Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (44 page)

In August 2006 I joined her for a “sprint triathlon” in Princeton, not far from her house. Like me she’d become more diligent about exercising; in fact she’d done a sprint triathlon already. This one consisted of a lake swim of about a third of a mile, followed by about thirteen miles of biking and a 3.2-mile run. I finished in just under an hour and a half. The following August—more than three years since I’d taken the critic’s job—we did the exact same course and I shaved five minutes off my time.

Dad came to watch, and told me afterward that even from a distance, on a far edge of the lake, he’d had no trouble figuring out which of the scores of swimmers plowing through the dark water was me. He could tell from my stroke. All these years later, he said, it was still strong, and it was still pretty much the same.

 

 

 

 

So that was that, then? Problem solved? Weight on track, with life to follow?

Not so fast.

One Sunday night I had my friend Kerry meet me for dinner at Cafeteria, an undistinguished restaurant in Chelsea that had flourished for years, its success fueled by its marriage of reasonably priced comfort food and a sleek, hip setting once used in
Sex and the City
. A few of the players behind it had just opened a successor, Delicatessen, that I planned to review. So I wanted to catch up on the original, which I’d never visited. I didn’t need to conquer the menu. I just needed a taste of the place.

But as Kerry and I chatted and I drained a third glass of white wine, I lost track of my limited purpose and lost touch with my discipline. I left none of the macaroni and cheese sampler—three kinds, generously portioned—on the plate. I rapidly gobbled up more than my half of the meat loaf and more than my half of the fried chicken. I even gobbled up the soggy, tasteless waffle that came with the chicken.

“I think I better stop here and skip dessert,” I told Kerry, who concurred: we’d had enough.

I used one of my fake credit cards to pay the bill, said good-bye to him on the sidewalk and hailed a cab, telling the driver, “West Seventy-fourth between Amsterdam and Columbus.”

We went uptown through the West Thirties, the West Forties, the West Fifties. As the West Sixties gave way to the West Seventies, I leaned forward and told the driver, “You know what? You can just drop me at the corner of Amsterdam and Seventy-fourth.” Right there was a bodega, and I’d decided, in a flash, without really weighing the pros and cons, without really deliberating much, to get the dessert I’d just denied myself.

In the bodega I had trouble choosing between a large square bar of dark chocolate with hazelnuts, a chocolate-covered ice cream cone like the kind I remembered from those boyhood Good Humor trucks, a classic ice cream sandwich and a package of six Nutter Butter cookies. So I got them all. What the hell. Hadn’t I determined that the occasional binge was okay?

I woke the next morning to find the various wrappers from my midnight feast strewn across a leather ottoman that sat between a couch and the television set, functioning as a coffee table. I was disgusted: the wrappers were proof that I’d gone beyond the usual periodic, permissible pig-out. I bunched them up, stomped into the kitchen, tossed them into the wastebasket and looked at the clock on the stove. It was ten twenty-five. Okay: I’d spend an hour on the computer and then get to Reebok before the lunch rush. I’d have my pick of treadmills and plenty of mat space and there wouldn’t be any wait for weight machines.

But I got absorbed in an article I was working on and in e-mail conversations with friends, colleagues and editors. Suddenly it was three p.m. and I was famished, unusually so, as if I’d stretched my stomach’s boundaries the night before and now had more space to fill. With virtually nothing in the cupboards or refrigerator, I called a Chinese restaurant and ordered spare ribs and roasted chicken—enough for three people, it turned out. I finished it all, because it was good and because it was there, and I grew sleepy ten minutes later. I took a nap. By dinnertime, when I had to head out for the night, I’d never made it to the gym.

A minor case of the sniffles persuaded me to cancel on Cathy the next day. The Pilates sessions had started to bore me somewhat, and at my insistence they always included these sideways sit-ups that targeted love handles and hurt like hell, never getting much easier over time. They were harder than teasers, which I’d indeed succeeded in mastering. I just wasn’t in the mood for them. How hard could a forty-three-year-old guy be expected to push himself?

I went to Reebok only twice over the next week and only once the week after that, when I also failed to restrain my restaurant eating, maybe because I was blue or because I was exhausted or because I’d hit a run of especially tempting restaurants—I didn’t really know why. For the weekend I headed out to Dad’s house in Scarsdale to join Mark, Lisa and their kids, who had come down from Boston for a visit. Mark and I set out at one point for a four-mile run. A mile into it, I had to ask him to slow down. I went the distance, but was breathing much harder at the end than he was.

That annoyed me, and my annoyance turned to alarm when, back in the city at the end of the weekend, I struggled to slip into a pair of size 34 jeans that I hadn’t had to struggle with two weeks before. My weekly cleaning woman usually did my laundry for me: had she left the jeans in the dryer too long and shrunk them somehow? That was what I wanted to believe. It was the sort of theory I might have successfully sold to myself in the past.

But I knew it was bullshit. I’d noticed a subtle tightness in other pants and shirts in recent days, and I had to admit that I’d been off my game in terms of eating and exercising. On top of that, I’d been sensing for a few months that I was going through one of those faint metabolic slowdowns that happened every five years or so, one of the wages of aging. And it was happening at the same time that I was noticing more aches and soreness whenever I tried to run anything over four miles. This was something new and scary.

I left the too-tight jeans on as I headed out to dinner, a way of not letting myself ignore the issue. Lucky for me, I was eating sushi that night, and I made a point of eating only as much as I had to. Over the next nights I demonstrated a similar restraint. And on the days in between I went to the gym: no evasions, no excuses. I addressed the aches and soreness by replacing some of the usual treadmill running with brisk walking on a steep incline. It didn’t produce as heavy a sweat, so I stayed on the treadmill longer than I usually did.

