The Weight-loss Diaries (36 page)

“Why, do you need something?” I asked, regretting the way the e-mail would sound from the moment I sent it.

“Not particularly,” he wrote.

I told him he could call every once in a while, and I couldn’t resist adding a zinger asking if this was something reserved for when the girlfriend wasn’t around.

“Wow, you’re way mean,” he wrote.

I promptly apologized—always apologizing, it feels like—and said my feelings had been hurt because I seemed to hear from him only when he had nothing better to do.

Month 18 (June)

215

“Oh, good God,” he wrote, which just made me angrier and more

defensive.

I wrote a long e-mail saying I was sorry I’d said anything about it at all, because while I didn’t want things to continue as they had been, I didn’t want him to feel obligated to talk to me, either.

Ugh. And I wonder why I avoid confrontation.

Actually, I know why. Because I’m terrible at it, because I feel like confrontation is yet another thing I should have learned how to do years ago but didn’t because I was eating instead.

I’ve traded the uncomfortable feeling of wishing I could say something for the equally uncomfortable feeling of having made a mess of things. At least I don’t want to eat anything—except my words.

Some days my life feels like one big struggle not to miss out on something really good. I’m happy to have options—Mary and the lawyers (where I am, the running joke goes, the token nonlawyer), the young-journalist crew, my old college friends, random people I’ve met—but sometimes I feel like I’m accumulating points or someone’s taking attendance. A certain number of absences and I’ll be out of the group—or at least out on all the inside jokes.

What to do on a Friday night is a small thing, but it’s yet another reminder that I’ve been so consumed with food that I’ve never developed that unswerving internal compass that says this is what I want and points to something that isn’t food or some other tangible. It goes back to the whole idea of being unable to trust my gut. Food has blotted out so much for so long that I’m rarely sure, on a most basic level, what I want.

Started tennis lessons with Alexy tonight, part of my unofficial plan to stop regretting and start doing. Unfortunately, I immediately hated the instructor, a guy in his late forties who has that kind of oozy, I’m-your-best-friend-though-I’ve-known-you-for-five-seconds manner. He’s no best friend of mine.

He told me loudly that playing tennis a couple of times a week would be great for me because I’d lose weight and be able to run faster.

It was just like the boxing instructor from last year, and once again I was too stung to say anything. Yes, I do a lot of things to lose weight, but at the same time I hate the assumption that that’s the only reason I would try a sport.

I felt this urge to show Mr. Tennis Menace, to be the world’s best beginner tennis player, which of course meant I made a crappy shot every time he looked in my direction.

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Month 19 (July)

After a month oftalking about it, my friend Cara and I have decided that if we’re really going to run the marathon this year, we’d better start training. It’s four months away, but if we don’t start now, we won’t have enough time to fit in even an eighteen-mile run—the bare minimum you need to be ready.

We ran ten miles today in the nasty, muggy heat, complaining all the way.

What
are
we doing this for? Cara wants to do it once to be able to say she’s done it. I’m not sure why I’m doing it. Because I’m hoping to regain some of that sense of peace I got on Saturday mornings from last year’s training?

Because I thought last year was a fluke, and I want to prove I really can do it?

Crazy stressed—have that boxed-in feeling where I’m pushing to see if there’s even an inch of give anywhere. My “I am the master of my new, simplified, saying-no life” lasted, oh, about forty-five seconds. I’ve got a bunch of work to do for
Washingtonian
and
Shape
, and now I’ve got an article for
Made-moiselle
due in less than a week. I’ve got almost no time between now and then—I’m supposed to go to a baseball game tomorrow night, then play tennis, then the next night is a work party, all things I could give up but don’t want to. Friday I’m off to North Carolina, and Erica’s here Monday. And Tuesday I’m out of the office all day working on another story. Yikes. Must sit down tomorrow morning and map out how I’m going to get everything done, otherwise I will freak.

