The Weight-loss Diaries (20 page)

I’ve grown to love the ritual of Saturday morning runs, even if I don’t always love the runs themselves. Sometimes I feel like I live for these mornings—for the order they bring, for how my life falls into place around them.

Every week I have to get up and run three days and cross-train another two, or I know I’ll feel terrible on the long run.

Thursday night happy hours have become a thing of the past—liquor is dehydrating, and (note to my bingeing self ) Juli has drilled into us that what you eat and drink for two days before the run is as important as what you consume the night before. Mary, Abby, and I don’t go out at all on Fridays.

On Saturdays after the run, no matter how horrible my week has been, I feel like all is right again. Often by the time I get back to my apartment, I’ll have a phone message from Mary saying, “Can you believe we did that?”

Last Saturday my friend Cindy called at noon, expecting to tease me about my having just gotten up. I told her—almost smugly—that not only had I been up since 5:00 a.m., but I had run twelve miles, taken a shower, read the paper,
and
done my laundry.

“Where is Courtney?” she asked. “Who are you, and what have you

done with her?”

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“How’s the weight?” Grandma on the phone. Apparently this week she’s dis-pensed with subtlety, since her usual way of asking is, “What did you have for dinner last night?”

“Fine,” I snapped. I knew I was going to have to give a little bit more information before the subject could be closed, but the trick is to offer just enough to get by yet not enough to provoke further discussion.

Grandma likes to hear good news—one of her standard opening lines is,

“So what have you got to tell me that’s good?” So I told her I’d bought size 12 jeans and planned never to shop in another plus-size department. Fourteens they sell at Lane Bryant (though I can’t imagine why you’d buy them there unless you were trying to feel better about yourself by imagining the size 20

customers being jealous of your relative slenderness), but 12s . . . 12s you can’t buy in any plus-size department. They’re squarely in the “normal” range.

“That’s what you said last time,” she said. “Why is it any different this time?”

Mission to abort the subject failed.

I knew exactly where the conversation was going, because we’ve had it before. I knew I shouldn’t take the bait, should just change the subject. But I couldn’t.

“Do you have to remind me of that?” I asked. Whined, really.

“I’m reminding you so you won’t do it again,” she said matter-of-factly.

I wanted to tell her that her “reminder” wasn’t helping, the same way her comments at dinner tables of yore about what I was eating never helped. But in the moment I couldn’t. I just felt stung. Stunned.

I got off the phone and ate two cereal bars. I would have eaten ice cream if I’d had any in the house.

What I wanted to tell her—tell
somebody
—is that, truth be told, things aren’t going so well with the diet these days.

Despite my saintlike behavior—this week alone I have passed up cake
four
times—all my virtue seems wasted. I haven’t lost any weight this week—

the second week in a row that’s happened. (And no, it was
not
“that time of the month.” Peeke and Shari and Nancy asked me that. Feel like I’m back in eighth-grade gym class, counting the weeks until I can use that excuse again.) After a birthday party last night, some friends and I went on to another party at a gorgeous loft in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood just north of mine. I prowled around looking for a drink, and who should I find but Larry?

In three years of overlapping circles of friends I’d never met him, but now

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

there he was again, two weeks after Karen’s party, at this random party, arm draped around some blonde woman’s shoulder.

He walked right up to me and smiled. He looked evil.

He nodded toward his date across the room. “Don’t you think Cara looks like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy?”

I paused, noticing how ugly his smirk made him look.

“No,” I said, surprising even myself. “Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was
pretty
.”

I strode off, feeling the silence solidify behind me.

“It’s Sunday morning—do you miss me?” said a voice on the other end of the phone.

It was Larry. Where had he gotten my number? I had never given it to him—not last week and certainly not last night. For an instant I couldn’t help being vaguely flattered that he’d taken the time to track it down. I’m crazy, I thought. If this is how I think, what happened last week was definitely my fault.

“Well, do you miss me?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I’ve finished packing. Are you coming over to kiss me good-bye?” he asked.

