The Weight-loss Diaries (32 page)

It starts as a tiny crack of uncertainty that becomes my own personal abyss. I let evenings like tonight call my whole life into question—what I’m doing with myself, what I
should
be doing with myself. Do I really belong in this field? Compliments about my work still catch me off guard, because what I write seems to me to be virtually indistinguishable from the rivers of words everywhere.

I wonder for the millionth time if I should have gone to law or business school, where I could end up with a career that would be so much easier to quantify:
I won this case. I signed that deal. I made X amount of dollars for the
company this year.
Concrete signs that indicate whether I’m heading in the right direction.

I know some journalists spend their entire careers at the tier of magazines that includes some I now occasionally write for, never breaking into the very top tier. I can’t stand the thought that at age twenty-four, this could be as far

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as I get. I could spend my whole life “almost but not quite”—a whole life of feeling, so keenly, what my limits are.

Skipped the party of an old friend partly because I had to work but mostly because I feel so fat. I haven’t seen this friend since before I started the column, but he has seen the column—as well as, of course, the pictures, and the ones making it into print now are me at my thinnest, from the summer. I don’t want to be asked about the column or wonder if people are wondering if the pictures are retouched because I don’t look like that in person.

I trekked to a supermarket twenty-five minutes away to buy a piece of cake with the crummy, cheap buttercream frosting I’ve always loved because I decided that was what I was craving. It tasted overly sweet and just horrible. I ate four bites—the last two spent double- and triple-checking that there was actually a “forbidden” food I don’t even like anymore.

I feel spent from the eating disorders piece. And now I’ve got to decide whether to use a pseudonym, which I go back and forth on. I’m not sure I want people to know these things about me, but at the same time not using my name seems like a validation of the idea that eating disorders are too shameful to admit to.

The story is part personal, part reported—all about the cult of thinness that surrounds us and how young most women are when they first begin suc-cumbing to it.

It’s estimated that 90 percent of Americans regularly consume low-calorie, sugar-free, or reduced-fat foods. Disordered eating—cutting out big groups of food, restricting yourself to nothing with more than five grams of fat, or social pig-outs—is rampant. Depending on which statistics you read, as many as 85 percent of college women indulge in it.

“I haven’t met a woman yet who hasn’t had some type of problem with food,” one therapist told me. “It goes from throwing up ten times a day to just thinking a lot about what you could or should or shouldn’t eat. I mean, who hasn’t said, ‘I can’t eat that’?”

The statistics, stories, and experts made me feel both less alone and more depressed than ever.

In an
Esquire
magazine poll of a thousand women, more than half said they’d rather get run over by a truck than get fat. In another poll, a group of college students said they’d be more inclined to marry an embezzler, cocaine

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user, ex-mental patient, shoplifter, nymphomaniac, communist, atheist, or marijuana user than a fat person.

And my own story: Bruce the Spruce telling me to eat my vegetables so I’d be thin; the private eating in college so I could hold back in public—never mind that everyone could tell from the way I looked that I had to be eating more than was on my lunch tray; and the Summer of a Thousand Peaches.

The irony of the article is that I’ve been told if all goes well, I’ll get a promotion to senior writer when it’s done. Over the past few years my mind has been so consumed with food that I started to fear it was affecting my job.

Now it is affecting my job, but not in the way I’d expected.

I turned in the piece at about 9:00 p.m. last night, possibly among the ear-liest I’ve ever turned in a long piece. The top editor is taking it home over the weekend to read, which means a whole weekend for me to freak out about it.

Mary called to say a friend of hers I met last week asked about me. Apparently he thought I was really funny. That’s me—a regular court jester.

Got an e-mail from the editor about the story with the subject line

“Relieved?” It didn’t say much, other than that I needed to go somewhere fun after this piece and that I should take the offer I’ve gotten to go on a press trip to Australia in May. Woo-hoo!

I feel like I’m stuck in some sort of Middle Earth, unfit for any world, for any way of coping. I’m beginning to recognize the feelings that lead to overeating and bingeing, but lots of the time I binge anyway. No part of the binge is comforting anymore, but I still do it because it’s what I know.

After a month and a half of going out every week, I’m not hanging out with Victoria anymore. The turning point came when we saw each other four times in one week. It was too much. Too many hours of frantic, forced fun and too much time with someone who, I’ve realized, doesn’t particularly care if it’s me sitting next to her at the bar or arriving with her at the party. It could be anyone—it’s just a role she needs filled, and it makes me feel empty.

There’s been nothing to say to her except that I’ve been really busy with a story. She seems to have already moved on.

Must be a better friend to the friends I have. And must be more open about what’s going on—like my behavior with Mary around the time of the marathon. But I feel like there’s a tipping point for how much you can pile

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on any one friend: How can I tell her about my mother and my parents’

divorce—which I have done—and then pile the bingeing on top of it?

My close friends never say whether they’ve read the
Shape
columns, and I never ask. But occasionally someone will bring the subject up at an odd moment. I was telling Mary about another friend who has started being overly solicitous about what kind of restaurant we can go to together and whether I’d be OK with it. Which of course makes me not OK with it, because then I feel like if I order what I want and what I want is not a salad or grilled fish, this friend then thinks,
Why have I bothered?

Mary didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Then she said the columns made her much more conscious about what she says about food and her own weight around me. She also said that she’d suggested to Abby that she do the same. I hate the thought that being around me is so much
work
.

Have spent the past couple of days e-mailing this woman named Kellie from D.C. who figured out that “Courtney Rubin from
Shape
” and “Courtney Rubin from
Washingtonian
” are the same person. Her first e-mail caught me off guard, and I responded.

