The Weight-loss Diaries (3 page)

Introduction

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cream sandwich. You’re on your own for that one, though.) I hope this book—call it the uncut version of the journals I kept during the two-year period I wrote for
Shape
—will be all of those things.

Most of all, I wanted to write my journey down—to record it while it’s still raw so as not to repeat it, and because I would do anything to keep others from going where I went and seeing what I saw. And if nothing else, to let others know what I learned the hard way: losing weight—and accepting yourself, whether you lose or you don’t—doesn’t happen in that nice, linear way you read about in magazines and books. It’s messy and it’s complicated, and you’re going to screw up a whole bunch of times before you get it right.

That’s OK. You’re not alone.

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The Eve of the Diet

First, Pig Out

Short list ofthings for which there never seems to be an ideal time: 1. telling your boyfriend you’ve accidentally forwarded his naughty e-mail on to his mother (with attachments)

2. paying pesky credit-card debt (what is it they say . . . creditors can’t get you when you’re dead?)

3. telling a coworker he smells like some sort of dead animal

4. starting a diet

I know that a diet—excuse me, change of eating habits, as you’re supposed to refer to it—has to be compatible with your life to be successful, but actually starting one seems incompatible with any lifestyle beyond that of a total hermit/loser/person-who-is-allergic-to-all-appetizers-and-party-snacks.

Which I am not (allergic to all appetizers, anyway).

This week’s reasons (excuses?) why I can’t start becoming the New and Improved Me: two lunch interviews (ordering no-sauce this and substitute that always makes me feel like the superpicky Meg Ryan in
When Harry Met
Sally
, only not as adorable in my neurosis), a cocktail party, and a friend’s birthday party. Oh, yeah—and I have three stories due by Friday, which for me means a lot of afternoon and late-night snacking (depending on the progress of the story, either a reward for job done or a bribe for getting one started). I could start tomorrow—OK, next week—but then I’ve got a dinner, a handful of bars to review, and another couple of parties. And so on.

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

At this rate, I’ll be better off waiting to wake up looking like Jennifer Aniston than waiting for the ideal week to start a diet. As a kid, I couldn’t cram my list of extracurricular activities into the space allotted in the yearbook. Now I’m still the girl who can’t say no, except these days my long days and late nights come from freelance assignments and not wanting to miss out on dinners, movies, drinks, or anything else that sounds fun. I’m always afraid I’ll miss out on something, and you can’t get in on an inside joke after the fact.

So after years of “I’ll start tomorrow,” obviously I haven’t. Now I’m 58

and 206 pounds—a good 50 pounds overweight. I’m twenty-three years old and trying to hush my perfectionist inner voice and be patient with myself, because—if all the diet advice I’ve read and heard over the years is any indication—I’m gonna screw up.

Besides, learning to ease up on myself sure beats the alternative: another year gone by where I’m dissatisfied with my health and energy, not to mention my inability to wear sleeveless clothing. Another year where I go to parties and immediately look around the room for someone, anyone, who’s fatter than me. Another year where I hopefully try on the largest sizes at the Gap, give up, creep into Lane Bryant, stand in front of the mirror in a size I cannot stand, and swear it’s the last time I’m going to shop there. (And also wish that its bags did not say “Lane Bryant” quite so prominently. The bags might as well say “I AM FAT” in blinking neon. If they’re so sympathetic to overweight women, can’t they package their stuff in, say, Macy’s bags?) Easing up on myself also beats another year where I dread going to visit my mother and grandmother only because I don’t want them to see me so overweight, and sometimes even dread going to work, because I have nothing to wear that fits. Another year where I write things in my journal—as I did last fall on the eve of a diet I never actually started—like: “I feel gross and ugly and fat. Oh, yeah—and too full. And depressed. And like a big blob taking up space. I don’t feel like thinking about this, much less writing about it. But I’m hoping writing it down means getting it out of my head for a while, like jotting down at night things I must remember to do the next day.

Rule 1: no eating on the run. Rule 2: no eating anything anyone else cannot see me eat. I make myself ill sometimes. Honestly, I can hardly face myself in the mirror.”

