This is me holding a pound of fat. Well, a fat replica actually. I’ve seen this visual before, but actually wrapping my phalanges around this bad boy made me ecstatic that I’m not carrying 85 of these fat clomps on my body anymore.

It also raises questions. For example, where did I hide all that fat? True, I owned a lot of black and flowy dresses–and several flowy black dresses–but still. I may not have been as clever as I thought. I think people had to notice.

Here’s the next question that hits me: how the heck did I carry it all around? When my children were young, just lugging around 20 pounds of baby made my back and knees hurt. But 85? Come to think of it, I think my back and knees did hurt, especially when I decided to try and exercise it off and took all those pounds for a jog. Good thinking. That could not have been easy on my joints. I’ve since learned that exercising it off is extremely difficult. In fact, you would have to burn 3,500 calories to burn one pound of fat. That’s a lot. Change really needs to begin with what’s going in your mouth–and in between your ears–with exercise as the back-up crew for maintenance.

Next question. By carrying all that extra fat, did I build muscle? I mean, when I go to Power and lift weights for an hour, I can see my biceps pop. Doesn’t it follow that just the act of carrying the fat builds muscle? All over my body?!

Welcome to my brain. I still don’t have an answer for that one.

And finally, you’ve heard that one pound of muscle weighs more than one pound of fat. How can that be? Isn’t one pound of anything and one pound of another thing still one pound? This last one warranted extra research so you probably know what I did next. I Googled it. Here’s the consensus. A pound equals a pound. The difference is muscle takes up less room. Check this out.

Looks like sushi, right? This explains why my shorts from last summer feel a little tighter this year around the thighs even though my weight is the same. Armed with this visual, and the idea that I like pink better than yellow in this diagram, I’m going to focus on getting that muscle in-house and finding another location (not on my body) for that fat.

One final thought. Next time somebody says, “I only lost a pound,” send them this. It really is an accomplishment.