The Weight-loss Diaries (39 page)

That’s something I’m still figuring out—and probably will be for a while.

For now, I’ve decided that the middle is going to be that I follow Peeke’s diet

238

The Weight-Loss Diaries

five days a week and try to figure out what I really
want
to eat the other two days. I know chances are I won’t lose weight this way, but for now the sense of control seems reward enough.

OK, that’s a lie. It’s not enough, but it will have to do.

For the past four days I haven’t eaten a single thing that feels anything but safe. No low-fat desserts. No restaurant salads that probably have as many calories as fettuccine Alfredo (if not quite as much fat). I’ve also gotten up for the past four mornings and done my entire fifty minutes of cardio.

Next week’s project: to get back to lifting weights religiously.

Depressing fifty-years-ago-versus-today calorie-burning list, courtesy of more research for my “Does Your Environment Make You Fat?” story:

climbing the stairs (18 calories per minute) vs.

taking the elevator, aka standing (1.8 calories per minute)

grocery shopping (3.5 calories per minute) vs.

ordering groceries online, aka typing (1.5 calories per minute)

washing dishes (2.5 calories per minute) vs.

watching TV while the dishwasher runs (.9 calorie per minute)

chopping wood for fire (6 calories per minute) vs.

turning up the thermostat (1 calorie per minute)

mowing the lawn with a hand mower (6 calories per minute) vs.

riding the lawn mower (2.5 calories per minute)

washing the car (4.5 calories per minute) vs.

hitting the automatic car wash (1 calorie per minute)

The timer on my phone says I’ve talked to Mom for fifty-three seconds. I think I’ve talked to telemarketers for longer than that.

I couldn’t think of anything to say, and she didn’t seem to want to talk about the TV or whatever was in her direct line of vision. I hung up the phone and wondered whom I could call to talk about her. Not Diana—these days we feed off each other’s grief, escalating into a crescendo of tears.

I couldn’t think of a single person who would make me feel better—or who wouldn’t make me feel any worse. Not because they wouldn’t try to help, but what is there to say? People always try to solve the problem. But they can’t.

Nobody can.

Month 22 (October)

239

I want my friends to tell me how to deal with this, like it’s a lesson I can learn somewhere. It is like losing weight in that I want someone to tell me what to do, preferably simple and concrete things. But losing weight and dealing with Mom’s illness aren’t secrets to be passed along. They’re things I have to figure out for myself.

I finished marathon number two, though I probably had no business running it with my lack of training. Definitely proof that if you want to do something badly enough, you can get yourself through it.

This year was much less fun than last year—none of the thrill of doing something new and the joy of discovering I could—and much hotter. My favorite runners’ T-shirt: “Caution, This Runner Makes Frequent Stops.”

Now I have done a marathon not once but twice. It is not a fluke.

Passed a store where I used to buy bingeables and thought to myself that it’s been a while since I’ve done that. I’ve eaten loads of things I shouldn’t have, but not in that rapid, panicky, doomed succession. It’s been a messy, painful, teary couple of months, but Shari has a cleaning-the-chicken-pan theory of life: things get really icky just before they get really clean.

For Halloween this year Mary and Abby and I are going as teenyboppers.

Mary’s wearing a pink T-shirt that says “I love boys” and even dug out her old retainer. Abby has a tiny clear plastic backpack. I’m wearing a Backstreet Boys T-shirt and some cheesy jewelry we bought at the mall. Unfortunately, I also seem to have extremely authentic zits.

This page intentionally left blank.

Month 23 (November)

This has been one ofthe longest weeks ofmy life. Fighting with Diana over so many things, the very tiniest of which is that she borrowed a black dress of mine and it had a hole in it and was crumpled when I needed to wear it. From that point on, every fight we’ve ever had in the past twenty-five years seems to have been replayed.

There’s so much crap flying—so many old resentments that flare up so easily—that I don’t know how we’re ever going to get through them.

It always comes down to the same question: why do we each treat our friends better than we treat each other?

