My mother eventually quit smoking, and I am sure the M&Ms cured her. As far as I know, she never poured candy in her pockets again, but ever since then, I have thought about it. I have thought about just carrying M&Ms and Goobers and Raisinets with me wherever I go. I have considered lining the insides of all my coats with Hershey’s bars and pouring hot cocoa in my shoes and padding my bra with Almond Joys.

I get a little worried when I realize there’s no chocolate in the house. I get a little panicked when I think that I have no access to something sweet, and no way to fix that. I get emotionally fraught when there’s no candy at hand and no one wants to give any to me; when it is offered, I sweep up huge armfuls like there is a candy shortage and the person who gets the most stuffed inside their face wins.

As I understand it, this isn’t regular, ordinary everyday behavior. A large majority of people don’t have deep emotional attachments to sugar. No one understands candy the way I do. So probably you should all give it to me so that I can take care of it.

Or probably me and candy need to take a break. We need to step back and re-evaluate our relationship. Our terribly, terribly troubled relationship. Our desperate, desperately one-sided love affair that only leaves me feeling sick and greasy and bad. My rerouted digestive system, it doesn’t like candy. It reacts poorly. It rebels and the world is a worse place for it, particularly the world in a small radius directly around me and my sick stomach, and I still can’t stop. Part of the Wonder of Weight Loss Surgery is supposed to be the Pavlovian-style relearning that takes place—eating X makes me sick. I will no longer eat X!

I eat a lot of X. Am I stubborn, or stupid? Don’t answer that.

I don’t want to do it any more. I don’t want to eat candy. I mean, I want to eat candy. I want to eat all the candy. I want to swim through a sea of Hershey’s Kisses and shower in a waterfall of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. I want my pockets to always be overflowing with Kit Kats and Nestle’s Crunches. I want the glorious bounty of bad chocolate to always be inside me.

But I also need to stop. Just—stop. I am tired of being a mess. No—let’s be excitingly positive about this. I am eager to be well. I am excited to be healthy. I am super-glad to have my (relative) youth and general well-being ready to spend it on being happy and feeling good about things. All the things. All the things inside my head and all the things in the world, all the things that are good. Feeling guilty and gross and sick is surprisingly not good. Will I be able to function? Will I even feel like myself? What will I fill my pockets with, if not candy? I am thinking ponies.

This event, my inspiration, encourages you to “Finish a project, phone a long-lost friend or relative, investigate something you’ve been meaning to investigate, take an alternate route, sign up, commit, cancel, change.” I can do that! There is SO MUCH I haven’t done! There are SO MANY things I can change.

So many, in fact, that I got dizzy and had to go lie down for awhile because I am weak and kittenish and easily distracted and I got hungry. I made a list of all the projects and goals and to-dos and haven’t-dones that have fallen off my list lately, and then I realized that I wasn’t actually going to repaint the entire house or write a comic gothic horror novel or plant an entire corn field in the space of the day.

So for my bonus extra super day, I thought I’d start small. I thought I’d go emblematic. Something that signals my intent to continue the way I’ve started, to begin as the way I intend to go on. I’ve been whining about how I’m dying to try hot yoga for years and years. I lived two blocks from a studio when I lived in San Francisco; when I moved to Utah, I lived next door to one. NEXT DOOR. And somehow I’ve never managed to put some pants on and go sweat and fart and probably pass out from heat stroke and fatigue in the company of strangers.

How could I have waited so long to publicly humiliate myself? There is no way of knowing. But the day’s finally come where I’m going to go for it. Today I’m going to go do hot yoga. And if it is a horrible nightmare from outer space I can pretend it never happened, because today is the day that doesn’t actually exist in the normal scheme of things. And if I die, I will respawn on March 1 because February 29 wasn’t real!

That sounds reasonable to me.

And if I don’t die, or have to spend the rest of the day floating in a bathtub full of cold water and ice, I’m going to take a nap.

Jennette was my inspiration—she announced, I am going train for the 5K! Oh boy, that was totally easy! she said. And I thought, holy crap, it’s totally easy! I can do it too! And then I might have totally blamed her for leading me astray when, after rising bright and early for a vigorous dawn run, I staggered home and crawled into bed, safely out of range of mooses, and pretty much slept like the biggest Wuss in Wusstown, population me,  for the rest of the day.

It could have also been the fact that I did not eat before I went out, and I forgot to bring my water bottle, and my iPod conked out so I tried to time my intervals in my head but kept losing count and erring on the side of “I will jog for an extra twenty, thirty hours just to be safe.” But it is easier to blame Jennette, really, because then I get to demand recompense. I prefer it in the form of cookies.

