The Weight-loss Diaries (17 page)

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

to do with getting to the gym more often or getting my arms into a shape where I might dare to wear something sleeveless. They didn’t have anything to do with running 26.2 miles in one day.

Trip to New Orleans to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Again I did the extra-lunch-in-the-office-fridge routine, planning for myself to screw up. I consumed far too many beignets and praline samples, but I at least stuck to my exercise routine, running outside in the brutal, swampy heat. I had to laugh when, running by Lake Pontchartrain, a guy came up to me as I stopped for water and said: “You must be from Washington or New York or somewhere like that.”

I looked down to see if I was wearing a
Washingtonian
T-shirt or some other dead giveaway. Nope. Just a faded one from the San Diego Zoo.

“Only some Type A type from New York or Washington would be out

running during Jazz Fest,” he told me.

Long pause while I tried desperately to think of something clever to say and failed miserably. So I just smiled, put my headphones back on, and ran off, laughing to myself at how wrong an impression one can get from meeting someone for five seconds. If I saw him again—and you seemed to see the same people again and again at Jazz Fest—I’d be “the crazy runner girl.”

As if trying on the description, I tried to add a couple of sprints on the way home but had to stop and walk.

While I was away, Mary checked out the Galloway group.

“I haven’t been running nearly as much as you, and I was fine,” Mary said.

“Abby was, too.” Abby is the other friend Mary’s managed to talk into this.

I don’t know why I didn’t tell her then that the idea of my doing such a thing was ludicrous. Instead I told her I wouldn’t be able to get out to Virginia to train. I don’t have a car, and the Metro doesn’t run that early.

“You can stay at my house on Fridays,” she said. There went my last excuse. Why not? I figured. I’d join the group to ramp up my mileage—it would at least guarantee I got in a good workout every Saturday. When the mileage got to be too much, I’d stop. Besides, maybe knowing that I’d have to get up and run in the morning would keep me from bingeing—and if I did binge, maybe the running would help keep the weight off.

My twenty-fourth birthday—and my first day of marathon training. Our group had its share of diehards and its share of first-timers, some of whom looked no more athletic than I felt. We ran five miles.

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After months of staring at flashing red numbers on a treadmill, running on the Mount Vernon trail with a group of people to distract me was easy. I was on such a high that when the Metro broke down in Rosslyn on the way home, I ran the three miles to my apartment. If you’d told me last year that I’d wake up at 6:00 a.m. and run eight miles on my birthday, I would have wondered what you were smoking and where I could get some.

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Month 6 (June)

This morning I practically skipped to work, still on a high from last night’s boxing class, where I realized my body felt so much lighter when we were skipping around. (I still hate the instructor for bringing up my weight the second day of class, but I refuse to quit the class because I refuse to let him win.) When we were warming up, bouncing from side to side, it seemed to take so little effort to move. It was like when you expect a door to be really heavy, so you throw yourself against it, but instead it’s so light it flies open so fast you nearly fall over. I kept overestimating how much energy I needed to jump and ending up much farther across the room than I intended.

I loved it. It made me want to run for miles and do cartwheels. If I knew how to do cartwheels.

Of course the gee-isn’t-life-swell feeling couldn’t last.

Lunch with one of those “friends” Bridget Jones would call a “jellyfisher.”

The sort who say something that sounds perfectly innocent, maybe even complimentary, until you stop and consider it.

She’s one of those friend types who seem much more difficult to jetti-son completely than to make polite conversation with (“Ooh!” Insert squeal here. “Haven’t seen you in
soooo
long!”) at various work events and to have lunch with about once every five months (after multiple reschedules), as we did today. She knows about the
Shape
project—she’s one of those people who always seems to know more about my career than I do—and after we ordered, she looked at me critically.

She didn’t say anything. Then, as if to herself: “Yeah, I can tell you’ve lost a little bit of weight.”

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

I’m not sure if it’s the way she said “little bit”—when I know it’s more than thirty pounds—or the tone or what. But immediately I felt like fat girl squeezed into too-small size 14 black pants. Never mind that these are the same ones that this morning looked like they might be a bit too loose.

