The Weight-loss Diaries (24 page)

“What is the evidence that these people are even looking at you?” she asked. “Most people are thinking about themselves. Maybe they’re thinking,

‘Gosh, how does anybody run that far?’ ”

I like this woman. I just wish I could believe her.

Something to obsess about besides food. A guy I met at a party last week—

and didn’t bother writing down that I had met because I’m a cynic and didn’t want to jinx it—actually called. We ended up talking for an hour, and I had to grab another call before we fixed a date to get margaritas. (We both don’t like beer.) Said I’d call him back but realized I didn’t have his number and sent three emergency e-mails to Mary trying to figure out what to do before remembering she was out of the office.

I track down phone numbers almost every day as part of my job, but it seems a little stalkeresque to employ those skills here. If I don’t call him,

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though, will he even give it a second thought? Will he think I’m blowing him off (which is what I would assume if the situation were reversed)? Or will he pick over the conversation in his mind, wonder if he shouldn’t have said this or that, and suddenly realize he never gave me his number? Then again, I’m going to take a wild guess that because Mars versus Venus is a gazillion-dollar industry, men do not think this way.

Nothing is ever enough. I put on my jeans today for the first time in nearly two months—it’s been so hot that wearing jeans has been unthinkable. With all the eating I’ve done recently, I should have been relieved that they still fit, but instead I almost cried in frustration that they weren’t any looser.

I want a vacation from dealing with food. I’m either starving (or feel like I am) or bingeing, and either way the thoughts of food are constant. Not only do I want my jeans to be looser for obvious reasons (I want to be thinner) but I want my jeans looser because I feel like I deserve it. I want a reward just for having to deal.

Mile 12 of the 13.1-mile half marathon, and I wasn’t thinking about Mark the photographer (no Molly today) or the fact that I’d almost finished. (Me, who once could barely run one mile!) Instead I was looking at the spectators, all of whom seemed to be staring at me. I was convinced they were thinking,
What is that fat girl doing running?
I was wishing I could hide, since I was sure they were laughing at my skimpy running outfit, a necessary evil, since it was ninety-eight degrees and anything else chafes.

Two guys—running buddies of mine—made me especially self-

conscious. They kept poking each other then pointing to Mark (he was on a bike, riding ahead of me, then hopping off to take pictures) and saying loudly, “Who’s that girl with the photographer? I think she’s on that new NBC

show.” More than one spectator yelled: “Hey, can I get your autograph?”

Mary is off doing a triathlon(!) this weekend, so it was just Abby and me and the guys, and the guys thought this was the funniest thing ever. They clowned around for the camera until Mark finally asked them to stop; he said all of those photos would be unusable.

As I got sweatier, I got crankier. When Mark yelled, “Smile!” at mile 9, I would have yelled back, “I don’t feel like it!” except it wasn’t worth the breath.

Afterward, he took a picture of me eating a banana—please, please, please, don’t let
Shape
run that one!—and chugging water, then of the guys and me having a water fight. Thank God I didn’t wear a white T-shirt.

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133

I finished in 2:15—just over ten-minute miles, which I was happy with, considering how hot and miserable it was.

Then I went to pick up my finishers’ T-shirt.

The guy asked, “5K or half marathon?”

“Half marathon,” I answered, and his eyes widened.

I was about to say something self-deprecating or defensive but suddenly realized he hadn’t even asked me my size, just automatically handed me a medium T-shirt. Not an XL, not even an L—an M. That’s when I saw a big red stop sign of the kind the body-image expert had told me to imagine whenever I thought negative thoughts. For half a second, I allowed myself to consider: maybe he’s actually impressed. Thirteen miles
is
kind of far. Maybe, just maybe, he’s thinking what I would have thought a year ago: “I wish I could do that.”

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Month 10 (October)

I haven’t been able to write for days because I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts. Yes, I’ve been bingeing again, with an abandon that scares even me.

