina defiantly refused to eat in that one scene REMEMBER THAT PART? REMEMBER? Ahh! And Chris had never seen it, so of course I had to usher him through the satin-upholstered luxe corridors of this fine, fine film. I hadn’t seen it for at least ten years and yet my memory is such that I can tell exactly which scenes are deleted or edited for TV broadcast and I am compelled to describe or even act out the missing dialogue. That’s right, I experience cinematic phantom limb pain for Mommie Dearest. How hideous is that?
Okay, I probably won’t post every day in November, since I have a column due soon and a trip next weekend. But I might have to tell you about how I lost seven pounds last month, and wow, that came out sounding like an informerical, didn’t it? I’ll tell you more later, hopefully not at all like an informercial and much more like the half-assed diet blog this site used to be.
