Stories I'd Tell in Bars

by Jen Lancaster

  I like how I feel, inside and outside.

  Please note I’m making it sound like post-Achilles, I had this huge and wondrous transformation regarding exercise, but that’s not true. I had to trick myself there for a long while. All I wanted to do for the two and a half months I was on the knee scooter was use the exercise machines, like the elliptical. Then once I finally hopped on them, I thought, “Hmm, I don’t care for these as much as I thought and I am ready to quit.”

  So, I’d save my best/worst shows to watch during my cardio sessions, like UnReal, and Housewives, and The Bachelor. They would be my reward. I made the most lit playlists in the universe and I could only listen to good songs if I was moving. I forced myself to have a habit until it became a habit and now on the days I don’t sweat, I feel weird and off, like I’ve forgotten to brush my teeth. The positive feedback loop is real – the more you do, the more you want to do.

  Through embracing healthy living and fitness, I've discovered something about myself that I never realized... I am a hyper-competitive douchebag, not only just in life [sort of had an inkling about that] but also in the gym.

  One life-changing day, I discovered that if I amped up the torque enough in spin class, I could top the leader board because while I’m not thin, I have a shit-ton of ballast. Oh, my God. Every time I take a class, it’s all I can do to not send my consistent number one rankings to my seventh-grade gym teacher.

  [Who deserves a C- now, Mrs. Baker, huh?]

  As I've always had poor coordination, I was unaware that I had the makings of an athlete inside me. I didn't know how much weight I could press, how many watts I could generate on the bike, how far I could row on the ergometer, how long I could keep my heart rate in the orange zone, how I could beat far more fit people in classes where metrics are measured.

  Frankly, now that I’m aware, I'm a complete dick about it.

  One could argue that embracing fitness has made me a worse person; one would not be wrong.

  That’s why I’m furious that something’s off and that I can’t figure out what. Is it too much cardio? Not enough calories?

  [Have I been invaded by an alien life form, because I never dreamed these could be questions I’d ask myself.]

  [Also, lest this sound too braggy-braggy, yay-me, I’ve yet to see one-derland. This is all relative, your mileage may vary, etc.]

  I’m flummoxed.

  My primary care physician sends me to an endocrinologist, because he’s flummoxed, too. He was there when my weight was a perfect bowling score. He knows how far I’ve come, he’s aware this isn’t denial, or me trying to blame-throw.

  As I want answers now, now, now, rather than wait until March (March, March) when his referred doc has openings, I make an appointment with another guy.

  I arrive with a big stack of paperwork. I’ve printed all my food logs and two months’ worth of workout data from my heart rate monitor. Let’s do this. The endo introduces himself and takes a seat next to me. I notice his South African accent immediately.

  Uh-oh.

  This is going to be a distraction. Anyone who came of age in the late ‘80s saw the movie Lethal Weapon II. Fact. Mind you, I didn’t much care for Mel Gibson back when it was a law to fangirl Mel Gibson. [Although, why am I suddenly obsessed with mentioning Mel Gibson in this book?] I was dragged to the theater with a bunch of sorority sisters. I’m so glad they coerced me to see it, as this is one of the most iconic movies of that time. I’m talking an actual generation-definer. There are two unforgettable lines that people still quote today. The first is when Joe Pesci cries about how, “They fuck you in the drive-thru.”

  The second line pertains to the villain. He’s an evil old white government dude from South Africa at the height of Apartheid. He and his henchmen are wreaking havoc in LA and they keep getting away with it; cops can’t touch them. This is really working (Gibson) Riggs’s nerves. At key moments throughout the film, the bad guy says, “Diplomatic immunity,” in his thick accent, real slow and evil, as way of justification.

  [Spoiler alert: eventually it all works out, in the film and in real life.]

  As this doctor speaks, all I can do is imagine him saying, “Diplomatic immunity,” for the first fifteen minutes of our appointment. I must bite my tongue to keep from asking him to please say this for me.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  [I feel like Gibson may bring out the worst in people ever since The Unpleasantness.]

