Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (31 page)

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m buying you two sessions with my trainer,” she said, and she wrote down his name and phone number as well.

That’s how I met Aaron. And that’s when I really turned the corner, accepting that if I wanted to do more than merely whittle at the edges of my excesses, I had to put real energy into the effort. I had to be methodical about it, and it had to hurt.

For the first fifteen minutes of my first fifty-five-minute session with Aaron, we only talked.

“What do you want to get out of this?” he asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “I need to lose weight.”

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “We can only do so much in fifty-five minutes. They’re going to be an intense fifty-five minutes. But before or after—you choose—you owe me thirty minutes on one of those StairMasters.”

He pointed to two machines right inside the door of his exercise studio. “You can come early to use them,” he said. “You can stay late. But you’ve got to give me those thirty minutes. And on the days when you don’t come in here, you’ve got to be doing cardio on your own. StairMaster, running, I don’t care. Not biking—I don’t want you sitting when you’re exercising. Not walking—I want your heart rate up. No easy stuff.”

He told me that if I was going to use him and stick with him, he wanted to see me twice a week. And he told me to be prepared for several months of twice-a-week sessions, plus good behavior in between them, if I wanted serious results.

I used the two sessions Maureen had bought for me. I bought myself ten more, and then another ten after that. They were seventy dollars a pop, an expense that definitely added up, but the payment I’d received for my book meant that I had extra money, and I couldn’t think of any better way to spend it.

Aaron’s exercise studio spread out over several floors of a yellow brick town house in the Adams Morgan section of D.C. It wasn’t a conventional gym: you had to be working with Aaron or with one of about a half dozen other private trainers in his employ to use it, and during any given hour no more than four clients and four trainers would be present. Sometimes there’d be only two trainers and clients. That created a sense of privacy that helped me. I had often talked myself out of visiting a gym in Georgetown that I’d joined a year and a half earlier by deciding that I had to lose some weight before I went, lest I be embarrassed in the midst of so many less flabby exercisers. At Aaron’s studio I could jiggle in something closer to solitude.

Aaron had a barrel chest, a tiny waist and not an ounce of fat on him. Although he was twenty-nine, he had an oversize mane of overlong, overfluffy hair that sometimes made him seem five to ten years younger and that belonged in a 1970s time capsule. I jokingly told him that he looked like the lost Cassidy brother, an amalgam of Shawn and David, ready for a seat in the front of the Partridge Family bus. He told me to shut up and do another bench press.

During our fifty-five-minute sessions, he never let me rest. We rushed without pause from one Cybex or Body Masters weight machine to another or we used free weights or he plunked me down on a section of padded floor.

“Here!” he bellowed as he raced ahead of me to our next location, our next station, our next grueling exercise. Then it was on to the next: “Here!” I felt alternately like a cowed spaniel in obedience school or like a misshapen, misbegotten recruit in basic training, the John Candy character in
Stripes
. For his part Aaron was a combination of drill sergeant and garden-variety sadist: the Marquis de Sweat.

We did crunches, about twice as many as I ever would have gotten through on my own. We did squats, but with a heavy bar of as many as sixty pounds balanced on my shoulders. We did curls, and we did them until my arms quivered like the strings of a clunky cello. If I stopped before Aaron thought I humanly had to, he kept me pressed in place and made me resume.

I would pout and sneer and wail and sometimes even scream at him. It was part of this whole comedy routine we developed, a way of making the torture go down easier and the minutes go by faster.

“I’m getting dizzy!” I’d shriek.

“Good,” he’d say.

“I’m going to pass out!” I’d warn.

“I’ll make sure you don’t hit your head on anything too hard.”

“I’m going to throw up!”

“Great. It’ll mean you’re really working.”

“I’m going to throw up on
you
!”

“Not if you know what’s good for you.”

The other trainers tended to move their clients to a floor of the town house that Aaron and I weren’t using. They found us too disruptive, and a few of their clients were put off by my tendency to shout out curse words to cope with my fatigue and pain.

I frequently told Aaron my body wouldn’t twist in the manner he was prescribing. He’d twist it for me as I sputtered, “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”

I’d seek his congratulations for a set of exercises well done. He’d counter that it was proof of what a superior trainer he was.

“A modest one, too,” I’d say.

“Save your words for writing,” he’d snap.

One day he didn’t have a trainee after me and, as I climbed onto one of the StairMasters, he left the gym to go to the post office.

“Thirty minutes,” he reminded me. “You owe me thirty minutes.”

After ten minutes I was exhausted, and I climbed down. What were the chances he’d return in the next twenty?

By the time I arrived home, there was a message on my voice mail.

“Quitter!” Aaron was shouting. “Wimp!”

If I showed up for one of my twice-weekly sessions looking no slimmer than I had at the last one, he said so, asked me what I’d eaten the day before, told me it had been too much and suggested I give him thirty-five minutes on the StairMaster instead of thirty.

If I tried to hold on to the StairMaster’s rails while I pumped my legs up and down, he raced over and swatted my arms back to my sides. Then, as punishment, he increased the tension on the machine by another level. And glared at me, for good measure.

I despised him and adored him and knew either way he was my best hope. Not just because of the paces he put me through when I was with him but because of the extra conscience he provided for me, the mirror I couldn’t hurry past. He was my yardstick, my checkup, my one-man Weight Watchers. With Aaron I couldn’t lie or stall or drape myself in something baggy. He saw me twice every week, and he saw me in a T-shirt and shorts. He could tell whether I was behaving, and he was never shy about telling me what he saw.