Dad is coming to D.C. next week, and this week has left Diana and me beyond the point where we can be polite to each other for an evening. I called Dad to suggest that I see him one day and Diana see him the next, so he wouldn’t have to be in the middle. Ended up crying as I tried to explain the whole thing, which, as a way of coping, is better than eating, but still I’m not thrilled with the idea of this becoming a regular thing.

Dad said something about how he’d known for a while that Diana and I had “issues” with each other, but he’s been denying that it was this bad.

Called Diana to discuss plans for Dad’s visit, and the conversation went downhill fast. It ended with her slamming down the phone and sending me an e-mail that said: “I just called Dad and asked him if he was sorry that he was coming to visit (I would be). Aren’t we great kids? Not that you care, but I will be doing nothing for Thanksgiving.”

No matter how angry I get with her, that last line still makes me feel guilty.

241

Copyright © 2004 by Courtney Rubin. Click here for terms of use.

242

The Weight-Loss Diaries

I gave up on the separate-nights idea with Dad. I felt, as always, like I was being the difficult child and immediately backed off. I have the backbone of an éclair.

Dinner on Diana and Dad time, which is usually about ninety minutes later than planned and indeed was this evening. They were busy dealing with a problem with Diana’s computer—and there were more than a few comments from Dad about why I wasn’t at all interested in the specifics of what was wrong with it. I considered asking him if my being fascinated by moth-erboards and memory would be better use of the intelligence he and my sister seem to think is wasted on what I do now, but I didn’t. Instead I sat on Diana’s futon reading a magazine and trying not to think about how hungry I was and how annoyed I was with myself for bothering to arrive on time.

Dinner was perfectly pleasant, mostly because I didn’t say much and wasn’t asked much. They talked about a load of Internet-related things that I didn’t care much about. For a while I tried to pay attention, but since they both appeared to have forgotten I was there, eventually I gave up and let the words sail over my head. I didn’t feel left out, as I usually do, because I wasn’t trying to join in. I just sat there, apart but content, watching people and eating my salmon. As a method of coping, not engaging with Diana or Dad definitely beats crying, but it’s pretty lame as a long-term solution.

Diana and I had a fight this morning about the whereabouts of my pink twin-set—basically, whether she had ever given it back to me—which quickly degenerated into the usual name-calling.

Have decided not to speak to her until I get back from Costa Rica. It’s scary how easy that will probably be, because we’re both so busy.

I’m so desperate not to feel guilty and not to overeat over her that I’m becoming positively granola: I’m trying breathing. When I’m obsessing, I’ve been breathing in for four counts, holding it for seven, and exhaling for eight counts. It’s actually hard to think about anything else when I’m concentrating on that.

And
I signed up for a lunchtime yoga class.

Caitlin from my fiction group sent around an e-mail to everyone she knew about an apartment for rent. Upon seeing my name, someone else on the list sent Caitlin an e-mail that said: “You know Courtney Rubin??? Personally? I am a huge fan.”

Month 23 (November)

243

Caitlin forwarded this to me, and I of course forwarded it to Mary, because I knew she’d make me laugh about the whole thing.

Mary promptly e-mailed back, threatening to dig out things I’ve left at her house to auction off on eBay. “I’ll make a mint off Courtney stuff!

Authentic skanky running socks worn by Courtney Rubin on July 7, 1999.”

At least I’ll never have to worry about her giving out my cell phone number—

she can never remember it.

Today I fixed a cabinet door that was coming unhinged. Went out, got a screwdriver, and fixed it. I’m feeling smug—like the love child of Martha Stewart and Bob Vila. Fixing the cabinet is such a small thing, but to me it’s significant.

I once read a description of alcoholism as “fear of life.” It’s equally apt for compulsive overeating. (In fact, much of the Overeaters Anonymous literature is Alcoholics Anonymous literature with the word
food
substituted for
alcohol
.) When you use food, you don’t solve problems; you avoid them.

Even if they’re as small as screwing in a screw. You have no faith in your ability to solve them, so you leave them to fester into things so large all you can do is throw up your hands and eat—another way that the world is

against you.

Dinner and a play with an acquaintance-probably-turning-friend—the cool person you always mean to get together with and somehow never do. Well, finally we did.

