For the record, I ended Holidailies (and thus, the year) at 178 pounds.

I bought a pair of size 14 pants and wore them in public. As far as I can tell, I didn't look like I was wearing a sausage casing, which means they probably fit okay. Even though those damn size 18 brown corduroy pants still fit perfectly. Which would suggest to me that going by pants fit is as pointless a scale as going by the length of my hair.

This brings me to about 25 pounds lost for the year total, which isn't bad, if you consider that I didn't really start actively doing anything until October ... and then I went on a cruise.

Maybe that's not the way anyone would advise one to start losing weight, but it worked for me.

Here's hoping it will continue to work in 2008!

Every year for at least the past ten or so, I've been making the same three New Year's resolutions. For the most part I've kept them, but only one really relates to weight loss, so I'll mention it here: don't eat at McDonalds.

It's more complicated than that, of course. (Nothing's ever simple with me.) There's obviously an exception if there's nothing else to eat, or if all the other options are worse, or if I actually wanted to eat there. The resolution was designed to prevent what had become an institution in my post-high-school life: going to McDonalds just because no-one could think of anything better to do.

I'm not sure I've really had to work very hard at it, to be honest. Situations changed, Starbucks got big, and the people I went with moved to Denver, down south, to California. Maybe our tastes would have changed anyway. Maybe we'd realize that life was to short to do things by default.

Maybe this year I should skip the McDonald's resolution and make a new one: to not do anything by default. Certainly if I did that with food, it would help my weight loss.

It hasn't gotten any warmer yet, at least not that I've been able to spot.

Whee, talking about the weather!

In past years of Holidailies, I've always had problems remembering to write on the weekends. Either nothing was going on and it was a real struggle to come up with something to say (I remember once transcribing the mistakes made by the closed-captioning while watching Spaceballs on TV), or they were so busy that while there was plenty to talk about, there was never any time to do the writing in.

Weekends are a little like that for weight loss, too. On one hand, there's that much more time to work out (or to at least walk to the stores) and to cook healthy-but-complex meals. And you can't be eating while you're sleeping in, after all! On the other hand, weekends are also a minefield waiting to be discovered -- the temptation to treat yourself to a huge greasy meal is never higher than when you've been doing boring tasks all day, and I find I always struggle to drink enough water on the weekends.

Perhaps that should be a New Year's resolution: to have better weekends.

One of the things I read fairly frequently on diet blogs is that the writers are surprised to find out that once they've lost the weight, they get cold more frequently.

This worries me.

I've always been a cold person, even at my heaviest. The girl wearing the ski parka at the bus stop in August? That's me. I'm the one in the office wearing two shirts, plus a sweater and a fleece vest, drinking hot tea and still complaining about the temperature. (My employers, in their infinite wisdom, chose to seat me in an area with the most overzealous air conditioning in the company, a situation that should thankfully change next month.)

As much as I want to lose weight, the thought of being even colder scares me.

But as I was standing waiting for the bus, wind blowing around underneath my now-too-large jacket, it started to feel like maybe it wasn't possible to get any colder. I can only hope that this is the case.

So, grand total holiday weight gain: 3 pounds. Unfortunately, I lost and gained two of those over and over and over again. I've read that yo-yo dieting can be harmful to your metabolism ... I wonder how long and how far you have to yo-yo before that counts? I'm hoping it needs to be a larger range for longer, or I'm in trouble.

You couldn't prove by my actions tonight that I'm hoping to get ride of those three pounds and a significant number of their greasy little friends, though. Instead of making pea soup for dinner like I planned, I got distracted by reading about how Denver's airport is somehow involved in the New World Order. And then I had some cookies.

Can I claim that international conspiracies are making me fat?

So, Christmas is over, all the packages have been unwrapped, and everyone's gone back to where they came from. People who have more vacation have headed off toe places that are either sunnier or snowier ... and the rest of us have gone back to work.

I bundled up all the leftover Christmas cookies and took them to work, too.

I don't know if anyone will eat them, but if someone does, it won't be me.

That leaves smoked salmon and bell peppers as my share of the Christmas leftovers. I'm not proud of my food intake over Christmas, but I know I can get back on track. New Years' is never a big food holiday for me, so I'm not worried about that. And then comes January, and things calm down and there's nothing else to do but go to the gym.

I wonder if I will outlast the New Years' resolution people?

