The rest of me

I had not seen Marta, the woman I prefer to do my waxing, in several months - only because she works the evening shift on weeknights, and I had been making weekend appointments for the sake of convenience. She does an especially...shall we say thorough job, which is much appreciated in the summer months.

"You lose weight," she commented during my session last week. "Leg up now. Good girl."

People have been commenting on my weight loss a lot recently, although always in the same flat, objective way that you state obvious facts. I suppose there's the inherent implication that I look good or better than I did 15 or 20 lbs ago. "Society says it's a good thing anyway," shrugged the guy who had recently dumped me, after mentioning that I definitely looked thinner. He would go on to make the same observation two more times over the course of our attempt to be just-friends one Sunday afternoon. I realized that being thinner did nothing to make me more or less attractive to him, so why did it matter?

That's the disconcerting thing about getting attention for this particular weight loss - I can't really take any credit for it, so I feel somewhat disingenuous in accepting (implied) praise. You know how there's a running excuse among weight-challenged that they have "a thyroid problem"? Well, I really do. As in, I no longer have one. My metabolism had been on the skids for years, but now I take a pill every morning which kick starts it to a normal level my crippled thyroid could never achieve. Oh, and I can't drink anymore - which was a mostly unanticipated side effect of The Cancer. Sort of a blessing in disguise. Possibly as a side effect of the medication or my months of medically imposed abstinence, I currently have the tolerance of a 4th-grader. The last time I tried to have two glasses of wine, I felt like I might need a good old-fashioned coma to shake it off. So between the sobriety and the synthetically-boosted ability to burn calories, I have managed to drop a pants size through no real effort on my part.

I have never been what could be construed as "skinny," nor am I now. I was probably never even what's commonly thought of as "fat," even at my heaviest weight in high school. As a woman, being tall simply puts you squarely in the general category of "large" where your weight doesn't really have as much impact. "Skinny" implies that I could somehow also be "small," and there was no way of doing that. I recently told one of the guys in my office what I weigh, and he looked at me incredulously. "There's no way," he announced. "That's 50lbs more than me." I pointed out that I'm also about 4 inches taller than he is.

When I was 12, we took a class trip to Ellis Island. I chose this particular opportunity to strap one of my mother's belts around my poochy lower stomach so I could tuck my shirt in - something I never did for shame of not having the flat belly my friends did. I remember several people complimenting me during the day that I looked skinny - the highest praise you can bestow on a pre-teen, natch. Even though I got to be desperately uncomfortable over the course of the day, it still never dawned on me what a ridiculous fucking nitwit I was for doing potential damage to all of the cargo one carries in one's mid-section. And let me tell you - crushing your abdomen under the unforgiving restriction of a gingham belt is not without consequences. I had what we charmingly referred to in my family as "the trots" for two days following this little adventure in body sculpting. Sometimes I wonder if I managed to rearrange my organs - Is my spleen warped? Is one of my ovaries stuck in my gall bladder? Certainly people have done more self-destructive things in the name of vanity, but this has always been my pinnacle of lunacy for the sake of appearances.

After college I made a conscious effort to eat better - I kicked my Wendy's habit, embraced portion control and learned that low-fat dairy products are in no way offensive. As a result my weight leveled off, and while I was certainly still Large by virtue of my height, my horizontal size had stablized in the "average" range - or so says my MySpace profile, anyway. I feel no need apologize for being a size 14 in jeans anymore than being a size 11 in shoes. None of the resolutions I've made in the last several years have involved my weight - lately, they're more along the lines of "buy new cookware" or "stop saying 'retarded'."

Except now I have even casual acquantainces mentioning how thin I am, and I can't help but thinking, "How fat did you think I was before?"

The downside of being the thinnest I have in my adult life is feeling a strange paranoia about gaining the weight back. It snuck off when I wasn't paying attention, so what's to prevent it from making a return while I'm less than vigilant? I'm being forced to think about something that I had happily designated a Non-Issue.

I still don't tuck my shirts in, by the way. Some things never change.