So last weekend I took a "girls' weekend" trip to NYC. We stayed in my friend's apartment on the Upper East Side, half a block from Central Park, on the fifth floor of a walkup building. You want stair training? Try walking up 5 flights of stairs every time you come home - that will boost your numbers precipitously. While simultaneously crushing your will to live. So there's that.
We did a lot of walking around Manhattan, and a lot of eating and drinking - - Mexican food for lunch, Chinese food for dinner, and street food (arepas, fried Oreo cookies, mini doughnuts, whoopie pies, salted caramels, bruffins, maccarons, and twistie cones) for snacks, and wine - so much wine. All that eating (and drinking!) combined with all that walking and the post-vacation weight gain is not as extreme as I had feared. I probably have all those damn stairs to thank, so "thank you, never-ending staircase".
On the way home we had to get in line for security screening at the airport, first to be screened by a TSA agent who checked our boarding passes and ID, and then to be screened by the x-ray and metal detector.
The TSA guy who was checking ID and boarding passes looked almost asleep - - he was slumped over in his chair and if he was awake, he was doing a fine job hiding it. But he was the first person who did this: he looked at my passport (photo taken in September 2011, when I was near my heaviest), and he looked at me, then he looked back at my passport, then back at me, and then he said: "You got skinny", as he handed my ID and boarding pass back to me with a grin. I tell you, it made my entire day. He is the first person to comment on the noticeable change in my appearance between the passport photo and how I look live and in person, in all of my recent trips. Photo comparison of my September 2011 passport photo and a photo taken from last weekend are at the top of this post.
It's not that customs officials, TSA agents and gate agents don't notice - they do, I can tell from the quick double takes that they do when they look at my ID - it's just that no one says anything out loud. The etiquette on mentioning someone's weight loss is a tricky thing - - many people worry that I am ill, and they are relieved to hear that my weight loss is intentional. People seldom lose as much weight as I have lost without being sick. I get that. But it's also really nice to have my progress called out. It made my entire day, I tell you!
My own experience wasn't quite as positive. I got a suspicious glare and a, "This isn't you!"... Followed by a demand for two more forms of identification. ;)
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