So I'll explain my Friday comment about getting smarter now. Although some of you who know me may have already figured it out by the photo of the car driving away! I've said it before, and I guess I'll say it again, the farther I drive from my house, the smarter I feel--especially when I am in a cute rental car headed for a weekend away alone in Santa Cruz! Yahoo! (Thanks to my awesome husband who truly believes that Mother's Day means a break from being a mom!)
Although I have to say that I had two completely different reactions from people when they heard that I was going away. One of the moms who I talk to when I pick up JJ from school said, "You're going away again?" when I told them that J.R. would be joining them for girl talk on Friday. And I have to admit that her comment made me feel a little guilty about it. Silly, I know. But then the other reaction came from our neighbor who was driving me to pick up the rental car. Now, mind you, he is (obviously!) a man and somewhere in his 70's. As we were driving down the hill, he said, "Now tell me again where you are going?" So I told him, and the next thing I know, he's got his hand up towards me, waiting for me to high-five him back! Well, let me say, that his reaction made me feel a whole lot better about the whole thing! Again, silly, I know. But, thanks, Bob!
But what I love about driving down to Santa Cruz is that I get over 3 hours of uninterrupted listening to National Public Radio, and I usually end up feeling pretty dang smart with all the new stuff I learn about! Gotta love Science Fridays for giving you lots of info about things that you ordinarily wouldn't know too much about. Like fat.
Now I know that most of us probably feel like we know too much about fat since we probably encounter it every day--whether it is on our bodies or in a bottle in our cupboard or a cube on our counters! But let me share some good news for those of us who think that liposuction would solve our problems but unfortunately our pocketbooks (and the reality of our lives!) doesn't really allow for that. It seems that women who get liposuction and lose fat regain it within in a year, but usually in a different place! So if you take it out of your thighs, within a year, you will most likely have it back, but probably around your belly--which other studies are showing is the most dangerous place to have it. It's like our body is trying to right itself again and get that fat back in there somewhere.

The interesting (or possibly sad) thing is that the women in the lipo study were divided in half, with half getting the surgery and the other half not. When the study was done, the women who had not gotten the lipo were given the opportunity to have it anyway. And even though the results showed that the fat came back, about half of the women still opted for the lipo. Now as a woman who is sitting here writing this in her pj's and no makeup on, I am shocked. Well, maybe shocked is the wrong word. It makes me feel sad that women still feel that looking a certain way is going to change the way they--and the world--feel about themselves. And I don't mean this in a judgmental way at all. I just mean it more as a comment on our culture these days. That's the one thing that I love when I come to Santa Cruz. You see all kinds of people, wearing all kinds of things. And I can tell you that there are a lot of women down here wearing bikinis who could care less about what the world thinks about them! And I am always so happy when I see them! It almost makes me want to bust out a bikini when I'm down here too! Almost.