Weighty Issues #1

For those of you who know me, there are two themes that seem to recur in my life:
1. people never seem to be sure how much I weigh
2. I consistently have disasters involving pants

Today, I wanted to share a story about the first time I realized my weight problem - so to speak.

In the second semester of my freshman year, I started trying to run a few times a week down on the track where the 40 time National Champ Arkansas Razorbacks practiced - this was before the renovation when you could just walk right out on the track at any time. I called this the midnight mile as we usually only went to run late at night. Amazingly, we used to run 2 miles without stopping and did it in about 17 minutes - while that doesn't sound like much it was for me.

Fortunately, this hard work paid off a little bit as I was able to avoid the freshman 15 - or at least most of it.

So, the story picks up one day in the last month of school as I was eating in the Pomfreteria (the cafeteria in my dorm Pomfret. Yes, I named it that). I had gone with my roommate and partner in crime. It was a good move because, well, I had intentionally avoided getting to know anyone in the Honors dorm - I refused to be one of the nerds. As I found out over the course of the next three years, There were actually some really great people there. Oops.

Anyway, my roommate of course found a whole bunch of people that he knew. In this case, they were two girls that we had met at the very beginning of the year. For no explicable reason, they made it a habit of coming by our room at random hours. So, I kind of knew who they were although I did not ever talk to them. Yay for shyness!

So, towards the end of the meal, my roommate and one of the girls headed out to the soft-serve yogurt machine. As awkward silence ensued, the girl who was stuck with me decided to brave the awkwardness. Here is what she said:

Girl #2: "So, wow, have you been working out?"
Me (totally thinking of the one day a week I ran slowly and ignoring the fact it was worthless): "Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that."
Girl #2: "Yah, I thought so cause it looks like you have lost some weight."
Me: "Oh, thats nice of you. Yah maybe a little"
Girl #2: "No, like, I thought you had lost like 50 lbs."
Me: AWKWARD STARE
Girl #2: "What? Didn't you use to be really obese?"

How do you respond to that? Well, if you are me, you don't. You stare blankly and spend the next 3 years of college carefully avoiding Girl #2. Although, irony of ironies, the next time I ran into her, was in the Elliptical section of the workout facilities...