Starving

One of the benefits of starving yourself on the Jenny Craig plan is that food tastes so good because you're so damn hungry. One of my colleagues brought me a cup of microwave kettle corn and by god it was like some sort of mysterious ambrosia. The Jenny Craig meals are generally pretty good, but after a few weeks of 100-calorie "Anytime Bars" and canned "Florentine Tortellini," you're pretty grateful for something different.

I went crawling back to Jenny at the beginning of this month after realizing that I'd gained 20 pounds in a year and my doctor actually suggested I might want to rein it in a bit. That, my friends, is a humbling experience.

I would find myself walking to work holding down my top because I hadn't realized how much-too-small it was. As I walked it would ride up over my expanding midriff, exposing far more than a 38-year-old professional should display to her colleagues and impressionable freshman college students. Other times I'd rush home to change into sweatpants because my undies were cutting off circulation to my legs.

Good times.

It's been three weeks and I'm down eight pounds. I'm now entertaining fantasies of beginning 2008 at my 2003 historic low.