The end of the year is coming, and with it, the end of the millenium. Yes, yes, I’m one of those annoying little nay-sayers who loudly proclaimed last year NOT the end of the millenium. Look at it this way, for all of you who are sitting there insisting that I’m wrong. Let’s say that someone is going to pay you $2000 and they’re going to do it in pennies (humor me here and don’t think about the weight of the truck you’ll need to haul all those little useless coins away). If we go by that silly logic that the end of 1999 marked the end of the millenium, why then I’ve gotten away with only paying you $1999 bucks. See, when you finish counting out all the pennies for the 2000th dollar, only *then* will you have a full 2000 in cold hard coinage. Not one penny before.

So anyway, the new millenium approacheth, and I’m going to celebrate it in wild and fanciful style. Along with Richard, my older sis and her husband, in the grand tradition of my family, we shall engage in an all out movie-watching, ice cream-eating frenzy, guaranteed to leave us bloated and bleary-eyed by the time that ridiculous little ball drops in Times Square, but also managing to get rid of all those pesky leftover Christmas cookies and candies once and for all.

It’s all for a good cause, see, because come Monday, it’ll be the New Year, and time for all resolutions to kick in. And this year, like so many other women out there, my resolution is – you guessed it – to lose weight.

Oh, come back here and wipe that horrified look off your face. Don’t worry – I have no intention of boring you to tears with a careful recitation of how many calories I ate each day, or how many ounces I lost in water weight on an hourly basis. My intention, in fact, is to mention my battle of the bulge as rarely as I can in this journal. Oh, I may slip in a note here and there when I’ve reached a goal, but considering how easily I lose weight (uh – *not*) you can be pretty certain you won’t hear a peep on that for months at a stretch.

My family, I’ve determined, was built for the caveman days. We would be cheerfully able to withstand any sort of famine, no matter how severe, merely by looking at pictures of food several times a day. Our bodies are capable of extracting calories from simply inhaling the aroma of freshly baked pastries, and once those calories are gotten, we hang on to them with the grim determination of a steel-jawed trap. Losing weight, for all the women in my family, is a long and torturous affair, riddled with exercise programs, copious amounts of swearing, and a tendency to gain a deep-seated hatred of anything that involves the words ‘low-fat’ or ‘sugar-free’.

I’ve had roommates who would simply ‘forget to eat’ and promptly drop five pounds over night. One girl in particular would get sick and consequently not eat for days on end, and then wonder why it was that she was ten pounds less than she was the week before. She was forever sharing her tips on how to lose weight with me. I wanted to hate her, but she was always so sweet and well-meaning and I knew that she simply didn’t understand that people like me who have the metabolism of your average corpse just don’t have the same capability to drop inches as people like her. Years later now, she’s finally reached the point where the pounds have begun to stick and she cannot seem to drop them without a lot of hard work and effort. I’m sympathetic, of course, but inside there is a teensy little part of me that evilly cheers and hollers “Ha! About time you saw how the rest of us have to live!”.

Heredity aside, I know that I need to do this. I’m 31 now and I’m not getting any younger. And I’m making sure to do this right. I’m not doing this for Richard, who has made it very clear for me that he would love me just as much if I were 300 pounds and covered in hairy warts. I’m not doing this simply because I happen to be getting married this year and I want to look good in my dress, because a perk of the Renaissance era clothing is that it’s marvelously flattering to those of us with ‘fuller’ figures. I’m doing this for me and me alone. I’m doing it because I want to be able to view myself naked in the mirror and not wrinkle my nose and say ‘ugh’. I’m doing this because I want to look at pictures of myself and like them. I’m doing it because I want to feel better about myself, because I want to be healthy, and because I know that there’s no better time to start then now. And if I use the beginning of a millenium as an excuse to kick it off, why then so much the better.