Apparently, someone was listening to all my whining yesterday, someone in a very high place, because when I went outside to go to the movie, it had just started snowing. Not enough to be annoying, just enough to dust everything with white and make it look like a proper magazine-style Christmas.

A white Christmas.

I can't remember the last time we had one of those. Well, that's not entirely true -- I can remember it; I was young enough and small enough to fit in the back jump seat of my dad's truck as we drove to my grandparents' house. But I can't place the date, and neither could my mom, when I asked her.

Suffice it to say it's been a while.

It was a nice Christmas treat (calorie-free!), and a nice reminder that things larger than my little wants and concerns are taking place, too.

Merry Christmas!

Things are changing all around me, and I'm clinging tooth and nail to the old ways. Nothing about Christmas is the same this year: it's the wrong day and the wrong food and the wrong location and the wrong emotions. One of my cousins is moving to Florida and it's clear she would have been long gone if it hadn't been for the party tonight. I had to work today, and the office was empty and wrong and downtown was deserted like a ghost town. Everyone is too busy tomorrow to do anything, so my mom and I are going to a movie.

A movie.

I always thought people who went to movies on Christmas day were a little silly.

I apologize. I seem to have become one of them.

I want to call someone up and whine, as if by doing so, I could stop things, roll back the clock, make Ellen get a job closer to home, have Christmas on a Thursday or Friday so the office isn't deserted, calm down my family so we aren't all running around ten directions and too busy to get together for a meal when we all get a day off work or school for it. I want to shiver at midnight mass and eat hash browns at my grandma's on Christmas morning and watch my cousins throw Lego bricks at each other.

I don't want to sit in a movie theater.

But then I wonder why I am so afraid of changes.

After all, the only way I'll lose weight is to change things, after all.

And then I wondering if shivering at midnight mass burns calories.

And then I decide that, while I can't prevent the changes, and there's no alternative to just putting up with them, it's also not the end of the world to spend a little time wishing for what we had in the past.

It beats not having anything to miss, that's for sure.

I've always admitted to myself that the main reason I wanted to lose weight was to be more acceptable to other people. There was never the snap that I read about on other people's blogs, where they reach some corner and turn it and suddenly it's all about them, and they're only doing it for themselves and everyone else can fuck off. The closest I ever came was the moment when I realized that in any group I was part of -- including "people at the mall on Thursday night" and "people on the #10 bus" and "people standing in line at McDonalds," as well as the more expected "people in my family" and "people in the employee focus meeting" groups -- was unlikely to contain anyone larger than I was. I didn't want to be the one bringing the 'value' of the group down, so I had to lose weight. There was nothing else to do.

What I haven't figured out yet is how to handle it when the process of losing weight is socially unacceptable and thus conflicts with the end goal of being socially acceptable.

I went to Subway for lunch today. The one nearest where I live seems to have really high employee turnover -- on any given day, I'm as like as not to find someone there that I've never seen before. Sometimes you get sharp people, sometimes not-so-sharp. This one had to ask twice what kind of sandwich I wanted and mumbled the question about toasting it so much that I only knew what he was asking because it was the point at which they ask that.

So they make the sub, and they toast it, and they put on the vegetables, and the mustard, and now we come to the point for the rest of the toppings.

"Vinegar, but no oil, and salt and pepper, please," I say.

He picks up just the oil bottle.

"Just vinegar," I say.

He picks up the vinegar bottle and moves both of them to the sandwich.

"No oil, please," I say.

He squirts them both on the sandwich.

And there's about 100 extra calories I didn't need, want, or ask for.

I paid for the sandwich, and ate it, because there didn't seem to be much else to do. It didn't seem right to throw a fit and make him throw out the sandwich just because of one flub-up, no matter that is dripped and seemed soggy and greasy on my tongue. I don't want to be the person who makes life hell for some person whose job is already probably less than ideal. I want to be the good girl, the one who doesn't complain.

I want to be socially acceptable.

But by eating that, I'm now 100 calories further away from being socially acceptable than I'd intended to be.

Do I pick 'now' or 'later'?

The key to weight loss, it seems, is to consistently pick 'later' when you want to pick 'now.' Don't have that cupcake now, have it when you're skinny. Don't have those potato chips now, have a glass of water, and if you're still hungry in half an hour, have an apple. Don't think of the process, think of the results.

But today, I picked 'now.'

Not one of my better moments.

