The Weight-loss Diaries (7 page)

Back to the idyllic family tableau. We spent the afternoon trekking around the museums. I’ve already seen most of the exhibits, but I think it’s more because I didn’t want to be there—and because Diana, as is typical, kept up a constant chatter about all the things she’d like to eat—that I noticed food all day. Kids with their Ziploc bags of Cheerios. Snack kiosks. People eating hot dogs and popcorn. The Air and Space Museum is filled with chocolate coins and other edible souvenirs, and I knew I was going over the edge when even the freeze-dried ice cream looked appealing.

Day 1

25

Everywhere I looked there was enticement to indulge:
You deserve a break
today. Bet you can’t eat just one.
And it’s true—I can’t. Later, when I stopped by the drugstore to buy contact-lens solution, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the snack aisle, examining labels and debating. Hmmm, vanilla Hostess cupcakes are 130 calories apiece. That’s not much more than a banana.

Maybe I could just substitute. It seems so reasonable, so
normal
. That’s just the problem. The desire to overeat—and to binge—creeps up quietly, cun-ningly. One minute I want a vanilla cupcake, and then I can’t choose between vanilla and chocolate, and the cinnamon roll suddenly looks pretty good, too, and then I have to have it all: the cupcakes, the cinnamon roll, and anything else that crosses my line of vision. It’s impossible to go back to the diet from there—I’m a total failure. I can’t even make it through one
day
.

My problem is that I think too much. What I wouldn’t give to be able to cut my head off and throw it across the room.

I looked at the food in the drugstore, a collection of fat grams so large it seemed impossible that all of them could be shoved into things as small and innocent looking as a cupcake I could eat in five bites. In a surge of deci-siveness I didn’t buy any of it.
I will not fail on Day 1
, I thought.
Maybe today
I’ll break my silent vows not to fight with my sister or snap at my parents, but at
least I will get the food right.

Dinner at
another
restaurant, and I was grumpy and hungry by the time we finally agreed on where to go. I had a grilled-veggie platter that was suspi-ciously greasy with what I judged to be two-thirds of a cup of mashed potatoes, an awfully buttery-tasting piece of corn bread, and a small salad with vinaigrette. I know I should have eaten protein (more filling), but this looked like the least damaging option, not to mention the easiest to order without having to make a scene about how it was cooked.

Of course, Diana made a pile of nasty comments (“What kind of crazy diet are you on today?” and—as a hiss—“You know we eat out when Mom and Dad are here. Can’t you just start tomorrow?”). She kept everyone at the table informed about precisely what I was and was not eating. Only a couple more days of these family meals, thankfully. Of course, I’m sure Mom will tell Grandma it looks like I’m on another diet again, which means Grandma will ask me about it, no doubt at the worst possible moment, like on a day I happen to have pigged out. I’ll lie to her or fudge or change the subject, hate myself for failing and being caught at it, and then eat more.

26

The Weight-Loss Diaries

I wish I could disappear for six months and reappear slim. I know my life fat, and I can imagine how it would be slim, but getting from one to the other . . . I close my eyes and can’t picture a thing.

An hour before bed. I spent it calling friends (not on a cordless phone, so I couldn’t end up near the fridge) and reading every peppy motivational magazine article I could find until it was time to go to sleep.

I feel as though I’ve spent the entire day just trying to get through it, literally living from one meal to the next. I hate it. And I can’t help wondering how it’s going to be when I have to go to work tomorrow—how can I write about anything else when my head is filled with food?

The Rest of Week 1

AKA How Many More Hours Until I Can Eat Again?

I fell asleep last night calculating how much weight I could possibly lose—

what size I could possibly be and whether I could pull off something sleeveless—by the time of Brent’s wedding in April. Four weeks in a month times four months—thirty-two pounds if I lose two pounds every single week, which I know from diets past is completely unrealistic. But there is the extra water weight you lose in the beginning, so maybe I could lose, say, twenty-five? Whatever the number, it’s not enough. But even I am not self-destructive enough to get out of bed and eat over that.

