The Weight-loss Diaries (18 page)

And of course, I eat.

Before Diana and I left for New Jersey, I had told myself that while I was at my parents’ I’d try to incorporate some of Nancy’s rules about eating what I crave. I knew, for example, that my parents would have cheese—something I never dare buy myself, since there’s no one to help me eat it. But when I was faced with a refrigerator that kept yielding new and surprising delights, à la Mary Poppins’s handbag, I couldn’t handle it. There was too much choice, and

94

The Weight-Loss Diaries

I felt like I had too little control over what I did and when. (“You don’t really need forty-five minutes to go to the gym, do you? You better hurry up—we want to go to dinner.”) I lay around at night berating myself for having eaten so much and freaking out that because in New Jersey we drove everywhere instead of walking, as I do in D.C., I technically should have eaten even less than I usually do instead of more.

The obsessiveness. I felt like I was being swallowed by it.

I knew I wasn’t strong enough to resist the usual eat-our-way-home car trip with Diana, where we chow on Auntie Anne’s pretzels (Diana) and Cinnabon cinnamon buns (me) and all sorts of other rest-stop grease. So I settled for deciding to stop eating once we hit New York Avenue on the way into D.C.

No eating once we hit the city limits.

I thought that knowing there was a finite end to the eating might make me feel more frantic, but it didn’t. Instead it sapped some of my desire to do it in the first place. I thought about how nice it would be not to go to bed really full this evening and not to wake up tomorrow sluggish but ravenous, both of which inevitably follow all the eating.

I concentrated on the feeling—where was the point that I could feel full but not sick? I decided I wanted only the frosting part of the Cinnabon, which you can actually order in a little cup for forty cents, so I must not be the only freak who likes that part best. Then Diana and I split cheese fries. At the third rest stop I looked at the convenience stores and the Burger King and the TCBY and didn’t see a thing I felt like eating.

I felt empty, almost. I’m so used to the franticness and the panic when it comes to food, so used to those feelings blotting out everything else, that I literally didn’t know what to do with myself. Then the joy took over. I kept looking at different foods and thinking:
Is it possible that I really don’t want
to eat that?
It was like discovering I had some sort of magical ability, and I had to keep testing to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. I didn’t eat for the rest of the car ride.

Today—four days after I got back from New Jersey, which is four days back on track—my friend Cindy had a dinner party.
I can do this
, I thought before I went, but really I wasn’t so sure. I debated whether I should try to starve all day and leave as many calories as possible for dinner or follow the old diet canard that you’re not supposed to arrive hungry—you should have a filling, healthy snack beforehand. The supposedly tried-and-true rarely works for

Month 6 (June)

95

me—I always eat my snack thinking there’s probably going to be something at the party I’d rather eat. And of course—God forbid I should think positively—I’m convinced I’m going to screw up anyway, so shouldn’t I skip the snack and save the calories as a buffer?

For once, though, I wasn’t stressed out before I even got to the party. This was because things in my closet actually fit, and I wasn’t throwing everything on the bed, looking desperately for the only pair of black pants that actually fit (and wondering if anyone would notice that I’d worn them about four times in the past week).

Though I’d already gone running, I decided to walk to Cindy’s. It’s a good half-hour walk uphill that I figured should be worth at least an extra something-bad-I’m-going-to-eat. It made me sad—sad for myself—that on the way I passed a good dozen places where in past years I had bought ingredients for a binge. Only six months ago I’d probably have been bingeing as I walked, the fear that I might not be able to eat everything I wanted at the dinner driving me to arrive at the party stuffed but still frantic for more.

On the walk it also occurred to me that I was nervous about the party.

Yes, I’d been to loads of other parties in the past few months, but not a dinner party that wasn’t at a restaurant (for as much as restaurants trouble me, at least you can attempt to order what you want without having to worry that you’re offending the hostess by not eating the potatoes au gratin). I was nervous about this party not just because of what I might eat but because I was literally not sure what to do with myself—how to occupy the time. I’ve spent so much of parties past trying both to concentrate on the conversation
and
figure out how I could eat what I wanted without anyone’s noticing—wondering if anyone would comment if I took a second or third piece of Brie
en
croute
—that now, as at the rest stop when I didn’t want to eat, I was at a loss.

