The Lard in My Life

Greetings, no one.

Hopefully, no one will soon become someone, and then someone will become many someones, and this blog will get read. Because as many things as I plan on starting to do for my health, writing this blog is not one of them.

I am writing this blog because of the lard in my life. Sure, some of that is the literal lard - this extra person I've been carting around my midsection for the past couple of years, whom I am not even able to claim on my taxes.

But there is plenty of other lard that has been weighing me down - the lard of artistic ambitions that have failed to materialize, the lard of friendships I have neglected to nurture or cultivate in the interest of trivial pursuits (not the board game), the lard of an 80-year-old back that prohibits me from living the life of a 31-year-old, the lard of a day job I no longer find amusing, the lard of financial hardship in spite of living a more-or-less monkish existence.

It is all this fat that I intend to trim. However, in the interest of focus, I will be writing mainly about my actual lard.

It's been a long time since I felt comfortable in my own skin. And that's a terrible thing to not feel comfortable in, because you can't take your skin back to Target and return it. Especially not after you've stretched it out as I have done.

As far as I can tell, the problem is accountability. It seems that when someone asks me to do something, unless I have some compelling reason not to, I do it. But there's no one standing around, waggling their finger at me on a daily basis and urging me to put down that lemon poppyseed muffin (which are DELICIOUS, by the way). So I need to do it. I need to do my own finger-waggling. And maybe keeping a regular blog is the way to do that. It's worth a shot.

Granted, there WAS another impetus behind my sudden crusade to retire the tire. Starting tomorrow, my office is beginning a program to make their employees less fat and ugly. They didn't put it quite that way, but that's the gist. Once a week, some of the good folks from Weight Watchers will be coming into the office, loading us down with some brochures and point calculators, and then charting our progress over a three month period. If I can lose 10% of my body weight in that time, and then keep it off for another month, I will score a cool $1,500.

Not kidding.

Yeah, it would have been nice if I'd simply decided to do this for me, but... hey. $1,500. You can buy things with that.

So here we are. The first weigh-in is tomorrow, and I'm doing my best to pack it on as much as possible beforehand. We're talking comfort food from Mel's and ice cream from Coldstone tonight, then possibly an entire pig tomorrow morning.

I'll keep you all (e.g. nobody) in the loop on my progress. And, of course, my goal is to lose much more than 10% of my weight. My aim by the end of this experiment is to be extraordinarily fit, healthy and happy. So that it doesn't sting as badly when I have a night like I'm about to have.