During dinner she made a comment about sometimes being unable to

stop eating, and I thought it was one of those girly comments—the “I shouldn’t eat this” statement women make because they feel they have to, because it’s not OK just to eat.

We talked about other things for a while, then she speared a piece of chicken kebab on a fork, pointed it at me, and said, “You write about this stuff, don’t you? I’ve read your stuff.”

Then the bottom dropped out of the conversation. One of those crazy, mad, intensely personal conversations I usually associate with long train or plane trips, where you know you’ll never see the person again.

She told me that lately she gets upset when she sees women she thinks are thinner or prettier. She’s been comparing herself to other women so much more, and it makes her not want to leave the house.

244

The Weight-Loss Diaries

I got a rush listening to this woman—who paints and cooks four-star dinners and will go turn cartwheels on the D.C. sidewalk just
because
. I watched her pick at her food, hands skittering like frightened animals. I thought about her possibly wondering what I would think of her for saying what she had just said, and I realized—as always, in that flash that comes when something has been so blindingly obvious that you’ve missed it entirely—that she wasn’t thinking about me or what I had ordered or whether I had finished it. The world is not Courtney-centric, except in my mind.

Finally. I’ve lost weight for three weeks straight, for a total of six pounds. I love that the scale has gone down every week, but mostly I’m loving how totally in control I’m feeling. Working out. Eating right. Lifting. Without consulting anyone to tell me it’s right or wrong, I’ve stuck with my plan of following Peeke’s diet, but with the option of following it only five days a week, leaving two days a week for eating what I want. So far I haven’t taken that option because I don’t want to—but it helps to know the option is there. I hope it will keep me from repeating the Peeke’s-diet-to-binge cycle of last year.

The success is especially sweet because these six pounds have been, to date, my hardest won—they’ve taken essentially a year. After all, it’s been about a year since I had the momentum going to lose weight for more than a week or two at a time.

Now if only I could lose my food demons along with the weight. And then there’s my glass-is-half-empty thinking. When I’m trying not to eat out so much and being vigilant about getting to the gym, the old worries resurface: I’m getting obsessive and being boring. Shari wrote me earlier this week after a particularly down-on-myself e-mail: “If you talked to a child the way you sometimes talk to yourself, I would have to call social services on you.”

I’ve spent much of this past year working on myself, which—Nancy suggests—may be one of the reasons my weight loss most of this year has been so torturously slow to nonexistent. Even I know her mantra by now: it takes energy to lose weight, and mine has obviously been going other places.

I haven’t binged in well over a month, but with prevacation nerves setting in, I called Erica to talk about it. We ended up drawing up a list of healthy snack food. Since she’s been packed for at least a week, whereas it’s two days before we leave and I have no idea where my shorts are, she even volunteered to go buy the stuff.

Month 23 (November)

245

IN COSTA RICA

Two steps forward, one step back. We’re in Costa Rica, and I am—as always—hating being overweight. Can’t help noticing that I’m the only person around who is at all overweight. I wish I had checked our trip itinerary more carefully. I didn’t realize there were so many times I’d have to get into a bathing suit.

Then again, I didn’t let the bathing suit issue keep me from doing anything I wanted to do. (Forget that in the past I never would have been on a vacation that consisted solely of hiking and water sports.) In the past week I’ve gone hiking, kayaking, snorkeling, sailing, and white-water rafting. And there’s still a week to go.

Forgot how much more forgiving Latin men are of any extra pounds (except if you’re on South Beach in Miami).

I’m finding the attention sort of embarrassing, which Erica is finding amusing. She keeps poking me, saying, “He’s checking you out,” and giggling.

I speak Spanish, but Erica doesn’t. So I can’t talk to anyone for more than a minute without her asking what he’s saying.

So much for a vacation fling.

This page intentionally left blank.

Month 24 (December)

Journalism conference in Boston. The fraud feelings again: I have such a hard time walking up to people I don’t know. Who ever heard of a shy reporter? My gut reaction is still to deal with any discomfort by looking around for the food. Getting a drink and maybe a bit of cheese is something concrete to do.