Half-Assed (10 page)

Two weeks after I changed my eating habits and actually developed some exercise habits, I was no longer tired in the afternoons. I didn’t find myself dropping quarters in the vending machine for a three o’clock sugar fix. My menstrual cramps were significantly less painful. My hair was less oily. I was less moody, and I stopped snapping at my family. I fell asleep quickly and slept the night through.

I was also kind of horny.
¹
Fat cells don’t just sit around being fat; they also raise the level of a hormone called SHBG (sex hormone-binding globulin), which binds to testosterone and diminishes sex drive. By losing weight I was freeing up testosterone, which stimulated my libido.

All it took for me to feel better was to eat better and walk a little. For years I’d been a hypochondriac, wondering if every headache were a symptom of brain cancer. I’d enjoyed the temporary pleasure of ice cream and candies at the expense of feeling good all the time.

All this healthy living was starting to make me feel alive. I’d never even realized I felt half dead.

CHAPTER 6

Stumbling Blocks

T
here were a dozen yellow and red roses on my desk. There was no card, but I knew they were from my mom. They appeared in the middle of March after I’d lost forty pounds in two months to weigh 330 pounds. The flowers were a much better show of support than the Hershey’s Kisses she’d given me on Valentine’s Day. I didn’t eat roses.

By the beginning of April, I was down another ten pounds. Bizarrely, I even lost seven pounds the week I ate too many Cadbury Creme eggs for Easter. I’d now lost the equivalent of the two tubs of kitty litter that I always struggled to carry inside from the car. I just had to repeat that loss three more times, but it wasn’t going to happen on the same brisk schedule. For the next several months my rate of loss stabilized to about ten pounds a month. The rational part of my mind that worried about loose skin was glad that the rapid rate was decreasing, but the pleasureseeking part of my brain was going to miss those thrilling months in which I lost five or six pounds a week. I’d been waiting my whole life to be thin. I didn’t want to wait any longer.

Four months was the longest I’d ever been able to sustain a period of weight loss. My good mojo was partly my own doing and partly luck.
I was more educated than I’d ever been before. (I could name four types of fats, three macronutrients, and two types of cholesterol.) My plan focused on foods I could eat, which was a more positive approach than focusing only on foods I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t tempted by sour cream and onion potato chips because my family kept them out of the house or at least hidden under their beds. There were no stressful events to send me running to the frozen desserts section of the grocery store. My treadmill was still working, and we had a service plan this time in case it did break. I also knew that it would take more than a year to get to goal, so I was settling in for a long ride. There was no shortcut.

I was pretty sure my clothes were getting looser. All my pants had elastic waistbands, so I wasn’t sure. My brother and mother claimed my face looked more slender, but they knew I’d been trying to become thinner. My boss and coworkers hadn’t said a thing.

There was a box at the bottom of my closet marked SKINNY CLOTHES, which was full of garments that most people would have labeled FAT CLOTHES. My younger brother’s girlfriend had seen the box one day and commented, “Huh, I have a box like that too.” She wasn’t even fat. Maybe every girl, fat or thin, has a box of skinny clothes in the closet, a box of hope waiting to be opened before its contents have gone out of style.

I pulled on a couple of the shirts. They fit. I pulled on a pair of pants and was able to walk around in them, but I’d have to wait another ten pounds if I wanted to sit down and breathe at the same time. I’d never cared much about clothes and had been perplexed by my friends who read lots of fashion magazines, but when I looked in the mirror, I felt so sexy and cool, at least in relation to how unsexy and uncool I’d felt just three months earlier. There might be something to this whole fashion thing after all.

Then I gained weight.

It was only two pounds, but it was the first time the numbers had gone up since I’d started monitoring my weight. My first instinct was to blame it on my menstrual cycle. I always lost less weight the week of my period. Then I’d lose several pounds the week afterward. My body was retaining water, so even though I hadn’t gained fat I had gained weight. The scale was too stupid to notice this. I felt bad for all the women who competed on
The Biggest Loser
show, since they were obviously at a disadvantage compared to the men thanks to this fluke of the menstrual cycle.

