Monday, Monday

It's dark in the morning now, and the cars are coated with frost. We actually turned the heat on a couple of days ago. I love cold weather, but for one thing: I hate getting out of bed, transferring from warm-snuggle mode to it's-morning-again mode. One of our cats, Mr. Stash, joins in the snuggling for about the last hour or two of the night, and so it was this morning; his purr sounds like an 18-wheeler. Mr. Salted went back to work today. He left about half an hour ago, and I miss him already.

My sci-fi monster leg is still rearing its ugly head. I tried calamine lotion and Ace bandage camouflage for the last couple of days and it didn't seem to help much. Today I'm trying a plain generic lotion and hydrocortisone cream combo with Ace bandage camouflage.

I'm a bad patient, probably because I'm not patient. It's hard for me not to walk on the bad foot--sometimes it's just easier to use it than strike some gymnastic pose on the knee scooter, balance, roll, and hope for the best. I think I would have lost my mind by now if it weren't for TV and this laptop, and my head is sufficiently back together to read books again; I have loads of those too. I just finished "Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which was, in the words of reviewer Stephen King, "one gorgeous read". A friend just sent me Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteredge" and I think that will be next.

I'm pleased today because the XXL yoga pants I got on clearance from Old Navy fit comfortably now. I watched some TV documentary the other day--I think it was "Secret Lives of Women" on WE--that featured three women who had lost significant amounts of weight. All of them became fitness buffs; one kept saying, "I was up to 200 POUNDS, I had to do something!" I refrained from throwing a pillow at the TV; I'd love to weigh 200 pounds. I'm not the only woman I know who would say that, either. I'm currently down to 231; now that I had this surgery, I hope to see 150 again. I remember 200 used to be my benchmark of doom too; back when I was bulimic and somewhere in the 170s or so, I said it over and over: "I will kill myself if I get to 200 pounds." I know that I meant it at the time, probably because it seemed implausible to me that I could get any bigger.

It's great that so many people lose lots of weight and get into fitness, but at the same time it can be off-putting and discouraging. One of the things that turned me off immediately about my exercise physiologist was the fact that he brought up me running a marathon at our first appointment. (There's about as much chance of me running a marathon as there is of Paris Hilton being invited into the Actor's Studio.) Personal trainers work wonders for some people, but I don't care for the dynamic at all. When I am cleared by the ankle surgeon, I plan to pick a pool and do some water aerobics or laps. My wellness center likes to preach accountability; the only one I want to be accountable to is myself; after all, I'm the one who has to live in my body AND my head. While their strong emphasis on follow-up after weight loss-surgery--particularly with the nutritionists--makes sense and has worked for many, they also seem to think that success can only be defined as they define it, where I think success has to be defined for each of us by each of us.