  I spend an hour talking to the endo (and listening for forty-five) explaining everything I've done. Because he's part of the medical group I've been seeing since moving to Chicago, he’s able to pull up my blood test results all the way back to 2003 when they went online. In comparison, there’s no comparison. He tells me I've earned my healthy living bragging rights.

  Cool story, bro, but why are my pants tight?

  I pepper him with questions.

  “Am I eating too much? Am I eating too little? Am I eating all the wrong things for my metabolism? Am I going into starvation mode because I’m doing too much cardio?” I demand. “Do we test my daily burn rate? Or bone density? Is it possible for my bones to be getting fatter, is that a thing? How about we try an elimination diet and we'd see if I’m reacting badly to certain food groups?”

  Do you know what he says?

  “You’re going to drive yourself crazy. At some point, you need to accept that getting bigger is a simple fact of aging because your body slows down. Plus, now your body’s used to you being healthy and it’s adjusted accordingly. You can’t fight this.”

  Then he says the thing that almost makes me go all Lethal Weapon.

  “Have you considered signing up for Jenny Craig?”

  I leave the endocrinologist with a prescription for Metformin, a drug with particularly unpleasant side effects, meant for those who are diabetic even though I am not diabetic, nor I am not pre-diabetic. He’d said he had some patients with symptoms like mine who used it successfully to get past a plateau.

  Okay, but I don’t want to go the Big Pharma route yet.

  I haven’t exercised every other alternative first and Metformin seems like going nuclear. I’m not yet ready to walk away from the bargaining table, you know? [He also wanted to put me on an experimental bladder control drug that has been linked to weight loss. How about... no.]

  When I tell my primary care physician about this, he refers me again to the original endo who couldn’t see me until March, March, March, and not now, now. He’s kind enough not to say, “Told you so.”

  My friend Gina suggests my plateau/gains stem from chronic inflammation due to reactive foods. I kind of don’t know what this means, so I consult Dr. Google. Basically, while I’m not flat-out allergic, there may be food my body says “do not want” after I eat. Which might explain why I gain four pounds every time I have one slice of pizza. Once slice!

  I decide to start the Whole30 plan on January 1st. Whole30 takes alcohol, dairy, grains, legumes, soy, and sugar (real, artificial, all forms) off the table for a month. While my diet has been (mostly) nutritionally balanced for the past two years, I eat at least four of the above five triggers daily. I'm not sure if I'll be pissed or relieved if I discover that low fat Greek yogurt and oatmeal have been the cause of my plateau.

  To prepare, I do a big Whole Foods grocery run on New Year’s Eve. I want to make sure I am loaded for bear here. I stock up on new, preservative-free condiments and salad dressings, reading every ingredient before I decide to buy it. While shopping generally takes me half an hour, this time, it’s more like an hour and a half. There’s nothing in my cart that isn’t grass-fed, free-range, or organic, nary a pesticide nor chemical nor artificial color to be seen. And sugar? Please. Not a grain, not a gram. Nary a drop of honey. I’ll make my own sweetness from within.

  I am one smug earth mother as I push my trolley full o’ goodness around the store.

  When I fork over what is essentially a mortgage payment, I am considerably less smug.<
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  New Year’s Eve night – my last hurrah – is a Christmas cookie, cheese, and bread-filled orgy, supplemented with champagne. When I wake up, I am seven pounds heavier than when I went to sleep.

  I know I did not eat seven actual pounds of cookies. Not that I couldn’t; my arm would have just gotten too tired bringing it all to my mouth.

  [“Congratulations! You got in ten thousand steps and ten thousand calories!”]

  I fix a black coffee, unsweetened, and sip it while I make eggs. I serve them with pan-wilted spinach sautéed with garlic, a side of sliced avocados, a few blueberries, and a piece of prosciutto. I mention this because: (A) everything is amazing and absolutely on plan, and, (B) a prominent editor told me that she was sick of reading what white ladies ate for breakfast. Sorry, but it’s relevant here.

  Over the course of the day, I have a nice arugula salad with steak strips and Tessamae dressing, handfuls of almonds, and chicken with pan roasted vegetables for dinner. Everything tastes great and I’m not at all hungry.

