Lumpy Girl Claire's Diet
- Skinny is a State of Mind

I woke up fat this morning.

In my mind I've been skinny all week, but today I woke up fat. Maybe that Twinkie cake has kicked in. Maybe it is just PMS. Whatever the reason, Lumpy Girl has reappeared.

No matter how I look at myself in the mirror, I can't find the skinny girl. It's like I'm some misshapen sponge that was dropped in a puddle and swelled right up.

Remember in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss was piling up the mashed potatoes to look like some mountain in Wyoming? That's the shape my midsection has taken.

I'm not sure how it happened. I've been following the diet (OK, except for that one little indiscretion with the Twinkie cake). I've been exercising. I even managed to not eat anything after supper last night, and I rarely can forgo the late night snack. Still, the mashed potato middle appeared.

I've been drinking more water but maybe not enough to flush out my system. Supposedly, if you are retaining water, it means that you aren't drinking enough. I ought to know that when I go to the bathroom and it smells like Starbucks, I'm drinking way too much coffee and not enough anything else.

If only water wasn't so boring on the tongue. Considering my sponge-like qualities, it's too bad that soaking in a tub wouldn't help, or that some twisting motion couldn't squeeze out the excess.

If my problem is PMS, then I'm not sure how to battle it, particularly since I seem to be in permanent PMS ever since hitting 40. Maybe the extra plumping that occurs around the belly can be counteracted by frequent bouts of excessive weeping. I'll just watch "Finding Neverland" a few more times and that ought to do it.

Whatever the reason, I'm in a bloat and my weight loss this week wasn't as good as I had wanted. I lost 0.4 pounds. At least it's still going in the right direction. And I guess that's not too discouraging considering my belly looks like a landing place for aliens.

Goals for the next month:

Try a new kind of exercise.
Get some variety in my diet. (I don't know how much more roasted chicken I can eat!)

Treats:

Manicure
Massage (?)

Claire