The Weight-loss Diaries (25 page)

A woman at the cash machine asked me if I was the girl who wrote for
Shape
, then told me I was “beautiful.” No kidding. I wanted to ask her if she meant beautiful in the picture in this month’s column or beautiful now, after I’m not even sure how many weeks of bingeing and then halfhearted dieting. I wanted to drag this girl to the nearest grocery store to grab a copy of the magazine so I could quiz her about whether I look thinner now than I do in the picture. I wanted to ask her what she’d think if she knew that the girl who initially was so faithful to the diet she lost nineteen pounds in the first two months—such an amazing weight loss that
Shape
mentioned it on the cover—

now couldn’t seem to manage two days in a row on the diet, let alone two months. I wanted to tell her I needed help and to grill her for any little tip, the way the Ben-&-Jerry’s-eating
Shape
reader who calls me at home does.

But I didn’t. And thankfully, she didn’t ask me for advice herself, which these days makes me feel like a fraud.

I got my cash and went to meet Mary for a movie. The desire to binge is so strong that in the past few days I haven’t even been able to think about getting through an hour without doing it, because that amount of time seems like an eternity. I have to divide the hour into manageable pieces, the way you do when you have a project that seems too monstrous to be one line on your to-do list. So I concentrated on walking from the ATM to the Metro—a short walk where I pass three convenience stores, two bakeries, and three coffee bars—without stopping in any of them. When I got safely to the Metro, where eating is not allowed, I was grateful still to be living in D.C. and not London, where there are candy bar machines inside every Tube stop.

Still no official word from
Shape
about how the weight gain will be handled in print—or whether it will be. Between worrying about this and worrying about the marathon, all I want to do is eat.

The night before the marathon. I’m a mess. Erica, my best friend from college, has come down from New York to cheer me on, and we rented a movie

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I now can’t remember a thing about. I worry that I’ve eaten too much at the prerace pasta dinner. I worry that I’ll oversleep. I worry that it will rain. I worry that I won’t be able to find my friends and I’ll have to run alone. I worry that I’ll lose the computer chip on my sneaker and my race time won’t count.

I can’t sleep. I worry that I’m not getting any sleep.

I did it! I ran the marathon yesterday. Twenty-six-point-two miles. I even have the medal to prove it.

About 7:45 a.m. yesterday morning—which feels like a lifetime ago—

Mary, Abby, Stacy, Dagny, and I assembled by the Porta Potties. We worried that we’d miss the starting gun while waiting in line. We tried not to look at the red and yellow balloon arch that read “FINISH.” Shortly before 8:30, we joined more than twenty thousand other runners pushing and shoving down a grassy hill slippery with dew.

Great
, I thought.
I’ll break my ankle just before the starting line
.

Waiting for the gun, I had the caged-in feeling I sometimes get on airplanes: this is it—once we’re up in the air there’s no way to get off, even if we’re about to crash.

I could always just stop running. But I had vowed that after all the training I would crawl across the finish line if I had to.

All along, my family had seemed skeptical. They treated my training like a fad I would outgrow. I didn’t think they believed I could finish, and even though I wondered myself, I resented that they did.

I’d been told the marathon was really two races: the first twenty miles and then the last six. Much of the first twenty are a blur, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have made it through them without the crowds.

Probably the best piece of advice I got was to write my name across the front of my shirt so people could yell it as I ran by. I had no idea how thrilling it could be to have someone you’ve never met high-five you and yell your name until you were out of sight.

I remember funny things the spectators did, like blasting Gloria Gaynor’s

“I Will Survive” as we ran around the dreaded Haines Point, an infamously long and boring section of the route. There was a guy at mile 16 who made us laugh by beating on a drum and yelling “Run! Run! You’ve got great buns!”

(Another yelled, not so helpfully, “You only have a ten-miler left to go!”) A handful of women called out, “Just think—you can eat whatever you want when you’re done!” I didn’t smile at that.

Month 10 (October)

141

Passing through a water stop staffed by U.S. Marines, I had to laugh.
This
has to be the only athletic event on the planet
, I thought,
where the volunteers
are in better shape than the competitors
.

