Before graduate school, I had always been the kind of person people called “too thin.” I was 173 cm tall and barely weighed 50 kg. My usual worry was that no matter what I ate, I could not gain weight. I often got scolded for being too skinny, and I never quite understood why my roommates seemed to envy a body with no extra flesh on it.
That changed during the summer after my first year of graduate school. I fell at Huangchuan bus station and injured my knee, right at the joint where it needed to move all the time. The wound became inflamed and suppurated, and I had to spend a week on IV drips. After the semester began, I stayed in the dormitory to recover. Fortunately, I did not break my front teeth or leave a scar on my face.
But while I was resting, something else happened without my noticing. Under the repeated assault of braised pork and chicken drumsticks brought by hillway, my weight shot up to 65 kg in three months.
After that, I tried a few scattered ways to slim down. I did sit-ups, hoping they would flatten my stomach. I also bought some chili slimming cream from Taiwan online, along with plastic wrap. None of it lasted very long, and naturally none of it produced much of a result.
Looking at the extra fat on my body, I felt awkward and unhappy. Clothes became harder to buy, and my mood suffered with them. For the next several years, my weight stayed stubbornly between 60 and 65 kg.
By the time I got married and began preparing to have Little Bear, I thought: pregnancy and postpartum confinement would make me gain weight anyway, so losing weight now would only be wasted effort. With that thought, I completely gave up on changing my figure.
Before giving birth, I reached 81 kg. After Little Bear was born, I dropped to 74 kg. But after finishing postpartum confinement, getting through the New Year holiday, ending maternity leave, and returning to work, my weight helplessly climbed back to 80 kg.
From early March to the end of May, I rushed home every noon to breastfeed. During that period, my weight slowly fell to around 75 kg, though from the outside it did not seem to make much difference.
Colleagues tried to comfort me: “Your arms, legs, and face all look quite slim. You’re not fat, not at all.”
Hillway was far less comforting. He said, “Don’t be too pleased about that. Those places are the final strongholds. If even they get fat, then everything has fallen.”
Once I had officially become a genuine “chubby girl,” I looked back at the days when I weighed 65 kg and suddenly felt that had actually been a pretty decent figure.
I once bought a batwing blouse online. Later, by accident, I saw the review hillway had written for me: “All I can say is that it looks good on the model. In real life, it looks very different from the model. Whether viewed from the front or from the back, it does not look as good as it does on the model.”
Honestly, that was too much. If it did not look good, then fine, it did not look good. Was it really necessary to analyze it from both the front and the back? Why not add a few comments about the side view while he was at it?
Hillway has never believed in weight loss that comes from getting something for nothing—dieting, pills, or anything of that sort. He firmly believes in the law of conservation of energy, and he does not think much of spot reduction either. Following his suggestion, I decided to start with jogging.
Since Little Bear went to sleep late at night and getting up early in the morning was difficult, we set the jogging time for the evening.
On May 28, hillway and I began jogging for half an hour every night in our residential compound. Before I started running, a tendon in my foot was already hurting because I had twisted it while wearing leather shoes. After three days of slow jogging, the tendon on the top of my left foot hurt badly, and the tendon in my calf also began to ache.
Hillway said I should let my foot recover first.
So the jogging plan came to a stop almost as soon as it began. I was anxious to lose weight, and all I could do was hope the tendon in my foot would heal quickly.