Sure, I’ve promised myself a million times to do something about my weight. And if I need any reminder of all my past failures to follow through, all I need to do is call my grandmother, who’s been nagging me about my weight all my life. I know that Grandma wants me to be thin because she

The Eve of the Diet

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equates it with having lots of dates, as she did, and with being happy (both from the dates and because I’ll be able to wear anything I want). But often, I am happy. I know I’m lucky to have some great friends and a job I love. But even I have to confess that I find it unbelievably ironic that I write the singles columns for the magazine, since some days I feel like the last woman any guy would focus on at a bar.

Grandma’s not alone in her idea of “thin equals happy”—most of my

friends think so, too—and that bothers me, because I know being thin won’t solve other problems in my life (lack of clothing choices excepted).

Still, much as I rail against it on principle, I know deep down that being thin—or at least being fit—could make me happier. As hokey as it sounds, these days—my twenties—are supposed to be the days I’ll always remember, and I know they can’t be when I feel as though there’s something (like about fifty pounds) keeping me from doing things I want to do, however small. I don’t think anyone would say my life is lived in a holding pattern, but I hate knowing that I won’t take up swing dancing or bike around the monuments in cherry blossom season. I hate feeling too self-conscious to walk up to a guy at a party, and I hate even more that I fall into the trap of letting my weight dictate my confidence. I hate buying outrageous black satin four-inch heels and then tottering around the Grammy Awards wondering if I’m going to break them—or burst out of my dress (and if I do, wondering if there is a single item in all of Los Angeles that will fit me). And I hate the lethargy that comes with being too full, my pants too tight.

Most of all, I hate that I’ve lost my sense of scale. No, not the bathroom one (I threw that one out years ago), but the one that would keep me from eating a rigid 750 calories for six days and then, the minute I eat a bite more than that, eating heaven knows how many calories for weeks. I hate that bad is good and good is bad, where I’m simultaneously happy to have a hectic professional and social life and then upset that appetizers and drinks and business lunches and late nights seem incompatible with getting thin. Realistically, I know they’re not; it’s just that I’ve forgotten—maybe never knew?—what an appropriate portion is, and I haven’t learned that food is just food, not anesthesia for stress or boredom or frustration. But I know I need to learn.

The question of the hour, I suppose, is: why (and how) is this time going to be different from any other time? (Besides, of course, that I’m going to be doing it in front of a whole bunch of people, on the pages of a magazine.) I know I can lose weight; to paraphrase Mark Twain, starting a diet is easy—

I’ve done it hundreds of times. It’s continuing to lose weight—or at least, not putting on every last pound plus extras—that’s always tripped me up.

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

Dr. Peeke, the diet doctor
Shape
has told me to consult with, says that before I can get started, I’ve got to put my diet history on paper so she can see what my blind spots are. She also wants a list of “toxic” relationships—

people who make my life difficult—and what she calls “stress milestones,”

major stressors like deaths and illness. I ran Peeke’s name through the Lexis-Nexis news database, and it seems her mantra is that stress makes you fat. I hope she isn’t going to be one of those doctors who tells you that you really shouldn’t work late or take a weekend assignment or some such impossible-in-Washington-if-you’re-young-and-trying-to-get-somewhere thing. Like doctors don’t have to work late nights and live unhealthy lives to get through med school?

I’m not too eager to regale Dr. Peeke with my diet failures, but I suppose I can’t expect this diet to be any different if I don’t let her pick through what a dysfunctional relationship I’ve had with food in the past.

I don’t remember exactly when I became conscious of food and weight—I think the feeling was always there. I have a diary I started when I was six, and in it are stars I drew in pink marker for days I didn’t eat any more than my twin sister, Diana, did. By the time I was nine, I often vowed to “cut out snacks,” but after an afternoon of sucking on ice cubes when I was hungry (a tip I’d picked up from reading my mother’s
Family Circle
magazines), I’d give up. In my elementary-school diaries, in between tales of learning to dive and winning a spelling bee, are chronicles of clothes-shopping trips, which invariably ended in tears and then resolutions to diet. What I find amazing is that when I looked at pictures of myself as a kid the other day, I was shocked by how
not
fat I was. I definitely wasn’t thin—I weighed more than my sister, and probably more than a child of my height should have—

but nor was I the little Oompa Loompa I seem to remember.

