The Weight-loss Diaries (38 page)

a plane tows your glider up a mile high, then leaves you to float back to earth—

but there was my little fear-of-heights problem. Even though the guy said I could come down after ten minutes if I didn’t like it, to get down you still have to be released from the plane—which is the part I was most afraid of.

Actually, I was afraid of all of it.

I watched two guys go up—I didn’t want to go until one of them came down safely. And even then I couldn’t help thinking that even if they were fine, my time up in the air could be the one time when something went wrong. But I knew I’d be really upset with myself if I were here, watched two people go up, and then didn’t go.

So I took a deep breath and strapped myself into the plane. It took twenty minutes before every slight bump didn’t convince me of my impending doom, but the bird’s-eye view of Boulder—with the jagged peaks of the Rockies close enough to touch—was a reward that trumped any CD or lipstick I’ve ever tried to bribe myself to exercise with. The glide became something of a visual mantra for the weekend. When something frightened me, I thought about the views—and better yet, the feeling of accomplishment—I would have missed by not trying.

I’m totally exhausted and a bit sore, though I’m not sure from what. The hike we did today in Gregory Canyon was hard, but not
that
hard. Maybe it was

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the dodgy footing, something I’m not used to. This was about the fourth hike I’d ever gone on, since growing up in below-sea-level Florida didn’t offer much opportunity for mountain climbing.

After lunch we went fly-fishing, which at first I found infuriating. I just felt so bad at it—couldn’t cast the reel the right way, couldn’t see the fly, couldn’t see the fish. I felt so conspicuous standing on the banks of Boulder Creek—overweight and clumsy in these hip-high waders.

I cannot understand how people fly-fish to relax. The forearm motion you need to master seems impossibly elusive. I would have bailed after forty-five minutes—the wading boots were rubbing uncomfortably—but quitting

seemed out of the spirit of this, the Can-Do Weekend. Nearly three hours and no trout later, I was relieved it was time to go.

Up at dawn this morning, already panicking about the rock climbing on the schedule for this afternoon. But first up was mountain biking. As I reached the top of Boulder Canyon, I was shocked to realize I’d biked uphill for an hour without stopping—and without feeling like a Mack truck had hit me.

It’s one thing to know I can run five miles for a workout—or even run a marathon—but it’s still awe-inspiring when I see how fitness translates to the rest of my life.

During lunch I rationalized eating more than my share of a fried-apple-with-custard appetizer, seeing as it might be my last meal.

Time for rock climbing.

After a steep hike up Gregory Canyon to Boulder’s Flatirons, I put on my harness.

“If you fall, you’ve got the rope,” the guides said repeatedly.

How comforting.

Am I the heaviest person ever to do this? I thought. What if they’re wondering if I’ll break the rope? What if I
do
break the rope? My arms shook with fear.

Coaxed by the guides, who yelled suggestions for footholds, I climbed at the pace of an anemic turtle, and I didn’t make it to the top.

But the point is that I climbed—and at one point I even deliberately let go, savoring the feeling of hanging in midair, facing down this mountain of rock.

Back home, and back down to earth. The battle against weight, it seems, is fought in an endless series of tiny struggles, like choosing a snack of low-fat

Month 21 (September)

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crackers instead of a couple of cookies. I won’t say you coast along—it’s definitely not that easy—but you do sort of trudge.

I’m tired of trudging, so I’ve been doing a little sprint. Back on the Peeke diet for three days. No cooking—I don’t want any more interaction with food than I have to have. And in structure, at least for me, there is freedom.

I’ve been hungry for the whole three days—one of which included a

phone appointment with Nancy Clark. I told her I literally felt like all I was doing all day was drinking Diet Coke and trying to hang on until the next time I was “supposed” to eat. I told her I thought this was why I was having such trouble getting back on the wagon for more than a week—because I dreaded this kind of hunger. Because now that I’ve eaten the old Boca-Burgers-and-egg-white-omelets way for three days, it seems like I’m always hungry.

“Maybe you are,” she said. “Are you eating enough?”

