Half-Assed (19 page)

I’d hit a couple of plateaus before, once in the 280s and again in the 260s. Now I’d built another camp in the 220s. Even when I wasn’t inhaling muffins like oxygen, the number wouldn’t budge. It was frustrating because I was still exercising and eating the same way as when I’d been losing weight, but I wasn’t getting the same results.

There were weigh-in tricks I could have pulled. I was always sure to pee before I weighed myself in the mornings. Some people avoided sodium the night before a weigh-in so they wouldn’t be bloated. Others skipped dinner all together. I took off my watch once and lost about 2 ounces. I considered weighing in naked, an option I hadn’t had at the house. The scale had been kept in the front closet because there was no space on the bathroom floor. Getting a new low number on the scale was like getting a new high score on a video game, but I wasn’t going to risk running into my brother naked in the hallway to get it. In the
western corner of Niger obesity was considered attractive and women actually put on scarves or hats before weighing themselves.
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I found this impossible to imagine.

My blog had started to develop a small following and everyone online gave me advice about my plateau, even though I couldn’t recall asking for any. I hadn’t gotten this much unsolicited advice since the last time I’d had the hiccups. I was told by my blog readers to cut carbs, reduce my fat intake, join Weight Watchers, eat a tablespoon of canola oil during lunch to reset my hunger levels, and become a vegetarian. Had I considered yoga? One person asked if I’d read about the intuitive eating philosophy, which said you should eat what you wanted to, but only when you were hungry. If I’d been able to do that to begin with, I would never have gotten so fat.

Another person suggested that I’d reached my set point. This was a theory that everyone had a natural weight his or her body wanted to stabilize at.
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If I had a set point, why had my body let me get so fat to begin with? Some people said the set point could be raised if you gained weight, but not as easily lowered when you lost weight. The set-point theory didn’t make much sense when applied to my personal weight history. I doubted I had ever been calibrated to 372 pounds because I had lost about 150 pounds without ever feeling hungry or deprived. The set-point theory would have been nice if it functioned like an emergency shutoff valve that stopped me from getting fatter than a certain weight, but it didn’t seem to work like that for me. There were always new scientific theories explaining how the complex organic machine that was my body functioned. I had no idea which ones were true or not.

I wasn’t going to give up because of small bouts of resistance. Some of my readers sounded as if they were trying to let me down easy and prevent my heart from breaking if I never got to goal. It was like I was
playing
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
and they wanted me to leave with the $250,000 instead of trying for a million.

I knew what I was willing to do to manage my weight and how much time I was willing to put into it. I was willing to challenge myself. I was willing to walk farther and faster. I was willing to cut back on food now that I was thinner and didn’t need as many calories to keep my heart beating and lungs breathing. I wouldn’t be happy until I knew I’d pushed myself as far as I was willing to go. I hadn’t reached that point yet.

The plateau might have been good exercise for my mind. It built up my ability to persist through times of failure.
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I had read that scientists believed persistence was governed by a circuit in the brain. Some people naturally had higher levels of persistence than others. Their brains told them to keep trying through the hard times because there was a reward at the end that would stimulate their pleasure centers when they succeeded. Fortunately, even if you started out with a low level of persistence, you could be trained to have more if you were not rewarded every time you accomplished a task. My brain was like an old lady in a casino who kept feeding coins into the slots because she knew the next one would bury her up to her granny panties in coins. When I did eventually start losing weight again, I was training myself that if I kept trying, the rewards would come. It also meant I should take a vacation in Vegas. The casinos obviously had lots to teach me.

