The Weight-loss Diaries (15 page)

I reminded myself that just as no one knows what size clothing you have on once it’s on your body, no one knows exactly what you weigh, and the numbers can be surprising. Last year, in a rare moment of openness, Diana told me what she’d weighed at her thinnest in high school—when she was small enough to shop in a 5-7-9 store. It was forty pounds more than I’d thought. Which was only twenty-five pounds less than I weighed at the time—and back then I was sure the number was more like a hundred. If only I had known. In high school, losing sixty-five pounds seemed so hopeless I figured I might as well eat. But twenty-five pounds—that would have been a different story.

Month 5 (May)

The fear offood and oflosing control is gnawing at me. I had a chocolate truffle today, and a Hershey’s Kiss yesterday, and I know I probably shouldn’t have had either. This, I know from experience, is how I go crazy. I have “just a bite” here and “just a bite” there, and I think I’m OK with it. But then the bites get larger and more frequent, until suddenly—maybe not the first or second day but soon—they become a binge. Who
are
those people who can eat a Hershey’s Kiss or a mini Snickers bar every day to keep from pigging out on chocolate? For me, one bite is too much and a million are not enough.

Certain foods, chocolate among them, seem to set off a chemical reaction in me. I have one piece, and no matter what the circumstances—feeling guilty, not feeling guilty, feeling full, hungry, whatever—I immediately have this urge to eat more. It’s a sharp urge, with a trajectory like an unexpected burst of pain: very intense, then a slow recession. Like pain, the urge leaves behind a desire to probe and pick at what hurts, plus a nagging fear that the pain can and will resurface at any moment.

As if poking my tongue at a sore spot in my mouth, I kept pausing in the middle of writing, thinking:
Is that twinge in my stomach hunger? What
do I want to eat?

Woke up this morning thinking about how on this day seven years ago I was exactly two months into the Emily diet—the very-low-fat diet my freshman year roommate devised. I remember how excited I was to start and how relieved. One problem I’m working at, I thought happily when I started. The diet was something to focus on in an otherwise dark and gloomy second semester.

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

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

I lost forty-one pounds on the Emily diet, and I still get twinges thinking about all the energy and effort it vacuumed up. My obsession affected my grades—nothing mattered as long as I lost weight.

I frequently stayed until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. at the college newspaper, where the deadlines distracted me from food. So at 3:00 a.m., when I finally sat down to study, I’d be so hungry that I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. But I refused to have so much as an extra caramel-flavored rice cake.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I craved control. I couldn’t control what grade I’d get on a paper—or whether I’d meet anyone at the frat party we went to—but I could control what went in my mouth.

I remember getting home in May, my jeans so loose I could pull them off without unbuttoning them. That night, before my family went out to dinner, Mom insisted I try on Diana’s size 10 jeans. They looked so impossibly small, but they fit. I looked at myself in the full-length bathroom mirror—

the first time I’d looked at my entire body in several years.
The scale will only
go down from here,
I vowed
.

Periods of extreme control followed by periods of no control at all.

Within a few months, I put all the weight back on—all that energy and effort, seemingly for nothing. Six months later, at Thanksgiving, squeezed into size 14 jeans I was afraid to wash for fear they’d shrink and I’d have to find out I was really a 16 or 18, again I stood in front of the mirror—this time afraid to look. I wondered:
How many times am I going to do this to myself—blow up
and shrink as rapidly as Alice in Wonderland?

I lay around this morning rehashing all my failures. Despite my vows and my certainty that this time is different, is it really? I’m so very tired of remembering chunks of my life by little more than whether I was eating or not eating, whether I could find anything to wear, whether I wanted to leave the house. I remember days when I couldn’t seem to drag myself out of bed—I was often still full from the night before and so dreading facing my closet and having to admit that only one pair of pants still fit.

The memory of failures past didn’t do much for my already flagging resolve to get up and go to the gym. As the minutes passed and it became clear I wouldn’t be able to put in a full fifty-minute workout before heading to the office, I grew more and more frantic. Somehow—in the space of an hour—I’d managed to turn today into a referendum about whether I’d succeed at this diet.