I heard a theory once that since the 24th is Christmas Eve, the 23rd should be Christmas Adam, since he came before her, and all. If I'm remembering things correctly from Sunday school, by that logic today would be 'Christmas Things That Creepeth Upon The Earth.'

Which kind of puts into my head an image of a Lovecraftian monster in a Santa hat, but that's really neither here nor there.

At any rate, the point I'm trying to make in my long-winded way is that though Christmas Creeps for most people today, my family decided that it was just way more convenient to have Christmas on a weekend, and so I've been eating ham, unwrapping packages, and listening to my uncle snore today.

Consequently I have nothing important to say. Creep Christmas, y'all!

My department's office party was today, and since I went the lenient route yesterday, I decided to go for the neurotic one today: writing everything down and tracking down the calorie count to the best of my approximation. One-quarter cup of cranberry relish and one-third cup stuffing, one-twelfth of a pie and one square of chocolate ...

So, yeah, it got tedious, but in the end it totaled up to a lot less than I'd thought it would, which was nice and saved me from being totally cranky this evening while I was baking Christmas cookies for tomorrow, since I could have one from each batch.

Obviously, I don't know yet if my approximation was accurate. That, like so many other things, remains to be seen. But the more I do this, the easier it will get, I assume.

And at the very least, I'll get better at leaning what to avoid. How can it possibly be that the cranberry-orange relish, which barely even tasted sweet, had more calories than just about anything?

I just couldn't get into the idea of another sandwich for lunch today. Normally I can eat the same thing over and over again for days, weeks, months even. (I once spent six months eating, mostly, tuna sandwiches and french fries, but because I also spent two hours a day walking to and from work, I didn't gain any weight. Oh, to live and work there again ..)

At any rate, I can normally eat the same thing over and over again, but apparently not today. There's not a lot of choices for healthy food in my office building; sure, most of the places shout about "fresh" this and "organic" that, but fresh organic butter has just as many calories as conventionally-produced butter that's sat in the freezer for a month, I'm sure.

I thought about not eating anything, or about having a latte and saying the hell with it, but I was hungry, and it didn't seem like a great idea to lapse into my bad habits. So I cast about and finally got a salad from the Italian place.

I think I did okay choosing, though, to be honest, I have no idea.

I suppose I could calculate it out to the best of my abilities: x cups of lettuce, y ounces of cheese, z tablespoons of dressing, and the like. Isn't that what old-school dieters were supposed to do, carry their calorie-counting books with them and furtively add up under the table how many bites of bread they could have?

But at best, it would be an approximation. It wasn't like they measured things out with cups and spoons, and while some things like tomatoes and peppers are relatively consistent in terms of calories, who knows what the dressing is like?

I decided to just let it go for today.

If I'm lucky, the scale will agree with my assessment tomorrow.

And who knows? Maybe if it does, I'll actually go through the process and figure out what I was eating. And then, who knows, it could become another regular in the rotation between turkey and veggie sandwiches.

For now, I'll enjoy not stressing out about it. Not panicking.

At least, I'll enjoy it until I wonder whether I'm relaxing ... or justifying.

I've been reading through the archives of a couple of sexuality blogs recently, and one of the entrie I read today brought something to mind that I've been bothered by for years ... I just don't know what to call it.

When men shout sexual things at random women on the street? Cat-calling? Being groped on the train? Whistling? What's the accepted term for it these days? Everything I've read about it -- and I'm not exaggerating here, I mean everything everything -- has made it seem like it's something that happens to every woman. Or everyone who looks remotely female. I've read tales of women twice my size in baggy sweats being on the receiving end. "Modest" women who wear pants underneath their floor-length skirts just in case someone might see ankle -- they're getting it, too. Apparently, it's the one characteristic that is common to all women, more so than cramps or wishing your breasts were a different size or anything like that.

It's never happened to me.

I've had things shouted at me, sure. I've been told that girls "like me" shouldn't be allowed to wear shorts in public. (One could wonder what that particular person meant -- blondes? Girls who carry JanSport backpacks? People with lavender polish on their toenails?) Someone slapped me on a bus once. I've lost track of how many times people in cars have told me I should ride my bike on the sidewalk, and pedestrians have told me I should ride it in the street. I'm not unfamiliar with random comments from strangers. Everyone sees everyone else, and some people have poor impulse control.

But it's never been sexual.

