Over the years, the weight continued to pile on.  I can remember my first set point being 127 pounds, but it wasn’t long, say in my early twenties that it crept up to 150 pounds.  That was the number I could not break.  So it is that today, after years of starving myself, and being generally vigilant about the fat, I weighed in at the doctors office at 177 pounds.  For the first time ever, I didn’t kick off my shoes to step on the scales.  I didn’t even moan to the all too tiny woman who recorded the number.  It was just another number that only carried the meaning that I was willing to attach to it.  I made the appointment for my routine check up.  I resisted the temptation to ask what I weighed the last time.  I don’t even want to know anymore.  I wasn’t there to be judged for my weight.  I was there to take care of my body.

My last maneuver was a raw food vegan regime…and let me say, it was the most radical, intense assignment I have ever accepted.   In the past, I have not been adverse at all to trying the latest diet to come down the pipe.  In fact I have lost count.  I still keep my lifetime membership card to Weight Watchers tucked neatly in a blue vinyl bag along with a stack  of booklets I collected.  I check in every few years, to get the new program, which I then abandon after a few weeks.   My  copy of “Do I Look Fat in This? sits on my bookshelf, waiting for me to read it again…but I simply cannot.  

It is time for me to defect…and I mean really walk away from all the endless advice on how to lose weight.  I am now going to actually do something so simple that I can hardly believe that I have not been doing this all along…I am going to eat less food…How?? you ask so I will tell you.  I am going to use intermittent fasting.  I will explain all this to you later, but first I want to tell you how I came to this place in my life. 

I still remember the elation, the feeling of euphoria that flooded my  heart when I was first went down to the local community center to enlist.  I was really much too young to understand what I was getting in to.  All I knew was that if I was ever going to look good in those clothes I wanted to wear, well I would have to be thin…  I knew I could never hope to be as thin as Twiggy, and I was certain that my mother would never support an eyelash adhesive addiction for those eyes….but I held high hopes that I could rid my waist and hips of anything that might look like a curve or extra pudge.    Weight Watchers had become the gold standard for rapid advancement into the ranks of the proud and the perfected. 

The only criteria for acceptancece into the program…you had to be at least  ten pounds over the ideal and acceptable weight according to the Metropolitan Life insurance charts for 1959.  I weighed in at a whooping 128 pounds…exactly ten pounds more than the lowest weight for my 5’6″ frame.  All  I could imagine was how good it was going to feel to drop those ten pounds…to weigh under 120.  After all, what right did I have to take up more space with my body than those life insurance companies deemed necessary for a female of my height.     I was a young girl who wanted to do my best to serve humanity, to live up to the standard of perfection.