The Weight-loss Diaries (21 page)

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

pictures: one of me sitting in a rowboat and one that’s a fairly tight shot of my face. The size of my chin in the second picture is horrifying, but at least I got a good laugh out of it. If readers only knew that picture was from an out-of-control party and what I’m holding in my hands is a Jell-O shot.

(Now, that would be an ad for healthy living.) There’s also a picture of a hand writing in a diary.

Worse than the pictures, I think, is the text. My weight in print—something I’ve lied about on my driver’s license, my gym membership application, and everywhere else but the column—is possibly more horrific than my face.

I cannot believe I actually wrote about Grandma calling me “as big as a house” and my fear of walking up to men at parties. Cannot believe I wrote these amazingly personal things, and now they are in actual print. I guess the whole idea that the column wouldn’t appear until a good eight or nine months after I started lulled me into a false sense of security—like, “Oh, that’s not for ages. Somehow I’ll deal with it when the time comes.”

Then again, I have long believed no one actually reads most magazines—

they just look at the pictures and headlines. I mean, why else am I always having to deal with the annoying comment, “I saw your article in such-and-such magazine”? I always want to answer, “Yeah? So did you read it?”

I showed the article to two friends at work. They didn’t make any comments about what I looked like or how it compares to how I look now. They didn’t say a word about the actual words. Instead, one asked if that was my hand holding the pen in the picture of a hand writing in the diary, and the other asked if that was my handwriting.

Yesterday Diana decided she wanted to try running and so came with me. It was definitely novel for
me
to be the fit one: I was running along just fine, and after ten minutes she was struggling. Every couple of minutes it was, “How long are we going to go? How long have we been going for?” Which I don’t tend to think about—I just run my normal route and worry about the time only on “speed” days, those days once every couple of weeks when I’m feeling inspired and decide to add in some sprints. Diana said something about having eaten a lot that day and feeling full, so she quit after about fifteen minutes and headed home. I immediately broke into a sprint.

I’m going to run the marathon!

Or at least, I’m going to try, though I’m still not saying anything to
Shape
about it. I don’t want the extra pressure, and I want it to be a corner of my life that’s just mine—not for public consumption.

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I decided to go ahead and try to run after not only surviving today’s eighteen-miler but even feeling good at the end. Felt bizarrely like I could have gone farther and—is it possible?—faster.

My confidence in my ability to do this is still pretty shaky. (I’d say “my confidence in my athletic ability,” except I still can’t use the word
athletic
to apply to myself.) And ever since last month, when I had those few days of eating whatever I wanted after I’d gained a pound, I’ve felt almost perpetually on the brink of a binge. I haven’t given in yet, but the fear that I’m going to lose control over food doesn’t do much for my faith in myself.

But I have run eighteen miles, and now, somehow, it’s a relief to admit: I’m going to do everything I can to cross that finish line, and if I can’t, it won’t be because I haven’t tried. At the same time, it’s scary. There have been things I wanted badly—admission to a seminar with a hotshot professor or a job—

but other people had much of the control over those. With the marathon it’s totally up to me.

An old male friend of mine used to say I had to be hit over the head to pick up on the idea that anyone was flirting with me. Today it was so blatant that even I got the message.

I was interviewing a young entrepreneur for a story, and he was over the top, saying that it wasn’t fair of the magazine to send somebody this cute(!) to interview him. He was cute himself, if arrogant. He told me I should come to New York for his thirtieth birthday party. Later he asked if I’d go with him to a black-tie dinner he had to attend in a couple of weeks.

I kept changing the topic back to the interview, trying not to blush and wondering if this was a stunt he was pulling to ensure I’d write a flattering story about him.

Finally I said, “You do realize this is all on the record.”

“You wouldn’t do that to me,” he said and winked.

“Only because I only have 250 words I wouldn’t,” I answered.

The rest of the interview proceeded as normally as I suppose it could have. He called later in the afternoon and left a voice mail. So I e-mailed him, saying I didn’t feel comfortable talking to him until after the story goes to press next week. We’ll see if he calls again after that.

