The Weight-loss Diaries (11 page)

In the spring of my freshman year at Cornell, I got a new roommate—

a thin one who arrived with a stationary exercise bike for our tiny room, one who knew a lot about nutrition. Feeling depressed during the cold winter and adrift at a huge university, somehow I ended up asking her for diet help. Emily was the first person to teach me about low-fat diets—in her world, any food was fair game as long as it didn’t have fat. She was also the first person to impress upon me the importance of exercise along with diet.

I hated the stationary bike, so under Emily’s tutelage I began jogging in place in our room. I don’t think I told her I was too embarrassed to exercise in public, and I can’t remember if her suggestion sounded as bizarre to me as

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it does now. All I remember was the overwhelming relief of putting someone else in charge of cleaning up at least one area of my life—weight—and feeling that my secret was safe with her. So whatever she said, I was ready to do.

First I jogged for fifteen minutes. Then sixteen. Then seventeen. Then a big jump to twenty-five. No matter how late I got home—and some nights I got home from the newspaper at 3:00 a.m.—Emily told me I had to exercise every day. She didn’t mind if I jogged while she slept; if she woke up, she smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. She taught me some leg and ab exercises I could do if I was too tired when I got home to do anything else.

Exercise appealed to the competitive, overachieving perfectionist in me.

I loved tracing the unbroken chain of days I’d exercised, as if they were pearls on a string. I never wanted to skip a day because once I did, no matter how many days I exercised after that, I was sure the one day I didn’t would mock me, ruining my perfect necklace.

I also loved the challenge: nearly every day, I tried to jog at least a minute longer. Usually I’d coax myself into going even longer than that. I listened to music and daydreamed. If that didn’t work, I’d stare at the red digits of my clock, calculating, say, that I was one-fifteenth of the way done, then two-fifteenths, then one-fifth, and so on. I’d figure the percentages, dividing the bottom number into the top, so my brain never had too long to pause and consider stopping. After two months, I was up to thirty-five minutes. In three months of diet and exercise, I lost thirty-nine pounds.

I had never exercised if I wasn’t dieting, so when I lost control of food again—somewhere in the beginning of my sophomore year—I reverted to my sedentary ways. Every few months I’d start a new diet, and with it a new exercise program. But I had a new problem: I knew what my body felt like lighter and fitter. Instead of challenging me, the fact that I could no longer jog for an hour—heck, I could barely go for ten minutes—was just another reminder of what a failure I was.

I didn’t exercise without dieting until a few months ago—the fall of 1998—when I began my usual starvation diet, got twelve pounds into it, binged, but decided to keep going to the Y anyway. And now there’s the
Shape
project, which allows me—as I did with Emily—to feel like I’m putting someone else in charge. It gives me someone to please with the results. I do what I’m told, plus some. After all, I’ve always been a good student.

Until the
Shape
project, I’d been walking three miles in forty-five minutes on the track, occasionally throwing in a few minutes of jogging. So I e-mailed that to Shari Frishett, the therapist (and certified personal trainer) who works with Peeke. Shari has encouraged me to e-mail her daily with a

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

workout report. After a week’s worth of missives about what I euphemistically called my walk-jogging routine (because I actually had to report it, I was jogging more than usual, but still not very much), Shari suggested I increase speed by setting a distance goal: say, 3.5 miles in forty-five minutes. “If you find you’re coming up on forty minutes and you’re nowhere near 3.5,” she e-mailed, “then that’s your cue to start running some more or running faster.”

Besides Shari,
Shape
asked Dr. Daniel Kosich, a Colorado fitness con-sultant, to talk with me. I had a few phone conversations with him in the early days of the project, and he told me that a handful of times during my workout, I’m supposed to speed up my jogging until I feel like I can’t go any faster, then slow down to a more comfortable pace. I laughed at this, since I’m already sweaty and breathing hard from the effort of turning my walk into a jog. But speed play, as he calls it—or interval training, as magazines usually call it—does double duty, improving cardiovascular fitness and inciner-ating fat, so again I’ve been doing as I’m told. Speed play also appeals to my competitive side. At first I struggled to make myself move any faster than I already was, but speed play is fast becoming my favorite part of the workout.

