The Weight-loss Diaries (27 page)

After everyone left, Diana, Dad, Mom, and I stood around the kitchen.

I felt sad looking at some of the dishes that were barely touched: the mashed potatoes, the special Jell-O heart Mom makes instead of cranberry sauce. I wanted to eat them myself, to make a big fuss over them, because I knew she would be pleased. The harder Mom tries to make things the way they always are (or always were), the more we all change or don’t want them the old way anyway. I’m not the only one watching calories, and I know almost everyone at the table wished Mom had made a little less food than usual—but instead this year she’d made more.

The standing around the kitchen kibitzing, as my mother calls it, is the only part of our family Thanksgiving I think I’ll miss. Teasing Dad about eating all the walnuts off the pumpkin pie. Teasing Diana about eating all the marshmallows off the sweet potatoes. Various dishes jogging our memories of other times they’ve been served and what happened at those events. For that ten minutes we feel like a family. Is food the only way we know how to connect? Is it all we really have in common?

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Month 12 (December)

In the never-ending search for the one thing that will magically restore my ability to stick to a diet, here’s another possibility: time of day I work out.

Today was the first day since I got back from London three weeks ago that I managed to get up before work and go to the gym. I’ve been going at night, which I think has been contributing to my haphazard eating. It’s probably psychological, but there’s something about going first thing in the morning that makes “I’m going to be good today” less of a vow and more of a reality.

This morning all the guys at the gym front desk and in the weight room asked me where I’ve been for the past few weeks. It was amazing to realize I’ve been at the gym at least five days a week for nearly a year—and that people have actually noticed.

Thanks partially to the 6:00 a.m. gym visit—which means that smug

feeling of sitting at my desk knowing I’ve already accomplished something—

today was one of those days where everything feels, if not right with my world, at least on its way to being OK.

I hate writing about other writers, particularly ones who are so much better than I can ever hope to be. I would much prefer to write such profiles in a question-and-answer format, so that none of my words clutter theirs.

I spent the morning trying to write the beginning of what is supposed to be a short profile of Natalie Angier, a
New York Times
science writer and author of
Woman: An Intimate Geography
. Except I’m stuck, and what are the chances our nice family magazine is going to let me open with: “A moment of silence, please, for the sadly shrinking clitoris. Despite
Cosmo
’s best efforts, it’s actually wasting away from lack of use”?

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

I’ve never had any job besides writing, so it would be hard to defend my private (and semi-self-serving) contention that mine is among the professions least conducive to losing weight—chocolate taster and food critic not included. When I write, I wish yet again that my vices were cigarettes, liquor, or nail biting, because every time I struggle over a sentence I try to think of something that might make the writing easier and inevitably decide I’d be able to concentrate better if I weren’t hungry.

More ammo for my idea that a social life is not conducive to dieting: got my fifth party invitation for the same Friday—the annual Christmas pileup. And I have something to do every night this week. And we’re on deadline. And I’m leaving Saturday morning for a weekend in New York, including the party of a friend I haven’t seen in ages. She e-mailed me about having seen the new
Shape
column (and picture), and I’m nervous because I think I looked better then. A lame excuse to avoid a party, I know, so I’m going anyway. Assuming I can find anything to wear, which—given that I refuse to buy size 14s again, which is what I seem to need—is probably not an assumption I should make.

This has been a week full of eating out and going out, but I’ve made it to the gym every day, and the part of my brain that looks at things like French fries and says, “not Courtney food” has finally switched back on. I forgot how good being in control feels.

I also forgot how crummy it feels to get on the scale knowing you’ve been good all week and not see the results you want. I’ve lost not one pound of the ten I gained—though I haven’t been able to bear getting on the scale since before London, and I’m sure I gained weight there—so perhaps this week I lost whatever I gained while traveling? Either way, I’m at 180. Thousands of minutes of exercise and seven months of watching and weighing and wondering—and now I weigh about what I did at the end of Month 4.