She had written—as nearly everyone does—that she couldn’t believe she was writing a letter to someone in a magazine and about how bizarre it was to be so proud of someone she’s never met and how much I had motivated her, even though she was struggling. I wrote back that contrary to what she was currently reading in the magazine right now (the marathon column with a picture of me at my thinnest), I too was struggling.

She wrote back: “Even if you never lose another pound, I love to hear about someone else’s struggles and how they are just like mine. Keep writing.”

Inspired by Kellie, I sent Peeke an e-mail asking for help. She told me to get a calendar and some star stickers and give myself red stars for days I do destructive things, silver stars for days I struggle but don’t act on the temptation, and golds for days where I really stick to the diet. The immediate aim is to get rid of the reds. Silvers, I suppose, are the realities of daily living.

Golds I can hope for but not count on. I’m not entirely clear on what this is supposed to do, other than, I suppose, make me face how many days a month I’m self-destructive.

A silver star day. My head is so filled with voices—Peeke’s, Nancy’s, and Geneen Roth’s telling me it’s OK to eat—that it’s hard to sort out what I feel from what I think I should feel.

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I had two jelly doughnuts for lunch today. Two doughnuts—nothing

more. This is progress.

Date tonight with this guy Dan I met more than six weeks ago—long enough ago for me to have given up on his ever calling.

We went to dinner downtown and talked mostly about our jobs. I never talk about the
Shape
column, and I didn’t this time either. It’s not the sort of thing I want to end up talking about with some guy I’ve seen just twice in my life.

When the waitress came to tell us about dessert, she stopped in midrecita-tion and stared at me.

“You’re Courtney Rubin from
Shape
,” she said. “You can’t order dessert.”

I felt trapped then. I never would have ordered dessert anyway, but I didn’t like it that after her comment I felt like I couldn’t. I wanted to point out that I’d left more than half of my mashed potatoes and hadn’t eaten any bread.

I also felt trapped because I knew Dan would ask about
Shape
, and the moment she left he did.

“I didn’t know I was out with someone famous,” he said.

I tried to explain the column in the vaguest terms possible, wondering if he was thinking, as I would if I were him:
Shouldn’t someone writing about
weight loss be thin?

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Month 16 (April)

Another day, another reason my life would be easier/better ifI were thinner. At a Passover seder I sat next to a cute guy, a cartoonist. The whole time I was talking, a little piece of my brain was thinking:
If I weren’t overweight, maybe I could be one of those people who meet a potential boyfriend
somewhere random
. When I went to the bathroom, I was afraid to look but figured I’d better face it. I examined my reflection and actually pronounced it not
too
repulsive.

Then I sat back down at the table, and Diana whispered: “We’ve got to do something about your hair. It’s all frizzy.”

Crazy athletic weekend. Saturday I ran the Cherry Blossom Ten-Miler. It was pouring, and with the windchill the temperature was sixteen degrees. I was supposed to be doing something healthy and good for myself, but I nearly made myself sick. Everyone I knew had dropped out of the race because of the weather, but I wouldn’t let myself.

On Sunday I went hiking with Mary and Stacy. I’m glad I didn’t know ahead of time that it involved lots of rock scrambling and a bit of rock climbing, because I probably would have wimped out. We were far along the trail before we started getting to bits that scared me, and at that point I just had to do them.

“I’ve heard even six-year-olds can do it,” Mary said, trying to be encouraging. OK, I thought, but there are six-year-olds who do backflips off ten-meter diving boards and ride Space Mountain at Disney World—both things that scare me.

A couple of hours into the hike, we came to a sheer wall of rock. The higher I climbed, the harder the footholds got to find, and the farther apart 193

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they were. Worse, there were bunches of people at the foot of the wall, all waiting for me to finish climbing so they could have their turn.

My knee-jerk response was to climb back down and wait by the car. But climbing down rocks is even harder and scarier than climbing up, and Mary and Stacy were having none of it. They waited close to twenty minutes in one place for me to move a few feet. I didn’t hear anyone on the trail laughing at me, either. In most cases they offered to help. It seemed the world was conspiring to keep me from quitting.

I was exhausted when I finished, but it was a good kind of tired. I won’t say I loved every minute of it, but I definitely loved having done it.

The past few weeks have been the kind where half my wardrobe is at the dry cleaner because I’m never around in time to pick it up. The kind where it takes me three weeks to find a free hour to get coffee with a friend. It’s the most unlikely of times, but all of a sudden food and exercise are falling back into place. There are lots of possible reasons, but I think it’s this: after a couple of months of feeling again how it feels to be eating anything and everything and too much of it all the time—in a word:
yucky
—I’ve had enough.

The high I got from the hike didn’t hurt, either.

It sounds so simple and so weight-loss-success-story kind of cheerful: I woke up one morning and decided to do it. But as Nancy has told me repeatedly, everyone knows how to lose weight—it’s just a matter of wanting it badly enough to make it work.

I’m tired of racking my brain for what I might possibly want to eat and then heading out to get it, all the while thinking:
I must eat it now because I
am absolutely, positively getting back on track tomorrow
. These days the only thing I crave is control. But I know I’ve got to be careful. Last year I ate the same things over and over: things that were safe. But here’s the rub: you eat the same thing every day, and suddenly you can’t take it anymore. You can’t figure out what you want to eat first. You’ve fallen into the diet trap—where foods feel forbidden because you’re afraid of them or what might happen if you started eating them. At least that’s what happened to me.

Forget about the gold and silver and whatever other color stars there were. That lasted a week until I tired of it, like a fad diet. Now I’m working on straddling the middle ground—halfway between eating exactly what I’m

“supposed” to and eating anything and everything. My plan is to balance my fear of what I might eat if given the choice with my desire to plan to eat healthy by bringing lunch three times a week and eating whatever I want

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