The Weight-loss Diaries (31 page)

How did I let this happen? Does anyone on the planet gain weight as quickly as I do? Three months ago I could still squeeze into size 12 jeans, but now I can barely squeeze into size 16 suits. I wish I could just bury myself in a hole somewhere and not come out until I’m at least a size 14 again. I’m sure
Shape
will fire me after the next photo shoot. They know I’m not losing weight, but even I’m not sure how much I’ve gained. I’ve guesstimated that I’m somewhere north of 180, but in these birthday pictures I swear I look like I’m back at 206, where I started.

I remember the subject of the marathon coming up at Abby’s birthday—

how she laughed and told a couple of guys at the party that it was one significant thing she’d done before she turned thirty—and how quickly I tried to end the conversation when Abby said Mary and I had done it, too. I felt self-conscious enough running when I was a size 12. But now people
really
must be thinking,
How the hell did that fat girl finish?
Because now I really am fat again.

I have to learn to stop bingeing—and to stop hating myself for it. Today I ordered three books from Amazon on compulsive overeating.

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Finally talked with Diana. She didn’t apologize for what she said last month—

we didn’t really discuss it—but we agreed that there’s enough going on in this family that perhaps we ought to at least make an effort to stick together.

During the conversation she kept mentioning that she wanted ice cream.

I considered telling her that I wished she wouldn’t tell me things like that, but I worried it would ruin the let’s-get-along spirit. When she launched into a list of everything she had eaten that day, I finally said, “Can we not talk about food?”

She looked annoyed. “Why not?”

I thought for a few seconds about how to phrase this in a way that wouldn’t bring up too many more questions and wouldn’t sound too accusing. Finally I gave up. I’ve never once been able to script a conversation with Diana.

“Because I’ve gained weight and I’m having a really hard time getting back on track and this makes it even harder,” I said carefully.

“Well, I’m hungry,” she said. “So how much weight have you gained?”

Ugh. The start of questions I never feel like answering, because all they do is make me think about how miserably I’ve failed.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Ten pounds?”

“I haven’t gotten on the scale,” I said.

“Fifteen pounds?”

She wasn’t going to drop it.

“I haven’t gotten on the scale.” Pause. “Enough that things don’t fit.”

The mood shifted then, subtly. We’ve both always talked about how

much we dislike change, and hearing I’ve gained weight was proof to her that things were returning to the familiar. I could see her relax slightly.

“What doesn’t fit?” she asked.

I got reckless then. Given where her line of questioning seemed to be headed, I figured we were going to end up yelling at each other in another minute no matter what, so I might as well say what I really wanted to.

“Why does everything about my losing weight seem to make you so

angry?” I asked.

“Because,” she said.

“Because why?” I felt like I was five years old, asking my mother why I couldn’t stay up for another half hour.

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“You’ve said it yourself before,” she said. “You’re the smart one, and I’m the thin one. You can change yourself, but I can’t change myself. If people are going to label us that way, why would I want you to be the same size as me?

What do I have left then?”

It wasn’t the answer I was expecting her to give. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t feel sorry for her, exactly, but I felt sad, thinking about the two of us locked in this struggle—the Thin One versus the Smart One—that seemed to have no resolution we could make peace with.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes. I think her answer stunned us both, and we knew there was nothing either of us could say to make it better.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “I probably should go now.” I got up to give her a hug.

“So that’s it? Now you’re done?” Diana asked. “Thanks for fitting me into your schedule.” I could see the ice clinging to her words.

Any goodwill I felt was quickly evaporating.

“Well, I don’t know what else there is to say.”

“We can talk about something else,” she said.

I didn’t want to point out that our usual topics of conversation were food, how much we wanted to eat, how fat we were feeling, and the family—

and we’d already covered or dismissed most of those.

We ended up talking about the Summer of a Thousand Peaches, and she said she’d figured out I wasn’t eating and was lying about it and that she had snapped at me all that summer because she’d wished I’d tell the truth and stop sneaking around.

