In light of the fact that I neglected to bring the lunch I packed (dumb ass pulls ahead in the odds) and that today may be one of the last summer-like days we have here for a while, I decided to walk four blocks to our newly refurbished City Market in search of food.

I found a little cafe that touts fresh, local ingredients.  Sold.

I decided to make this just another meatless Monday and ordered a grilled veggie pita with a side of black bean/corn salad.  The veggies included zucchini, mushrooms, onions and a variety of lettuce leaves, with some mozzarella cheese (hardly any, really) and garnished with a mild remuolade.

The sandwich was very tasty –veggies were still crisp but nicely grilled — however in the four blocks I had to walk back to my desk the pita got a wee bit soggy.

Note to self: EAT SOMEWHERE BESIDES YOUR DESK ONCE IN A WHILE!

The black beans should provide enough protein to power me through water aerobics tonight, and the red onion in the dish should ensure no one wants to get close to me for the rest of the afternoon. Win/win.

Second note to self: Make this at home! Nom!

Nude is beautiful. Just not on the furniture, please and thanks.

There was a meme all over Facebook this week about a woman who reportedly wrote a response to a bulletin posted at a gym. I  do not know if any of this is true, so the journalist in me resisted posting it to my wall.

Also, many of the memes included a nude photo of French model Tara Lynn (pictured here) sitting in a wicker chair. While she is certainly beautiful and I appreciate tasteful nudity, I don’t like naked people on furniture. It’s an phobia I have about ass-matter-transfer, one of the multitude of reasons I would never be comfortable at a nudist colony, and totally not relevant to this discussion.

Any old hoo, this is the text of the meme:

A while back, at the entrance of a gym, there was a picture of a very thin and beautiful woman. The caption was “This summer, do you want to be a mermaid or a whale?”

The story goes, a woman (of clothing size unknown) answered the following way:

OK. There’s a lot going on in that meme, and it has generated a lot of discussion.

For some, it’s been eye-opening that beauty does come in all shapes and sizes.  

For others, this seems to say that it’s OK to be obese, no matter what the consequences to your health. (I follow this blogger on Twitter and she’s smart and funny. I totally get where she’s going here.)

My take, for what it’s worth, is this: If some staffer at a gym really posted that flyer, it’s a condescending way to isolate and shame women and it sends the wrong message. In other words, that person is a douche.

Women should not be shamed into fitness because of their appearance, ever. This is not a way to incentivize exercise, at least it’s not for me. The horrific memories of school gym classes come flooding back and that is one of the reasons I’ve always felt like I don’t belong in a fitness facility. Every gym teacher I ever had was Sue Sylvester. True story.

But I am trying to convince myself now that I do belong. I remind myself that I do not swim to look prettier in my swimsuit. I swim, despite all the cellulite jutting out for the world to see, to improve my health.

To the woman who wrote the response that has now been tweeted and liked around the Internet, I am almost there with you. Whales are not overweight and they are certainly not unattractive. They are powerful, graceful and fit. Mermaids are not real and certainly not aspirational. I want to enjoy food, drinks and ice cream, too. I want to embrace my curves. But I also know that too much “cultivation” is going to kill me.

If losing weight has the side benefit of looking better, then that’s great. But the goal for me is to alleviate my arthritis pain and help my mobility. My current weight is impeding my career and my personal life. I have no illusions that I will ever be thin or look like the images in magazines, which are totally unrealistic and, frankly, unattractive.

Fifteen years ago, I was fit and active. I walked more than 20 miles a week and had no problems with blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol etc.

Still, I was 40 pounds over the weight I am supposed to be for my height.

Tara Lynn (with clothes) is gorgeous and curvy. And a size 12, from what I've read.

I have always had a round ass and chunky thighs, and no matter how much shame is shoved down my throat, I always will be curvy. I was not OK with that when I was younger. I loathed the way I looked and those body images haunt me to this day. It’s part of the reason that, as I became older and less active, I piled on so much weight — I found comfort in food that eased the pain of never feeling pretty enough.

People who do not have emotional issues with food will never understand that statement. Those who do know exactly what I mean.

It rained all day here yesterday, which I gather is a rare thing in October in Southern California. Um, so yeah, all you Californians who laughed that our 5.6 earthquake in Virginia last month was barely enough shaking for a martini? We don’t call it a “weather event” when it rains. We just call it rain. We don’t like it. We avoid going for walks. But we keep calm and carry an umbrella.

