Week 76: up 1 pound (-61.0 pounds total!)
Hello everyone! So good to see your lovely faces. Kisses, smooches and hugs to you all…it’s a Monday morning lovefest! Let’s start this week off right.
HMD’ers, I need to beg a moment of your time for some brutal honesty. Got your coffee? Ready? Here goes. This stuff that I’m doing, all this “changing my life” and “trying to become healthy” and “attempting to love myself” and “staying away from margaritas”, all this stuff is HARD! Her Hotness is doing some hard stuff up in this piece! Look at today’s results. Seems pretty crappy, right? Never a good thing to go up, right? Well, a wise
television theme song once said that you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and then you have the facts of life. Here are the facts of my life as I see ‘em: I’m only human. (I think. Freakish flexibility aside, I’m pretty sure I’m not descended from aliens. I’m, like, 80% totally sure.) I have strengths (again, freakish flexibility) and I have weaknesses (again, those blasted margaritas!). Sometimes I will rock your world. (Karaoke, anyone?) Sometimes I will not. (Drunken karaoke, anyone?) With me you must take the good (60 pounds lost, woo hoo!), you must take the bad (60 pounds lost…like 3 freaking months ago!), you must take them both. I must take them both. This journey is an absolute must, for just as the show that spawned that wise theme song once enjoyed the company of one George Clooney, so too shall I!!! (George, didya read the part about the freakish flexibility? Didya?!?)
I tell you all this because I have been putting myself through the ringer lately, and I’ve been keeping it from you. I have fibbed about my weigh-ins once or twice these past few months. I have been punishing myself with must do’s and should do’s and have to do’s…I’ve become a musterbator. I don’t want to be a musterbator! No more musterbating for me! Musterbation weighs too heavy on one’s soul and sucks the joy out of one’s life. (Except for the fact that it is totally fun to say musterbation!)
I wanted to come clean in the off chance that a few of you were actually reading this as an inspirational weight loss journal and not just using it as an excuse to see Hot Pics of Gerard Butler. Speaking of:

You’re welcome.
Anyhoo, now that I have that off my chest, now that Talent and Ambition are unburdened and free, I want to let you know that today is Good Times Monday! Wooo hooooo!!! Things have been too heavy lately, and I ain’t heavy, I’m Her Hotness! I’ve been trying too hard to be perfect for you kids, perfect for the rest of the world, perfect for myself. But I’ve realized that perfection is for Nadia Comeneci, not me. I don’t need to be perfect. I just need to be better. Make better choices, think better thoughts…this should be fun. I want this to be fun! Hard work, yes, but not drudgery. Not misery. Not bleh bleh with an extra helping of bleh. Kids, I am an improv comedian at heart. I do things best when I approach them with a sense of play. Play! Just that word, how much joy, how much fun immediately springs to mind! THIS is what I want to recapture, this is what I want to bring back, this is what I intend to bring to my workouts, to my writing, to my everyday existence…the sense of adventure, the wide open space that is my future, the thrill of the unknown me that is coming closer, ever closer, to the surface. The bouyancy and lightness of play, even talking about it here takes the pressure off, and when the pressure comes off the weight comes off, literally AND figuratively. Let’s have some FUN ya’ll!! Who’s with me?! Who’s ready for some good times, good times?
Another wise television theme song once said that if we’re lucky we got ‘em - good times. Well hell, luck - I’m you’re lady tonight, cause we do indeed got ‘em - GOOD TIMES, GOOD TIMES! Now go and have yourselves one kickass good week! I will!
