Numbers At My Feet

I lost twenty-five pounds.

I can’t remember when I decided to lose weight.

It feels like only yesterday that I had broken a promise I had once made to myself, and hesitantly stood on the old scale in my Nana’s bathroom.

The needle jumped from the zero and past the "160" mark. I stepped off quickly, then left. I shook the number from my head before it could settle there. Was that the deciding moment?

I couldn't tell you.

But nonetheless, I made a decision. A big decision.

I let the amount of food I was eating every day slowly dwindle down to somewhere around one thousand calories at one point. My evening walks turned into my evening runs. I remember how it felt, taking a rest on a cool rock at the end of the walking trail, gulping water, being slick with sweat. It was excruciating, but I pushed myself to do it every day. And then it didn’t feel hard anymore. I simply pushed myself along, looking at the dull brown river as I ran alongside it, my mind completely blank. Then, when August began and marching band practices made it hard to spend time at home, I started going for bike rides. By the end of the summer, I was only consuming around 1200 calories at the most and going for two bike rides per day. It was excessive. I didn't care.

And at one point, my clothing stopped fitting me. I poked new holes into my white stud belt, all the way up to where the studs started. My friends would look at me, envy shining dully just behind their eyes, asking me how I had done it.

It was a strange feeling. It was foreign. People were never jealous of me. People probably hung out with me because they wanted friends that they didn’t have to be jealous of.

There was a time when my weight loss went from an experiment to an obsession. The amount of calories in all of the snacks in my house became common knowledge. There are 140 calories in 26 cheese curls. I still know that. Maybe I'll always know that. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the last ten pounds I still want to lose. Every time I eat something outside of the strict confines of my diet, I immediately begin planning what foods I will eat (and not eat) the next day.

I may look a little better in my clothes, and the numbers at my feet have slipped neatly back into a "normal" BMI, but along with the weight, I lost something else.

It’s something I can’t really find a word to describe. Is there a word that means "the ability to go through one day without any worries"?

Happiness?

But did I even have that in the first place?