Got up at 5:00—that’s 5:00 a.m.—to make it to the gym before an 8:00

breakfast meeting. I needed the feeling of having worked out—I feel the binges coming on again.

Yesterday was a miserable day, the sort that makes me question everything about my life and the choices I’ve made. I wrote crap; was totally broken out (feeling shitty and zitty, as I told Mary); had no idea what to say to Mom when I talked to her in Florida, where she’s looking for an apartment; and wanted to hang up on Grandma when she asked about my weight. I thought she’d be happy I had a bunch of parties to go to, but all she wanted to know

Month 12 (December)

155

was whether I had any “escorts” for them. So much for my idea that the silver lining of the divorce would be that she’d be less eager for me to get married.

After I felt fat and unmarriageable, next came poor and pathetic. Why, Grandma wanted to know, couldn’t I get a holiday bonus like Diana did?

Because I work for an ink-on-paper media company, not an Internet company.

I had too much cake at a birthday party and tried to make up for it later by not eating dinner, which by now I should know better than to do but still try every once in a while. Kind of the way my sister tries sweet potatoes every Thanksgiving—just to check and confirm that she does, indeed, still hate them.

So I narrowly managed not to binge today. I had to break the day up into little chunks of time to get through. I cannot imagine how I’m going to have the time and energy to plot a move to London in three months when it seems like 90 percent of my brain is consumed with a minute-by-minute struggle not to eat.

After a fiction reading I went to tonight, I had to fight the urge to stop into so many places on the walk home. I concentrated on remembering that horrible, full, tired, out-of-control feeling I get when I binge and how much more difficult that would make all the things I have to do this week. It worked. And I got home to discover that my purple (well, eggplant-colored) suit fits again. In dark moments I think I’d better wear it tomorrow, in case it doesn’t fit again for a very long time.

E-mail from Diana saying that she saw a picture of me on the party page of a magazine and, “You look great!” That picture was taken three weeks ago.

The skirt I’m wearing in it doesn’t fit, even with control-top pantyhose. I know because I wanted to wear it today.

So today I wore the eggplant suit, attempting to stop myself from looking like an actual big round eggplant by wearing four-inch heels. I promptly fell on the rain-slicked pavement while running to a happy hour, and the woman who helped me up sort of peered at me and said, “Are you Courtney Rubin from
Shape
?” I stood there, hose ripped, knee (and ego) slightly bruised, while she told me how much better I look in real life than in the pictures. Hmmmph. Not sure how to interpret that.

Total parties I was invited to last night: five. Parties I made it to: three. Parties I really enjoyed: zero. It had nothing to do with the parties and everything to do with me. I spent most of the night looking at the tiny tops the

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

women were wearing and remembering how just about this time last year I was swearing that next year I’d be one of them. I’m still down more than twenty-five pounds from where I started, but I know from past diets that the 180s for me are slippery territory. Gains of a pound can suddenly make an entire size not fit—and it’s ridiculously easy to gain a pound after a couple of drinks. I badly want those drinks so I can float away from my body, forget about it at least for the evening.

I had a couple of drinks and then—inconspicuously, I thought—some

chocolate fondue. But my friend Michele called this morning to say a friend of hers had called and said, “I didn’t know you were having celebrities at your party.”

Michele, of course, answered: “What are you talking about? What

celebrities?”

“I saw that girl Courtney who writes that weight-loss column for
Shape
,”

came the response. “And she was eating chocolate fondue.”

That body image expert was wrong. Everybody
is
looking at me.

“Oh, my God! How did she get so fat again?”

I’m sure that’s what everyone’s thinking.

I don’t want to get on the scale. I don’t want to be seen eating anything

“bad.” Putting on pounds is never good, but it’s even worse when in the not too distant past you were just getting used to shrinking, not expanding. It’s depressing that all the compliments and encouragement from friends have been replaced by dead silence, when now I need a boost more than ever.

In yet another terrifically timed e-mail from
Shape
—not their fault, but still—the photo folks want to know when next week they can shoot me.

