She did yoga, jogged, took ballet classes, did Pilates, swam lengths, and had regular acupuncture. --Leanne Shapton, Was she pretty?

I'm clumsy, but capable of grace, I wrote on my Facebook page. About me: I trip over my own feet sometimes, but I can hold your gaze.

I learned clumsiness as a girl whose mother did not abide her "elephantine" footsteps. I learned to creep through our house with my feet pivoted from the ankle, on tiptoe, to make the least noise possible. My goal, then, as a girl, was to provoke no sound: screaming especially.

My goal, now, as an adult, is to learn poise, to make exultant (thud!) noise on sprung hardwood: to take ballet. Admittedly, I'm not yet ready to stand in first position, at the barre in supple leather slippers (like those penciled by Andy Warhol, those illustrating this post): I've much more weight to lose, much more than the twenty-three pounds I've lost, before I'll be light-enough on my feet to enroll in recreational adult classes at the National Ballet School. But my intention to take ballet classes is akin sincere promises sent long-distance in a love letter, an earnest assurance to a fitter self.

My goal, now, this instant, is to embrace fitness as I embrace food: with joy, playfulness, experimentation--taking pleasure in the body's capacity for change. That means exercise without the extremism to which so many North Americans are thought to ascribe. (At least, according to the French woman not fat, Mireille Guiliano.) Without the exercise extremism to which I ascribed before, last year when I sought to lose weight by urging myself to the gym six days a week, urging myself harder, faster, tracking my time, my speed, my incline, my resistance in an Excel spreadsheet. Gentler exercise, to walk through the city or to do Sadie Nardini’s Weight Loss Yoga For Overweight Yogis on YouTube, is thought to prompt weight loss without stimulating the appetite, as vigorous exercise is said to do, and without exhausting either the body, causing plateaus, or the will to persist in making lifestyle changes. Gentler efforts, too, most allow for joy, play, experimentation: yoga, ballet, jump rope (Punk Rope, if ever in New York City)...

Still, will walking, yoga, ballet be exercise enough to sustain the changes I'm intent to make? This, the clumsiness in my psyche: the girl's fear of screaming taking the form of adult perfectionism, measurable exercise extremism. ("You must be perfectly quiet" internalised as "You must be perfect--and you must be able to quantify your perfect efforts.") My mother, as fond of riddles as of silence, phrased the only answer as a question: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. One step. One pose. One position. First position.

I think it's closer to madness today than it was then. There's no perspective on it at all. --Arthur Miller, The Paris Review

"Greater than and less than, you can figure out which one from the alligator's mouth, which way it opens," said my grade four teacher. "The alligator always eats the bigger number. The alligator is always very hungry." She drew teeth inside the mathematical symbols.

The summer before I'd been greater than and the teeth of my zipper, that on pink Bermuda shorts, had eaten into my skin. After, my mother had driven me to the hospital; in the emergency room, I was given a needle to numb the swell of my stomach while the doctor extracted my torn flesh from the metal zipper. After, my mother had driven me to Weight Watchers.

Unsurprisingly, my first effort at weight loss was not successful: Weight Watchers isn't recommended for children as young I was then, just nine or ten.

Unsurprisingly, I was resistant to ever joining again. "I know no one who's lost weight and kept it off going to Weight Watchers," I said. "Do you?" I asked friends. Four admitted they'd gone, lost weight on the Flex plan. Three confessed the program had worked, taught good eating habits, but they'd lapsed. "It's a lifestyle, not a diet," they said. One summed: "It's the people who stop working, not the plan, not Weight Watchers."

That I could understand: a year ago, I lapsed after months of bicycling through the city, of brisk walks on artificial inclines, mornings on the treadmill at the gym, of clean eating and of keeping Excel spreadsheets listing my caloric intake. I'd lost thirty pounds, plateaued. On that plain, a battle that was epic, pitting thirty years of habit against six months of effort. It was David vs. Goliath, if this was a battle with a resolution explained by science: calories in vs. calories out. I started to binge. I binged. I gymed. Binged. Gymed. I stopped tracking my food: I couldn't list the bags of chips, the frequency with which I ate them. And then, in dark November, stopped going to the gym. I gained weight, the thirty pounds I'd lost and more in addition.

When one of those I'd solicited for a success story confessed she'd re-joined Weight Watchers the week before, that she'd gained ten pounds in the month since her wedding, I joined too. I hadn't planned to track points for food intake and activity. It was a snap decision. I was ready. I couldn't stand how tight my jeans had gotten or how differently I fit into a subway seat. My friend would be my Weight Watchers buddy.

In my efforts to become less than, to lose weight again (over one hundred pounds in sum), too I am also seeking to become greater than I am: less resistant, more open, in this example, the parable of how I got over myself and joined Weight Watchers again.

In my first week on Weight Watchers, I've read blogs kept by others committed to losing weight, been encouraged by how bravely each chronicles her experiences, positive and negative, and articles her weight and measurements. I'm not yet ready to post my weight on the internet, but in my first week on Weight Watchers, that since Tuesday, November 17, I've lost six pounds--a sum larger than I will lose most other weeks, I know, knowing that the first two weeks on Weight Watchers one loses more than the one to two pounds healthfully averaged after, but nonetheless a number as encouraging as the blogs I've read.

Two especially favoured:

http://questionsfordessert.com/

http://msbitchcakes.blogspot.com/