Today, Day 2, I was so proud of myself for making it through Day 1 that I practically leaped out of bed to get to the gym, where even a glimpse in the mirror of the lumps of uncooked dough that are my arms didn’t ruin my mood. The high lasted all morning. I smiled at people on my way to work, sang out hello to every last coworker, made myself a to-do list, and happily began attacking it.

Unfortunately, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is hardly known for inspiring record attendance at work. Because my job depends a lot on other people actually returning my calls, I ended up popping out of my office every ten minutes to see who was around to chat. Bad news, because in popping out I discovered that practically every restaurant in town had sent us a holiday gift basket. There were endless gaily wrapped tins of chocolate and nuts—it seemed so natural to grab a few on each trip past the lunch table, which happens to be in the center of the office, right by the printer and impossible to avoid on the way to the bathroom or the supply closet or out the door. But I didn’t.

27

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

28

The Weight-Loss Diaries

It was like something out of a cartoon—I could practically hear the food calling to me. I decided to try to clean my office, but that required multiple trips to the supply closet (translation: past the table). I also tried to drink water, but the water is right by the table, too. I’m always amazed by how small things like that can make me feel like everyone and everything is conspiring against my success, so I was inordinately pleased with myself when I finally went out and bought a giant water bottle to save myself trips past the table to refill my cup. Foiled again, because I still had to contend with trips to the bathroom, which is also past the table.

I was disgusting even myself with how much time I spent thinking about food. I felt like I was just marking time between meals, passing minutes until I could eat again. I was doing things (cleaning a desk drawer, organizing files on my computer), thinking about how long each task would take and how close it might be to lunchtime or snack time when I finished.

If food is a drug—and I’ve certainly used it as such—then these first few days of a diet are withdrawal. Not a process I want to have to repeat, so I hung on until 6:00 p.m. today, Day 2, feeling the siren call from the panet-tone (love, love, love bread) grow slightly fainter as I sailed by it on my way out the door.

Day 3 of the diet, Day 2 of the diet at the office, no doubt Day 1 of something else diet-related if I think about it long enough: the baskets of chocolates and nuts and other “edible press releases,” as we call them, continued to arrive. But I didn’t have any. Of course, I want some kind of award for that.

It’s like when I save the company money by, say, taking the Metro instead of a cab and think:
Can that be added to my salary, please?
Here I think:
Can those
extra calories somehow be credited directly to my account, so that I lose pounds
just for not having consumed them?

On top of all the tins of easily grabbable things, there was an office farewell party, which meant trays of cookies. I was hungry—the party was at 4:00 p.m., my snack time—but felt too silly to pull out my cottage cheese in the middle of the festivities. I tried ducking back into my office, but I couldn’t—I got stopped in conversation, and the whole time I kept looking for a way to escape to go eat my cottage cheese. (I don’t really like cottage cheese, but Peeke says cottage cheese, so cottage cheese it is.) I know I can’t take so much as one bite of a cookie. Even though they’re never that great, I know I’ll still want to finish.

When I was a child, one of my favorite books starred a strong-willed little girl named Ramona Quimby, whose older sister, Beezus, one day found

The Rest of Week 1

29

her in the basement surrounded by apples, each with a single bite missing.

When Beezus demanded to know what was going on, Ramona replied innocently, “The first bite always tastes the best.”

I was about six years old when I read that for the first time. I remember being struck by it and trying for the next few meals to notice how the first bite of whatever I was eating tasted. It did taste good, but to me, so did the second bite and the third bite and beyond. Even if confronted with a whole pile of apples, I wondered if I’d be able to casually toss as much of each apple aside as Ramona had. Even at age six, I doubted it.

I hate feeling caged, which is how I felt today—raging internally about a situation I felt I couldn’t escape and becoming as cranky as a tired child because I couldn’t get what I needed. Or really, because I couldn’t make myself ask for it.