Of course I laughed. The idea that someone like me might have to eat more just sounded insane. Counting calories makes me miserable, but Nancy calculated the calories of everything I’d eaten in the past two days and suggested that for my weight (I estimated 185, though I was fearing it might be closer to 200) and activity level I could probably eat twenty-one to twenty-two hundred calories. In other words, another three or four hundred calories a day. That’s a couple of chocolate-chip cookies or a peanut butter sandwich.

I found this hard to believe, and the addict in me thought, “Well, I really just want to get done with losing weight, so I’m not going to eat the extra.” Finally Nancy said, “If you exercise and you’re starving, your body goes into a famine state. It thinks it needs to hold on to every last calorie.”

Famine is something I’ve associated with eight-hundred-calorie diets, not the eighteen hundred or so I’ve been eating. But there was a real-life expert telling me this was applicable, so you can guess what I’ll be doing this week.

I’ve already calculated that even if my body doesn’t need the extra four hundred calories per day—that they’re extra—that’s twenty-eight hundred, or a gain of less than a pound. Which, sadly, is probably a better outcome than that of an awful lot of weeks of this year.

E-mail from an editor who wants to know if, for an article, I want to test ways to make sex more fun. I write back: “Is the magazine providing the person with whom I test this?”

I got on the scale this morning, because I can’t test Nancy’s eat-an-extra-four-hundred if I don’t know where I’ve started from. Somehow I’ve dieted myself

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up to 190 pounds—just 16 away from where I started twenty months ago. I couldn’t stop thinking:
That’s just 10 away from 200
.

So I found myself eating today—and a lot more than four hundred calories. I can’t get on the scale tomorrow—no weighing two days in a row. Every good dieter knows that—and also knows not to get on the scale after a lot of eating.

Now I won’t be able to tell if Nancy’s plan has worked, since I’ve probably gained weight from today. I raged at myself for eating and ruining the plan for the week. Tried to throw the piece of paper with my grocery shopping list across the room. But paper doesn’t absorb violence. It flutters delicately. So unsatisfying.

I’ve been eating the extra four hundred calories for four days. I’m definitely not full but not quite hungry enough to be on a diet. It feels wrong. It feels like I’m cheating. It feels dangerous.

What also feels dangerous is all the calculating and plotting and bar-gaining (could I save two hundred calories for tomorrow?) I’m already doing.

The addict in me picking at the edges of this, wondering if I can make it three hundred fifty calories per day next week and then three hundred the week after.

And the scale hasn’t budged: 190 again. But I’m not as frustrated by this as usual, maybe because I didn’t feel hungry every moment of this week. I wouldn’t say I was so full I didn’t deserve a reward on the scale, but I definitely wasn’t so hungry that I felt like the scale inching downward was the only thing that would make the hunger worth it.

I’m trying four hundred extra calories a day again this week.

Talked to Mom and then Dad tonight and decided I didn’t want to choose where I was going for Thanksgiving this year—or worse, deal with a joint affair, which they’re still threatening. I’m going away—opting out entirely.

Month 22 (October)

I’m road testing tips from the “Does Your Environment Make You Fat?”

story, and they’re freaking me out. I feel like I should or could be moving something at every moment to make up for all the calories I’m apparently saving by not having to churn my own butter, by having a suitcase on wheels, and by sending e-mails.

One tip is to set an alarm at work and get up from your desk once an hour—not, of course, to hit the vending machine but to walk around for five minutes. By the end of an eight-hour workday you’ll have forty extra minutes of activity to show for it.

Except if you’re me. By the end of an eight-hour workday you’ll have an obsessive person who thinks,
Hmmm, if I add an extra half minute to each of
those intervals, how many calories will that burn in the long run? An extra
minute?

The process of burning off all the calories I’m supposedly saving by living in the twenty-first century—I always suspected I had been born in the wrong century—seems so huge and insurmountable it makes me want to do nothing.

I’ve given up on the four hundred extra calories a day. The constant calculating and recalculating of options is making me crazy. My compromise is to eat another snack if I’m feeling hungry, but the snack has to be relatively healthy. Fruit. Yogurt. A handful of nuts. A small bag of pretzels. Limited choices. Nothing too exciting.

