The Weight-loss Diaries (8 page)

Sunday was the worst day of Week 1, and I think it probably always will be the worst day of the diet week. That’s because Sundays bring the prospect of brunch and movies and mall food courts and other activities and places that involve snacks or meals out, plus the nagging sense that you shouldn’t be doing anything fun—you should be doing all the errands and chores you’ve meant to do all week. I don’t have a car and have to walk everywhere, so if the weather’s anything less than my ideal (sixties and crisp, which it is about two weeks a year), I never feel much like schlepping around. Just the thought of loads of errands on freezing, rainy, or sweltering days usually makes me want to use eating as a delay tactic. As my grandmother would say, I have to eat, don’t I? So as long as I’m eating, I don’t have to do anything else.

If I don’t have to work—and often, even when I do—I’ll spend hours with the Sunday
New York Times
. I usually sit in the Xando coffee bar two blocks away and read it, often looking over at the muffin and cake display cases, considering having something and usually wanting everything. I envy the ease with which other people seem to linger over their coffee and cake, apparently forgetting about the cake for entire sections of the paper. I rarely manage to put my fork down unless there’s nothing left.

Sunday is also my evening for catching up on phone calls, always to my grandmother and then to my parents. Unlike my sister, who is frequently accused of making snap decisions and then regretting them, my parents seem to think I have it all together. Diana often cries when frustrated, now admits she chose her college almost randomly, and has had the more typical twenty-something’s career trajectory—job hopping while she figures out what she really wants to do.

While in high school, I started working at our hometown newspaper, plugging away at my dream of being a writer. Maybe because I’ve done things

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

my parents might not have chosen for me—gone far away from home to college, then decided against graduate school and instead headed for a decidedly nonlucrative, nonacademic career—I’ve always worked hard to edit my tales of what’s going on. “I know exactly what I’m doing” is the message I’m trying to get across—that and “You don’t understand.” Apparently, I’ve been such a ruthless editor—done such a good job of convincing them—that they rarely question my choices anymore, which makes me feel more like an imposter and more alone than ever. When I venture that I might be floun-dering at any number of things in my life, my parents don’t seem to know what to say. Now they really
don’t
understand. For them, my problems seem to be a surprise ending for which they’ve had not a hint of foreshadowing.

They give me the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head and tell me how well I’ve done in the past and that they never worry about me because of that.

Nice, but not helpful.

Since my father isn’t often home and rarely answers the phone when he is, mostly it’s my mother I talk to when I call, and maybe that’s why I get so upset. You’d think after all these years I could accept that she’s never going to be the sort of mother you call at least once a day to report on anything and everything, or even the sort of mother you call to ask what you should wear to dinner at so-and-so’s house or what you should write on a condolence card. But I can’t. Since the surgeries, my mother’s attention span has gotten shorter and shorter, to the point where these days conversations with her last ten minutes, maximum. She tells me what she’s watching on television, and I try not to get annoyed and frustrated by her second-by-second update of the latest Danielle-Steele-book-turned-Lifetime-movie. I try desperately to think of something we can talk about for more than thirty seconds, but for the most part my mother doesn’t participate in normal conversational give-and-take. She waits for me to finish speaking, then says something unrelated, or nothing at all. It isn’t that she’s rude—only that she can’t concentrate.

Still, it’s my instinct to call my mother when something goes horribly wrong or wonderfully right, times when I want my mother—want
a
mother.

My pre-call hope that maybe this once I’ll get what I want—what I need—

from her is what makes these conversations even worse than they might be.

She won’t be excited, and I’ll feel deflated. Or she won’t be upset or outraged, and I’ll become more so.