Anyway, my vacation goal to plan each day around the equation of eating less plus moving more, which is supposed to equal less fat on my ass, was set back a wee bit because it was too wet to walk toward the ocean (more irony, I guess.) So I ended up walking on the fitness center treadmill. I really hate treadmills because it makes walking a chore.

I ended up trying to calculate how many miles I had to walk to earn a pineapple martini. I decided it was two miles. I am not going to show my work.

Anyway, my husband decided to skip dinner with his colleagues at the Cheesecake Factory (I know, right? WTF? We’re in California and they want to go to the shitty Cheesecake Factory?) and we went to a place down the street, Killer Shrimp.

And I had a “killer” margarita (it was sublime) and a bowl of lobster mac and cheese. If my calculations were correct, to walk that bowl of creamy sin away I owed that treadmill 26 more miles. Uphill. At marathon pace.

So I only ate about a third of it. It was maybe one of the finest tasting dishes I have ever had, but it was so rich, that a third was plenty.

I am not going to mention that Phil and I figured out if you combined lobster mac and cheese with french fries, you get the most wonderful thing on the planet. Patent pending.

Much better view than CNN on a treadmill television.

All has returned to normal here in L.A. this sunny morning, so I walked about two miles around Marina del Rey. Much more pleasant than a shitty treadmill.  When Phil is done with his meeting, we plan to hit the Getty Center and Old Town Pasadena before dinner with his family. Since I am uber self-conscious about eating in front of his relatives, I am hoping for a calorie deficit for the day.

Moving more. Eating less. Is this really me?

Since this means I won’t eat dinner or I will eat it very late, I brought along a nectarine and this Special K protein meal bar (chocolatey chip!) to eat before I head to the fitness center.

The hag  counselor at Weight Watchers said I should probably add more protein to my diet, you know, so my fat ass would maybe drop a pound instead of gain a pound. Just pointing me in the right direction.

So I bought these protein bars today.

Did you ever make a mud pie when you were a kid? And it looked just like chocolate and, since you were a kid with a vivid imagination, you sampled your mud pie, only to find it doesn’t taste anything at all like chocolate, just gritty dirt sprinkled with tiny rocks?

Then you know what this protein bar tastes like.

Congratulations, Kellogg. You managed to make something chocolate thoroughly unappealing to me.  I am in my 40s and I didn’t think that was possible.

Well, at least I still had the nectarine.

I wonder sometimes about my inner dialogues and just how many fucked-up voices there are inside my head.

For example, when work was done yesterday I should have headed straight to the pool for a water aerobics class. But my the voice in my head that helps me make shitty decisions came up with some really compelling arguments to skip the gym and go home to the couch.

• It was overcast and gloomy. Who wants to swim when it’s damp outside?
• The instructor is a creepy retired gym teacher, resulting in flashbacks to the 1970s, where all my troubles with physical fitness began –gym class PTSD.
• The hillbilly family would likely be there, and hillbillies are very hard to drown.
• I swam laps on Sunday and my body still ached from it. Hello, I never said I was Diana Nyad.

Diana Nyad > me

Despite the fact that I know I always feel better after I workout, and my inner optimist tries to rally me on, my inner cynic always coddles me into making bad choices.

It’s like there is a two-party debate continually raging in my brain.  My inner Progressive whispers to get fit and stay positive, but my inner Reactionary always shouts that and makes that sound like a sissy idea from a pansy ass.

Even though I know that’s a completely false, I fall for it almost every time.

It’s all very noisy, the rhetoric is endless and at the end of the day, nothing gets done. Just like Congress.

I know I wanted to find better ways to pay homage to the hard work that is dieting. But honestly, after weigh in yesterday I was starving, and I needed to run an errand for work, so my husband and I ended up in this amazing little downtown bakery and I ended up with an almond croissant (similar to the one in this photo) in my belly.

Not gonna lie: It was abso-freakin-lutely fantastic.

We also took home a loaf of ciabatta bread because this bakery makes the most wonderful breads, and our carb-loving selves could not resist a fresh loaf of wonderful.

I spent the afternoon trying, unsuccessfully I am sure, to burn off that croissant. One hour in the pool doing laps and aerobics until my limbs were fatigued probably only worked off the almond silvers and didn’t put a dent in the butter layers of the pastry, but it did make me feel good.

The sun was warm, the water was cool and the sky was clear. Being in that water felt amazing. I can work every muscle without fear of hurting my arthritic joints, I can bend and stretch in ways that are nearly impossible on dry land. In the pool, the weight that binds me is almost a plus because it adds to my buoyancy. For that hour, I felt weightless and free.