I picked at my bedspread, flashing back to him lying on it, and how much I had wanted him to leave.

I didn’t care about a clever—and cutting—closing line. “No, I’m going to tell you good-bye over the phone. Good-bye,” I said and hung up.

Still, much as I hated myself for thinking it, a tiny bit of me couldn’t help wondering if he’d call again. I remembered talking with a colleague about Bill Clinton and his way with the opposite sex: some women will take prurient interest over no interest at all. I wonder if I’m always going to be one of them.

Yesterday Abby, our friend Betina, and I ran the Rockville Rotary Twilight 8K—my first official race, if you don’t count Race for the Cure, which I don’t.

I finished in 51:54, a 10:27-a-mile pace. And despite constant thoughts of

“Will I come in last? What if I come in last?” I was 326th out of 460

women—so not even close to last. I actually felt like I could have run faster—

Mary said Betina told her I was “positively speedy” at the end.

My reward for a week of good eating and finishing my first race? I
gained
a pound. I got on and off the scale six times to be sure. (It started out as best

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two out of three, and when one of those times it looked like I’d gained a pound and a half, I decided on an average of four out of five.)

Peeke said these things happen—that my body likes where it is now, and it’s holding on to the extra weight.
Apparently it’s as stubborn as I am
, I thought. This gain of a pound (I refuse to think pound and a half ) means there has been no net change in my weight this month, since I lost one pound the first week and then stayed the same for two.

Frankly, after the weigh-in I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the rest of the day, foodwise, and of course I didn’t. I ate a jumbo chocolate muffin. Then in the afternoon I had two pieces of cake and swiped frosting from a third.

Have spent the past four days since the weigh-in eating anything and everything I want, thinking:
I’ll get back on track tomorrow
.

I’ve also spent the past four days freaking out. I didn’t want to call anyone for help, because I didn’t want to think about the fact that I can’t stop eating, much less write about it in my food journal. But this afternoon, with nightmares of return trips to Lane Bryant dancing in my head, I finally called Nancy. She reminded me that losing weight takes serious effort and asked what’s been eating up the energy I’ve been so good about devoting to the cause. After hearing my catalog of stressors (looming deadlines, family issues), she said, “I give you permission to maintain for a couple of weeks.”

“But I want to lose,” I practically whined. Who wants to devote all this effort just to maintain? Still, maintaining beats gaining, I suppose, so I’d better give it a shot.

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Month 8 (August)

No net change in my weight last month, so today was just the thing to cheer me up (drench previous words in buckets of sarcasm): a
Shape
photo shoot. Woo-hoo! And this time they want to photograph me running.

I begged Molly, the photographer, to do the shoot somewhere deep in sub-urbia, where we couldn’t possibly run into anyone I know, but she said there had to be monuments in the background.

After a chat with the stylist about clothing—nothing too form-fitting, please!—she sent a box of clothes that contained loads of form-fitting things I would never wear. My usual aim for gym wear is for it to be as unremarkable as possible. But the stylist’s first-choice outfit was a tight purple top and leggings and stoplight-red sneakers. I thought about lying and saying the purple catsuit, as I’ve nicknamed it, didn’t fit right. But the other options in the box were at least as bad, and I certainly didn’t want an “authentic” picture, which would be me in baggy gym shorts and a frat party T-shirt. So I put on the catsuit and wondered: could I smile, suck in my stomach,
and
run all at the same time?

Molly tried to be cheerful. “Look at your adorable red sneakers!” she said when I showed up for the shoot.

Doubt anybody was looking at them. Instead, I can only imagine they were wondering what the hell I was doing in the beastly heat of an August afternoon, running around in a workout outfit designed for winter (which is when the column will appear).

I spent two and a half hours skipping up and down steps that led to a path by the Potomac, running on the path itself, stretching, and pretending to tie my shoes. Pretending to tie my shoes was my idea—if the only thing 111

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

Molly could get excited about was the damn red shoes, well, let’s at least make sure we see them in the picture.

