I entered the time of corona like a caterpillar, and thanks to a decrease in booze and an increase in healthy habits I’ve exited my COVID cocoon looking like…a stick bug, I guess. My lost 25 pounds is now super obvious in ways it wouldn’t have been if I’d been able to watch it slowly disappear during regular life. Most of these observations are pretty dumb, but in the moment it’s like “whoa, that’s different.”
These are the things they don’t tell you about losing weight during a pandemic.
Your clothes will not fit. You’ll buy skinny jeans you never would’ve dared to buy in the past and they’ll slide on easier than your socks, with room to spare, and then you will go eat an extra brownie cuz fuck it.
You’ll walk into one of your favorite pubs for the first time, lower your gangly ass into a stool, lock eyes with other you in the bar mirror, and wonder where the fuck the rest of you went. Did I forget me at home? Did I fall out of my pockets? How is there so much extra room in this seat and why am I all angular looking?
You will catch sight of yourself out and about in your favorite Sox cap and wonder why the fuck that hat is suddenly way too big for the rest of your body.
You will attend a baseball game at your local ballpark and the ancient wooden seats will be utter torture. You will spend the next three nights Googling ass implants and relating to Hank Hill. You will wonder if the Kardashians have had it right all along.
You will realize that the dinks on the sidewalk are not slower than ever, you’re just even faster.
You will be cold because you are no longer properly insulated, so you’d better hope your pandemic ends in the spring or the summer.
When you move, you will individual pieces and parts working together in ways you couldn’t detect before, and you’ll go slackjawed and stupid and say something like “yoooooo, so that’s how my arm works! I never knew!” If anyone hears you, they will think you’re high.
The sight of a giant restaurant dinner will simultaneously delight and disgust you. Like, where’s the rest of the family this fucking thing is supposed to feed? Was this eighty pound plate delivered to the wrong customer? Am I supposed to bring half of it home?
And you will feel good, because you took your need to cope and turned it into something that made you feel productive, and you will do so without judging others because we all needed our thing during that pandemic and you are damn lucky yours was running in ever-expanding circles around the neighborhood.