I made a resolution at the beginning of this year to lose weight. I'll admit it's something I've done every year for a fairly long time now - this promise to myself to lose weight - but this year I figured for sure I'd do it because of the wedding. After all, having a wedding looming over your head mid-way through the coming year is a powerful incentive to try to look a bit nicer for those wedding pictures. However, after two months of going it alone and meeting with miserable (ice cream and pizza related) failure, I turned to Richard and made him a deal. Crafty gal that I am, I suggested that we join Weight Watchers together and when *both* of us had lost a certain amount of weight each, we would get something (computer related, of course) we've been really wanting for a while. I did this because I finally recognized that I'm completely incapable of doing this on my own, and after all, they say that misery loves company. But anyway, luckily, he agreed, since we both have just about the same amount of weight to lose, and he was starting to ponder that whole 'wedding picture' dilemma himself. And the cool thing is that he has just as hard a time at it as I do. There is nothing more horrid than going into a weight-losing pact with someone who can simply melt away the pounds by drinking one less glass of soda per day, especially when you happen to have the metabolism of someone just recently coming off a year-long fast.

This diet hasn't been easy, not by a long shot. In fact, I shouldn't say this is a diet, because it isn't - it's a life-long eating regime. It doesn't matter what you want to call it though - whatever it is, I still will hate it. There are days when I just don't want to care about the number of points in a serving of food, or when I don't want to have to drag out the measuring cups in order to eat my breakfast cereal, or when I wish that there was some miraculous way I could still suck down half a garlic-sauce-and-roasted-chicken pizza with Richard one night and toss it back with root beer floats and not think a thing about it anymore.

But there have been some good points. Having people notice that I've lost weight is always a small thrill. Watching the numbers creep slowly down on the scale is marvelous. Looking in the mirror and noticing that I might actually have a waist after all is even better.