I eventually burst through my plateau, if only by force of habit. I was used to exercising and eating healthily, so I just kept doing that. It had become my new default setting. My weight loss also kept slowing down the closer I got to my goal weight. My body was smaller, so I wasn’t burning as many calories a day. Bodies were highly adaptable. If you pushed them one way, they pushed back in the opposite direction. If I didn’t drink much water, my body would start retaining it. If I ran
a lot, my body became more efficient at running. It could accomplish the task at a lower energy cost, like a grocery shopper on triple-coupon day. Losing weight was like trying to pass another car on the highway, only to have it speed up every time I made a move in the left lane. The secret wasn’t to pass the car at full throttle but to zigzag and confuse it until I could slip by. I needed to mix up my exercise routine and vary what I ate to keep my body from thinking it needed to store fat. My body didn’t care how good my butt looked in jeans. It cared about not dying. If I were living in a time when food was scarce, I would outlive all those people who were naturally skinny and couldn’t keep their fat cells full after eating a bucket of chicken wings.

I decided to set early August of the next year as D-day. I wouldn’t be storming the beaches of Normandy, although that would be great cardio. No, this was the date my older brother had set for his wedding. I’d weigh 160 pounds or else ... I’d have to buy a bigger dress.

No matter how long I’d been at this, I noticed that I always seemed to be a year away from my goal. The previous fall I’d celebrated my birthday by determining that at my current rate of loss I’d be at goal in a year. Many months later I was still a year away from goal. What strange twisting of space-time was this? It made me think of Zeno’s Paradox: To get from point A to point B you must first travel halfway there. Once you got halfway there you had to then travel halfway between the remaining distance. Then you had to travel halfway again. You had to continue doing this infinitely, which begged the question, “How the hell did we actually manage to go anywhere at all?” I didn’t know.

I did know that we managed to get from point A to point B. I could get to goal too, but I would have to struggle through the dieting trifecta of doom first: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. During this time I had to pass candy displays built in the middle of the grocery store, monuments of tribute to a religion I no longer practiced. The
landscape for those months consisted of fields of candy corn, a sky full of pumpkin pies, and a sea of eggnog with creamy foam breakers. The abundance of feast holidays during the winter months might have heralded from the need to eat more when it was colder. Or people just loved an excuse to eat like pigs.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were supposed to be times to celebrate family and life, but it was also time to pay tribute to my gastric system. When I heard the magic clinking of green and red M&M’s being poured into a glass bowl, I still came skittering around the corner like my cat when he heard kibble bouncing into his bowl. Pavlov might have had something to say about that, but I wouldn’t have heard him over the crunching in my mouth.

When I snuck a peek at the scale two days after Christmas to weigh the damage I’d done with chocolate-covered cherries and candy canes, I discovered I’d lost two pounds. Perhaps all the chocolate acted as a laxative? I couldn’t explain it. After my Christmas bender, I confessed my sins on the blog, like a good old-fashioned Catholic. Bless me, Father, for I have binged. I had been to a Catholic confession only once before I’d stopped going to church, but I spilled my eating sins online much more frequently, waiting for forgiveness from my readers. If only my body would have granted me indulgences like the church used to. For a small fee I could have gotten my dieting sins erased.

The holidays were different these days because I
did
feel guilty. In previous years I could eat half a pumpkin pie and a tub of whipped cream on Thanksgiving and feel fine about it. I had no idea how many calories it had or how badly it would affect my body. Now I was enlightened, thrown out of the Garden of Eden with only an apple to munch on.

As I went through life, I acquired and lost certain filters. The things happening in my life, be it my job or losing weight, shaped the way I looked at the world. When I worked at a copy store for a year
designing resumes and business cards, I not only got a regular paycheck but also developed the “Compulsively Identify Fonts” filter. Customers frequently requested that we re-create an item exactly, so I had to learn to identify fonts. Within a week of starting, I nearly collided with a car on the expressway because I couldn’t keep my eyes off a billboard with an unidentifiable sans serif font. I saw the musical
Ragtime
and spent thirty seconds of the show distracted by a banner on stage, trying to determine if it used Bodoni Poster or Britannic Bold. I couldn’t watch television without randomly yelling out font names used in commercials, seeing glares not from light bouncing off the TV screen but from my family. When my job was eventually eliminated and we were all laid off, I was grateful because I finally stopped randomly yelling the names of dead font designers like a Tourette’s sufferer.

