news at 11:00

I've been thinking about a clever way to write this post for the last few days, and I am now throwing my hands up at clever now. I guess I'm all out of clever at the moment.

It's been a big fat week in Bumptown. I'm going with the gloss here rather than highs and lows and tears that happened at the beginning of the week. As Elizabeth Bennet says: "In cases such as these, a good memory is unpardonable." So gloss, gloss it is.

We made our final (gulp) payment for our South Africa trip, so it is fairly safe to say we'll be jetting off to South Africa in 8 1/2 weeks time. Man that was a whole lotta money. But now we can look forward to it--stop dwelling at just be excited for what lies ahead.

Eight weeks is also the amount of time left until the half-marathon--8 weeks and 2 days, to be precise. I'm excited--I've run 10.22 miles in 2 hours so I'm hoping I can make it in less than 3 hours.

We also got an offer on the Homestead, the house Mr. Bump and his brother inherited from their grandparents. Cross your fingers for us, please, that everything goes well. If it does escrow will close before the South Africa trip.

And (drumroll please...) I think I can safely, officially say that I have lost 100 pounds. As of this morning it was actually 102 pounds, but some of that is water loss from my workout last night. But I've got to say, for some reason it seems anti-climactic. I guess it was so slow in coming, these last few pounds, that it wasn't dramatic. It was like, "Oh--what do you know. I've hit the Diamond Earring Weight. Huh." So much else is going on, maybe the number doesn't matter as much as I thought it would. And I guess I've got further goals out there, so maybe that's why. I've yet to hit that magic number which means my BMI falls into the "healthy weight" category. That's something I'm thinking toward. I'm also thinking about how kind of icky and saggy my body looks (oh the horror of bending over, people), despite all I've done. I think I'm going to have to focus on the dreaded strength training. Maybe now that the weight loss is not so urgent in terms of Reaching! a Goal! I can focus on other ways of being healthy and strong. And my arms looking better in a tank top.

And there is the fact that despite achieving the Diamond Earring Weight, there will be no diamond earrings. Not for a while, anyway. For further details see above paragraph re: enormous payment for South Africa trip. And although this is self-imposed (sort of), it makes the reaching that goal a bit of a letdown I guess. There are all sorts of ways I suppose I could reward myself, but I'm sort of meh on those. I want to get what I want, so I say I'll just wait. But there's something a small voice inside my head keeps pointing out every so often: I really don't feel like I deserve to spend that much money on myself anyway. Who wants to pick that apart for me?

So I don't know. That's probably the biggest reason I have been wrestling with this post. I'm rolling that admission around in my mouth and I don't particularly like it, but it rings true enough that I can't just spit it out. A lot of this whole weight loss thing, particularly these last 50 pounds (since last December) is purely mental. After you lose the weight, along with the extra skin comes a lot of other stuff that doesn't melt away by physically getting rid of the fat. I know I've read/heard about that from other people, but it really is true. It isn't a huge, psyche damaging thing, but it is now part of the mix. I don't feel any different, and when I look at pictures of my old self I still truly believe that is how I look. Part of it is only just realizing what I looked like then in the reflection of what I look like now.

Here's another thing: I catch myself looking at more overweight people, maybe who don't even weigh as much as I once did, and I sort of mentally tsk at them for an instant, and then catch myself almost immediately. I am so grateful to all the people in my life who never mentioned my weight. First and foremost the wonderful Mr. Bump. To the people who did feel like the needed to intervene with a comment, I appreciate where you heart was at. But I promise you no one needs the fact that they are overweight or fat pointed out to them. Trust me, you know you're fat. This may sound like I'm at the end of a journey and I'm summing up, but I'm not. I've got miles to go before I'm svelte. Or done. Or no longer in need of my scale.