I’m falling in love with my husband all over again, ever since he gained 30 pounds.

     When I met my husband 14 years ago, he was a stringy 140, 5 foot 8, with a 28-inch waist. He was hanging out at a mutual friend’s apartment, and when I walked in, he was just pulling a frozen Totino’s pizza out of the oven.

     He said, “Got a hankering for some pizza?”

     I thought, What a corn pone. His cowboy hat looked heavier than he was. Yet we hit it off immediately. Maybe it was the Brut aftershave, or maybe it was the joke he told about Anwar Sadat (What song did they play at the funeral? “I Love a Parade!”) but by the end of the night, I was in love with a hay seed.

     Oh, and I always have a hankering for pizza … and pie … and chips … and just about anything anyone’s ever offering as long as it’s loaded with sugar and fat. When I met Jim, I was reading a book called When Food is Love and had just worn out my second Target treadmill. My refrigerator contained three different kinds of romaine lettuce, and my freezer three different kinds of “low-fat” ice cream. Jim’s size 28 jeans were the tiniest pants that have ever spent time on my bedroom floor. We were married within a year of that first night.

     Since then, we have been partners is many things. We have bought and sold houses together. We ran a business together. We are raising a child. We are both writers, lovers of 80s music, and we both ululated like dying pole-cats the day Bush got re-elected.

     But in my struggle against hip chowder, in my endless quest for the one pair of jeans that make me look like I did when I was 16 ½, in my love/hate relationship with every morsel of chocolate I have ever eaten, I have always been a one-woman army.

     I have been alone in owning the same exact pair of pants in four different sizes. I have been alone in knowing exactly how many calories are in almost any traditional American meal or snack, and even a rough estimate on saturated fats. I am the only person in my house who eats her cereal with Sweet ’n Low and skim milk. (Add a handful of raisins, and Jim likes to call that little concoction the bowl full of sorrow.)

     Until now.

     Times have changed. Years have passed. Jim has recently quit smoking, and as a reward for his sacrifice and hard work, the metabolism fairy swooped down and zapped my beloved right in the thyroid.

     Don’t get me wrong; he still looks fantastic. In fact, his grey smoker’s pallor has been replaced by gorgeous, healthy, tan skin. His shoulders are bigger from working out, and he’s actually acquired what can only be described as … a normal-sized ass.

     But his body has changed, and after half a lifetime of carefree eating, the boy feels strange.

     Here’s the comparative breakdown:

    1995: Jim 140 pounds soaking wet and holding a kitten.
 Me: 160-ish.

     1996: Jim 140 pounds … 15 minutes after eating a Whopper with cheese and onion rings. Don’t forget the large coke.
 Me: 170-ish naked and 20 miles from the nearest Burger King.

     1999: Jim 140 pounds while still wearing his 28/34 Levi 501s and his Nike’s.
 Me: 188-ish, emphasis on ish. After way too many snack-breaks between classes, I graduated college summa cum FATTY.

     2001: Jim 141 pounds wearing a 3-pound leather jacket.
 Me: 160 pounds after 5 months on those Metabo-life pills, which were later found to cause heart disease in lab rats.

     2002: Jim 146 pounds and considering (gasp) trying on some size 29s.
 Me: 155 and holding on for dear life.

     2004: Jim 151 pounds: 28/34s of yesteryear now lanquishing in a Goodwill bin somewhere, waiting for an anorexic basketball player to take them home. Me: 162, then 164, then 154, then 166. Somebody please either shoot me or sew my jaw shut.

     2007: Jim 163 pounds. Picture a white guy standing on a scale, almost naked, and screaming, “Honey, my socks weigh 20 pounds!”
 Me: 164 with my socks on.

     2008: Me: 167, Jim … 167!

     Yes, grasshopper, the student has become … the student with an under-enthusiastic study-buddy.

     And I am in love all over again. At last, Jim knows what it means to buy a pair of pants not because you don’t already have 25 pair in your closet, but because 24 of them don’t fit anymore. At last, he understands why I always have the waiter serve the salad dressing on the side.

     So, now, we’re work-out partners. We bought a 90-day boot-camp-style workout program on DVD called P90X, which gives new meaning to the phrase “getting medieval on your ass” and was clearly choreographed by Nazi war criminals.

     The X in P90X is for the X-treme amount of pain you will inevitably feel in all the expected places, plus I feel a strange bruised sensation in the skin on my ribs. How does that happen? What muscles did I offend to cause that?

    Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because my new work-out buddy, this new man in my life who finally has to give a shit that there are something like 500 calories in a small mocha latte, he’s feeling the pain, right along with me.

     Of late, my love has been heard saying things like, “We need to get one of those George Foreman grills,” and “Honey, do these Dockers make me look fat?”

     Couldn’t you just pinch his pudgy little cheeks?  

     He even went to the grocery store the other day for the expressed purpose of acquiring “healthy food.” Know what he came back with? Ingredients to make tater-tot hot-dish, Stove-Top stuffing, and smoked cheddar cheese. How cute is that? I have so much to teach him about the world of weight obsession.

     Under my care, my little pot-bellied protégé will be an insecure ball of useless diet trivia in no time. He’ll understand that the best way to reward yourself after a workout is with half a box of “Snackwells” and that no matter how much weight you lose, tomorrow is always there for you, waiting for you to gain it back.

     Now, that’s the kind of love that lasts a lifetime.

     Got a hankering for some carrots sticks and low-fat dill dip?