Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (28 page)

“Of course not! I’m sorry! I just don’t know what’s going on with me. I’m feeling pretty good.”

At last, a confession: I was feeling good. 
That
must be the problem.

“What’s wrong with that?! That’s great!”

I looked to my old friend, the tissue box. I hadn’t cried in this room for months. After all that drama, the novelty of normal eating had begun to wear off. If it wasn’t quite instinct then it had become habit. I applied my new eating skills without much conscious effort, like the novice driver who suddenly finds herself shifting into third without even looking down at the gearshift. Oh, I still stalled out frequently enough, but that was just part of the deal. Cars stall sometimes. You don’t call AAA for such a minor incident. You sit there for a second, trying to figure out what happened, and then you restart the engine.

For instance, earlier that week, I’d been lying in bed at 11 p.m., thinking about Oreos. It was an odd but nagging yen, and so I padded to the kitchen for the box of cookies in the back of the cabinet. I stood at the counter, eating them in the dark, noting how fast I chewed and how much I wanted a third, a fourth, a fifth Oreo. They were tasty, but not
that
tasty. They were as good as stale Oreos can be, so what was going on? Hormones? Stress? What was I missing? Oh, right: Dinner.

I’d come home from work still pretty full from my late lunch and decided to skip the evening meal entirely. Why eat if I wasn’t really hungry? Intuitive! Cut to: four hours later when I intuitively shoved a bunch of cookies in my face. But it wasn’t some crisis of binge-eating backsliding. It was a normal, biological instinct given that I hadn’t eaten since 3 p.m. and set myself up for a late-night blood sugar crash. The lesson was simple: a late lunch doesn’t mean skipping dinner. It means eating a later dinner. This was one of those stall-out moments that made me stop and pay attention. It’s how I learned that intuitive eating wasn’t just about listening to my gut. I still had a brain, and I should listen to that, too. Since I didn’t have to punish myself for eating anymore, I could be curious about why, when, what, and how I ate. Thinking about dinner in terms of nutrition (rather than net carbs) and satisfaction (rather than cheating) meant I could have Oreos when I wanted them, but never wind up in a situation where I
needed
them.

Wow. Did I have my shit together, or what?

“So, am I like…Am I official?”

“An official what?” Theresa asked.

“I mean, am I an intuitive eater? Officially?”

She raised her eyebrows like I was a child suddenly asking to sleep in a big-girl bed.

“What do you think?”

“Come on.”

“I don’t have a certificate, if that’s what you’re asking for.”

That was definitely what I was asking for.

“Look,” she conceded. “I think you know this work takes time, right? Did you expect to be all done in, what, nine months?”

“Not
done
done.”

“You’re in a boring phase right now. Consistency is boring, but it’s a good thing. How much are you thinking about food these days?”

Aside from the occasional Oreo incident, I only really thought about food as long as it took to realize I was hungry and decide what I wanted to eat.

“Not much.”

“Good,” she said. “Right?”

“Right.”

“How would you feel about taking a break from our sessions for a while? Just to see how it goes?”

I froze. Was she dumping me? The Oreo story wasn’t that impressive. I wasn’t done! Fuck this big-girl bed!

“Oh. We could try that.”

Theresa and I picked a date six weeks down the line, and I managed to leave without hugging her.

“Okay, off you go!” She waved as I headed for the elevator. “Have fun with boring consistency!”

Theresa hadn’t stamped me on the forehead and declared me finished. But, after that session, I had to admit to feeling done-ish. The peaks and pits of those early stages had passed, and now the only task was to keep walking on this long, level ground. I knew too that there was no going back. I would never diet again. I’d never even want to. I’d known from the beginning that this would be a lifelong process, but it was strange to see how different I suddenly was from the person I’d been less than a year ago.

That sounded like an ending, of sorts. And what a relief, because I had a story to tell. All along, I’d known it wouldn’t conclude with me striding out onto a stage in a brand-new bikini and highlights, revealing myself shiny and new: the “after” shot.

The whole point was to quit trying to get to that perfect “after” and deal with my food issues in reality instead of on a reality show. Still, a book needs an ending, so I had to find a finale somewhere. And, this moment, with my friends and I moving on with our lives and Theresa taking off my training wheels—it felt just right. Handling change and boring consistency: That’s pretty much adult life, right?

My perfect finish would be even better for its imperfection. No bullshit. No convenient sunsets or last-minute epiphanies where it turns out that what you needed was right in front of you, all along. No neatly tied-up ending, but a nice bow nonetheless. Had I not been so preoccupied with my lovely little analogy, I might have remembered that bows are made to be yanked loose.

I
got the first text about an hour after work. Standing in my kitchen, I chopped cool chunks of mango, waiting for the air-conditioning to cut through eight hours of clingy heat trapped in my airless, top-floor apartment. All week I’d been making big bowls of mango and avocado salsas for dinner, resentful of my stove’s very existence. My phone began to chirp in the living room. It was one of those rapid series of text-message pings that usually signaled an engagement or break-up announcement.