Every time I try it I think:
How fast can I go?

I’m going to visit a friend in Nashville next month, and I’m wanting to eat now because—get this—I might eat a lot a month from now.

I’m dreading the visit the way I dread doctors and dentists and anything that requires me to wear shorts in public. I fear the loss of control and worrying about food all weekend. I’ll have someone watching what I eat twenty-four hours a day, which always makes me want to eat in secret, like Scarlett O’Hara eating before the ball so she can pick daintily in public. And what if Nicole wants to know things I can’t really answer, like why I don’t eat more lunch if I really do think I’m hungry an hour later? (I can’t—that would be more calories. Besides, Peeke says it’s impossible that I’m really hungry.) And most friends and restaurants don’t serve perfectly measured-out cereal with milk for breakfast, Boca Burgers for lunch, and salads and an egg-white omelet with vegetables and one ounce of Healthy Choice low-fat cheese made in a nonstick pan for dinner. I can just about handle one meal out without freaking about what unseen (and fattening) ingredients are in my food, but every meal of every day for two days?

Peeke doesn’t think what I’m thinking is quite as crazy as I do. I have to

“re-create a user-friendly environment within which you will be safe to do your self-care.” In the Peeke universe—the more I learn about it, the more parallel to mine it seems—I’m supposed to call Nicole and tell her I’m prepar-

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ing to do a few 5K races and that I need lots of fruits, vegetables, and good protein options for my “training.” Peeke does this all the time, she says, and people respect her for it. Well, yeah, but she’s a diet doctor.

This is another diet-doctor solution that sounds not unthinkable when someone’s saying it (or has written it), but when I stop and actually consider it, I can’t imagine doing it. When you’re overweight, the last thing you want to do is issue a pile of special instructions—to friends or restaurants—because the last thing you want to do is attract attention to (a) yourself and (b) the fact that you are, um,
eating
. Which is totally ridiculous, because unless you have a rare disease, it’s not like you got fat by any other way
but
eating. Yet somehow I persist in thinking it really matters what I eat in public.

Part of me thinks Nicole won’t care if I tell her what I need, but another part is worrying about her thinking I’m annoying and high-maintenance and not fun, the way a handful of us snicker over a friend who makes the world’s hugest fuss about her wheat-free diet. (I confess to dashing off some wheat-free haiku after a particularly torturous lunch with her and then e-mailing the poems out to a few friends: “I’ll tell you why I/cannot eat a bit of wheat/It’ll take just five hours.”)

I wish there were a way to mention what I need and to have that be the end of the conversation, but I can’t imagine it will be. Maybe it’s because my mother and grandmother have always been so oversolicitous when they know I’m on a diet—worrying so much about whether there’s stuff around for me to eat that I want to eat a box of chocolate just to show them I’m not going to die from it—that I expect anyone else I tell to be the same way. I don’t want to spend a weekend having someone ask every five seconds if such-and-such restaurant will be OK. I just want everything to be normal.

As I did during my freshman-year-of-college exercise regimen, I’ve begun racking up the mileage. Distance goals appeal to me even more than time goals—I ran three miles, I can imagine myself casually dropping into a conversation one day. But not yet. I’ve done 3.51 miles in forty-five minutes, then 3.57, then 3.66. I usually walk the first two-thirds of a mile or so, then jog a while (up to ten minutes, if I can), then walk for a bit, then see how ener-getic I’m feeling before jogging anymore. I’m actually starting to enjoy the sweating, the being out of breath—tangible proof that I’ve done something, that something is happening.

But the first fifteen minutes of my workout are the worst. Sometimes I have to bully myself through it:
You’re going to spend the whole forty-five minutes here. Now, are you going to stand here fixing your ponytail, or are you actu-

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

ally going to work out?
Other days, only out-and-out bribery works, like buying myself a new CD. Once I get going, I always manage to finish. The perfectionist strikes again.

