The Weight-loss Diaries (28 page)

Christmas Eve. I did indeed end up at the Matzo Ball. I’m going to be dining out on stories from it for at least a week or two. (If one more guy made a joke about how he was the nice Jewish doctor my grandmother was hoping for, I was going to start handing out her phone number directly.) Nearly two thousand people there, and let’s just say that if nearly every Jewish guy who’s single in the D.C. area was in that room, I’m in very big trouble. Mostly I skulked around, playing wingwoman for Betsy. It’s a role that I loathe but that seems to have been assigned cosmically to overweight women everywhere.

The best you can do is to be the funny sidekick, and tonight I wasn’t feeling up to it.

I wanted to go home, but Betsy made it clear that if I was a good friend, I wouldn’t desert her. So I stayed. When finally we left—she with four phone

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numbers—I got out of the cab a couple of blocks away from my house and went to CVS, looking for anything I thought might fill the empty hole.

I knew better than to think I’d find anything. But I bought some ice cream anyway.

The day after Christmas, one year anniversary of the diet. This time last year, I thought I’d be thin by now. I imagined my awe-inspiring “after” picture, where I’d wear something sleeveless and impossibly trendy, preferably from a shop I walk by nearly every day but only once have had the nerve to enter.

I thought my life would be perfect.

I certainly never thought that a year after I began the
Shape
project, I’d still be fighting a lot more than the last 10 pounds—I’m at 184, up 15 pounds from the summer—and that even with professional support I’d still be struggling.

Where will I be at this time next year? I hope not here.

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Month 13 (January, Again)

New Year’s Day 2000. In New York City. Despite all the dire millennial predictions, everything is still standing. Including me, even though I was so sick two days ago I didn’t think I’d be able to get out of bed, much less get up to New York and go to a party.

The flu—or whatever it was—came over me suddenly, virulently, five days ago. One minute I was packing for a New Year’s Eve trip to Lake Tahoe, and the next I thought I was going to collapse if I didn’t sit down. I lay down for a minute and then couldn’t get up again. When Diana came by with apple juice and water, I had to crawl to open the door.

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t even read because my eyes kept tearing and glassing over with fever. From my window I could hear the sounds of D.C. slowly emptying out, everyone heading to millennial New Year’s Eve celebrations. The phone was silent. All my friends were leaving town, and they thought I had left, too.

But I couldn’t. Diana had changed my airplane ticket to thirty-six hours later, in case whatever I had was a twenty-four-hour bug, then she left herself. On December 30 I was still running a fever of 103.2. I called Dad, who wasn’t especially freaked—I always run high fevers.

I felt sorrier and sorrier for myself, alone on New Year’s Eve. The only thing that cheered me up was thinking about how much weight I was probably losing, because I couldn’t eat and was only drinking water. Why ruin a perfect fast with apple juice?

On New Year’s Eve Day, when I was feeling slightly better and bemoan-ing that there wasn’t enough time to get out to Tahoe before New Year’s, my friend Keith called from New York to leave me a Happy New Year message.

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“What are you doing home?” he asked when I picked up. He insisted I couldn’t spend New Year’s alone in bed and that if I didn’t think I could get up to New York by myself, he’d come down on the train and get me.

Love my friends. Also loved that after five days of not eating, I could fit into my little black dress. Wondered if I could make it through to 2000 without eating a thing.

New year, old me. Ate my way through New Year’s Day, where I recovered from New Year’s Eve by watching endless amounts of E! and eating endless amounts of Chinese food with my friend Erica, whose apartment I stayed at in New York. Then ate my way through the train trip back to D.C.

Now am getting fatter by the minute. And freaking out because out of nowhere I got a call to come up to New York for a job interview at a magazine that has always intrigued me. Of immediate concern is what to wear—

something black, obviously, but not sure anything in my closet fits. (The first thing that popped into my head when I heard the word
interview
was: how much weight can I lose in two weeks?) Then there’s a much bigger issue: if I get this job, I’m not sure what I’ll do. I don’t want to move to New York just now—don’t think I could handle living somewhere that makes me feel circus-freak large, much less having to go out and talk to people, as my job would require. Anyway, if I could get it together to move to New York, shouldn’t I just move to London, which is where I really want to go?

I’m not sure I’m ready to move anywhere. I don’t want to start my life over somewhere looking like this. I want a fresh start—to leave myself behind. But I always get there first.

Mom found a two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood, only a couple of miles from our old house. Same zip code, totally different life.

Dad is en route to San Francisco.

They’re about as far as they can get from each other and still be in the same country. I picture them, little lit-up dots on the
Sleepless in Seattle
map.

Except
Sleepless in Seattle
has a happy ending.

You stress and stress and stress about getting all the facts right in an article.

You consider who might object to what details so that maybe just once you’ll be prepared when someone calls to complain. But the one thing people pick on always turns out to be something I haven’t thought about twice.

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E-mail exchange with Natalie Angier, the
New York Times
writer I profiled. She apparently never reads stories about herself but broke her policy to read mine. She said her husband liked it, and he’s picky.

I had described her as seeming fragile, and her e-mail about that made me laugh. “Fragile??? What about me seems fragile??? You’ve got to go weight lifting with me sometime. I bench press 140 and can do, oh, fifty to sixty push-ups at a stretch; how about you? All in good cheer, but honestly, fragile I ain’t.”

I wrote back that I could manage a mere forty push-ups but that I had just run a marathon—how did that figure in the scoring?

She promptly replied that she, too, got a laugh out of this exchange.

And—something I’ve been thinking about since she said it—that we’d all be a lot better off if women saved their competing with each other for these sorts of things.

