The Weight-loss Diaries (5 page)

Outside the house I constantly felt as if I was going to get caught not knowing something I should have known—something my mother should

have taught me. My mother wasn’t up to talking about makeup or men or even small things, like polishing shoes. I’d visit my friends’ houses and watch their mothers fuss over them—whether they needed a haircut or whether their

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

T-shirt had been washed too many times and ought to be retired—and I’d wonder if I were the one who really needed the tune-up.

Even now, it seems, every day a friend of mine will talk about something she learned from her mother—a special way of folding laundry, an expression, a shortcut—and I’ll search my own memory for something similar. I come up empty, and I realize again how awfully little time I really got to spend with her.

That’s because, even when she’d recovered from surgery, chunks of her memory and personality were gone. I hear stories about my mother in her twenties and thirties—this smart, capable woman who changed her own tire (“in jeans!” my grandmother says with awe) on Fifth Avenue in the 1950s and was the first person her friends called when they needed to know anything about anything—and I can’t help wondering if I ever knew her. I’m supposed to feel lucky that she’s around at all, but so many times I feel as if she’s here but not really here, and I feel cheated instead. And then I feel guilty.

One of the toughest bits about her illness is knowing how hard my

mother worked when I was young to shield me from pain. She knew I was terrified of doctors and dentists and needles and would request that the dentist do whatever needed to be done all in one visit, so I wouldn’t have to spend a week or so dreading a filling or having a tooth pulled. When I had to get my tonsils out, she didn’t tell me until two days before, so I’d have less than forty-eight hours to worry about it. And in the hospital before my surgery, she got my father to ask that I be given general anesthesia using a mask, so I wouldn’t have to feel the IV go into my arm.

I don’t know which makes me sadder: that she can’t protect me from the pain of watching her or that there’s nothing I can do to help her.

My father is almost intimidatingly smart and rarely wrong, but no matter how much he insists that brain tumors are not genetic and that I won’t have one, I don’t believe him. I don’t think about it every day anymore, but when I’m feeling melodramatic, the idea of ending up like my mother adds an extra urgency to a lot of things.

Like many people with whom I went to college, I want to be successful—

and if I can be young and successful, so much the better. But I also want not to regret things—and I’m pretty sure that at some point I’m going to regret how angry I’ve been with myself about my weight and how much time I’ve wasted feeling that the extra pounds keep me from doing things I want to do.

In truth, I end up doing almost everything I want—going to the beach, dancing with friends, ordering dessert—but I do it almost defiantly, my enjoy-

The Eve of the Diet

13

ment tempered by fear and a constant internal voice telling me what an idiot I look like. I’m convinced the voice would shut up—or at least quiet down—

if I didn’t feel so conspicuous, so
fat
.

So on to the diet, and what I can do to make this one go differently—more successfully—than the ones before it.

For one thing, this time I’m even starting differently. Instead of saying,

“I’ll start tomorrow” or “next Monday” or “when I get back from vacation”

or “January 1,” I’m starting now. Which means no night before to pig out and eat everything one last time, swearing that I’m never going to eat these things again. I hate waking up to that sick, full feeling, and I’ve already got a good fifty pounds to go—so do I really need to pig out and add a couple more pounds to the pile?

Here’s another way this time will be different: I’m not starting in a flash of rage or humiliation or disgust.

I’ve had many bring-on-the-celery-sticks moments over the years: when Bruce the Spruce—one Florida mall’s answer to Santa Claus—told me to eat my vegetables so I’d be tall and thin like my sister. When my mother yelled at me for being fat as I dove into the Halloween candy, spilling it all over the kitchen floor. When my grandmother yelled at me for taking a second helping in front of an entire table of Passover guests. When a pair of size 18 jeans was too small. When, as I was standing with two friends at a party, two guys walked up to the three of us and treated me as though I were invisible.

