Happiness is a friendly…

Happiness is a friendly scale that is clearly lying to you but in a good way. According to my scale, I am now down to 139.6, which is two pounds less than two days ago. Kevin claims that some of that holiday weight wasn't real weight -- that it disappears quickly if you go back to sane eating habits. I'm not sure I understand his mental picture of excess fat -- some of it appears to be solidly entrenched, while other bits are just floating around in there. Okay, now that's just a gross image for this early in the morning. Sorry.

A brief moment of joy yesterday when I walked into the grocery store and saw mini-daffodils -- the spring flowers are here! I bought two pots of mini-daffodils and one of heaven-scented white hyacinth. Soon there will be irises -- yay! I spent $11 on flowers, which is a significant portion of the weekly budget, but if I have to eat ramen to afford flowers, I'll consider that a worthwhile trade. :-)

Yesterday I also finished the laundry (4 loads!), though Kev's clothes aren't quite all put away yet and cooked a beef and potato curry for dinner. Oh, it was good to make curry again, and eat it. It made me happy. Kev and I watched a movie, Before Sunrise, which was both sweetly romantic and clever. I recommend it for your Netflix queue or local video store.

Afterwards, we ended up having a long discussion about transparency, confidentiality, and academia, in which we determined that my instincts are just deeply not in sync with the deceptive standards of the professional world, and it makes me stressed. So after a while, we stopped having that discussion and went back to just snuggling. I am glad and grateful that as a writer, I get rewarded rather than punished for being as honest as I know how to be.

Bob's calling me at 10 my time, and we talk book talk. My job interview's at 5:30. There's still cleaning to do around here, but I think I'm also just going to spend some of the day reading. I need a holiday, after my holiday.

8 thoughts on “Happiness is a friendly…”

  1. Before Sunrise is one of my favorite movies ever, but I haven’t had a chance to see the sequel. Let us know how it is after you have seen it. I love the dialogue in the first movie, unfortunately my boyfriend fell asleep after the first 15 mins, but I enjoyed it so much, especially since I enjoy having random conversations like that, and I’ve always felt like and old woman in a younger body.

  2. I second Steph’s comment: The sequel is excellent. The passage of time, and the physical changes that it has wrought on the faces of the actors, is a real presence in the film.

  3. Kevin’s model of fat makes some sense to me — your body is a dynamic homeostatic system that organizes itself around what it sees as “normal”. Longterm, gradual changes in eating habits (for good or bad) can reeducate it as to what is “normal”; short term, radical changes like holiday splurging or a crash diet are viewed by the body as a deviation from the normal, to which it struggles to return. If people quickly regain the weight they lose on a crash diet, why shouldn’t they quickly lose weight they gain from an uncharacteristic binge?

  4. I think it is true, actually, and I’m pretty sure there’s, like, science behind it. Have you read anything about “set points”? The general idea is that your body has a natural “set point”, or a weight that it wants to be at, and it will defend itself against either gaining or losing from the set point. That’s one of the reasons why exercise is so important in long-term weight loss, since exercise is one of the (relatively few) things that can move your set point.

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