The Story So Far...

I'm fat. Not as fat as I was, but still fat.

I know it, I'm aware of it. Painfully aware, at times.

I got up to somewhere in the 330s or 340s by the time I graduated from high school. I was the queen of extracurriculars, yet did very little in the way of actual activity. I made the yearbook (with the help of only two or three other people), I volunteered through Key Club, I did homework, I used the computer... I ate (a lot). I slept. That was about it.

Then, in my first year of college, instead of finding the Freshman 15, I lost the Freshman 30. Suddenly, I had daily activity. I worked in the dish room of the cafeteria and I had to haul ass all over campus to get to where I was going. It was more exercise in my first month than I had gotten in all four years of high school.

Sometime at the end of freshman year (who am I kidding? I know exactly when it was...) I ended up with my first ever boyfriend. Over the next year, I got to the lowest weight I had seen on a scale since middle school - the 280s.

Since then (that was 2001, if you want to keep track), I have regained and lost those same 40-ish pounds dozens of times. I've stopped telling people when I get under 300 again, because it's just not news anymore.

Oh, yeah, I moved to Japan in 2004 and have been here ever since. You'd think it'd be easy to lose the pudge in the land of the waif, wouldn't you? Yeah, it's not. Every week there's white rice, white bread, tempura-ed everything, fried tofu, full-fat high-calorie bars marketed as health foods....

And then, just as many idiotic fad diets as there are in America - the apple diet, the banana diet, the cookie diet, the 35 calorie dehydrated soup diet (seriously, you eat that three times a day and subsist on 105 calories a day plus water for a week). The country as a whole has no idea what "healthy" is. Whole grains are a mystery. People are horrified when I tell them that I eat brown rice, convinced that it is actually bad for your digestive system.

The nearest gym is an hour's drive away (and I don't have a car).

The nearest pool is a school pool populated by miniscule pre-adolescents who would enjoy nothing more than staring at the super fat foreigner with big boobs (huge, by Japanese standards) in a bathing suit.

Yet, against all odds, I'm approaching that magical scale decade of the 280s again. People seem to do well when they log what they're doing and put it out there for the world to see. This is my dedication.

I'm Big in Japan, baby.