Dukan Day 16, 8.2 lbs lost.   Eight pounds in sixteen days! My chiropractor is impressed.   She can see the difference in the rolls on my waist; I can see the difference in the fullness of my toes, now visible past what used to be stomach.

Dukan Day 20: 8.8lbs lost - almost 9 lbs in 20 days!   This, despite a blip caused by a diet-barred celebratory cake and wine!    Is this a miracle?   I enjoyed thoroughly that evening of good food and company, absolved of guilt; resolved to merriment.

Something strange has happened here.  I have discovered a hard core within myself that does not mutter any longer about ice-cream or cakes.  I have even gone to bed hungry and been happy to feel hungry once more.   How long has it been since my body recognised that signal?  Two hundred calories a chocolate bar equals twenty hard minutes on the elliptical trainer.  Where did all this excess come from?   Layer upon layer, it weighs upon me.   My pregnancies; my back injury; my father’s death; my decision to go back to college after twenty-five years; my new career... each one contributing another stratum of what?  Castration? Knowledge?   Gravitas?   
 
Castration.  Has this 'mewling, puking babe'  finally accepted banishment from the breast?   Am I encountering a limit, an 'enough', a boundary to my appetite?   Shall I henceforth welcome sufficiency, not satiety?

Knowledge.  No doubt about it, I have a fascination for consuming knowledge but what I ultimately seek is self-knowledge, perhaps even a kind of wisdom.   I know now that the knowledge that has mattered most in my life has been found in the interaction with significant others, in my experience of childhood, parenthood, friendship, marriage.  I looked for it there when I went back to college but this is not about education, though going back to college has been a part of its discovery.  Self-knowledge, wisdom is not found in what we are taught but, rather, like Fionn burning his thumb on that mythic salmon, it is discovered in what we learn, from mistakes, from experience and from life.   These impingements penetrate beneath the layers of degrees and diplomas and other accolades to endure permanently at the level of action, not opinion, thought not theory. 

Gravitas.  Is that what I sought when I ate myself into this shape?   I have always been small, short enough to be mistaken for a child.   Was I trying to eat myself adult?

... ... ... ... ...

I stroke my waist and pinch my hips.  I have begun to wear trousers again.  A bright red pair of linen trousers - mark them well!   I am drawing attention to my body in a way not seen since - since...

since my peekabooo pregnancy outfit, protesting its practicality;

since the leathers I bought to wear on the bike, defying the laws of physics to squeeze skin-to-skin into a size even then too small;  

since the crochet lace I wore over my wedding dress, its unconscious profanity betraying the true purpose of this ceremony;

since the mini-dress I wore one summer after breaking up from an intolerable relationship, socially-encoded communication of an implicit desire...  

... ... ... ... ...

Gravitas.   This word resonates with me, for some reason.   Am I mixing it up with 'gravity'?   Is it an expression of my preoccupation with weight, heaviness, weightiness, ponderousness, seriousness?   Perturbed at the lingering effect of this word on me, I looked it up.   Thank you, reference.com, for a definition that resolved also my associations.   

'Gravitas  (specifically dignity, seriousness, and duty) is one of the several virtues that ancient Roman society expected men to possess, along with pietas, (duty to the gods and duty to family - particularly to the father (which is expanded to duty to the community and duty to the state thanks to the analogy between the family and the state, conventional in the ancient world)), dignitas (personal reputation, moral standing, and ethical worth), and iustitia (Lady Justice herself, replete with scales and blindfold).'* 

 Ah, a virtue: one to marry with the cardinals: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice.    Strange that I had not anticipated this, and yet, looking over my past few posts I see I had: debating image and worth, family and  values.

So... this is a question, not of aesthetics, but virtues and ethics.   I am debating not an appetite for life, but an ethic for life, a moral standpoint on my life.    

More than a blip, I have reached an impasse.   Dare I proceed? To quote a modern oracle, ... Because I'm worth it?

Shall I be yet that same fair Juliet, though less the better part of nine pounds or more?   

*Note: this is my contraction and summary of the references on reference.com.