I knew the fact that I wasn’t going to get in a full workout today would be constantly gnawing at me. Every time I put something in my mouth, I’d

Month 5 (May)

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think about whether I could or should leave a little over, to make up for my missing gym time. I’d pick over the day’s schedule, wondering if I could fit in the rest of the workout somewhere. And I’d think about my less than half a workout, wondering if it would be the beginning of my excusing myself for missing five minutes here, ten minutes there . . . then not going to the gym for days in a row. I wished I could think of someone to talk about this with, to stop its cartoon-monster-like looming in my head. But I knew what everyone would say:
Stop being ridiculous; it’s just one workout
.

I knew that, and yet I continued obsessing—in fact, am still obsessing.

How am I supposed to relax and think about the big picture—it’s how I eat and exercise day in and day out that matters—when the world is seemingly filled with information about how small things make a big difference? How can I not panic about five minutes off my workout or an extra Hershey’s Kiss when there are articles to read about how just three extra bites a day can pack on a pound a month? Yesterday I saw statistics about how sending e-mail instead of taking a two-minute walk down the hall can cause a weight gain of a pound a year, and extra telephone extensions, which mean we don’t have to run to grab the phone, add two to three pounds a year.

It makes me want to fidget constantly—the fitness magazines I love to hate report that a Mayo Clinic study showed you can fidget away up to 850

calories a day, or the equivalent of a good eight-and-a-half-mile walk.

It’s crazy.
I’m
crazy. Maybe my addiction isn’t so much to food but to addiction itself. I fixate on something to fixate on.

Diana interlude. As if I could go more than a few days without one.

Today was my day off from the gym, but I was feeling edgy, so I decided to take a walk. (Long pause to appreciate that I was not only choosing something instead of eating but choosing something that might be construed as exercise.)

Diana and I had been leaving messages for each other all week. We kept missing each other. Today I was having a surge of that springtime let’s-clean-everything-including-relationships feeling I get when life seems pretty good.

(Am I
looking
for something to mess things up? Is that why I call her?) And because Peeke has been after me to think of ways to catch up with my sister that don’t involve food, I called to see if Diana wanted to join me on my walk.

She suggested I come with her to pick up something from her office and we’d walk back to Dupont Circle from Bethesda, a rambling eight miles that’s mostly downhill.

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

So . . . we did, except every five minutes she kept talking about the food she wanted to eat along the way, trying to convince me to eat at Cactus Can-tina, this Tex-Mex place where it’s virtually impossible not to overeat, and she kept up a nonstop patter about how fat she is.

I started wishing I’d taken a walk with only my portable CD player for company. Except that wasn’t possible—or at least not particularly advisable—

in the middle of Washington, D.C., after dark. But I didn’t lose my temper.

Instead I played reporter with Diana, asking her about one of her favorite topics: her job.

Every once in a while, my curiosity about Diana trumps my annoyance.

Four years at college—except for summers, only sporadic contact—away from each other and from our identities as one-half of the Rubin twins seems to have turned us both into someone the other doesn’t recognize. Growing up, I used to take all of my going-out cues from her, so she’s not used to me as nightlife reporter—the idea that even though she went to college in D.C., in my two years here I already have been more places than she has. The Diana I knew growing up didn’t have any special aptitude for computers and cried when she had to stay up late to finish particularly difficult math homework, so I don’t know this Diana who’s a driven technology whiz—who can fix her own computer and who works until 8:00 or 9:00 every night.

So today I asked loads of questions about her new job, Internet market-ing. Essentially, she surfs the Web for a living, telling clients where and how to advertise, putting together complicated reports using a bunch of programs and a pile of data. I have to admire that she’s so obviously good at what she does, and I’d tell her more often if giving her a compliment weren’t such an infuriating experience. You have to repeat it at least seven times, and she’ll call later and bring it up out of nowhere, just to have you say it one more time.

