The Weight-loss Diaries (6 page)

a weight loss that I know perfectly well can’t happen every week—I still will be lucky to be a size 14 in time. Which seems like such unbearably plodding progress. . . .

One of the many pickles of dieting—excuse me, changing one’s eating habits—is that you want to be thin the minute you start. Heck, you feel like with this amount of denial and deprivation, you
deserve
to be thin. But you catch sight of yourself in the bathroom mirror at some point during the day and you make a face. Even though you haven’t eaten—let’s make a list here—

the extra piece of cheese at breakfast, the rest of the rice at lunch, the half a cookie left in the office kitchen, you’re still fat. And it all just seems like more effort than you can stand—how much easier it would be to go back to what you know, which is food. And then you think: if you can barely make it through this one day, how are you going to make it through the days and days that stretch ahead? It seems hopeless, so you might as well just eat.

A perceptive friend once ventured that I had a fear of success with dieting, and I can’t help wondering if she was right. Yes, it’s just food, but it’s so much a part of the way I live my life. It’s a bit like trying to change in an open dressing room—you’ve got your own clothes half off and you’re desperately trying to yank on whatever it is you’re trying on so you’re not standing there naked. Without food to reach for automatically, I feel, if not defenseless, then definitely vulnerable and unsure of what to do with myself.

It’s scary to think that I’ll probably never put anything in my mouth again without thinking about it and mentally calculating how many fat grams and calories are in it and whether I can have any more. It sounds so ridiculous, but what will fill my brain? I feel as if I’m about to end a long-term relationship and am desperately looking for things to do on a Saturday night.

What will replace the Kozy Shack rice pudding and two plastic spoons during rambling conversations with Kara about men? I know the pizza place my friends hit at 4:00 a.m. after a late night most definitely does not serve salad.

And let’s not forget all the calories in the liquor that has us out until all hours in the first place—does this mean I’m going to have to stay in, at least in the beginning, until I get more used to things? I so resent the idea of food keep-

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

ing me home on a Saturday night—it seems so unfair. Hasn’t food already done enough damage?

We—Mom, Dad, Diana, and I—passed the whole morning sitting around

my sister’s apartment, which happens to be in the same building as mine but on a different floor. Dad was being incredibly high maintenance in his effort to be low maintenance, and Mom was keeping quiet—her standard (but usually unsuccessful) attempt to avoid an argument with him. Dad said he’d do whatever Diana and I wanted, but the minute we suggested something, out came the qualifiers. Essentially, he wanted to do whatever is the coolest thing in D.C., but he didn’t want to have to wait on line for it. Sure, Dad.

By 11:30, I was getting antsy. I had eaten breakfast at 9:30 (tried to sleep in so more of Day 1 would disappear, but no such luck). If we first decided what to do at 11:30, by the time we all got moving and actually got there, I knew we wouldn’t end up eating lunch for hours. Which normally would be OK—I’d just grab a snack. But I didn’t want to end up eating an extra snack today. I wanted Day 1 to be perfect.

Dad likes to go only to restaurants he hasn’t been to before, and ones that serve “interesting” food. (Chinese, Mexican, and other American-ethnic sta-ples don’t qualify.) So it wasn’t totally self-serving when I pointed out that once we were in the vicinity of all the museums, there wasn’t going to be anything but food carts and Starbucks.

“Didn’t you want to try Teaism?” I asked. It’s a Dupont Circle teahouse that serves Indian and Japanese food. I conveniently forgot that it also serves salty oat cookies, which are so good (and portable) that former Washingtonians often ask you to bring them some when you visit.

Diana glared at me. She’s got a sixth sense for all things diet-related, and she wasn’t pleased.

“Can’t we just go and eat lunch later?” she asked.

I knew then that if the argument/discussion went anything like the zillions that had come before it, Dad would say he was stuffed from breakfast, even though he hadn’t eaten any, and Mom would say we had to “get a bite to eat.” Dad would protest and Mom would insist that “the kids”—that’s Diana and I, though we’re twenty-three years old—had to eat, though really it was
she
who wanted to eat. Deadlock would ensue, and eventually we’d go eat, quite possibly because everyone would be forced to behave in a public place. Or maybe it’s because food seems to have the same effect on all of us

Day 1

21

that free chocolate-chip cookies at the grocery store have on toddlers—it makes the whole ordeal that much more bearable.

