The Weight-loss Diaries (23 page)

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

when it’s another woman, I don’t know one who will order exactly what she wants even if you don’t agree to split it with her or at least agree to have a few bites.

Side order of guilt with the salad, anyone?

This has been one of the longest weekends of my life. Bonnie decided not to come to D.C. until Saturday afternoon since I wasn’t really going to be “available”—meaning “much fun”—Friday night or Saturday morning. Fine. Cool.

Problem solved.

She got off the plane, gave me a hug (no word about how I looked), and promptly started complaining about the weather. She complained about the heat. She complained about the rain. She complained about what her hair looked like in the heat and rain. She complained that it was too hot to walk anywhere. She didn’t want to go anywhere D.C.-ish, like to a museum. She wanted to shop but then complained that everything was too expensive and that it was depressing to see all these things she couldn’t buy. She complained that the Metro stops were too far apart. (See previous complaint about it being too hot to walk anywhere.)

Things became so strained that I finally suggested a couple of movies, figuring the extra-strength air-conditioning plus the fact that you can’t talk in the theater would shut her up. But she didn’t feel like watching a movie. So we got a table at Xando and ran out of things to talk about halfway through our drinks.

I spent the weekend feeling trapped, alternately wondering on what, exactly, our friendship had been based and plotting how I could sneak off and binge. I couldn’t escape her, couldn’t seem to make things the way they used to be, so I ate to escape her. Yes, the urge to binge was in full force, in spite of—or maybe because of—the huge meals we were eating in all the restaurants I had been so worried about before she got here. I didn’t even try to resist going, because the fact that we were both hungry seemed to be the only thing Bonnie and I had in common. The urge to binge was so strong I even resorted to ducking off to CVS while she was in the shower. I took the cinnamon rolls back to my apartment and ate them standing next to the kitchen garbage can, ready to hide the evidence the minute the bathroom door opened.

The gym would have been a good escape from the whole uncomfortable weekend, but by the end I couldn’t even use it. I was that full.

Today I found out I’ve gained four pounds with all this eating, and still I haven’t stopped. I can’t.

Month 9 (September)

127

I got on and off the scale, checking and double-checking. It was 173 all four times I checked.

I thought about all the starving I was going to have to do to end up with a net loss for the month. I thought about whether it was possible to run twenty miles—as I have to do for training—if I’ve been starving for the days immediately preceding it. Probably not. So I thought about just going back to the Peeke plan of the diet’s early days—the days before I thought I could get away with having a drink here and a piece of chocolate there and still lose weight.

I thought about the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to face the Boca Burgers at lunch today—the probability that I’d spend the whole day in a silent struggle between what I know I should eat and what I want. I couldn’t bear it. Not today.

All together now: tomorrow. I’ll start tomorrow.

Having my picture appear with the
Shape
column means that nobody wonders if the Courtney Rubin in the column is the Courtney Rubin she knows.

The silver lining in this is that random people from my past are starting to pop up. My editor says she’s gotten a handful of e-mails from people claiming to be high school friends of mine. Today I personally got an e-mail from Jennie, a former
Miami Herald
reporter who knew me when I was a sixteen-year-old kid working there but to whom I haven’t spoken in years.

Jennie has heard from a colleague we both still keep in touch with that I’m running the marathon and wrote to ask how the training is going.

Namely: am I dropping weight like crazy?

I wish. I wrote back that I was eating like a madwoman and that I’m probably the only living human being to worry about
gaining
weight on a marathon-training program.

I’m sure she got my response and thought I was exaggerating. The scary thing is that I’m not. I haven’t been able to stop eating since Bonnie was here.

The two and a half days she was here plus the three since then are the longest-running binge I’ve had since before I started this diet. The thought of running on Saturday—today is Thursday—isn’t stopping me. Nor is the thought that if I keep eating like this, I’ll end up with a net weight gain for the month and I’ll have to tell
Shape
. This is how it is when I binge: tomorrow and next week and consequences cease to exist. There is just what I want now and how I’m going to get it.

