Part Seven: The Beginning of the Beginning

Well, it looks like I’ll begin the New Year with a large deficit in my bank and a large surplus in my person. I’ve never been good at making resolutions, and much like Lent, where for the past several years not being religious myself, I have taken to giving up giving up things, New Year’s Day for a long time now has been a day where I either make no resolutions at all, or I resolve to do one very big important thing that I keep under my breath and under my Stetson.

This year though, I’ve been hit with an unavoidable trifecta to reconcile:

• One: I need to (with the help of my better half of course) reorganize and refresh our house and make it into a home; a place where we want to be.

• Two: I must, against all odds, learn how to budget my meager financial existence cleverly enough to start paying down some of my very significant (mostly educational, but alarmingly present nonetheless) debts - because god almighty, I don’t know if I’ll ever know a time when I don’t feel that I owe.

• And three: I must organize and refresh my body, and learn how to budget my calories and start trimming down some of my very significant (mostly indulgence-based) areas - because god almighty, I don’t ever want to know a time where I have reached the point of no return and can never go back and do it right when it comes to health.

Let’s face it. One of the most substantial accounts we are given to manage in our lives is our health. If we are fortunate, we start out with a certain amount of good health in this life - a stock if you will; a store of goods. As with anything else, it seems to me that this stock can get depleted or be diminished based on how you take care of it. And, like most things, this store comes complete with a variety of items, each with their own expiration date. And, as we are well aware, we are dealing with perishables here :)

So we start out with our stock of health items, and as we get older, these are tapped in to, and in some cases are only replenished with diminishing returns. I broke my right wrist in two places when I was about 11 years old. Is that wrist as strong as the other? Probably not. I was a heavy smoker for roughly five years of my life. Are my lungs as shiny and pink as they once were? Probably not. And what of the food? The food that we put into our bodies is one of the most significant variables that affects our health. So, even putting the overindulgence aside for a moment; what of the bad choices? What of the non-organic canned vegetables, the reduced-fat mass-produced pastries and the non-dairy creamers of the world? What of the nutraceuticals? Fat-busting this, energy boosting that? What of the pizza, the hot dog, those little “fruit” filled pies that they sell for 39 cents at gas stations - all these things that are considered “food” in this country? How do we even know what all of these things are doing to our bodies? Was my body healthier five years ago when I lived in Chicago and was thinner than I was in high school? I doubt it, because that weight loss, while fast, was largely aided by fat-loss shakes, and I’ll tell you what: drinking that pink sludge made me feel like I was dying. Yeah, so I could zip a size 0, but my quality of life was bunk.

So on New Year’s Day, I will know my enemies. All of them. I am in the process of amassing an arsenal of knowledge and preparation to fight my tendency to make bad food and nutrition decisions, and I am finding new ways to get myself in the habit of exercising a bit each day, and doing some significant moving around 3-5 days a week. I am going to be presenting the things I am learning about food and wellness to you, dear reader, both good and bad, as they come. I plan on launching a couple of new supplemental series to the curvy girl confessions that will profile my findings, so look for those coming up.

And now, a couple of short, incomplete lists:

Five things I want to lose in the New Year:

1. A generous smidge of my love handles, saddlebags, tummy, extra chin and bootie. 2. My inability to keep up on a simple haircut. 3. My general disorganization and haphazard method of keeping my house, finances and body in good order. 4. The bad habit I have of often eating too much and doing so before bed. 5. My general avoidance of fixable unpleasantries.

Five things I want to gain in the New Year:

1. Advanced bellydance skill (while maintaining a good amount of the curvaceousness it takes to really work it.) 2. Better friendships and relationships all around. 3. A better understanding of my body and how it works. 4. The ability to wear my old jeans again without it cutting off my circulation. 5. My first published novel. (We’ll see about that one.)

This week I’ve started slow - the last couple of days really not eating more than I should and when I do eat, trying to prepare things that are good go-to’s, not just fatty, synthetic tasting edible nonsense. I made some semblance of black beans and brown rice last night, and tonight I am making curtido. Thank you Pilar’s Tamales for peaking my interest in El Salvadorian cuisine. Yum! They are good for you and absurdly delicious. And for people like me who may buy too much food and have it go bad on them (another thing I am trying to improve), vinegar salads like curtido are great, because they get better the longer they stick around. Score one for me!

Anyway, the point is, I’m making steps towards this goal. Baby steps, but steps, and that’s where it starts. And you know what? I’m not above incentivizing the process at the moment. In fact, I think a great way to motivate myself to walk to work every day is to buy those pretty reasonably priced boots I’ve had my eye on Zappos.com, and when I reach my goal weight, I think I am going to get a tiny, tasteful, glittery stud pierced in my nose, so there.

Happy New Year! More confessions of a (very) curvy girl will come out every Wednesday.

You can contact Elizabeth by e-mailing her at elizabethpalmer@annarbor.com.