Another introduction

Hi, everyone!

My name is Nathalie. I’m 30, I live in a midwestern college town, and I work as a librarian. And also--bet you didn’t expect this--I’m overweight, and I’m trying to turn that around with some irritating lifestyle changes that seem to be taking up copious amounts of my time. Stuff like going to the gym and cooking instead of relying on crappy take-out.

I don’t know when the lightbulb finally went off in my head that my weight was getting out of control. It’s been creeping steadily upwards since I graduated from college (gasp!) ten years ago. My jobs became more and more sedentary, and I could no longer eat the way I used to eat. I actually spent an entire semester eating Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies for lunch every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I think I washed them down with Crystal Pepsi or something equally vile. Whatever it was, it was sugary and it wasn’t labeled “diet.”

I’m 5 foot 5, and I weighed about 135 when I left college. Three years later, I was up around 155, and the following year, I was 160. Every year, I gained five to ten pounds. Even when I left (er...got fired from) the World’s Shittiest Publishing Job in 2001 and took off for graduate school, where I walked to class every day, I kept gaining weight. I finally got frustrated with the way I looked (and the fact that most plus-sized clothes are unfortunately unattractive) and joined a gym last April. I told my then-fiance (now husband) that I was doing it for health purposes. But I can be honest with you all--it was totally vanity. When I met with a trainer for the first time, she weighed me, and I was 201 pounds. All I could think was, “when did that happen? And how much effort will I have to expend to fix it?”

To answer my question: it happened over a period of ten years of eating too much and exercising too little, and it looks like I’m going to have to expend more effort to fix it than I had ever dreamed possible. Weight loss is hard work, and sometimes it’s frustrating when there’s no results. I’m read plenty of articles that advise me to ignore the scale and not weigh myself more than once a week, but when I’ve been eating all my vegetables and hitting the gym every day, I want to hop on the scale because I want to see something. I want that reward, that quantitative indication that I’m doing something right. Yeah, my pants are looser, but the numbers! They don’t lie! Do they?

I’ve been working out with a trainer a couple of times per month, and he’s set me up with a resistance training and cardio program that I can get into (or at least pretend to get into). I go to yoga classes and do Pilates with a trainer. I’ve been drinking eight 8 oz. glasses of water per day, even though it means I wake up in the middle of the night to pee. I’ve been going to nutritional counseling at my gym and have changed some of my dietary habits accordingly. I’m also participating in a program that the nutritionists and fitness specialists at my gym have developed--it involves weekly meetings and educational sessions, along with keeping a food journal and participating in various self-esteem boosting exercises. It’s all working out well for me, except for the self-esteem stuff. I’ve never had a problem with that. As a matter of fact, I find the self-esteem boosting kind of embarrassing. I’d rather learn more about fiber and what it can do for my digestive tract.

I have always had a big fat ass.. No matter what I do, my ass is always going to be big. This isn’t some sort of low-self-esteem related body image distortion, it’s the truth. My butt is big, it’s always gonna be big, and I’m not afraid to admit it. But I’d like to get rid of the saddlebags, the belly, and the dreaded batwings that hang off the bottoms of my arms. It would be nice if my butt would shrink in proportion to any other shrinkage, but I can’t hold my breath on that one. I do believe that my ass is here to stay. But those damn batwings? They’re so gone.