Reluctantly Healthy~

This week I had dinner with Charlotte, who is one of my steady girl dinner date partners. We share a love of red meat, wine, and have a shared intolerance of stupidity. It gives us lots to talk about.

Anyway, during the course of conversation we were talking about the ridiculousness of weight loss and gain. She, being pregant, has an excuse for weight gain. I am simply gestating a twenty pound pizza. And simply writing that sentence makes me want a pepperoni. What on earth is the matter with me???

Absolutely nothing.

Here is my view on weight. Would I like to be 150 pounds and toned and smoking hot and never have to worry about thunder thighs ever again? Of course. Would I like that at the expense of pizza and pop and ice cream and M&M's and all the other completely awful-for-me things that I like? Not a chance.

Genetically, I am not meant to be skinny. Seriously, I researched this and some people's genetic code makes their fat cells more likely to absorb and hang on to fat than other people. It also genetically picks what places on your body that fat clings to. When I told Lola this she didn't feel better. I thought it was reassuring - like....'Hey! Its not us! Its our jeans! Errr....genes!' But she was not reassured. As a matter of fact she went crazy and declared war on our genes, getting all skinny and toned and reinforcing all my bottled up shame from eating more than two doughnuts in one sitting. Ugh.

BUT...

I saw how much Lola had to do to get skinny and toned - and I watch her beat herself up for gaining a few pounds back or losing tone and getting soft or squishy a bit. And I think about all that work sometimes when I sit on my couch and eat my doughnuts. Poor Lola, missing all this sugary goodness and eating her little portions of low fat, low carb, (blasphemy!) mini meals and snacks.

This is not to say that I just sit around and eat and work on producing fat rolls. I occaisionally declare war on my genes from time to time as well. About two years ago I got on a scale just out of curiosity and almost passed out when it said two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds? How on earth had I got there? If you are two hundred pounds, this is not an insult to you by the way - but for me, that was the line. I knew where I had been my whole life and for me to cluelessly just climb the scale and hit that point was ridiculous. I was completely motivated to get healthy and wage war on my super-soaking fat cells.

So Lola and I and Leah and Olive and a few others all joined a local body challenge and vowed to be in bikinis by summer. Lola kicked all our asses and still today makes me look like her chunky version, but I lost thirty pounds and I felt better than I had in years. At 170, I went out and bought bikinis and lived in them all summer long. I was happy. I was healthy. And I was shameless. And according to medical professionals...I was still twenty pounds overweight.

I am never going to be at my doctor recommended weight. I haven't seen 150 pounds on a scale since I was in high school and I have zero plans that involve ever seeing it again. I know that Americans are overweight and that we all should be health conscious, but at what point do we say enough? People are made in all shapes and sizes and we should embrace that. Especially us women. Let's stop beating ourselves up and find that things that are beautiful about us - whether they jiggle or not. Because let's be real here....do you really want to live a long healthy life....without donuts?

Lola's Last Night~

It is here. The big, tell-all bachelorette blog. Are you ready????

First things first. The ladies all need aliases. It is mandatory. Also, it is fun. Last night at dinner my blog was brought up and apparently aliases are crowd pleasers. We had some discussions about possible aliases, but no hard decisions were made. Probably because the alcohol was messing with our ability to stay on topic for very long. With that in mind, all my ladies have a few days to request an alias change from what I am about to give them if they so choose.

So this is our cast for the evening....myself, my sisters Lola (the bachelorette) and Leah, my sisters-in-law Fiona and Olive, my friends Sasha and Stella, and four new blog characters. Actually, I am lying. One of the 'new' characters is actually my friend Cindy, who has been mentioned in this blog many times - but always as 'my friend Cindy'. I repeatedly think of aliases for her and then forget what I picked. Starting today, she gets to be....Charlotte. Our three new blog inductees are Lola's best friend that lives out of state and is pretty much an honorary sister at this point, and two sisters that Lola and I know from high school. Lola's best friend gets to be...Hot Mama...and one of our sister friends really wanted to be known as MacGruber - so by default her sister gets to be MacKenzie. One brief note before moving on to our tale. We seriously have the best girl group ever. There is nothing that makes you feel better than a night out with a group of women that just get you. There is major power in a group of strong, fearless females - and ladies, I am proud to call you all members of my wolf pack.

