One Pound Down

The scale was at 154 this morning!  Woo hoo!

On Friday our department had its “summer” outing - a cruise to one of the Harbor Islands, where we played softball and ate grilled things.  (Unlike most publishers, we have our busy season in summer.)  I had been looking forward to the cruise but dreading the softball game.  Scott, who is my office neighbor and our department FunGi (get it?), spent the two weeks prior insisting that I was playing on his team, even though I was picked last in gym class every week, had never hit or caught a ball in my life, and was extremely unthrilled to show up at a company event in athletic wear.  (In fact, I wore jeans and, screw my heel fissures, Tevas.  Oh, and a shirt with the Jolly Roger and a head scarf and big hoop earrings and a name tag that said Deadeye Dot - did I mention that the cruise had a pirate theme?)  Talk about trepidation - I spent the whole cruise wondering why these ships don’t serve booze.

I didn’t score any runs, and I didn’t catch any balls (though I did scoop up a grounder and miss tagging a runner by a mere fraction of a second).  But I didn’t strike out once, and I ended up running for Scott, who recently had surgery on his ankle, and I made it to third base at least once.  And our team, the sad sacks and losers, the Bad News Bears all grown up, was ahead by several runs until the very last inning when the other team, coached by a very competitive project manager and composed of all the most athletic people in the department, scored like 5 runs.  Final score - we lost 13-12.

Scott pointed out that we had more fun than they did - and I think we did, too.

After the cruise, I walked back to the office to work on an overdue document - probably a 40-minute walk on a gorgeous fall day.

Saturday I woke up with a very silly farmer’s sunburn (like a farmer’s tan, but red and sore) and extremely sore muscles - and the scale was UP a pound and a half.  How could that be?  I spent all day Friday, you know, exercising.  How could I gain a pound and a half overnight?

On Sunday my husband and I went to the Boston Folk Festival, where I worked on getting my shoulders equally burned as my lower arms.  We forgot our folding chairs, so we sat on the ground, which, given how sore I still was, made me feel about 75.  Well, OK, sitting wasn’t that bad, but getting up was a chore.  And I got up A LOT - I drank only about a half a liter of water throughout the day (usually not enough), and I probably had to pee at least a half a dozen times.  I never thought I’d say this, but the Port-o-Potties actually seemed inviting. 

Now I’ve lost the 1 1/2 pounds I gained, plus 1 more.

My hypothesis is that the sore muscles were evidence of inflammation, and one symptom of inflammation is edema, which is a fancy word for water retention.  As the muscles healed, the edema went away, and all that water had to go somewhere.

I like to think that, on Saturday morning, my weight was not 156.5 pounds.  I like to think it was 154 pounds, plus 2 and a half pounds of excess water.  And if you know some scientific reason why that could not possibly be true, please don’t tell me, OK?