The Weight-loss Diaries (9 page)

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

I e-mailed Shari Frishett, the licensed clinical social worker who works with Peeke, that I was scared that I was becoming obsessed—that I feared restaurants and parties and meetings that ran late and just about anything that might throw off my meal schedule. She pointed out that I needed to restructure my sentences (and my thinking). Why was it, she asked, that I think of what I’m doing as obsessing instead of as “being vigilant about self-care”? And instead of thinking I’m crazy for not wanting to go certain places, she said, why not think of it as not putting myself in situations that compromise me emotionally?

I can’t accept this way of thinking—at least, not yet. Thinking as Shari does makes me feel like food is still running my life, except instead of being obsessed with how to get it, I’m obsessed with how to avoid it.

And once I start thinking along these (cranky) lines, there’s no stopping how far I’ll go. Tonight at the gym I caught sight of myself in the mirror and was unable to stop thinking about how far I have to go. Usually, that’s my cue to throw in the towel, but this time I also couldn’t stop thinking:
What good
would
that
do?

The magazine I work for is supposed to help readers find the best of Washington, but sometimes, at least behind the scenes, we are embarrassingly undis-criminating. Catch us at 3:00 in the afternoon and some of us might even eat three-day-old cheddar-cheese-flavored popcorn if it’s sitting out on the table.

For the past couple of weeks, it’s been an active struggle for me not to eat whatever’s sitting there—and yes, some of it actually has been worth eating.

But today there was a giant box of chocolate truffles, and I wasn’t even especially tempted. Victory! Usually I would have spent the entire time I was at the lunch table thinking about them, and then I would have ended up having two or three, or as many as I thought I could take without being particularly obvious about it. Or I’d try to escape from the table as quickly as possible.

Victory two: I had half a glass of Merlot and one sip of a martini—not bad when you consider I spent six hours at four different bars for a story. (After the Merlot, my strategy was to order drinks I loathe—like dirty martinis—so I could walk around with a drink but not feel tempted to sip it.) Yes, alcohol is not technically part of the Peeke plan. She says it preferentially stores fat on the stomach, which I definitely do not need. I’m to stay completely clear of hard liquor—it has too many calories and “really disinhibits,” known to the rest of us as getting tipsy and then eating too much without thinking. If I absolutely have to drink something, I’m supposed to nurse a glass of wine (100

calories). “Taste and savor, not gulp and consume,” Peeke says.

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It is virtually impossible to write about nightlife and not drink anything at all. Peeke says I should ask for a different assignment, but I can’t. Writing about nightlife is part of my job, and I can’t suddenly announce I won’t do it anymore. Cue which-is-more-important-in-my-life argument from Peeke.

But I want it all: I want to be successful
and
I want to be thin. Do I have to choose?

Craving 2 percent cottage cheese, maybe because it’s the most fattening-tasting thing I’m allowed to eat.

Today I told Peeke I was having major trouble with being hungry about an hour after lunch. She e-mailed back an explanation of the difference between hunger and appetite. Appetite is “I want,” and hunger is “I need.” If I’m really and truly hungry, she said, I’d have hunger pangs or be shaky or have a headache. Besides, she can’t believe I’m actually hungry if I’ve eaten the lunch I’m supposed to eat: two Boca Burgers on two pieces of bran bread with a haystack of lettuce, plus a piece of fruit.

So I called her—because I didn’t really want an explanation, I wanted a solution. Peeke’s was to whip out the baby carrots or—this always kills me—

recognize what I’m feeling as appetite and walk away. When Peeke said that, in this voice that ought to be on a motivational tape, it all sounded so reasonable. But when I got off the phone and thought about it, I realized that if I could do what she said, chances are I would never have gained this much weight in the first place.

I felt like an idiot—the reporter who has nabbed five minutes with a very important source, then not managed to ask the essential question. So I called her back.

“How do I accept that it’s appetite and move on?” I asked.

“Don’t think—do,” she said. “Women think too much.”

Well, that clears it up.

I should have known tonight was not going to be good, Diana-wise.