When I got back to my apartment, I thought about all the relationships in my life food had ruined, poisoned, or just dirtied. It had caused me to lie to nearly everyone in my life in one way or another, even if it was just “I’m not hungry” or “I already ate.” It had made me keep people at a distance, so they couldn’t glimpse my secret life. I pictured myself, sumo wrestler sized, surrounded by a pile of food that was like a moat, with everyone I knew on the other side, unable to get across.

The purple-catsuit picture—along with a column about discovering my inner athlete, when I was in a sports-experimenting frenzy—has hit print. Editors keep calling me up and asking me to write about exercise—always a variation on new research or new ways to work out—and I feel like a fraud.

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These editors probably don’t care what I look like—much less that I don’t look like the
Shape
pictures anymore—but if there were a not-ridiculous way to bring up in the phone conversation that I’ve gained weight, I would.

The annoying thing about having gone on a date with a guy I met at Xando (David, the not-nice Jewish lawyer) is that now I don’t feel like I can go there anymore to read my newspaper. I saw him and so couldn’t deal with the idea of a torturous conversation with him that when he came up to me I pretended not to recognize him.

“Oh, you must mean my sister,” I said. “We’re twins.” Little does he know that Diana is one inch taller and I can’t bear to think about how many pounds thinner.

Got the compulsive-overeating books today. Two of them I immediately put aside as not much use. Dull, preachy, clinical, and like trying to swallow a particularly loathsome energy bar—reading them reminded me of sitting in Weight Watchers meetings as a kid, wondering why I had to be doing this when all of my friends were out doing something fun. But I got through a bunch of the third,
Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating
, by Geneen Roth.

She is the first person to make me feel not alone—not the only person who has ever struggled with this and not a bizarre case study waiting to be written up in some medical journal. Which is ironic, considering that “You make me feel like I’m not alone” is definitely among the top three things
Shape
readers write to me.

Roth writes about deciding what she’s hungry for and eating chocolate-chip cookies at every meal for two weeks. Which is, I suppose, sort of what I had tried to do with the peanut butter and the apple crumb cake so many months ago. Except it didn’t work because I still considered those foods

“bad.” I felt guilty when I ate them and didn’t dare eat them as much as I wanted.

I’m afraid to try eating whatever I want, because the potential for weight gain terrifies me. Forget that I’m gaining weight by the minute anyway—I’m still
trying
to lose weight, even if you can’t tell from the scale. I don’t think I can call up
Shape
and say flat out that I need a few months to gain who knows how much weight so that maybe, possibly, someday I can have my head in a place where I can lose some. I feel trapped.

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The problem with Roth’s book is that I can already see that for it to work you have to surrender to it completely. You can’t do it halfway—put limits on it, saying, “Well, I’ll eat whatever I want as long as I don’t go over sixteen hundred calories a day.” You have to genuinely start believing that you can indeed eat whatever you want in whatever amount, if that’s what you’re hungry for.

It seems like you should need a lobotomy to believe this, not a $12.95

book.

I’ve been brooding on
Breaking Free
. Despite the fact that you can’t really do it halfway, I’m still determined to try. If I could just hold myself to three reasonable meals a day
and
exercise—well, who knows what could happen?

But it’s so hard to figure out what I want to eat. It’s like breathing when you scuba dive—the more you think about it, the harder it is. Today I spent two hours in the grocery store trying calmly to consider things I might like or want. It was scary, because the only times I’ve considered so many things in a grocery store is when I’ve been bingeing, and I had to keep reminding myself that I
wasn’t
bingeing. Not yet anyway.

I ended up leaving without buying anything. What looks good to eat at 9:00 p.m. on a Tuesday is rarely what looks good to me at noon or 7:00 p.m.

or some other hour on another day. Eating what you want is really about living in the moment—not planning out of fear what you’re going to eat and when. Eating what you want is also about trusting yourself to know what you want, and diets are about exactly the opposite. You can’t trust yourself, so you have to look to someone else—or to some finite calorie count—to tell yourself what you can have.

