I love this time of year.

Now I’m hardly a petty person (control your laughter, Wayne County), but one thing that annoys me is the people who say they ‘love all seasons equally.’ Come on. These are times of the year. They aren’t your children; you don’t have to shield the weird or cold or snotty ones from the knowledge that you love them less than their warm, sunny siblings.

My favorite season, hands down, is early summer. Maybe because of positive associations with getting out of school, but more likely because everything is pretty right now. About the only high ticket I drew in my family’s genetic lottery is that I’m the one with the least allergies, so I can bounce around outside with the pollen and spores wafting through my hair, not getting a sunburn courtesy of my Italian mother. Don’t be too jealous of that one, though; my knees get five o’clock shadow. It’s a trade off.

Everything smells better when the sun is shining. Have you ever noticed that? You can walk by the most backlot-stock apple pie cooling on a windowsill when the sky is the color of a Soviet battleship and it just won’t get you as happy as the same smell does in the summer.

Everything tastes better in the summer too. And I don’t just mean ice cream (though to be honest, I MOSTLY mean ice cream); I mean fruit and deviled eggs and Country Time single-serve packets and veggie kebabs on the grill. Best of all though, is how this time of year makes you want to be outside. Even on the hot days; like the earliest days of winter, we’re not yet so inured to the heat we just crave temptrol environments. If I could find a way to telecommute from the banks of the Lackawaxen I’d do it.

I was walking downtown on Main Street at the end of last week, on one of these achey-gorgeous early summer days, and I can’t even describe to you how wonderful it felt. Whole families were outside, swinging kids by their arms and getting them hopped up on frozen yogurt. Flowers were lined up like a Thomas Kinkade casting call. I felt...I can’t even do it justice. Incomparably free and easy. A breeze was blowing right through my insides, blowing away all the banality and small-mindedness the winter had accrued.

It was around this time I realized my skirt was falling off.

I...I don’t know quite the tone to strike here, if I’m honest. By any competitive standard you’re reading the words of a failure right now. I promised you 25 pounds; you got nine. No way to sugarcoat that, and when I look at the achievements of the winners of the contest it’s downright humbling. The winners of the contest lost over 20% of their body weight. That’s like dividing your body up into fifths and losing one of them. That’s truly astounding. I’d love to know what they did. In a just world they’d be the ones down here, writing their stories, sharing their tips.

But unfortunately, you don’t have a just world. You have me. So what last tips can I give? What words of wisdom shall I share? Well, I can instruct by bad example. “Don’t convince yourself that since you ate yogurt for breakfast and skipped lunch pizza is ok for dinner” would be one. And no, you won’t ‘work out twice as hard tomorrow.’

Because this is...actually hard. I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting to find some of the physical exertion challenging, but I didn’t think that simply the process of ‘getting in shape’ would have the same emotional effect on me it did. Sometimes I’d spend an entire day, two, a week doing everything right; the gym, the vitamins, healthy breakfast, the whole deal. Then I’d put on a pair of jeans that were tight before and...still tight. All I’d want to do right then was pig out; how people stay on diets when other people in their house eat junk food I have no idea.

Sometimes I’d mess up for a whole week and still lose weight. The week I lost the most wasn’t the week I lived the healthiest; it was the week I had stomach flu.

So is that it? Do we chalk up this entire benighted enterprise to a girl biting off more than she could chew, pretending to an expertise the final analysis shows she didn’t command? Perhaps. But I can’t quite do that, not in my secret heart of hearts anyway. And if you’ll indulge me for a few more paragraphs, I’ll try to explain why.

On Monday I went for a quest for a tomato. This may not sound difficult, but this tomato I was looking for was grown in Plato’s cave. This was the ideal tomato. This tomato was the size and density of a small watermelon, red and streaked with an underbred green that told me Dole scientists had never gotten their banal, soulless paws on its DNA. This tomato would look up at me from some produce bin, lost and unloved amidst its inferior brethren, its unblemished skin crying for the judicious application of kosher salt and some unbridled savagery with a breadknife.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s been a teensy recall of tomatoes happening lately. I guess people have been dying or something. Whatever, give me my damn tomato! Unfortunately, the recall seems to be effecting certain tomato varietals from California, Guatemala, and the Netherlands (they grow tomatoes in the Netherlands? Well, I guess if you can make wine in Australia...) or, as I prefer to put it, “any tomato a person of sound mind would ever want to eat.” What’s left are sad, anemic little tumors the color of a human gum.

In desperation, I started leaving the supermarkets and hitting the bodegas and ethnic delis on Main Avenue between Scranton and Old Forge. I finally found my dream tomato’s homely cousin, sitting in a wicker basket in front of the meat counter in an Italian deli. Next to the basket were 20 ounce jars of Nutella.

If you’ve never eaten Nutella, it’s a chocolate hazelnut spread popular in Italy which I used to eat with a spoon in college. It’s extraordinarily sweet and rich and once upon a time it was in a short list of my favorite foods. I haven’t eaten it in years, but just seeing the jar made that particular thick, unctuous oil slick of flavor coat the inside of my mouth, and I nearly lost my appetite for sexy little Mr. Tomato in my hand.

Not because I wanted the Nutella, mind. But because I was nauseous.

I now truly believe that 50% or more of my reliance, as a cook and an eater, on fats and sugars was a physical habit, perhaps even an addiction. I couldn’t have seen that until I detoxed. It’s not that I don’t like chocolate now; I do. But I like so many other things, things I don’t think I could have appreciated the same way. Tomatoes. Hot peppers. Fish filets. Citrus fruit. There’s still a place in the world for Nutella, but how much sadder would it be if I never found my tomato - because I never went looking?

Then there’s mornings. Specifically, the fact that I wake up during them. I used to wake up with a headache. Always. So consistently, as a matter of fact, that I didn’t even notice it until one morning in about week seven when it was gone. I drink a lot less coffee now, which probably has something to do with it. I’ve actually, corny as it sounds, started drinking milk in the morning. I don’t know, it makes me feel full. And if I’m out of milk, sometimes I’ll have orange juice, or sometimes I can run all the way to the convenient mart and back. Without panting.

I nearly cried the first time I did that. I actually did cry when I was making the photocomposite above, which has the picture I took of myself in week 5 next to the one I took yesterday. That’s only a 5 pound difference there, since I didn’t take one right at the beginning. But I know it was a stark difference then as well. I know it because there’s something I haven’t told you; at my heaviest, about 2 years ago, I was 178 pounds.

That’s 29 pounds. 29 pounds and no more morning headaches, tomatoes and high kicks and jeans I haven’t worn since college. 29 pounds of feeling better than I have in a long time. I know I said I wanted to lose 20 more pounds, which would have brought me to 138. And I didn’t get there. And now that the contest is over, I’m not going to strive for 138 pounds.

I’m going to shoot for 120.

Or 118. Or 122. Or size 6 jeans, or my old high school uniform, or running a mile uphill. Whatever rubric you want to go by. I don’t know how long it’ll take; if I thought life was getting in the way before I imagine it’s only going to get worse now. But I don’t intend to settle for okay; what superhero does that? It’d be like Superman only saving Metropolis most of the time, or Batman only being half insane.

And I’ll make you a promise, Wayne County. I’ll check back in. This time next year, June 9, 2009, I’ll email Steve or his futuristic non-union robot equivalent my weight, a picture, and a few words of wisdom. Because you guys deserve no less. I may not like routine, I may still be undersold on the wonders of tofu, but I do know I like you. I like the words of encouragement and gentle ribbing you’ve given me throughout this contest, and I really really like what you’ve accomplished for yourselves, and me. I owe you, and myself, at least that much; to be honest with you if the change you have made in me is permanent.

I already know it’s for good.

Thank you all so much, and I’m going to miss you.