By the beginning of this month, Month 2 of the diet, I had a new goal, courtesy of Shari. It’s to go four miles in fifty minutes. I like this part—the cardio part—of my workout so much more than the strength training, which I’m supposed to do two days a week. I have a simple routine: some dips, some crunches, some bicep and tricep curls. But unlike the walking/jogging, where I can zone out, I have to focus on the lifting. People tell me I’ll like it more when I see results, but right now I just think it’s incredibly boring, and I resent doing it when there are a million other things I’d rather do with the time.

I look for things not to like, the way I do when I’ve decided instantly upon meeting someone that I don’t like him or her: no headphones are allowed in the weight room, so I’m stuck listening to the gym’s crummy music. I can’t speed through the weights—that just defeats the point. I also dislike looking in the mirror while I lift, watching the fat on my body shift as I move through the routine. On the track I’m mostly left alone, but in the weight room there are always a few trainers—big, burly guys—and I feel like they’re constantly watching me, waiting to dash over and tell me how poor my form is. In a roomful of people wearing weight-lifting gloves, moving purposefully from one exercise to the next, I feel tentative and uncertain and, yes, fatter than ever.

Fat Tuesday, and a very Fat Tuesday it was. It started with my hovering around the office lunch table in my size 16 jeans (better than 18s, but not enough), eyeing the Mardi Gras king cake, this Danish-y cake topped with a sickly sweet frosting I could practically taste. I’d been feeling as though all I’d done for days was resist things I wanted to eat. Yes, it is working—I
am
losing weight—but this was lost on me in the moment. I thought:
I want cake.

Now.

They say that when you feel the urge to overeat, you should stop and think about what’s making you feel the compulsion, recognize the thoughts and emotions that lead you to find comfort in food. Fat chance. I
wish
I could point a finger at something specific—stress or frustration, maybe. But I’m not sure what it was. I left the table and started walking back to my office, pretending I had a phone interview to do. But before I got halfway down the hall, I turned and strode purposefully back to the table. After days of eating much the same thing because I don’t want to think about it, of avoiding restaurants

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and happy hours and dinner at other people’s houses, I still can’t avoid all the possibilities of things I could eat. Though Peeke keeps telling me it’s not that I’ll never be able to eat chocolate again—that I’ll be able to eat it someday, when I “learn how”—I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking about sneaking in a little bit of what I want—do I really have to tell Peeke if I eat a Hershey bar instead of two Boca Burgers, since they have almost the same number of calories? I’ll feel gross—or “feel foul,” as my friend Mary would say—if I eat the Hershey bar and not the Boca Burgers. But what if I had one Boca Burger and half a chocolate bar—could I eat half a chocolate bar?

Could I eat . . . ?

I was so sick of the endless calculating and thinking that I finally stopped thinking entirely—shoved calories and diets and food out of my mind and grabbed a piece of cake. Because it was there. Because I haven’t been able to have anything else I wanted for the past six weeks. Because. Because. Because.

I started with a Courtney-sized sliver, which I’m not sure is anyone else’s idea of a sliver but is definitely a much smaller piece of cake than I would have taken in the past. I eventually moved on to three, maybe four servings, not that these things come with preprinted portion sizes.

I felt sick. I wished I had a long shirt on, because after I finished the cake I was afraid to sit down—my pants felt so tight they might split.
Is it possible to gain that much weight in less than five minutes?
I wondered. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks worrying about when I might really screw up—worrying and waiting and wondering when it would happen—and today I

finally did.

It was only 11:30 in the morning, and I wasn’t sure how to get through the day. This wasn’t one piece of chocolate or a couple of drinks. This was enough cake for me to wonder if anyone had seen me—enough for me to feel ashamed and fat and guilty. Having eaten that much—and knowing that tomorrow is my weekly weigh-in day and it’s pretty obvious I’m going to show a gain—I wanted to eat everything I’ve been wanting to eat for the past six weeks. Every last muffin, bowl of pasta shells and cheese, and chocolate truffle.

For a half hour, I couldn’t think about anything else. I surfed the Web, looking at cyberdiet.com and other websites with calorie charts, getting annoyed that all the numbers weren’t the same and trying to figure out both what the maximum number of calories I could have consumed was and how many hours I might have to exercise to burn them off. I’m not sure whether I was more bothered by the numbers or by the fact that no matter what fig-