The Weight-loss Diaries (34 page)

I want to call
Shape
and say what they’re doing is cheating, but it’s not like I’ve been telling the whole truth, either.

My new, productive, going-to-make-my-life-perfect thing is that I’ve joined a fiction-writing group, hoping it will force me to finish some of the short story fragments I have lying around. Except after reading the stories for tonight’s meeting, I’m no longer sure this was such a good idea. Everyone is so good it’s daunting.

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

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“Just from the way you talk I can’t wait to read one of your stories,” one of the group members told me as we were leaving.

Great—no pressure there.

Tonight was supposed to be my first night in my new apartment. But my mattress doesn’t fit my bed frame, so I can’t sleep on it. I had to trek back to Mary’s, and tomorrow I’ll have to deal with Mattress Discounters again. As if I need any more things to do.

When I went upstairs today to collect my phone from my old apartment it was gone. Stolen. A small thing, but another thing to replace. The money pit, this flood is.

It’s also been a diet buster. I’ve gained six pounds. It’s hard to take solace in the fact that if this had occurred a couple of years ago, it might have been ten or fifteen.

For the past few days I’ve been trying to wear myself out. I can’t bear being alone with myself at night, lying awake hating myself for gaining weight, for bingeing, for being so desperate to get food that I lie to people I love. I feel like my relationship with food has taken precedence over all others—it’s an abusive love I can’t seem to extricate myself from.

I make mental lists of all the things food has ruined, damaged, or stolen.

Time. Concentration. Happiness.

I feel like I’ve tried everything I can think of to lose weight—every last tip I’ve ever read. My resolve to lose weight is fading—worn away by every morning hoping today is going to be the day I get back on track and then, sometimes an hour into the day or sometimes twelve hours, failing.

Tonight I talked to Shari about the bingeing. I didn’t try to prettify it as pigging out or attempt to put a positive spin on it—“at least I’m exercising”—

as I have before. I told her I’d started to think I was getting over it—hence the upbeat ending to the eating disorders piece, which she read—but I’m not.

It’s back, and I don’t know what to do.

I haven’t discussed the bingeing with anyone associated with
Shape
. I talked with Shari about it partly because I should have done so ages ago, but also selfishly, so I could feel like I was making a fresh start—this collabora-tion on inventing the new Courtney. It’s my perfectionist thing again: I’d rather start over and have the chance—unlikely as it seems—for all to go perfectly than constantly have to stare at my mistakes, the non-gold-starred days on the calendar. Also, I was starting to feel dishonest every time I had a con-

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versation with her about
Shape
—like I was hiding something, which I was.

Dishonesty, like every other crummy emotion, leads directly to eating.

So now I have a new plan of attack: food journals. Again.

I’m supposed to write down absolutely everything I eat (especially if it’s a binge) and how I feel—not so I can be chastised for not sticking to a diet, Shari says, but so we can see the cause and effect and I can learn to short-circuit the system. It will be a slow process, and Shari says I’m not supposed to be worrying about losing weight while I do this. But how can I stop worrying about that? Even if I try, the obsession gnaws at the edges. My brain automatically thinks things like:
I ate this instead of that—that’s a calorie savings
. Or:
We’ve spent all day walking around—that has to cancel some of what
I ate at lunch
. And I know that in order for what Shari’s proposing to work, I’ve
got
to binge for us to have something to work with.

I don’t want to have to write down that list of foods, to confront it, to contemplate it. But I’ll try anything now, and keeping food journals and analyzing them sounds so simple, so doable.

I feel hopeful again.

Four weeks and three days after the flood—or the Great Flood of ’00, as Erica has taken to calling it—I’ve finally gotten my (sometimes still soggy) stuff out of all of my friends’ apartments and moved into my new one, just two floors below my old one.

It’s clean and new and unsullied by memories of starving or bingeing. I don’t look at the futon and remember how I can never find a comfortable spot on it when I’m binge-level full, because the futon was ruined in the flood. I don’t walk into the closet and see the mark on the wall from when I threw a shoe in frustration because nothing was fitting.