For the first hour of the party, I focused intently on the conversation.

Every time my mind began to wander to food, I’d pause and bring it back.

When I finally braved the buffet, I started out slowly. Chicken and papaya and rice, the least diet-damaging dish I could find. I felt pleased with myself, almost smug. And whenever I get too confident that I know exactly what I’m doing, inevitably that’s when I screw up. Lulled by a couple of glasses of wine and some comments about how good I looked, I figured I could have a bit of Brie and maybe some cheesecake. But soon all the comments about how good this cake or that paella was drove me back over to survey the buffet, where I had more Brie and a sliver of chocolate cake. Then more slivers. I should have just taken a piece and sat down and eaten it properly—savored

96

The Weight-Loss Diaries

it—but I couldn’t. Where, I wondered, is the diet tipping point—the line where you think about food just enough to get it right but not so much that you’re obsessed?

Soon I was feeling a bit too full—a feeling that these days is paired with panic and a sense of impending doom. When I went to the bathroom—I’d drunk nearly an entire two-liter bottle of Diet Coke in an effort to stop eating—I could see the imprint of the button and zipper of my jeans on my stomach. Fat. Fat. Fat. There was a scale under the sink, and though I was wearing jeans and boots—and it was the end of the day and I should have known better—I couldn’t resist torturing myself.

It said I’d gained seven pounds. That I weighed 178 pounds instead of 171.

I got on the scale four times. The least I’d gained, this scale seemed to say, was six pounds. If I subtracted for jeans and shoes and lots of Diet Coke (wondered briefly if there was another full bottle of soda somewhere I could grab and weigh, just to be more precise), maybe I’d gained only two pounds?

Two and a half ?

This is why I don’t have a scale in my own bathroom.

Yes, I’m a wee bit obsessive, but in the light of morning even I’m not so crazy as to think I could possibly have gained seven pounds in one evening. That would be the equivalent of nearly twenty-five thousand calories over and above what my body needs, or more than seven entire cheesecakes. Two pounds would be seven thousand extra calories, which is, I suppose, possible, but . . . seven thousand calories is still a little more than two cheesecakes, or eleven personal pan pizzas. I
know
I didn’t eat that much. But still I can’t stop thinking about it.

To put myself out of my misery, I e-mailed Peeke. Her response: a phys-iology lesson. When I’m eating by Peeke’s rules, I’m not eating a lot after 5:00 p.m. and definitely no starches like breads, pasta, and rice. When I eat even just a little more than I normally do at night, I don’t efficiently burn up those calories, so they sit there. Carbs are the worst: it’s a biochemical requirement that you store four molecules of water for every one of carbohydrate. Therefore you put on disgusting amounts of water weight when you eat carbs. Which is what I did.

To pee out the weight—which is certainly preferable to having to work it off (what I’d have to do if I’d put on seven pounds of fat), Peeke said I had to eliminate starches totally for about forty-eight hours. Just protein, fruits, and vegetables.

Month 6 (June)

97

The moral of this story: eat in the evening and you’ll wear it the next morning. And for two days afterward.

For years I listened to my parents snipe at each other or just avoid each other and wondered when they’d get divorced. I wondered until the fights and the long silences and the retreats to opposite ends of the house became a part of everyday life, something I just worked around, like the one car window that couldn’t be rolled down or the toaster that required a couple of strategic bangs to make it work. I stopped wondering when, and now that the day has finally come, it’s caught me by surprise.

In typical understated Dad fashion—it really is a matter of life and death for the patients in his intensive care unit, and to him nothing else ever seems that dire—he mentioned the divorce as an aside when I called to ask him a quick question. I’d told him I was on deadline, and just as I was getting off the phone, he said, “Hang on a second.”

Just like that. “Hang on a second”—as if he had something on the tip of his tongue to tell me and he’d forgotten it.

Then he said that he’d gotten a job in San Francisco and that Mom

wasn’t going with him.

I didn’t have to ask what he meant. The tears started silently streaming.

