objects in the mirror may appear

Every morning I get on the scale.  I do it to judge how my day should go but not in a ‘am I going to have a fat day’ way more in a ‘am I going to stay out of the Dr's office?’ way.  The number has no emotional power over me.  Don’t get me wrong I want/need to lose some weight, how much seems to be debatable depending on whom you ask.  But if I was to share my reasons for pursuing fitness this would be the list:

1.  Control  

2.  Power/strength  

3. Endurance/speed  

(yes, I am a head case of a different variety) 

Okay so weight loss didn’t get on the list but it is certainly a side effect I am hoping to see.  What I am NOT hoping to see when I weigh in is a sudden drop in my wt indicating I am overloading my system with ketones and glucose sending my ph into chaos and me into metabolic acidosis.  So I contently watch the scale move in ounces not pounds. 

1. I am defiantly stronger [fucking burpees].
2. I am happier
3. I have more energy
4. My house is cleaner, kid schooled more, & husband very-very happy.
5. And for the most part I have stayed within healthy blood sugar ranges.  Minus that one morning when a sudden 2 pound weight loss accompanied the accusation of BC putting sugar in my coffee because my sugars had risen so high I was tasting sugar in my mouth! (not normal & especially not normal for hypoglycemic) 

Over all the amount of weight I have lost is negligible but the exchange of fat for muscle is headed in the right direction.  Typical for me.  I put on muscle like a body builder and lose weight/fat like a diabetic (ha!).  I am not designed to be a small girl: I am in the same size jeans whether I weight 160 or 145, how I feel in them is what changes.  I love to work out and after a summer and fall of pure hell, injury & sickness I feel like a 10 year old let out for recess.  Perfect!!!  Life is perfect :)

And still a funny thing happened along the way: last night at Beach's gym I walked past a full length mirror in the bathroom and almost died to see how heavy I am.  Seeing myself as fat is a luxury I don’t have.  I don’t have time to be distracted by how big my thighs look when I am fighting for my life. Perhaps I'm being dramatic just fighting for my toes, eyes, heart, kidney's, and brain....  The numbers that matter to me are glucose, ph, and all the points on a full panel not a digital display or a size on a tag.  I don’t have energy to waste on cosmetic beauty attempting to pass as health but there it was staring at me “I am fat”.  [In fact one of my friends wrote a fantastic blog commentary about the FAT problem every woman should read Coco's Corner.] 

I walked away from the mirror my head silent but plotting, and not in a good way. As a hypoglycemic diabetic with control issues I walk a very fine line hence that morning weigh in.. I have great capacity to lose my head and due true damage, with a track record to prove it. Then something happened to put it all back in perspective. On the way back to the group W bench I had to brush by a good looking man in a nice suit.  I watched his eyes scan my body from gym shoes to baseball shirt & Little House Laura braids (post swimming hair-do). He smiled, double check my empty ring finger, look me in the eyes and smile even bigger.  He was checking out my control.                       

And he's right: what I have done is worth smiling about :)