Smallest Loser

I love cake. It's just so yummy!

Cake is particularly yummy for breakfast, with a nice big cup of coffee (my other addiction). Sugar and caffeine and butterfat... a match dreamed up in Heaven, for sure. And mid-afternoon, with a cup of tea, you just can't beat a little sliver of cake for a pick-me-up.

It's pretty good for dessert, too, but if there's cake in the house I will -- by that time of day -- have already indulged in a "little sliver" several times, so after-dinner is the one time of day I can (sometimes) shrug it off.

If I ate all the cake I wanted, I'd have to audition for Biggest Loser. As it is, I am often astonished that I'm still well under 200 pounds. Not that I'm as slim as I'd like to be. Over the past 9 years, since turning 40, I've watched my mid-section slowly and steadily lose the battle with middle-aged spread as the numbers on the scale have crept up, a pound here, two there.

I figure I'm doing pretty well to confine my cake indulgences (most of the time) to once weekly, and my excess poundage to around 20. I'd rather the excess were zero, but the bottom line is I'm not willing to give up cake completely to get there.

Last year my sister and I decided we would be email diet buddies. We'd support and encourage and motivate and check in with each other and lose weight together. As of Jan. 1, 2008, my total weight loss for the ENTIRE previous YEAR was a whopping... 1 pound. One. That's pathetic!

I've been pretending, since Jan. 1, that I'm going to get more serious about eating less and exercising more. But mostly it's been pretense. However, as of this morning I'm down another pound and a half, to 157.5 (not too bad for 5'8" and almost-50, but a tad on the pudgy side). Better than nothing, but still in Smallest Loser territory.

So, I've decided to go public. Maybe if I blog about it I'll actually get my butt in gear. Whether or not anyone but me (and probably my husband and sister) will ever read this doesn't matter. I'll pretend there's someone out there who's keeping an eye on this blog and expects to read reports of successful shrinkage.

If I hadn't spent so much time getting my banner image sized to fit just right (I'm new at this), I'd ramble on a little longer, but it's way too nice a day to spend the entire afternoon inside at the computer... I'm gonna go put on my sneakers and go for a walk.