The Weight-loss Diaries (10 page)

Instinctively, I suck in my stomach, wishing I could pull the entire fatness of me inside every portion of my body and retreat, retreat, retreat from anyone ever looking at me again.

So of course in this frame of mind nothing I put on looks good. I want to stay home tonight, partly because I don’t want anyone to look at me and partly because it’s at times like this that alcohol and party snacks are especially lethal. It’s not because my friends and I are setting out to get drunk tonight.

It’s because when I’m feeling crummy, I don’t handle alcohol well. Booze makes me a more intense version of myself: if I’m happy when I drink, I become louder and sillier—myself in caricature. But if I’m feeling at all bad, some ridiculously small thing (a raised eyebrow, a perceived slight) can make me have to blink back tears.

I know this, and still I keep trying, keep hoping that alcohol will dissolve the feeling that I need to stand defensively at a party, arms across my chest, the phrase “Don’t look at me” running through my head like a news ticker, making it hard to concentrate. I picture the alcohol seeping into my brain cells, washing away my incessant examination of all the women around me, stopping me from wishing I looked like any one of them but me. Sometimes I think I can almost feel the seeping, the way you can practically feel a candy bar rotting your teeth—but the alcohol never really works.

Tonight I tried on a bunch of pants that I wore last month, and they’re not much looser. I really hope I haven’t gained weight from the margaritas at

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

a friend’s birthday . . . and I’m panicked that not going to the gym today means I won’t lose any weight this week. And what if those two margaritas I drank at the birthday were 300 calories a pop as opposed to the 200 apiece I was estimating? What’s more, what if every drink I had this week (a lot of parties) was 300 calories instead of 200? That would be something like 1,500

extra calories total, instead of 1,000. I did do an extra thirty-five minutes of cardio this week to balance things out, but there’s no way that was 1,500 calories’ worth. So, 1,500 extra calories would mean that I gain half a pound. Or should mean it.

I’m terrified that trying to lose weight is turning me into a cranky, boring person. It’s not like I used to think about literature or symphonies or rocket science twenty-four hours a day before, but now I fear that food and calorie counts and when and how I’m going to get to the gym and whether I’ve lost any weight and when a smaller size will fit is all I think about. I hope it’s not all I talk about. It reminds me of a book I once read as a kid, about this little boy who was trying to become the perfect person. After lots of sipping of lukewarm tea (recommended by a book he found on how to be the perfect person), he discovered that perfect people are boring. If losing weight is supposed to make my life perfect, does it follow that it will also make me boring?

By definition, people who are significantly overweight do not trust their gut.

And I’m not talking just about ignoring—or being unable to interpret—sig-nals that I’m full. Because for so long I’ve eaten to blot out every strong feeling (anxiety, sadness, boredom), each bite takes me further and further away from myself, the voices inside me becoming ever fainter until I’m not even sure I’ve heard them at all. The dissociation shakes me from my bearings, making it impossible to know what I want and need on the most basic level, making it impossible to trust myself.

I thought I shouldn’t have gone to the party tonight, but I went anyway.

It was the party of a work friend of Mary’s, and I just didn’t have it in me to chitchat with people I didn’t know. The only people I knew at the party were getting tipsy and then dancing, neither of which I felt like doing. So I stood there, not drinking anything except Diet Coke and feeling cranky and edgy and . . . separate from everyone at the party, as though trying to connect with them through a film of Saran Wrap. My cue to go home should have been when my friends started to irritate me—when they seemed so loud and happy that I couldn’t stand it. But I didn’t. I never want to leave parties until everyone else does. What if something interesting happens after I’ve already left?

