No Human Hold Button

The other day I ran into an acquaintance I had not seen in a couple of years.  She was generous in her compliments on my weight loss, not having known about my weight loss challenge or this blog.  It was nice to surprise someone since most everyone I know gets a bit or two of my daily humdrum by reading this blog, even if occasionally.

My friend asked me how I lost weight and I summarized the basic changes to my diet of eating fewer carbs, not much added sugar, veggies, fruits and protein, no major revolutions in the diet world.  I told her about the blog and my accountability to myself through brutal and I hope humorous honesty in a very public way.

“Well, now you can stop that,” she said.  “Stop what?”  I asked.  “Well you can eat a cookie now that you lost weight.”

I know she must have never had a weight issue in her whole life because she was shocked by my response.  “I don’t have a hold button on my weight.  I am either going down or going up and if I let my foot off the pedal I can easily go back to where I was.”  If only there was a pause like I have on my TV remote control.

It would be great to have a way to hold ourselves at a place we are happy with.  What if I could flip a switch and never get another wrinkle around my eyes, or that my skin would not get saggier?  Life just does not work that way.  We are all moving in some direction, either better or worse.  When I was a teenager I could hardly wait until the day I no longer got zits, that day came and the next day my skin was getting dry and tiny lines started to appear.  Well, maybe that is a small exaggeration; perhaps it was three days between acne and dry skin.

Since there is no way to pause ourselves at our best I am just coming to appreciate the littlest things that still work.  Today I am thankful for my wrists.  I gave up long ago on my breasts holding any shape that resembles round, eyesight being capable of reading a font smaller than 24 without glasses or my short-term memory holding a list of three grocery items from the time I leave my kitchen until I get in the car.  My long-term memory still works and it says my wrists today look like my wrists of 30 years ago.  Now that is something to appreciate.