I am posting this a day early because we have a busy second half of the week and busy weekend ahead of us.

I originally committed to reporting on my resolutions here in ye olde blog to provide myself with some level of accountability. But it’s starting to feel a little boring, and almost a little braggy to be doing this every month. I’m going to keep it up, because I know I will hit rough patches in the future and hopefully my anxiety about having to report a failure to my three loyal readers will keep me going at that point.

This month’s rotating resolution was squishy with no clear, measurable units of success. My goal was to be nicer to my husband. As I think often happens in long relationships, he usually inhabits the very bottom spot on my priority list. We’ve got kids and cats and a new house and jobs and dinner has to be made every fucking night. Showing him affection just hasn’t seemed like a priority.

But our kids are getting older and more independent and I am starting to taste a distant future in which it’s just the two of us again, or at least just the two of us more frequently. And when we finally come up for air and look at each other again, I want us to both be excited about it.

So, again, no measurable unit of success here, but if you asked my husband if he had a good month he would say yes. I met my goal. Mic drop.

And then there are my ongoing fitness and nutrition goals.

Guys, I can’t believe I’m going to write this, but I am killing it at my fitness and nutrition goals. I wouldn’t say it’s effortless, but the habits that caused me so much struggle and pain in January and February feel incredibly natural now.

Even more incredible: I am LOOKING FORWARD TO EXERCISING.

I KNOW.

ME.

All that sweating and gasping and cursing and crying I did in those first couple months has started to pay off. That first mile of running? It feels great. Kettlebell level one exercise? Awesome all the way through (except Turkish Get-Ups which are still awkward as fuck but I’m starting to think that’s how they’re supposed to feel).

I am only exercising three times per week, which is laughably distant from meeting the CDC’s minimum exercise requirements. It’s probably time to push things up a notch to four times per week.

And have I written at all about my nutrition goals? I don’t think I have, largely because they are embarrassingly simple. I am only eating sweets on the weekend, and I am eating an apple four times a week. Yeah, I know. That really is it. But it has been really good, and those little changes have been surprisingly effective in informing the rest of my eating throughout the week.

Food is a difficult thing for me to navigate. I spent a lot of my life restricting my food intake which made me obsessed with food and more likely to binge eat. I feel at peace with food when I am not restricting. I am not losing weight, and I’m not trying to lose weight, but it’s easy to fall back into old restriction habits when I’m making an effort to “be healthier.” I don’t want to live a life where I can’t eat Cadbury Creme Eggs during Lent or accept a homemade treat at work from a dear colleague. I also don’t want to live a life where I eat sweets every day–I feel physically terrible when I get in that habit! So how do you restrict without restriction? I am still figuring it out.

I am so proud of myself, and I wish that was the end of the story, but I’ve been grappling with a lot of big feelings around GLP-1s, the closing chapters of the body positivity movement, and the end of body diversity in the world around us. I am so proud of what my body is accomplishing this year, and so proud of how strong it is, and yet I live in a culture that will never see my body as healthy or sexy or strong or worthy of praise.

I am in the process of ripping down the scaffolding of my positive body image-which I had foolishly built on the supposition that someday fat would be divorced from health and fat people would be accepted as worthy of love and respect–and rebuilding it based on my own inner strength. There will never be peace for a fat person’s body in the outside world, so I have to find it within.

It’s going to be a shitty process. I am not looking forward to it. I will probably write about it a lot here this year. Sorry. It will probably become tiresome, but maybe you’ll learn something about societal fat bias along the way.