My girly hormones might also explain why I’d felt the need to eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from the vending machine that week. I hadn’t been walking as much lately, either. I wasn’t being completely lazy; I’d just had two colds in three weeks, and I already wheezed enough when I exercised. If I tried breathing through a layer of phlegm, I might suffocate. I spent evenings on the couch instead, worrying and fretting that a microscopic virus might mark the end of my successful loss and herald the beginning of a long gain. Small slides were how bad habits started. A few days off could become a few weeks, and then a few months, until I was left wondering where it all went wrong. I needed to get back into the routine before the path I’d worn down was overgrown with weeds.

Of course, the cold might make me lose weight. The chicken broth diet was probably slimming.

I was also starting to get bored. Bored with my food. Bored with walking. Weight loss was a repetitive task. Eat right, exercise, sleep, repeat. Forever. I opened up my cookbooks again and looked for new recipes that wouldn’t require me to buy something weird like muskrat root. I had to keep answering the same question every night, “What are you having for dinner?” I was sick of it. Why couldn’t other people answer the question for me? And then do all the cooking? And while they were at
it, could they lose all this weight for me too? My family had erratic work hours and could not be counted on to cook dinner regularly, so I was responsible for all of my own meals. The year before I would have just gone to McDonald’s or Taco Bell if I didn’t want to prepare something. Now that wasn’t an option. Instead, I was leaving plates of leftover food in the microwave for my shocked yet grateful mother.

I noticed I wasn’t sweating during my walk as much as I used to, so I kicked up the treadmill speed by a couple of tenths of a mile and increased the incline. I didn’t enjoy hauling my huge ass up the slight hill, but I did it anyway.

I was doing a lot of things I didn’t particularly want to do. I suppose that might be the definition of discipline. I had to override my desire to do what I wanted in the short term to get what I wanted in the long term. I couldn’t support the fast-food industry and expect to get a slender body. Living healthy took so much time and effort. I’d barely worked on my other personal projects since I’d started. My bag of crochet work looked so lonely leaning against the bookcase, but I doubted needle arts burned many calories.

There was a battle raging between two parts of myself, Current Me and Future Me. Current Me was gung-ho about losing weight, eating healthy, and eschewing the elevator in favor of the stairs. Future Me would think about how close the convenience store was and how easy it would be to buy a bag of Reese’s Pieces without anyone’s knowing. I hated that bitch. Those two girls were locked in an endless boxing match with an infinite set of rounds.

Then one day Future Me bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

I had made a few small transgressions from my eating plan out of ignorance. I’d bought a salad at a fast-food place and later looked up the nutritional information online, only to discover the dressing had more fat than I did. The server went rather heavy on the bacon bits too, as if he
were flinging pork confetti at a parade. If we were playing the blame game, I didn’t deserve a penalty for that. I did deserve a foul for the ice cream.

I collapsed on the couch after work, sick of writing code and sick of the headache that Excedrin had not cured. I was out of Lean Cuisines and yogurt and diet sodas, and I knew I had to go to the grocery store if I wanted to eat lunch tomorrow. I looked at my reflection in the TV set, trying to talk my likeness into going to the store for me. She just sat on the couch and stared back at me.

There was
one
good reason to go to the store. That’s where they kept the ice cream. I suddenly wanted to get off the couch. I returned with lots of healthy food and one pint of ice cream. A half hour later only the healthy food was left.

I felt so much better. I hadn’t had any ice cream since December. Strangely, I didn’t even feel all that bad about eating it. I hadn’t purposely strayed from my diet since I’d started. It felt good to break the perfect spree. In high school I’d gotten all As for three years. By senior year I wasn’t just scared of bees with wings and stingers but of big ones in capital letters on my report card. I’d been academically perfect for so long that it would have been traumatic to screw up right before becoming valedictorian. I managed to sustain my streak through high school, but when I gotaBin my first semester of college, I was relieved. Being perfect was way too exhausting. I’d had my ice cream. I’d enjoyed it. My perfect dieting streak was broken. Now I’d just get back on track and make sure this didn’t become a habit.

I lost a pound that week anyway. I hadn’t even walked for three days. My body made absolutely no sense. Some weeks the scale was a distracted referee who missed reprimanding me on a foul. Other weeks it made a bad call despite my lack of errors.