Oh my God, did you hear from Jon?!
It was Chrissy. I wiped my hands on a dishcloth and began to type back. Before I even got the
No
out, Jon’s face popped up on my screen as the phone began to ring. It was a heavily filtered picture of him dancing in my kitchen two years earlier, back when we could hardly fathom the novelty of making your phone photos look like real photos.

“Hi,” I answered, guts in a preemptive knot. “What’s up? Are you okay?”

“Ben just broke up with me.”

“What? When?”

“Just now.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

I looked up at a dusty shelf in my living room and stared at a used-up Anthropologie candle I hadn’t yet bothered to throw out. I didn’t know what to say, and what came out of my mouth sounded something like a 911 operator script:

“Are you alone? Where are you right now?”

“I’m walking down the street. I literally just walked out the door.” He sounded dazed and hoarse.

“What street?”

“Uh, Clinton Street.”

“Okay, are you all right?”

“No, Jesus. No, I’m not.”

I flinched at my own idiocy. Obviously, he wasn’t all right. “Okay, just tell me where you’re going and I’ll meet you there.”

I scooped a few mouthfuls of mango and avocado into my mouth, stuck the bowl in the fridge, and headed out the door.

I’d seen Jon cry a handful of times in the fifteen years we’d known each other. Most of the time it was at the end of some campy tearjerker like
Steel Magnolias
when I’d catch him dabbing quickly at his eyes. But that night at Chrissy’s house, he sat on the sofa wracked with the kind of sobs that bring no catharsis. They didn’t end so much as ebb and then surge out of him again. Soon, Debbie came over, and the three of us sat in uncertain silence around our friend looking at each other and thinking of how useless people are at a time like this. At least, that was what I was thinking.

I went home that night, rattled and angry on Jon’s behalf. Breakups happened, of course, but this was a bad one, and he’d need extra support. Tomorrow I’d ask him over for dinner; I’d make a vegetarian pasta while he sipped wine in my kitchen and gave me the latest updates. Then we’d watch something silly, with no discernible romance (
Showgirls
?
Romy and Michele’s
?), before he’d doze off on my couch. Our friends would close ranks around him, help look for apartments, sit and talk on each other’s couches until he felt better.

I pulled the half-made mango salsa out of the fridge and sat on my bed, ravenous and sleepy. I hadn’t let myself get this hungry in a long time, but hey—life intervenes. I sat in quiet, itching for sound and wanting to shake the night out of my brain. But, no, I would be mindful. I’d get this one thing right. In silence I ate every bite of my chilly dinner and went to sleep, leaving the dishes for later.

Jon didn’t come over the next night. Instead, he asked me to come to his place.

I’m coming from the doctor. Might be 5 mins late
, he texted, as I dashed into the subway, dodging an ominous sprinkle.

The doctor?
I thought.

By the time I got aboveground, the rain had turned biblical. It was the first of a dozen treacherous rainstorms that flooded the city all summer, as if June and July had to one-up winter. I trudged toward the brownstone Jon had lived in for less than a month before the breakup, and waited in the wide, prewar door frame. As miserable as it was, it felt right to be cold and bedraggled in the rain. Jon showed up ten minutes later with a bandage in the crook of his elbow, wet and shaky as a cat.

“Are you all right?” I asked. Again, the answer was obvious.

I’d thought I’d come to help him pack up his boxes and get him drunk while he cried over Ben. But an hour later, the bottle of white wine sat sweating and unopened on the kitchen counter. Jon picked at the bandage on his arm from where they’d drawn his blood sample, and told me the rest of the story. Weeks ago, he’d felt the pain in his groin. He didn’t go to the doctor, because he never went to the doctor. Then the pain got worse.

“Then this happened.” He gestured around his newly broken home. When he’d finally gotten checked out, the mass had gotten even bigger.

“Hey, you don’t know if it’s a ‘mass’ yet,” I cut in.

“Right,” he murmured, still staring at the bandage.

“It’s probably just a cyst. I’m 99 percent sure.” Of course it was. It had to be. “Listen, we’re thirty! This is normal! It’s just wrinkles and cysts from here on out!”

Jon laughed a little, but didn’t meet my eyes.

“Dinner?” I asked. And, he looked up at last.

No
, I realized. It’s not bad breakups that render friends useless. At least then there are bags you can carry and Unfriend buttons you can hit. Cancer makes an idiot of everyone.

It took weeks to get a diagnosis and even longer to find a surgeon. Getting cancer in the movies always seems so formal: The doctor comes in with a file in his hand, smiles, and tells you the plan. But the first thing we learned when Jon got sick is that no one’s got the plan. You can get all the files and smiles you want, but it takes a village to find a specialist.

