Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (25 page)

H
eading out the door one steel-blue winter morning, I did the usual routine: zip the coat, scan the room, earbuds in, gym bag, handbag, keys. I locked the door and shook it in the jamb, just to be sure, then lumbered down the stairs making a swishy racket in all my winter gear. Outside, I waved at my early-morning neighbor friend and his rambunctious golden retriever. We’d never exchanged names, but Friendly Glasses Man and I saw each other most mornings as I headed to the gym before work. I liked to think he called me Cool Sneakers Lady.

A busy Thursday lay ahead, but I had a whole two hours between me and my to-do list. Blustery though it was, this little walk to the subway was my peaceful interlude before the day got hold of me. I flexed my toes inside my sneakers, breathed in deep swallows of ice-water air, and guffawed as I turned onto the avenue and got smacked in the face by wind. Everything felt more awake, somehow. There was a new vibrancy to my neighborhood, as if someone had come in and polished all of Brooklyn overnight. I turned my face up toward bright spots of sunlight cutting through the cold.

9/11.

It occurred to me just as I made it to the subway entrance.
Oh right, 9/11. That’s what this morning reminds me of. Clear blue and cloudless. People always talk about
how gorgeous the weather was that day, and it was remarkable. I remember sitting on the porch outside my dorm at Walnut Hill, under the same crisp, blue sky, redialing my grandparents, then my mom, then Dad, and then my stepdad. With each unanswered line or busy signal, I grew more certain that all of them were dead. And, even after I had ascertained that everyone I knew was alive, I knew they would be dead soon, and so would I if I wasn’t careful. Each night for months, I patrolled the dorm, slamming every window and laying my towel down to block the air gap under my bedroom door, just in case the terrorists returned with crop dusters, scattering anthrax up and down the eastern seaboard. I slept with the radio alarm clock turned on and tuned to the twenty-four-hour news station, quiet enough to appease my roommate, but loud enough so I could listen to all the updates on the end of the world.

The J train arrived, interrupting my trip down terrible-memory lane. That was when I realized what was different. I’d put in my earbuds before leaving the house, but hadn’t turned anything on. I’d walked five and a half blocks without any distraction, and now 9/11 had occupied my head.

Motherfucking mindfulness.

That was the culprit. This ridiculous commitment to growth and change and “mental health” had ruined absolutely all the fun. No, it was more serious than that. I didn’t listen to audiobooks and musicals for
fun
. I listened to them in order not to think, because look where thinking got me. I needed those thought-killing distractions to get through the day, and clearly I wasn’t ready to go cold turkey. That kind of detox is dangerous for any addict, and I had almost thirty years of using to my name.

Sure, someday I’d like to be able to walk five blocks in silence, but I had a lot on my plate, so to speak. So, for now, I just wouldn’t push it. Not yet. I’d still be twenty-nine for a few weeks. It would be easier when I was thirty.

Mealtime rules remained. I’d turn off the television or cover the computer screen and squirm through a mindful turkey sandwich until I felt full and satisfied. Then, I got back to the noise. I couldn’t enjoy distracted eating, but I went whole hog on distracted everything else. I could navigate my entire commute without employing the senses of sight and sound, occupied as they were with the Twitter app on my screen and the podcast in my ears. I blew out my phone data plan every month, downloading new episodes on the go, simply incapable of riding the subway without Marc Maron or Ira Glass for company. If I spotted a friend, I turned away and looked at my phone, preferring to hang out with the people I could hit Pause on. The TV went on the moment I got home. Swinging the door shut, I grabbed the remote before my shoes were even off, like a kid who gets twenty minutes of television before her parents get home and make her empty the dishwasher. I didn’t turn the screen off until the last possible second before bed, and then came the audiobook to read me to sleep.

I fell back on my high school cast-recording habit, loading up my iPhone with
Wicked
and
Spring Awakening
, but only the biggest, belt-iest numbers. Because I no longer lived in a musical theater prep school dorm, I quit singing out loud with the windows open, lest I incur a noise violation for waking up all of Williamsburg. Instead, I just mouthed along with the lyrics—which made it even better. Now, I didn’t even have to hear my own voice; I could just borrow Idina Menzel’s or Audra McDonald’s!

