Logjams

Something evil happens when you start losing weight and start burning more energy than you ingest: practically everybody you have contact with turns into an idiot.

The biking buddies who don't clarify where you're supposed to meet for coffee, so that you end up parking your arse in front of their office building for half an hour while they're waiting 500 metres away because they thought you meant another building....morons. The bank? Unmentionables. Tax office? Don't get me started. The student who refuses to use the English she learns in class and, instead, insists on translating every single blessed word from Spanish to English? It's a miracle I'm still employed.

I used to think that I could like being hungry. I know what it's going for, I know why I'm doing this, but God, this is hard. I would rather bike an extra fifty kilometres a day (and I would, if I had the time) rather than have to cut back on carb consumption, like I'm doing now. I feel continuously like I'm three minutes away from either a meltdown or a migrane, and I really, seriously have to restrain myself from talking. ("Are you sure that you're not going through early menopause?" my mom said last night. "When I went through The Change I was never ever really sure what the hell was going to come out of my mouth.")

I look at my Facebook "friends" and think, Why are you here? You're not my friend, and blow them away. I look at the bathroom and before you know it, every surface has been blasted with window cleaner. I look at the pile of photocopies of ESL handouts sitting on the sofa and think, Screw it - it's saved on the hard drive, and chuck them into the recycling bin. And all the time, I'm thinking of bread, of pasta, of all sorts of things I probably should not have, and am thankful that I don't live really, really super close to a grocery store, because I'd be the size of a Volkswagen Beetle right now.

And all the while, I keep trying to calm myself down by thinking, you asked for it...you knew what this would entail when you started...you know what you're like when you're on a diet...you know you love it when you walk into a room of your friends and one by one, you're becoming skinnier than most of them...you know how good it feels to blow by the guys on the rides, especially coming home when you can hold a higher cadence than most of them...you know that it'll be worth it when you win an important competition...ride with Group A without thinking twice...zoom up Canencia or Navacerrada or the Marie-Blanque....

And then I have a piece of bread and some butter, with some spices spread on top.

And then I stop to breathe.

And then I start thinking that it's probably a very good thing that I'm still single and live alone.