Team Love

I reclaimed my husband after the 8th inning last night. As promised, he enjoyed drinks with us before the game and I actually felt a little bad for him because his fake tooth fell out again while we were eating spring rolls. I think it was the carrots I grew--so crisp and fresh!

When we got home, his first duty was to help me pick an outfit for my teaching interview that happened this morning (Corey is obviously the best choice for fashion advice). I tried on a lot of clothes last night, and none of them fit. This made me terribly upset. I had flashbacks to the awful morning this February when I realized I had gained 18 pounds of cheese weight over the winter. But, despite really heavy societal pressure and thanks to my Cross Fit trainer, I am trying not to focus on weight as a number. Much more important is the amount of harmful fat I have clogging my insides.

I reluctantly climbed aboard our magic scale and discovered that I have 30.6% body fat. One third of me is fat. One third. As in only two-thirds of me are bones and muscle and organ tissue all combined. (Corey is, of course, under 12% body fat.)

This is not good for my heart, it's not good for my rugby game, and it made me really, really sad. I've been working so hard this summer on our team fitness challenge PLUS I've been killing myself with Cross Fit. I know I make a lot of jokes about being a great big forward, but when you come from a family inclined toward weight gain and then you marry a tall, lanky string bean, it can get upsetting. Particularly late at night when none of your dress clothes fit and you are faced with the plus-sized racks. I had this vision of my future children begging me to come chase them somewhere and being unable to run after them, weighed down by my fat.

We talked about it for awhile and Corey is going to help me follow the advice of the food books I've been reading all summer. We're going to continue to eat healthy foods (we don't really do fried and I can't remember the last time I ate something chemically and preservative-laden) but I'm not going to eat them at night anymore and I'm going to eat less of them. Plus we'll use his Lance-style food scale and keep track of our consumption.

This will be a real challenge for me, because I am used to eating mass quantities of food. I feel such aching hunger after working out, but as I get older it takes less and less food to satiate these well-earned gorges. Corey can continue to do so, because he has the metabolism of an 8-year-old boy (according to our magic scale). But his big team love effort to help me is that he will eat these mass quantities of food in his basement cubby and not in front of me where I get tempted.

We want to be healthy adults and continue to be healthy old people. We want to hike and climb things for many decades to come, and I'm not going to be able to do that if I keep adding fat stores to my short, stubby body. I want to be 23% fat. This is, perhaps, a more difficult goal than graduate school. I just feel really thankful that I have Corey with me to help me get there again.