I’m not particularly religious—God is reserved mostly for silent bar-gaining at hospitals and exams—but I am convinced something terrible is going to happen to me because I started this bingeing streak on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Not at the break-the-fast after Yom Kippur but
on
Yom Kippur. While I was supposed to be fasting.

Alexy and I had gone to the supermarket to buy some of the food we needed for the break-the-fast party she was hosting. When we parted at the corner, she went to her apartment to cook and I walked into the first café I saw. I bought two blueberry muffins and ate them on the four-minute walk home, panicking about what I would say if anyone I knew caught me. When I got home, my phone was ringing. It was Diana talking about how much she wished she could sleep away Yom Kippur because it’s so hard to fast.

I tried to listen, but I felt so guilty I couldn’t concentrate. Yom Kippur is a difficult holiday for anyone who’s trying to learn moderation, as I am.

There is no middle ground with fasting: you can’t do it halfway.

I got off the phone and tore through my kitchen. Shredded low-fat cheese and huge handfuls of dry cereal. I was eating just to eat, and I knew it. But as usual, in the moment it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except eating.

After a week of bingeing—and in a binge-induced fit of desperation—I came clean to
Shape
today, about gaining weight.

I didn’t use the word
binge
—too scary. Too much like a serious problem.

I don’t know if it was a conscious decision, but I also didn’t use the phrase 135

Copyright © 2004 by Courtney Rubin. Click here for terms of use.

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pig out
. Instead I wrote to Maureen that due to a “variety of circumstances”

I’d been seriously slacking this month, to the point where I’d gained about five pounds. Actually, it’s six: the two I still have to lose from my binges when Bonnie was here, plus four I’ve just gained from this last fit. I told Maureen I was getting panicked about the fact that I was going to look horrible and stupid and idiotic in print and that then I just kept eating—that it was a nasty cycle that sort of fueled itself. I couldn’t resist ending my tale of woe on a positive note, fully aware of the irony that I usually struggle for the shiny happy spin in the column: I pointed out that I have been saintly about exercise.

Which I actually have. Maybe I should give myself a break and think about how much worse off I would be if I hadn’t been doing all this running.

Shape
column number three hit print today. (No word on how they want to handle the weight gain.)

I wrote the column so many months ago that now it’s almost painful to look at. I see the picture of a girl who is nineteen pounds thinner than when she started, but I don’t find it inspirational. All I see is a girl who had no idea what was coming. I was so full of optimism then, so sure that this was going to be the time I actually finished what I had started—that I’d get all of the weight off. For good.

Now I feel like only stop-action photography could capture my trans-formation from thinner back to fat again—that the bingeing is going to make it happen that fast.

What makes the weight gain even worse is all the people rooting for me.

I’ve gotten mail about articles I’ve written for the
Washingtonian
, but nothing like what the
Shape
column has brought in: letters—six pages, some of them—

and photos and cards and inspirational sayings and, of course, diet tips.

It’s strange having people I don’t know learn such personal details about me, but it’s stranger having the people I do know learn them. It’s occurred to me that when I was a child, the mere idea that my sister had been snooping in my journal would be enough to send me into a rage, but here I am dump-ing it out for the world to see. Yes, this is different, because I’m supposedly in control. But words are like eggs—they hatch things that grow beyond your control.

Like
very
responsive readers. My phone number is listed, and I’ve already had a bunch of calls from around the country, including one from a thirty-four-year-old woman who keeps calling at around 10:00 p.m., wanting me to talk her off the Ben & Jerry’s ledge.

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I want to help her, and I try to. I probably wouldn’t call a magazine writer at home for advice, but I definitely can relate to the desperation that leads to such an act. I want so badly to be able to give this woman the one nugget of advice that she’s looking for—the one bit that will make a difference, that will make the diet she’s attempting different from all the others that preceded it.

But I’m still looking for the nugget myself.

