The Weight-loss Diaries (22 page)

Peeke left a message for me in her great cathedral of a voice: “Don’t you dare ever give up on yourself—you’re doing great. Please, Courtney, nose to the grindstone and remember the regrouping you’re doing is the hardest of all.

You need to hold on now—it’s the sixth mile of the 10K. And you never give up!”

If that woman doesn’t have a contract for a motivational tape, she will soon.

I e-mailed Peeke to say I thought the problem was that I’ve stretched the diet too much—like an elastic waistband you stretch and stretch until it sort of flops. I do stick to the diet she set out in the beginning—except when I don’t. I have a cookie and figure if I eat a little less for dinner it should even out. I have a few bites of pasta off someone else’s plate when we’re out to eat.

For lunch I’ll think,
How bad could it be to have a mozzarella and pesto sandwich for lunch just this once?
And because I’m not really keeping the food journals, and because these aren’t binges, I conveniently forget about the extras.

So I’ve decided I need to go totally back to basics for a while. Back to everything Peeke told me on Day 1. Cereal and banana for breakfast. Boca Burgers or other protein on good bread with lots of veggies for lunch. Noth-

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ing fancy. Few or no choices. I did it at the beginning—I ought to be able to do it now.

Except it’s just so tempting to have a bit of the chocolate on the lunch table or that cookie instead of my proper snack and say: tomorrow. I’ll start tomorrow.

Feel like a huge weight has been lifted. I’ve been on this diet for more than seven months, and today was the first day I actually asked for help. I didn’t make excuses or lie about why I didn’t want to go for pizza with Mary. I just took a deep breath and said, “I’ve been having a rough time with the diet, and I’d like to go out, but I don’t want to eat there.”

It’s such a small thing, but it’s something I haven’t been able to do before.

I haven’t wanted to call attention to myself and what I eat—I think because, as silly as it sounds, I’ve always feared the impact it’s going to have on my social life. Eating is such a big part of life—dinners out, parties, brunches,

“let’s order Chinese and watch ‘Sex and the City’ ”—that the last thing I want to do is be the person everyone groans about. Like, “Oh, God, we can’t invite Courtney. We’ll never be able to find a restaurant she can eat at.” Or “Oh, God, is she going to sigh about the fat content of everything the way Katrina sighs about everything she can’t eat because it has gluten?” Everyone has shorthand for friends: “my friend who plays in a band” or “my friend who works at the Justice Department.” I’m usually “my friend who works at the
Washingtonian
” or “my friend the writer.” I definitely don’t want to be “my friend on the annoying diet.”

Mary didn’t blink—just asked where I’d feel comfortable going. I felt so free after that—and so safe. It’s not like she’s going to physically restrain me from bakeries, but at least for today there was no lying, no pretending everything was fine when my body feels like it’s splintering from the tug-of-war between eating everything and resisting. My comment about not feeling like I could go for pizza touched off a long talk about food and weight (though not bingeing, which seems too messed up to tell anyone about). Food and weight are not anything Mary and I have ever really talked about, apart from Mary’s girlie “I feel foul,” which she says whenever she feels like she’s eaten a lot. It’s what she says instead of “I feel fat”—a phrase I have never used, even once, because to me it would be like saying I have brown eyes. It’s a fact so immutable it doesn’t require mentioning.

Sitting outside tonight at dinner, I felt like—I never thought these words would come out of my mouth—it was too hot to eat much of anything, even

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the fresh fruit I had ordered. The whole time we sat there—a good couple of hours—I could barely focus on the conversation. I kept thinking:
Am I
really not hungry? Is that possible?
And I wasn’t. Who knows? Maybe someday I
will
be one of those people who push away a chocolate dessert after three bites because it’s too rich.

Finished my first big race: the Annapolis ten-miler. It’s infamous for being a hilly killer—up and down these steep bridges—which I didn’t learn until long after I’d signed up. And I finished—nowhere near last—in 1:45. Less-than-ten-minute miles! I did the last mile in 8:15, so I wasn’t even close to beat from running the previous nine.