I didn’t manage to leave over any portion of my plain grilled chicken and nearly dry noodles, the way I usually try to. I sat there and raged and ate and envied her for eating peanut noodles as she talked about the fact that she really should get her (size 8) self to the gym every once in a while.

Life is not fair.

I left lunch convinced I was hungry, though I had eaten more than usual.

About 3:00 p.m., sitting in the Borders café—my office away from the office—I felt the urge to binge. I once read that when your diet motivation is flagging, you should try on clothes. So I headed down the street to the Gap.

As soon as I reached the dressing room, it occurred to me that this was yet another one of those diet things that sounds good in theory but—depending on one’s mind-set—could be complete crap in practice. What kind of motivation could I possibly get from looking at myself in clothes that all seem to be different sizes despite having the same number on the tag? (Size 14s in Gap classic jeans seem as small as a 10 in the rest of their clothes, but size 14s in reverse fit are just fine.) Am I supposed to get the shiny, happy “I want to stay this size” feeling or the self-loathing I seem to specialize in—the “God, I’m still so fat” variety?

I could fit into a couple of 12s, but a 14 still seemed to be my size. Which was frustrating because several years ago, when I weighed only six pounds less than I do now, I could get into 10s. Which does not make sense, as I’m working out more now than I did then—more muscle—so shouldn’t I be smaller?

Post-Gap I was hungrier than ever. Yogurt, I realized, was not going to cut it. But I couldn’t decide whether in that danger moment it was worse to eat my yogurt and feel cranky or to brave eating something else and risk a subsequent tidal wave of wants. I wanted a piece of this apple crumb cake I used to eat all the time in my prediet days, but I wasn’t sure I was ready.

My new kick—courtesy of Nancy—is to start eating foods I desperately want. She says if I crave a food, that means it has power over me, and I need to eat it more often. Every day, if that’s what it takes.

I started with peanut butter, which on the scale of things I crave is maybe a four or so, as opposed to the, say, seven or eight of apple crumb cake. I’ve eaten peanut butter nearly every day for the past two weeks. Two table-

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spoons—a proper serving—on rice cakes. These regular indulgences are supposed to keep me from dipping the spoon (or my fingers) in the peanut butter jar at 11:00 p.m., because I already know I’m going to have some for breakfast or lunch the next day.

It works—sort of.

If I’m fine and happy and not too stressed when I’m having my peanut butter, I eat it and feel satisfied and maybe a little smug that I’ve managed to incorporate such a thing into my diet. But if I’m feeling at all angsty, I don’t feel any fuller or more satisfied from the peanut butter than I do from my usual (and by now nauseating) two Boca Burgers on two pieces of whole-grain bread with lettuce leaves—and I
do
want to stick my fingers in the jar.

I also start considering what else I can eat.

But back to this afternoon. I lingered around the bakery like I was hoping to accidentally-on-purpose run into someone I have a crush on. Finally I bought the cake, took it to my office, and stared at it. Looked at the bit of grease from it that had seeped onto the napkin. Turned it around on the napkin on my desk. Thought I could practically taste it and wondered if that might be enough. Finally took one bite. Paused. Waited for the urge to eat the whole thing in three bites. It was there. Dare I take another bite? But could I even throw this out if I wanted to?

I tried another bite. Does it even taste
that
good? I considered. Maybe I should have gone for something else. Pause. Can’t go down that road of options—that’s the road of wanting everything.

Another bite. Chewed. Paused. Waited for fear. Another bite. And

another. The last time I ate anything that slowly was when I had to make four bites last for at least twenty minutes or so, and not even because I was testing out the whole theory that you should eat slowly because your stomach takes twenty minutes to let you know it’s full. That time I’d looked up at a restaurant and realized I’d gobbled down my food before anyone else at the table had gotten very far—and there’s little more embarrassing to an overweight person than having the waiter ask, “Finished?” while everyone else is nowhere near there.

I felt full when I finished the cake—full enough to begin estimating the absolute most weight I could have gained from it. Could it have fifteen hundred calories? I told myself I was not overestimating, just being reasonable.

