Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (5 page)

And so here she was, fifty-two years old, in line with a two-year-old whining behind her, and a college junior “wondering” if three pounds a week wasn’t unreasonably slow, what with spring break coming up. Mimi knew the scale would do exactly what it wanted to, hovering a pound or three up or down from 255, but really, after delays at the Salt Lake airport en route from presenting at a PubMed class and the temptation of Cinnabon and Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, what did she expect?

At least I threw the last couple of chocolates out. If I just had more self-control
, she thought for the thirty-sixth time that morning.
If I just gave up
one
thing. There must be life after chocolate…

When her turn came, it was quick. “Two-five-four-point-two,” Linda said, writing the numbers down in her log. “That’s terrific, Mimi! A point-three-pound loss! Keep up the good work!”

Mimi smiled for Linda and thanked her. That could add up to a whopping fifteen-point-something loss in a year, by golly.
I could be at goal weight when I’m five-seven-point-something years old!

It was eleven o’clock on a cloudy and cold but dry Saturday in April when the meeting was over and they’d gotten their new recipes and reminders about drinking water. Mimi decided to turn her hunger and sarcasm into optimism and head for Whole Foods with Linda’s three-point turtle “cheesecake” recipe in hand.

We who eat compulsively, eat instead of speaking. We are the stars in a play for one actor, and both the stage and the dialogue are our bodies for the rare, critical audience. Like great drama, weight is showing, not telling, a psychic and biological story.

Losing weight is the opposite of the dumb show of gain. The audience is bigger, more varied, and more vocal. Confessions are made (“I have issues with food, too,” my internist, who had hectored me about my obesity, admitted when I lost weight. Could she have told me that a hundred pounds of fat, despair, and confusion earlier???) and ambitions are formed.

The impulse to lose doesn’t always involve three-digit numbers, fantasies, or the demands of doctors. It is not always epic. Sometimes weight loss is the drama of facing what is under our beds or behind the curtains, ferreting out the icky sources of unhappiness we furthered by our eating. We are in search of the courage to no longer ignore our dreams and to demand that we be taken seriously as we fashion a fitter, more disciplined body. These are fundamental principles in an authentic life.

Lindsay slapped the snooze bar one more time and twisted the pillow under her ear. Why get up when she could hear the shower running? One of the things Jalen couldn’t stand was her peeing when he was using the bathroom.

Jalen woke her before she got her seven minutes’ grace from
Morning Edition
. He sat down heavily on her side of the bed and said, “Look at my blister.”

Lindsay mumbled concerned noises and burrowed deeper into the comforter.

“It’s worse today.”

“Mmm.”

“I could barely keep running after seven miles.”

“Awww.”

“It really hurts, Linds. What am I gonna do? We’re running Fuller Park to Tannery tonight.”

Lindsay summoned up a complete sentence at last. “Skip it, Easton.”

“Hon,” he said in that reasoning-but-really-whining voice that felt like a forklift. “I can’t skip it. I got the okay from the parks department for the run.” Jalen was good at coming up with plans for his running club. He was also good at coming up with basketball and tennis courts, baseball diamonds and swimming lanes. Lindsay was good at coming up with another seven minutes of sleep.

“Linds, wake up. I’m gonna lance it, and then I want you to bandage it.”

Lindsay sighed and threw off the covers. He wouldn’t leave her alone, so she might as well get up.

Jalen saw her emerging from the quilt and stood up.

“Tell me honestly, hon. Do I look fat?”

She groaned. He asked the question every morning and every night, and she groaned each time.

“You weigh less than I do, Jay. Stop it.”

The thing about weighing thirty—
thirty!
—pounds more than your husband is that you never get to ask that specific question. You’re stuck with variations on “Does this make me look fat[ter]?” or “Do you love my body?”