And I behaved, partly because the rhythm of my twice-weekly appointments with him allowed me to stop thinking in such big, daunting, long-range terms, and to start thinking in increments. The goal was simply to be good for another three days, until the next session. The goal was to shut him up.

But I also behaved because I finally had the ability to keep to a schedule and no longer had excuses not to. Working for the magazine meant that my deadlines came along only every few weeks and I had flexibility in planning interviews and establishing the structure of my days. I could decide to take three five-mile runs in a given week and, if I found the energy and will for them, also find the time.

I was lucky in another way, too: my many years of competitive swimming had taught me what serious exercise was, giving me a sort of body memory of it. I knew how to work out, or rather knew that working out wasn’t fifteen minutes of moderate walking on an inclined treadmill while reading the latest issue of the
Economist.

I also knew that I had to try to find some joy and reward in the exercise itself. As my running routes along the Potomac grew longer, I made certain that they were the prettiest ones I could trace, with water views, bridges and grass-lined paths.

The more weight I felt myself losing, the more determined I was to keep losing it. The adage was true: nothing succeeds like success. And I was exhilarated by my success. I was addicted to it.

I still ate a lot. Although I didn’t count calories closely, I had many days when I consumed more than three thousand and possibly as many as four thousand. It seemed to me that by not trying to push the calorie count too low and by trusting that this sustained and sometimes furious exercise would pay off, I avoided those anxious binges, the ones that sprung so readily from the valley of low blood sugar and profound hunger, and I avoided sleep-eating and the compulsive counting of the days until whatever diet I was on was done. I wasn’t so focused on an end point, and thus wasn’t consumed with the idea that everything leading up to it was an act of barely endurable asceticism.

On some nights I’d nonetheless be tempted to stage one of my all-out feasts, but I’d think about my upcoming visit to Aaron or the next run I was going to take and about how mad I’d be for not feeling any lighter and for having wasted the last training session or most recent run. I’d been stuck for too long, and this liberation from that feeling was infinitely more rewarding than anything I could eat.

Every two weeks or so I made a point of going out and buying some new article of clothing I wouldn’t have been able to fit into on my previous shopping trip, and I also made a point of rummaging through my closets and throwing out something that had become too loose. I set it up so that if I gained weight again, I didn’t have old clothing to return to and would instead have to go out and buy replacements for it, spending money I didn’t want to. That became another threat that helped to keep me in line.

I began to experience familiar routines in unfamiliar ways. There was a diner of sorts around the corner from where I lived; I had often gone there in the late morning to get a toasted bagel with a fried egg, a sausage patty and cheese on it. I still did this, because I needed fuel before or after a run or a session with Aaron. But in the past I’d thrown on a pair of loose sweatpants and my hooded sweatshirt and even a baseball cap to walk to the diner, and while waiting for my breakfast sandwich, I had tried not to make eye contact with the server, and I’d willed the people around me not to notice me, a man too heavy to be eating this way. Now I found myself entering the diner without a cap, in the T-shirt and shorts in which I was about to exercise or in which I had just exercised. And I occasionally struck up a conversation with the server.

With a cousin, Mark
(second from right)
and Lisa
as I work my way back to fitness.

Two months after I’d started with Aaron I was even able to fit—snugly—into some size 36s that didn’t come from Brooks Brothers.

It had taken years for me to get as big as I’d gotten; it took much less time to get smaller again. Maybe that was another bit of luck, or maybe a testament to how fiercely I wanted this.

 

 

 

 

On so many fronts I was calmer and more content, and that included work. I preferred my magazine job to my previous jobs in Congress, on the campaign trail and at the White House. Not only were the hours saner, but I liked being able to dwell on a topic and to take the time to fret over the structure of each piece, even each paragraph.

I landed the first long interview that Gary Condit, the Congressman then under suspicion in the disappearance of a female intern, gave after a disastrous TV interrogation by Connie Chung. And I got an unusually generous amount of time—hours and hours—with Hillary Clinton, who was early in her first term as a New York senator. The editors at the magazine had the clever idea of a joint profile of her and of Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from the state; it was smart because each senator had to worry that the other would try to hog my attention, so neither could be stingy with the access I was allowed.

At one point I had dinner with both of them, and Schumer, trying to get over a cold, ordered tea. Clinton asked me what I was going to drink. I sensed that she was looking for permission, and I said I might like some wine. She instantly echoed that, her smile widening, and went on to drink two glasses. Up close, she was a good deal less stiff than she had ever seemed from a distance.

About six months into the job, as my editors and I pondered who else in Washington to profile, I was presented with a much different opportunity. The position of Rome correspondent for the
Times
had suddenly become open, and the newspaper needed to fill it with someone who didn’t have a web of personal commitments and could relocate right away. I qualified. On top of that I had some exposure to Italian culture, had studied Italian for a few years in college and—because of the book on priest abusers—had some knowledge of the workings of the Catholic Church. The newspaper’s foreign editor asked me if I might be interested in the position.

Absolutely. It was a chance not only to live and work abroad, but to do it in Italy, which wasn’t exactly a hardship. It was a position with clout but without huge responsibility: the most serious European news was covered out of Paris, London and Berlin, the capitals of countries that mattered more to the United States, both economically and diplomatically. The newspaper’s Rome correspondent typically spent more time on colorful features than on straightforward news stories. That suited me.