Apparently I’m looking good enough that
Shape
has asked for a goal weight—

the number at which they’ll be able officially to declare this project a success.

But Peeke is very resistant to the idea of a goal weight for me, somebody with a lifelong history of being overweight, because it’s impossible to say where my

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body will be comfortable. It has never stayed at one weight for very long.

Peeke would much prefer to focus on bringing down my body fat percentage, by both losing weight and upping muscle.

A good body fat percentage for me, Peeke says, is 20 percent. I don’t know what I started at, though Peeke estimated 34 percent. Currently I’m at 169 pounds and 24 percent, which means I need to lose about 7 more pounds of pure fat to get to 20 percent. Except you don’t lose only fat (you lose water and sometimes muscle), so it’ll probably be a bit more on the scale—maybe 10 pounds or so.

If only when—or if—I finish losing weight I’ll be done thinking about weighing and measuring and worrying. But I never will be.

Dad is coming to town for a conference—without Mom, of course. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. I don’t like sitting there while Dad and Diana discuss the fine points of cars they like and—now that Diana has a Web job—

go on and on about various computer- and Internet-related things. I often feel like the third wheel on outings with Dad and Diana, probably because they’re so much closer with each other than I am with either of them. And ever since Diana told me she and Dad once had a conversation that involved something about how I’m too smart to have the job I have and write about the sometimes frivolous things I do . . . well, I just wonder what other things about me they’ve discussed.

Instead of waiting for the inevitable discussion/argument with Diana about what to do with Dad, I suggested to him directly that we go bike riding on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Dad biked across the United States as a kid (something that, I’ve often teased him, makes him sound a lot cooler than the Dad I know), so I knew he’d probably like the idea, and he did. And I knew that if Dad were into it, Diana wouldn’t want to be the one to spoil it.

I didn’t even really realize it until the words
bike ride
popped out of my mouth that I was actually suggesting we do something active—and suggesting it as though it was a totally normal thing.

I know Dad’s on the phone with Diana now. I wonder which one of them brought up first how unlike me my suggestion was.

I joked to Mary that one of the reasons I’d suggested a bike ride was that it would be impossible for Dad, Diana, and me to talk much as we rode single file, wind whipping. In the car on the way to the shore, I couldn’t wait for the silence. Dad talked a lot about the divorce, repeatedly referring to Mom as “Mommy,” as if Diana and I were four years old.

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I know he often wishes we were—these days he talks a lot about how sorry he is not to have been around much while we were small. But he seems to want it both ways—that we be little kids
and
adults. In the same

“Mommy” conversation, he started talking about what he wanted in a “mate,”

as he called it. I was afraid that if I said anything about the appropriateness of the topic, Diana would glare at me and I’d snap back and we’d squabble.

Then Dad would get annoyed and we’d all sit in stony silence—all before we’d even been together for forty-five minutes. But just as I was wondering if Diana wasn’t a bit uncomfortable, too—Mom and Dad aren’t even divorced yet, for heaven’s sake—she said, “Dad, I don’t really think we should talk about this. Or about Mom.”

Which made conversation a bit stilted—all roads leading to the topic we weren’t supposed to be discussing. On the bike ride itself, I couldn’t help thinking guiltily that if Mom were here, there was no way we’d be here.

Mom circles the parking lot for the spot closest to the door. She does not move any more than necessary.

My food problems began when we stopped for lunch. There was abso-

lutely nothing on the menu that wasn’t fried or mayonnaisey, and the fact that I haven’t lost any weight despite having behaved on the food front
and
running miles and miles—well, it made me feel frantic. I had a crab cake sandwich—I think the bread was buttered, too—without the fries and was still hungry when I was done. The hunger—combined with knowing I was going to be with Dad and Diana all day and that if I were to say I needed a snack at 3:00, Dad would probably say we should get it later—made me anxious.

I’ve never been able to explain—not to my family, not to anyone—that I can’t wait. I’m sure part of it is that being told when I can eat or when we’re going to eat reminds me of being a kid, of knowing that I was going to have to sneak food when Mom wasn’t looking, because I probably couldn’t eat all I wanted when she was.

