Two of the OG blogging queens have died in the past year, Julie Powell and Heather Armstrong aka Dooce, which has left me a bit shook. I didn’t regularly read either of their blogs when I was a fellow blogger in the aughts, but their entrepreneurial accomplishments impacted my life a great deal. They were talented writers and I’m glad they’re being celebrated as such, but people shouldn’t overlook what innovative businesswomen they were either. Dooce was the first person I’d heard of who was making her entire living off her blog. I can’t express how groundbreaking this was in 2004. It would b ..read more

A friend invited me to visit Twitter headquarters almost 11 years to the day before Elon Musk bought the place, and I gotta’ say, people were having a lot more fun back then: It was Halloween, so people were dressed as lobsters and brought family and friends to the party dressed as Velma and a ballerina and Captain America. The shindig had a happy and loose vibe that is kinda rare at work functions. I have wondered about the lobster man this week. Hopefully, he got out years ago when his stock options came through like my friend did; if he’s still in the building, Elon Musk is bound to boil h ..read more

I’ve started doing Pilates again and it’s made me realize Ana Caban is immortal on DVD. The instructor who taught me all about my core and making little circles with my heels is forever thirty-six years old in the beginner’s workout video I pulled out last week. (That’s assuming, I’ve done the math correctly based on the 2006 copyright and this Facebook post about her 50th birthday two years ago.) She was about ten years older than me when I first starting doing this workout, but now my TV-sized instructor is five years younger than me, and it’s giving me an existential crisis. As I was engagi ..read more

First, I lost 200 pounds, then I found 200 pounds. (Spoiler alert: It was in the ice cream aisle.) Then I lost 115 pounds. Things rarely happen the same way twice, so how was the weight-loss different this time? It’s less thrilling, but that’s fine The first time I lost more than a hundred pounds, I shouted it across the whole internet. “Whee!!! This is amazing! I’m having so much fun! Triple exclamation points!!!” This time around, I’m just quietly muttering to myself, “Please stay off. For the love of God, just stay off.” One of the reasons I stopped blogging at PastaQueen.com was because I ..read more

(Hi! You might want to read part 1 about regaining weight first.) Where were we? I’d lost two hundred pounds in my twenties, spent most of my thirties gaining it back, and felt stuck, unsure how to move forward–or more importantly–downward. What made you start losing weight again? Fear of imminent death. When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I realized obesity wasn’t going to kill me 20 years from now, it was going to kill me 20 days from now. What had once been a distant threat became an immediate danger that was closer than my next period. As a severely obese woman, I had often wondered h ..read more

I stopped writing about weight loss more than a decade ago because I didn’t want my body to be central to my online identity anymore. After blogging for six years, I’d said pretty much everything I had to say about weight loss anyway, so I didn’t want to dump empty calories into people’s blog readers. I’d also started to gain back weight, eventually gaining back all 200 pounds I’d lost, which I didn’t want to write about because it would undermine my strategy of ignoring the problem and hoping it would go away on its own. When I finally started losing weight again during the pandemic, I was h ..read more

I haven’t written a post in 14 months, so I was going to make a joke about still being alive, but that’s not funny during a pandemic, is it? However, I am alive, grateful to be so, and fully vaxxed and boosted so I can continue my 15,040-day living streak. Here’s a round-up of the year’s highlights, because I am for-real getting old now and need to write things down or I will forget them. Vaccination, baby! When I turned 40 last year, I was bummed that it put me in a more deadly COVID-19 cohort. Instead, my advanced age was good for my mortality because it made me eligible to get my shot two w ..read more

I know I’m supposed to be depressed about turning forty, but after this dumpster fire of a year, it feels like a humblebrag to say I’ve survived four decades on this planet. “Suck it, 2020! You ain’t killed me yet!”* (*That’s not a dare. Please don’t prove me wrong, 2020. Your flames are beautiful and bright!) If you’d asked me a few years ago what I thought the worst thing about turning 40 would be, I would have said it was the undeniability that more than half my life might be over. In reality, it’s the undeniability that 99% of my life might be over if that guy restocking the soup aisle do ..read more

I’m turning 40 at the end of October, but it’s the date one week after that I’m really dreading. Here’s how it’s marked on my calendar: Yes, Election Day is coming, and I don’t know what comes after that. I’ve read speculation. A Washington Post article titled “What’s the worst that could happen?” lays out many horrible possibilities. With the exception of the “big Biden win” scenario, each of our exercises reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse. A war game designer wrote an article at Medium detailing fo ..read more

If anyone had asked me why I rescheduled my January physical for March (which they didn’t), I was going to say it was because of icy road conditions, but really I wanted time to lose weight. My doctor has always tackled the topic of my weight compassionately and non-judgmentally, but I prefer congratulations to gentle scolding, so it didn’t seem like a big deal to delay the appointment a few months. Then the apocalypse happened. So, I rescheduled the appointment again, picking a random date in the future, having no idea what that future would look like or if I’d even have a future since there ..read more