Hot Manspiration of the Week: Kids, last week America changed and this week the
change train hits Hot Man Diet at full speed. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for an historic hit of Hotness. Gracing these pages for the first time ever - a Hot Womanspiration of the Week!!! HMD’ers, I now have an idol (besides Nadia Comeneci). I now have someone that I want to be like when I grow up. Tina Fey, if I could Single White Female my way into your life I totally would because I think everything you do is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! Loved you on SNL. (The show’s first female head writer, you go girl!) Loved Mean Girls. (LiLo owes any credibility she has as an actress to you.) Love, love, love, can’t say love enough times to accurately convey how much I LOVE 30 Rock!! Your Sarah Palin rocked my world, hell, it rocked everyone’s world! And I’ve just spent a lovely afternoon enjoying Baby Mama, which was funnier than I expected and which featured the wonderfully Hot and woefully overlooked Greg Kinnear. Greg, please do forgive me! We shall meet again on these pages, you and I…
seemed permanently fixed and hoping above all hope that Hope would prevail. Prevail it did, and whatsoever will come of his actual term(s) in office, whatever President-Elect Barack Obama is able or unable to implement, this much we know is true: Yes. We. CAN!
soon-to-be Commander in Hotness and I’m going to EMBRACE CHANGE. I’m going to open my arms, my eyes, my mind, my heart…I’m going to dig my heels in, roll up my sleeves, get my hands all nice and dirty with WORK…I’m going to do it, I must do it, I WANT to do it, I await with breathless anticipation the results of my doing it…the time for change has come! The time for change is here! This is when I change! Yes I can! Yes I must! Yes I will!
Talented up the ying yang. Successful as all get out. Hot as a mo fo, yo. And they’re working it, kids, these boys are working their tails off, striving, thriving, improving, working it! How dare I accuse them of Manspiration-lessness?! Flog me, peeps! I deserve it. 
This last one is a request BY ME and is dedicated TO ME. Actually, it is my way of extending an olive branch to Major League Baseball. I treated baseball horribly this year. I did not give it the love it deserved, because I could not look past the Keystone Cops-esque performance of my once glorious Yankees to see that 2008 was a helluva good time. The Tampa Bay Rays took the world by storm. (Special Note from Her Hotness - look up Tampa Bay’s Evan Longoria for a nice spot o’ Manjoyment.) The Dodgers finally became the contenders they always shoulda been. Chicago sent two teams to the playoffs, and Boston did NOT make it to the World Series. Good times! In the end the Phillies, the team that should be mine according to childhood geography, won it all for the first time since 1980. And a Hot Man named Cole Hamels would lead them there…
Ah, Cole Hamels. Flog me, I deserve it! I deserve it for letting a season of the only pro sport I follow pass me by like so much tumbleweed. While I was off not watching baseball, you were racking up some serious stats. And in the post-season, man you were just on fire - 4-0 with a 1.80 ERA! What the?! No wonder, no wonder indeed that you were named World Series and NLCS MVP! Cole Hamels, how, HOW could I be mad at baseball when it was overflowing with Manspiration of your ilk?! Flog me, I deserve it. And congratulations, you deserve it. (Extra points for being limber enough to do this…makes a woman think some baaaad thoughts, ya know…) 
to run. You heard me. Run. And my legs, my legs that desperately needed a good shave, my legs became beautiful to me because they were strong. My thighs, my thighs that I have been battling since the onslaught of puberty, my thighs became beautiful to me because they were strong. My arms, my arms that have been so neglected and ignored for most of my life, my arms became beautiful to me because they were strong. And my heart, my heart that was pumping, thumping, beating fast and steady in my chest as I ran, my heart that was so fragile for so long until I changed everything so that it might have a chance to survive AND thrive, my heart that has been through so much but is ready for so much more, my heart became beautiful to me because it was STRONG. And then it occurred to me - forgetting all of the outside worries, letting go of all of society’s expectations, how do I really, really feel about myself when I’m all alone, when there’s no one to judge but me, and when all there is to judge is the purest, clearest, most heartfelt version of Leah that can be gifted to the world? How do I feel then? Is it too hard? Too demanding? Too overwhelming? No. No. Not at all. Thank god, not at all. It is simply thus:
this week, kids. The weirdest Hot Men have been popping in and out of my thoughts, and in honor of my two pounds lost I bring you two of the Hottest. First up we’ve got Josh Brolin. He hosted SNL this week, though Sarah Palin stole ALL of his thunder. (My vote for best SNL cameo actually goes to Mark Wahlbeg, a previous HMD HM of the W…if you have not seen the sublimely brilliant