  The only down side is that I don’t love black, unsweetened coffee.

  But I can live with that temporarily if this helps me get some answers.

  DAY THREE: I like everything I've eaten and I'm not fixated on food. No headaches, no cravings. I did not tackle Fletch and steal his wine on Sunday, nor did I slap the Bissinger Peanut Butter Maple Oat Chocolate bar out of his hands last night. And I can live with drinking black coffee; my breakfast beverage doesn't have to taste like mocha ice cream to start my day.

  It should, but doesn’t have do.

  Melissa Hartwig, the diet’s author, is a fan of saying that kicking a drug habit is hard, drinking coffee black is not.

  Because my sugar intake’s so much lower and I'm not having insulin spikes, my hunger level is nil. My energy level is off the charts. My joints feel better, my fingers seem less sausage-like, and my perpetual stuffy nose is clear without spray or decongestant.

  The plan says not to count calories or weigh myself, but then there are no metrics, and I love me some data points. If I can't measure it, I can't manage it. If I can't manage it, I can't fix it. Naturally, I'm tracking calories. I've taken in the same amount I've been consuming for the past six months. Bottom line, I feel good.

  By the way? I'm down six pounds.

  Six pounds since Sunday.

  I’d settle for five if I could have a splash of cream and a packet of Splenda in my coffee, though...

  DAY FOUR: Thus far, no problems with the plan itself. I attribute this to having been so ready to try, eager to discover if food-based inflammation caused my plateau. Also, I have nothing going on this month – no parties, no travel, no day job, no picky kids to feed - so I have fewer barriers to entry. (If you’re doing the program despite these hurdles, you are a damn hero.) While I can’t imagine living so restricted forever, if in the next twenty-six days I learn that oatmeal is my own personal Satan, then I can plan accordingly.

  THE GOOD: I’m reexamining my habits. For example, I’m in the throes of finishing a project. Last night around 5:45, I realized I’d given no thought to dinner. Often when I’m busy, I opt for delivery or takeout.

  However, I don’t know how to find what I’m supposed to have outside of my own kitchen. (I haven’t read that far in the book.) I needed to cook.

  From start to finish, assembling chicken thighs and vegetables on a sheet pan took ten minutes, less time than I’d need to leave the house and return with dinner. While the organic chicken is pricier than what I usually buy at Costco, home cooking is far less expensive than my usual alternative. Plus, I wrote while dinner was in the oven and the chicken was excellent. I never bought chicken with the skin on because I thought it was supposed to be horrible for you; actually, the numbers aren’t so bad. And chicken skin is an edible jacket made from flavor.

  THE LESS GOOD: Fletch keeps telling people, “We’re doing Total30.” Number one, no. Number two, I’m sorry – WE? After we had our healthy Whole30 dinner, he ate a piece of cake the size of an anvil. That’s fine. I just want to clarify that he’s not “doing Whole30” so much as he is consuming the breakfasts and lunches I’ve started making for him, in addition to our usual dinner. Again, happy to do nice things for him, but credit where due, please.

  THE SUMMARY: Again, all is well. If I fall into a vat of chardonnay between now and next time, I shall make note.

  DAY SEVEN: Today is Incident Day. First, we almost have An Incident with the string cheese when I’m trying to give Loki his pills. There’s cheese stuck on my fingers and I go to lick it off and I get the cheese to my mouth and it’s there, just waiting to be swallowed and I panic. I end up spitting it out on the floor.

  Why does this stuff always happen right as Fletch walks into the room?

  He’s like, “Please don’t spit on the kitchen floor.”

  I don’t even try to explain.

  Then I head to the grocery store. I go there every goddamned day now for something. Glad I’m not busy with a day job. The sample lady is not only giving out bites of my favorite cheese – Belle Etoile triple crème brie – but pairing it with a generous Dixie cup of champagne. I stand there so long, watching other shoppers quaff their champs and eat their cheese, that it gets creepy. Now I'm obligated to hit a different store tomorrow, as employees already suspect I’m casing the joint, because who legit goes to the supermarket every day?

  In other news, I buy cashews in bulk and divvy them up into single-serve snack bags. Then I spend ten minutes giggling about "my nut sacks" because I am twelve.

