Choose Your HARD!

Something that I have discovered over the years: It's EASY getting fat.
Truly. It is just so darn easy. All it takes is mixing a little bit of laziness with a handful of a love for food, mix in some complacency and let it rise for a few years. Presto! You are F A T.

Something else that I have learned: It's not so easy being fat. Being fat is HARD. It's miserable. It's painful, physically and emotionally, and the worst thing about that pain - you don't recognize exactly how painful it is while you are hip deep in it. Oh I knew I was unsatisfied about something, but I thought surely it's not me personally? I pointed at my work, the fact that I hate Maine winters (which is not difficult to understand considering they can last 7 months of the year!), and finishing my degree was - and is - taking forever. The vague unhappiness, that you wear like an itchy shirt, had a number of sources, but not one of them was the fact that I was 130 pounds overweight, and slowly killing myself.

Why? Exactly why I got fat would take far too long to explain. "How" is much easier. One delicious bite at a time. In my years of experience, dieting meant giving up all that deliciousness and starving myself while exercising like a fiend. A sensible diet? What's that??? Moderate exercise? Huh??? I was always an either-or person. Either I continued to eat like a King, or I starved myself like a peasant. No middle ground. Each attempt at weight loss was a sprint to the finish, and always ended in failure. No, worse than failure. I'd gain back everything and then some. Eventually, I simply gave up, and embraced my rotundness in all its glory.

Until...

My sister Janet joined Weight Watchers in February of '07, and hounded me. She was relentless, dog-with-a-bone persistent. I caved in mid-March. Something that I have discovered between March and now...

Losing weight is HARD! It is tedious. The rewards are slow to come. Some weeks, there are no rewards, only disappointment, even when you have done everything you are supposed to do, when and how you are supposed to do it. Eventually though, the rewards do come. The effort begins to show. It gets easier to run. You learn to love and crave healthy foods in appropriately-sized servings. But, it never stops being HARD.

So, to whomever visits this spot to see what those wacky "Two Fat Sisters" are up to, I know I speak for the both of us when I say:

Being fat is hard. Losing weight is hard. Chose Your HARD!