Which bemuses me. See, I’ve been heroically sized for most of my childhood and all of my adult life. I won’t get into the complicated reasons behind all that, but I’ve been dealing with excess weight for a good fifty years or so.

Until last year, which had a number of medical things happen. For one, I officially entered menopause in April. With most women, that means that their estrogen level drops precipitously and they start putting on weight. With me, it meant that my cysted-up malfunctioning ovaries finally shut down and stopped dumping estrogen into my system at random times, also stopping the random water retention that would occur no matter what part of my cycle I was at. As I wasn’t constantly bloating up anymore, I slowly dropped from 334 pounds to 321 pounds.

Then I got cancer. The surgery required to remove it left me with a relatively torn up mouth for months. Biting into anything tough or chewy was challenging due to my numb lower lip so I switched out my breakfast bagel for oatmeal. Anything crisp or sharp like chips threatened to damage the healing gumline so those got deleted from my diet as well. My surgeon said no working out for six weeks minimum, so I switched over from 15 minutes of walking a day to 30 minutes.

And I lost more weight. Mind you, I’m sure that the increased exercise and ditching the chips helped with that. But I went from my average breakfast of a Lender’s onion bagel with regular cream cheese and a serving of Frito’s chili cheese corn chips (488 calories) to three bags of Quaker Oats instant oatmeal, a splash of heavy cream, and two heaping spoons of brown sugar (454 calories). Calorie-wise, that’s not much of a change. My calorie intake for lunch and dinner remained pretty much the same, and may have even increased a bit.

Nevertheless, I continued to lose weight. At my 01/24 oncologist’s appointment I officially weighed 301.4 pounds (with clothes and shoes on—I was 299.6 that morning naked). As of this morning, I weigh 289.6 pounds.

According to medical science this weight loss doesn’t make sense. I haven’t made that many changes to my eating habits, and I’ve been walking every day for years. Hell, this last weekend I was eating fast food and store-bought pizza like it was going out of style because Lyndon and I both had con crud and I was too sick to cook. And I still lost weight.

But. My paternal grandmother, who also had Hashimoto’s and I suspect had PCOS as well, was a large woman for much of her life until she hit her fifties. Suddenly she lost all her excess weight. She said it was due to a diet, but I think what really happened was that she went into menopause and stopped getting hit with estrogen storms. Not having to deal with constant bouts of inflammation, her body shed the excess weight and settled at what should have been her normal baseline. That seems to be what’s happening with me.

Which … is nice? I mean, I’ve been going shopping in my closet and finding all kinds of clothes that I haven’t been able to wear for years because I’d outgrown them or they were bought on the dream of, “Well, someday…” I had to throw out a bunch of my capris because they were simply too big and baggy, and I’m getting to the point where I need to go through my t-shirts and consider which ones to save for a t-shirt quilt because they’re too big. When I step out of the shower I can see the actual outline of my shoulders and upper arms, and my collarbones are slowly emerging. When I’m in bed I can feel my xiphoid process (the lower tip of the sternum) and the curve of my ribs.

And yes, I have sagging skin. I’ve got an increasingly impressive set of batwings, and pretty much everything on my torso is drooping. By the end of this I’m going to need a tummy tuck at minimum, and a tummy tuck, butt/breast/thigh lift, and brachioplasty at maximum. But my neck skin seems to be tightening up (I’m using Vaseline on my lymph node removal scar every day so maybe that’s helping) and my calves look fabulous.

So, yeah, I’m getting smaller. It’ll be interesting to see if there are any changes in my vitals at my physical in April, especially since I may well be in the 270s by then.