I want a new, clean life to go with my new, clean apartment.

The Sunday night blues. Mary has a date, Abby and Andrea are off shopping, Alexy is annoyed that I don’t want to hold my birthday dinner tomorrow late enough (8:30—but it’s a Monday night) for her to do her volunteer work first.

And I’ve been getting answering machines for everyone else I call.

Diana got back from visiting Dad in San Francisco tonight and informed me that they had been talking about me. Don’t get mad, she said, but (a guaranteed way to annoy me before she’s even said whatever it is) I was too smart to spend my life writing about the silly, fluffy things that I do. I asked if there

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was anything else they had discussed about me that she’d care to share. She said my fear of driving.

“Anything else?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything. I have a funny feeling they also discussed how much weight I’ve gained.

May 15, 2000: my twenty-fifth birthday. At the gym this morning I kept thinking about how different this birthday is from last year’s. Well, how much heavier I am, though doing the math to come up with an exact figure is too depressing.

It didn’t seem like an auspicious start to the day. But I got in to work and the phone was ringing. My friend Josh in Chicago, who is not generally a phone person. He was about the last person I’d expect to remember my birthday, and he hadn’t.

“Hey, All-Star,” he said. Turns out this media gossip website we’re obsessed with linked to a
Washington Business Journal
article mentioning my promotion to senior writer. Except the article says I’m twenty-four, which, as of today, I pointed out to Josh, I am no longer.

So Josh e-mailed the website, and a line appeared beneath the article, identifying Josh as “a Rubin pal”—we got a laugh out of that one—who wanted to correct the record on my age, since it was my birthday.

I got “happy birthday” e-mails all day from journalists I barely know or don’t know at all, including one from a reporter I met once before he moved to New York. “Congrats,” he wrote. “It’s fun being young and successful.” I laughed at that one.

Because I’m going to Australia on Friday, the real birthday party is when I get back. Tonight’s gathering was a low-key girls’ night at a Brazilian restaurant in Adams Morgan. One caipirinha, no dessert.

I’m getting nervous about the Australia trip. It’s exactly the sort where I can’t confess my worries to any of my friends, because I would sound whiny: I have to go to Australia and go to a bunch of press dinners that will involve a lot of expensive food and wine. Waah.

What I can’t say is that I become panicky at long meals where I can’t escape food or where people are pushing it at me and I’m required to give an explanation for why I’m not having any. I debated saying I couldn’t go on the trip, but as always, I loathe having food be the determiner of what I do.

This is supposed to be the fun trip I get to take after all of my work on the eating disorders piece, and it’s starting to seem anything but. I’m too anx-

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ious to be amused by the irony that I’ve just published six thousand awfully honest words about my troubles with food yet can’t say ten honest words to my boss about it, even though he has clearly read my story and so something like this might not come as a total surprise.

Trips for me are also still all-or-nothing food propositions. I can’t get my mind around the fact that I can, theoretically, stop overeating or bingeing at any point. Once I start, I can’t stop until I get home. Witness last November’s trip to London.

Food makes it hard for me to enjoy vacations. Or really,
I
make it hard for myself to enjoy vacations. I go on them with unrealistic hopes. I think amazing things are going to have to happen to make all the struggle I’ll have with food be worth it—that whatever I do or see has to be unbelievable or else it will be lost in the food.

Meanwhile, I’m having a tough time with the food journals. Usually the idea that anybody is going to look at them means I either eat saint-style or tidy them up a bit, the way my mother used to clean the house before the cleaner did. Even though I’m not technically dieting, I don’t want to answer to Shari why I’ve eaten, say, a Dove bar or a muffin. I don’t want her to know.

It’s like I’m going to get a grade on my food journals. As always, I want to be a good student. Have to keep up appearances.

It occurred to me the other day that my gotta-get-an-A instinct is probably part of the bingeing problem, so finally I admitted it.