Much of the time I felt as though I were in a cheesy, this-is-your-life video: my friend Erica at mile 10 and points beyond, Alexy by the Reflecting Pool, Kelly somewhere in the middle. I got teary-eyed when an unexpected friend popped up, waving a sign or calling my name.

By the last six miles things had gotten so tense that Mary, Abby, and I were barely speaking. (We’d lost Stacy and Dagny along the way.)

The three of us had promised to finish together—something veterans had told us would be nearly impossible, because pace falls apart in the end—but Mary was having trouble with her knee.

Mary was about thirty feet behind Abby and me, with our friend Betina, who had come to run the last ten miles with us. I was torn about whether to slow my pace. Slowing down was painful by that point, and if I stopped running, I didn’t know if I could start again.

“Go ahead,” Mary said, but I knew she didn’t mean it. I made a last effort to slow down, but physically I couldn’t. At the prerace pasta dinner she’d been talking about us doing the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego next year, but she looked so annoyed I wondered if we’d even be speaking then.

Our strategy for getting through long runs had been to obsess about small things: not “How will I get through this?” but “I wish So-and-So would shut up” or “These shorts are beginning to chafe.”

To take my mind off the race, I decided to be annoyed that my parents hadn’t shown up. They were driving down from New Jersey to bring my sister her car anyway, so couldn’t they at least stop by? This is only the biggest thing I’ve ever done, I thought. If I get married, are they going to skip the wedding?

As we neared the end, all I could think was: “One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other.” I counted steps. I looked down, because however close the finish line was, it wasn’t close enough.

I’d heard horror stories about the last two-tenths of a mile uphill to the Iwo Jima Memorial, how the slight rise would feel like Mount Everest. I didn’t notice.

I saw friends who’d already finished, and somehow I picked up speed. As Abby and I crossed the finish line, I saw my parents and my sister. They’d shown up after all.

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“That was a great act of physical courage, ma’am,” said the Marine who put the medal around my neck. Another wrapped me in a Mylar blanket, and a third unlaced the computer chip from my shoe.

Abby cried. Mary collapsed against us. Someone took pictures. I was numb. So much of my life for the past six months had been about getting here, and now it was over.

At home the phone rang nonstop. “Running a marathon must be like having a baby,” I told everyone who called. “You need a while to forget about the pain before you can do it again.”

Erica and I went to Pizzeria Paradiso to celebrate. (Mom and Dad had gone back to New Jersey maybe twenty minutes after I crossed the finish line—Dad had to work.) Erica tried to make me wear my marathon finishers’ T-shirt, but I wouldn’t. So she settled for stopping everyone we passed who was wearing one and saying that I had done the marathon, too. She also told any person who so much as looked our way.

This morning at work I traded e-mails with Dagny, who’d loved every moment of the race.

“I still can’t believe I did it,” I wrote. “It all feels like a dream—until I try to go downstairs with what feel like eighty-year-old knees.

“But I am HOOKED. See you next year?”

Have not gotten on the scale for two weeks, making excuses (ran outside, overslept) to Peeke—and to myself—for why I haven’t gone to the gym on Wednesday mornings, weigh-in days. (If
Shape
is going to fire me—I still haven’t heard from them, and I’m too afraid to bring up the subject myself—

I don’t need to suffer more by looking at the number on the scale.) I don’t need the scale to tell me I’ve gained weight. Nothing fits. I ran around today looking for a dress for Halloween—Mary, Abby, and I decided to do the eighties high school prom girl thing: frosted pink lip gloss, poufy teased hair, and even poufier dresses. After going to six thrift stores—all full of last-minute costume seekers holding up random items of clothing and saying things like, “Do you think I could be a pirate in this?”—I finally found a shiny turquoise monstrosity. It looks more sixties than eighties, but I don’t care. The important thing is that it fits. It’s a size 16. All I can hope is that it really is true that clothing sizes were smaller in the sixties.

Month 11 (November)

The marathon is over, and so is a week ofpeople—mostly women—say-

ing, “Your body must still think it’s on mile 24—I bet you can eat whatever you want.”