Next, I invented a new way of lip-synching without even opening my mouth. All I had to do was put on some headphones and let my facial expressions do the singing. Walking down the street or hiking up the StairMaster, I could face-sing along with “Defying Gravity,” my eyebrows and forehead contorting through emotional beats of hope, excitement, vengeance, and, at last, triumph. This, by the way, is a
great
way to appear completely unhinged in public.

Grocery shopping was made all the more dramatic as I sang the first act of
The Last Five Years
, in my head, in the produce section, never once making a sound. I wasn’t putting apples in a bag. I was packing up clothes to leave my husband, remorseful and crying over our shattered marriage. In New York, no one is fazed by seeing a lunatic in the supermarket. I just had to resign myself to being that lunatic and I’d never have to suffer the monotonous reality of grocery shopping again.

On the treadmill, I went back to my childhood obsession,
The Secret Garden
. Being almost thirty, I decided I was
almost
too old to fantasize about playing an eleven-year-old, so I just started face-singing along with the older female characters. Progress! Adulthood! Normal! Right?!

In those final, sweat-soaked minutes, I’d reach for the good stuff. I needed something really potent to get me through the last push. But first, I took a quick look around the gym, just to make sure my middle-school crush hadn’t suddenly turned up at Equinox Tribeca to catch me working out to
Newsies
. The movie.

The closest comparison I draw to this experience is “smiling with your eyes”—that bizarre photo trend that Tyra Banks made famous, inspiring a generation of slightly-too-wide-eyed selfie takers. But instead of smiling with my eyes, I was high-kicking down nineteenth-century New York streets, tryna sell more papes. With my eyes. I’d unconsciously throw back my head, “hitting the high notes” and punching the air while holding my phone, triggering Siri to interrupt and ask me if I needed help. Only then would I notice the alarmed gaze of the woman jogging next to me, alerting both me and Siri to the fact that yes indeed, I needed serious help.

“What do you mean by
everything
?” Theresa asked during one of our weekday sessions. I’d forgotten my headphones back at the office and arrived a twitchy mess after having to endure a fifteen-minute subway ride without a podcast in my ears. One raised eyebrow from Theresa, and I cracked.

“I mean, I do every single thing with a distraction. I feel like I’m not even in the world, just in my head. Also, I think I’m addicted to multitasking.”

Theresa gave a light chuckle at what she must have assumed was sarcasm. It was not sarcasm.

“I can’t even walk to the train without headphones. I can’t watch TV without playing a game on my phone.”

I felt like a deviant teenager. I wanted her to ground me with no TV and no phone.

“Maybe you could try reading?”

I nodded. I listened to audiobooks every day, but couldn’t remember the last time I’d read words on paper.

“Just a suggestion. It’s totally up to you. I’m just saying, it might be worth a shot. Think about what mindfulness has done for you with food.”

“Yeah, I know. I enjoy food more, and I don’t eat past the point of fullness,” I grumbled, really leaning into the sulky-teenager bit.

“Cool. What else?”

I shrugged. She shrugged back. No dice.

I left Theresa’s office and headed out into the ceaseless gale blowing down Madison Avenue. This season had been record-breaking in its miserableness. Months of relentless, bone-deep cold had turned throngs of commuters into huddled masses yearning to break free. The wind itself felt like a perfect excuse to hop in a taxi and go home to watch movies in bed. But I’d just spent forty-five minutes talking about how I wanted to grow the hell up and quit escaping reality. Responsible adults didn’t hail cabs they couldn’t afford and go home to watch
Sliding Doors
on a weekday afternoon. They walked to the subway and went back to work.

I instinctively reached for my headphones before remembering I had left them at the office.
You can do this
, I ordered myself.
Jesus, you can make it fifteen minutes without
This American Life
to entertain you.
I turned onto Forty-Second Street and headed toward Grand Central, hearing snippets of conversation as bundled-up tourists stopped on the corner to admire the big old train station. The air was so frigid that prickles of pain blew across my face, but they didn’t seem bothered. It was all I could do not to shake their shoulders and tell them to get inside, get out of this horrible day, that Grand Central wasn’t going anywhere and they should come back in the spring, when everything would be better.