But diets that started out of, essentially, revenge haven’t worked. A few weeks later, the moments still stung—in fact, they still sting today—but somehow that has never been enough to keep me going. Losing weight is hard enough—painful enough—on its own. Adding the constant mental replay of my most embarrassing moments somehow has always driven me into the arms of something sweet, instead of away from it.

This diet isn’t starting from the pit of despair, either. Instead of a flood of tears and a flash of “I must do something now,” this diet has its roots in a gradual realization: I’m tired of feeling out of control. As I reread old journals one dark afternoon last week, I was struck by how much my weight figured into everything I thought and did. No matter what else I was writing about, somehow I’d end up writing about weight.

Me writing about a party where I drank far too much: “I have a hang-over this morning, which would be a more than fair price to pay if something fabulous happened, but nothing did. And it isn’t that I don’t remember it,

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

either. Being drunk may loosen everyone else’s inhibitions, but unfortunately it does nothing to rid me of this terrible self-consciousness of being fat.

When you’re fat, it all just hangs out.”

On looking for a new job: “More than plowing through piles of awful clips or trying to come up with ridiculous action-verb synonyms for
wrote
(
penned
? ick) for my résumé, the thing that always stops me from getting too far is the idea of having to find something to wear. I need a black pantsuit, and I hate the idea that probably the only one I’ll be able to find will have an elasticized waist.”

On a concert: “One of these days, I will find the perfect pair of shoes to wear to the 9:30 Club. The bottoms of my feet always hurt after concerts there—you have to stand the whole time. Is this a fat thing or does this happen to everybody? I know, I know—I should just wear sneakers. But every time I go to put on sneakers with normal clothes, I can’t help thinking about this one very fat woman I read about who
had
to wear sneakers everywhere—

her feet were too fat for normal shoes.”

I read page after page, horrified by what I had become. I felt trapped by my own body, literally weighed down by it. I was saddened by the things I wrote: my (somewhat sick) wishes that if everyone has his or her way of dealing with stress, why oh why couldn’t mine be smoking or
not
eating? My disgust with myself that although I was fat enough that losing all the weight I wanted to lose would take seemingly forever, somehow I still wasn’t fat enough for a gastric bypass, aka the stomach-shrinking surgery, which required you to be 100 pounds overweight. There were times when I went so far as to wonder if it wouldn’t just be easier to gain the weight needed for the surgery than to try to lose all I had to lose.

Other people, I realized as I read my journals, marked their lives with birthdays or graduations or major purchases (cars, apartments). I marked mine with weight. Anyplace I went—restaurant, city, whatever—I could remember what size I wore (I usually avoided the scale) when I was there last.

Holiday memories were divided into ones where I ate whatever I wanted (nasty comments and sharp looks from family members be damned), ones where I ate exactly what Diana ate but then ended up late at night in the kitchen eating everything I hadn’t eaten earlier, and ones where I was so restrained and “good” that I was cranky and grumpy the whole time.

So here goes nothing. Tonight I’m off to go grocery shopping for the first half of the week. I know it would be more efficient to buy for the whole week, but the idea of a refrigerator that full . . . I can’t handle that right now.

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I must be the only person on the planet who—out of lack of cookies or crackers or pretzels—could manage to pig out on low-fat string cheese and nonfat yogurt and raspberry preserves, but if that’s the way I am, I might as well recognize it.

I’m also going to buy—I admit it—my usual pile of fitness magazines.

Their “lose five pounds with these five easy changes” articles always appear to be geared for those people who need to lose only five pounds yet somehow still regularly drink whole milk (“substitute skim!” the mags tell us oh-so-wisely) and eat fried chicken (“substitute grilled chicken”). Who are these people, and if they eat so much fried chicken for these changes to add up, how is it they have only five pounds to lose, anyway?

But I digress. Paging through the magazines often keeps me from stuffing my face (at least for one night), so if the tips actually worked for me, I guess I’d have to consider that a special bonus.

Anyway, enough. I’m off.

