Not every day is a good day...

...and today I blame the Girl Scouts.

I walked into my office this morning and stared at the expanse of brown fake wood desk in front of my keyboard. Something was different. My stuff had been moved around, and instead of the usual water bottle and "Stuff I should've done last week" Post-It, someone had brought me a dusty three-hole punch that looked like it might've come out of a World War-II telegraph office, and two brightly colored boxes. It took me a second to realize what it was, but when I finally read the packages, I let out an audible groan while my inner voice cheered at the same time. Girl Scout cookies. If Satan could be boxed and mass marketed, he would taste like Thin Mint.

In the morning I laughed about it...another funny relic from my past dalliances in the world of fat and sugar, because I had ordered these cookies back in October when I just didn't care that my waist was starting to overtake my waistbands and that my ass seemed to be growing a second ass of its own. I put them away in a Wal-Mart sack and stuck them under my desk, making a mental note to blog about it later after my workout.

Nine hours later, I wasn't so happy anymore. I found myself in the same position I was in last Wednesday--slumped in my chair with dinner on my plate and an overwhelming urge to just give up. I held those stupid Girl Scout cookies like they were kittens in my lap, tracing my finger over the perforations on the edge, and just willing myself to open up one box and start chowing down. To ruin all this because it wasn't worth it anyway. I didn't do it. I threw it in the back of my cupboard with the peanut butter and the Sunchips--fat girl contraband--and when I shut the pantry door I stood back and shook like some crack addict, 10% proud that I had made it past another hurdle, and 90% on the verge of tears because it still won't put a dent in all this fat. I fear I'm hitting another little hump already and it's starting to gnaw away at all the goodwill and cheeriness I built up after the first successful weigh-in. I don't know why coming home at night leads to such depression for me in particular, but it affects me profoundly and I haven't quite figured out a way to let it pass through without feeling like a loser for getting so upset.

I know part of the reason is because every daily weigh-in since my planned cheat day has not been good. So not good, in fact, that my weight has jumped back up the four pounds that I thought I had bid good riddance last weekend. I suppose I can blame it on several things...a natural consequence of the monthly cycle, maybe some water retention from too much salt...but I can't stop the relentless fear that maybe the weight never really went away in the first place. The scales lied. I was dehydrated, and I somehow filched on getting accurately weighed all last week. But I know I didn't. I just don't understand why it won't drop back down, and why I am so easily manipulated by the numbers on the scale.

I went to exercise today, even though I didn't really want to, because today is Day 11 and Day 11 is just too far down the path to give up, and at the same time too early to make excuses. I went, and I did my thang but it hurt. Everything just goddamned hurt and while my shins burned and my body slogged along on the treadmill and my muscles from yesterday's escapade in the Big Boy Room sang with pain, I got angrier and angrier at everyone around me. I hate the moms who never break a sweat on the ellipticals in their shiny track pants and their hooded sweatshirts as if it could possibly even be remotely cool at any time in the gym. I despise the rows of military wives on the stationary bikes, permanent size sixteens with hair dyed the exact same of burgundy, pedaling their bikes as slowly as possible and chatting like hens while I work my ass off on the treadmills behind them. I silently seethe at the athletes, their perfect asses clad in the most scanty of running shorts, long limbs springing off the treadmills as they take their leisurely thirty minute run for the night, while I fight to keep my stubby legs churning at my own embarrassingly slow pace.

The one I hate most on these nights is myself, because I feel like such an extraordinary loser for working as hard as I think I do and not getting anything back in return. I hate that every day I can remember I have been obsessed with being smaller, being prettier, being more desirable. I am ashamed to admit that I'd give up my health or my intellect in return for just a taste of what it's like to be beautiful and healthy and to move with grace and efficiency instead of always trudging along. I am so angry that I can spend an hour working as hard as I can for a few hundred measly calories. I hate that my face turns red when I run, that my boobs bounce on the elliptical machines, that my calves look like two pale sausages splooging out over my athletic socks.

There are some nights when I am so afraid to look at the scale again, because I'm convinced it will just keep going up. I'm scared to think that every morning as I smoothe my clothes over my body, there will always be a disgusting, flaccid stomach poking out underneath. And I'm terrified that I will keep doing everything exactly right like I have been this past week and a half and nothing will change, because the universe is having one gigantic joke at my expense. I guess I'll just have to keep trying, because at this point I really don't know what else to do.