If there is one thing that unites pretty much all of my friends, it’s that they all love to eat. Some have smaller appetites than the others, but they all enjoy eating food and see eating as a pleasure in life, not something they do simply to survive. One of my oldest friends from middle school has always been a stick, and she’s always had the largest appetite. She’s also known for eating slower than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, and after you are done eating, she has just barely scraped the surface of her dish, and then slowly will inch her way to your leftovers on your plate. We were on the phone tonight, and she said that in the last two years, she’s realized her metabolism is finally slowing down, and she cannot eat as much as she used to. She’s managed to surpass me in weight even though she is two inches shorter than me, and the bridesmaid dress she wore to my wedding stopped fitting a month after the wedding. She asked me for advice on how to lose weight and what I did to lose weight four years ago.

This is part of getting older — realizing that you can’t do all the things you wanted to do and eat all the things you want to eat without consequence. It means recognizing that your body is changing and that you need to slowly adjust what you are doing to it to treat it right, otherwise it will come back and be very mean to you.