After being too nervous to hit the “send” button all day, I finally e-mailed to Diane an edited version of my struggle with food for the eating disorders story. I didn’t explain that it was no longer really about my friends. I just sent it, maybe hoping the desire to binge would leave me the moment the story left my computer.

Diane called two hours later with her edits. She didn’t say much about the writing or the content or the fact that I had spilled this with no warning.

I wondered if her reaction to the bits I had sent her was like Ms. Clark and my high school essays about Mom: so raw with emotion that they had to be handled gingerly.

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All she really said that touched on its personal nature was: “Are you going to use a pseudonym?”

That’s when I thought, Oh, God. What I do really
is
sick. I shouldn’t want anyone to know it’s me.

I’ve never been able to explain to my sister why I don’t like renting movies.

I’ve finally realized why. I’d rather go to the theater because it may be the one place I’ve never binged—a safe haven. At the theater, I never buy anything except a giant Diet Coke. I want to lose myself in the movie, which I can’t do if I’m sitting there debating every last mouthful of popcorn or chocolate—

and thinking about what else I might like to eat. But at home—or at someone else’s—there’s always a nearby kitchen to consider.

Pride and Prejudice
marathon at Alexy’s: a bunch of girls and all six tapes.

And brunch food: bagels, pastry, and—an English touch—scones. À la Geneen Roth, I tried to focus on eating what I really wanted, but of course that was something that wasn’t available—pancakes. Grrr. “I will conquer this,” Mr. Darcy was saying on-screen. Me, too.

“I am determined that nothing but the deepest love could ever induce me to matrimony,” Elizabeth Bennet says, and I considered—as I always do when I watch a period film—whether I would have liked to live in her time.

Not as I am now—being overweight, sarcastic, and a terrible housekeeper probably would have been even more of a liability then than it is now. I need to have been born when being overweight was considered a sign of health and wealth—instead of the opposite.

Ran the St. Paddy’s Day 10K—my first race since the marathon. It was also my first 10K: last summer I skipped directly from an 8K to a 10-miler.

I met up with my friend Christie and her boyfriend, and I remembered that the last time I saw her boyfriend—a year and a half ago—he had just finished running the Army Ten-Miler. It’s strange to think I wasn’t regularly running so much as a mile then.

It felt good to be back in the weird world of runners: families waving silly inspirational signs, The Juggler (a guy who juggles as he runs), power gels (though you don’t need them for a 10K), and all. I felt out of shape. I kept switching speed and length of stride and the position of my water-bottle belt, hoping suddenly everything would fall into place and I’d feel a surge of adrenaline. It never happened.

As I ran, I wondered how many weeks of proper eating and regular

workouts it would take to get my pace under ten-minute miles. Running is

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easy to obsess about—the mileage, the speed—but it’s probably a healthier obsession than any I’ve had yet.

The trouble with acknowledging your feelings instead of just eating to “stuff ”

them is that you’re still stuck with the feelings once you’ve acknowledged them. Or is that what running, meditating, and yoga are supposed to be for?

Tonight, at a scary dinner party filled with New York media types, I felt like an idiot—partially for talking so much, which I always do when I’m nervous, and partially because I wasn’t happy with my all-black ensemble. I can’t say it flattered me—it mostly just covered me up, which is all I seem to demand of clothes these days. I grab practically the first thing that I can actually zip or button. I don’t scrutinize the fit, because that would require scrutinizing myself.

The evening got off to an inauspicious start when I walked into the room and everyone—including the only person I knew at the party—

appeared to be in the sort of deep conversation you don’t just go join. At dinner, the woman sitting next to me—a scary (and scary-skinny) New York editor—apparently had heard from somebody that I’d worked for the
Miami
Herald
as a teenager. She asked me rather pointedly how I’d done that, as if she didn’t believe it, and proceeded to preface her response to any other comment I made about stories I was working on now—she asked me about them—by saying I was young and naive. The only bonus was that she made me so nervous I could barely drink or eat—I wondered if she would correct which fork I used. Or maybe she was waiting for me to ask for a straw to sip my wine?