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Thursday, April 28, 2011

Here's Something That Sucks

My husband and I are trying to lose a couple of pounds and get into shape. It shouldn’t be that hard. We are smart, relatively drug-free people. We support each other. We live in Florida, where most people are blond and toned and a lot of the fat and/or ugly people have been driven out, so we don’t have the disadvantage of looking around and fooling ourselves into thinking we look pretty good, relatively speaking. (I understand it’s like this in California, too.)

But losing five pounds is harder than you would think.

Here’s a snippet from a conversation my husband and I had in our bathroom yesterday morning, while he was getting ready for work. He had gotten on and off the scale without saying anything. (Always a bad sign.)

Me: “Are you losing any weight?”

Him: “No, and I’m not going to until I can stop drinking wine. And that’s not going to happen until things stop sucking. And that’s something I don’t have a lot of control over. It’s kind of out of my hands.”

Things sucking is the new glandular problem. We’d love to lose weight, really we would. If it were up to us, I’d be a Victoria’s Secret model and my husband would be that guy from that movie with Diane Lane, the guy who was killed when Richard Gere bopped him on the head with a snow globe. But we can’t help it. We have a things-sucking problem. Which requires us to drink the wine, and there you have it.

I stopped weighing myself with any regularity. Because I’ll tell you one thing that sucks and that’s my bathroom scale. The little beeyotch sits there while I’m at the gym pedaling away on the bike, lifting weights, and running on the treadmill, and then I come home and drink about 70 liters of water - last week I ate prunes, for crying out loud - and then it tells me I’ve gained a fifth of a pound. Shut up. You suck.

I have two weddings coming up. Because I’m very event-goal-oriented (I can’t even vacuum without dinner guests on the calendar), my weight loss and fitness goals are enmeshed in these two weddings and the dresses I’ll be wearing to them.

The purple dress I bought for my nephew’s wedding is perfect for standing, walking, even sitting, but I’m not sure I can get into a car without ripping something.

The green dress I bought for my niece’s wedding might as well be a sweat suit; it’s stretchy and has lots of give. I could not only stand, walk, sit and get in and out of a car, I could also do the chicken dance, roll into a fetal position, and attempt a couple of round-offs at the reception. (Don’t worry Amy: I’m not going to do that.) However, it accentuates a roll of extra fat around the middle (meaning the dress doesn’t have enough starch or discipline) so I just look matronly in it.

The gym, the bathroom scale, the prunes, nothing was helping. So I broke down and bought a spandex slip. It’s made out of a thin wetsuit material. In fact, it looks like something a Bond girl would wear, in the way that famous people can wear underwear out in public and look perfectly normal.

Remember when I made fun of people who wear girdles? I take it all back. My stretchy Bond girl slip is not a girdle, but it may as well be. It’s tight enough to keep everything where it belongs and might even allow me to exit a car without being on a stretcher.

Putting the thing on my body, however, is a feat. If I try to slip it over my head, it tightens up around my neck and threatens to cut off my air supply, which is scary. If I step into it and try to pull it up, it binds my legs and I could topple over. I need a spotter to get dressed now.

I wonder how many emergency room visits are the result of someone getting stuck in their Seamless Tunic Shaper.

I’m hoping that sometime between now and these weddings I’ll lose those few pounds and I won’t have to wear any constricting undergarments. That wouldn’t suck at all.

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