If You Chance to Meet a Frown...

Two months ago I started a weight loss program. Several weeks later, I'm feeling pretty good about it and myself simply because people are starting to notice and say things to me, so I know it's working. In fact, I may have been feeling a bit too confident about things.

Until.

I was at my sister's house a couple of weeks ago. I got out of the shower, which is across from a rather large mirror. I don't have that luxury at home so I took a moment to look at my nekkid body. Not a happy sight. In fact, it was a bit of a let-down after all the ego-feeding I'd been getting.

Don't get me wrong -- it's tons better than it was in April, but there's still some work to do. The reason I know this is that my belly button looks like a frownie face. Not the button itself, but the waistal surrounding it. Because there's a fair amount of excess flesh pulling the waist's skin down over the belly button, you can't actually see the umbilicus; rather just a dent where it should be, and then skin overlapping it in a downward motion. (It makes me sound like more of a behemouth than I actually am; I'm just trying to be descriptive. Believe it or not, when you do a Google image search for "belly button," there are only preggers bellies and pierced ones.)

I used my hands to pull the excess skin (okay, and the flab) back so I could see what my tummy would look like at my ideal weight. Ahhh, much better. There's the belly button just as it should be -- more like a nose than a frownie face. I made up my mind right then and there that no matter what the scale says, the frownie face transformation into a nose will be my goal. When I see that with no help, I know I've made it.

It was such a good realization for me that I went home and shared it with Linda. "I'll know I'm where I want to be when I don't have a frownie face anymore." Her blank face indicated that not everyone has spent quality nekkid time time in front of the mirror analyzing her belly button and what it looks like, so I showed her. With the visual aid, it was immediately obvious what I was talking about, and she even went and got a blue Sharpie marker and drew eyes and a nose above the frownie face. It was a little difficult to accomplish since we were both laughing so hard -- you can't really get a good drawing when the canvas is shaking so much.