The Rest of Month 1 (January)

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In my less morose moments, I can almost laugh about the unexpected fringe benefits of dieting. Sometimes I feel like the diet makes it hard to have a social life, and it often makes me resent all the things I usually love about my job—that I have to go out a lot. But planning not to be caught hungry at various events is turning out to be quite good for my professional life. One night at a dinner I had to attend, I literally met everyone in the room because I was so busy trying to concentrate on the people and not the Southern buffet of fried chicken, dripping corn bread, and peanut brittle. (I knew the fried chicken was coming, so I’d eaten beforehand.) As an added bonus, at most after-work events—where there are usually greasy appetizers—not eating anything at all means I never get caught in midbite, or in that awkward position of juggling plate and drink so I can shake someone’s hand. Nor do I have to worry about spinach in my teeth. Aren’t I positively Ms. Glass Is Half Full?

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Month 2 (February)

You always read in magazines and diet books about volunteering to

bring vegetables or a fruit dessert or something else you can eat when you go to someone else’s house, but I couldn’t imagine actually doing it or, frankly, that anyone else actually did it.

But I tried the bringing-something routine, and I’m here to report that it was easier than I’d thought. I called Alexy to ask if she needed anything for her annual Super Bowl party. But instead of waiting for her to say she had everything covered or to tell me to bring some soda or chips, I followed up my “Can I bring you something?” with “Like maybe some veggies and dip?”

She said, “Oh, that’s a good idea. I don’t have a single healthy thing planned.”

Just as I’d suspected.

I brought a big platter of mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, carrots, and broc-coli, and I ate them. So did everyone else—in between pizza, chips, and chocolate.

Not that everything was perfect. I had invited Diana, and after twenty minutes I was beginning to wish I’d swallowed my guilt that she had nowhere to go and left her home. She kept making cracks—which I tried to ignore—

about how I was being a martyr by not eating the high-fat dips. She didn’t look pleased when my friend Amy started making a fuss about how thin I looked. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I was sure I’d return to find Diana had dipped my vegetables in batter and fried them.

When I was in college, I had a friend who, instead of giving up something for Lent, would commit to doing something good for forty days. Volunteer.

Recycle. Call her mother more often.

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

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

Other friends used to tease her that her approach was only to make herself feel better because there was no way she could give up the corn fritters she loved from the pizza place down the road. But I always think of her when I try to explain why I’d rather exercise than diet. I’d rather
do
something than deny, deny, deny.

It didn’t used to be this way. It’s practically a cliché of the overweight to say how much you hated gym class as a child, but of course I did. It was nerve-racking enough to get graded on how many times I could serve the volleyball over the net (A for five times, B for four times, and so on), but then there was the comparing of myself with all the other girls. In regular clothes, I could possibly convince myself my flaws were camouflaged. But not in a gym uniform. Before I left the locker room, I’d lock myself in a bathroom stall, pull my knees to my chest, and stretch my T-shirt over them, hoping to make the shirt big enough to hide me. Later, sitting on the scuffed gym-nasium floor, I’d cross my arms over my thighs, hoping to make myself smaller, if not invisible. When I forgot my uniform, the dread that possibly none of the spare maroon shorts and T-shirts would fit sometimes gave me a stomachache. It wasn’t that I was so fat in middle school—I wasn’t. But I knew that even if the uniform didn’t fit because it was, say, an extra-small, I wouldn’t be able to laugh it off the way the other girls did.

There were plenty of other kids who weren’t very good at volleyball or softball, but that never seemed to matter when it was my turn. I don’t remember anyone calling me fat in class or otherwise attributing my complete lack of sports aptitude to that, but I was sure that was what everyone was thinking. When I was standing around waiting for my turn, I did plenty of whispering about all sorts of things that had nothing to do with gym class, but when other people whispered when I was at bat, I was sure they were laughing at me. Which of course never did anything to improve my sporting abilities.

Before I got too self-conscious—which I date around age six, when we moved to Florida from New Jersey—I loved to swim. One of my few memories of my grandfather—he died just before we moved—is of going to the pool with him. Years later—when I wouldn’t jump in the deep end because I was afraid my body would make too large a splash—I used to yearn for those days at the pool with Grandpa. Back then, I wouldn’t jump for what now seems like such a sweet, childlike,
normal
reason: I was too afraid.

