The situation with my weight turns out to be more dire than I thought.
For years, my scale had been telling me I was 200 pounds. Nah, it seemed to reassure me, you're not budging. The shirts are only feeling tighter because they've been in the wash too many times. Clothes shrink. That's what they do. I'm 200 pounds, so there's no way I could be getting bigger.
I didn't realize there was a little dial that could serve as a tear weight, and it got nudged off of zero. I thought something was busted, and I needed a new scale. So I bought a new one on Saturday and discovered the dial on the old scale. Still, I wanted to compare the two readings, just to see if I really needed the new scale. Old scale told me I was 200. New scale told me was … 215.
Oh, shit. I was inching toward 220. I passed critical mass a long time back.
I immediately jumped online to research weight loss techniques and walking and heart rates and calories and all that stuff. I went to the workout room twice that day, half hour each visit. I've adjusted my short-term goals. Now I'm walking for 35 minutes, not 20, and I'm keeping a heart rate between 129 and 147. These past two days, I managed to reach roughly 75% of my maximum heart rate.
For now I'm concentrating on making sure I get my 35 minutes of treadmill time everyday. I've finished week one, and the scale says I'm down to about 210. Five pounds isn't very significant. I'll feel I have momentum when I'm down to 205, and I'll start feeling some modicum of success when I'm at 200.
But to give my short-term goal a motivation for continuing, I'm aiming to hit 150. I don't care about the timetable for me to get there. I'm starting to delude myself into thinking these 5 pounds in one week could get me to that goal in roughly 10 weeks. I'd be very happy if that were the case.
I'm not counting on it. I'm not setting my expectations high either.
I do, however, have another intangible goal I want to achieve. There's a guy in my department that I've developed a bit of a crush on. I'm not sure where the turning point was, because the first time I met him, I didn't think anything about his attractiveness. But something about the way his clothes hug his body kind of … gets my attention. He's not buff or muscular, but he is just nice to look at. And it seems like this change is a somewhat recent development too. Perhaps it helps that he's stopped wearing the same white business shirt he wore when he first moved to the US, and in the past few weeks, he's even worn t-shirts.
Still, I want to illicit that kind of reaction in someone else.
I want someone to look at me the way I'm looking at this guy. Maybe someday I'll get serious about becoming a gay stereotype and have the abs and muscles. Right now, I just want my clothes to drape my body in a way that suggests more than it probably will ever have.