I must have imbibed the “I am too fat” mentality by osmosis, because for a long time my mother rarely commented about my size outright. To get her to lose weight, Grandma had nagged her, and her father had tried to inspire her with cash incentives. She always said she didn’t want that for me. But somehow I still got the message that everyone would be happier with me if my sister and I really were identical, if I could be the “skinny mini” that Diana was.

Somewhere between fifth and seventh grade, I crossed the line from baby fat to fat. In seventh grade, when I actually was overweight, my diary recorded my fear of ordering what I really wanted in a restaurant. It didn’t matter that, unofficially, I was “the smart one” of the Rubin twins. My sis-

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5

ter—who did well in school herself—was “the thin one,” and I gladly would have traded. No matter how many science fairs and math contests I won, I’d still have to do it in clothes that never seemed to look as good on me as they did on everyone else. And when I walked up onstage to get my awards, the kind of music that accompanies dinosaurs stomping through video games often played in my head.

By the time I started high school, Mom was frequently engaging in what she considered subtle commentary about my weight: raising her eyebrows or narrowing her eyes when I reached for seconds, and an occasional “You don’t need that” in a low, dark tone. One summer Grandma got right to the point, asking about a pair of shoes we’d bought together that I no longer wore:

“What’s the matter? Did your feet get too fat?” Later, Diana oh-so-helpfully reported that Grandma had told her I’d gotten “as big as a house.”

I feared being caught eating. The tiles seemed to squeak impossibly loudly between my room and the kitchen, so I often sneaked food into the guest bathroom. When my parents left my sister and me home alone, we both gleefully raided the refrigerator—with its giant “He Who Indulges Bulges”

hippo magnet on the door—but she never seemed to gain weight from it.

At the diet camp I went to the summer before tenth grade, I lost thirty-one pounds—the first time I lost a significant amount of weight. The camp recommended kids go to Weight Watchers when we got home. I lasted maybe a month. At the lone meeting that suited my schedule, I was the only person under forty, and I’d sit there feeling resentful that I had to spend an hour in a room of people my parents’ age while everyone else I knew was out doing something fun. I also hated having my mother and grandmother—both

Weight Watchers veterans—watching every bite that went into my mouth, seemingly waiting for me to fail.

So I’d eat what I wanted to in private. I’d go on an eating jag—“just this once,” I’d tell myself, vowing to cut back the next day to make up for it. But inevitably I’d be hungrier than usual the next day, and in my black-and-white world any unplanned bit of food was evidence of my total lack of willpower.

So I’d eat more, and pretty soon I’d gained back all the weight I’d lost over the summer, plus a little more.

I lost a lot of weight a handful more times—always on very low-calorie or very low-fat diets—but I’d never get down to my goal. I’d get close to it, but by then the months of deprivation would have me primed for months of bingeing.

The worst the diet-and-binge cycle ever got was two years ago, when I first moved to Washington. I’d just graduated from college and was deter-

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

mined to lose all the weight I had decided was holding me back from the life I dreamed of.

I began on a not-unreasonable 1,400-calories-a-day diet but soon grew frustrated with my plodding progress. So I began cutting out foods until I was down to 700 calories a day. Omelet made of three egg whites plus mushrooms for breakfast, Lean Cuisine frozen entrée for lunch, Pillsbury frozen blueberry pancakes for dinner (250 calories and what seemed to me to be a whopping four grams of fat), and a Weight Watchers 40-calorie chocolate-mousse pop for dessert. I adored packaged foods because I could be absolutely sure exactly how many calories they had. I drank Diet Coke like it was my job.

I’ve always prided myself on doing unpleasant tasks as quickly as possible, and losing weight was no exception. If some cutting down was good, more was better. By August, I’d replaced both breakfast and lunch with two peaches, often “running errands” at lunch so no one would question what I ate. I’d exercise an hour every day. Anything less was total failure. Some days I was so light-headed and tired, I didn’t think I could drag myself up the stairs to my second-floor office, but there was no way I would allow myself to take the elevator.