Here we go

Let me not tell you about my weight. 

I'm not doing it for you, dear readers, and so let me not detail my nutrition plans, my exercise regimen, what I worry about, how I feel about skinny women or my naked body or that asshole who runs Abercrombie and Fitch. Let me not recite numbers of steps, flights of stairs, calories consumed, pounds measured, pounds lifted, minutes of cardio, hours of yoga. Am I being hostile? Perhaps. But mostly tired of watching women of my acquaintance make their weight their sole, life-wasting goal.

Let me say instead how sometimes my new pants are loose, even though I have a suspicion that this might just be a factory defect. Let me tell you how my chataranga has improved, how I can do more than two per cycle, but I still want to work on the push up required to make the multiple flow smoothly together. Let me tell you how my lower back hardly ever hurts anymore, and though I cannot see them, I know that my abdominal muscles are strong enough to pull my pelvis back to a normal tilt. How I can feel with icy clarity (that wows my chiropractor) when my ribheads have come askew and when the tight typist's muscles in my forearm prevent my radius from popping back into place beside my ulna and need a little "external motivation". Let me tell you about how instead I am watching money slip through my fingers like grains of sand and how I am hoping in the end that I will not regret it.

And let me leave you with a little Frida Khalo Marty McConnell, because I feel like it's relevant.

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell:

“Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.”
        -Marty McConnell