I’m twenty-four years old, I don’t live with my parents, and they’ve already moved from my childhood home. I shouldn’t be so upset about the divorce, but I am.

Dad talked on and on, in the overly soothing tone that I’m sure he used to use when he worked at the hospital in Miami, when he had to discuss a patient’s imminent death with the family. I didn’t hear most of it. I was concentrating hard on not making any sound as I cried. I didn’t want him to hear me, because I didn’t want him to try to make it better. That would make it worse.

Nobody was moving out of the house in New Jersey right away. But

come January—six months from now—when Dad set off for San Francisco, Mom would go back to Florida. Almost thirty years of marriage—over, just like that.

I wanted to ask Dad what finally had pushed him over the edge—and I knew without even asking that it was he who had done it. Three things ran through my head. The first was a line near the beginning of Grace Paley’s

“Wants,” a short story I had liked in college: “In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never

98

The Weight-Loss Diaries

invited the Bertrams to dinner.” The second was Mom asking—I think when I was in third or fourth grade—how many of the kids in my class had divorced parents and seeming so proud that having still-married parents put me in the minority. The third was from Mom’s first brain surgery. Her best friend Bobbi from college had flown in from Israel and spent the night at the hospital with her. While Mom was in surgery, Diana and I asked Bobbi all sorts of questions about Mom and what she was like in college. We didn’t ask the one thing we wanted to know the most: if she died in surgery, did Bobbi think she would have been happy with the life she had had?

I’ll never forget one of the things Bobbi told us that day: that all Mom—

capable Mom, who had once worked as a social worker and run a thousand different volunteer projects—had ever really wanted was to get married and have children. I felt both relieved and guilty. Relieved that Mom had gotten at least some of what she wanted (even if, when she got it, it wasn’t what she thought it would be) and, if I was part of all she ever wanted, guilty that I had sometimes gotten so angry with her while she was sick. Diana and I occasionally tried to ease our guilt by wondering whether, since she hadn’t seemed to be able to care about anything during all those years, she also hadn’t been able to care about how we’d treated her. The thought never really made me feel any better.

This afternoon I cried while I finished a couple of items for my page in the opening section of the magazine. My page is supposed to be young and snappy and lighthearted, and I was feeling anything but.

I skipped a bar opening and went home, not sure what to do with myself.

I didn’t want to read or watch TV or talk to anyone or even eat. I suddenly realized what I wanted was to put on my headphones and just run and run and run until the sound of the music and the sound of my heartbeat drowned out all my thoughts.

Ran ten miles this morning! It sounded like a big deal until Juli, our running-group leader, asked for a show of hands from all of us who had just run our first ten-miler. Probably a dozen hands went up, and we high-fived and cheered.

I could barely hear what Juli said next: “When you’re done, ten miles will seem like a joke.”

Sixteen more miles on top of this?

Month 6 (June)

99

Mary and Abby groaned. I made a show of doing the same. I still haven’t told them I don’t think I’m going to be around to train for much longer. I don’t want to quit, but nor do I want to fail, and I’m pretty sure my body wasn’t exactly born to run, much less born to run 26.2 miles.

Today would have been my parents’ twenty-eighth wedding anniversary. I’ve never been so happy that I didn’t get my act together and have my card in the mail early. In years past, I’ve ended up having to FedEx or send it by second-day priority, because I always had so much trouble finding the damn card in the first place. After all, there’s hardly a Hallmark-approved (or even Shoebox-approved) card that says something like “Happy anniversary—hope you don’t spend too much of the day thinking back to 1971 and wondering what you were thinking.” Plus, there was always the chance that Dad would mostly ignore the anniversary, which would make Diana’s and my anniversary cards or flowers seem even more mournful, like “It’s a girl!” balloons that accidentally arrive at the hospital after the newborn baby has died.

It’s been three days since I found out about the divorce, and I’ve cried off and on, mostly for Mom. I’m pretty sure Dad will be fine, but Mom is sick, no matter how much we might pretend she’s OK. Her whole life these days has been him and us, and I don’t know what she’s going to do. She’s saying this has been coming for a long time, and she’s just sorry she didn’t ask him for a divorce first, but that’s Proud Mom talking, I’m sure of it.