Eat, Pray, Walk — A Weight Loss Year

July 1, 2008
Tuesday

Today is my birthday. I am entering the best years of my life. It’s going to be a mango bango year!
                — from my paper journal, March 9, 2005

I came upon the line above while searching through my notebooks for something else. I’d pulled out a short story to work on for an August deadline and couldn’t believe that the last note was dated August of 2004. Surely I’d worked on it since then! It’s my best story! My workshop leaders had told me that when this story was examined at Bread Loaf!

In 2004.

So I spent yesterday paging through the material I’ve amassed over the last four years. Sure enough, I found nothing about that story, but along the way I found other bits that reminded me of ideas I’ve let languish, projects I’ve allowed to remain stalled. I knew that the theme for NaBloPoMo July was “food.”  I’d dropped out of posting every day, too. There is an eating scene in every piece of fiction I write, and my turns through my notebooks had shown me that I do indeed write a lot about food, that I like writing about food, and that what I write is some of the freshest and liveliest stuff I produce. Why not put everything together, resurrect Refiguring,  and join the NaBlo fun again?

I was happy to open the administration panel and see that my last post in this section was at least in 2008. It was in January, and it was one of two. They, in turn, had followed a few I’d posted a year before, which followed some brief remarks I’d made the year before that.

And here we are again. I’m still a member of Weight Watchers, I still have a push-pull love-hate relationship with that organization, with my weight and appearance, with cultural norms and societal expectations about how we look and how we interact with food. I have written elsewhere about my feeling that I have just entered a period of remarkable calm and productivity. So for at least thirty days, I’m here.

The title of this piece comes from a recipe in Weight Watchers’ Quick Meals, a cookbook I have used a lot.  It has a lot of feathers (Post-It bookmarks) sticking out of it, some of them placed there by Lynn in 2003. She’d expressed dismay at the prospect of whole wheat fusilli with ham in walnut cream sauce for dinner, and I asked her to go through the book and find things that might suit her better.

Mango Bango (Spicy Mango Cream) is on p. 186. It calls for fresh mango, lime juice, and hot pepper sauce to be pureed with some vanilla frozen yogurt and served as a dessert (2 points, or 1.5 fruits and 35 optional calories, not a Core recipe, depending on which Weight Watchers algebra of intake accounting you follow).

The food I grew up on lasts a long time — apples and raisins, potatoes and onions, rutabagas and turnips. I want bright juicy fruit now — mangoes and papayas, pomegranates, peaches, nectarines, cherries.

I did have a mango bango year in 2005, and things just got better from there. I haven’t lost any significant amount of weight, but I haven’t gained any either. In body size and shape I’m about the same (though my hair is much better now!), but in terms of my optimism and my personality and the way I’ve grown and changed and gotten closer to who I really want to be, I’m way ahead of the somewhat fearful woman of February 2005 who thought she might now have neither the physical nor the emotional strength to go to Wyoming.

That was two Wyoming trips ago.

There are some fresh cherries and some fresh mango in the refrigerator.

I’m at the beginning of a mango bango summer. See you tomorrow!

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