When I’m feeling melodramatic, as I do now, I wish they could literally shoot me. Put an end to all of this.

Am torn between trying to push off the photo shoot for as long as possible and angling to have it done immediately, before I can gain so much as one more pound.

My body seems to be conspiring against me.

After three days with a miserable cold, when the fact that I couldn’t go to the gym made me frantic, I did something funny to my back yesterday while using the triceps rope. It doesn’t really hurt when I’m sitting down, but there’s a sharp pain when I switch positions. It takes me several minutes to stand up, and this morning it took me about fifteen minutes to change clothes—I could hardly pick up my feet. If this is the sort of thing Grandma

Month 12 (December)

157

gets when she mentions back pain, how does she not complain about it more often?

A doctor friend suspects a compressed cervical disk, but I’m hoping it’s just a garden-variety pulled something. I thought of Emily, my roommate from college, and her exhortation that I exercise even when I don’t think I can.

I tried to do a few leg lifts, but the pain made me catch my breath.

Back a bit better, but I’m still moving gingerly, and I’m afraid the gym might undo whatever healing seems to have occurred.

Got an e-mail from a
Shape
reader who says she needs moral support—

that she’s very overweight and thinks she could never look the way I do. She wants to know if I’ve ever thought of giving up on the whole weight-loss thing entirely.

I was about to fire off an e-mail telling her I knew exactly how she felt, but then I realized I have never thought of giving up. I have been frustrated and negative and hopeless, but I have never once said: I’m going to stop trying. I don’t know how, but some tiny shred in me clings to the belief that maybe someday I will do this right. Someday I will learn. And somehow I continue to believe this despite all evidence to the contrary.

Actual evidence to the contrary: tonight I tried on some of my “fat”

clothes and noticed some of them fit disturbingly well.

At the grocery store tonight, I chose my snack food not just on calories per serving but on how much damage it would do if I finished the whole box.

E-mail from a guy from Michele’s party, who skipped all pleasantries and got directly to the point. My e-mail address is easy to track down—I work for a magazine and not one of ten million government agencies with their bizarre acronyms—so he e-mailed me for contact details for a friend I was with that night. Not, “Nice to meet you” or anything like that. Just, “How do I reach your friend?” Now I really feel like the elephant in the room: huge but invisible.

This incident does not make me kindly disposed to going to a couple of

“Jewish Christmas” singles activities my friend Betsy is insisting she needs company for. One is called the Matzo Ball, and the other is called the Gefilte Fish Gala. I’m not in the mood to find the titles cute. Instead they’re more evidence that food is everywhere and against me.

Though for one reason or another I have not gone running since Thanksgiving, I signed up for the Cherry Blossom Ten-Miler in April.

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The phrase
cherry blossom
reminds me of something I wrote in my very first
Shape
column: “I hate knowing that my weight keeps me from doing things I want to do, including going biking around the monuments in cherry blossom season.” Another spring is coming, and it looks like once again this year I’m going to be wishing it weren’t—that sweater weather would stay indefinitely so I can hide.

The
Shape
project is technically supposed to be over in a couple of weeks, though I’ll still be filing the columns through March, and they’ll be in print until the September issue. No one has said anything about how we’re going to end it, seeing as I’m hardly a
Shape
success story. Maybe they’re hoping what I’m hoping—that I’ll magically pull it together in the next few weeks and lose nineteen pounds in two months, the way I did the first two months of the diet.

Tonight I dug out the journal I kept from the Summer of a Thousand Peaches—that summer I ate four peaches a day and nothing else and ran for an hour a day. If I thought I could do that again, I just might try it. That’s how desperate I feel.

I flipped through the pages, looking for a clue to how I managed it. But there was very little written. Suddenly I remembered: I couldn’t keep a journal that summer. Writing about a relationship that was falling apart hurt too much. Nor did I want to submerge myself in the doubt (about my job, about my life, about whether D.C. would ever feel like home) that was already chest-deep. So I didn’t write and I didn’t eat, letting hunger blot out all the other feelings.