Meanwhile, got home tonight exhausted and starving and completely

uninspired by everything in my refrigerator. Grumpy just at the thought of eating an (unsatisfying) frozen dinner, and figuring out something to make from a cookbook would mean (a) digging through some half-unpacked boxes 217

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

to see if I still
have
a cookbook after the flood, (b) deciding what to make, and (c) schlepping to the grocery store to get the stuff, only to get home and realize I’ve forgotten something crucial and irreplaceable, like, say, the tomatoes needed for a marinara sauce.

So I called for Chinese takeout. And I wonder why I can’t lose weight.

I haven’t had a drink since before Canyon Ranch over a month ago, and now I just don’t want to drink—well, get drunk—anymore. I don’t want to drink all those calories, and I don’t want to risk waking up the next morning feeling crummy. For most people, drinks make connections easier—alcohol as social lubricant. But these days drinks don’t rid me of this terrible self-consciousness about being overweight. So I stand there with my Diet Coke, feeling like a buzzkill, a sentence I read a long time ago running through my head: “When you’re fat, it all just kind of hangs out.”

I don’t know quite when and why the self-consciousness set in again.

Maybe because I was slowly, slowly becoming aware that my body was shrinking, and so now that it’s expanding, it seems to take up more space than ever.

Mary has always said I wear my feelings on my face, and all I can do is hope that not everyone is as perceptive as she is. I hope not everybody can tell that I’m not having a blast.

My “invisible outsider” feelings came out tonight over the tiniest thing. I was at Tony & Joe’s, a bar on the Georgetown waterfront, for an outing of a bunch of women—a big gang of us (this work friend of someone’s, that old law school roommate of someone else’s) that only recently has coalesced. Exactly the sort of outing that lately I’ve been finding less and less appealing: a let’s-meet-new-people night (translation: male-type people). I don’t want to meet anyone looking like this—don’t even think I can. Instead I look at the women I know—smart, fun, pretty, and
thin
—and I envy them all.

I wasn’t planning on drinking tonight, and I knew I had a
Shape
photo shoot tomorrow. When I showed up, everyone had been drinking for nearly two hours and was in full-on crazy, flirty mode—the opposite of how I felt.

Hate summer, when there are no clothes to hide myself in.

There’s also been this thing going on with one of the girls and me.

Though we were pretty good friends last year, Alison doesn’t speak to me unless absolutely necessary. She didn’t look my way when I said hello tonight.

Month 19 (July)

219

Not an auspicious beginning to the evening. Twenty minutes later, she didn’t so much as offer to get me a drink when she headed to the bar. (The place was packed, and I loathe fighting my way to the bar for just a Diet Coke, because the bartenders are always annoyed—crummy tip.) Finally someone else from our group went over for a round and forgot my Diet Coke. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have forgotten anyone else’s drink.

I ended up blinking back tears—yes,
again
—and muttering a lame excuse about allergies. Which Mary did not buy. I ended up nervously telling her that I hated feeling like I had to be drunk even to remotely belong in this group these days.

Her response surprised me.

“I sometimes feel that way, too,” she said. But she always seems at the center of everything.

The key word:
seems
. There’s the world as I imagine it in my mind, and there’s this completely different reality I discover only when I say things—as I did today—that are hard to say.

Shape
photo shoot—they were taking photos for two or three months’ worth of columns. Exactly how many, I don’t even want to know.

In what I was hoping wasn’t going to be an omen for the shoot, the power went out on the whole street just before the shoot, so I couldn’t blow-dry my hair. I had to wear it curly—Diana would say frizzy. Not attractive.

At least I wasn’t upset about the clothes this time: I did love the black bead-fringed capri pants the stylist had sent from the Gap.

Molly the photographer had an intern with her, who got a laugh out of the whole extravaganza. One shot of me hiking. Another of me hanging out.

