Announcement: Dave and I are starting a new diet. Well, technically Dave’s already been on one for a while – he lost 30 pounds before the holidays. He’s been doing great, I’m really proud of him. But he got off track during the holidays, and now that he’s trying to start back on his diet, I’ve decided to join him. It’s always easier to tackle a challenge with a partner, right?

And this doesn’t count as a New Year’s resolution, because I don’t believe in them. Besides, I’m starting this on January 3rd, so it has nothing to do with New Year’s, and everything to do with not liking the way my clothes feel on me. Yes, my size 12 jeans still fit, and I only weigh maybe five pounds more than I did when I got married, but I’m feeling decidedly flabbier. I figure it’s better to tackle these things when I have a small, manageable goal in front of me, rather than waiting until my size 12 jeans don’t fit me anymore, or waiting until I hit 200 pounds or something. So, I would like to try to lose ten pounds. Maybe 15, but that would put me at the peak of my weight loss after my gastric bypass, and I think I only stayed at that weight for a few months, so I’m not terribly optimistic that I can maintain that again.

It’s awkward for me to write about this because I don’t like talking about my body image issues. I feel like I’m probably going to get one of two reactions: (a) people who don’t have a problem with their weight can’t believe that I’m happy being a size 12, and they wonder how I can stand to look at my fat ass in the mirror every day; or (b) people with real weight problems can’t believe that I’m whining about wanting to lose a measly ten or fifteen pounds. What do I have to complain about? The latter reaction is probably how I would’ve felt myself before my gastric bypass, so maybe I’m projecting a little bit of my past there.

The thing is, I have accepted that I will never, ever be super-skinny. Even after surgery, a size 6 is just not in my future. It’s not in my genetic make-up. And that’s fine, I’m totally at ease with being the size of the average American woman. I don’t have to be perfect. I can walk into pretty much any clothing store and find something that’ll fit me, and that alone is more than I ever dared to hope for, before my surgery. So I’m really not complaining, I’m just scared to death of regaining the weight that I worked so hard to lose (seriously, if you think surgery is the easy way out? You are dead wrong), so I’m trying to be proactive about nipping this flabby feeling in its proverbial bud before it becomes an issue.

I think part of the problem is that having a two year-old in the house makes it impossible for me to eat healthy all the time, so I’ve just given up on even trying. If I make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich for Catie, and she only eats a quarter of it, I figure that heck, I went to the trouble to make the sandwich, and I don’t want to just throw it out, right? It seems so wasteful. So I eat it. Or when she gets a free cookie at the grocery store and decides that she doesn’t want the last two bites of it, she hands it to me, and what am I supposed to do with a piece of a cookie while I’m trying to push a grocery cart? I wolf it down and move on. And what I should do is find a trash can and toss it.

I hesitated to even mention anything about this diet on the blog, because like I said, I’m not really comfortable talking about my weight issues. But I was worried that some of my posts over the next few weeks might have sort of a cranky, “grrr I will kill the first person who crosses my path in exchange for a cookie” vibe, and I thought that might warrant some explanation. So that’s what’s going on. I don’t suddenly need Prozac, I’m just suffering from junk food deprivation. Poor widdle ol’ me.