The Weight-loss Diaries (26 page)

• eating, in a discrete period of time (e.g., within any two-hour

period), an amount of food that is definitely larger than most people would eat in a similar period of time under similar circumstances

• a sense of lack of control over eating during the episode (e.g., a feeling that one cannot stop eating or control what or how much one

is eating)

That is me
, I thought grimly, reading faster and faster.

2. The binge eating episodes are associated with at least three of the following:

• eating much more rapidly than normal

• eating until feeling uncomfortably full

• eating large amounts of food when not feeling physically hungry

• eating alone because of being embarrassed by how much one is

eating

• feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed, or feeling very guilty after overeating

3. Marked distress regarding binge eating.

4. The binge eating occurs, on average, at least two days a week for six months.

5. The binge eating is not associated with the regular use of inappropriate compensatory behaviors (e.g., purging, fasting, excessive exercise) and does not occur exclusively during the course of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.

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I read the whole thing three times, slowly, wondering if the “two days a week for six months” disqualified me, or maybe the “inappropriate compensatory behaviors”? After all, I’ve tried to starve. . . .

Then I noticed a warning above the description: “It is important to note that you
can
still suffer from BED even if one of the below signs is not present. In other words, if you think you have BED, it’s dangerous to read the diagnostic criteria and think, ‘I don’t have one of the symptoms, so I must not have it.’ ”

I felt both heartened and horrified. Heartened because this description of my eating habits in an actual book means that I am probably not the only person who does these things. Horrified because the book is one of mental disorders, which suggests that stopping bingeing may not be as simple as exercising a little willpower—or having the pressure of the watchful eyes of thousands of magazine readers upon me.

Binge eating disorder, I learned, is sometimes called the “forgotten eating disorder,” because it receives so little attention. Diana had never heard of it. When she heard the term
eating disorder
, the first thing she said was, “Are you bulimic?”

No, I told her, though there are times I have tried to throw up. I told her my understanding of binge eating disorder—that it is bulimia, only without the purging. She tried to be sympathetic, but her questions about it ended up making me feel like a zoo animal. (“Hey, look, honey—it eats
eucalyptus
!”) She kept saying she couldn’t understand the bingeing—how I could buy all that food in the first place, much less eat it (any bit of it) in public? What I couldn’t make her understand is that I
am
ashamed of doing that, and the shame of it just fuels the cycle.

Then again, everything seems to fuel the cycle.

IN LONDON

I spent my first day in London jet-lagged, sitting in an Internet café just off Trafalgar Square, writing what I have privately nicknamed my “weight-gain diary.” I couldn’t write honestly about what, specifically, made me gain weight—I’m still trying to figure that out. So I ended up writing that after months of practicing healthful habits, it’s terrifying how fragile I still am. In the beginning months of the diet, I’d trained my body so that after a few days

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of eating poorly I’d actually wake up craving cantaloupe and salad. But after the past few months of haphazard eating, the “healthy food, please!” mech-anism just isn’t kicking in again.

I wrote about the stress of the project itself: “I thought having
Shape
readers follow along with me would be the world’s best motivation, but sometimes it spurred me to new heights of destructive eating patterns. I’d slip up for a few days and then be so stressed about ending up with a loss for the month and looking good in the photo that I’d eat more. Then I’d try to eat less than I should for a few days to make up for it, which only made me pig out in the end.”

For the record, the plan for the photo this month is an empty pint of Ben

& Jerry’s with a spoon in it. I’m sure some friend will see the column and comment not about what I said but about whether that’s my spoon and whether I got to eat the ice cream.

In the column I deliberately used
pig-out
and not
binge
.
Pig-out
requires no explanation—everyone understands it, though it means different amounts of food to different people. But
binge
—
binge
is a word that calls attention to itself. If I used the word
binge
, I knew I’d have to explain why and how it’s different from a pig-out, and that was not something I was ready to admit to myself, much less in print. Yes, I told Diana I thought I might have a problem, but mostly I told her hoping she’d roll her eyes and tell me to stop being ridiculous and melodramatic. “You don’t have an eating disorder,” I could practically hear her saying. “You just eat too much.” But she didn’t.