A third of me reading a book on the porch of Molly’s friend’s house. I once read that to keep her mind occupied during shoots, Cindy Crawford calculates how much money she’s making per minute. Since for me that’s a big fat zero (and let’s not get started on how I’m not Cindy Crawford), I entertained myself with thoughts of which book I should pretend to read for my Cere-bral Courtney shot that might get the most reaction out of readers.
Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire
? Too dorky.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
? Too obvious.
My Year
of Meats
(my book-club book)? Sounds too much like a diet book, even though it’s fiction. The cover of
Remembering Denny
is too dull for a photo.

And the galleys from a book I’m reviewing—I think
Shape
would say that would make the photo unusable. There had been a handful of queries about

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

where to buy a necklace I once wore—I’d bought it at a market in London—

so I was supposed to be careful that anything visible in the picture could be purchased somewhere in the United States.

Talked to the Canyon Ranch doctor today, who says I don’t have insulin resistance, though I may have a tendency toward low blood sugar, which makes it all the more important for me to eat every three hours. That might explain why I get so frantic and irritable when I don’t and why I then make a mad dash for the sugar. To keep my sugar levels at an even keel, I’m supposed to eat more protein than carbohydrate at meals and eat my snack of fruit with some protein, such as nuts or string cheese. I’ve heard all these things from Dr. Peeke before, but I listened to them today as if they were some kind of breakthrough. The doctor suggested I go get my blood sugar tested at some point when I’m feeling cranky and irritable, but I’m sure I won’t. Too much effort.

Crazy, isn’t it? I’d go trekking all over town for some random snack food if someone told me it was low-fat and yummy, and I’d do any number of other inconvenient and/or embarrassing and/or unpleasant things to lose weight. But I won’t go get a blood test. Probably because low blood sugar isn’t the answer I’m looking for.

Another tentative stab at confrontation tonight. God, it is so much easier just to eat. But every time I have a negative feeling and I don’t deal with it, I know my stomach will keep track.

Got annoyed with Mary that some of the things I told her were getting passed on to another friend of ours. It has caused a couple of sticky situations.

So I took the proverbial deep breath and said, “I just wish you’d be careful what you tell Betsy.”

And . . . it wasn’t that bad. She agreed. She apologized. That was it.

So why can’t I stop thinking about it? Why do I feel like it’s I who’s done something wrong?

Uncomfortable feelings versus feeling uncomfortably full. These are the choices.

For the amount of angst
Shape
causes me, occasionally I love it. Their travel editor has decided I should test my newfound athletic abilities by going hiking, rock climbing(!), and mountain biking in Colorado in September. And a classically trained chef who lost piles of weight when she took a chef ’s job

Month 19 (July)

221

at a spa has seen my weight-gain diary and told
Shape
she wants to fly out and rescue me.

She wants to come make over my kitchen—wait until she hears my

kitchen is about the size of a phone booth and about as well equipped—and show me how to make quick, good food. For a story, of course.

I hope her idea of quick isn’t two hours and seven pans.

Pants that didn’t fit three weeks ago fit today. Hallelujah! Maybe I can dare to get on the scale this week?

On second thought, better not ruin my sense of triumph. You can “it’s just a number” me all you want, but I know that when I see it, my weight will feel like a three-digit indictment. It will still be too far away from where I wish it were.

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Month 20 (August)

Another evening offlirtation—the third in two weeks—with a guy I’ve nicknamed Bacon Boy, because I know he’s as bad for me as intravenous bacon.

Sometimes we’re like best pals—or something more. Other times I feel like I might never hear from him again. He reminds me in so many ways—

including looks—of an old boyfriend. Flirtatious. Funny and sarcastic, with an edge. But over the edge, you can fall.

It seems all I do is think and strategize about dealing with food, and yet somehow I still screw up so badly. I know perfectly well that I should not, say, show up at a dinner party starving, especially one that starts later than my usual dinner hour. I know I’ll overeat, and yet I head on over there in denial, thinking that somehow this time I’ll manage something I’ve never once managed in the past.

I go to the party hungry and I eat. That night or the next morning, I look at the way my jeans fit, and all I can think is:
What was I thinking?
Why, oh why, do I persist on hoping that somehow, as if by magic, this time will be different from all the others?