When I got out of the pool, my muscles were sore, but my joints weren’t in any pain. I spent an hour by the pool reading and just soaking in the glory of a late summer afternoon. It was a better reward than that tasty croissant.

Yeah, I just typed that and meant it. Stunning. Especially to me.

After I left the gym, I had to go back downtown to finish my work errand, and that meant a half-mile walk. After the workout in the pool, it felt good to use my legs on land and think about how they are getting stronger and feel lighter with 20 pounds off. My feet, however, were on fire.

I may need to spend a day shopping for a great pair of walking shoes that aren’t ugly. Not a simple task.

Later I went to the grocery store and I was really hungry. That is normally a dangerous situation. But I kept thinking about the ciabatta bread and planning what could I do with it that won’t blow our diet. Just because it’s Saturday shouldn’t mean a daylong calorie and fat indulgence. But damn it, I need to eat something satisfying.

So I bought almost every veggie that I love: Baby spinach leaves, romaine lettuce, green and red peppers, grape tomatoes, English cucumbers. To sweeten things up, I bought berries and melon. Then I bought our favorite peach/mango salsa and every lean deli meat that appealed to me: turkey, ham, roast beef.

So our Saturday night feast was like our own personal Subway sandwich bar. We loaded the soft, crusty bread with all these veggies, meats and mustard and enjoyed crispy raw veggies, multigrain chips and salsa as side dishes.

For a special treat, we had Skinnygirl margaritas muddled with fresh blackberries. Oh. My. Mercy. That? Was one of the best cocktails I’ve had in a very long time. Low calorie and high antioxidants. Booze just became a healthy choice.

Life is damn good.

Every bite of the food was delicious and every sip of the cocktail was refreshing. I felt indulgent but not guilty, because this was great food  and drinks that we really enjoyed, but they were much better choices than what we were making just a few weeks ago.

And that, after all, is the only way I will ever lose weight and keep it off.

I am contemplating going to a yoga class today. I like yoga, but with my bad knees it can be tricky. And at my gym, there are mirrors on two of the studio walls that are hard to avoid — if I don’t get one particular spot in the back of the room, I have to stare at myself while trying to do the poses.

And when I watch myself as I practice yoga, it looks a lot like this:

Nothing lost this week, but nothing gained.

If this were my first time at the weight-loss rodeo, I might be discouraged. But it’s not so I am not.

This week was a market correction of sorts because I dropped too much last week, really.

I am, however, going to have to step up my game.

As soon as I finish this post, I am headed to the gym.

I loathe exercise. With the heat of a thousand suns burns my hatred for working up a sweat while my heart beats out of my chest and I gasp for breath.

If I could channel that energy into fat-burning, I would be willow-like. Wispy, even. But I can’t. And I want to be strong, despite the many obstacles that face me when I arrive at the gym.

I will work out slowly and methodically. Still, anguish will follow.

And I have to work tonight, so the fact that even my hair follicles will be in pain while I am trying to form a coherent criticism of a play at an experimental theater makes the idea of setting foot in the gym even less enticing than normal.

And don’t get me started on the fitness-crazed douche bags that look at my fat ass on a treadmill like I don’t belong there, as if I didn’t already know that.

Piss a protein shake on my grave when I’m dead, Mr. Six-Pack-Asshole, since clearly you’re convinced you will outlive me. Until then, turn your smug face back to the mirror where you can continue to admire your veiny, spray-tanned pecs.

Despite all those very valid reasons to stay home and watch “Project Runway” on my DVR,  I am going to the gym anyway. Because that’s the only way to become strong enough to enjoy my life.

Today was the first day in about a month that a person who hates to sweat profusely could walk around outside and not feel like a sprinkling of gooey cheese melted on a pie in a pizza oven.

(I prefer delicious metaphors, a habit I will not surrender due to dieting.)

It’s also the first day that it was not melty-cheesy-hot AND I felt I could handle walk since the cortisone injection in my right knee 10 days ago.

So out I went.

And it felt OK. Not great, but OK. Considerably less achy-hurty-arrrgh than it would have been before the shot.

And I needed to get some fresh air  and exercise because I am showing physical signs of stress today and am trying to develop new coping skills that doesn’t involve a tub of Duncan Hines frosting and a spoon.

I declare my brief journey into the mean streets of a small Southern city a success.

But I don’t get high. I get sore. I get depressed. I get pissed off that simple things are just so damn hard for me.

