In which I just realized I haven’t blogged in, like, ten days or something! Ack!

I watched all four-point-five seasons of Battlestar Galactica in the space of half a month. It was frakkin’ awesome.

I have been in bed for three days with an evil, mean, awful cold. I’m coughing like I’m in a TB ward and I can’t smell anything.

Why can’t I buy simple cotton long-sleeved fitted women’s t-shirts anywhere? How hard is it to make long-sleeved freakin’ t-shirts that aren’t fugly and boxy?

I still need to buy new underwear, but I’ve run out of Xmas money and I’d rather pay my cell phone bill instead.

I’ve lost ten pounds! [People tell me I “don’t need” to lose any weight and roll their eyes when I tell them I’m dieting, but honestly I think it’s because we’re all so fat we can’t even see it any more. When overweight is the norm – as it currently is – obesity really doesn’t look that much bigger.

When I dig through pictures of myself and friends, on Facebook for instance, the slender people – those who would have been deemed ‘normal’ just twenty years ago – stick out because there are so few of them. Type II diabetes is rampant, heart disease is rampant, depression and weird pain disorders are rampant: my whole fucking culture is unwell. We’re also fat and eat diets that are historically the highest-calorie, highest-fat, and highest-cholesterol EVER. Related? Hell, I don’t know. Seems like it could be. Maybe we just live too damn long, and this is what aging looks like, except a lot more of the 30-somethings are heavy than was true a decade ago. That and the whole it-seems-we-evolved-to-move-around-a-lot-more-than-we-do thing.

I’m not cult-of-the-body obsessed with slenderness (because I’ve aged out of that particular demographic) (yay the invisibility of one’s 40s!), but I do live in a body and I pay attention to it and the truth is that the heavier I get, the less comfortable I am. Period. Dropping even ten pounds has made me feel better. Not to mention that I’m eating delicious and cute stuff like the bento above, so it’s not like I’m suffering.

Bentoing really makes you concentrate on your food. I find that I prepare it, decorate it, and then naturally put everything away before sitting down to eat. This stops the dreaded going-back-for-seconds thing pretty effectively. And eating thoughtfully presented food really is nourishing to a set of senses most Americans routinely ignore.

While we all know the BMI chart is a guide and not gospel (because it doesn’t take body type into consideration) (and God knows I’ll never be willowy), it’s not an utterly useless tool. It tells me that the “overweight” range for my height and gender is 150-179; “obese” starts at 180. So: I’m overweight even after losing ten pounds. Three weeks ago I was a mere twenty pounds away from obesity! While overweight seems to contain little increased risk (beyond that for diabetes, which no doubt sucks enough to be scary on its own), it’s still the gateway to obesity: twenty pounds isn’t that hard to gain. (My waist-to-hip ratio, if you prefer that measurement, is 0.84, which puts me firmly in the 0.81-to-0.85 ‘moderate’ risk category. So yes: I do need to be dieting and it is appropriate.) I’d rather be forty pounds away from increased chances for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes than twenty; I’d also rather feel energetic and light on my feet than all jiggly and achy.]

Oh, and if you didn’t figure it out, the point of the previous post was this: If you’ve got old Polaroid film stashed around somewhere, MAIL IT TO ME.

• 105 Million Americans Have Diabetes or Prediabetes, CDC Now Says