Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (26 page)

It was February, and I was getting firmer and stronger. I could feel it and sort of see it. I could almost imagine walking around the house without any clothes, but since I never knew when Wolfie or Tony would barrel through, I kept them on. Sorry, Tom. I did make one concession to a better body image. I wore more shorts and tanks.

It was time. After nearly two years of dieting, maintenance, and workouts, I was enjoying my body—kind of. I would never go so far as to say I was ready to declare myself “hot,” but we were in a much better relationship. Whether my body was bikini-ready was another matter. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t.

I was stuck. I weighed about 130. One day I would weigh 130.6, another day it would be 131.2. This went on for weeks. I’m not a complainer, but I openly vented my frustration at not being able to break into the 120s. I was working my ass off and not making
the progress I wanted. Christopher showed superhuman restraint for not telling me to shut up. He assured me that I would get to where I was supposed to be.

One day, though, following a workout, Tom heard me carping about my weight and said, “I am so sick of these 130s.” I whipped around from the kitchen counter where I was preparing an ice bag and looked at him with daggers. Laughing nervously, Christopher said, “Oh no, Tom, don’t say that!”

Poor Tom. He knew he had put his foot in his mouth. He was horrified.

“I don’t mean you’re not going to see the 120s,” he said. “I’m just as sick of the 130s as you are. You’re going to get there, honey. And I’ll be so happy for you.”

For a moment, I wondered if I was too obsessed by a number that might not be achievable. I was adamant about not putting myself in a place that was unnatural, unhealthy, or unattainable. Why did I have to have a perfect body? Who had a perfect body anyway? Michelle Pfeiffer was one of the most naturally gorgeous, perfect-looking women I have ever seen, and she was once asked what she would do if she could be anonymous for a day. She said that she would take her children to the beach and enjoy herself without worrying about paparazzi photographing her.

If Michelle Pfeiffer worried about being photographed on the beach in a bathing suit, I had to adjust my expectations. I still felt the sting of being ambushed by paparazzi on the beach two summers earlier. I had weighed 140-something, which was a hell of a lot better than 175. If it happened now? I’m not going to kid anyone. I do not want a telephoto lens aimed at me, ever. I will never be comfortable on a public beach until long-lens cameras are banned. But I feel much better about walking around in shorts.

I began to look at my struggle to break into the 120s as a reality check. I had to be realistic and avoid idealizing a perfect me. Nothing was perfect—unless it was topped with nuts, whipped cream, and a cherry. So I told myself that, when I got into a bikini, if I did, I was going to have to be okay with a little muffin top and still feel proud of my accomplishment.

The day-to-day reality was another thing. Despite the pep talks I gave myself, I wasn’t as together or enlightened as I wanted Wolfie or Tom to think. Yes, I’d lost a lot of weight, improved my life in numerous ways, gotten rid of some personal baggage, and acquired some wisdom. I now truly believed that God would love me as much at 180 pounds as He would at 126 pounds. But that wasn’t the point. It was going to be my ass in that bikini, and I didn’t want to see too much of it.

“Why am I not making more progress?” I asked Christopher one day as he put me through my warm-up exercises.

He reminded me that my body was going to try to fight me, as he’d said at the start of our sessions. He also said that all the traveling that I had done over the past two months had slowed me down. It was hard to make the kind of progress I wanted while eating room service and working out in hotel gyms. To break into the 120s, he said, we were going to have to step it up.

“We’re going to work harder?” I winced.

He nodded.

“Oh, crap,” I said.

He doubled the ten thousand steps I walked each day above and beyond my workouts to twenty thousand steps. He also created a specific, strict workout for me to follow when I was on the road, and he followed up with e-mails. On my end, I got stricter
about my workouts and diet when I was on the road. Without making a big deal out of it, I recommitted myself to the type of discipline I knew was necessary.

“I can see the change in you,” Christopher said one day.

“I don’t know what it is,” I said. “It’s like a reaffirmation. Maybe I just believe in myself a little bit more.”

“Exactly,” he said. “You’ve always believed. But every day your sense of belief is getting a little stronger.”

He was right. Beyond any physical transformation, I was going through a test of faith and belief that was personal and was about my embrace of a Higher Power. God knows, I did enough praying to get through my workouts. If I could get into a bikini and feel comfortable about it, it might be proof that He did exist.

At times when I was working out, I felt like I was on a mission from God, though I felt more affiliated with
Ghostbusters
than any organized religion. As I said, I did a lot of communicating with the Big Guy Upstairs, my favorite being, “Please God, let me run for three more minutes without collapsing.”

In fact, I did a lot of counting as I ran (just five more steps, three more, okay, ten more steps and then it’ll be easier) and playing of songs on my iPod (I would try to get through one song, then try for two more). I kept an eye on my watch, waiting for my endorphin rush after twenty minutes. I thought about calories I burned. Sometimes my head was so full of numbers I felt like Rain Man.

When I thought I couldn’t take any more facts or figures, Christopher came over with a buddy named Rick, who gave me a gadget called a Body Bugg. It was a computerized calorie counter about the size of a digital watch attached to a Velcro band. Rick
strapped it around my bicep and explained that it would track how many calories burned through exercise and daily activities as well as how many calories I consumed. At the end of each day, I could see where I stood.

All I had to do was input the food I ate and then download the information from the Body Bugg onto my laptop. I had no problem understanding, but Rick had problems setting up my computer because the Internet was down. It had rained the day before and, as I explained, we always lost service for about twenty-four hours afterward.