For “current weight” I put 180—a gain of 11 pounds. It’s an estimate. I haven’t been able to make myself get on the scale.

Tonight Elizabeth and I went to a fair after Guy Fawkes Day fireworks on Clapham Common. We got some candy floss—that’s British for “cotton candy”—and Elizabeth talked about how much she loves sausage and pep-pers and also fried chicken, something I never would have expected. Greasy fingers do not go with my image of Elizabeth in her fabulous vintage coats and pearls.

Elizabeth and I have known each other for four years, but we’ve never talked about food—until this trip. She’s been full of questions about the
Shape
column, which she’d heard about from a friend of hers who saw it. I had never told her about it—Elizabeth has this image of me as always on the

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verge of writing the next great American novel. I didn’t want to tell her that instead of writing about the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, I was writing about my inability to control my weight.

Last night we didn’t eat dinner before going to the theater and were ravenous when we got home. I was having grapefruit, but Elizabeth was tearing through bread and Greek cucumber dressing. When at first I mistook the container of dressing for chive cream cheese, she looked horrified. “Do you think I’d be eating it like that?” she said.

I stopped short of saying, “Well,
I
have.” It was the first time I’ve heard her sound aware of calories or fat—Elizabeth, who once told me that she just can’t worry about food most of the time and that, anyway, she hasn’t met a single guy who preferred Twiggy. Easy for her to say—she’s a single-digit size with no major effort. Last I checked, she owned one pair of running shoes—

and she bought them sometime in the late 1980s.

Thank God for Elizabeth—or whoever up there seems determined to keep me from bingeing. I can’t duck off from her for more than a second, and I’m not even that frustrated by it. I think it’s destiny that I
not
binge on this trip.

I tried to sneak off after we got off the tube last night—said I needed to buy a Diet Coke—but Elizabeth insisted on coming with me. (I did manage to sneak an extra Cadbury’s chocolate in addition to the one I ate publicly.) The one other lapse was when we were at the cinema: I ducked off to go to the bathroom and bought a chocolate muffin. I didn’t even really want it—

would’ve much preferred a cream scone I saw earlier today. But it’s a habit: the sneaking, the stockpiling just so I won’t have to say I’m hungry (much less actually be hungry) later. Must go running tomorrow before consuming huge amounts of chili and bread-and-butter pudding at the Sunday lunch we’re planning.

Ran for sixty-five minutes today—got a bit lost—and (victory!) didn’t eat the popcorn at the movies just because it was there. I was stuffed from lunch, anyway—the chili.

Debating extending my vacation and going to Barcelona for a few days.

I got an e-mail from a friend who lives there, and he was urging me to come on over. I so hate for food to be the determinant of what I do, but I guess I should wait and see if I start bingeing. I know that once I start bingeing on a vacation it’s a free-fall, and I won’t be able to stop. Every morning I’ll wake up promising myself I’ll stop, but I’ll end up clinging to the idea that I’ll stop

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the minute I get home—clinging to the idea of home the way a lapsed November dieter clings to the idea of January 1 and New Year’s resolutions.

Some people come to Europe and find inspiration for novels, short stories, and films. A week in London, and I’ve written in my journal not about the people I’ve met or the shows I’ve seen or the quirky things I’ve noticed or the long talks Elizabeth and I have had. I’ve written about food: What I’m eating.

What I’m not eating. What I want to be eating.

Have eaten nonstop for two days. Loads and loads of chocolate. Not sure what kicked it off—possibly the constant worrying that I
would
binge, the constant refusing of food, and the constant mental noting of what I have and haven’t eaten already balanced against what I might eat later.

I have a pair of black pants with me that I now can’t button. Feel like I need tent-size tops to hide the doughnut of fat around my middle created by too-tight jeans. And now I’m in Barcelona. I’m trying not to wish I’d just gone back to D.C. yesterday, as planned, but it’s not working. I can’t stop bingeing. I keep thinking that if I’d gone home yesterday, today I’d be getting back on track. But it’s not about location—it’s about me.