After all, aren’t I always reading that bagels from bagel chains have eight hundred—and they probably don’t have nearly as much sugar and fat as the cake.

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Though I thought about the cake and its possible effects on my diet off and on for the rest of the evening—and, in fact, am still thinking about it as I write—I ate my regularly scheduled dinner. No extras, no cutbacks.

Progress, I suppose.

Today I finished the Race for the Cure, the nation’s largest 5K. I’d like to be excited and call it my first race, except there were so many people that “trudge for the cure” is probably more accurate.

Mary and I aren’t nearly fast enough to be out front, surging ahead of the masses, so we ended up quickly realizing that since there were too many people for us to run, we’d better let go of any ideas that this would be a workout and just walk along and chat. Except now that we’ve skipped marathon training to do the race, we’re going to have to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to beat the unforgiving D.C. summer heat and do our eight—

count ’em, eight—miles.

I’m sure someone has written something terribly pithy about how you’re always a child in your parents’ house, but pithiness is beyond me right now.

I’m still dealing with the feelings of guilt that followed my three-day regres-sion to childhood, complete with the raiding of the refrigerator. This weekend I spent at my parents’ house was one where I felt like I ate as if the past five and a half months had never happened. I mindlessly grabbed chocolate from the box on the counter. I picked at leftovers on the table. I ate lunch because my mother announced it was time, not because I was hungry. I listened to my parents’ constant snapping at each other—their undisguised disgust with each other—and ducked off to the kitchen for a snack. I tore through the cabinets looking for junk food when I was alone in the house.

Some of my eating, I’m sure, was due to my mother’s incredible focus on it. Before I arrived, she’d asked me what I was eating these days so she could have it in the house. She had tried so hard to be considerate that I couldn’t bear to tell her when I got there that she had bought the wrong yogurt—I’d wanted fat-free. And she’d bought five containers—how could I possibly eat that much in three days?

Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. I didn’t want to hurt her—as always, my mother wants us to be the perfect happy family when we’re all together, but we never have been, and I can’t imagine we’re going to start now. So I ate one of the yogurts, all the while feeling resentful that I had to eat it, wishing I could spend the calories in a full-fat yogurt on something I’d rather eat. Which was

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probably what led to poking through the refrigerator to see what there was that I
would
rather eat.

When it came time to choose restaurants for dinner, my mother was worried about me. “Will there be anything for you to eat there?” she’d ask about every restaurant my father suggested. I tried to tell her that there’s a diet portion of everything and that I’d be fine. The trouble with my mother is that her diet ideas—like her ideas of what I should wear to a party (“Don’t you think you should put on a skirt?”)—are fossilized in the amber of her ado-lescence. Pasta, potatoes, and bread are verboten. Cottage cheese and tuna fish are diet manna.

All of the attention made me very uncomfortable. The more the spotlight shines on me, the more annoyed my sister becomes. My father usually sides with my sister, so I kept waiting to end up at some place that had nothing but fattening food and desserts my sister knows I adore. That would be just like her, I thought darkly. Think I’m paranoid? While I was on one of my diets of yore, Diana—who never passes up the chance for chocolate—ordered an apple dessert for the table to split. (“I knew it would make you happy,”

she said when I confronted her later.) Anything with “junky apples,” as we both call them, my sister says so reminds her of me that occasionally in college she’d call me long distance from a restaurant pay phone just to tell me somebody was eating them.

In an attempt not to lose my temper, I reminded myself that it had barely been a year since my parents had moved from Miami back to New Jersey—the only living human beings, I like to tease them, to do so. So my sister couldn’t know the restaurants in the area that well and couldn’t make subversive choices. But I knew it wasn’t the choice of restaurant that mattered—it was my (and my family’s) behavior once we were there. I’m so used to getting upset or annoyed by things they say—whether it’s about my choice of job or choice of entrée—that the slightest thing sets me off.
I have changed
, I want to yell.
I’m not the same person I was ten years ago
. Trouble is, the minute I’m around my family, I become that person, that child. I lose my temper.