By some bizarre quirk of brain or scalpel, there are a few stories in my mother’s long-term memory that have been left intact, like the one house on a block left unscathed after a tornado has turned all the others to rubble. At

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least one Sunday a month, when I feel like I really, really need her but deep down can admit that I’m probably not going to get what I want from her, I try to get her to tell a few stories from her childhood that I know she likes and remembers. How as kids, she and her brother, my uncle, used to make a fuss when my grandmother made fish for dinner, sailing up the stairs making a big production of holding their noses. Or how she and Uncle Dennis got my grandparents out of the house so they could get things ready for a surprise anniversary party. I know these stories by heart, but I want to hear her tell them. What I love to hear is the sound of her voice—more animated than I seem to have ever known it, as if she’s remembering not just the event but once again feeling the feelings that went with it. I cocoon myself in her voice, shutting out the knowledge that she’s anything less than fine, for as long as the story lasts.

But the second she finishes, the spell is broken. Though I’ve felt it a zillion times before, there’s a fresh sensation of missing her, and I inevitably get off the phone feeling worse than ever.

Lost four pounds this first week, which I, Ms. Glass Is Half Empty, have somehow managed to turn into a negative. In diets past, I’ve lost seven and eight pounds the first week, so four pounds is a major disappointment. After all this effort, I want more. I feel I deserve it. And it makes me cranky to think that this is probably the most I’ll ever lose in a week—soon it will trickle down to half a pound, then nothing, then maybe even a gain.

Four pounds is not enough, nor is the fact that I’ve gotten through one week. It’s not long enough for my new eating habits to be automatic, not long enough for the kinds of stunning results that would give me resolve of steel—

and just long enough to feel as though all my effort is going to go up in flames (or cheesecake) any minute, the way it always has in the past.

It’s not that I haven’t been successful—I have, at least according to the scale. But one of the greatest ironies about trying to lose weight is that after all these years of fixating on the numbers, all of a sudden they don’t matter much. What I really want is to look in the mirror and see the difference, and I don’t. Not yet.

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The Rest of Month 1 (January)

There’s something about dieting that makes your body public property, the way I’m told it is when you’re pregnant. Everyone has nutrition advice, and the bag of baby carrots always open on my desk seems to be a neon orange sign that announces I’m dying to hear every last well-meaning-if-often-annoying word. This friend did the Atkins diet. That one swore off French fries. This crony of somebody’s mother gave up everything white—no flour, no sugar, no mayonnaise. And surely I must know that a red-carpet pileup of celebrities swear by the Zone?

If I had my choice, I wouldn’t tell anyone I’m on a diet. But you can’t suddenly begin eating radically differently than you have in the past and expect no one—particularly when your friends and colleagues are journalists—to ask. So I’ve just been saying I’m trying to eat healthy, and avoiding the words
weight
and
diet
because both always seem to be a cue for women to start talking about how fat they are, which is very annoying when nearly all of them definitely are not. “Eating healthy” doesn’t seem to flip quite the same conversation switches, yet most everyone understands that it translates as “losing weight,” the way women understand that when a man says, “I’ll call you,” he means “How’s never? Does never work for you?”

I’m just over two weeks into this diet—um, eating healthy—thing, and the scale says I’ve lost weight: six pounds (four pounds the first week and two the second). But I want so badly to
look
like I have that it seems all I do is second-guess myself. Am I doing enough exercise? Have I misread a serving size and therefore accidentally been eating too much? Would I lose weight faster if I left the carefully measured teaspoon of olive oil off my salad and just used balsamic vinegar? Is the Zone really the way to go—should I maybe 35

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

attempt to follow it while still following Peeke’s
and
Nancy’s advice? Heck, is that even possible?

At one point, I’m so stressed out by whether I’m doing enough and whether the nutritional advice I’m listening to at the moment is the one I should be listening to—not to mention stressed by a bunch of deadlines—

that I nearly cram a chocolate-caramel cluster into my mouth without thinking. The fierceness of my reflex to eat one—and then another two or three—is so intense that I literally catch my breath. For some reason I think of a postcard I once saw on one of those free-card kiosks: “A moment of hes-itation is all it takes to miss the boat.” If I could just pause for a moment, maybe this urge to eat would pass.