Without any available entertainment, I decided to go ahead and think about Theresa’s question. What
had
mindfulness really done for me with food? The answer came so quick and simple that I actually rolled my eyes at it: everything. Fine. I admit it. While I couldn’t quit distraction all day, quitting it at mealtimes had changed every single thing about food and the way I ate it. It wasn’t just about feeling full faster or tasting more flavors. I didn’t even like the same foods anymore.

It started with soda. I’d been a Diet Coke junkie for years, downing two to four (to five) per day. I used to get a kick out of horrifying colleagues when I cracked a cold can first thing in the morning. “It’s the same as you drinking your latte,” I’d say. “Except it’s fat free!”

Sometime in the past few months, though, I’d stopped drinking soda like water. Now, I could hardly drink it at all, grossed out by the bitter film of aspartame that lingered on my tongue. With every sip I was suddenly conscious of the not-realness of it: fake flavor, fake sweetness. Each time I popped into a bodega for a beverage on my way to the subway, I wound up dawdling in front of the soda section, staring at the plastic bottles like a visitor at a particularly dull zoo.
You can eat or drink whatever you want
, I reminded myself. That was rule #1 of this no-rule system. But, I just didn’t want it. For the first time, drinking soda felt like pouring a can of chemicals into my body for no discernible reason. It didn’t feel like a Bad Food so much as a pointless one. It was something I’d gotten used to over the years as a legal indulgence. On a diet, I couldn’t eat popcorn at the movies, but I could suck down fifty-four ounces of Diet Anything, guilt and worry free. Now that guilt and worry were off the table, I didn’t need soda as a defense. I just needed something to drink.

Another spooky shift came as I watched the food on my plate gradually become more seasonal. All winter, I carted home great gourds and squashes for pots of pilgrim-y soup. I roasted every root I could find and threw pomegranate seeds and orange zest on top, never once thinking of mangoes or tomatoes.

“My body is psychic!” I told Theresa, imagining that I’d reached a mythic upper echelon of intuitive eating where cravings became magically aligned with mother earth.

“I think it’s just that citrus fruits taste really good right now,” she countered. “Plus, they’re on sale.”

I paused to think about all the people I’d already told about my psychic stomach.

Okay, but so what if it wasn’t actual magic? Mindful eating had worked more wonders than any diet had. All they’d done was teach me to ignore my dumb-ass body with its fat-ass desires and just eat what they told me to eat. Now that I’d flipped the switch, bringing consciousness to every bite, my body seemed to desire only the best, the freshest—and frankly, the cheapest. That, too, was a relief. Had I been craving daily avocadoes
that winter, I would have gone broke by March.

Other cheap foods, however, had lost all their guilty pleasure. Running errands one Sunday afternoon, I dashed into a Midtown deli, hungry for lunch and overwhelmed by a PMS craving for salty, fried meat. I hit the hot food trays in the back and loaded up my plate with spare ribs and chicken fried rice. Scooping on a modest side of green beans, my ovaries screamed “
More meat, bitch
,” but I told them to watch their language and remember that they could always go back for more.

Yanking out my earbuds, I sat down at a sticky table in the back. It took a few minutes of consciously (quickly, but consciously) chewing through tough, gristly bites before I looked up from my polystyrene plate and realized I was eating a stomachache. A year earlier, this food might have been my secret treat—a prime selection for a Final Pig-Out. Now, it tasted like fishy, reheated oil and the freezer. It tasted like almost-garbage, and as I sat there thinking of all the times I’d impulsively binged on a plateful of heat-lamp food, the meal turned rotten in my mouth. My salty-fried-meat craving wasn’t so much satisfied as it was trumped by the greasy churning in my stomach. Had I scarfed it down while reading a magazine or clicking through Twitter, it might not have registered. But now I knew I’d never be able to eat this food again—certainly not for fun.