Her hair bears silent witness to the passing of time

When I was 14 years old, over a period of three months, I miraculously and unexpectedly lost 30 pounds (amounting to 20% of my total girth at the time). Conveniently, those same three months happened to be the summer break between my last year of middle school and first year of high school, meaning that it was surprisingly easy to forever discard my former, "Nerdy Marshmallow Puff of my Graduating Class" self. It was a dramatic enough physical change that, six months into high school, more than one of my middle school teachers failed to recognize me on sight.

To my recollection, I did absolutely nothing to lose the weight--which is why I call it miraculous, although in this case "miracle" is undoubtedly just a code word for "puberty." My eating and lifestyle habits were as chicken-finger and couch-filled as ever that transitional summer.

Ironically enough, it was this sudden, unsolicited gift from the Gods Who Apparently Cared About My Social Life that inspired me to start exercising and eating healthy. While there was no clear indication that my weight loss was correlated to such things, after having lost the weight, I became unreasonably certain that I would gain it back if I didn't give my health habits a makeover. So when I started hitting the ellipticals and salad bars a few months later, it was not, like most people, in pursuit of a particular goal, but more an attempt to purchase insurance on this suspicious, unearned charity I'd received.

Now that I've spent almost a decade in my new body, I don't often think about the random, paradoxical experience that led me to my current health-conscious habits. I assume, like most people, that eating right and staying active result in weight management--not the other way around. I consider near-daily exercise the norm and point to it as the reason that, to this day, I've kept Marshmallow Me at bay.

On rare occasion, however, it strikes me how improbable it actually is that, thus far in my relatively short life, the only time that Nature has conspired to surprise me resulted in a Publishers-Clearing-House, "You're-A-Wizard-Harry" style surprise. Something unexpected happened to my body that inspired me to enact healthier habits, and it was good news. Granted, puberty-induced transformations are pretty common and nothing to get too excited about. But then again, I have friends who, in their own relatively short lives, can also point to occasions where nature has conspired to change their lives, and more often the "surprise" is cancer, juvenile diabetes, or congenital heart defects.

This is just to say: I'm sometimes surprised by just how many reasons I have to feel blessed.