I didn’t feel bad about chomping down on the cherry chocolate chip ice cream, but I did determine its caloric content: 1,040 calories.
That was not something I’d done before. In my previous life, I’d gone back for two or three soft-serve ice cream cones at the all-you-can-eat Sizzler buffet and never regretted it at all. Now I had a heightened awareness of how different foods would affect my body, and I doubted I could ever flip off the light switch on this enlightenment. I’d always vaguely known that a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese was bad for me, but discovering it had 740 calories was shocking. That was half a day’s worth of food for some people. Fleshing out the details was like the difference between knowing there was a war going on in another country and seeing photos of a child mutilated by a land mine. The specific was far more shocking than the generalization.

It didn’t seem to hurt me that badly anyway. Only a couple of weeks later, at the beginning of June, I stepped on the scale and a smile curled on my face when I saw the number 298. I was out of the 300s! I could weigh myself on regular bathroom scales now! I realized this milestone was just a fluke of our base-ten numbering system. If we had eight fingers I probably would have gotten excited when I hit 320 pounds, which is 500 in octet. But I wasn’t going to let mathematical overanalysis get in the way of a party. I was under 300 pounds! I was already one-third of the way to my goal after only four and a half months. There was no reason to feel bad about canoodling with Ben & Jerry from time to time.

The next time I ate ice cream I felt differently.

The woman backing out of the parking spot behind me at the bookstore had not mastered the ability to drive and talk on her cell phone at the same time. The price of my brother’s birthday gift card was twenty bucks, but it cost me $700 damage to my back driver’s side door. I came home and ate his cupcakes. And some ice cream. And some cake the next day. And then some cookies for the Fourth of July, though by that point I’d already been awarded a check by the driver’s
insurance company, so I had no good excuse for pigging out. I’d actually earned money from the accident. At best I could claim that I thought the sounds of fireworks were signs of the coming Apocalypse and I’d decided to go out with my mouth mashed full of snickerdoodles. Two weeks later I was so tired of cooking dinner that I decided to buy an Extra Value Meal at McDonald’s.

“No! Don’t do it!” my brother called from the kitchen as I escaped through the back door. I pretended I didn’t hear him. My family’s support had gotten me a long way, but it wasn’t going to get me to the drive-through.

My first ice cream indulgence had been an isolated incident, but this was becoming a multiple-week bender. I felt bad, not just emotionally, but physically. All that sugar made me sleepy and moody. I’d forgotten how much better I felt when I ate well. I’d gone through most of my life in a sugar coma and I had no desire to go back. I didn’t want to become someone who apologized whenever she ate a piece of cake, but I couldn’t recklessly eat whatever I wanted to anymore, either. If I did that I’d be trading my fortieth birthday cake for a daily injection of insulin.

Thankfully there were no birthdays to celebrate for several months. By now my healthier ways had become habits that I was able to pick up again. I’d never dropped them completely anyway, just fumbled the ball a couple of times without letting it completely hit the ground. Besides, I didn’t have much else to do. I hadn’t made many friends since we’d moved out of state several years ago. Friday nights were not spent at clubs with techno music blasting through speakers; they were spent on the treadmill with techno music blasting through my tinny earphones.

I still resented the fact that I had to bother with any of this. I’d never dieted because I wanted eating to be simple. This was complicated. I felt ridiculous counting out exactly thirty pistachios for my midafternoon snack. If I counted out twenty-nine by mistake, was
I going to be chewing on the plastic bag in ravenous hunger before lunch? If I counted out thirty-one was I doomed to a life of obesity? I wished I could instinctively eat whatever I wanted without worrying, but the last time I’d done that I’d gained 200 pounds.

I was still confused about what was “good” or “bad” for me. A dozen cookies were definitely bad, but one cookie was okay, right? When did the number of cookies I ate become too high to be part of a healthy diet? I didn’t know, so I stuck to a small set of foods that I knew were “safe.” I was hesitant to try anything new that might screw me up. I was still wrapping my head around all the new information I’d learned in the past five months. My brain was full. I wanted to find a place where I was nutritionally responsible but still indulged occasionally without giving myself unnecessary reprimands. A life without ice cream wasn’t a life worth living.