It began when I had to go downstairs to her apartment to get some mail of mine she’d accidentally taken. We hadn’t seen each other since last week, and she was in fighting mode the minute I walked in the door.

“New jeans?” she asked. They weren’t, and I didn’t want to prolong the line of questioning by asking her why she’d asked in the first place, so I didn’t say anything.

“Awfully interested in clothes now that you’re losing weight?” she said.

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

“No,” I said.

“I don’t recognize that sweater.” It sounded like a challenge.

“You were with me when I bought it three weeks ago, remember?”

“You just keep showing up in all these things I’ve never seen before.”

Another challenge. I wasn’t in the mood to point out that it’s very cold outside, and I’m considerably fatter than I’ve been in a while, therefore I’ve had to pull out winter clothes from college, which of course she’s never seen—we went to different colleges, and when we were home in Florida, we never needed to bring sweaters.

My attempt to discontinue that line of questioning only served to open me up to equally unpleasant ones. Where have I been for the past week? (On deadline.) Why do I only seem to call her when I have nothing to do? (I don’t, but we have this argument all the time.) Why didn’t I come to brunch with her and her friends this morning? (I didn’t want to tell her that brunch is the stuff of which my diet nightmares are made. Should I eat breakfast first since I can’t wait to first eat until 11:00 or noon? Should I count it as lunch?

Breakfast and lunch combined? And is there a single healthy thing one can eat for brunch at Tabard Inn, land of cream and beignets?)

All of my answers seemed to annoy her—as did my refusal to go to the grocery store with her. I’d already gone, and even if I hadn’t, I couldn’t think of a more miserable way to spend an hour than to have her pick up every unhealthy thing in the store and talk about how much she wanted to eat it and how fat she was feeling.

Feeling guilty because I’d blown off her brunch invitation and the grocery store, I invited her to come to a movie tonight with my friends Mary and Robin. Afterward, we went to Xando, where I managed not to touch the s’mores that had been ordered. I just sipped my vanilla tea and tried to tune out Diana’s full-scale offensive: “Don’t you want any?” “Aren’t you going to have any?” “They’re really good.”

As we were walking home, I told her I’d gotten the official green light from
Shape
to start the columns—they’d wanted to see how things went for a few weeks before any contracts were signed. The whole project is “really dumb,” she said, since it “wasn’t like they actually motivated someone to lose weight.” I didn’t say anything. I know the prospect that I might succeed drives her crazy, but I hope I don’t let her drive
me
crazy in the process.

It happened. I’d been wanting chocolate for days, and when I walked past these chocolates on the lunch table midmorning, I gave in.

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In a panic, I nearly ran back to my office, my pants already feeling tighter.
Omigod, omigod. This is it. I’m going to go out there, eat more chocolate,
then decide to eat whatever I want today, which of course means I’ll be unable
to decide what to eat first, and that’ll be the end of three weeks of dieting.
I sat in my office, already dreading having to write down what I ate. Unable to focus on my work, I tried to guesstimate how many calories were in a chocolate, not wanting to go see if there was a calorie count on the box because I was afraid I’d just use that as an excuse to eat more. As in, I’ve already consumed five billion calories, so what’s a few more?

I find it almost unbelievable that an innocent piece of chocolate can set off such a chain of thoughts in my head. And I definitely thought about them for a while as I tried to reason myself out of the very feelings of guilt and failure that all the diet advice I’d ever read or heard said I had no reason to have.

Still, just as I’m not going to wake up thin, I’m not going to wake up with an instantly reprogrammed brain, which is hard for me to accept. As I’ve said before, patience has never been one of my greatest virtues.

I go to synagogue maybe twice a year—on the Jewish High Holidays—

but today I felt like someone was looking out for me. When I finally left my office, the chocolates were gone.

I passed the Great Bar Challenge—as I nicknamed my sports bar blitz—

thanks to lots of Diet Coke. But the disaster of the week happened when I wasn’t quite expecting it. It’s like the Ms. Pac Man game I loved as a kid—

you gobble down three ghosts, duck into a tunnel, and sigh with relief, only to reach the other end and get clobbered by another enemy.