“That’s the reality of my glamorous life,” I said. “The pool leaks, the back patio is falling apart, and our Internet has a mind of its own.”

“Too much information,” Tom said.

“Well, that’s how I am,” I shrugged. “You want me, you get the whole package, including the house that is falling apart.”

Anyway, it took a few days for me to get used to wearing the Bugg on my arm every day. As an accessory, it didn’t go with jeans and T-shirts or with the fancier outfits I occasionally slipped into at night for events. But I kept it on nearly all the time. I also had to record everything I ate and drank—and I mean everything. I had to be exact in order for the Bugg to spit out accurate results.

I didn’t realize how much I overlooked or forgot about until I made the effort to be rigorously precise. Christopher had told me that some of his clients had worn the Bugg but lied about what they ate. What was the point? They were only cheating themselves. I believed in the old cliché about being as sick at your secrets. It applied to drugs, alcohol, sex, relationships, and, yes, food.

One thing about me, though: I didn’t lie. I had lost weight by being honest about what I ate and how much I exercised, and unlike
the majority of people who shed pounds on diets, I had kept it off for a year by applying the same honesty to the rest of my life. Was I perfect? Not by a long shot. But just walking around with fewer secrets gave me the lightness of being that I had craved, that I knew could only be measured in my soul, not on any scale.

For all my trustworthiness, though, I still had second thoughts when Christopher asked for the password to my Body Bugg account. It may have been the idea of giving anyone one of my passwords. I wondered why he wanted it. It was like giving someone permission to look through your window whenever he wanted, day or night. I also asked myself, Didn’t he trust me?

No, that wasn’t it. As Christopher explained, I was doing an amazing job of working out and staying on top of my meals. But it wasn’t good enough. My life was more complicated than normal because of all the traveling I did. He wanted to see everything in black and white each day. He thought it would help me, too.

“You’re great at the weight you are right now,” he said. “One hundred-thirty is terrific. Don’t you feel good?”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“But if you want to go to another level, you have to be amazing.”

“I need to be amazing—at least for the day we take pictures.”

From then on, I felt as though I had an extra set of eyes on me at all times—and I did: they were Christopher’s.

But I also got into it. I inputted info and downloaded computations five or six times a day. Whenever I wanted to know where my calorie deficit stood, or if I had one that particular day, I could see it in black and white. It eliminated the balancing act that every dieter knows too well. There was no more bargaining, tallying,
guesswork, or emotion. The numbers simply popped up in front of my face. I was either over, even, or under.

Tom was ecstatic. He no longer had to listen to me go on about what I had eaten that day in what had become a nighttime ritual. He got to kick back. In fact, he took advantage of the situation. Aware that I couldn’t resist adding to my daily calorie burn, he began suggesting late-night mattress aerobics.

“Who knows how many more calories you could burn?”

“Hey, great idea!” I smiled.

I liked the Bugg more than I had imagined and wondered what it would be like if such a device could be applied to life in general. In what ways would my life have been different if, at the end of every day, I’d received a printout not just of calories but of my behavior toward myself and other people? What if everyone was held more accountable for his or her actions?

In a sense, it was like asking how you would behave if Jesus were standing next to you. On the other hand, it made me realize that the highest moral authority any of us must answer to at the end of the day is one’s self.

I’m a news junkie, and I thought about this idea of accountability more and more as Obama dealt with one crisis after another. Whether he was tackling the financial mess, addressing exorbitant bonuses paid to executives of failing businesses, or closing Guantánamo and putting an end to torture and secret prisons, he seemed to make decisions as if he and America had to answer to a higher authority.

Good for him—and us. What had happened to the country, that we woke up almost daily to headlines about Wall Street cheaters,
ballplayers taking steroids, power-drunk politicians, and trashy TV and celebrity websites, that—as we all know—pander to the worst tastes and sensibilities?

Excuse me for getting a little preachy, but we seemed to have lost our moral compass and sense of accountability. It was as if, as a country, we had decided we could eat and drink anything, and not exercise, and then were shocked when we woke up one day fat and unhealthy. I liked to think that Obama was putting America on a diet, teaching people to count calories and make healthier choices. No wonder Rush had a problem with him.

I was a good example of someone who wished that she had been held more accountable in the past, but who had woken up to the truth, made changes, and was on the road to being healther and happier. I’m obviously being overly simplistic when I compare my own transformation to the mind-boggling efforts of leading the country out of complex piles of doo-doo, but, hey, I’m also a good example that change is possible.

I had to continue to believe because, with about one month to go before my bikini shoot, I still hadn’t dipped below 130 pounds. I couldn’t work any harder. It simply required an enormous effort. One day, I burned more than 3,000 calories, a record for me. The next morning, Christopher was all smiles as he led Tom and me through some easy stretches before our run.

“Great job yesterday,” he said.

“Way to go, Val!” Tom also said.

“Why am I not enjoying this or feeling as happy as you guys?” I asked.

Christopher smiled.

“I know that, despite the hard work, you’re having some fun,” he said.

“What do you mean
fun
?” I asked.

“I logged onto your Body Bugg info this morning and—”

“And what?” I asked.

“I saw an additional blip of late night activity.”

“Yeah?” I said, not comprehending his point.

“Somebody was having fun,” he said.

I blushed and turned to Tom, who read my eyes correctly. Christopher had been able to see that we had fooled around the night before. Tom’s next thought was the same as mine. For weeks, Christopher had obviously been able to see those midnight workouts that Tom had thought were a good idea. The guy, as sweet as he was, knew everything—and I mean
everything
—about me.