(lat.: To whose benefit?)
The person behind this blog, the person who conceived and is writing this blog, the person also shamelessly benefiting from this blog — that’s me: I’m a Ph.D. student in the humanities, somewhere in my early thirties, trying to live that “mens sana in corpore sano” principle. My twenties saw all kinds of upheaval: A never-ending series of moves, including a few dramatic ones — cross-global as well as cross-continental — and an average of 1.2 annual local ones. (It took me until my 30s to acquire a bed that did not fold up and tuck away into a corner of my hovel apartment.) There were also about three college and post-college degrees, a couple of different career paths, a few boyfriends and the un-changing resolve to lose weight/keep weight off/start exercising/keep exercising/eat healthier/eat less obsesively … you get the picture.
My thirties were a much happier time: I found a career path I loved, a field that fascinated me, and — bizarrely enough — a school that was willing to pay me to get trained in it. After some agonizing, I moved across the country (yet again), settled into a nice community, bought a bed, made friends — two unrelated activities, I’d like to add — and lived happily ever after. At the same time, though, I started realizing a number of not-so-good things: For one, I didn’t have any pictures of myself from recent years — I had been a camera dodger from an early age, but by age 30, I had become a pro. The pictures of me I *did* see were pretty horrifying; out of the blue, it seemed, I had grown an unprecedented double-chin, overstuffed sausages as arms and legs, and a beanbag chair around my middle. When I finally hopped on the scale, after a month of fairly intensive efforts at reforming my life, it showed me a scary number, one I had never seen before. In more serious news, some of my friends started doing unhappy things — like dying, even and especially at a young age, or developing cancer, heart disease, and the other “top ten killers of Americans today”. And so I was both unprecedentedly happy, and unprecedentedly unhappy.
After months of half-hearted attempts to shore up the energy to keep eating healthy beyond the 2-hours-into-”diet” mark or actually, you know, getting my rear into the entry-way of the luxurious local gym, something clicked. That was some time in March or April. Now, at the tail end of July, there’s 35 lbs less of me. But never fear! I’ve still got at least that much to go and unquestionably much to blog about — phood, phitness and the PH.D.
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