Jemima, you suck.

God, I hate the book Jemima J.

Several years ago when it came out, a friend of mine sent it to me because she said it was wonderful.  It's about an overweight girl who meets someone fabulous on the internet, decides to lose weight, and goes to see him after she gets thin.  I love chick lit and I love books about fat girls, so I was eager to read it.

The rest of this post will probably have a lot of spoilers about this ridiculous book, so if you haven't read it and you want to, probably best to skip this post.

Anyway. So Jemima Jones is portrayed as being the fattest fuck in all of England.  No one is as fat as Jemima. She's got triple chins.  She puts the ass in massive.  Her stomach is huge as hell.  She's FAAAAAAAAAAAAAT.

Naturally, she has a thin and beautiful girl friend, thin and beautiful roommates, and a huge crush on the hottest man ever.

So then she discovers the internet and chat rooms.  And, as it happens, she lies like a dummy to this guy she starts chatting with.  Hey, we've all been there!!  When it turns out that the guy she's chatting with actually is extremely fit and gorgeous as all get out, Jemima decides to join a gym.

Awesome. No matter what the catalyst is, getting healthy is NEVER a problem.

But here's where the book loses me.  No, not just loses me.  Makes me angry!

Jemima goes into the gym for her assessment with a trainer. He says he needs to weigh her. Okay, okay...I'm with you so far.  This actually happens.  Jemima is sad about getting on the scale. Hey, been there, too.  And then the weight pops up on the scale.

204 pounds.

Yes, I wrote that right.

Jemima Jones, the fattest thing in all of England, is 204 pounds.

A little bit later we discover that she's 5'7 in height.  I went over to My Body Gallery and popped in those measurements.  Do you know what a woman who is 5'7 and 205 pounds looks like?

Get the fuck out of town.

So Jemima basically starves herself, works out a lot, and gets to 120 pounds in a few months.  She flies off to meet the gorgeous Brad, who conveniently owns a gym, falls in love with him, and then gets fucked over when it turns out that he actually likes fat girls.  Then the guy she had originally had a crush on sees her thin and falls in love with her.

Well then.

This book would have been so so much better had  Jemima like, you know, actually BEEN fat.  Or if her first crush had loved her despite her weight and had been too shy to tell her.  Or if she'd just been happy enough to get fit despite all these men.

I hate this book.

The Sum of It All

So I had my training session yesterday with my new trainer.  Well, okay.  I keep calling him "new" even though we've been together now for almost 2 months.  My original trainer, Seth, left our gym in early September for a new and better career.  I was lucky to have him for as long as I did, and I really hope he's doing well.

Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, knowing how I am)  I kind of lost my motivation after Seth left.  I guess I don't deal well with change. It's not that I was working out FOR him.  It was just that we were buddies, and I enjoyed our 30 minutes together each week, and I liked showing him what I had done the during the week when he wasn't with me.  We chatted about his kids and my boyfriend and music and movies. It was fun.

After he left, I was paired up with another guy, Johnathon.  Now don't get me wrong. I like my new trainer just fine.  He's a nice guy, and I think he is a better trainer than Seth was because he's very very efficient with our time.   When we finish a workout, I know that I have worked my muscles about as hard as I possibly could without hurting myself.  But we're not really buddies yet.  And maybe we're not really supposed to be. He's hired to give me a workout once a week, which he does and does quite well.

No, my problem now is really just with myself.  I can't seem to make myself go to the gym if I don't have a scheduled session and that's terribly terribly bad.  I'm unhappy that I haven't lost much weight.  Back in the summer when I was at the gym 3-5 days a week and eating better, I wasn't losing much.  I have lost body fat.  I have gained muscle.  But the scale is hovering around the same number that it was at when I started this whole thing back in June and I don't know how to fix that.

Well, no.  I do know how.  I just don't want to do it.

And that pretty much sums up my life right now.