The Weight-loss Diaries (2 page)

In a way, it did.

I kept up the gym workouts through November. Some weeks I’d go just once or twice, other weeks four or five times. In retrospect, I realize it was my first success with moderation—I was used to doing all five workouts (all no less than one hour) per week or not doing anything at all. My food—and weight—stayed pretty much the same, though, except occasionally I’d give up a brownie here or there and hope that my minor calorie savings would magically melt away some pounds.

One day in early December 1998—just as I was wondering how I would possibly keep up my exercise routine through the holidays—Leslie Milk called me into her office. You’ve probably heard of the concept of “office spouses”—

well, Leslie is my office mom. She tells me when I look like I haven’t gotten enough sleep, warns me when there’s an “occasion for sin” (like a birthday

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cake), and always knows where to shop. A serial dieter for much of her life, Leslie had road tested various regimens on the pages of
Washingtonian
. So of course I’d told her about my gym-going routine. She also wrote occasionally for a fitness magazine called
Shape
, and she knew they had a story idea in search of a young writer—or really, a writer-dieter. They wanted someone who already was motivated on her own to lose weight—someone, Leslie thought, like the already gym-going me.

They wanted this woman to keep a very public weight-loss diary about what the struggle was really like. They also wanted to photograph her.

They were crazy.

Then I stopped to consider. Writing for a magazine—in other words, making a public commitment to losing weight—might give me the push to actually finish what I had started so many times. In the back of my mind, I also hoped that doing this publicly might stop me from bingeing—I’d be way too embarrassed if I ever had to admit in print how much I could sometimes eat.

When the columns began appearing, people wrote or even came up to

me on the street to congratulate me and thank me for what they usually called

“bravery” in writing about myself and my weight. But it wasn’t bravery—it was mostly my own, um, fatheadedness. At the time I agreed to write the columns, I didn’t know anyone who read
Shape
, because it wasn’t something I admitted
I
did. I’d read the success stories while waiting in line at the grocery store, and—lured by the promises of a “bikini body in four weeks”—

I’d shove the magazine under the breakfast cereal and Lean Cuisines as if it were a trashy novel and hope the cashier wouldn’t comment: what was a fat girl like me doing buying a magazine like that?

So when
Shape
asked me to write about myself, I figured it could be great.

I’d get paid to lose weight and no one would ever have to know.

Ha.

Shape
has a circulation of 1.6 million, and I didn’t find out until after the first column hit print that even people in my immediate circle of friends read the magazine. I guess I never knew because
Shape
just wasn’t something that demanded discussion, like a really great article in last week’s
New Yorker
.

Either you followed the workouts or you didn’t, but unless there was news of a way you could lie on your couch and still get that bikini body in four weeks or less, you rarely needed to bring up what you’d read at lunch the next day.

In the year of writing for
Shape
, I was supposed to become the “after”

picture.
Shape
would set me up with a doctor and a nutritionist (but not, as most people assumed, a personal trainer, because a trainer would remove the

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story from the realm of “you can do this” and into the celebrity realm of

“well, I could be thin, too, if I had a low-fat chef and a personal trainer”).

And off I’d go to the land of women who never have to worry about whether the Gap’s size XL shirt will fit and whether anyone they knew will see them walking into Lane Bryant.

In the beginning, all went according to script. I lost ten pounds the first month, five in the first half of the second. Then it finally happened. I spent so much time worrying and waiting and wondering when it would happen, and it did. “It” being a pig-out nearly two months into the diet. I didn’t gain any weight from it, but I didn’t escape other consequences. The need to overeat—to binge—slowly became one I couldn’t ignore. Nor could I control it.

Before long, I finally gained weight from the bingeing: two pounds. I’d already lost enough that month to show a net loss in print, but I began to panic.

My attempt at damage control did more damage. As a veteran of starvation diets, I figured I could easily get rid of the two pounds. So I bumped up the workouts and skimped on a few meals. In doing so, I started a binge/

starve cycle that would go on for months as I binged, freaked out that I had a
Shape
photo shoot or column deadline coming up, tried to starve, and then ended up bingeing again.

