Day 66: In the groove

Thanks for all the nice words about my awesome new dress! I'm especially feeling proud of my upper body these days so it's nice to have something that shows it off. Lower body... still needs some work. Luckily I still have a few more weeks with you guys!

I have another great incentive to work hard right now: we just booked a trip to NYC in early September. (So Elena, I won't get to see you before the PCP is over, but let me know if you'll be in town Sept. 5-9 and we'll definitely meet up!) The last time I was in New York was late March, when I was almost 20 pounds heavier than I am now. Our daughter stayed home with her grandparents, and my husband and I had a super-fun few days in the city, visiting everybody we could find, endless lunches and coffees and dinners and drinks, plus a fabulous Passover feast. (We're not Jewish but our best friends are, so we always celebrate the holidays with them -- and this upcoming trip is scheduled around Rosh Hashanah.) We walked a lot but we also ate a LOT. We had some really good food (anywhere Mario Batali is cooking is going to be fab) but what I really remember about the trip was the visits we had with our friends. That has been the very hardest thing about leaving New York a year ago -- we were there long enough to make some very close friends, and we miss them all.

So I'm excited about getting to see some people I haven't seen in a while, getting to feel the pavement of New York under my feet again, and showing my daughter her hometown again. Yes, she's coming with us this time, which will bring its own challenges. (We took her last September, and if you happened to be there and saw a vomiting child on the High Line, yeah, that was us.) But she's old enough now to be able to enjoy some fun things, so I think we'll hit up the Bronx Zoo -- I used to work at Fordham, just down the street -- and maybe the Natural History Museum if she seems up for it. And I want to show off my new bod and my new sensibilities!

I just have to share a little story about our Israeli friend who's hosting us. She's an amazing person, and I want to be just like her when I grow up. She's a doctor (that's how we met -- she and my husband worked together) and very healthy herself, mentally and physically. She's an outstanding, amazing chef, yet she never seems to overindulge. She sees food as a great pleasure of life but is able to keep it in its place. She and I traveled to India together a few years ago, and I remember sitting down for dinner with her one night and when our food finally came, she said, "Oh, good! I'm hungry! I love eating when I'm hungry!" That, right there, seems beautifully sane. If we eat when we're hungry (duh), the food really does taste better and the whole experience is more enjoyable. It's this eating when we're not hungry, eating to solve any other problem than hunger, that has given me so much trouble over the years. Slowly, with a lot of help, I'm learning another way.