I was out in the Virginia countryside with a friend, and we had plans to try a new sushi place. I’d even asked Peeke for the rules on eating sushi (six to eight pieces—yikes! I normally eat at least twice as much). Sarah and I were supposed to eat at 6:30 p.m., and I’d done fine leading up to the dinner—ate a very filling snack at 4:00 (low-fat cottage cheese with lots of raw vegetables).

But we got very lost, and by 8:30 p.m. I knew I was literally hungry, not just thinking I was. I hadn’t eaten in more than four hours. Because the options were limited, I didn’t protest when she pulled into a Mexican restaurant at 9:00 p.m. I felt almost smug as I quickly revised my dinner plan, thinking maybe I would order fajitas.

Then we sat down, and I realized that maybe you can never be too rich or too thin, but you can definitely be too helpful. Sarah knew about the diet, so when the waitress set down the basket of tortilla chips, Sarah promptly

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

moved it out of my reach. She picked up a chip, nibbled at it daintily, and said, “You’re not missing anything.”

Suddenly those chips seemed like the only thing in the world I wanted.

She opened the menu, suggesting items and then saying, “Oh, you can’t eat that.” I thought darkly about Nancy’s saying that there’s a diet portion of everything. I scanned the menu for fajitas and, once I saw them, closed my menu and announced that’s what I was having, hoping to preempt further discussion.

She ordered mini empanadas as an appetizer, and by the time they arrived I was so hungry and so annoyed with her that I ended up having three. And was that a slightly disapproving look I caught from her? It was almost enough to make me grab the basket of tortilla chips. Which did not bode well for my navigation of the rest of the meal.

All during my fajitas, I tortured myself with the fact that I’d eaten three fried things (the empanadas). I couldn’t stop thinking:
No matter how good I
am the rest of the night, I still screwed up.
It was like realizing toward the end of the semester that even if you got 100 on the last two exams, you still weren’t going to end up with the grade you needed, so why bother studying at all?

I had half of Sarah’s flan for dessert. By the time I got home—and even though I’d eaten much less, and much more healthily, than I’d normally eat at a Mexican restaurant—my pants felt ridiculously tight. I knew it was sci-entifically impossible for me to have gained back all the weight I’d lost, but I lay on my couch trying to prepare for the worst. The math again: what is the absolute
most
number of extra calories I could have consumed? What is the absolute highest the scale could creep?

It didn’t. I actually still lost two pounds, for a grand total of eight these first three weeks, and I got off the scale feeling as though I’d gotten away with something. And the scale was below 200—I am never ever ever ever writing a “2” as the first digit of my weight again. As if they knew, people kept commenting on how good I looked today. It’s funny to watch the divide, though: the women all said I looked like I’d lost weight. (I don’t think I do. It’s just that if women want to compliment other women on something nonspecific—as opposed to shoes or handbags—“You’ve lost weight” is a default, as automatic as saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes.) The men just complimented me on my outfit, an (unremarkable) eggplant-colored suit.

All the compliments made me so happy I wanted to eat, of all things. I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was. “Happy” to me automatically flashes

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back to happy-going-out-to-dinner, as though the two are completely indivisible. Besides, when I’m happy I think:
Life is great. I guess I don’t need to
lose weight to be happy
.

Some people’s entire lives are spent feeling that all would be perfect if they could just lose ten pounds. As of this week, I have lost that and it doesn’t make a shred of difference.

I did get those compliments the other day, but I can’t help thinking it was my turn or something—like the day I got them happened to be the one day of the year everyone I know decided to start the “Let’s try to say one nice thing every day” program. You know, make someone’s day and all that.

Tonight I was trying on clothes before going to a party and I couldn’t stop thinking about how fat I still am, and how many pounds I have to go before I’m even in the realm of normal, which I define variously as being a size 12

or having my weight not be the first thing someone might notice about me.

I steel myself before I look in the mirror, and just at the sight of myself sometimes—like tonight—I feel my throat tighten as if I’m going to throw up.