Assorted Factoids

• I have been between 130 and 140 pounds for most of my adult life. I count my adult life as starting somewhere in college, as my freshman year of college I was 17, 5 foot 4 (I'm now 5 foot 5), and 125 pounds.

• Staying between 130 and 140 pounds meant that I was pretty much a size 8 everything.

  Right now I'm a size 10. I was on the verge, at 165, of going into size 12.

• I weighed 145 in August 1996, right before graduate school started.

  I weighed 165 in August 1997. A pretty substantial, and uncharacteristic, weight gain. It's not completely incomprehensible that I might want to lose this weight, is it?

• People have a lot of issues around weight and the losing thereof. Most of the issues are their own and don't really have a lot to do with me and anything I'm doing.

• I have no desire to be Twiggy or Kate Moss. In fact, I think I'd look pretty silly. I'd also have to weigh under 115 pounds, since even at 128 (which I have weighed, this lifetime) I was curvy. Not much I can do about those curves; this is Irish heritage I'm looking at.

• Jogging is a lot easier and a lot more fun at 130 than it is at 160.

• I have extremely low blood pressure. This is apropos of nothing. I just think it's hilarious that someone as high-strung as I am can have blood pressure that qualifies her as "dead."

• Usually I define a "binge" as eating vast quantities of food past the point where I could say I was hungry, past the point where my stomach feels comfortable, and even past the point where I'm tasting the food. I have done this from time to time, and I don't beat myself up over it. It happens, and I probably had fun doing it.

  For the purposes of the diet I'm on, a "binge" is eating anything that isn't on the menu--that is: shakes, boullion, decaf coffee and diet sodas--when I'm not hungry. Hey, if I'm hungry and I don't have a shake on hand, that salad is gone. But I don't want to break this diet.

• I'm doing a liquid diet because some friends of mine have done it, and it has worked for them. They have to a person emphasized to me two aspects of how to be successful: you have to change how you eat, and you have to exercise.

  They have also said it's a lot more fun to do those two things when you have already lost the weight.

• One of my friends lost a little more weight after completing the liquid diet and going back on a regular diet.

• This is the first diet I've ever been on in my life. This is a pretty amazing statement from an American female in the last decade of the 20th Century.

• This is also the last diet I'll ever be on. I don't understand how anyone could go on more than one of these things in her lifetime.

Any questions?

I've also learned, from the mailbag this week, that lots of people have issues with anger. We're not really taught how to deal with anger, are we? This is why negotiators make so much money--they can do stuff that would send the rest of us in for heart bypass surgery

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I'm going running with Tiffany today, over in Santa Monica. I told her that all I've done this week is 1.5 miles. She said she understands. Then she said on the beach we won't know how far we're going. I told her I don't want to be in traction tomorrow.