Erica and I are going to Costa Rica for Thanksgiving. Hiking, sailing, white-water rafting, the whole works. Pause for a moment of silence: I am actually 235

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choosing
to spend a vacation doing things that burn a whole lot more calories than lying on a couch.

Ran eighteen miles today. My last big training run before the marathon, and I feel anything but ready. I’ve barely thought about it and barely planned for it. The weekends have rolled around, and I’ve thought about where to squeeze in the run, as opposed to last year, when I planned my weekends around the run.

Tonight—after someone announced I had run eighteen miles this morning—what feels like the gazillionth woman said to me, “How much weight have you lost with all that running?”

And the gazillionth woman was disappointed by my answer: “Not much.”

It’s the same disappointed response I get when I tell them I don’t have a simple answer to dieting, like don’t eat carbs, clap your hands four times after each meal, don’t eat potatoes, don’t eat anything purple, don’t eat after 8:17 p.m. People seem to hate hearing that you can’t just add a marathon to your life and watch the weight fall away no matter what you eat. If you could, wouldn’t there be a book by now called
The Marathon Diet: The Six-Month Plan to Stuff Your Face and Still Lose Weight
?

Sounds like a bestseller to me.

Today I ran the Army Eleven and a Half Miler. Its official name is the Army Ten Miler, but I got stuck in major traffic and ended up having to jump out of the cab and run about a mile and a half just to make it to the starting line on time. It wasn’t the best race I’ve ever done, but I think I’m the proudest of it because I almost didn’t do it at all.

Last night I hopped from a party to disco bowling and didn’t have so much as a cocktail at either one because I had to get up early and run. (I’m back to having a couple of drinks at parties.) Cara—my race buddy—and I left when everyone was going to Polly Esthers, this cheesier-than-a-pot-of-fondue dance place I happen to love. But as she has before—and though she, too, chose to train for the marathon—Cara seemed to treat me like it was my fault that she had to run, had to get up early, couldn’t have a few drinks. I told her that if she didn’t want to run, she didn’t have to, but that I wanted to get in one more good run before the marathon.

It was late, and we’d have to get up in four and a half or five hours, but I’d already not drunk any alcohol all night in preparation and had schlepped

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out to Alexandria to pick up my race packet. Besides, I knew it was going to be hot today, and if we didn’t do the race, we’d still have to do a decently long run. I didn’t want to end up doing it in the middle of the afternoon, the sun glazing us with sweat.

Just as the cab we were sharing dropped her at her door, Cara bailed. She decided she wasn’t getting up in four hours and running ten miles. As the cab pulled away, I almost told the driver to turn around and take me to Polly Esthers, because if I wasn’t going to have to get up early, I might as well have some fun.

That’s when I got angry.

Not so much at Cara, but at myself. Why did I immediately assume that because my friend wasn’t running the race, I couldn’t? Why was I allowing somebody else to prevent me from doing what I knew I should do? It was like my not speaking up about restaurants (voting, say, for the one with healthier food). I knew I should do the race—I knew I’d feel more confident about the marathon if I did it, and that’s important, because the marathon is at least 50

percent mental. Besides, I’d never run a race by myself—was I even capable of doing one without someone to get me through it?

I couldn’t sleep last night. The longest I’d ever run by myself was seven miles or so, and that had always been with music, which isn’t allowed at races.

I worried about feeling like a loser, running a race alone. I prayed for rain, aka a legitimate excuse to bail myself, but the day dawned bright and sunny.

Traffic almost kept me away, but by that point I was so determined I hopped out of the cab and ran to the starting line, arriving just as the gun went off.

The race seemed long and lonely, but I never wondered—as I occasionally have in races past—why I was doing it. I was doing it for myself.

Something in me snapped this week. I was talking with Shari about how when I started losing weight last year I was so rigid about it—eating the same things over and over. That was too strict, but what I’m doing now—following Peeke’s diet halfheartedly, making “substitutions” that I know are not calorically equivalent (giant chocolate-chip cookie for a nonfat yogurt and a fruit)—is obviously too lax. So I’ve got to do something in the middle. But what is that—and how can I keep the search for the middle from becoming another obsession?