One of the reasons I had signed on with
Shape
was that I’d hoped the pressure of losing weight in public would help me kick the bingeing habit I’d been fighting all my life. Instead, it kicked it into high gear. I was so ashamed of how much I ate—and so terrified of being seen as a failure—that I couldn’t admit my slipups to anyone, much less in print. No one in magazine success stories ever seemed to mess up—they started at the beginning and then didn’t stop until suddenly they were at goal weight: a stunning size 6 with abs of steel. No one in success stories went from one day eating grilled chicken and salad to eating, as I did one day in the space of a half hour, two packages of Hostess cupcakes, an iced cinnamon-apple roll, a Chunky bar, a piece of corn bread, one blueberry muffin, one chocolate-chip muffin, and two can-noli. Obviously, I thought, there must be something wrong with me. Besides,
Shape
had already objected that some of my columns were too negative, too depressing, that I was making losing weight sound too difficult. I couldn’t imagine what they’d say if I wrote about gaining weight. Talk about a downer.

The binges were occasional at first but soon grew so frequent I couldn’t starve or exercise enough to offset them.

Late one night, I finally wrote to my editor about gaining weight, about how terrifying it was to have worked this hard and now to feel myself getting fatter by the hour. I sent the e-mail off and spent a sleepless night sit-

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ting on my couch, watching the shadows creep across my apartment. I tortured myself with nightmarish scenarios of my being fired, not to mention what sorts of things
Shape
might write in the magazine to explain why they were yanking the column. (Maybe an editors’ note where they explained that I’d eaten myself out of a job? Don’t think Grandma’s going to be passing
that
article around the condominium.) I remembered joking with a journalist friend when I started the project that, given the pathetic success rate of most dieters, it actually would be easier to identify with the story if I didn’t lose weight. But I didn’t want to be an accurate representation of reality—I just wanted to be thin.

After some debate—and a little toning down of my self-flagellation—

Shape
published what I’d privately dubbed my weight-gain diary. I was overwhelmed by the response. Readers had been pouring out their tales of frustration to me since the beginning, but never like this. My
Shape
e-mail account overflowed in forty-eight hours. People sent cards and words of encouragement and empathy and thanks for “being real,” as more than one woman wrote. I had to get caller ID because so many tracked down my home number.

The truth had set me free from everything except the bingeing. The one month where I gained weight became two, then three. My year contract with
Shape
was extended to two. I lost a couple of pounds, then gained them back plus more. I began to cringe at the photos of me appearing in print and wondered if I’d finish the project heavier than when I started. Then suddenly I’d be filled with fresh resolve, and I’d lose some more weight.

Though I often cursed
Shape
for stressing me out about losing weight, the blessing was that when I was finally ready to admit I needed help—serious help—with the bingeing, I knew where to get it. I began consulting with Shari Frishett, a therapist who worked in the office of Dr. Pamela Peeke, the doctor of internal medicine and nutrition researcher
Shape
had set me up with. For about eight months of the second year, my weight yo-yoed crazily while I worked on my head. What I discovered was this: while I’d spent a pile of time learning about carbs and cardio, weight lifting, and planning, what I really needed to know was that being overweight has little to do with food.

Of course, food is what packed the pounds on, but when you’ve got more than fifteen or twenty pounds to take off, the food is being used to replace
something
.

In my case, I ate because I couldn’t stand up for myself (eating, for example, out of exhaustion, because I felt I couldn’t say no to anyone); because I

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couldn’t tell people (even my family) how I felt; because I didn’t really know any way to be nice to myself besides white cake with big buttercream flowers. Being overweight, for me, was about demands that were too high and resources that were too low. Why did I choose to eat instead of, say, drink or smoke or do drugs? I don’t remember ever actively choosing eating over anything else, but I was a good kid who followed the rules, and eating was a relatively safe way to escape uncomfortable feelings. I couldn’t show up for school or work drunk or stoned, but I could definitely show up full.

