Jemima J. (19 page)

_p. 137
Paul nods sagely. “Good. I’m glad you’re here, because the biggest mistake people make is to crash diet and do no exercise, which means that yes, in the short term they lose weight, but they inevitably put it back on again, plus you’d be horrified at what serious dieting and no exercise can do.”

“What do you mean?” I’m intrigued.

“You wouldn’t want to be left with great huge folds of flabby skin would you?”

I shake my head in horror.

“That’s why you need to exercise. You have to tone up and firm up, and that’s just as important as what you eat. Speaking of which, have you thought about a food plan?”

“I’ve cut down what I eat, but no, other than that I haven’t really thought about it.”

“How would you feel about me working out a diet for you?”

I nod enthusiastically as Paul starts explaining about proteins, carbohydrates, fat groups, food combinations.

“Food combining is the best way for you,” he says and, pulling a blank piece of paper out from a drawer, he starts writing. For breakfast every day, he writes, I will have fruit, as much as I want, but no melon because it’s harder to digest. I will always wait for twenty minutes before eating anything else to allow the fruit to digest.

For lunch I will have salad with only one of the food groups, because I will never mix protein with carbohydrates. For example, he writes, salad with cheese, salad with a baked potato, salad with bread. I could have, he tells me, an avocado and tomato sandwich on whole wheat bread with no butter. Avocado is fine, he says, when it’s eaten in the right combination.

For dinner I will have vegetables with grilled fish, or chicken, and again I can have as many vegetables as I want.

“And,” he says, looking up, “you will need to drink lots of water every day. At least one liter, preferably more.”

“Will I lose weight quickly?”

“You’ll be amazed,” he says. “But it’s better that you don’t
_p. 138
lose it too quickly because the quicker you lose it the quicker it will climb on again. But this isn’t a diet, Jemima, it’s a way of life, and once you understand that you’ll find that your entire shape starts changing.

“I want you to have regular assessments,” he says, standing up and walking towards the gym, “every six weeks or so you should come in to see me to check your progress.”

I follow him meekly into the gym and Paul starts by showing me the warm-up exercises. He leads me to the bike, and says, “Five minutes on the bike, I think, just to warm you up.”

So I sit and I pedal, and within two minutes sweat is pouring off my brow and dripping on to the floor. “That’s it,” says Paul. “You’re doing great, nearly there.” Jesus, I want to stop, I can already feel the muscles, what muscles there are, in my legs cramping up, but if Paul says I can do it, I can do it. And I do.

“Stairmaster next,” he says, pressing some buttons on the Stairmaster. Fat burner, he enters, then my weight, then ten minutes. I start climbing.

After two minutes I’m thinking this is really easy, what’s all the big fuss about? After five minutes I think I’m going to die.

“I. Don’t. Think. I. Can. Carry. On,” I manage to get out in spurts of breath.

“ ’Course you can,” says Paul with a smile. “Think of the tiny, pert bottom you’ll have.” I picture a tiny, pert bottom in my mind, and motivation, inspiration, floods my body and drives me on. I manage nine minutes, and then I really can’t do any more.

“Don’t worry,” says Paul. “Next time you’ll do ten, but you have to break the pain barrier. Once you’ve done that it’s easy, and every time you come here you’ll find it gets easier and easier.”

After the Stairmaster I row 1,500 meters, then finish off with a one-mile powerwalk on the treadmill.

“You’ve done brilliantly,” says Paul, who seems to believe in the power of motivation and isn’t letting the fact that he is talking to a bright red, puffing, sodden lump put him off. “I’m
_p. 139
not going to give you any weights just yet. First of all we’ll concentrate on the cardiovascular stuff to burn some fat, and then we’ll work on building muscle.”

I stagger down to the changing room, where I shower on shaky legs before going in to work. But you know the strangest thing? The strangest thing is that, tired though I am, walking along the road on my way to the office, stopping briefly to buy a bottle of mineral water, I don’t think I’ve ever felt better in my life.

_p. 140
“I’m going to a farewell party tomorrow night.”
I type in my e-mail to Brad.
“One of my closest friends at work is leaving to work for another television company so I’m pretty sad. I know it will be a good night, but I don’t know who I’m going to talk to anymore, other than you, of course, whom I seem to be becoming more and more dependent on.

“Anyway, I won’t be able to talk to you later as I’m going straight to the gym, but call me tomorrow when I get home after the party and I’ll tell you all about it.

“Big hugs and kisses as usual, JJ. xxxxxxxxxx.”

Good heavens, let us just stand here and take a look at Jemima, because the transformation, in just a month, is completely remarkable. Paul, the trainer, is quite frankly amazed, but he is also slightly worried because the weight has dropped off at an alarming rate, and he suspects that Jemima is eating far less than he told her to.

His suspicions are right. Jemima took his diet sheet home with her, put it in a drawer, and promptly ignored all the
_p. 141
good advice, and for the last month this has been her daily routine.

Jemima Jones gets up in the morning at 7
A.M.
, and has a glass of hot water with a slice of lemon in it. She pulls on her tracksuit, shoves her clothes for work into a training bag and is in the gym before 8
A.M.
Over the course of the month she has doubled the routine Paul devised for her, and has added some movements of her own. She spends fifteen minutes on the bike, twenty-five minutes on the Stairmaster, fifteen minutes on the rowing machine, and half an hour on the treadmill, mostly powerwalking but with the odd spurt of running.

She then does floor exercises and sit-ups, and gets to the office a little after 10
A.M.
, completely ignoring bacon sandwiches on the way there.