Magarita Man—the non-beer-drinking guy from the party the other week—

called to say he’s traveling for the next two weeks. Ugh. At the rate I’m eating I’m going to be at least a size bigger by the next time I see him.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling totally idiotic, because I just read an art review by a guy I spent two hours talking to at another party and who had asked for my number and said we should go out. In this one tiny 150-word review he mentioned a girlfriend—
so
hate that style of writing—so how is it that in two hours I got nary a mention of this chick? What is with this guy, anyway?

Note to self: ask Stephen for the guy view on how much time should elapse before mentioning a girlfriend. Personally, I think the tipping point is somewhere around a half hour—too much earlier and the guy’s being pretty con-ceited, thinking that wanting to date him might be the only reason you’re chatting. But too much later is just not fair.

If—upon hearing I’m running a marathon—one more person says, “You

must be able to eat whatever you want,” I’ll be so torn between screaming and crying that I just might spontaneously combust. I
cannot
eat whatever I want, because eating things other than what I’m “supposed” to eat—at least according to Peeke—induces fear and panic. I worry not just about burning off whatever extra I eat but about how full it’s going to make me.

This morning I realized—in that blinding flash that comes when you can finally put a name to something that’s been there all along—that while being really hungry inspires panic (When am I going to get to eat? What if I can’t wait that long? And what if I can’t get rid of this hungry feeling?), so does feeling full. Even if the fullness comes because I’ve eaten something as innocent as two bags of baby carrots—just the feeling sends me into a tailspin. I associate fullness with bingeing and with being fat. I think; therefore I am. I am full; therefore I am fat.

I am also cranky and frustrated. I’m tired of running and, on alternate days, using the elliptical trainer, but I’m afraid to try any new form of cross-training—like roller-blading—because I’m afraid I’ll break or sprain some-

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thing and miss the marathon after all this training. (Ditto for a pair of extra-high heels I wanted to buy myself as a treat.) Fear and anxiety about the marathon are making me want to eat and eat and eat, and the only thing stopping me is, of course, the marathon. I’ll hate myself more than ever if, because I can’t stop eating everything in sight for a few weeks, I ruin something I’ve been working on for nearly six months. For now I’ve given up praying that I’ll stop bingeing for good. Now I just concentrate on getting through one hour without bingeing. Then the next. And then the next. Call it the ultra-marathon of the mind.

I have a new obsession: that I’m going to get injured in these last three weeks before the marathon, and it’s not even going to be a glamorous injury, like from rock climbing or skiing. It’s going to be a klutzy, lame injury—the sort that sounds like I made it up just to avoid running the damn race. This morning I banged my right ankle getting off the cross-trainer. And then I slipped getting out of the shower. If I could swathe myself in bubble wrap for the next three weeks, I just might consider it.

My other new obsession is slightly healthier. I’m going to move to London—not someday, not when I get around to looking into it, but on March 1, about six months from now. I’ve always wanted to live abroad, and lately I’ve had this acute sense of the passage of time, maybe because an ever-increasing percentage of mine seems to be taken up with diet and exercise and bingeing.

I have a friend from college living in London who has the amazing ability to make absolutely anything I want to do seem possible. I’m going to visit Elizabeth after the marathon, and when we talked today, leaving my friends, quitting my perfectly good job without another in sight, and moving across the Atlantic to an outrageously expensive place where it’s gray half the year seemed like a totally rational idea. If not now, when?

The conversation with Elizabeth was a blur of plans and pep talks. For the half hour we spent on the phone collaborating on the invention of the new transatlantic Courtney, I felt so free of everything, from whether this guy from the other day will ever call me right on up to bingeing and paralyzing self-doubt, such as whether I’ll ever make it as a writer. When I hung up the phone, all the fears came flooding back and I wondered whether running to London isn’t just another attempt to escape myself—if moving is just the lat-

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139

est in a long line of things (losing weight and finding a great pair of black pants among them) that I think will make my life perfect—and whether Elizabeth is just the latest in a long line of gurus (like Peeke before her) who I’ve decided have all the answers.