I didn’t want to say I was still hungry after lunch, because then Dad would suggest dessert and Diana would get annoyed when I said I didn’t want any, and I’d get so frustrated with
that
that I’d probably eat.

Eat. It’s still my knee-jerk reaction to everything.

We got back on our bikes, and I actually forgot about my hunger for a while. It was a clear summer day, I wasn’t at work, I had lost thirty-five pounds over the past seven and a half months, and there were a zillion things in the upcoming months I was looking forward to. Life seemed pretty good.

But in the car on the way home, we stopped at a huge gourmet food store.

Cookies and chocolate and cakes everywhere.

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I didn’t have to consider what I’d write in my food journals—aka how I’d explain this to Peeke—since lately the journals have become more and more sporadic. I’ve been doing so well—or so everyone thinks—that no one even asks for them anymore.

I pushed thoughts of what I might gain out of my head. I wanted

everything.

I knew I could probably buy one thing in front of Dad and Diana, but what if what I bought wasn’t a single serving and I wanted the whole box?

And what if I had one bite of whatever it was and decided it wasn’t really what I wanted? They would never understand that I had to throw it out and get something else. And what if that wasn’t the right thing? And what if they bought something and I wanted more of it than was normal? I feared having to explain myself. If I were thinking rationally, I would have considered that I’ve lost thirty-five pounds and therefore should have been able to brush off any questions from them by saying I knew what I was doing. If I were thinking rationally, I would have considered that they might not question my eating at all, because they’d be eating themselves. But on the brink of a binge I don’t think rationally. All I think is that I’ve got to get what I want, and I’ve got to get it without anyone I know seeing me.

I ended up claiming I was going to the bathroom and then going to a distant cash register—hidden from view by hundreds of jars of marinades—and buying a package of chocolate-covered raisins. Not really what I wanted, but my rationale was simple: (1) They were among the first things I saw. (2) The package was small enough to shove in my bag. (3) The raisins themselves were small enough that I could sit in the back seat of the car and eat them covertly—popping a few into my mouth while ducking my head and pretending to rummage for something in the depths of my bag. (4) Unlike with chocolate-covered nuts, my breath wouldn’t really smell from raisins.

The fear of being caught plus the disgust that I was probably setting off a binge plus the fear that I was never going to lose more weight at this rate suddenly equaled wanting everything in the store. I knew the raisins weren’t going to be enough for the car trip home—once I finished them, I’d have to have something else.

But I couldn’t. I ate my chocolate-covered raisins, plus as many cookies as I dared from the box Dad and Diana had bought, and by the time we got back to D.C. I wanted dinner. Immediately. I knew that wasn’t going to happen, so I made an excuse that I needed to buy contact lens solution and ducked out to CVS, where I bought a Twix bar and a Kit Kat. I would have bought more, but I knew I couldn’t binge full out. I knew I couldn’t handle

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sitting through dinner at a restaurant feeling as sick as I do when I binge. Plus today is Thursday, and I’ve got a race—a race, not just a training run—on Sunday.

Gained two pounds. Two pounds! And I didn’t even have a major binge. The smaller I get, the less forgiving my body is of any extra bit of food. Call it the booby prize of weight loss.

Just so happened Peeke e-mailed today asking for an update, and I wasn’t in the mood to put on my usual happy face. I didn’t give all the details of my slipup—I said I’d eaten some junk food, including cookies and chocolate-covered raisins. I told her—flat out—that I was frustrated, that I didn’t know how I was going to make it through another day on this diet because I was starting to feel like I was starving, and that I was thinking about food more than I ever have in my life. It’s like a 1940s University of Minnesota starvation study I once read, where researchers restricted thirty-six men to half their usual food intake for six months. Thoughts of food consumed the men during that time: they read cookbooks, collected recipes, even hoarded kitchen utensils. I don’t like to cook, but lately I find myself reading the food sections of the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
and becoming unreasonably irritated that the
Times
doesn’t include calorie counts for its recipes.