She could hear a jazz combo between segments of the radio program as she went through her morning routine. The music was redolent of smoky little nightclubs and shiny red nail polish, and she clenched her fists thinking of her ragged cuticles. She pulled off her flannel nightgown and scowled at how her tummy flamed over her hips, then stepped on the scale, telling herself that if the readout wasn’t less than the 172 that she’d held on to through the last two weeks of no wine, no popcorn at night, no lattes, and regular workouts, she’d bump her three-mile run up to five for the next couple of days. She took a deep breath as she hesitated. Jalen would notice if she increased her running. He would bite his tongue not to give advice, making the air heavy. There would certainly be an invitation to go along with his club, which meant a choice between hurting his feelings or coming home crazed from watching him run in tandem with Patra Fletch, his partner in Home Fit, their personal trainer company—if two people could be called a company.

It was one thing to do a leisurely jog around Tinker’s Creek on a cool sunny April Sunday, admiring Jalen’s gorgeousness and the sprinkles of buttercups. It was another thing to join his crew as one of the slower of the dozen.

Patra Fletch was not slower. She was a prodigy of self-sculpture.
With a name like that, just wouldn’t she be?
Lindsay asked the mirror. Her red delicious apple cheeks and her ponytail bobbed back at her in agreement. Lindsay had a moment of admiring her ponytail, enough to step on the scale. The numbers flashed and settled on 171.4. Her first fear about Jalen was over for the day.

Dieting is scientific and mechanical: fewer calories expended than consumed day after day after goddammed day.

The semantics of dieting, on the other hand, are about as exacting as playing an étude wearing oven mitts. This concerns me because failure is built into the semantics.

This linguistic sloppiness starts in the secret of our heart. “I have to do something about my weight,” Mimi was telling herself as she floundered with Weight Watchers. The statement is a stalling tactic, hinged on the words “do something.” Mimi is not stupid. She has a master’s degree in medical library science and holds a prestigious job. If “do something” meant working to get the flab off her body, she’d be speaking in specifics: “I have to go back to the Weight Watchers Core Plan” or “I have to stop eating gelato.” “Do something” can mean anything. I could, for instance, paint my weight in silver and gold glitter or sing about it. The phrase has nothing to do with intention, but as long as we say we have to do something about it, we’re—maybe—fooling ourselves and others that we’re on the brink of, um, a diet.

Then, of course, there are the questions.

“How did you lose the weight?”

The
weight? The use of the definite article instead of a pronoun separates fat from the person in question, either as a form of sensitivity or a refusal to understand that the fat body was and continues to be as much a part of the person as her thinner body.

The
also turns weight into community property, the way a wife might ask her husband, “How did you lose the keys?” as they stand in the rain outside their locked car. “Lose” is problematic, too. To lose something is to hope to find it.

Is there one big stockpile of fat that we all draw on? Is there a Fat Lost and Found at which we have to describe our weight (“It’s thigh fat, about thirty inches, with dimples?”) in order to reclaim it?

If I lose property that is exclusively mine, the noun is preceded by a personal pronoun: “How did you lose your book report, Frances?”

There is nothing more personally and exclusively mine than the weight I bear. It is a more conscious and public part of me than my joy or sexuality or great hair. My weight or my size crosses my mind every time I make a meal, make a date, bend over to tie my shoes, go outside, put on clothes, and countless other motions and imaginings.

The word
weight
in that question is just as peculiar. The most successful anorectic has weight, a glimmer of a fetus has weight. Without a qualification (even a generic one such as “so much weight”) and taken literally, talking about losing weight reduces the successful dieter to nothing at all. Further,
weight
says nothing of what, really, weight
is
. Weight is muscle and bones and blood and organs and fat. We don’t burn weight, we burn fat, from which getting thinner is a by-product. Is fat so alien, so unmentionable, that it’s safer to talk about it in terms of sterility and separateness, an item made of not-us? Still, the question of how, unreflective as it is, persists. As it happens, the Angry Fat Girls put their money where their mouths are in two organizations. Katie and I have continued our alliance with twelve-step programs for eating disorders, and Wendy, Mimi, and Lindsay attend Weight Watchers. Our organizations do not dictate the how of dieting, there aren’t necessarily set perimeters. Our food varies from day to day, and each camp has its own vocabulary for operating within it.

The lingo that twelve-step programs for eating disorders employ is as wide of the mark as any other. “I’ve given away fifty pounds,” you might hear a particularly enthusiastic member say. “To whom,” I want to snap, “a thirteen-year-old anorectic?” The newly thin would answer that she gave her pounds to God or HP, “Higher Power,” just as she turns over all of her life to Him or Her or It. I can’t bear people talking about HP. I inevitably wonder how Hewlett-Packard has provided a miracle.

“I’ve released fifty pounds,” another twelve-stepper might say. This is somewhat more realistic except that it’s backwards, isn’t it? Wouldn’t fifty fewer pounds release the body?

Ought we say, “I have been
relieved
of fifty pounds”?

Or our inquisitors could frame the question of how someone loses weight the way they might ask how someone eased another physical ailment: “How did you get rid of your migraines?” or “How did you cure your flu?”

At least these questions aren’t hinting that we will re-find our weight or that it, like Lassie, will re-find us, which is found in that announcement that, yes, we’ll have dessert, but “I just hope it doesn’t show up on the scale tomorrow,” as though the needle will bounce around until it settles on cheesecake.

Members of twelve-step programs for eating disorders speak of their food as being “clean” and “tight” in addition to the broad generalization of “abstinent,” which means whatever the going definition of refraining from compulsive eating is.
¹²

Members “work a strong Program” and participation is complicated. As a Stepford Wife, I can attest that Program requires a lot of time and something between obedience and surrender, as stated in the source for all of the 601 twelve-step programs,
Alcoholics Anonymous:
¹³
“Those who do not recover are people who
cannot
or
will not completely
give themselves to this
simple
program…”
¹⁴
There are meetings to attend, calls to make, histories to be written, amends to make to people we have harmed, books beyond the Big Book to be read.

Weight Watchers, which itself is a brand name open to interpretation (someone who is “watching his weight” is usually trying either to maintain his weight or lose a few, rather than a lot of, pounds. Or does the weight watcher watch his weight the way birders observe the Bicknell’s thrush?), offers two diet plans, the Flex and the Core plans. The names probably say it all, but Flex allows the greatest variety of foods, each of which is assigned a certain number of points. The Core Plan, which doesn’t use points, relies on the Core List of foods, which are basically fresh, unprocessed foods and do not include any breads. Denise, a responder to my blog who uses the Flex Plan, instructed someone who asked about Weight Watchers, “You are supposed to eat as much of the Core foods as it takes to feel ‘satisfied,’ which is the scary part of that option. Who is ever satisfied when it comes to food? If I knew that feeling, would I have a weight problem to begin with…?”

No counting? How can you lose weight without counting? If you don’t count calories (or points), you’re going to have to count something else. Ounces. Cups. Units.

Weight Watchers is the most lucrative company in the fifth-largest industry in our economy, generating $50 billion a year. In 2003, Weight Watchers’ revenue was approximately $943 million, while Jenny Craig saw $280 million and LA Weight Loss achieved $250 million in gross income.
¹⁵
Their revenues are higher yet when special supplements and branded foods are added.

Diet programs are not cheap. According to
Forbes
, the first week in Weight Watchers, in which one pays initiation fees and shops for new foods in order to follow the Flex Plan, costs $385. If the average American household spends $5,781 a year on food, this breaks down to about $27.79 a week per person, exclusive of fast food.
¹⁶
Diets culled from books rather than organizations are equally expensive. Following
21 Pounds in 21 Days: The Martha’s Vineyard Diet Detox
calls for a $200 kit of supplements, a juicer, weekly visits to a colon therapist, and organic foods.