That running for the camera is the last exercise I’ve done in five days. The first day after the shoot was a day off. But then I overslept the next day. Felt sick the third. Gym closed for a freak air-conditioning glitch the fourth. And I had an early morning interview the fifth and ended up staying at work until after the gym had closed.

But a funny thing has happened after five days of not exercising: I feel as disgusting as if I hadn’t showered. I crave moving—make that sweating—the way I sometimes crave anything with frosting.

In diets past, too many days off caused a spiral into self-loathing: disgust over my slothfulness fueled forays to the local Mexican restaurant for the cheese-drenched comfort of nachos. Too full to move, I’d call it quits on the whole program.

This time I’ve stuck with it long enough to see benefits: I’m not out of breath when I sprint for the Metro. I don’t get frustrated with fancy footwork in step aerobics class—I can focus on the moves because I’m in good enough shape not to have to struggle to breathe. A few days ago I e-mailed Shari to tell her that I’d run six miles Saturday, taken a two-hour bike ride with friends Sunday, and planned to try a ballet class. Her response was immediate: “You are an athlete! Do you realize that if you placed a personal ad, you’d have to put ‘Must be fit’?”

Actually, I hadn’t. Athlete?

I still haven’t really told anyone—and especially not Peeke or Shari or
Shape
—that I’m running with a marathon-training group. I definitely don’t say “training for a marathon,” because I don’t really think I am. Yes, I’ve planned my summer so as to avoid leaving town on the weekends—I’m sure if I miss a single Saturday I won’t make it through the next one. But I still think of training as something temporary, a way to make sure I get in a good workout at least once a week. So I don’t want there to be anyone to answer to—certainly not
Shape
—if and when I have to quit.

Ten-mile runs have become twelve, then fourteen, then sixteen. We pass the time on the run gossiping, singing, complaining about pains, and playing versions of drinking games, using the water in our water bottles. Abby, Mary, and our new running buddies, Stacy and Dagny, talk all the time about the

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day of the marathon and how they plan to celebrate when they cross the finish line. I never say anything, because I’m still not sure I’ll be there.

Yes, I’ve done fine with the training—good enough, even, to think about quickening my pace. But every week I wonder if it’s going to be my last with the group. I’m convinced there’s going to be some number of miles at which my body will give out, proving what I’ve known all along: I was not meant to do this.

E-mail from Maureen, my editor at
Shape
: they’ve got the first copies of the magazine with my inaugural column. Gulp.

I’ve been so focused on the day-to-day of the diet that I’ve practically forgotten—at least as much as it’s possible to “forget” something for which I’ve had photo shoots and deadlines—that anything about it will actually appear in print. Thus far there’s been minimal editing on the columns, so after I turn them in, they don’t reappear in my in-box with a bunch of questions from editors, forcing me to confront the idea that people are actually going to be reading what I write.

I was too afraid to go back and look in my files to see what I’d written for that first column. What I wrote privately for Peeke about my diet history and what I wrote publicly for
Shape
are a tangled loom in my head, and I’m not sure I want to look at how much of the former might have crept into the latter. All I remember for sure was deciding not to mention Mom’s illness in print. Too private, too complicated.

Maureen said she thought I’d be pleased with the way the pages looked.

All I could think about was the “before” pictures I had to send
Shape
a few months ago, when they suddenly decided they should use a real “before”

picture and not the me-minus-twenty-three-pounds one they had shot in March. I had to really beat the bushes to find them any shots of myself, since I was never one to pose willingly for pictures. Now I wish I could affix a Post-it to every copy of the issue, saying, “But I don’t look like that anymore!”

That, I suppose, is the point.

Shape
issues arrived at my office today, along with a note from Maureen saying she’d just seen the film from my running photo shoot (the catsuit shoot) and, “You look GREAT!!!! I mean it!!!!” (No extra exclamation points added.) Cannot say the same for the first column. It’s a two-page spread, with two