Since I started losing weight, I had acquired the “You’re Actually Going to Eat That Crap?” filter. At my extended family’s Christmas Eve dinner it was kicked into overdrive at the sight of deep-fried chicken set next to potato salad slathered in mayonnaise, which was low fat only in comparison to a bathtub full of chicken fat. This filter made me a judgmental asshole, but I at least had the sense to be a silent judgmental asshole. I couldn’t turn off the filter even if I wanted to. Two years ago a pepperoni pizza made me think
Yum!
and now it made me think
Is that cheese low fat?

Unlike the font filter, this was a good filter to have. It kept me from gaining weight. But if I were to ignore it for too long, it would probably have faded away just like my other filters. It also made me painfully aware of how poorly my fellow citizens ate. I’d never realized this when I was one of them.

Social eating was the most frequent trigger for a slipup. When I was in my own kitchen, the worst thing I could do, other than cut a finger off, was to eat an entire bowl of sugar-free, fat-free pudding. Out in the
real world, the gun was loaded, the safety was off, and I was a dollar menu away from shooting myself in my pinky toe. I wanted to be part of the group and celebrate birthdays and anniversaries at restaurants, but it was difficult to do that without overeating. Sometimes I wished I were an alcoholic so I’d have a good excuse not to go out drinking.

I found myself pondering how many calories were in a single M&M. I didn’t know because I’d never eaten only one M&M, unless I unearthed it in the sofa cushions while searching for the remote control. Surely stale M&M’s lost calories with age, like the half-life of radioactive materials. After doing some division, I determined that there are 3.4 calories in a milk chocolate M&M. I looked it up after attending a baby shower for a woman (and baby) I didn’t even know, because it had been a better question to ponder at the time than “If I faked a folding-chair malfunction to break my arm, would they let me leave for the hospital immediately or make me wait fifteen minutes for an ambulance?”

As with any social event, I had to face “The Trial of the Buffet Table.” The candy-corn cups and vanilla cake and sherbet were easily avoided because I’d eaten two hours beforehand. Vanilla wasn’t even in the same league of dieting temptations as chocolate. Each guest also received a foam flower centerpiece in a miniature flowerpot containing a bag of M&Ms. Earlier in the year I had read a study that showed people were more likely to eat candy if it were put within easy reach.
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You didn’t have to be a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to know that! I’d figured it out by the third handful.

I lasted an hour before I started digging into my flowerpot, just a couple at first and then some more until I’d eventually eaten thirty candies out of boredom. At least I’d squashed my ability to scream by filling my mouth with chocolate. Otherwise I would have yelled, “Why must the baby have two dozen blankets?! Is she going to be sleeping in the freezer?”

At least I didn’t face pressures like this at work. My company had three employees including me. There were no birthday parties with cupcakes, no boxes of donuts lying in the lobby, no Christmas parties where I’d have to trip the waiter serving hors d’oeuvres to prevent myself from pigging out. It was just me, the microwave, and my Lean Cuisines. Once or twice my boss suggested ordering pizza and I told him, “No thanks.” I didn’t have health insurance, but the low-pressure eating environment was doing wonders for my health.

My health had been doing wonders for my family’s health too. Several months after my mother sold the house and we had all moved to our own apartments, she called me. “Hey,” I said, recognizing her familiar voice. I put down my fork. I was eating dinner way too fast like I always did. I needed to slow down and enjoy the food, but I still ate as if I were trying to win a hotdog-eating contest.

“Hi,” she replied warmly. “I was just calling to thank you.”

“Oh, for what?”

“For keeping all that junk food out of the house,” she said. “I’ve been kind of bad lately, eating a lot of ice cream. My blood sugar has gone up.” My mother was not diabetic but her mother had been, and the doctor was being particularly rigorous in preventing Mom from following in her footsteps. She checked her blood sugar frequently and went in for quarterly checkups. “I just wanted to thank you for keeping us eating healthy.”