A lack of natural coordination pretty much meant I sucked at every single sport I ever attempted. The only thing I could do reasonably well was hit a softball, because let’s face it, you just stand there and time your swing.

I was always the last picked for every game in school. I was the first target in dodgeball and then I would plant my fat ass against the cinder block wall that no doubt contained seven layers of lead paint and tried really hard not to cry. I usually failed at that too.

So anyway, I hate to exercise. And I’ve been off work for three days and have not been to the gym even once, even though it was on the to-do list.

Making salsa was on the to-do list. I got THAT done. Priorities. I haz ‘em.

I am down to one pair of jeans that I can wear since I piled back on half the weight I worked so hard to take off in 2008. I have like, two dozen pairs of pants, and can’t squeeze my chubby cheeks into any of them.

I wear what were supposed to be my fat jeans for two or three days, wash them and wear them another couple of days. To my office. Luckily, my boss has yet to ask me why. I’m hoping she just hasn’t noticed.

I make sure to wear nice underwear every day because surely these overworked jeans will soon unravel into threads and fall off. I’d rather not be wearing granny panties with stretched-out elastic waistbands when that happens.

Last weekend, my dryer died. This was a surprise since I was reasonably sure it’s partner, the washer, would be the first to go. It’s sad when one half of a couple goes before the other. The washer seemed lonely standing there next the decaying corpse of its formerly warm friend.

Out of mercy and respect for their longstanding relationship I had no problem sending my 13-year-old Whirlpool washer and dryer together appliance heaven, even though the washer was still chugging loudly away. Brand new front loaders FTW!

But when the dryer died, that was a clear obstacle to my wash-and-wear jeans situation. The new appliances wouldn’t be delivered until Friday. I hadn’t washed my jeans since Saturday. I was not looking forward to smelling like ass by mid-week and I doubted anyone would believe I spilled ketchup on the exact same spot every single day on each pair of what has to be a wardrobe of the identical pairs of the same faded jeans.

So on Wednesday I figured out that, with just the right top, I could get away with wearing a pair of yoga pants to work. I’m so short that for me, yoga pants are just, pants.

On Thursday I sent my jeans through my washer one last time and then took them to the laundromat to dry them. Laundromats are scary places and I cannot say I missed them over the last 13 years. Jeans went from wet to dry and I didn’t get mugged so I considered myself very lucky.

The point of all this is that I have ballooned to the point that I have ONE THING TO WEAR on the lower half of my body and so I had to wear stretchy pants to work and risk getting assaulted at a sketchy laundromat to maintain the ONE THING with a zipper that I can wear.

And all this drama is the direct result of comforting myself with cannoli and tiramisu every time I have a shitty day and believe me, I have some pretty crap-filled days. Custard and chocolate beat the hell out of Prozac and Klonopin for endorphin building in my brain, and believe me, I take both.

I took Friday off so I could be here when my space-age OMG THEY ARE SO COOL washer and dryer were delivered. Then I was going to go to the gym. But I needed to study for what I sure was a midterm in learning to program this washer that promised to handle my bulky bedding and my whitest whites.

And then I needed to pick up an order from a For Your Pleasure party because, hello, you know. And then it was dinner time and Hoylier came home and I had planned a nice meal and I had all this laundry to do.

So I reasoned that the sweat I worked up scrubbing five years of filth off the laundry room floor was a good cardio for the day.

Yesterday I was determined to do two things: Go to the gym and buy another pair of pants. Then I got the sinfully brilliant idea that walking the mall would be a great way to get my heart rate up AND I could shop for fatty fat-ass pants at the same time.

I am nothing if not a good time manager.

The mall walking went better than expected. I was concerned that I would get too distracted by purses and shoes (fat girls can always find purses and shoes that fit, which is why we commonly obsess about them. I should write a book about this shit) but I really did stay focused and circled the mall three times.

I stopped at Macy’s and found a pair of pants in EXTRA FAT WIDE ASS size that would fit. On sale, no less. I picked them up.

And then put them back on the rack.

If only having ONE THING that covers my thighs and does not have elastic at the waist or ankles isn’t enough incentive to get serious about dropping some of this weight, well then, maybe exposing my silky floral drawers to the other customers in the deli aisle when these jeans disintegrate will do it.

I am wearing these jeans until they fall off, either from being too big or from sheer overuse. And probably the only way to get back into my other pants is to put on the yoga pants and really exercise. Which, as I covered earlier, I hate.

I am way to complicated from a woman with only one pair of jeans.