I'm cranky.

When I hit 164 pounds I officially became overweight by BMI standards rather than obese. Right now I’m about 17 pounds away from having a healthy BMI (at least last time I weighed myself I was). I’m 5’2” tall, and according to the powers that be, a healthy BMI would require that I weigh between 101 and 136 pounds. The thought of weighing that little is moderately ridiculous to me. Also, the thought of only being 17 pounds overweight is even more ridiculous.

My brain doesn’t seem to register the weight loss as much as my body does. In my head I’m still a fat girl, and I imagine it will probably always be that way. And I’m glad it is that way because I don’t want to be one of those people who forget what it is like to be morbidly obese. There is no forgetting something like that. The craziest thing to me is that I know people now who didn’t know me at 220 pounds, and so to them I’m not the token fat girl. That’s just doesn't seem right to me. It freaks me out a little, to be honest.

The thing that annoys me most (well, maybe not most, but certainly a lot) is when people think that weight loss is easy. I hate hate hate when a genetically blessed and super thin person will say, “All it takes is diet and exercise. Fat people are just lazy.” That, my friends, is complete crap and kind of makes me want to kick rocks at people. While statements like that annoy the holy hell out of me, I have to admit its almost worse now that I have lost a significant amount of weight to hear someone downplay what I have been doing with my life. Sure, I make self-deprecating comments about how I stopped drinking so much beer after college and that did the trick, but when other people say things like that to me it makes me moderately insane. They don’t know what I’ve done, or how hard it is, so I pretty much just want to bitch slap a large amount of people.

The same goes for fitness endeavors. I have friends that have been hardcore runners for years, so to them my accomplishment of running at a 10-ish minute mile pace during a 10k isn’t that impressive. Granted, they act impressed and are very supportive, but I can just kind of tell that to them its not a big deal. Luckily they fake it well. But there are others who make comments about how something sounds “easy enough” that basically make me want to scream and punch them and cry and punch them again. (I’m sounding very violent. I’m a nice girl, I swear!) To go from walking, to barely 10 minutes on the elliptical, to 30 minutes on the elliptical, to Couch to 5K, to running, to training for a half marathon… It is not freaking easy, darn it! I will not forget what it was like to struggle to do 10 minutes of cardio. I can’t forget it, and I won’t let myself forget it, because I don’t want to end up in the same place.

I’m more concerned with being healthy and being physically fit than with a healthy BMI, but it seems that the two are on their way to arriving at the same time. And anyone who thinks that what I am doing is easy can pretty much just punch themselves in the face because it will save me time, thank you. If this were so damn easy I would have done it a long time ago.