I was so nervous about this race you’d think I’d never finished that 8K or eighteen-mile training run. Mary said my nerves were part of my inability to give myself credit for anything. I couldn’t seem to explain that there was something about a ten-mile race that just seemed almost overconfident on my part—a statement that I’m a runner and not just someone playing at it. Loads of people sign up for 8Ks and 10Ks, but ten-mile races attract a different—

and serious—crowd.

The people at the expo—where you pick up your race packet and where every running-related company on the planet tries to sell you stuff—looked like real runners. What does a real runner look like? Well, thin. I wondered if people thought I was the (171-pound, size 12, giant of a) friend coming along to lend her friends support—if they thought I was the person who’d be holding Mary’s and Abby’s stuff and cheering them while they ran.

Call from the young entrepreneur. He left a message, not saying a word about the story other than that he had seen it, and so now that it was done, if I didn’t want to talk to him, I’d have to give an excuse other than that I was writing about him. I wasn’t especially interested, but now that he is, well. . . .

One thing that worries me is that he’s not exactly discreet—during the interview, he skewered half a dozen people he had to have guessed I also know. Makes me feel like I wouldn’t be a date—or whatever it is—so much as a scathing-anecdote-in-waiting.

I have run through stomachaches, knee pain, heat advisories, and rain. But today I hit a wall.

It was just a ten-mile run—and by now, I really can say “
just
a ten-mile run”—around the monuments, but it seemed like four marathons. My body felt like lead. I cried through the last three miles, tears burning my eyes as

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they mixed with sweat. I cried not just because moving my body felt like moving a rusted, badly put-together robot but because I was sure this was really it. No matter how much I want this, my body has realized what my mind has always known: I can’t.

Mary reminded me that everybody has bad runs—hadn’t Juli told us

that? I want to believe her. I want to believe in myself. But today brought back every doubt. Yes, normal people have bad runs and then are fine the next week. But I am sure I am not “normal.” Just eight months ago, I had barely run so much as a mile.

I don’t want to go to the next training session—don’t want what I’m sure I’ll get: confirmation that I can’t finish. But I don’t want to quit, either. I’m so close. And I’m surprising even myself with how badly I want this. I make silent promises that have nothing to do with food or weight:
I will not gossip.

I will try harder to get along with my sister. I will not claim not to have gotten
an e-mail when in fact I’ve deliberately deleted it. Just please, please let me have
this one thing
.

Even if Saturday’s training session is OK, I can’t help worrying:
What if
my next “bad run” is the marathon?

Month 9 (September)

The bad news: no net change in my weight for the second month in a row.

The good news—unrelated to weight—is that I am not totally paranoid.

Knew the guy in line at the grocery store behind me was staring and couldn’t figure out why. My zipper wasn’t unzipped. I was wearing black, so there couldn’t be any embarrassing stains on my pants. I wasn’t on a binge, so there was nothing especially noteworthy about my groceries: Boca Burgers, Egg Beaters, mushrooms, bagged salad, grape tomatoes, low-fat shredded cheese, Special K, peaches. Got home to find a message from the guy on my machine. He had memorized my number when I gave it to the cashier (so she could log my order on my loyalty card). Wanted to call him back just to ask what about the method in which he had gotten my number was
not
creepy and stalkeresque, but decided to restrain myself. Wanted to call Mary and tell her, but as crazy and vaguely scary as the episode is, I am also oddly, shamefully flattered by it.

Am I ever going to have a day when I wake up and think,
Gee, I look fabulous today
? Forget the psychological benefits; it would definitely help me out with
Shape
. They’ve informed me I’ve not been taking nearly enough photos of myself to fill in the gaps between shoots. I’m supposed to be taking pictures every month, but without a set day to do it, I always put it off. It would be different if I woke up the odd morning and my skin was clear, my hair was falling at exactly the right angle, and I felt thin. But that never happens.

So I put off facing the camera, hoping tomorrow will be better.

Shape
still doesn’t know about the marathon, but they know from the monthly “workout schedules” I submit with the columns that I’ve been run-123

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ning at least three times a week and doing some smaller races. So now that I’ve become such a “runner girl,” as my
Shape
editor Maureen has taken to calling me,
Shape
wants authentic action shots of me at a race. Cynical me can’t help wondering if it’s because they don’t believe I actually do these races. I can’t really blame them, since I can hardly believe it myself.