But how to pause—to shut my brain off from the endless debate of

whether and what and how much I should eat, or what I can eat without anyone commenting? I know it sounds hokey, but I take a deep breath and try to figure out what I really want, chocolate-caramel cluster aside. In this case, it’s someone to do the crummy parts of my job, leaving me just the good bits.

It comes to me in what feels like a brilliant, lucid flash:
I want to eat because
I don’t feel like doing what I have to do today and the rest of this week
. It seems so self-evident that I can’t believe it’s taken this long to occur to me. But how could it have? I was always too busy stuffing down unpleasant or scary thoughts—do I need a new job? what if I can’t find one? what if I’m totally unsuited to this profession and just haven’t figured it out?—by eating.

To complicate matters, I also want to eat because I might eat later. No kidding. This is the problem with planning—this endless thinking about what food problems might come up over the next day or week makes me feel as though I’m constantly about to fail. I picture myself on a racetrack knock-ing over hurdles instead of sailing gracefully over them, except in my mind the hurdles aren’t made of wood—they’re just giant treats à la Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. This week’s problem-that-I-have-to-think-about-yet-don’t-want-to is that I have to do all these sports bar reviews, and bars are hardly diet friendly. Even if I sit around drinking Diet Coke, I’m still going to have to at least look at the menu. How else am I going to be able to go back to the office and write up the bars with cringe-inducing sentences like, “If your team is losing, the Fred Flintstone–sized plate of nachos ($5.95) is a good distraction”? And looking at the menu means contemplating the options, which means . . . well, usually not anything good.

More alien to me than regular exercise or sandwiches stuffed with Boca Burgers and vegetables (which I’m already getting sick of ) is all the planning

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required in making these lifestyle changes. After all, I’m the kind of person who pulls all-nighters and then ends up on vacation without toothpaste or underwear because I’ve packed fifteen minutes before heading to the airport.

But now I’ve got challenges that caffeine and convenience stores won’t solve, since you can’t leave five workouts to do until Sunday night or hope to make a healthy dinner out of cupcakes from the CVS snack aisle. Now I go to the grocery store once a week—me, whose refrigerator once held only leftover Chinese food, if that—and sketch out my meals for the week on Sunday mornings. I make a huge salad and keep it in a plastic container so it’s the first thing I grab when I get home, starving, at 9:00 p.m. I pack lunches the night before.

And I hate it. I hate thinking about dinner when I haven’t even had breakfast. I hate thinking about whether there will be appropriate snack food at a meeting, or whether the meeting will run late, and whether I should eat beforehand. Thinking, thinking, thinking—all this thinking about food.

Will I ever be one of those people who push their leftover chicken idly around their plate with a fork, not thinking about it? Not feeling proud that I’ve left something over nor barely able to restrain myself from finishing it?

I don’t want to eat out very much because I can’t tell exactly what’s been put in my food, and I worry that I’ll be tempted by too many choices or too much after-dinner lingering with leftovers still in front of me. I find myself lying to friends to avoid having to go out to eat—I’ll say I’m not sure when I’ll be off work, or I’ll ask if I can meet up with them for drinks (in my case, a Diet Coke) later. On days when I am eating out, I panic all day about what will happen if I become too hungry before dinner or if someone’s really late and we can’t eat when we’re supposed to. I know I could eat an extra snack, but that makes me panic about having fewer calories available for dinner.

Sometimes I find myself doing a cost-benefit analysis of going out: is whoever will be there or might be there worth the chance that I might screw up my diet? The way the math works out, it almost never is. Birthday dinner of a not-very-good friend whose friends I’m not crazy about—I probably won’t go because (a) you always eat and drink more at birthday dinners than at normal ones, and (b) I might eat even more than the regular old birthday indulgence because I’m bored with who I’m sitting next to or because, say, we’ve gone somewhere family style and I feel totally not in control of what I’m eating. My good friends will be my friends whether I eat out or not, or so I hope, so I don’t have to go out to eat with them. The only people who end up making the eating-out cut are people I might not see for months and months if I don’t see them for dinner. And even then, sometimes I’ll still try to find a way around it.