I’ve spent years looking at women’s fitness magazines and I’d have to say my overall feeling reading them is less inspiration and more exhaustion. It seems like the overall message is that you are not okay the way you are, so get crackin’! Lose seven pounds in a week, banish wrinkles, tighten your skin, thrill him in bed (never any consideration for female readers who are not heterosexual), fix your diet, fix your fitness routine, fix, fix fix, because clearly you are broken, girlfriend.

My friend Kathy is a fairy dogmother—at least that’s how I think of her. For over five years now she, and her dog Max, have played foster parents to six dogs coming to her from Chicago Animal Care and Control through New Leash on Life Chicago. These are dogs that have either been surrendered by their owners or taken in as strays and not picked up. Kathy and Max welcome these dogs into their home and give them the love and care they need to prepare them for permanent homes.

When I was growing up I based my idea of a vacation on what the Brady Bunch did. I knew instinctively that my dad’s version of a vacation-- load up the station wagon with sleeping bags, clothes, cooler full of leftovers, and hit the expressway at 4am (avoiding rush hour) to drive out of the city to...well... to drive, and drive--was seriously flawed. No, the Brady Way must be The Way. You would fly somewhere. You went with the people you really loved, like Kitty Carryall or your favorite housekeeper.

This past Sunday was my first Bike the Drive. After sleeping fitfully and waking every hour or so worrying I'd miss my 4:30am alarm, I got up in the dark, downed a smoothie I made the night before, bought a fresh water bottle from the bleary-eyed clerk at the all-night Kwik Mart near my house, and hit the trail downtown.

Yesterday, my mother drove down to the city from the senior center … switched places with me for the last time, and I drove her back up to Northbrook where we sold her car. We sold her car because she cannot afford the payments any more, and I feared if she put it off any longer they would repossess it and she would still be stuck with a financial burden. And she has enough of those already. More than I can manage. In this country people worry a lot about being good parents; do we worry as much about being good daughters and sons?

My dad once bragged about how he lost ten pounds on “the grapefruit diet.” Basically, this diet consisted of eating a grapefruit for two out of three meals a day. No real surprise he lost weight, also since he was biking forty miles to and from work a few times a week. But it’s easier to believe it’s just one thing that will make everything right.

I won’t go on comparing the two sports—George Carlin did it far, far better than I, but thanks to a Psychology Today article I read a while back, I’m realizing that when it comes to goal-setting, I’ve been playing baseball on a football field and wondering why I’m not making a touchdown.

My earliest memory of Mom’s vegetable cooking involved cans of peas and carrots, cooked to within an inch of their lives so that they both turned a grey-green hue and the only way to tell the difference between them was that the peas were the round ones, the carrots blunt-edged cubes.

I know a thing or two about quitting. I quit ballet after realizing you didn’t get to wear tutus right off the bat, nor was it—apparently—okay to walk around on your toes in ballet flats, encouraging your other seven-year-old classmates to join you.

I’m halfway through a Fuji apple turkey salad at Panera Bread when he calls and dumps me. “Bad timing,” he says. He quotes a Wilco song I don’t know and says goodbye. I cry most of the walk to the bike shop and wonder how I didn’t see it coming.

So 42 days ago was my 42nd birthday, and that morning I was at the gym on the elliptical watching Last Holiday with Queen Latifah in closed-captions on the little shaky TV screen, and thinking that there is a hell of a lot of pressure to have an epiphany on your birthday.

I think Dad hoped I would love biking as much as he did, but I was an overweight teenager who had just changed schools since my parents couldn’t afford private school anymore. I was lonely, miserable, and angry about the divorce, and I did not want to “Go for a ride.” Not for twenty years.

Remember when you first got email? How excited you were to check it, how excited you were to get email? I rarely approach checking my email with that kind of enthusiasm any more. In fact, often times I log in and see how many I have and feel some combination of exhaustion, resentment and responsibility…

So here is my confession: during the past semester, after teaching two four-hour classes almost back-to-back, I’d come home mentally spent and turn on America’s Next Top Model.

We had some decadent good times this weekend, but it’s over. When I bought that quart of you, I lied to us both.

In my mid-thirties I realized I needed to change my relationship with food, for good.