You'd think I could just consider myself lucky and get over it, but instead, it makes me feel like a failure at being female. I've written about this on assorted message boards with subjects from feminism to television, when it was on-topic, and not once has anyone else piped up to say that they're in the same boat, so to speak.

Sometimes I wonder how much weight I'll have to lose before society, in the form of whoever does this stuff, decides I'm thin enough to be acknowledged as a sexual person.

And then I think of the flip side: what happens if I'm never good enough?

When do I give up?

We went out to dinner with my grandma today. I'd known for weeks that this was coming, and that I'd probably have no control over what there was to eat, and that I'd better eat all of it if I didn't want my lack of appetite to be the main topic of discussion between now and New Year, and I thought I was okay with that ... until the dessert buffet turned up.

To understand why this is an issue when I don't normally have problems ignoring desserts, you have to understand my role in my family. My mom is the driver, my dad is the lecturer, my brother is the thinker (when he's around), and I'm the fat girl.

It sounds horrible when you put it like that, doesn't it?

But when I think back over the years, one of the things I can remember my family most consistently doing is giving me food. Even when I didn't want or need it. Anything that isn't on their current diet, whatever that might be, gets given to me, and my role is to eat it, so they can enjoy it vicariously. When they're doing low-carb, I get everyone's bread rolls. When sugar's the culprit, every Christmas cookie that comes into certain relatives' houses will go right back out the door ... into the car with me. I have one relative who hates Starbucks, so occasionally I'll get their gift cards passed on, which isn't too bad, but it's just a symptom of the larger problem.

My cousins are allowed to spend Thanksgiving without eating a single bite, if they want.

Two or three people will take me to task if I don't have seconds on dessert.

Which brings me back to the dessert buffet.

Dinner had included a huge portion of salmon, so I wasn't terribly hungry by the time dessert rolled around. I took a small slice of the fruit tart, and about a three-bite portion of chocolate cake. Not that bad, right?

When we got back to the table, assorted relatives put half a slice of pecan pie and half a huge piece of tiramisu on my plate.

I can only come to the conclusion that my relatives want me to eat myself to death.

Because why else would two people, given the chance to choose exactly the quantity of exactly what they want, independently decide that they needed to take twice as much, so they could give some to me?

I can't take any more Delilah. I wanted to listen to Christmas music tonight, so I put on the station here that plays Christmas music between Thanksgiving and the day itself, but all the time I'm home, they play Delilah's show. I put up with this for a while, but I can only hear the song about the dying mother and the shoes so many times before I start picturing the kid as the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, going around conning people out of shoes.

The other song that I'm really getting to hate is "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays," with its implication that everyone ought to just stay put.

I mention this only really because I couldn't put up with Delilah any more, and I finally switched back to whatever station on my usual rotation of them was the first one not playing ads. It happened to be playing Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages."

I'm old enough to have heard that when it came out originally, but as it happened I didn't; the first time I remember hearing it was actually seeing the video on VH1 Classic on a JetBlue flight to Boston on vacation.

You'd think I might be thinking of the trip now, right?

Wrong.

The memory most triggered by that song is worrying that the shirt I was wearing made me look fat.

It probably did; I can remember what I was wearing and it wasn't the most flattering shirt. But maybe there's a lesson here: I need to quit obsessing. Who cares if I looked fat in the shirt? It's not like I could have taken it off and looked less fat; at best I would have gotten into a fight like that girl who got dinged by Southwest for having too short of a skirt.

Whether or not I ever quit being fat, who wants to look back on their life and have nothing but memories of worrying about how they looked?

Does running a million miles an hour all day (figuratively speaking, of course) count as exercise? If so, I should be able to eat what I want, because it feels like I've been going nonstop since Friday night. I still prefer this to work, of course, because it's different and thus at least somewhat more interesting, I don't feel particularly relaxed.

I don't feel particularly well-hydrated either. Maybe that's the next thing to work on: drinking enough water on the weekend.

It's always something, isn't it?

The washing machine has finally eaten enough of my underwear that I had to give in and buy some more. I'd hoped I wouldn't have to for a while; the thought of actually being able wear something cute or being able to easily find my size was sufficient enticement to keep wearing the old stuff, even if it was a little large.

At any rate, I headed down to the department store that had the best price, and got the underwear, and while I was there I decided to try on some pants. The gray cargo pants that I bought as 'skinny pants,' while not loose, could certainly be classified as 'fitting,' and since it's difficult to judge degrees to which something doesn't fit, having a different pair that I could use a gauge seemed like a good idea. It's a lot easier to tell whether you can get the button closed than how many inches of waistband you can pinch.

