Somehow I like swimming for pretty much the exact same reasons I’ve avoided swimming. You can’t read when you’re swimming; you can’t watch TV when you’re swimming; when you’re all done doing nothing but swimming, you can’t just stumble home without changing, because you’ve been swimming, and you have to shower and make yourself not smell like diluted Ajax, and that takes a half hour or more, and yet—I love it. All these years of fucking around at three different gyms, and apparently you only had to give me a big box of warmish water to make me behave like a real working-out-kind-of-person. Who the hell knew?

(Well, I guess I did go the park district pool near my old apartment regularly for a couple months in 1999. And then I stopped for some reason, like there maybe was a full moon, or else something on TV, or else someone shouted “Hey! Look over there!” and pointed at something behind me, and when I turned back around my swimming motivation was gone, oops.)

It does not hurt at all that my gym has towel service, and good showers, and a steam room. And a locker room that is carpeted and blandly cushy like a new office building, so that my swimming routine feels like a wet but agreeable second job. Which it is, kind of.

Please don’t mind me while I continue to be amazed that I can actually do things that result—in real live scientific fashion!—in losing weight. I mean, I know that I did this before and wrote a whole damn book about how it felt, but at some point I fell completely out of step. And I became convinced that well, it was just me, that I had this quirky little defect that impaired my ability to fully commit myself and attend WW meetings regularly and click repeatedly on my online POINTS tracker thingy every single day. Sometimes I tried to think of this as a special and endearing defect, like Rudolph’s nose or Dumbo’s ears or Britney’s personal judgment. And sometimes I just scowled and got fat. But I guess I just didn’t like going to those meetings and all that daily clicking clicking clicking, because somehow I’ve found time to do the cooking and salad-spinning and planning and swimming and showering and being an all-around trooper who jumps in the air in slow motion until the frame freezes on her dazzling smile, so there! I am cured! (Except I’m still fat.)

Wanna hold my turkey? It weighs slightly less than the total amount of weight I’ve lost. Holy shit!

(My turkey is thirteen and a half pounds. I’ve lost almost fourteen now. Who wants some white meat?)

Happy Thanksgiving!

A couple of you have pointed out that This Thing I’m Doing sounds a little like the Weight Watchers Core Program, where you eat only heartbreakingly sensible whole foods and don’t have to count any POINTSâ„¢ because your metabolism is just too bored to even bother turning it into fat. Or something like that. So I can sort of understand if This Thing sounds awful because it sounds like Core, because who the hell wants to be on Core? It’s like the Weight Watchers short bus. It’s the orthopedic shoes of WW, really, and you stomp around sadly mumbling “me no allowed to eat bread” while everyone else at the WW party is on the other plan, wearing their sexy Flexy high heels and telling stories about their fabulous lives where they get to eat daring little portions of cheese and flirty slivers of cake every day, woohoo! And you wonder how everyone else can stand to wear those POINTy little shoes, because you never got used to how they felt no matter how hard you tried.

Okay, so that’s another weird analogy for how I felt the last time I did WW a bit over a year ago.

I also never really took to Core because the recipes were pretty awful. To be honest, a lot of the dishes in that Eat to Live book are kind of brutal, too, with things like Raisin Coleslaw and Anti-Cancer Soup (oh, let me pound my spoon with anticipation), and if making those had been my first experience with This Thing, I don’t know how it would have turned out. Chris had the book to begin with, and he’d found a couple of recipes that didn’t make you want to pound your fingers flat with a twenty-eight-ounce can of beans. But like I said, I like how it’s going so far. More later.