So how did I celebrate that
and
the first day of November—or, as an overly cheery substitute teacher used to write on the blackboard, the first day of the rest of my life? I went to Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast with Mary—

who, a week after the marathon, is still occasionally frosty to me about it—

and Abby.

Two jelly doughnuts later, I headed to an appointment with Peeke, worrying that she would have some insidious way (a hair test? laser vision?) of telling where I had been for breakfast. I told her I had done the marathon, and she didn’t seem surprised.

“I always knew you were an athlete,” she said and hugged me.

Unfortunately, my haphazard eating—and that’s putting it nicely—has been neutralizing all of my “well-intentioned athletics,” as Peeke says. We didn’t discuss the how and why, which made me wonder if the reason for the face time (something I’ve had with her about three times in ten months) was so she could see just how bad I looked.

She announced she was calling off the
Shape
project for a month or two, and instead of being relieved, I just wanted to ask her to tell me honestly if it was because I looked like I’d gained weight.

Instead I nodded as she talked about how I needed to regroup—how I needed to use this as a learning experience (no matter how much I exercise, I
can’t
eat whatever I want) and how the diet was like mile 24 of the marathon (apparently I’ve now been upgraded from mile 5 of the 10K) and I just had to hang in there.

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

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

I do feel better after talking with her. Now if only I didn’t have to go off to London next week. It occurs to me that I have yet to manage a week’s vacation in my adult life without bingeing. But I’ve
got
to. My jeans are already on the verge of not fitting—I’m afraid to wash them for fear they’ll shrink the tiniest bit. I can’t afford more bingeing. I’m hoping that just knowing I’ve told Peeke I’ll e-mail her every day while I’m away will keep me in check.

Turns out Peeke can’t temporarily call off the
Shape
project, though to ease the pressure she got them to agree not to photograph me for a month. After all this dreading, what
Shape
said about my writing about gaining weight ended up being pretty similar to what they had said about writing about losing it: don’t be too negative. And end on a positive note.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC

Thankfully, despite boredom and frustration (and fear—this is a really bumpy flight; shouldn’t I be able to have cheesecake, even if it’s crappy airplane cheesecake, before I die?), I’ve managed to do OK on food. I wouldn’t let the flight attendants serve me dinner or breakfast—just ate my own food so I wouldn’t even have to consider what on the tray was appropriate. And I didn’t do my usual airport pig-out, which I’m sure was partly because I bumped into an old friend.

Frankly, I’m terrified about this trip. I know Elizabeth likes to eat late, eat dessert, and drink wine—all of which could be a disaster. I know there’s nothing I
have
to eat, but I loathe seeming so lame. And eating late is tough.

I guess I’ll carry the protein bars Peeke recommends (though they taste like dog food) in my bag and eat them in the bathroom if I have to.

Last night before I left, Diana came over. She does not fear flying, as I do, but she always insists on seeing me before I go on a trip, “just in case.”

She showed up at my door with her new cat, and as Fred started sharp-ening his claws on my mattress, Diana and I had one of these very honest conversations we have maybe once every couple of years. One minute she was looking at the clothes I had scattered around (but didn’t want to try on in front of her in case they didn’t fit), and the next I was spilling out that I thought I might have an eating disorder.

Earlier today, as I was poking around on eBay, looking for a guitar (yet another in a long line of things I think will make my life perfect), I snapped.

Month 11 (November)

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The guitar made me think of my fear of playing in public, which made me think about all the things I will never do while I am overweight. So I looked around some diet websites, searching for something inspirational. For months I’ve come across mentions of binge eating disorder and immediately dismissed it as yet another excuse for being overweight, like “I’m big boned” or

“I have a slow metabolism.” But today I felt desperate enough to think (hope?) that if enough people do something like what I do for it to have an official name, maybe it also has an official solution. So I clicked on a description of binge eating disorder from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders
on the American Psychiatric Association’s website: 1. Recurrent episodes of binge eating. An episode of binge eating is characterized by both of the following: