The Weight-loss Diaries (33 page)

(within reason) the other two days. The weight won’t come off as quickly, I’m sure, but maybe, just maybe, this time it will be for good.

My eating disorders story is getting a mention on the magazine cover, and one of the cover-line options was something like, “Fear of Fat: One Woman’s Struggle with an Eating Disorder.” I vetoed that one fast. I’m OK with talking about my bingeing in an article when I can pretend, as I’m doing, that the article really is mostly about other people. But seeing “one woman’s struggle” is somehow just too revealing.

I can’t believe I’m really publishing this. Tonight I sent the parts involving Diana to her. Not so much for her approval, but as a heads-up. She wrote back something I wasn’t expecting: that she remembered a lot of the moments I was referring to with Mom and Grandma. She used to feel so awful during them—so unsure of what to do—she wanted to cry herself.

I keep envisioning myself someday writing an essay or short story titled “After the Flood.” But all I can do now is look around at the rubble and try not to cry.

I got home Thursday night at 12:30 a.m.—I’d just put the eating disorders piece to bed, and I still had some freelance assignments to plow through.

But I’d decided I deserved to go out and so had a couple of drinks. All I wanted to do then was sleep for hours, but when I walked into the building, one of the guys at the front desk said, “I don’t think you want to go up there, Miss Rubin.”

The guys often tease me about my piles of mail and the hours I get home, so I thought they were joking. I smiled wanly and headed for the elevator when one of them took my arm.

“Miss Rubin, you don’t want to go up there,” he said. “There’s been a flood.”

I didn’t believe him. I’m still not sure what happened—they said something about a pipe being left open. All I know is it took the building extra long to discover the problem because there was no one living beneath me, so the water had to get all the way down to apartment 203 (through two floors) before anyone called the front desk.

There’s so much stuff ruined I don’t even know where to start. Of course, tons of this is my own fault, because my apartment was an absolute sty—I’d been telling everyone for weeks that I was going to take off a couple of days just to clean my apartment and get my life in order. So of course, loads of

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things were on the floor that had no business being there: magazines, CDs, clothes.

I keep trying to look on the bright side, saying that at least I’ll really have to clean everything now. But I’ll also have to replace so much stuff, which I don’t have time for.

I felt so violated, seeing my stuff strewn around the hallway in soggy piles and knowing that the maintenance guys had seen my apartment in an embarrassing state. But I only started to cry—of all times—when I couldn’t reach Diana. I was so tired, I had to go to the bathroom, and I just didn’t want to have to deal with anyone. Diana and I are so used to seeing each other at our worst that I wanted to be with her not so much because I thought she’d make me feel better but because I wouldn’t have to be on my best behavior around her. There’s nothing I could say or do that could change her opinion of me.

Finally Diana came home, and I collapsed on her futon but couldn’t sleep. Something was bothering me. So I begged Diana to dig out her copy of the lease. I had to know: can you be evicted for being a slob?

Insanity, I once read, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If that’s true, I’m certifiable.

As always, it’s my instinct to call Mom when something goes wrong, so I called her this morning about the flood. I wanted her to tell me exactly what to do, and she didn’t, or couldn’t. She talked about what she was watching on the news—not because she doesn’t care, but because her illness means her attention span is severely limited.

So I left Mary a half-hysterical voice mail, and she promptly called back, saying she was ditching her happy hour plans this evening to come over, help me assess the damage, and then take me to stay at her place. She must have spread the word about the flood to our friends, because the offers of places to stay and rides anywhere I needed started coming in.

In daylight, everything in the apartment was even worse than I’d remembered. College newspapers and high school yearbooks ruined. Pictures I’d meant to put in albums stuck together in clumps. Journals smeared to the point of unreadability, because I love to write with felt-tip pens. Mary and I threw out bags of stuff. I tried not to cry.

Sitting on Mary’s couch alone on a Saturday night. It feels good. I’ve read maybe a hundred pages of my book-club book, practiced my guitar, done two loads of laundry, hand-washed a shirt and a rug, and made a stab at finding

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all the phone numbers to call various companies whose bills are now too soggy for me to see how much I owe them.

If this would have been a nightmare for anybody, it was doubly so for a weight watcher. Dealing with the aftermath of the flood—getting things cleaned up, fighting with the phone company, trying to replace dozens of things—is like a full-time job on top of the overtime I’m already working.

I’m lucky to have a friend willing to let me crash in her apartment for several weeks, but Mary’s place is far from mine, not to mention far from the gym I’d deliberately chosen because it was convenient to
my
place. I’m on someone else’s schedule, without my own space, time, or even refrigerator. I hate having anybody—even Mary,
especially
Mary—see what I eat all the time. Knowing that I can’t, say, have pizza for dinner two nights in a row—

because that’s not really normal—makes me want to binge. (What
doesn’t
seem to make me want to binge?)

It’s all I can do not to lie on my couch—OK, Mary’s couch—and eat

myself through it. I can’t figure out how I’m going to exercise, and all the planning required to eat properly for a week just seems like one more thing I don’t have the time or energy to do.

Every time I go back to my apartment to investigate, I find that something else has gone wrong. Now my stuff has been ruined four times. First with the initial flooding and then when things I had salvaged were thrown on top of ruined ones when maintenance men came to deal with the carpet. After that, I told our building manager I wanted to be told when there were people working in my apartment. But when I checked up on my apartment Thursday, I found work had been done in the bathroom, and more of my stuff was thrown on the floor, broken, soggy, and otherwise ruined. Later that evening, when I wasn’t there, a sink backed up and made everything in my kitchen muddy and unusable. There’s still mud on the floor.

On top of this, our building manager had told me they’d pay for dry-cleaning all the clothes and other things that were salvageable. But today there was a note in my mailbox saying she had to follow what the building owners said. They are insisting it’s not their fault and that my lease absolves them of any responsibility.

I threw my cell phone across the room and cried.

I’ve been crying off and on for days. Even someone asking me how I am—

in just the right sympathetic tone of voice—sets me off. And everything—

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even getting myself to work, which from Mary’s is a commute—seems to require more energy than I have.

I’ve eaten haphazardly, and I don’t think running around town trying to do a million errands exactly counts as exercise. So once again I’ve turned to food as one thing I can—maybe, possibly, if I try hard enough, please God—

control.

Nancy reminded me that every day I have a choice: to lose, to maintain, or to gain. We have a limited energy pie, and losing weight takes a slice—

unfortunately, not the calorie-burning sort—that, when life is crazy, might be needed for other things, like dealing with landlords. “Times of chaos are not lose-weight days or weeks,” she told me. They’re maintain-if-at-all-possible weeks.

I also have to adjust my definition of
successful
when it comes to weight.

The classic definition is, of course, the scale going down, but for now I may have to define
successful
as coping with the flood without gaining weight—

forget about losing. After several months of ups and downs, I’m so frustrated that just when I was finally ready to rock again, my life seems to be conspiring against me. But really, what can I do? Given the option to gain or maintain—well, the choice is a no-brainer.

My weight-gain diary is in this month’s
Shape
—the column I wrote nearly six months ago, at the beginning of November.

The column makes me ache for myself back then, writing with an

everything’s-going-to-be-OK-in-the-end cheer I’m sure I didn’t feel. Then there’s the ending: “The key, Peeke says, is to regroup. Dust yourself off, figure out what went wrong, forgive yourself, and get on with it. If only it were that easy.”

Six months on, and I still haven’t. Haven’t forgiven myself. Haven’t gotten on with it.

But the response to the column has been unlike anything I ever expected.