Shari says I’m right—my instinct to edit
is
key to figuring out how to stop the bingeing. Why do I worry about pleasing other people when I’m hurting myself ? The simple answer is that I crave outside validation, that it gives me something I’m not able to give myself. But the more complicated question—

and answer, which Shari says won’t come quickly—is why I can’t.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE PACIFIC

On a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney, a flight I should have been on at this time yesterday. Am angry, angry, angry that even though I showed up for my flight two hours early, I still missed it because of the lines.

I’ve been prone to rage this month over the smallest things—late Metro trains, lines that move maddeningly slowly, my inability to find a receipt to return a ten-dollar hammer to the hardware store. Worse, with the rage has come the new and unattractive propensity to burst into tears, as I did yesterday when I found I wouldn’t be flying out until today. I can’t remember the last time I cried—was it the day I heard about the divorce?—before I

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started doing it practically every other day since the flood. I’m hoping the tears are just from general stress/bad luck/exhaustion. I’m also hoping maybe—like sweat being the sign of a fever that’s breaking—the tears are a sign that I’m letting feelings out some way other than bingeing, even if crying isn’t exactly my ideal response.

IN AUSTRALIA

Palm Cove, this Australian resort town, feels like it could be in South Florida.

Pink and turquoise buildings. Surf shops. Tacky souvenirs.

But the sky here is so clear—and so star-studded—it actually seems fake. I wish I knew half of what I was seeing, though I did finally find someone who could point out the Southern Cross. Both days we’ve been here, I’ve gotten up early and run on the beach at sunrise. It was so beautiful I didn’t even think about how many extra calories I was probably burning by running in the sand, which is harder than running on pavement. Well, I didn’t think about it for long, anyway.

People keep bringing up things they saw the first day of the trip. I’m trying not to get too irritated and to take comfort in the things I won’t miss. And I’m hoping to find out that there’s some great cosmic reason I didn’t make it onto my original flights. But neither of those planes crashed.

Went snorkeling and scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef today, even though almost no one else did. I felt self-conscious, especially because one of the men on the trip—the sort of overly friendly grandpa type who started referring to me as “Court” five seconds after he met me—kept loudly teasing me that I was doing it because the guy in charge was cute.

If I were really into this guy, I was tempted to say, do you think I’d want him to see me in a bathing suit?

This is like something out of a dream, and not just because the sharp edges of life have been dulled by too much champagne.

I’m on the Orient Express—actually, it’s the Great South Pacific

Express—and it looks like something out of the 1920s. Deep polished mahogany with gold fixtures. Velvet. All sorts of things emblazoned with the train logo that I’m sure more than one guest has filched.

Wrote to Grandma because all this gracious living reminds me of nothing so much as the black-and-white picture she has in her bedroom of her and

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Grandpa standing on the steps of a cruise ship sometime in the 1950s—she in a sleeveless dress and he in a dinner jacket. They look like movie stars.

I’d love to come back on a train like this and be slim. Be able to wear sleeveless dresses with strappy sandals and no control-top hose—and not have to worry about bulging out everywhere and whether my feet resemble Miss Piggy’s.

Daydreaming about coming back here keeps me from thinking about the picture I got two days ago of me with a koala. My arm is so huge—it looks bigger than some people’s thighs—that I can never show the picture to anyone. I know it’s possible it’s just an unflattering photo, but I’m really
that
unsure of what I look like, and there’s no one I can ask.

Being on the train is frustrating, because there’s no way to exercise. I can’t even take a walk—the corridors are so narrow you have to stop every two minutes to let someone else by. There’s practically nothing to do but eat, and that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve managed to miss tea today, a fact I know I’m going to spend half of dinner trying to slide gracefully into the conversation in case I feel the need to explain why I may be eating more than everyone else.

It’s official: I have the travel bug again. I’ve been collecting tips for places to go in Australia and New Zealand, thinking:
How can I get off a couple of
months to go traveling, and who could I convince to do it with me?
People in England do this sort of thing all the time—work for a couple of years, quit their jobs (or just take their six weeks’ vacation), and hit India or Australia or the Far East—but it seems so rare for Americans. The biggest obstacle for me, though, seems not to be time, money, or company, all of which could probably be solved. It’s weight. How can I take the trip of a lifetime and not be able to bear to look at the pictures?