I grabbed three pairs of pants sized N-4, N being the size I was for the past few years, and headed off to the dressing room.

Well, I could get the buttons done on all of them.

None of them were even uncomfortably tight.

The odd thing was, the N-2 pants looked better.

I'd never actually given that much thought -- I'd always just figured "the smaller the number, the better they look." But the larger pants undeniably looked better. It was tough to categorize why, maybe I'll figure that out in the future. For now, it's enough to know that I could fit into N-4 pants if I had to, even if I'm not wearing them at the moment.

I didn't get any of them as 'skinny pants,' either. One had too low of waist, one had too much flare, and the third only came in bad colors. Somewhere out there, I'm sure I'll find a pair I can stand.

Though, it's questionable whether I'll be able to get them closed initially after all the teriyaki I ate tonight.

But I'll get there eventually.

For once, I don't have anything to say, even to beat myself up. Sure, I didn't eat perfectly, but I don't think I did so bad overall, especially considering I wasn't able to have my usual breakfast, and I went out to dinner. I didn't go to the gym, but we did trek from one end of the mall to the other and back, and all over Target, and they had cute socks at Target, which made all the hiking worth it.

I wonder if I like cute socks so much because they're probably the only piece of clothing I've never had difficulty finding in my size?

It's entirely possible that I'm just overthinking here, but it's a somewhat sobering thought, wondering how many little things like that are connected to me weight, whether I suspected them or not.

And I'm not going to apologize to Ms. Spears for nearly borrowing her lyrics, although I will thank her for keeping me well-entertained at the gym, via People magazine.

Lyrics aside, you'd think I would have been able to pay attention to what I wrote yesterday, but of course I didn't, and I ended the work day having had precisely one caffe mocha and three peppermints. Which isn't a good meal by anyone's standards, and by the time I left the gym I felt shocky and dizzy and practically inhaled my dinner.

I feel better now, but that was an exceptionally boneheaded move.

I need to stop making boneheaded moves.

I had the world's worst salad for lunch today.

It might not be as bad as the sandwich that my mom bought in Banff once that had a layer of mold in addition to turkey and swiss, so I'm going to refrain from calling it the worst lunch ever, but I certainly can't think of a worse lunch salad. At least in the category of "salads that sound good from the ingredients but fail to live up to their promise." (I once came across a description of a salad on a menu in Cannon Beach, Oregon, that made me feel queasy just reading the description. Needless to say, I didn't order it and have no idea how it would have actually tasted and thus have ruled in ineligible for the sweepstakes of YUCK.)

So what have we learned today? That I exaggerate.

At any rate, as salads go, it was awful. It was supposed to be "California-style Nicoise," and I have no idea what they mean by "California-style," unless that means "primarily composed of wilting romaine stems and the bitterest yuppie lettuce possible, served with a side of too-sour dressing that was too runny to stick to the leaves anyway."

I say this not to pick on the salad, because 95% of the food I've had from that place was excellent and I'm sure that at least the 'wilting' part is more or less chance, but because it highlights a bad habit of mine that might be the next thing to target on my list of behaviors to change: my excessive focus on reducing the number of calories I eat during the day.

I always worry that I'll come home after work and be unable to resist munching on everything in the cupboards, and thus my primary instinct is to save as many calories as possible for the evening. Since my breakfast is pretty much set in stone, this means my attempts tend to focus on trimming things from my lunch. So I was going down the row of salads looking for the lowest calorie count and, you know what? Sometimes you get what you pay for. Even if you're paying in exercise instead of dollars.

And then I came home and wasn't hungry anyway, and nothing sounded good, and I didn't have dinner until 8:30 PM and it didn't come anywhere close to the binge I imagined (it never does), and don't I feel stupid now for subjecting myself to that disappointing lunch?

I guess what it all boils down to is that I need to rust myself more. I need to trust that I can find a reasonable dinner each night, and I need to allow myself to eat a reasonable portion of food at lunch. Because a steady diet of dismal salads is going to kill my enthusiasm much faster than resisting the slightly-stale wasabi peanuts in the kitchen cupboard.

Besides, I'll finish the peanuts eventually and then that won't be a problem. But I'll have to eat lunch for the rest of my life.