Anyway, that’s indeed what happened: we headed out for food. And to think I wonder how I got so fat in the first place.

Another problem with starting a diet: facing the idea that maybe weight isn’t the problem I think it is. I know that sounds contrary to everything I’ve said so far, but consider that everyone seems to think being thin is the answer to all my problems.

I wonder if it’s easy to focus on losing weight as the cure-all because it seems like such an obvious problem with a relatively straightforward (though not easy) solution. It’s like women constantly changing their hairstyle because it’s something they can actually have some control over, unlike height or complexion. There’s so much that I blame on weight—I don’t know that I want to find out that something much harder to fix (my personality,
me
) is really the problem.

As a child I associated happiness exclusively with going out to eat. Inside our house, resentment rippled beneath the surface, occasionally breaking through. To me it all seemed to stem from my parents’ marrying the idea of what the other was supposed to become, instead of who they were at the time.

“I thought you were going to be in private practice,” my mother—who had worked to help put my father through medical school—would occasionally mutter.

“I thought
you
were going to work after the kids were born,” my father would say. It was his answer—sometimes said aloud, sometimes not—to everything. Why he worked the long hours he did (a constant source of tension). Why he chose to spend Saturday night puttering around the garage instead of spending time with my mother. (He worked hard all week, and he was going to do what he wanted.) Why he wouldn’t let her call someone to fix the dishwasher. (He could do it himself, when he had time, so it irked him to pay someone to do a job he was sure wouldn’t be done to his exacting standards.)

My sister and I never had to cringe at the sight of our parents holding hands or kissing—I don’t remember ever seeing it happen. Anger—yelling—

seemed the only legitimate emotion. Crying was not tolerated well—the stock responses were: “Be a big girl,” or “I’ll give you something to cry about,”

or just plain, “Don’t cry.” Boredom also wasn’t accepted: “Mom, I’m bored”

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

was met with “I’ll give you something to do,” or “Go play with your sister.

You girls have built-in playmates.”

If we had anything to celebrate—birthdays, awards—we celebrated by going out to dinner. I remember that even the prospect of going out could make a whole day seem brighter. The actual dinners were rarely the shim-mering moments I envisioned, but I loved the anticipation of them the way I’d later love starting diets. There was the prospect of perfection, of food mellowing us the way alcohol mellowed others, creating what felt like connection among the four of us. There was the prospect of being—if only until the entrées were cleared—the way I imagined other people’s families were. And of course, there was the prospect of something else we rarely had at home because none of us “needed it” (my parents’ words): dessert.

For the record, for lunch on Day 1 I had a grilled-chicken kebab with the best estimate I could make of a half a cup of rice. I also had a quarter of a salty oat cookie—Diana had insisted Mom and Dad try one and, of course, con-tinually called attention to the fact that I hadn’t had so much as a bite. So finally I did. The guilt was overwhelming. When the cookies were gone, all I could think about was how to get another one. I had eaten only one-quarter of one measly cookie, but in my mind I had already screwed up. Big time.

I was a crumb away from ditching the diet, eating whatever I wanted in the afternoon, and then going ahead and eating dinner as if it were the Last Supper because, hey, I’ll just start tomorrow. But I didn’t, partly because I couldn’t figure out how I was going to sneak away to buy another cookie. But mostly, I didn’t quit because I’m tired of all the years of false starts. Yes, it’s a long road to looking the way I want, but it’s not going to get any shorter until I get moving.

I’ve read so many articles and books about diets over the years that there’s a twenty-car pileup of words in my head. I feel as if I could justify any food as being on some diet somewhere. You know, start out the day with eggs and bacon—an Atkins diet day. Then at lunch decide I want pasta and rationalize that I’ve switched to a low-fat diet (and just happened to have used up my day’s allotted fat grams at breakfast). Chocolate in the afternoon? Well, isn’t it total number of calories in a day that matters, so I’ll just subtract this Twix bar from the total. And so on. To top it off, the two experts
Shape
sent me to consult with have dueling eating plans, which means I’m constantly second-guessing myself. Should I be trying the other plan? Would the other one work better—or faster?