Got a raise, came up with a couple of story ideas I’m actually excited about working on, got a call from an editor at another magazine asking if I’d write for her, went to a (very difficult) spinning class, heard a friend’s band play, had a long conversation with an old friend I haven’t spoken with in ages.

Today was one of those days when I felt happy enough with my life to consider—for at least a minute—why I’m doing something (dieting) that seems to make me so unhappy.

I thought back to that e-mail I got from a
Shape
reader about whether I had ever thought about giving up. There are two ways to give up. The first is to lose hope completely. I don’t want to do that. The second is to accept myself at this weight or whatever weight I might become. I know there’s an entire fat-acceptance movement that does this, but as yet I can’t, and I’m not sure I want to. I don’t think I look good this way. I won’t say thin is better—

as in thin people are superior to overweight ones—but I definitely think thin (but not necessarily model size) looks better. Frankly, I don’t
want
to wear miniskirts or bustiers or halter tops at this weight. Just because it’s in my size doesn’t mean I should wear it.

What I want is to stop looking at my life through the prism of food and weight. I want to get an invitation to a party and not immediately worry about whether anything will fit and whether I should eat beforehand. I want to be able to look for a new job without wondering if there’s truth to those studies about how overweight people are paid less and looked at as less competent.

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At this point I would gladly trade the ever elusive possibility that someday I’ll be thin for a certainty that I could stay the same size (even if it’s a 16) for the rest of my life.

Shape
has decided to extend the project for another year. Despite the pressure and the constant worrying, it didn’t really occur to me to say no. Knowing I have a whole other year—the luxury of time—makes me hope that maybe now I’ll do things better. Maybe now I’ll succeed. Besides, I’m too far into this now. Giving up would feel as though I’m totally giving up—that because I couldn’t lose weight in this one year, I’m never going to. And I’m not ready to say that yet.

What this translates to on the magazine page is that what was supposed to be my victory lap is now just another mile on the trip. I’m getting two pages in the September magazine (my one-year anniversary issue) to dedicate to what I’ve learned this year. My summation of the past twelve months has an optimism and cheer I don’t quite feel, about how I’ll get this right someday. The ending in particular: “I haven’t quite conquered the food and weight issue, but . . . I never went more than five days without exercising, and usually never more than two. No matter what I ate, I never stopped running, and I know that’s a major achievement. Maybe life isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty darn good.”

Spent all day with Mary and Abby at the outlet mall. I should have known it would be depressing. Outlet malls always are. Because the best stuff you can find is usually stuff for a season at least four months away, I always end up spending the whole day contemplating my weight (or contemplating it even more than usual, if that’s possible). Do I want to invest $100 on this spring jacket—and on the fact that I’ll be this size in four or five months?

Should I buy it smaller as an incentive? The way things are going, the smartest bet would probably be to buy it bigger, but who wants to do that?

Of course I couldn’t find a single New York–appropriate black pantsuit—

or any other interview-appropriate attire—that fit. Toward the end I got desperate enough—or is it realistic enough?—to give up on finding anything in a size 14 that would fit, and I tried on 16s, a size I definitely did not want to buy. I finally found a pair of black pants and a jacket. I don’t love them, but I don’t know that I’d love anything at this size. The interview is tomorrow, so I guess I have no choice.

I’m having flashbacks to an interview for a prestigious scholarship I had in the winter of my senior year of high school. I was wearing a navy blue suit

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I’d bought for debate tournaments and feeling crummier than usual about myself—the suit had an elasticized waistband, which made me feel fat and sloppy. By then the adjectives
fat
and
sloppy
had become an indivisible pair in my mind, so I always felt like a cross between Pig Pen and one of those huge women I’d see in the supermarket—the kind who wore tent dresses and sneakers because their feet were too fat for normal shoes. I’d been trying to diet for the week beforehand, and I was wishing, as I did with all important events in my life, that I could put off the interview until I’d lost some weight.

The interview—with the president of a community college—started

innocently. First question: what books was I reading? Easy. I relaxed and chatted away.

The next thing I remember is his asking me about being fat—and that was the word he used.
Fat
. First it was a poke, a nudge at the side of an anthill to see if anything was really alive in there. I don’t remember his exact question, only that it so stunned me that I answered it, the way I would years later when a guy asked me ten minutes into our first date when the last time I’d had sex was.

Then the president began kicking sand everywhere. He quizzed me about the way being fat affected my daily life, whether I thought it would hinder me in the future, whether I thought being fat would keep me from ever having a date in college. Fat. Fat. A drumbeat of fat.

I didn’t cry. I discussed these things clinically, as if speaking about another person. My mother, my father, my sister, my grandmother—all had called me fat before, and I’d cried or exploded all of those times. True, those responses weren’t options in an interview for a scholarship I desperately wanted, but mostly I think I did neither because of the way he’d asked me the questions.

He didn’t blurt out the word
fat
in a moment of anger or disgust the way my family did (then often tiptoed around for days after, trying to pretend they hadn’t). He phrased his questions the way I’d later learn to phrase questions for reluctant sources—assume what you know is a statement of fact and work from there. He talked about my weight as though it were a perfectly normal thing for a fifty-something man in a position of power to say to an awkward, nervous sixteen-year-old.

As we talked, the image I had of myself in my head kept getting fatter and fatter, blowing up like Violet, who chews the not-yet-perfected gum in
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
. In my mind I was a tiny pin of a head on a huge round body, arms and legs sticking out feebly. The image made it awfully difficult to concentrate on his questions. All I remember thinking was:
I’m fat; I deserve this
.

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I left the interview feeling raw and exhausted, hating myself more than ever. I stumbled out into the sunlight, got in the car, and headed off to numb the pain in the only way I knew how. I drove to Kentucky Fried Chicken and ordered half a dozen biscuits.