Lara Zielin

This past weekend at a book event in Chicago, I made the joke that I’d gained 20 pounds writing DONUT DAYS because I called eating pastries “research.” Which, okay, that’s only partly true: I have gained 20 pounds, but it’s not from donuts; it’s more likely from cheese.

These days, I’m losing some of my excess by waking up early three days a week and spinning my butt off. It’s a good thing, and on the recent Chicago tour I felt good. I liked how I looked in the event pictures—generally.

But this past summer, I was neither spinning nor feeling fabulous, and I still had to go on a book tour.

Where I was slated to see people from high school. And college.

And multiple photos were going to be taken.

Um, that’s pretty much my definition of hell.

Before the trip, I cried a lot. I was petrified. I was so worried that these high school women would chatter among themselves and say, “Oh, man, can you believe how fat Lara’s gotten?” My grade-school nickname would come back with a vengeance: Lara Tubbalarda.**

(** It’s totally okay to laugh. It’s pretty dang funny. )

Dude, if you’ve never struggled with your weight, you’re probably scratching your head right now and thinking I sound pretty insecure. Which, I probably am that to a degree. But if you’ve ever had to organize your closet into various sizes to accommodate your fluctuations—or hell, just had a hard time buttoning your pants—I’m going to guess that you’re empathizing with what I’m saying, at least a little.

Gaining weight sucks. The thing is, in my mind, it was one thing to gain weight and live my quiet life and not really see anyone. But a public book tour where I was going to see people from my past (who had last seen me at my 10-year high school reunion, where I was probably at my skinniest ever) was brutal.

Did I mention I cried?

Okay, but here’s the thing. The book tour was really awesome. And the women from high school and college were just lovely. I highly, highly doubt they snarked about my excess behind my back. Why? Because they were focused on the fact that I’d written a book. That was published. That I was on tour. That it was good to see each other after so long.

Sure, maybe they saw I’d gotten a bit bigger, but they didn’t focus on it. Because there was so much other good stuff to focus on.

They saw the things about me that I couldn’t even see at the time: that on my tour, I was more than the sum of my scale numbers.

In all honesty, I still cringe when I look at some of those book tour pictures. But I’m working on focusing on how much was totally awesome about that tour—how I reconnected with so many people, how I met so many new people, how I was able to sign and sell so many books.

A while ago, I read about an author who didn’t want to get her author photo taken until she’d shed a few pounds. She kept postponing it and postponing it until finally her publisher was like, we need this now or your book goes to press without an image.

At the time I thought, that’s so sad. Here this author was, with a published book (at the time I read that story, I didn’t have an agent or a book under my belt and would have given my left arm for either) and yet she was plagued by her weight.

Well. Sad it may have been but my recent book tour showed me I have more in common with that author than I’d realized.

My goal moving forward is this: to continue to focus on my successes and not my weight; to focus on my talent, which doesn’t wane just because my weight waxes; to focus on writing as much and as well as I can because it keeps opening door after door of opportunity.

A book tour is still a book tour, after all.

And that’s worth celebrating, no matter what the scale says.

This is me and author Charity Tahmaseb at the Red Balloon bookstore in Minneapolis this past summer. Um, yeah, not my fave picture, but I still count the tour a great success.

Here I am this past weekend in Chicago. Thanks to spinning, I feel like I look lot a lot better (and I flat-out feel a lot better!) though I’m trying not to let the scale dictate my emotions.

Here’s a full-body shot. Not that different from this past summer, but I’ve shed a lot of mental weight too!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 8:34 pm and is filed under looks like life, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.