The scary thing is that I think I might do exactly the same thing when it comes to accepting compliments. What is it they say about our hating in other people the things we hate most in ourselves?

I’m sifting through the rubble of today, piecing it together the way you do when an apparently stable wall collapses.

This morning I felt hungry the minute I finished my banana and Grape-Nuts Flakes with skim milk. By the time I left the gym, I was already wondering how I was going to make it through the morning. And by the time I left for work, I was considering options. Carrot sticks sounded disgusting at 9:30 a.m. An apple? Not appealing.

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I walked into work, and there on the table was a platter of leftover muffins from this bakery down the street that I love. The interns, who sit right by the table, were at a meeting. No one was around. My brain shut down. I grabbed a chocolate-chocolate-chip muffin the size of a baseball and ate it in about four bites. I’ve been craving chocolate for days. I ate another. Then I hovered, picking at a banana muffin and a carrot muffin and—just in case anyone walked by—pretending I was waiting for the printer to spit out an article. I swiped another muffin, stuffed it into my bag, and headed to my office. Then I went back, hovered around the printer again, and grabbed one more.

I could feel the muffins clogging my insides from my stomach all the way up to the back of my throat. I wasn’t sure how to get through the rest of the day. I was torn between wanting to eat everything and wanting to starve myself until breakfast tomorrow. I reasoned that I’d better eat the lunch I packed for myself anyway, because if I didn’t, I’d almost definitely binge in mid- or late afternoon.

After lunch I felt full and exhausted. It’s a feeling I once had daily, but until now I’d almost forgotten how awful it is.

I spent the afternoon alternately working on a story and wondering if I should give up my afternoon snack—and being grateful that nobody could see inside my head to what it is I was worried about. I know there are millions of more important things in the world to think about—AIDS, Third World debt, someone else besides myself ? Thinking about myself thinking about calories and weight and muffins and what I would have for dinner made me feel more fat and self-indulgent than ever. But it didn’t stop me from thinking about it.

The afternoon passed by agonizingly slowly. Why can’t time creep like that when I have a deadline to meet? At 4:00 p.m., just as I was contemplating whether I needed the cottage cheese and carrot sticks I’ve stashed in the office fridge, there was a call for a birthday party. So I ate chocolate cake.

Three pieces, plus extra frosting from around the sides. I’m not sure whether to cry or scream. Things were going so well until today—why did I have to screw things up? Is it that I’ve been relatively happy these days, and since I usually blame my weight for my unhappiness, I’m not sure what to do when I start considering, even for a moment, that my weight may not be totally to blame for it?

The thought scares me. Though publicly I’ve scoffed at the notion that losing weight solves all problems, parroting the “I’m still the same person” line,

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privately I know I’ve clung to the idea. Sure, losing weight might not get me a promotion or more money (though there are those studies about overweight people being paid less than their thin counterparts), but being thin would, I think, put an end to so much of what makes me unhappy on a day-to-day basis. Namely, looking in the mirror every morning and hating the reflection, not wanting to leave my apartment and face anyone looking the way I do.

Sometimes I think that being overweight is muffling the person I want to be (or is it the person I am?), like hearing a radio from the office next door. At parties, especially, there are people—not just men—I want to speak to but don’t feel like I can lumber up to (and that’s the way I am in my mind,
lumbering
up to them). At the office I censor myself. I make plenty of sarcastic comments privately, but at meetings I keep quiet, just because I don’t want anyone to look in my direction.

A quarter to five. I’m suddenly acutely aware that in fifteen minutes Mr.

Lee’s, the stand on the first floor of our building that sells snacks, will be closed. If I can hang on for fifteen minutes, I can avoid the danger. At the same time, I’m becoming pretty sure that once Mr. Lee’s closes, I’m going to decide I must have food, and I’ll be so impatient and frustrated that it may lead to an all-out binge. I’m not sure which is worse. I want cake with icing and cookies that are soft, neither of which Mr. Lee sells (Famous Amos—