I also remember swimming at a New Jersey pool where a family friend was a member. I must have been about five, trying to earn a red ankle bracelet

Month 2 (February)

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that qualified you for what, I can’t remember. My sister and I swam well for our age; we were considered young to take the test. I failed; I’m pretty sure Diana did, too. Unlike the years that followed, from which I can recall every cringe-worthy detail about every cringe-worthy bathing suit I ever owned and the cringe-worthy way it fit, I can’t remember what I wore that day. Nor can I remember why I didn’t pass. I couldn’t know then it was to be the last time I didn’t ascribe a sports-related failure to being fat—and the last time I wouldn’t spend the week afterward loathing myself for both the failure and the weight.

In Florida, instead of sending your little girl to ballet class, you send her for tennis lessons. Not Diana and me. My parents weren’t fans of any sport, and neither of them liked the outdoors. I can imagine my mother wrinkling her nose when she learned that tennis lessons were the after-school activity of choice. Running around chasing after a ball in the heat?

In the first house I remember, on Long Island, we lived on a cul-de-sac, the sort of storybook place where kids played kick the can and chased Char-lie, the neighbor’s black Lab, without fear of cars. In Cherry Hill, New Jersey, we also lived on a kid-friendly street—where all the backyards between our street and the one behind us created one huge green space. Diana and I had a jungle gym that was the envy of the neighborhood, and we played on it every summer night. Later, we’d hurtle ourselves across the lawn, trying to trap fireflies in a special lantern. To this day, my enduring image of childhood summers is this: I’m five years old and wearing orange shorts (my mother’s favorite color), giggling hysterically as I somersault and slide across the cool grass.

In Florida, we lived on a busy road, and no one had a backyard. Everyone had pools and fences. Our own pool required a lot of upkeep—some of it Diana and I could do (and didn’t), and some of it we couldn’t—so we rarely used it. I remember my mother taking us to the park on Tuesday afternoons, but on other days I often read. Intellectual pursuits were always encouraged, so I can’t remember anyone ever telling me to take my nose out of a book and go play.

Right about that time was when my mother and grandmother started to nag me about my weight and what I ate. It was the early eighties, when tuna fish, celery, and Tab were still the answers to extra pounds. Exercise? I don’t remember hearing about it.

As I grew older, I dabbled in exercise, always in secret. At the time I don’t think I acknowledged why I didn’t want anyone to know—I didn’t want to

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

discuss my body and what was wrong with it, since I already heard enough about that. All I remember is that I was insistent on privacy—a rare com-modity when you have a twin sister.

About age ten, I found a pamphlet on the bookshelves in my father’s study. It outlined a calisthenics regime used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I tried it, squeezed between the two twin beds in my room, the rough brown carpet I hated burning my knees when I did push-ups. After a few days nothing seemed to be happening. I decided I probably wasn’t doing the exercises right, but didn’t want to ask for help, so I gave up.

Later, I read about walking programs in the
Family Circle
magazines my mother had piled in her bathroom. They nearly always advertised “Drop Five Pounds by Next Month,” while simultaneously putting an “easy, luscious”

chocolate cake on the cover. Walking around the neighborhood was out of the question; having anyone see me would be too embarrassing. So I’d walk around and around our open kitchen and den, making precise right angles on the square cream-colored tiles. I would decide to start with 100 times around, but someone would nearly always come in in the middle—usually to open the refrigerator—so I’d have to stop and pretend to be wandering idly. That, too, got old.

At some point, my brain turned the vague idea that exercise without diet was pointless into hard fact. Exercise alone wouldn’t do anything very quickly, maybe not anything at all. So the summer after high school, when my sister joined a gym to get in shape for college, I didn’t go with her. I couldn’t seem to diet, and I was sure that even if I went to the gym every day, I still wouldn’t lose enough weight to start college thin.

While my sister dashed off to the gym five times a week, I glowered. For years I had daydreamed about a fresh start, about going off to college—and in my dreams I was always thin. But now the moment was upon me and I wasn’t.