Living in Los Angeles, I see celebrities shopping at the grocery store, pumping gas, dining at restaurants, basically just going about their daily business, as the people around them quietly catch a glimpse. I usually think things like, "Wow! She looks great without make-up,"or "He's shorter than I imagined," and more often than not, "Her thighs are smaller than one of my ankles!"
(Cough....Cough...Teri Hatcher) It's hard, in this town, not to find "perfection" everywhere you look. A lot of these people pay a price for this "perfection," a scalpel here, a syringe there, chain smoking and black coffee; fortunately, that's a price I'm unwilling to pay.
So today's celebrity sighting was Ricki Lake, I saw her at The Frame Store in Brentwood. She was standing over a counter cluttered with photographs of herself, choosing various mats and frames to complement the pictures. As you may or may not know, she's recently dropped quite a bit of weight (again), a fact that she's been more than willing to share with the media over the past couple of months. If I were her, I'd be shouting it from the rooftop, megaphone in hand, flood lights waving, while wearing something that showed off my svelte new figure. She looked fantastic, healthy and glowing as she perused the many photographs of the new and improved Ricki! Essentially, her weight jump-started her career as a character actor (character being the term used when you don't fit the mold, beauty and body-wise in Hollywood) in Jon Water's cult favorite, Hairspray. She played the plump and perky Tracy Turnblad, the eternally cockeyed optimist who danced her way to stardom. This role led to many other feature film /made-for TV movie roles. If memory serves, sometime in the early to mid nineties she dropped the weight, grabbed a microphone and voila, The Ricki Lake Show was born! Her weight has gone up and down over the years and right now she's DOWN. Oh, how I covet those DOWN times, because it seems as if they never last, the clock strikes midnight and you turn into a pumpkin again. I hope Ricki is able to spend the rest of her life at the Prince's ball, because it sure does suck when your dance with a single digit dress size comes to an end!
Okay, so why did I just spend an inordinate amount of time discussing Ms. Lake's battle with the bulge? It's the same reason I read People Magazine's annual Half Their Size issue cover to cover. I relate to these women and I desperately want to know their secret. How did they do it? 1/2 a grapefruit, a hard boiled egg, and 8 ounces of skim milk for breakfast, a small grilled chicken breast with steamed spinach for lunch, and poached salmon with mixed field greens for dinner? Heck yeah! I can do that!! I mustn't forget the two healthy snacks a day, a handful of almonds, string cheese, celery and carrot sticks. Yummmmm........ Just thinking about it stirs up images of me, tall and lean, jogging around my neighborhood in nothing but shorts and a sports bra, my six pack glistening in the morning sun. Alas, I must resign myself to the fact that the reality of my situation is far from my celery wishes and carrot stick dreams. Just ask Oprah, she's got the world at her fingertips and she still can't get it right! If Oprah can't lose the weight and more importantly KEEP IT OFF, what hope is there for the rest of us?
I grew up in the South, the land of fried foods and vegetables cooked into mush with salt and fatback. I had two older brothers, tall and lean, who snacked on junk food and chugged syrupy sweet neon yellow Mountain Dew by the liter. This was my environment and I followed suit, not really putting on weight until early adolescence when my bad eating habits and lack of exercise finally caught up with me. I've been battling the bulge ever since. When I went to college and eventually moved to California my eating habits underwent a metamorphosis. Water, as a beverage? What a concept! Steamed vegetables crisp and sweet? How novel! I was smitten with these new healthy alternatives to what I was raised on. I've never been much of a meat eater, even as a child, and I love vegetables and eat a wide variety of the healthy stuff. Unfortunately, I've had an on again, off again relationship with exercise. When I'm on, I'm hard core, I work hard and sweat, I don't skip workouts. But when I'm off, I'm way off and find it hard to recapture the motivation that was there only a week earlier. I'm an all or nothing kind of gal, witnessed currently in my couch potato to half marathoner goal.
As of now, I'm getting over a case of bronchitis and haven't trained in nearly two weeks due to my deafening cough. I'm currently in waiting; waiting to get back on the exercise horse, eager to transform my body, and ready to join Ricki and all of those "half-their-sizers," healthy and glowing at the finish line.
