Thank You, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!

It was predicted that the Internet would turn us into an isolated society of bleary-eyed hermits who shun human contact and subsist on a diet of news feeds, weather updates, and cyber porn.

“They” were wrong, at least for me and a few thousand other people I “know.” The Internet introduced me to a world of people I’d never have met in the physical world. People who have made a lasting impact on how I think and live. People armed with compassion, snark, empathy, and tough love.

“But the beginnings of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!” from The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Entering the world of weight loss is all that: vague, tangled, chaotic, disturbing, _______ (insert adjective). And the reality is that most of us don’t journey in the first, fifth, or tenth time with a cohesive plan and the right equipment. We attack weight loss with dogged determination and motivation for about a day, maybe a week, sometimes – if we’re lucky – a month or longer. The problem is that we usually go at it alone, and inevitably we fail because, let’s face it, the self-determination and self-motivation of weight loss is hard to maintain for the long haul. But it can be sustained with a little help from the right friends. The friends who’ve been there, are there, done that, doing that.

Some of my best friends are the people I’ve never never met, or at least didn’t meet right away in the traditional face-to-face way. They are the folks I’ve met through the Weight Watchers 100+ To Lose message board and through blogging. Without their support and occasional ass kicking, I’m pretty sure I’d still be in that “Gotta lose weight. Crap, this is hard. Oh what the hell, eat a donut. Now I feel guilty. Starting tomorrow, I’m eating only celery” cycle.

Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune of meeting face-to-face the User Names who’ve supported me on this journey of dieting, maintaining, blogging, and learning that weight loss is not pretty, it’s not easy, and it’s not a path to happiness. One of the first people to educate me on that latter part was Marcia, or as I first knew her: Aging2Perfection.

When I joined the WW message board in February 2005, I learned quickly that Aging2Perfection was not prone to delusion. She was firmly grounded in the reality of the weight loss world. But she also had the innate ability to love herself, something I floundered with, tangled up in that sticky web of self-acceptance. It was Aging2Perfection who challenged me to step back and breathe and be a better friend to myself.

Finally, last Sunday, I met Marcia. We met at Pamela’s in the Strip. I ordered the crepe pancakes and she ordered the banana walnut pancakes. Our server set a plate in front of me and a plate in front of Marcia while we were talking. We started eating while talking. It wasn’t until I bit into a walnut halfway through a pancake that I realized that she was eating my order and I was eating hers. We laughed, swapped, and kept talking. And if it wasn’t for the fact that people were waiting for our table and she and her husband had to go home and I had to watch Mae, we’d still be talking. Talking about everything, particularly about how our lives as mothers and grandmothers have run parallel the last three years. Weight didn’t really enter into our conversation.

Weight is a part of our lives, not our entire lives. Weight (A) is the proper subset to the superset of life (B). I often forget that and make weight the be all and end all of my day. I let it set the tone of my mood and intentions. It’s people like Marcia who bring me back to reality, and for that, I’m eternally grateful.

Some people have a Bucket List. I have a Face-To-Face Thank You List. I wish I could be like Jeannie and blink every one of you who have supported me and been my teachers these last seven years to a face-to-face pancake (or egg white omelet or oatmeal or smoothie) breakfast. We could even chat over leftovers! Or ride bikes or take my daughter’s spin class. Walk or hike. Drink coffee. Whatever.

I just want to say: “Thank you.”

Weight Doesn't Disappear When It's Gone

In October 2007, I had the good fortune to meet a very sweet and inspirational man: David Elmore Smith.

David is in the white sweatshirt.

David was sexually molested as a child and lost his mother when he was 17. Yet, at 650 pounds, he found the courage to lose 400 pounds and he told his story to the world. David and I met when we were on Oprah, and he went on to do many other TV appearances, including the TLC documentary, “650-Pound Virgin.”

David has been out of the spotlight for a few years, but he resurfaced on the Today show Wednesday, having gained 300 pounds. In this Huffington Post article, there is a link to the Today video, and below is an excerpt of his sad, yet very honest, truth.

"All my life I was this monster in my head and all of a sudden to be this good looking guy, it blew my mind away, I didn't know how to deal with it," he said. Smith also felt like "a terrible mess" on the inside, and eventually turned to alcohol and drugs to cope, "Today" reports.

When those outlets didn't help, he turned once again to food. "A lot of people were counting on me to be inspiring, and I didn't want to let anybody down. But I just felt so bad, I didn't know how to cope," he says.

Weight doesn’t disappear. It hides, waiting for you to feed it your fear. David’s gain put me face-to-face with my own 20-pound gain and the 150 other pounds lurking in the dark recesses of my mind.

I’ve searched (not as desperately as I think I have) for a reason for my gain. Something outside me I can blame. But the truth lies not in what I eat or my reluctance to move or the pain of arthritis or perimenopause. The truth is deep inside me and buried in mistrust, and David’s truth has nudged me to at least admit that (lately) I’ve been walking – zombie-like – down the path I swerved to avoid seven years ago. When school/family/friends/love and all its ensuing conflict/euphoria/worry/obligation piled up and I couldn’t sort through it all like laundry, I looked longingly back, like Lot’s wife, at the path of “How I Used To Live” and turned into a 20-pound pillar of salt, with the very real potential of adding 150 more.

Losing weight and, more importantly, keeping it off, takes a lot of concentration. Yeah, yeah…it takes determination and motivation and inspiration and all the other “tions” you can name, but first and foremost it takes concentration.

Distractions, however, deactivate concentration, and when it comes to weight loss and maintenance, the distractions that deactivate concentration aren’t simple things like the lure of an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. They are deep-seated emotional issues or family issues or work issues that not only distract, but cause a reaction that is counter to what our concentrated self would “approve” of.

David didn’t consciously gain 300 pounds back. Nothing in him said, “I want to be morbidly obese again.” I didn’t consciously gain 20 pounds. And nothing in my mind is saying, “I want to be 300 pounds again.”

A lot of people were counting on me to be inspiring… 

I want to inspire, but I’m as vulnerable and flawed as anyone on this path, including David. And that truth in and of itself is inspiring. I wish David all the love and self-care he can find as he works through his “terrible mess,” and I hope he finds the truth that lies beneath, the one I could see in his smile and in his eyes when I met him: kindness, sincerity, and a strong desire to live.