I’m trying to convince myself that everything happens for a reason, even if I have no idea what the reason is while it’s happening. Maybe I’m going to meet the love of my life on the 3:00 a.m. bus to Barcelona’s airport?

Ha.

Finally back home, and panicking because I have just a week and a half to stem this disastrous tide of overeating before heading to New Jersey for Thanksgiving. Feeling fat—though as Shari repeatedly tells me, fat is not a feeling. At least I was the diet saint today, though I could manage only twenty-five minutes at the gym.

Today was, as I’ve privately been referring to it all week, the Last Thanksgiving Predivorce. I was dreading it—and joking that I’d have to take notes for my novel—and now that it’s over, I’m not sure what to think.

Diana and I missed a big chunk of it. She got a flat tire last night, and since we drove around until 1:00 a.m. or so looking for a place to buy a tire (I could have told her we wouldn’t find any), we got a late start this morning. And predictably, there was traffic, so we didn’t end up getting to New Jersey until nearly 5:00 p.m. Mom’s guilt trip—for showing up late and not

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helping—stopped at all ports of call. Secretly, I was glad to have missed all the yelling that goes with Mom as perpetually frazzled hostess: yelling for helping, yelling for not helping, yelling for being in the way. . . . I think Mom’s getting frazzled when she has people over must have started happening in the past few years, since I can’t imagine she could have gotten quite this crazy in the days—twenty-five years ago—when she used to like to throw huge parties. It doesn’t fit with what we used to hear about Mom as entertainer, organized and efficient. And I’m instantly uncomfortable with frazzled Mom—it reminds me too much of The Beginning of the End, my melodramatic way of thinking about our bat mitzvah, which is when we started to notice something was wrong with her.

There was more food than I remember there ever being, probably because Mom made spanakopita in an attempt to use up the phyllo dough in the freezer before she and Dad go their separate ways in a month and a half.

“Need to use it up” was also the reason given for the acorn squash and the forlorn pile of cocktail napkins imprinted with “Jerri & Eben.” Then there was all the usual stuff, including mashed potatoes, which poor Mom left until late, hoping Diana (who’s the reason we’ve always had two kinds of potatoes—she hated sweet potatoes as a kid) would arrive in time to peel the five-pound bag.

The conversation at dinner was the usual patchwork quilt, punctuated with long silences. Aunt Missy admired the new dining room table—which Grandma had bought this year as an early wedding anniversary present, just days before the divorce was announced. Uncle Ronny spent the time he wasn’t eating reading the paper in the corner. Uncle Murray—in bolo tie—was doing his usual mischievous deliberate mixing up of names (calling me Diana) and equally deliberate mishearing of everything anyone says. He’s been doing this sort of thing since Dad was a kid, and even Dad can’t begin to guess what he might say.

Despite—or maybe because of—the impending divorce, Mom and Dad

didn’t really seem to be sniping any more than usual. Maybe because this is the way it’s been for more than twenty-five years and they don’t know any other way. All the guests were Dad’s family (Grandma stayed in Florida, though she did call to recite what she’d eaten), and I wondered if we’d ever all be together like this again. Probably not.

During dinner, people kept disappearing in twos. Diana and Dad ducked off at one point for what I later found out was a discussion of one of Dad’s latest electronic toys. When I found them, Diana went back to the table and

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Dad and I ended up talking about the divorce and why he hadn’t left the marriage earlier (because of us, he says). Then it was Mom and Aunt Missy going upstairs to measure Diana’s and my old bedroom furniture. In case someone in the family wanted it.

When Dad and my little cousin David got up to go look at something on the computer, I decided it was my turn to leave. I wanted to play the piano—the one Grandma bought for Diana and me fifteen years ago. It’s been sold with the house, and this is probably the last time I’ll ever see it. I opened the piano bench, which for years has contained a history of my life in sheet music: the “Für Elise” I marked up for my first recital; the Springsteen “Thun-der Road” I bought to give myself something to concentrate on besides a failed relationship. But the bench was empty—cleaned out and ready for its new owners. I wish I were.