SO ABOUT THIS DIET THING...

THANK YOU! to the hundreds of you that have written and commented with encouragement, suggestions, and support. I really truly absolutely positively appreciate each and every one of you.

My life history has been on a diet. I have done every single program, pill, video, card, and meeting available and have enjoyed and been successful on each, including the three-day hot dog diet.

Remember that one?

You basically ate air for two and a half days, and then you got to have a hot dog for dinner on day three.

Well, I might have forgotten the finer points, but I know that Valerie Murino and I did it in the eighth grade and she lost six pounds and I gained eight.

Now that I am who I am...53...peri-menopausal (any day now, please God)...sans thyroid and three parathyroids (thank you thyroid cancer)...a Crohn's patient (gd prednisone)...and in end stage renal failure (thus, dialysis), it takes a village to keep me on track.

Dialysis makes dieting tricky, because the kidneys do so much related to weight loss and gain in terms of fluids, toxins, and minerals and vitamins. On any given day, my weight can fluctuate as much as ten or twelve pounds, depending on the comings and goings of those three things.

This doesn't mean anything other than the fact that everything I know about diet and nutrition gets turned on its head a bit. But, my dialysis unit (like all, I would imagine) provides me with a dietician to help me navigate.

I have three little goals to hit in the next month that are crucial: at five pounds lost, living donors can begin their testing process to see if they are eligible to donate a kidney either to me or to a paired-donation chain that I am on. (This means that I might not get that exact kidney, but one that matches me from somebody on the chain.) At ten pounds, I can repeat all of my testing to make sure that there aren't any underlying issues going on that would prompt rejection, and at twenty pounds I can look the surgeon in the face and say GO.

(GO in my world means becoming active and moving up the UNOS list for kidney transplant. I have accrued two full years on the list, but active status puts me in an entirely different checkout lane, especially if I have a living donor come forward. I had been kinda hanging out on the inactive list when my sister fell through, and I don't think it takes a team of psychiatrists to figure out why. Somehow, I guess I got it in my head that I wasn't worthy of a kidney...but these are stories for a different day.)

I started this journey at well over 400 pounds, so the scenery along the way is very familiar to me. But my life kinda kicked me in the shins the last few years, and...to be brutally truthful...I've kinda half-assed it and used bankruptcy, Stewey's death, moving out of my house, Jersey Boy's arrival, and just about everything else I could think of get in the way.

What can I say? I eat when I am happy, sad, angry, joyful, calm, stressed, bored, tired, cranky, organized, hungry, bloated, sick, well, and when the minute hand moves on the clock. I love to read about food, think about menus, plan dishes, shop, cook, chop, broil, grill, and sautee anything remotely related to anything edible. I love Ina, Martha, Guy, Rachel, and Robert as though they were related to me, and every time I go into my tiny little kitchen I pretend I'm coming to you live from the Hamptons.

My mom was Greek and my dad was Italian, and their fathers were both in the restaurant business in some way...whether it was the Washington restaurant in Lima, Ohio (Grandpa Loukos) or Rich's sandwich shop in Phoenix, Arizona (Grandpa Rich)...I come by my love of food honestly. Aunts on both sides of the family are gourmet chefs, my mom could hold her own, and even Dad was known for his skills in the kitchen.

It runs deep.

But now, I have to face the fact that being jolly and portly and curvy and rolly polly and big enough for my own zip code might be cute and part of the SpinsterStitcher charm, but the reality of being a 300-pound hummingbird are getting in the way of me not dropping dead at the ripe old age of 53.

My plan (physician and dietician approved) is simple. Two meal replacement shakes/smoothies per day followed by a salad with three ounces of protein for dinner. Until I exhaust my supply of Oikos triple zero yogurt, almond milk, and frozen fruit, I will use that for smoothie ingredients, and then it will be Boost Glucose control (but not the high protein ones) shakes.

When this twenty comes off, I will be able to slowly get back to my normal way of eating, which is actually quite good for maintenance and nutrition, but I will literally cut everything I eat in half, and I'll go back to enjoying an occasional treat day with a cheeseburger. My food diary looks like that of a nun in training for a triathlon, so we know I'm doing all of the right things, but my system needs a bit of a ZAP to get it losing again.

Yes, I know, I know...the dreaded e-word is also part of this, but can I just point out that I have loathed exercise from the moment I emerged into the world? The heat and humidity don't help me any, but given the fact that I have both a swimming pool and air conditioned gym at my disposal, I am now officially "an exerciser".

(But I reserve the right to bitch and moan and complain about it endlessly, and long as my heiney is doing it. The moment I stop...I promise to zip. the. lip.)

So, Dearies...the gauntlet has been thrown and Yours Truly has picked it up. I will report my progress on this here blog each and every Friday after treatment. You will get the good, the bad, and the ugly, which I hope soon becomes the ecstatic, the thin, and the healthy!

And yes, in case you were wondering, this here blog post has been the most intimate, brutally honest, scary, awful thing I have ever attempted in eleven years of blogging. I can, though, think of no other way to hold myself accountable than to reveal my soft fat underbelly to you, God, and everybody else. No. More. Hiding. Behind. A. Cartoon.

(Who...by the way is at goal weight. The minute I hit 160, I'm commissioning a SpinsterStitcher catsuit, cape, and mask.)

Enough.

Enough talking and writing and joking and planning and plotting about it. Time to get to work.

Happy Thursday! Do something loving and kind and brave and come tell me all about it!