Must It Come to This?

Following college, I gained weight much as I suspect everyone does.  Since walking to classes and hitting the dance floor around closing time had been my sole forms of exercise, the pounds slowly crept on as I travelled constantly for work.  Who ever thought I'd tire of endless restaurant meals and free hotel cable?

By hitting the gym a couple mornings a week and paring down my diet, I was back to my ol' fighting weight in no time.  Seriously, the food journal I kept at the time lists dinosaur vitamins as my supplements (recorded by amount and color, of course) and every weekend records an accurate count of how many calories I drank in beer.  It also had this great column for you to record why you ate- let's just say "bar time" was listed more than once.

Eventually, old age crept up on me and I could no longer rebound so easily from the hangovers.  (It's much more difficult to nurse a hangover when you have stuff to do.)  I added actual food back into the rotation to make up for the lost liquor calories, but stayed slim and trim.

Then I started dating my awesome husband.  Dinner would start with drinks and appetizers, move on to a full main course and finish with desserts.  Movies required soda and candy.  Being of German heritage, I guess I expected weight gain to make me look like a cue ball with legs.  My stomach kept getting bigger and bigger while the rest of me stayed thin.  You can guess where this is going... two highly-invasive abdominal surgeries later and I was declared healthy-ish.

The surgeries gave me two things: no more extra stuff to blame (at least for now) and the perfect excuse to never, ever, ever even think about doing a crunch ever again.

Then I quit smoking.  And discovered sugar.  And learned to cook so I could make everything exactly how I wanted it.  And learned to bake so I could make as much as I wanted.  (A friend asked me, "What's the difference between learning to cook and learning to bake?"  The answer is about 30 pounds.)