So we kick off the night at a local restaurant that we all know and love. Partly because they have good food, but mostly because we like to go drink wine there. Hot Mama made us all adorable wine glasses - leaving us no choice but to fill them. We had a brand spanking new server who told us it was his first night on his own. And the poor kid gets a group of eleven shameless, noisy, wine drinking ladies looking for mischief. He held his own fairly well and we kept our harassment to a minimal level. We ate, we drank, we made Lola open lingerie in the dining room, and we had a man at the next table start unbuttoning his shirt for us. (We tried to talk him up onto a chair, but he demurred.) We took a gazillion pictures, laughed like idiots, had Lola pretend to be a waitress at a nearby table, and pretty much probably annoyed anyone that was looking for a quiet dinner out. Thankfully, the waitstaff is mostly familiar with us and fairly tolerant.

Having done our damage there, we migrated out into the neighborhood on foot, wine glasses in hand. We hit a handful of downtown bars for fill-ups and continue making Lola earn pretty thongs by doing things that would have been embarrassing when we were younger, but as mentioned before- we are all pretty much shameless now. Here are a few highlights from our walk:

• Olive and Fiona trapping a man in the bar on his way out so that we could get a picture of them holding onto his suspender straps. This was really funny in person and he was a good sport.


• Lola using the waitress to get a condom. This is only hysterical because she got it off the kid working the bar, but he made the waitress promise to keep it hush hush because his dad was in the bar and he didn't want him to know he gave her a condom. hahaha


• We went to an outdoor bar on the river and there was some Jamaican music being played....so naturally Lola and Olive went to the dance area and Lola played the bongo on Olive's pregnant belly for the bar. I laughed so hard I cried, but that may have been the whiskey leaking out my eyeballs.

And this was the tame part of the evening....

We all found our vehicles and the designated drivers herded us all together and we headed over the bridge into our city's little bar district. We started out at the martini bar, where Lola was supposed to find a guy that would give her his underwear. Instead she found a man that ripped off his underwear TAG for her. (He wears Tommy boxers if you were wondering) Then she had to sing a song to someone - so naturally we picked one of the band members that was on break for maximum embarrassment. She did good, although I still have no idea what song she was singing. We danced there for a bit to the decent cover band and then progressed to the pub up the street. I am going to admit that at this point my detail recollection is going to get fuzzy. By this time we have had wine, whiskey, martinis, and are back to whiskey. No one got messy drunk, but we were definitely all feeling good. I remember lots of dancing, lots of singing back at the band, searching for a bald head to kiss, (which never happened because the one guy we found was too sweaty - Lola refused) and at some point Lola opened up her last pair of panties - which Hot Mama thoughtfully made granny panties.

Right around then, we decide to go to the bar across the street where, let's be honest, we are considered the old people. It is the bar where you are most likely to be propositioned in disgusting ways or have drinks spilled on you. It is the bar with the biggest dance floor - which worked well for our party. It is also the bar that Lola and I used to frequent during the infamous summer of sinning. We lose Stella to a guy at the bar and head to the dance floor, periodically sending someone to check on her and make sure she didn't want to be saved. By the end of the evening the guy started saying profanity every time one of us came over, proving our theories about this bar, but Stella enjoyed him for the moment. We closed the bar down there, spending the last part of the night with a trio of wet behind the ears 21 year old kids who thought we were the coolest thing since sliced bread. One of them was so cute I wanted to stick him in my pocket and make him my pet - in a completely non-sexual way. He was adorable. He was completely agreeable to the plan, but I don't think I have the energy for caring for an overgrown boy laced up with hormones and beer. When we left him he was dancing around proudly wearing Lola's bright pink bachelorette sash. Stand up kid.

All in all, a fantastic evening. And most of us even stayed awake long enough to have last call. Although I wouldn't be lying if I said that we spent most of the last hour complaining about our heeled boots and trying to hold back yawns. Everyone had a great time, got home safe, and the story almost ends there. However, my phone rings off the hook at nine the next morning. Five minutes late my mom pulls in my driveway frantic that I need to go pick up my Jeep before they tow it. Apparently 911 dispatch called her to let her know my Jeep was parked in a parking lot that was scheduled to be re-paved that morning. What are the odds? Apparently, I should have answered my phone. So at 9:30 the morning after, I get dropped off in front of an group of construction workers in my pajama shorts and a tank top. Not the best way to heal a hangover. Just in case you were wondering.