There is this depressing thing at my work called a body fat meter. It measures what percent of your body weight is fat, water, and other tissue by measuring the electrical resistance in your bare feet. It prints out a receipt helpfully listing the percentages and total pounds in each category. The machine is not super-accurate but in a way, it is kind of fun to have a receipt listing my percent body fat, right where sales tax would be listed on a grocery receipt. I get on this machine every six weeks or so, and no matter how much my weight changes (ok, it doesn’t change MUCH), it always declares that my percentage is one point above the desireable range. That’s the depressing part.

Since my golly-I-need-new-pants high point in mid-December, I have begun erratically exercising more and erratically enforcing a one-food indulgence-per-day rule for myself. I occasionally endure the cheerful encouragement of the free fitness trainer at my work; he is excellent at knowing when I am plotting to quit my weight lifting reps too early. If I seem especially stubborn on this point, he will ever-so-kindly swap my weights for the next size down and make me keep going. He is unaffected by my black stare of doom, which communicates the message, “I am old enough to be your mother, youngster, so don’t even think of bossing me around again.” I would have had to begin childbearing when I was 10 yrs old for that to be true, but you are allowed to mentally exaggerate when you are resisting others’ attempts to help you get healthy. (It’s a human right,look it up on the UN website).

Unrelentingly Cheery Fitness Trainer and I have fortunately eliminated the need to buy me new pants (I wonder how he would be as a personal shopper? As far as I know his wardrobe consists entirely of sweats and basketball shorts). But that darn “desirable range” percentage point! Why must it elude me?