Every day since Bonnie left, I’ve tried to stop. I’ve gotten up, eaten my breakfast—Special K, milk, banana—and gone to the gym. So far, so good.

But it seems like only more food will cure the almost inexplicable, uncon-

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

trollable hunger I get the morning after a binge, as if the binge has literally stretched my stomach. I picture the things I’ve eaten in the past few hours—

muffins, a calzone, a brownie, and cantaloupe (my pathetic attempt to eat at least one healthy thing)—all sitting whole in my stomach, in cartoon colors, pushing out my stomach into strange shapes, as if it were a balloon at the hands of a child’s birthday party clown.

Jennie wrote to me that she didn’t even like to drive twenty miles. Now I have run that distance, feeling the entire time that I’m going to throw up because I’m so full.

In diets past, I would have given up the exercise the moment I started bingeing. But the marathon training has become more than a way to burn calories. It’s something to master besides my appetite. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let food keep me from crossing the finish line.

Today was a great day for running—cooler than it’s been in ages—but I couldn’t enjoy it. I didn’t talk, and I didn’t listen. Instead I concentrated literally on putting one foot in front of the other, thinking about lifting my knee as if it could be done only if I concentrated hard enough. I calculated the calories I was burning and the pathetically small amount of food—at least compared to what I’ve eaten over the past week—that the run would burn off.

Today is the one-week mark. I’ve eaten virtually nonstop for one whole week. Now in my mind the cartoon food (all in its whole, unchewed form) has filled my entire body, a gruesome collage of gluttony.

I’m terrified that nothing in the world—not the prospect of my jeans not fitting, not the prospect of dealing with
Shape
or anyone else—is ever going to stop me from eating. The weight gain last Wednesday didn’t. The run hasn’t. This awful, horrible weighed-down-by-my-own-body feeling hasn’t.

And hating myself hasn’t.

I can’t explain what takes over when I binge: how I can know how

destructive it is and yet, in the moment, just absolutely not care. When I binge, it’s like being in midair, free of everything: the possibility of weight gain and the nagging fears that what I do is not normal, that it’s sick. Except I can’t hover in midair for long. Eventually I have to land. I have to deal.

Finally e-mailed Shari an official invitation to attend my pity party: I can’t stop eating. Except for the baby carrots in the fridge—I’m not eating
them
.

I didn’t detail the bingeing, just said I’d had a friend in town last week and hadn’t been able to get back on track.

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She told me to stop thinking so much and go for a run, to eat an entire bag of baby carrots, if necessary, when I want to eat, and to e-mail her a list of everything I ate from that moment on. Suddenly it all seemed so simple, so doable. As simple as that, I thought, OK, I’m going to do this. Someone is expecting me to. Someone wants me to.

Which begs one question: why is the fact that I want to not enough?

It’s been twenty-four hours back on the diet, and already I can feel my resolve slipping. Going back to a diet after having been off it is much harder than starting fresh. There’s no joy of the new, none of the sense of possibility.

There’s only endless thought about how long it might take to undo the damage I’ve caused, plus dread of constant hunger—and the failure that inevitably seems to follow that.

I’ve eaten two and a half bags of baby carrots in the past two days and nothing else except my exactly-according-to-plan meals, which I’m psyched to e-mail Shari. Frankly, the thought of eating so much as one more carrot is so unappealing that when I want to eat, I just don’t. Why can I not get sick of, say, chocolate like that?

E-mail from
Shape
’s photo people saying that after the half marathon they think they’d next like to photograph me when I get to 160 pounds, and when do I think I’ll be there? As if I could predict such a thing. That’s when I realized I really haven’t lost any weight all summer: I’ve just been losing and gaining the same two pounds, and now there’s the six I’ve just gained.

When do I think I’ll be at 160? “The Twelfth of Never,” I want to e-mail back. I’ve never weighed 160 in my entire adult life, and at the rate I’m going, I’ll be lucky just to get back down to 169 (which sounds better than 170).

