I spuddle.

I have some bad news.   Brace yourself.

I?  Have.  Gained!  Ten*  POUNDS.

I weighed myself this morning because my pants wouldn’t button and I thought, Gee, nothing will help my ailing self esteem and poor mood more than getting on the scale and getting punched in the head with a series of numbers I DO NOT WANT TO SEE.

It’s true.  After many many years of weighing exactly the same amount, more years than I can count, even getting pregnant and then having babies, I have weighed the same.  Exact.   Amount.   Well, actually in university I gained that old freshman forty.   Fifteen?  NO, FORTY.   But then I lost that by working out obsessively and treating my body horrifically.   And  obviously not while I WAS pregnant, I gained forty or so pounds with each pregnancy, but don’t hate me — it just came off when the babies were born in a couple of months time and fine, I was that person that you hate.   Or not, because even though I’m thin-ish (or was, HAHA), I was in terrible shape.   Not for all of those years, but most of them.   Since having kids, anyway, because I never exercise.   I don’t.   I admit it.  I can’t seem to find a gym with childcare, but now I have and I’m not going to join until September because of the way my childcare works in the summer, etc.   Excuses!  I haz them!   But I have gym equipment in the basement, and damn it, I am going to use it.

For thirty minutes.

Every day.

Even if it is midnight before I can fit it in.

I am posting this because I want to be accountable but not really.   Like I don’t want you to say, “NICE WORK ON THAT BOX OF CHOCOLATE COOKIES!”   Because that is the kind of help that I resent even when I’ve asked for it.   I just want you to know that indeed, my pants are too tight and this tightness of the pants is making me grouchy and when I’m grouchy, I suck.    It’s true, I do.   I’m a horrible grouchy person.   I do not wear “grouchy” lightly.   Poor Ali.   I mean, I’m probably not going to be super nice about The Bachelorette tonight.    SORRY.

So here’s the thing.   I AM ON A DIET.   I am!  No more crappy food.   I swear.   I promise.   I VOW to you my audience of People Who Watch The Bachelorette.   I will stop eating Doritos and drinking wine every day like it’s a health tonic.  I will stop eating toast for breakfast and cheesetoast for lunch and garlic toast for dinner.   I hereby do solemnly declare that by the time school goes back and I can start going to the gym, I will weigh that same magicky number that I’ve always weighed.

And then I will get fit.

I may even take a vitamin pill.   Even though I think they’re stupid.

Because!   I!   Am!   Forty!

And I don’t want to just give up entirely and let my body slide slowly to the ground, which it is in danger of doing, I swear, I look like a skeleton wearing a fat suit that is made of some kind of heavy gel such that although my head and neck and shoulders are thin, as you move down towards the ankles, I just become wider, much like a pyramid of some sort.   It ain’t pretty.   And I ain’t wearing it anymore.

Besides, I have spent years buying expensive designer jeans for next to nothing on eBay and who wants to duplicate that kind of work?

Why am I telling you this?

Who are you anyway?

TELL ME.

And I will tell you, every Monday morning, how I’m doing.   Even if how I’m doing is CRAPPILY and GROUCHILY and filled with the horror of the MUFFIN TOP.

Filed under: The Ten Pound Project