The next time I went, I did not make those mistakes. I made lots of different, interesting ones, but not those ones, and when I finished up my run with my shoelaces untied and my iPod cord tangled around my head and my sweat jacket trailing along the path behind me and the sun burning my eyes and a long trail of spilled water all the way down my front and somewhat unsure where my keys were, I felt absolutely fucking fantastic. I felt like a goddess. A damp, sweaty, squinty, total mess of a goddess who had just jogged, very slowly and with poor form, probably an entire total of 100 feet, and was absolutely and entirely, absurdly proud of herself.

I jogged! Outside! I was wearing spandex and a sports bra, in public, under the great big blue sky where anyone and god could see me, and I ran and ran and ran until it was time to stop and I wanted to do it again and again and again.

I managed to do it three times more before a trip out of town got in the way. I packed my running clothes and my shoes and I had very determined plans and yet somehow, ended up at a breakfast buffet, face down in a pile of waffles and fresh cream and ripe strawberries instead of on a treadmill in the bowels of a hotel in Vegas. Weird. But I missed it! I’d start again on Monday! Except I was sick on Monday, and tired on Wednesday, and on Friday I had missed both Monday and Wednesday so what was the point?

The point is that I miss it. I have never run outside, not on a treadmill before, and it was spectacularly awesome. It was fresh air and changing scenery, trees and grass and dogs passing by (I am a fan of all these things) and running through the shade and out into the sun and alongside the river all the way up to the dinosaur park  and back and it was just about one of the best things ever, and I am saying that about exercise, I want you to understand, and I miss it.

image by Today is a good day

The house was packed full of people, mostly around the food. I poured myself a glass of white wine, and hugged people and laughed and kissed and fed cheese to the pug and exclaimed and laughed and then had to excuse myself because I had started to feel hot, jangly-headed, flushed and nauseous. I sat down and it passed, and I got up again to circulate, had to sit down again. It passed; I had lost my drink somewhere. I bumped into the host on the way back to the kitchen but had to excuse myself in the middle of a sentence because the dizziness was climbing up the back of my neck and closing over my head, and I couldn’t breathe, and the sense of wrongness and terribleness was overwhelming. The bathroom was locked, and I sat in the dark bedroom next to it, on the floor with my knees drawn up, hoping that I wouldn’t make a mess on their nice wood floors when I expired.

When the door opened, I launched myself inside, locked it, and laid full-length on the tile floor and breathed slowly, waiting for it to pass, whatever it was. And I mentally reviewed every single thing I had put in my mouth today, every sip, every bite, every possible crumb that had passed my lips. I laid there and berated myself for being an ass, for ruining everything, for always doing everything wrong, because that is what I do. Self-Recrimination is my middle name, which makes it hard to fill out forms.

I laid there for a long time, listening to the voices go up and down the hall, until I thought I could stand up again without fainting. I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, in case anyone was out there monitoring my noises and wondering what I was doing (and as if taking an epic poop was less embarrassing than trying not to faint in the bathroom), and I went and found E, told him we had to go. He assumed that I was sick because of something I ate, which always makes him mad–he does not want me to be sick. He wishes I would stop making myself sick. “Honey,” he said. “What did you eat today? Were you eating junk?” But he touched my forehead, realized that I was, actually and for real, sick.

“Really?” I said. “You’re way hot,” he said. “What about my temperature?” I said, because even death cannot rob me of my comedy. “That too,” he said. He got us home, tucked me into bed and fussed around me until I fell asleep happy, despite feeling like hell. It is lovely to be taken care of sometimes, and even lovelier to know that something is not your fault. Less lovely–how my entire life revolves around weight loss surgery. Every thing that happens in my body, every noise and grumble and pain and itch and tingle and lump has something to do with weight loss surgery. Everything in my life goes back to the fact that once upon a time I had weight loss surgery. Some days it feels like my epitaph–Liked Pudding, Had Weight Loss Surgery.

I used to identify as a fat girl; maybe this is what has rushed in to take its place, to fill the void where the boobs used to be. That is a chilling thought. But it is one of the major facts of my self, and my self-identity, and of course, a lot of that is of my own making; body issues are interesting to me, and weight loss surgery has directly and unavoidably affected my body and my body image, and I think about it, and write about it, which means I think about it and write about it. But even with all the attention I pay to it and spend on it, it still surprises me to realize that it has become such an intrinsic part of my life, so intertwined with everything I do and everything I feel–again, sometimes that is my own making, but sometimes it is something that can’t be dodged–eating, thinking about eating, drinking, talking about going to get coffee, getting dressed, getting undressed, being touched, feeling guilty about not going to the gym, running after the dogs but not being able to keep up, taking a supplement every four hours. Sometimes directly related, sometimes peripherally, all of it adding up to feeling like I’ve remade myself in the image of The Eternal Weight-Loss Surgery Patient.