Today I decided to go along with Diana and her friend Jill to IKEA—

which is in a mall I can’t otherwise get to easily because it requires a car, which I don’t have. I’m not stupid enough to go to a mall with my sister—

who always points out foods I love and says things like, “Wouldn’t an Auntie Anne’s pretzel be good right about now?”—without ammunition. So I’ve brought a container of yogurt and deliberately dug out a larger handbag to hide it—I’m not supposed to go more than three hours without eating, Peeke says, because that’s how I get too hungry and then overeat. I also brought a plastic spoon, because—as ludicrous as it sounds—I was pretty sure I’d be ducking into the bathroom to eat. I don’t like conflict, particularly with my sister, and I knew she’d say something diet-related that’s snide if I whipped out the yogurt in front of her. Some days it makes me laugh that I’m supposed to be the writer in the family, because Diana definitely has a way with words—a way to make them hurt more than anybody I know.

Instead of going to the bathroom, I ended up claiming I was going off to look at lamps. The little white lie set off a spin cycle in my head: lying is what I’m used to doing when I want to sneak off and buy French fries at the food court—not when I want to eat a 100-calorie nonfat yogurt. I ate my yogurt in about four big gulps, feeling as if there was a giant spotlight on me even as I tried to look inconspicuous.

Next problem: I should have guessed that Diana and Jill wouldn’t be ready to eat dinner anywhere near the time I’d want to. On this diet I’m inexplicably hungry about an hour after my afternoon snack, though I try to delay eating dinner for as long as I possibly can—after all, once dinner’s over, I’m not supposed to eat the rest of the night. When I eat at 5:00 or 6:00, I panic

30

The Weight-Loss Diaries

that I won’t make it through until breakfast, and even though I know eating a piece of fruit won’t make the difference between my losing and gaining in a given week, my mind still sticks to just one formula: extra calories equals failure. And I’m pretty sure that if I give in and eat something extra, I’m not going to stop with just a piece of fruit.

By 6:30 p.m., I was becoming antsy. I was counting down the minutes until we’d leave. It didn’t help that I had zero interest in eighty-five-dollar bathroom storage units, which Diana and Jill were debating with a graveness I don’t think I’ll even have if and when I buy a house. Bored, I had nothing to do but think about the fact that I was hungry—something I will never say aloud unless someone else does first—and wonder what sort of argument would ensue about where we’d eat.

At 8:30, we ended up at a Chinese buffet restaurant at Diana’s insistence.

It’s an understatement to say I have a bad relationship with buffets. I tend to spend the entire time looking at other people’s plates, trying to guess what an appropriate portion is and how much food I can take without attracting attention.

I spotted a menu and decided to skip the buffet altogether. There was no way I could handle endless trays of food when I was that hungry. The plates coming back from the buffet didn’t bother me as much as I would have thought, though I did wish Diana and Jill would stop being so polite and telling me to help myself from their plates.

Jill offered once. Diana kept offering. You don’t start fights with your sister in front of friends, so when Jill went to the bathroom, I told Diana to please stop.

“It’s rude not to offer,” she told me in a tone that teetered on patroniz-ing. For some reason, Diana has always taken it upon herself to lecture me on manners. In high school she used to snap at me if I didn’t immediately say,

“Bless you,” when she sneezed.

“I think it’s rude to offer when someone’s already told you they’re not eating that,” I said.

She muttered something I couldn’t hear. When she returned from her next trip to the buffet, she offered me a fried dough ball dipped in sugar.

The rest of Week 1 veered crazily between I-can-do-this (cue
Rocky
theme) and this-totally-sucks (no soundtrack, just intense desire for food). Call me a teensy bit impatient, but there were moments when I thought it was taking forever for anything to happen. I spent a lot of the week hating being fat, hat-

The Rest of Week 1

31

ing worrying about everything I put in my mouth. I hated that I couldn’t even go out with friends and have a drink without figuring out what has the fewest calories, or else ordering Diet Cokes. My friends aren’t alcoholics, but give them a couple of drinks apiece and the dynamics
do
change—and being the only totally sober person in a roomful of drunk people is not fun.

At other moments—such as after I passed up some food I’d normally eat or after I finished a workout—I could practically feel my jeans getting a tiny bit looser. Of course it was my imagination—if you really could lose weight that fast, would so many people have trouble sticking to diets? But at least for a few minutes, I could convince myself that just
feeling
thinner was enough, that pretty soon it would be real.