Day 1

23

The two couldn’t be more opposite in terms of what and how much I’m eating. Dr. Peeke doesn’t have me counting calories—she’s given me what amounts to a modified Atkins diet—high protein and controlled carbs (none at dinner and no refined carbs—like white rice or white bread—at all). From her, I have a template that calls for me to eat essentially the same thing every day.

Breakfast: oatmeal or cereal with milk or egg-white omelet with vegetables, plus fruit. Midmorning snack: fruit (but not if you’re eating lunch exactly three hours after breakfast, in which case skip the snack).

Lunch: high-fiber bread with lots of green things and 3 ounces of turkey, chicken, or fish or two Boca Burgers, plus fruit. Snack: soup with six to ten low-fat crackers or nonfat yogurt with Grape-Nuts or cottage cheese and vegetables. I’m allowed to eat as many vegetables as I want—woo-hoo, go crazy!

Dinner: giant salad with about six low-fat croutons (yes, she really did say

“about six”) with diet dressing or balsamic vinegar and a tablespoon of olive oil, plus vegetables—I can eat a whole package of frozen ones if I want—plus, again, 3 ounces of chicken, turkey, or fish or two more Boca Burgers or an egg-white omelet with lots of veggies.

I’m supposed to have eaten the bulk of my calories by 5:00 p.m. so I’m not overloading my body with calories right when my metabolism is slowing down for the night. And I’m supposed to avoid pasta and bread at dinner, since I don’t need the kind of energy that carbs provide as I’m getting ready to go to bed. Hoping for some slight relaxing of the rules, I tried to protest that I don’t go to bed before at least midnight, but bed at 10:00, bed at midnight—they’re the same, Peeke says. Unless I’m running marathons after dinner.

Peeke says that obviously I’m not going to eat like this every day for the rest of my life but that this is a start for someone like me who’s on the run and doesn’t love to cook. Things will get added and changed in a couple of months, she promises.

Nancy Clark is a sports nutritionist, which means the first thing I told her is that I’m about as athletic as an anemic slug. She laughed and said not to worry, that she considers activity level when creating eating plans and that just breathing for the day entitles me to a couple of thousand calories. She says that while Peeke’s plan sounded fine, she’s worried I may be cutting back too far, since Peeke’s plan works out to about 1,600 calories per day and she thinks I need to be eating something like 2,300 a day. Nancy’s breakdown:

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The Weight-Loss Diaries

roughly 600 calories for breakfast, 600 for lunch, 500 for a snack, and 600

for dinner.

Nancy’s plan is more Weight Watchers style, where supposedly nothing is off-limits. For example, she says I can eat a bagel with peanut butter, whereas Peeke says I can’t have any bagels at all, that I “don’t know how to eat them.” Translation: I don’t know how to incorporate them into my diet—

to eat a proper size bagel (which is
not
the kind of size they sell at bagel shops) and not load it up with all sorts of high-fat accoutrements. And I don’t know how to—here’s Peekespeak for you—“taste and savor, not gulp and consume.”

The two plans are appealing to me for different reasons. I like Peeke’s because of the sheer lack of choice—I don’t have to think about food, which is good, because once I get started on that route, I can’t stop. But I also look at Peeke’s and think:
How can I possibly eat this every day?
Nancy’s I like because it sounds so damn reasonable. Five hundred calories for a snack is
a
lot
of food: it’s a couple of candy bars. Or
two
Lean Cuisines, which would be more than I eat for dinner when I’ve been on one of my starvation diets.

But the addict in me thinks:
How could I possibly lose any weight eating this
much?
It will take
forever
for me to lose weight this way, and I know from experience that if I don’t see results soon, I won’t be motivated to keep going.

After all, sometimes feeling better is not enough of an incentive. Carrots do not taste better than chocolate, and sometimes carrots just won’t do.

So I decided to follow Peeke’s plan. But I’m following Nancy’s for the couple of days my parents are here, just because Peeke’s doesn’t seem restaurant-friendly. In fact, Peeke—not Nancy the sports nutritionist, which I would have expected—is so firmly in the food-as-fuel camp (in other words, taste shouldn’t matter) that she’d probably tell me to eat
before
we got to the restaurant, or to bring my own food and insist on eating it there, something I can imagine only some high-maintenance celebrity doing.