The next race I have is the MS Half Marathon in a couple of weeks, which will be, at 13.1 miles, the longest race I’ve done yet. I know I’ve said this before every race, but I’m nervous about not finishing. It’ll be bad enough to deal with myself if I fail, let alone a photographer who’s supposed to be documenting my success.

E-mail from Maureen asking how I’ve managed to convince all these friends of mine to work out with me.

Her question made me consider how much losing weight has changed

even the people I choose to hang out with. I never used to have any friends who were much into fitness, and most of my old friends still aren’t. I think some of them are still adjusting to the new me, this alien creature who actually wants to go biking and try a ballet class. (Still haven’t gotten up the nerve for that last one—I keep picturing myself looking like Babar the elephant in a pink tutu.) I even wonder if some of them are resentful, the way you feel when your best single friend starts seriously dating someone and there’s some turbulence before your friendship reaches a new equilibrium.

It’s not that I don’t hang out with old friends anymore; it’s that I don’t see some of them as much because they’re not game to do all the sorts of active things I suddenly want to try. Recently, one of them said—a hint of ice in her voice—that she hadn’t seen me in forever because I was always out “running a marathon.” I ended up staying up incredibly late—just like old times—

to chat with her because I felt guilty, then had a hard time getting up for the gym, which made me feel resentful. Feel like I just can’t win.

Speaking of old friends: one of the things I want to do this weekend—Labor Day weekend, when an old college friend is coming to visit—is try a body-sculpting class I’ve heard is fantastic. Despite my best efforts to like lifting weights, I still would rather run for hours than do a set of chest presses, so I figure a class might help.

I haven’t seen Bonnie in two years, and I’ve spoken to her only sporadi-cally since then. I could tell she was weirded out when I told her I had a ten-

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mile run Saturday morning I couldn’t miss and that because of it I wouldn’t be able to stay out very late on Friday night. Considering that our college friendship involved more dessert than I care to think about, and that the last time I mentioned running she told me she didn’t even own a pair of sneakers, I shouldn’t have been surprised that there was a long silence from her end.

Finally she said, “Well, if that’s what you have to do.” So—despite her frequent comments that she wants to lose fifteen pounds—I’m not optimistic that she’ll want to join me for the class, and I know I’ll feel guilty about leaving her to go on my own.

I know what the standard diet advice about this would be: I’m supposed to teach my friend about my eating/exercise program and make sure she understands how important it is to me (because it is, isn’t it?). But where’s the line between being a good host/wanting her to have a nice time and then doing what I need for myself ? I know what the diet experts would say about that, too: do you have to have food to have a nice time? Well, no. But when I haven’t seen a friend in a couple of years, it seems more than a bit rude to say, “I’ve got to go run Saturday morning, which means I won’t be much fun Friday night, and by the way, remember those two or three restaurants you’ve been wanting to try? Well, I don’t want to go to them because it’s hard for me to stay on a diet there.” I want to compromise and say, “OK, let’s go to whatever restaurant you want. But for me to do that without being totally, totally neurotic (as opposed to just sort of neurotic), I need to go work out.”

As Shari says, if you decide to eat something inappropriate—like a “big old sit-down fancy schmancy,” as she calls it—you must have a plan for how you will physically offset the calorie intake with running, biking, lifting, etc., that day. If that means that you have to run twice that day, so be it.

The amount of working out I need to do to offset the number of calories Bonnie and I might eat—one of the restaurants is Southern, with nary a vegetable that isn’t fried—well, that’s a lot of working out. So which is worse: disappearing for hours to work out so we can eat where she wants or not disappearing for hours but then being much more difficult when it comes to restaurant choices? I know, I know: how about moderation—a little working out and a little “bad” food? Two problems with that: one, I’ve been struggling to get (and stay) on track these days, what with not losing any weight and the constant struggle not to binge. So even just a couple of bites of something I don’t normally (translation: shouldn’t) eat can be dangerous. Two, the problem with going out to dinner with just one other person is that, especially