I really am getting old!

Thanks to the stress of my prelim (round 2), I had been up late for many nights over the past couple weeks studying. I started snacking late, eating lots of sweet and fatty foods, and going to sleep on a full stomach. Eventually, I started feeling fatter. My jeans felt a little more difficult to get into, and it hurt like a bitch to pull them off without undoing the top button; something I have done all my life. I hoped that maybe, there was a possibility that all my jeans shrank when I washed them last. However, on Wednesday I looked at myself really well in the mirror and lo and behold, I noticed that I am beginning to develop a spare tire. My stomach is beginning to poke out a bit. It seemed to me that my love handles were about the only thing on me that were well-defined. So I went to the gym and weighed myself, and believe it or not, I gained FIVE pounds in less than two weeks! And those five pounds were sitting right on my waist.

Now to me, there's nothing wrong with having a few extra pounds. Especially on men, a little extra weight can sometimes be a good thing; men don't need to be slim and slender to look good. A bit of a gut is easily overlooked if a man has well-defined arms. However, when you're small like me, a tire around the waist looks TERRIBLE. You run the risk of looking malnourished and just plain screwed up. As a matter of fact, five pounds is approximately four percent of my total body weight so this is quite a gain. Back in the day, I could do anything and not gain weight; I could eat anything at any time and the scale wouldn't budge. All through college, I ended most nights with a sandwich in the snack bar before bed.

As such, there is no clearer sign to me that I am getting old than this sudden drop in my metabolic rate. Because I am complicated and have all of these complexes, I fear getting fat. This is mostly tied into my fear that getting fat would make me less attractive to someone I may be attracted to as well as my correlation between fatness and unhealthiness and hence death.

As I was walking back from the gym, I saw this guy who works in a store on Euclid. He is friends with a friend of mine, and so I had been introduced to him and have sort of talked to him a few times. Although he seemed very friendly, I always thought that he acted really awkwardly around me, and it sort of made me feel weird until one day he confessed to me that he has a huge crush on me. I was very flattered, although the feeling was not mutual. I felt a bit embarrassed, but I was still happy to know and now I see his awkwardness in a different light. Anyway, so as I was walking up Euclid after firmly establishing that I am getting fat at the gym and feeling a bit blue about it, this guy passed me. I said hello, and the customary quick "how are you?" I was expecting the usual, "good, how are you" to which I would reply "good" and he wouldn't hear it because he would have been past me by then, but instead he replied, "better now!" with a smirk. For the first time in my new fat life, I felt good about my physical appearance.

Anyway, now that Ramadhan is here, I am hoping that my daytime starvation combined with nighttime exercise and protein drinking will help me both lose the fat and gain some muscle. We'll see how that goes...