shedding the weight of the world

I always feel bad bringing up this subject, because I realize how many people out there struggle with weight far beyond anything I can understand. I've been blessed with my father's metabolism and the weird talent to forget to eat, so take all I say with a grain of salt and the understanding that I don't hold weight against anyone. I just want to be able to talk about it from my perspective.

Over the winter I picked up about 5lbs on top of the 3-4 I already had above my "really, really fit" weight level of 125. At first, I just blamed it on eating out too much, not biking, and generally being lazy. Then, one day in May (after biking to work and being relatively back into shape post-winter), I realized I was back up over my typical high school weight. By no means did I think I needed to lose weight at that point, but I was simply surprised. I haven't been over that since I went off to college, and I started to think that the mid-twenties metabolism shift had hit me. But then, a week ago, someone at work suddenly asked me if I'd lost weight. I hadn't checked in a month and a half, so I chalked it up to more biking and my cycling interest in food (I was forgetting to eat more often in July than I had for the previous few months). I checked the scale two days ago and sure enough, I've dropped 7lbs in the six weeks since I checked the scale last.

Thing is, it's not all the eating and the biking. Well, it is, but I wouldn't have lost the weight had my emotions not shifted. I'm starting to think that the eating shift happened when I no longer needed something to stabilize my emotional state. Sometime around the end of June, I pulled out of my dark cloud, then over the last few weeks I've been pro-actively grabbing my life and making steps towards where I want to be. I'm scared shitless a lot of the time because of the steps I'm taking, so my nerves probably help keep me disinterested in food, but it's a good nervous that in some ways has been propelling me. I'm happy, and thus crave less fat and want to get out and exercise more. I'm in awe of what my body does and how I react to these extremely simple, yet frustratingly intertwined processes.

I can't help but be grateful that my mood is generally not in a co-dependent cause/effect relationship with food. What I mean by that is that I can pull out of a bad emotional situation without having to fix the food problem, yet the food problem comes along for the ride and fixes itself. I doubt that without my mood lifting, I would have been motivated enough to drop the weight (which, I repeat, I didn't need to or feel pressured to at all). I also wonder whether losing the weight would have lifted my mood as a by-product, or whether it would have stayed right where it was. "What if's" for miles won't help, but hopefully in the next few weeks I'll start to be able to open up about what's going on, why I'm suddenly happy to the point that my health has improved, and what I'm looking forward to.

Dare I say it... I might have a plan?