  Finally, we install a new alarm system. Our old system did not have a dummy panic code setting, but the new one does. Apparently this one is a few fat-fingered digits away from our nightly-setting code.

  FYI, the Lake Forest PD has quite the response time and they are not impressed by braless women in flannel pajamas. I feel like we could have avoided this, had cheese been an option.

  At least I have found NutPods, an almond-based creamer that foams beautifully in a cappuccino. At least there’s that.

  DAY NINE: Would I like to bite into a wedge of Port Salut cheese like an apple? Yes.

  Have I bitten into a wedge of Port Salut cheese like an apple whenever I grab some to give the old fella his pills?

  No.

  What I’m finding is that this plan is all I talk about; this is my singular focus. Suddenly I’m sorry for mocking every vegan and gluten-free person I’ve ever met.

  So, when I assault strangers who have not asked with information they do not seek, I tell them I’m not following the plan for weight loss, per se. Instead, I explain I’m trying to determine if food sensitivity is the reason for my plateau. I’m not restricting so much as establishing a baseline. If I lose weight on X calories/day without grain, sugar, dairy, alcohol, or legumes, and I gain again on X/day with these foods re-introduced, I’ll know problem is what I eat, not how much, and I can adjust accordingly. I haven’t had problems with my caloric baseline because I’m not terribly hungry outside of meal time. When I do get hungry, it’s more like a “I’m a bit peckish” feeling and less a “I will kill you and everyone you ever loved for a Twix bar” thing. A bonus, yes?

  I’ve been sharing this journey [minus ten points to me for using this word, especially in a non-ironic sense] on social media in real time and I’m getting some push-back. Again, perhaps it’s because no one is asking. Some commenters question why I can’t simply accept the fact that I may be at my “set” point right now, being content with the results I’ve had so far. That’s a legitimate concern, especially as I’m a huge proponent of loving yourself at any size.

  The short answer is vanity, which is also why I highlight my hair, do Botox, and never leave the house without coloring in my eyebrows and lips. I don’t take these actions because I’m unhappy; rather, I like myself so much that I want nice things for me.

  The longer answer is that I’m stubborn. I’ve never worked harder than I have in the past two years, yet I’ve s
topped seeing tangible results from these efforts and that is unacceptable. Not because I have a ridiculously high and incredibly narrow definition of the standards of beauty, but because I refuse to let an arbitrary or outside force define my limits.

  I will always fight my way around an obstacle.

  [Um, hello, decision to publish my own memoir.]

  From a systemic standpoint, my heath continues to improve, but I want to SEE it. Pictures or it didn’t happen. Again, it’s not because I don’t like me or feel like I’m not worthy regardless of size or age or ability to create a smoky eye.

  My analogy is that if I had a job where I crushed goals and smashed expectations, eventually, I’d hope for recognition. Maybe a raise, a promotion, a bigger office. Something. While we feel innate satisfaction for a job well done, ultimately we work so we can live our lives indoors. What would make me want to quit that position is if the company said, “Now that we see your extraordinary capabilities, perform at no less than this level all the time or else you’re fired.”

  In the above case, it would be hard to not turn in my notice. Yet since the “job” is maintaining healthy habits, quitting’s a terrible option.

  To finish beating to death the body-as-employer metaphor, I’ll say that I don’t require the keys to the executive washroom or access to the corporate jet as thanks. But having my photo posted in the break room under the Employee of the Month placard would go a long way towards job satisfaction.

  Now, if the plan allowed me to track my weight, I’d tell you that I’m down ten pounds in nine days... not that you asked.

  I still miss cheese. Just not as much as I did.

  DAY FOURTEEN: We're doing a home renovation project this weekend.

  Looks like I picked the wrong month to give up drinking.

  DAY SEVENTEEN: I screw up the alarm again, this time on my way out the door to go to the grocery store after I finish at the gym. I’m still pulling out of my driveway when the police arrive. We’re going to get a bill for this soon, aren’t we? The officer who reports looks like a young Tom Cruise. He’s very nice and doesn’t call me an idiot. Out loud.