It was a damn fine book, and a good read, and I was proud to know Shauna and I was very happy and it was all good and you should all read it and these were all things that I had expected, when I had picked up my copy and prepared to tear my way through. What I didn’t expect was the feeling of longing it would engender in me, the weird restlessness, the sense that things were not as they should be and what was I doing, sitting on the couch and not wearing pants when I could be at the gym, doing a Body Pump class. Lifting iron! Sweating to the music! Going Rahr! and kicking ass and taking names because I am Powerful and Strong! And sitting on the couch, not wearing pants.

It is kind of a cliche to read a book about someone’s big, life-changing adventure and say that it is inspiring and inspirational and makes you want to achieve something inspiringly inspirational, but there it is. Shauna writes about going to the gym and finding these group exercise classes and becoming completely addicted to them, going religiously, loving how they made her feel, ending up splashing out on a gym even when she was adventurous yet poor after moving to Scotland. Body Pump! I put down the book, when I finished, and I immediately went to my gym’s website and looked up the Body Pump class schedule and wrote down the times and days and I was ready to put on some pants and go pump! My body!

Except it has been about two weeks and my body has yet to be pumped. At the gym, I mean. And I am itchy. I keep looking at the schedule, keep thinking about putting on sneakers (and pants), keep thinking about getting out there and getting pumped and how inspired I was and how good it would feel and maybe if I pumped my body a lot somehow I would get to move to Scotland or something, and yet I remain, on the couch, pantsless.

Inspiration is a wonderful thing, but it turns out that it is not enough. Maybe I only have enough room to fit in one small good habit at a time. I’m writing regularly, with great verve and happiness and a feeling that to not write would be a terrible thing and also impossible and wrong. I will concentrate on that, for awhile, build up my Responsibility muscle, stretch and bend and work the shit out of it in front of the computer every day, without pants, putting together a book I am proud of, so far, for the most part. And eventually, when I feel that my grasp on this new habit I have is less tenuous, less liable to shatter into a million pieces and leave me pantsless on the couch eating cheese doodles and forgetting how to write a sentence, when I feel like I have got this one, important habit carved so deeply into me that it has decorated my bones, I will see about adding a new one that involves weights and clothing my bottom half and muscley things.

Maybe that is a cop-out, laziness, a fear of pants. But I have this image of me as a plate spinner, adding one too many (two) and having everything crashing down, and I think a plate to the head would kill me. I’ll get there, and you will be so impressed with me and all my magnificently whirling plates, and I will be impressed too.

Image by kReEsTaL

Pictures, lists of measurements, a Word document I found on my computer that listed all the ways my life would change and all the things I would do that spoke more of the great bone-deep unhappiness I was filled up with than any determination or hope or ambition.

I was such a different person, two hundred pounds ago, three years ago. I am also exactly the same. But what I’m missing, what I’ve lost, is the sense of unhappiness and inadequacy and constant awareness of every physical flaw I perceived myself to have. It was all-pervasive, oppressive, endless, all-encompassing, and it got to the point where I just didn’t notice it any more. I moved through my life as if it were perfectly normal and ordinary to hate yourself and everything about you, to be absolutely flummoxed as to why any one would ever think you were beautiful or worth loving, or worth any time at all.

In pictures, I was a beautiful girl. I looked like I knew that I was beautiful, too. That was a lie. There are pictures of me at my absolute highest weight, three days before my surgery, and I am laughing, dressed up like a Devil in a Blue Dress, with flaming red hair and bosoms for acres and I look beautiful, unselfconscious, as if I am happy and full of ineffable joy, confident in my loveliness.

That was not me–not the me I felt like on a daily, hourly, minute-to-minute basis. I could struggle out of my unhappiness for whole moments at a time, but I’d always collapse right back in, more exhausted than I had been before. I went home from that Halloween party relieved to be leaving, excited that my surgery was in only a few days.

I was not healthy at my highest weight–my blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, they were all fine. But I couldn’t breathe when I walked, and I could barely walk. My knees ached and my hips throbbed and my chest felt tight, always. I scratched myself raw and bloody from the never-ending yeast infection. I peed when I laughed or coughed. My heart fluttered. At my highest weight, I was desperately unhappy and uncomfortable, and because of that, I was unlovely, crouched down out of the way, head ducked like I was prepared for a blow, shoulders rolled forward, slumping, miserable. I was not beautiful at my highest weight because the self-loathing had ground me down and the disgust had worn me out.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably go on saying it–I wish I could have found a way out of that. I did need to lose weight, because 316 pounds did not feel good, was not something I could carry around for the long term. But I had been weights all the way up and down the scale, between 200 and 300 for practically all my life, and I had been healthy, and I had been beautiful. And I could have been happy, maybe, if I had tried harder.

Instead I bowed out of the game completely, ran fast and far away, as quickly as possible, and only when I stopped and caught my breath was I able to turn around and see where I had been, and how small it all seemed from here. It took so much to gain a sense of perspective.

photo by StuffEyeSee