When I dreamed of writing a book, it was always a novel or maybe a histor-ical biography, never an account of what I considered some of my darkest secrets: my weight (the actual number), my body image, and my dysfunctional relationship with food. Though my weight consumed my thoughts, there was no evidence of that in my professional life (I’d never written about it before
Shape
) or, I hoped, in my personal life.

Of course, I literally wore the consequences of my obsession—extra weight—but I worked so hard to hide any other evidence: the cupcake wrappers, the predinner dinners so I could eat like a “normal person” in public, the constant mental recalculating of calories to figure out whether I could have another roll at a restaurant.

It was only when some of the more painful columns began to hit print that I found out how good at deception I’d been. After reading a few paragraphs about my fear of restaurant eating, one of my most perceptive friends called and said, “I’ve never thought of you as anyone but a person who always has someplace important to go and something funny to say. I had no idea that you thought about any of these things as much as you do.” She paused and added, “Besides, you’re always out. How do you even have time to binge, much less obsess about all this?”

Another friend, one of my closest, said she couldn’t believe the divide between the side of myself I presented in public—“someone who really has her shit together”—and the sad, angry, frustrated side she glimpsed in the columns. I didn’t know what the traditional image was of someone who had as tortured a relationship with food as I had—maybe someone who sat home every night waiting for the phone to ring or who talked about food all day—

but apparently I did not fit it. I wasn’t relieved. I had always wondered whether, if my friends knew about the bingeing and the secrecy, we’d have become friends in the first place. After seeing their reactions to the columns, I wondered it more than ever. I found myself asking how well you can ever

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really know another person. I can be a cynic and a harsh judge, but suddenly I had a fresh sympathy for—and curiosity about—nearly everyone I met. For a while, I would actively wonder: if I had hidden everything so well, what might be hiding under, say, the annoying girl next door’s polished but frosty blonde exterior?

I also was shocked by how many people—both friends and (thin)

strangers—I had always assumed had a normal relationship with food would venture an offhand comment that they saw bits of themselves in my columns.

Maybe not as extreme, but they, too, had thoughts of fishing half-eaten candy bars out of the garbage or watching other people at the table to see if anybody else took a third slice of pizza before doing it themselves. A thin friend called one afternoon, seeming edgy. After a long conversation about nothing in particular, she finally said, “Listen, I need to ask. What is a binge?

Is it eating four slices of cake? Because I’ve definitely done that.”

During the two years I wrote for
Shape
, I had the same love-hate relationship with fitness books and magazines I’ve always had. It’s the success stories, especially, that get to me. The smiling faces in their sleeveless tops and slim-fitting pants taunt me. I read every word, yet I don’t feel as though I understand anything. I’ve had a million “I’ve had it with my fat self ” moments, I want to yell at them, so what made the one that kicked you into gear different? Did you ever mess up? How did you not give up hope when you looked at the calendar and saw you had a friend’s birthday party and then a weekend away and four lunches out? Did you ever just flat-out want to eat because you were so damn sick of thinking about what you could and couldn’t eat that you thought you’d go mad? And did you ever wonder deep down if all of this—planning and calculating and organizing and exercising and denying—

was worth the effort?

Shape
gave me a page for the column, which translated to about 450

words a month. That was about enough to sketch out a few major themes about planning meals or how crummy it felt to gain weight. It was not enough to do what I really wanted, which was what I’d been looking for and hoping for myself in the hundreds of diet books and articles I’d read over the years.

I wanted to read something honest about what it felt like, day in and day out, to try to lose a significant amount of weight. When you’re trying to diet, some days you need cheerleading. Other days you need sympathy. Reasons why you shouldn’t eat. Reassurance that you’re not the only one who’s ever felt this way or eaten this much. (And then there are the days you really do need an ice-