Weight, what?

Anyone who knows me or has spent any time talking about me knows that I'm obsessed with my weight. I talk about almost nothing but. How may ounces I've gained or lost, recounting every calorie consumed or burned.

Okay, that paragraph may be totally false, but this summer, I have begun focusing intently on my weight. Yes, I know, I'm spending far too much time around adolescent girls and now I'm acting like one. Honestly, though, I've known enough people with eating issues that I take the matter very seriously. What happened, though, is that last spring I hit 180 pounds and a little bit beyond for the first time. I'm not quite 5'8" and that's a lot of pounds. At the same time, I got a call from my doctor saying my cholesterol was over 200, which I guess is the dividing line between okay and not. I checked and looked at how you lower your cholesterol and I was already doing everything you're supposed to do, except for losing weight.

So I set off to lose. But nobody's interested in how I'm losing the weight, not even me. What's interestinger is the effect it's had on my behavior. It started innocently enough, with a scale in the bathroom. I would check it each morning to get as clean a read as possible. So I could see my weight bounce up and down, day to day, but with a definite trendline downwards.

Eventually, I lost 12 pounds, down to 169. Then, unfortunately, I got sick, and there was a two-week period where I ate almost nothing, and my weight dropped close to 160. My clothes all stopped fitting and I felt awful, so my doctor told me I had to gain that last part back. So I did and settled back into the low 170's.

Wow, that's even more boring than the other stuff I'd edited out because it was too dull. Back to the behavioral. Any nutritionist will tell you that you should weight yourself no more than 3 times a week, because it just bounces around and you can get obsessive about it. But I decided it would be interesting to see what the difference was between when I went to bed and when I woke up. It's more than one would think. For me at least, 2 to 3 pounds.

Where did it go? What happens to weight you lose anyway? The law of Conservation of Mass says that mass can be neither created or destroyed. But that's in a closed system, and anything that breathes, eats and excretes is not at all a closed system. So I guess the answer is it goes out. Was it all just from breathing out moisture? Or is something more sinister at work?

Of course, one thing leads to another, and over time, I took to weighing myself at every opportunity. It's not like I'm sneaking off upstairs to secretly weight in. But if I'm in the neighborhood of the scale, I'm on it. I now know that my weight is consistently lowest at around 6 PM, right before dinner. Right after a long bike ride is good too, but a few gulps of Gatorade wipes that out. There are all kinds of other creative times to weigh yourself as well. You can learn a lot about your bodily functions if you want to, but fortunately, my curiosity on that score is limited.

Going to the city

I spent Wednesday evening in the city. What city? New York, of course. What other city is there? Even when I lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan was "the city." You never called it Manhattan.

I arrived by train and walked up to the theater district. I would be remiss if I did not mention how interesting it was trying to walk away from Penn Station at 5:05. It's a bit like swimming against the tide, except sweatier and smellier and more likely to get stepped on. But I found a good non-Starbucks coffee shop to hang out and watch the humidity settle on the passersby.

Part of the fun is enjoying the calm I feel as a native in the midst of absolute chaos. I wouldn't call what was happening around Penn Station as chaos; it's quite deliberate and purposeful and insistent. 42nd Street, on the other hand, is genuine chaos. People looking up, down, left, right, behind and forward, stopping suddenly, lining up for this and that. Milling around Madame Tussaud's and Ripley, conveniently located next door to one another. I know exactly where I am and where I'm going and can saunter along toward my destined dinner with my father.

I had realized at some point that I hadn't spent any time with my father in a while. There are many reasons for that, not the least of which is that he lives 150 miles away. But on this occasion we both made the effort to get together.

After the show, I had nearly an hour before my train, so I walked around Times Square. As someone who grew up using the place mostly as somewhere to change subway lines, it took me a long time to see the attraction of it as a tourist destination. Not anymore. At 10:30 on a Wednesday night it was jammed with people walking around, eating, drinking, looking at the giant video screens, having their picture taken with various cartoon characters (lots of Spider-Mans, all wearing backpacks for some reason).

At one point, I walked through a plaza in time to see a policeman holding a guy bent over a squad car, and noticed first that lots of people were taking pictures, second, that the policeman was looking at the camera, and finally, that he then let that guy walk away and then bent another guy over the car and repeated the process. You know, Paris may be the City of Light, and there may be Disney stores all over but you can't get this anywhere but the city.