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Day 1

The first day ofa diet is unpleasant—
unpleasant
being a euphemism for the sort of word my editor would say can’t be printed in a family magazine. The thrill of starting something new lasts for maybe four minutes, which leaves me approximately twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes to wonder (a) how long until my next meal, (b) how long I can keep this up, (c) whether one chocolate-chip cookie would do that much damage, (d) how much weight I can lose in a week, and (e) whether I possibly can be a size smaller in time for my friend Kate’s party in three weeks.

I was never one to fill the margins of my high school notebooks with my name plus the last name of my current crush, but this morning I was being equally ridiculous, scribbling calorie counts for hypothetical meals all over my
Washington Post
. It’s worse than trying to use up store credit—my attempt to not let a single calorie of my 600 calories per meal go to waste is resulting in some ludicrous-sounding repasts:

Lunch: one Lean Cuisine macaroni and cheese (280 calories); three

peaches (120); one fat-free, sugar-free Fudgsicle (45); three Hershey’s Kisses (72). Which still leaves 83 calories. Note to self: must find website that lets you search for foods by very specific number of calories.

And of course, all the calculating of possibilities made me hungry for every one. Consider the snack options: a can of Progresso rotini in chicken broth (160 calories, three grams of fat) or a can of Progresso tortellini (140

calories, four grams of fat)? String cheese or yogurt? Peach or nectarine?

(Well, that one’s easy: peach—it has half the calories of a nectarine, so I can have two.) I wanted them all, and I’d just had breakfast.

It’s all about options, and having options is what gets me into trouble.

Reduced to its simplest terms, more food options equals more eating. Period.

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

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

Fewer options equals less wondering what to snack on, which equals staying within calorie count, which equals losing weight . . . I hope. But once I get into the penne-versus-peach debate, it’s all over. If the can of rotini is 120 calories more than a peach, and I choose the peach over the rotini every day this week, that’s 120 calories times seven. Which equals a savings of 840 calories.

Which is equal to a dinner and a half, or a little over a third of one day’s calories. In a month I could lose an extra pound. Big deal.

So I started thinking about more dramatic calorie savings. Which brought up more options. Then started to think I really wanted the rotini anyway, which is twenty calories more than the tortellini. And if I did that every day, that’s twenty times seven. . . .

It’s been said that math is supposed to be sense. This is nonsense. I know that, and still I can’t help it.

To make things worse, I’ve started on the day after Christmas, an idea that seemed like less and less of a good one as the minutes passed. Not only is my family in town, which means we eat every meal in a restaurant, but everywhere there are Christmas leftovers and half-price Christmas chocolates. But I figured if I didn’t start today I’d eat like mad until they left in two days. Then somehow I’d use those two days of eating to justify putting off starting until New Year’s or, more likely, January 2, since there’s still plenty of eating and drinking to be done in the wee hours of New Year’s Day. . . .

I had my carefully measured cup of Special K with one-half cup of skim milk and one medium banana for breakfast, but I was still hungry. The idea of two restaurant meals looming later already made me want to give up and go buy one of those Godzilla-sized chocolate-chip muffins. I know from experience that no matter how plain I try to order my food in a restaurant, I still get frustrated by not being able to know
exactly
how my chicken or fish is being prepared (how much butter is really in there?). I don’t dare order pasta—no way can I deal with trying to figure out what depressingly small bit I’ll be allowed of the Mount Saint Pasta I’ll no doubt be served as a portion.

If I were a smoker—and there are so many times when I can’t help wishing, despite my pulmonary-doctor-father’s best scare tactics, that cigarettes were my vice—I’d be the sort who could quit only by going cold turkey. Since I can’t give up food completely, I feel this need to be as perfect as possible in the beginning of a diet, if only because I figure I’m just going to get sloppier as time goes on. And if I start out sloppy, that leaves that much less space for

Day 1

19

margin of error (translation: times I can screw up and still have the scale go down).

I don’t have much margin of error. I’m already counting the weeks to a friend’s wedding in April and figuring that even if I lose two pounds a week—