Damn the man.

I have a confession to make.

And I normally wouldn't have ever really written about this because I feel like such a douche for saying it, but I finally got to see that episode of A Different World where Dwayne Wayne becomes an afterschool mentor for rival gang members played by those adorable boys from Kriss Kross and I spent a fantastic seven minutes daydreaming while they rapped about how "bangin' is a shame, and gangs are to blame" that Whitley and Denise Huxtable transported me back to 1992 so I could lavish myself in their collections of New Kids on the Block Hats and kicky print vests over tuxedo shirts, so I'm feeling like I'm in a pretty good place emotionally right now.

My first weight loss blogs? Not this one, but the four before this that all have about three entries apiece and then found their way to the Great Blog Campmeetin' in the Promised Land? They were all written for a guy.

And this guy is actually not a horrible person, on balance. He has a great job, cares about the environment, makes me laugh, likes the same music I did, and made hours-long conversation seem like an absolute joy every time we talked. But this guy had a little problem...he wasn't into fatties. And as he told me this after a long period of being a fantastic friend during my marriage, I felt that instinctive shrinking in that I do when someone around me who I like has a disdain for weight. So I made jokes, and I made excuses for him...I said it wasn't his fault that he was only into thin women, because "it was biological". I told him it was just fine that he felt ashamed for being attracted to me, but only from the neck up. I preened whenever he said no other female connected with me like I did, and that I had a gorgeous face and a great sense of humor and that he had real feelings for me. And I tried to ignore the fact he said all these things through text messages at 3:00 am when he was riding home from some bar or concert and bummed out that he hadn't left with a girl on his arm.

And our relationship reached a real low point when I agreed to write an online personals ad so he could meet women. He called me his "sexretary", and he sent me the login information so I could weed out the unacceptable women and write back to the promising ones. He said that we should make a deal: that he would get all the sleeping around out of his system (I think the euphemism "wild oats" was used several times), and I would lose enough weight to fit into a size 8 and then maybe we could be a real couple.

And Internets, this is where you get to question my character as a human being, because I was all for it.

And so I started to follow the diet he recommended, and I let him berate me for eating cheese on my salad, and I got so neurotic and anxious about sending him pictures of my body and weighing in that I actually began to GAIN weight. I still have a cache of emails from me to him in my outbox, and every single one of them begins with "I'm so sorry, but...". And so after about six weeks of this, of him pushing for progress and me defiantly giving him excuses, we just dropped it entirely. And we started arguing a lot more than we talked and now our interactions are limited to brief hellos and how are yous and I spend a little time every day looking at his icon on my messenger and wishing we could have just one more decent conversation as a way to say goodbye.

And I'm posting this not out of a need for any sort of emotional catharsis, but as an explanation mostly. A, a different male friend of mine recently started reading this blog, and had a few questions about women's body-image and self-esteem and all the emotional reasons why we're doing what we're doing, and I'm afraid I didn't really give him great answers, as I tend to be flippant in the face of emotionally raw stuff.

We were discussing my last big post where I questioned the need for separating physical appearance from physical health as a motivation for eating right and working out, and he asked me if it was ever possible to just lose or gain weight for health reasons only. And I told him I didn't think it was...that for every woman trying to change her body and her life, there probably was the voice of at least one man in the back of her head that would always push her to run further, sweat more, eat less stuff. And I think that's where our wires got crossed, because A took that to mean that for every woman losing weight, there's a man she wants to attain as a result. And I know why he thinks that, at least in my case, because we spend a lot of time discussing dating and relationships and sex, and I often lampoon myself as a husband-seeking , sex-crazed coquette because I assumed he knew that's pretty much the opposite of who I've become. I guess facetiousness gets lost in translation somewhere between the keyboard and the IM window, and I need to be more aware of that.

But to answer A...when I say there's a man's voice in every woman's head, I was generalizing the basic desire that anyone feels to be adored, accepted, beloved for who she is. And it may not necessarily be just an old boyfriend or a thoughtless teenage boy in high school or whatever...it could be a mother, or a girlfriend, or even just a stranger on the street who made a snide comment in passing...but those voices exist, and it takes a lot of strength to rise above the basic sentiment of you're not good enough for me. Sometimes it takes hundreds of days of failing, thousands of miles on the elliptical...it takes pain and sweat and tears and that exquisitely painful process of breaking yourself down, looking at all the pieces, and then putting yourself back together again to make someone recognizable and yet stronger. I'm trying to say the emotional reasons for losing weight never really go all the way away, even though most of us evolve to a level where working and out and eating right for the sake of feeling good is a much more viable option for our lives.

And am I saying that anyone who chooses to lose weight hates themselves? No. I'm also not saying that I was immune from seeking out external motivation for changing my life at first, even though I can honestly say it's not the case anymore. I have four dead blogs of food journals, apologies, and self-loathing to prove it. And I was worried initially that this blog would go by the wayside too because all I wanted to do was get thin and get revenge...I'm very thankful I ended up realizing there were much more rewarding reasons for writing here, and trying these things in my real life.

But when I weigh-in once a week, or when I decide whether or not it's worth it for me to have a bowl of ice cream with a friend, do I hear that guy's voice in my head? Absolutely. And as much as I hope it'll fade the more time and healing I put between us, I doubt he'll ever completely go away.