The period that followed was a whirlwind of text messaging and irresponsible Googling. Jon soon told Debbie and Chrissy, and then we started the group texts: The girls and I kept our anxious worrying to one chain and included the upbeat, informational updates on the chain we shared with Jon. After a few days of cold-calling hospitals, he eventually wound up at Beth Israel Medical Center, officially diagnosed with testicular cancer.

That was the scariest part of that mean, relentless summer: the casual chaos of it all. What if the Affordable Care Act hadn’t passed and he hadn’t been forced to get insurance, finally? What if Google had gotten him the wrong doctor? What if he’d ignored the pain for another week? In just the five days between his diagnosis and surgery, the tumor had grown even larger.

What do you want for dinner?
Harry’s text popped up as I climbed the stairs out of the subway. It was a Tuesday evening in July, and so hot that the idea of cooking sounded like a punishment.

Let’s order
, I replied.
Whatever you feel like.

We’d fallen into a habit of weekly work nights at his apartment. Harry would sit at his computer, plowing through graphics for his latest freelance project, while I sat on the couch behind him tapping sporadically at my laptop. It wasn’t exactly romantic, but neither was the prospect of going out to dinner when all I had to talk about was my friend, his breakup-cancer crisis, and all the work I wasn’t getting done because of my friend and his breakup-cancer crisis. It felt wormy, being so stressed out by someone
else’s
personal disaster, but the fact was I could barely concentrate at the office, forever waiting for the phone to ring and the bad news to get worse. And, when it did, what could I do but get up and go? There are people in your life whose hands are yours to hold, no matter what, and Jon was one of those in mine—even if I had specifically asked him
not
to get cancer this summer.

I stopped into the gourmet grocery downstairs from Harry’s studio for a bottle of seltzer before heading up to our super sexy work date. Hit with a blast of deep-freeze air-conditioning, I spent ten minutes wandering up and down the aisles in delicious procrastination. Suddenly, I had the best idea ever: ice cream. Oh my God, did ice cream sound good. Every inch of my body still tacky with sweat, I beelined for the freezer aisle.

For most of my life, real ice cream had been out of the question. It was for birthdays and cheat days and national emergencies. I’m pretty sure I bought a newspaper on 9/11, but I’m positive that I bought a pint of Häagen-Dazs. Aside from those circumstances, no way. If I wanted cookie dough ice cream, I got low-fat cookie dough frozen yogurt. That was indulgence enough, but real ice cream, without a good reason, was simple hedonism.

But I’d already worked through ice cream in Theresa’s office. It was up there with French fries in terms of Bad foods that I’d wrestled into neutrality. Now it was just something I enjoyed on occasion. Ice-cream-flavored frozen yogurt had fallen into the realm of diet soda; it tasted like a chemical facsimile of something real. Now I understood that a real craving could be satisfied only by the real thing. And this was an extremely real craving.

“Ooh, you got a little work-night treat, huh?” Harry spotted the pint of Coffee Toffee Crunch I’d left to soften on the counter. He passed me a take-out box of cold shrimp summer rolls from the Vietnamese restaurant down the street.

“It’s not a
treat
. I don’t do food treats anymore,” I replied in a fake-smug voice, trying to hide the actual smug.

“Okay,” he said with a shrug.

“God, shut up! I just felt like it. Intuitive ice cream!”

“Got it! Do I get to have some, too?”

“No, I’m going to eat the entire pint.”

He shrugged again. I put down my summer roll. “Did you think I was going to eat the whole thing, like some monster?”

“Nope, just wanted some ice cream. Didn’t mean to call you a monster.”

We finished dinner then worked until almost midnight. Rather, he worked, and I rewrote the same paragraph eight times, then scrolled through Twitter for an hour. Before bed, we took two spoons and dug into the pint of Ben & Jerry’s, trying to think of things to talk about besides cancer.

The day of Jon’s surgery, I slow-cooked a giant pot of ratatouille. True, food can’t solve a crisis, but people still need to eat during one. Making a decent meal is one of the few ways to feel less useless in the face of serious illness.

At five o’clock, I pulled the pot off the stove and went to get dressed. I threw on a short, airy summer dress and took a quick glance in the mirror. It was a basic, blue babydoll frock I’d purchased years ago, cut loose in the middle so I could comfortably wear it during fat and thin-ish times. My gaze paused on the short, cap sleeves pinching slightly into my upper arms. I turned sideways and, holy shit. I looked pregnant. I looked swollen and sweaty and twelve months pregnant.

I yanked the dress over my head and opened the closet again. As ever, the thing was messily jammed with decades of clothing, most of which I never wore. In recent months, I’d branched out and begun wearing more than the same five items, but all of a sudden, nothing looked right. That blouse was too tight around my breasts and that skirt always made my hips look even wider than they already were.

Ten minutes later, half my closet lay heaped on the bed and I still wasn’t dressed. I was, however, late. Giving up, I pulled the old blue dress back on, grabbed the pot of summer stew, and headed out the door, feeling my inner thighs brush lightly against each other with every step.