This is the first issue that has my e-mail address in it, and the account overflowed. Lots of all caps and exclamation marks. “You are the most REAL part of the magazine!” and “I just wanted to tell you that you are amazing, and such an inspiration” and “We’re all rooting for you, you can do it!!!!!!!” (no extra exclamation points added) and “Thanks for sticking your neck out and taking this project. You rally my spirit and help strengthen my resolve.” And one of my favorites: “The first time I looked at my friend’s
Shape
magazine I thought this is another magazine with stupid ideas on how to motivate you,

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but then I saw your article and subscribed to
Shape
right then and there. Every month I can’t wait to read your diary. We’re all behind you 100 percent.”

Sherri, one of the senior editors at the
Washingtonian
, came into my office today carrying a bunch of pink roses and a card. In the card was what she had nicknamed “Getting Courtney’s Head Above the Water Fund”—a mall gift certificate that much of the office had chipped in for.

I was speechless. It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

Love everybody. Love my office.

Am swearing off complaining about anyone at the
Washingtonian
.

At least until next month.

The eating disorders story is out. Cover line: “Fear of Fat.” Headline: “Losing It.” I hope nobody but me knows just how apt that seems to be for my state of mind these days.

I jump every time my office phone rings, but it’s never about the story.

Instead, those calls seem to come when people don’t think I’ll be around—

or maybe when no one is around to hear these women call. The time stamps on my voice mail are at 11:12 p.m., 2:37 a.m., 3:07 a.m. Women (and it’s nearly all women) reaching out in the darkness—or possibly, I imagine, by the light of the refrigerator.

The e-mails have been very encouraging, though sad. One 260-pound

woman wrote about how just after she read it she was walking across the street and some guy yelled, “Why don’t you go on Weight Watchers?” There are flattering e-mails from two novelists I’ve profiled, plus a sweet one from a guy I know about the struggle he had helping an old girlfriend who was bulimic.

Despite the nice e-mails, I wish I could go into every book and grocery store in the Washington area and buy up every last copy to keep anyone from reading it. I especially wish there were some way to prevent my friends from doing so.

When I got back to Mary’s today, she seemed to want to talk about

something. Finally she said, “I read your story in the magazine.” The eating disorders piece.

The magazine story is mostly about college and right after I graduated—

before Mary knew me. But she wanted to know how much of the behavior I wrote about is still a problem. The piece ends on an upbeat note—that it has been long enough since I’ve binged that I’m starting to forget what it feels

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like (true at the moment I wrote the words, but not now). Still, she was worried about me, especially because the last lines of the story suggest that I’m still struggling: “My story doesn’t have an ending because it never ends. You never completely stop thinking about food. You just work on doing it less.

Instead of thinking about it all the time—100 percent of the pie—you aim for 75, then 50. You hope for 25. And whatever you do, you just keep going.”

That was it—my opening to talk about all of this with her, to explain some of the behavior—the obsessiveness—that I’m sure sometimes has repelled her. I answered her question—told her that I didn’t do some of the more extreme things in the story anymore, that I didn’t starve. (I didn’t add that sometimes I still think about starving and wish that I had the willpower.) But I didn’t tell her anything more than that. Between the flood and the divorce and my mother and my constant worries about a thousand other things, I already feel so needy; so depressing. So heavy with grief.

Month 17 (May)

Grandma hasn’t said anything about the eating disorders story. (I’m not expecting Mom to say anything other than the story is long, which, in fact, it is.) I want to force the issue, the way I often do when I know I’ve gained weight and just want to hear it from Grandma already. But I can’t bring myself to say anything.

Dad’s e-mail: was Bruce the Spruce really that insensitive?

I avoided a
Shape
photo shoot because of the flood—it was supposed to be two days after. So now I’ve been told to take lots of pictures of myself this month because we’re very behind. There’s a plan for an extended photo shoot next month, where they’ll take pictures for four months in one day. I can’t decide which is worse: to have more photo shoots (and more chances to look bad/stupid/fat) or just the one. I hate the fact that with one, even if I make major progress, it’s not going to show in the pictures.