My friend Ned had been talking a lot about a new fitness program he was trying out with a trainer he’d just hired. It was an intense twenty-eight-minute workout of concentrated, high-stress weight lifting. That was a departure from what I’d been doing, and I needed a departure, a jolt. So I stopped seeing Cathy as often and started cheating on her with Jay, who left my muscles so fatigued that they hurt—and seemed to keep burning calories—for days after each session. A combination of Cathy and Jay worked better than Cathy alone. And at whatever point that ceased to be true, I promised myself, I’d figure out another combination. I’d keep mixing it up so I could keep going.

About three weeks after Mark’s visit, the jeans I’d worn out for sushi weren’t tight anymore. The recovery and relief came just in time, because Terry was in Manhattan for the weekend.

T
erry lived in D.C. and had worked at Aaron’s exercise studio when I first went there in 2002. For one of every three of my sessions back then, he took Aaron’s place training me. I never got to know him well, and he had stopped working as a trainer by the time I reconnected with Aaron after Rome. But in the summer of 2008 I ran into him at a mutual friend’s birthday party, and we flirted.

“You don’t look the same,” he told me.

I nodded vaguely and changed the subject, because I never knew what to say to a remark like his, which at once shamed and thrilled me.

After the party we flirted some more, by e-mail, then had a long date when I later happened to be in D.C. Now, about four months since the birthday party, he was in town to see a play with some old buddies of his. We met for a drink.

We talked about his new job in the not-for-profit world, about mine in the epicurean one. He wondered aloud about my decision to take it, at first tiptoeing up to the question, then just asking flat out: Why hadn’t it made me heavier?

I said I was watchful and balanced in a way that I hadn’t been in the past.

“How did you manage that?” he asked. “What’s the difference between then and now?”

We were in the backseat of a cab at this point. He was sitting closer to me than he had to, his left hand casually grazing my right arm. He was a good-looking guy, a
great
-looking guy, a life of serious athleticism reflected in his build, a face animated by optimism and confidence.

“I think the difference,” I told him, “is how much I’d rather be like this. Once I pulled myself out of whatever it was I’d sunk into, I never wanted to go back. I was pretty miserable. I think remembering that and concentrating on how I feel now—being aware of how much better it is—that’s the difference. I’m determined in a way I wasn’t.”

After he and I parted I kept thinking about my answer, which wasn’t, I concluded, quite right or quite complete. The main difference between then and now wasn’t determination. It was honesty. I didn’t lie to myself the way I had in the past. I especially didn’t lie to myself about food.

When I was honest with myself, I had to acknowledge that there’d never been, and would never be, a magic eating or dieting formula that overrode and erased whatever volume of food I consumed: no skeleton key to a skeletal me. I had all the proof of that that any sane person could ever demand.

I had to admit that the success or failure of every diet I’d ever attempted boiled down to the most basic equation of all: how much energy I expended versus how much fuel I took in. And no matter what I’d once tried to tell myself, I always knew, in the course of a given day, whether this equation was out of whack.

I knew whether I was doing a token amount of exercise or really pushing myself, and I knew that for me, exercise mattered, always making the difference. At some point during my first years as a restaurant critic I’d spotted an article about studies that maintained that overweight people who upped their exercise inevitably upped their eating proportionally, canceling out the benefits. For me this wasn’t true, and I knew that because I knew the history of my own body. Most of us do, if we look carefully and candidly at ourselves. The care and the candor are the challenge.

I knew which of the dishes in front of me were the most fattening, how much of each was prudent versus reckless. I just had to listen to that knowledge. I had to accept and acknowledge that one botched day or even one botched week wasn’t apocalyptic. It was life as most people lived it—certainly as I did. Yet I had to acknowledge as well that it was the right, small, short-term decisions, one after another, that yielded long-term results. Losing weight—or not gaining it—boiled down to putting back the second dinner roll I’d just reached for, running or walking the extra mile, getting off the uptown Number 1 train when it pulled into the Sixty-sixth Street stop, near my gym, rather than staying on until Seventy-second Street, going home and unwinding until dinner out.

And I had to understand that if I set some matinee idol’s physiognomy as my goal, and wallowed in self-pity at any condition short of that, I was acting like the same self-defeating fool who’d fried his face in front of a sun lamp and bleached his hair in pursuit of a silly ideal. That was truer than ever now, after those years in my thirties of so much extra weight. I had to accept that I’d never be as taut as I’d fantasized about being.

As I honestly reflected back on all the eating I’d done—all the
over
eating I’d done—I had to recognize that I’d almost always gotten something out of it. Accomplished something with it. The hunger in me wasn’t an invention or an act of will: it was there from the start, and it was bigger than most people’s. But the chubby boy who ate more adventurously than his siblings caught the notice of grown-ups that way, and some of the notice was admiring.

Through my eating I probably drew a few more hugs from Grandma than Mark or Harry had. Through my eating and dieting I forged a sort of pact with Mom, and while my gluttony earned me her pity and censure as well as her delight, those were forms of attention, too. In college and in my twenties, my eating—or at least my worrying about it—gave me the cop-out I apparently wanted sometimes, an escape clause from the awkwardness and vulnerability that went along with physical intimacy. My most extreme eating during the Washington years wasn’t as strategic—its costs vastly exceeded its benefits—but it was the predictable consequence of all that preceded it, the ugly flower of destructive behaviors that had taken root years before. When I was truthful, I could see all of that.