Thanks to my six-pound gain, I’m currently at 175. Which I know nine months ago I would have given anything to weigh, but now it seems scarily close to 180, which is scarily close to 190 . . . which is then only a few binges away from 200.

Diet advice, courtesy of
Cosmo
: every time you feel like having a hot fudge sundae, have sex instead.

Considering that the closest I’ve come to having sex recently is the screaming orgasm shot this guy sent me at a bar because he decided I looked like Monica Lewinsky, I have a vague sense that said tip is not going to work.

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Lost two pounds. Two more pounds to go before I get back to 169. Considering my progress of late, I cannot imagine hanging on long enough to get there.

Ever since my friend Matt quoted me in an article he wrote for the
Fort
Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
when we were in high school, I’ve had zero trouble understanding why some of the people I call for my own stories don’t want to be interviewed. I doubt Matt meant to, but he took my quote out of con-text, and I sounded like an idiot.

Which is how I sounded today. This radio station wanted to interview me about the
Shape
project, so I agreed, stupidly thinking there was only so much damage I could do in the two minutes max I was sure I’d be allotted on morning drive time.

I hardly got the chance to do any damage. The DJ did it all by herself.

She had sounded so friendly on the phone the other day, but during the interview . . . well, she made me feel like some sort of circus freak, with her commenting on how unhealthy and heavy I was and repeating my starting weight on the air so many times I was starting to wonder if she was getting a cash bonus for each mention. She didn’t seem to care that I’d lost any weight; she was obsessed with the idea of how anybody lets herself get to 206 pounds in the first place. She also made me feel deviant for ever craving blueberry muffins, by her insinuating that “normal” people—apparently, “normal” people like her—always confine their cravings to chocolate. Since I’ve never met her in person, I can only imagine she’s one of those women who prances around in a string bikini, complaining loudly about how fat she is. (Anybody who thinks she’s
that
fat doesn’t walk around in a string bikini.) I was hoping this morning was one of those cases when other people would think I sounded a whole lot better than I thought I did, but somehow I doubt it. No one has said anything except, “I heard you on the radio this morning,” and then they give me what seems like a knowing little smile. I don’t weigh 206 pounds anymore, but today I feel like the number is written in red across my forehead and every bit of fat on my body has been circled with Magic Marker, as was supposedly done to some sorority pledges in an infamous story told endlessly while I was in college.

I’m not 206 pounds, but I feel as fat as ever. I have trouble buying dessert without wondering if the person selling it to me is thinking,
So that’s how she
got so big
. It’s practically a reflex to look for an XL at the Gap. And when I

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131

look at pictures of myself in an attempt to see proof that I look different, I still automatically try to pick myself out of a group by looking for the biggest figure.

I’m a size 12 and sometimes 10, but I look in the mirror and my brain morphs it into a funhouse mirror. On one level I know that, but still I can’t stop myself. So
Shape
has a new expert they want me to consult: a body-image specialist. I never even knew such people existed.

It wasn’t an auspicious beginning when she told me she wanted me to meditate. What’s next? I wanted to ask. I know meditation isn’t that out there anymore, but I still couldn’t help wondering if next she’d have me dancing around naked, banging on African drums, and chanting affirmations like,

“I am thin and beautiful.”

But considering that in the past I’ve gone to crazy lengths (eating just four peaches a day and nothing else) to lose weight, I figured I should at least listen to this woman if there was a chance she could rid me of the ability to make myself so miserable.

She told me that because I’ve struggled with food and weight for so long, I don’t see my body very clearly. No kidding. I told her about the (ridiculously Courtney-centric) thoughts that litter my brain, such as that people at a party are all noticing that my stomach sticks out in my jeans, and she didn’t make me feel like a freak. She just said that, as with losing weight, stopping my toxic thoughts won’t happen overnight.

Since I have a race coming up, I also told her about my paranoia that the spectators are secretly laughing at me.