She sits at her desk and swigs mineral water all morning, and then for lunch she has a side plate of plain lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber, while Geraldine shakes her head in amazement, still unable to comprehend Jemima’s willpower after all this time. Once lunch is finished, Jemima will feel ever so slightly guilty at having eaten anything at all, because Jemima has taken this dieting business to extremes.

She drinks another liter of mineral water during the afternoon, finishes work at around 6
P.M.
, chats to Brad on the phone usually for at least half an hour, and occasionally an hour, and then goes back to the gym.

She does an exercise class for an hour at the end of the day, and then relaxes in the steam room or the sauna. She still thinks she is huge, although she is infinitely less huge than she was a few months ago, and refuses to watch herself in the mirrors at the gym, except to think that one day all this excess weight will be gone. One day she will have a hard body. One day she will
be
a hardbody.

If Jemima had any choice at all she would eat nothing in the evening, because she has started this new regimen and she is determined to lose the weight, but she knows that if she eats absolutely nothing, she will not have the energy to exercise,
_p. 142
and she needs protein, so dinner is a small plate of steamed vegetables and a plain grilled chicken breast.

The food she eats is boring and plain, but for once she doesn’t care. She doesn’t have cravings, she feels too good at having lost this weight. She likes the feeling of her clothes being large and, although she hasn’t as yet bought anything new, she knows that if she carries on being as good as she has been, it won’t be long before she will be able to wear whatever she wishes.

Jemima Jones has been losing between five and six pounds of weight a week. Add her weight loss this last month
‌
—twenty-two pounds
‌
—to the thirteen pounds she lost in the previous month, and we will see that Jemima Jones now weighs 182 pounds.

Paul has told Jemima that, at 5’7”, she should aim to get down to 140 pounds, but Jemima Jones has ignored this and has decided that she will weigh 120 pounds, even if it kills her.

Jemima stands in the bathroom, takes off all her clothes and looks at herself in the full-length mirror. She still feels revulsion at the cellulite on her thighs, the bulges on her hips, but even she has to concede that the change is miraculous.

For, despite being 182 pounds, Jemima Jones now has a waist. She has knees. She has a small double chin, rather than a quadruple one, and her face is almost unrecognizable for it has slimmed down so much. JJ is slowly emerging from the fat of Jemima Jones and, although she is not yet the JJ on a bicycle on a hot summer’s day, there is no question that she is getting there. She is finally getting there.

And tomorrow night is the night she has been dreading, Ben’s farewell party. Everyone has been amazed, because nobody has ever left the
Kilburn Herald
to go on television. Some have left to join national newspapers, regarded as heroes by the colleagues they have left behind, but those are few and far between, and nobody has ever dreamed of knowing someone who started at their crappy local paper and went on to be famous.

_p. 143
“Next thing you know we’ll be interviewing
you
,” guffawed the editor, clapping Ben on the back after it had sunk in that he was losing his star reporter. “Don’t forget us when you’re rich and famous, eh?” And Ben just smiled, mentally ticking off the days on his fingers.

For all his diligence and hard work, Ben has been far too excited these last weeks to concentrate on the paper, but he has been forgiven, and his normal daily duties have already been delegated to others, his presence at the office now being a mere formality.

Ben was at the office when he received the call telling him he got the job. He knew the screen test was the best he could have possibly done, but he didn’t know whether it was good
enough,
and the days of waiting were some of the worst of his life.

“It’s fate,” he kept saying to Jemima. “Either it’s meant to be or it’s not.”

“Que sera, sera,” she would echo back, hoping that fate would smile upon him, but hoping too that fate would smile upon her, that perhaps it wouldn’t mean taking him away from her, because she was absolutely sure that once Ben left the
Kilburn Herald
he wouldn’t look back, he wouldn’t remember the friends he left behind.

And it is safe to say that Ben and Jemima are friends. They weren’t, when we first met them, they were merely colleagues, but as so often happens in times of need friendships are forged, and Ben needed a confidante, more than ever during the week of the long nights, as he dubbed it.

But friendships can be a transient thing, as Jemima well knows, and their friendship, as much as it is based on trust and admiration, is equally based on convenience, and Jemima is certain that once Ben is immersed in the glamorous world of television she will no longer hear from him.

But Jemima wants Ben to be happy, more than she wants him to be at the
Kilburn Herald,
and she was the first person he told when he heard he got the job.

_p. 144
“Ben,” said a sharp voice on the phone. “Diana Macpherson here.”

Ben’s breath caught in the back of his throat, and Diana’s laugh cut through the silence. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you want to know what I thought of the screen test?”

“Yes,” said Ben, not sure what to make of her tone.

“I’ve just watched it,” she said, “and I had to phone to tell you that you. Are. Fucking. Amazing.”

Ben gasped. “You’re joking!”

“I never joke about things like this. This is one of the best screen tests I have ever seen, and I can’t believe you haven’t presented before. Are you sure you’re telling the truth?”

Ben laughed.

“I’ve shown it to the head of features and we both agree that you’re the right man for the show, but there is one problem.”

Ben’s heart sank. “A problem?”

“Yeah. It’s not a big one, but when we spoke you said you wanted to do news and politics, and I’m afraid that’s not what we’re offering. We’d like to offer you a year’s contract on
London Nights
as the chief show business reporter.”

There was a silence while Ben tried to digest what she had said.

“You still there, Ben?”

“Yes, sorry. It just wasn’t what I expected.”

Diana sighed. “I know, but I’ve been in this game long enough to know what people’s strengths are, and although I know that news and politics are what you really want to do, I also know that you’d be wasted on that. You need to be much more high profile, and quite frankly, Ben, with this as a stepping stone the world’s your oyster.”