Baby Steppin' :)

Last night I walked for 45 minutes, one minute over my previous night's walk of 44 minutes. Woo Hoo and all that jazz. Today I walked two miles in 54 minutes. I'm not the fastest kid on the block, but it was a delightful time with Caroline, both of our noses poked in books for part of the walk, and our voices running together as we talked for the rest of the walk. I plan to walk another 30-45 minutes after church tonight.

I'm not heavy....am I?

Rude wake-up call yesterday....I have finally eaten my way past a line I never thought I would ever cross. I have waddled straight over from Overweight into the squishy neverland of Obesity. This, from a girl who once was hospitalized for Anorexia Nervosa...a woman who survived each day on one Snicker's bar and one orange, both carefully sectioned off to eat at elaborately scheduled times. Unbelievable, and yet true. I stood on the flat ultra-modern scale - it does everything but pat you on the back and tell you everything's gonna be all right - and watched my entire ten cents worth of self-esteem shrivel up before my very eyes. The scale informed me that 96.5 pounds of my body comes from muscle. Not bad, I'm thinking, and then the scale haughtily reminded me that that left about 44.5 pounds of FAT. My cholesterol and triglycerides have sky-rocketed. I am officially an Obese Woman. Go figure.

I think it would be much easier to accept if I had always struggled with my weight but that isn't the case. I was too skinny as a kid, always teased about that, and even into my college and early married years, I was thin as a rail. Too thin, thus my trek into the world of Anorexia. I remember standing on another scale, this one in a private hospital for people like me, with rolls of quarters stuck into the pockets of my robe. Daily Weigh-In: it worked until a savvy counselor caught me and threatened to send me packing to the state facility for people also like me, but people not fortunate enough to have private insurance to cover the tab. "They'll stick an I.V. in you and feed you that way," she warned ominously. I shuddered. Force fed? I couldn't fathom that horror.

Now, two decades later, I am a Fat Person. This both repulses and fascinates me. How did I get to this point? At what time did my once concave belly morph into the bulging belly that now masquerades as a full-term pregnancy belly? I think of last summer, when a possibly well-meaning (but equally possibly catty and mean) person asked if I had done in vitro? "I mean, you are obviously too old to have conceived on your own...and you are obviously quite pregnant...so how did you do it?" I seriously considered pushing her skinny little catty self in the deep end, but I maintained my composure. I smiled beatifically and patted my round little Buddha bump. "Oh, well, I am just one of those fertile Myrtle's, I guess," I murmured before walking casually over to my towel and gingerly easing down onto the orange and tan monkey scampering over my beach chair.

I don't understand how, or why, I got to this point but I realize suddenly I don't need to know either of those things. What I need to know right now is simply this: how to manuever my way back out of FatVille and back into a place I once called Normal: FitVille.