Happy middle of December to you!

Hopefully, you’ll feeling just the perfect amount of pre-Christmas glowy warmth by now. I’m very fortunate to have developed the life skills, particularly in my 40s, to pull off a pretty much stress-free Christmas. It helps having very cool people in my family, but I also let go of the Martha Stewart Perfect Christmas dream years ago. Good thing too, because that GD Martha pressure helped introduce me to my old pals, Anxiety and Meds.

I swear I used to think I was a failure of a woman if I didn’t have hand sewn Christmas napkins with a matching table runner in the kitchen, festive and perfectly folded in thirds (no raw edges of course) hand towels in the bathroom and a handcrafted wreath that had seriously affected the TSE due to a sudden acute demand of hot glue sticks.

But no more! Instead of spending hours in the kitchen baking (sorry, family), I make one thing – Christmas bark. It’s pretty much the best treat you can make without turning on the oven. It has Bernard Callebaut dark and white chocolate swirled artfully together with pistachios (green) and dried cranberries (red) throughout. Did you know that salivating over Christmas bark stops your brain – okay, my brain – dead in its tracks?

My body played a horrible yet magnificent trick on me last week. For whatever reason, I got a 12 grain bagel at Timmy’s one morning. Maybe I was just living on the damn edge – I don’t know! I do my best to not eat sugar, flour and processed crap, so the bagel was a bit out of the ordinary. But it was just a bagel! Nope. Apparently it was an attack bagel that, once in ma’belly, had some sort of frantic seizure resulting in a good old fashioned belly ache topped off with a most fetching degree of bloat. It seems the longer you don’t eat stuff like that, the harder it is for your body to process it. Egads, I’ve eaten myself into a corner!

[insert segue] At a gig last Saturday for a construction organization, as I was dealing with performing to a huge room cut in half by a gaping maw of a dance floor, without a stage or lighting, a young man decided to heckle. I had just spoken briefly about losing weight. It went something like this:

“I shouldn’t be so self depracating. I’ve actually lost 40 pounds. [thunderous applause, me preening] You can join in the fun at losinglori.com. Now, if you’re one of those people who has difficulty spelling and doesn’t know the difference between lose and loose… [pause], I can’t guarantee what website you’re going to end up at. I mean, it could still be me. I have had 2 kids.”

Wait – I totally didn’t have to tell you that part. Too late. Then I go on:

“I get frustrated with people who have lost weight who thank the program that they’re on. ‘Thanks, Jenny.’ The only way I would thank Jenny is if Jenny herself came to my house around 11:00-11:20 at night – because that’s the Eating Hour – physically restrained me then sedated me to get me through to morning. Until that happens, Jenny can kiss my fat white ass.”

At that point, young man shouted, “Does she sedate you with a Twinkie?” and at top speed, if I do say so myself, I replied, “I didn’t come here to talk about your penis, dude.”

Now in all fairness, there’s nothing stunningly clever about what I said. In comedy land, going for a hecklers twig and berries is fairly standard, but I think they appreciated the speed at which I hit him with my figurative fly swatter. But then I thought more about it. Calling a penis a Twinkie really isn’t the worst thing in the world. I’ve heard they’re quite tasty, and what they lack in length, they most surely make up for in girth. So, whereas it could’ve been taken as a compliment, the fact that ‘Twinkie’ has connotations of something teeny tiny trumped its positive attributes.

I lost 3.2 pounds (POST-POOP UPDATE: 4.7 pounds!) this week by the way. After last week’s .8 gain, I was fairly sure it would be a gooder this week. It’s still hard for me to believe that I don’t count calories or log my food anywhere now. If someone asked what I’m doing to lose weight, I’d say it’s a very personalized stew of information that [disclaimer] works for me but doesn’t mean it’ll work for everybody. I eat foods with a low glycemic index, I avoid sugar (except natural), white flour and processed foods, and I go to a psychologist every few weeks to keep my head on straight.

Also, I have a group of intensely kind and supportive friends, family and even pseudo-strangers who support me every day.

Yep, that’s YOU!

Love,

Lori

UPDATE:  It’s difficult to put this delicately, but after a particularly… impressive ‘deposit’ in the powder room, I reweighed myself and have no shame in posting the new and improved results:

Pounds lost this week: 3.2 + 1.5 hahaha = 4.7

Total pounds lost: 43.9