Candice

Candice (aka Bookish Penguin) is a New York City native living in New Jersey who started a personal blog so she could explore the aspects of life she finds most interesting: love, self-esteem, gender issues, Harry Potter, cooking and baking, making lists, and anything else she could read about in a book.

Candice saw her first nutritionist in elementary school, had to take extra gym classes in middle school with the other “heavy” kids, and had people write “butterball” on her locker in high school.  In 2004, after struggling with a lifetime of being fat, Candice underwent Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery and, a year and a half later, had corrective plastic surgery to remove excess skin following her weight loss of over a hundred pounds.  As is the norm, though, many of those pounds crept back on and Candice was left trying to understand what didn’t work and why.  This led to research and exploration not only of the surgery’s results, but of the concept of weight loss and prescribed “right” sizes, how one achieves a healthy relationship with food, and what it takes for someone to accept who she is.

A self-described nerd, Candice is an academic at heart and by trade.  By day (and also often by night), she teaches composition and supervises a college tutoring center.  Prior to her work as an academic, she worked in Human Resources, which allowed her to encounter a vast array of health issues and struggles with the insurance industry.  She earned her B.A. in creative writing from NYU, her M.A. in English from Rutgers University, and is currently pursuing her doctorate in education at Columbia University, Teachers College.  She is happily married and she and her husband are expecting their first child in May 2010.

You can read her blog at Bookish Penguin and follow her on Twitter.