As You Do On The First Of January

I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.

That’s a quote from Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls, a young adult novel whose main character is struggling with anorexia.  It was a Christmas present.  So was the other book I’m reading, Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness, the actress’ account of her struggle with her image.  It seems almost kismet that I should start reading these books today, the day when it seems every woman in the world is stepping on the scale and promising themselves that they will be 5, 15, or 50 pounds thinner by summer. 

The gym has been crowded since eight this morning (not that I went, I just walked by), leftover cookies and cakes are thumping down the trash shoot every twenty minutes and it seems everyone has added some type of fruit to their shopping cart – along with Weight Watchers frozen meals.

We have just passed through the time of year when food took center stage.  It started with Thanksgiving dinner and continued with Christmas lunches at work, going out to eat with friends, gifts of cookies, candy and cakes until the big drink-a-thon New Year’s Eve and the greasy hangover cure breakfast that followed.  At no other time of year do breakfast, lunch and dinner become events unto themselves. 

So with all the food around, food that I cannot eat, I had to fight back.  I started cooking and then baking and, as expected, eating. 

Now, food and I have had a volatile relationship as of late.  Every since I found out I needed to cut out gluten, eating has just been, well, consuming.  But since my diagnosis I’ve put being thin on the back burner and focused on not being sick to my stomach.  Since cookies and cakes were no longer on offer and I couldn’t face making anything myself (or spending a fortune to eat a poor sugar-filled substitute) I had no problem fitting into my jeans.  Don’t get me wrong, I was nowhere near svelte.  By NYC or LA standards I’m pretty sure I was fat.  But by Philly standards I was on the thinner side of the scale. However after the last two months of cooking and baking and eating, let’s just say I should have gone into the gym this morning and not just walked by.

So I started this morning, as you do on the first of January, to come up with a strict plan.  It was two pages long and would have consumed all of that precious time between getting home from work to going to bed at night.  And as I looked at it, at all that time I could be spending writing, with friends and with my husband, I felt mad.  That’s when I realized, I’m not going to spend all my time on how I look, I’m going to spend it on how I feel.  If I feel a bit bloated or pudgy, I’ll cut back on the salty snacks.  I’ll exercise not to fit into a smaller size but to feel stronger, because I am not the space between my thighs; I’m the strong muscles within them that are going to kick this year’s ass.