My history of my body, Part 3

After a couple of years working as a lab tech, I knew I wanted more from a career. The solution was graduate school. This was not an easy decision: I liked my job and made a decent salary. I was going to give up a lot. But I had to look ahead and I knew I'd be frustrated at this level. My coworkers were extremely encouraging and agreed that this was the step I needed to do. They wrote letters of recommendation and gave me a bunch of advice.

I applied to a number of schools and ended up at UPenn. At first, I was wait-listed, then accepted which made me wonder how firm my standing was in the program. I spent my first year terrified that the faculty would come to their senses, that I'd be pulled aside and told that they had made a mistake, and I was to leave immediately. In addition, I was lonely. I felt trapped in my apartment in a terrible neighborhood in Philadelphia, where a girl could not go out after sunset. Whether it was mood or lack of activity or poor eating habits (or, most likely, all three), my weight started to creep upwards.

This was the first time I joined Weight Watchers. In those days, you counted portions: a certain number of bread servings, a certain number of fats, meats, fruits, etc. They gave to a weekly journal with little boxes at each day that you were to cross off as you get your servings. As someone who loves lists and crossing things off, this was right up my alley. I was living by myself with a limited food budget, but this worked for me. I ate the same thing every day (literally, the same thing) and the pounds came off.

The truth was that, even when I first joined, I was barely overweight. I needed to lose less than 20 pounds. However, the WW standards for reaching my "goal weight" had me weighing about 10 pounds less than that, a weight my body fights. Now, as I assess my body, I know I should have pushed back. I am a muscular gal and, at my best, I have curves and muscles. Learning to love that should have been more important than another 10 pounds, but WW doesn't think like that. I ended up leaving without having hit my "goal", but I knew what I should be eating and how much.

Around this time, my roommate and I joined a gym. It was a bare-bones gym for muscle heads. It was cheap, month-to-month, and on our drive home, in other words, perfect for us. We went almost every day, and we spent the entire time teasing the other about wanting to leave so early, so we stayed longer, another 10 minutes on the Stairmaster or another rep of the weights. When we got home, if one of us went for junk food, the other would ask, "are you really putting that shit into your body?" After a couple of months, I actually loved my body. I saw the definition in my arms, my clothes looked great. To this day, if I could magically go into any version of my body, that would be my choice. But then we moved and stopped going to the gym, and I never got that body back.