CHAPTER 12
I Should Know Better By Now
After losing 150 pounds, I felt like a dieting genius. Some days I felt so disciplined that it could rain chocolate chips like hail and I wouldn’t bother catching the candies in my mouth. Other days, I wouldn’t have minded the hail damage if it meant I had an excuse to devour a downpour of chocolate.
In May, just a month before I moved out, I had thoroughly searched the refrigerator for some cheese sticks, looking under every square packet of ketchup we’d seized from fast food restaurants. I couldn’t find a speck of grated Parmesan, never mind an entire stick of mozzarella for my lunch bag. My mother or brother had probably eaten the last piece and hadn’t told me. By three o’clock in the afternoon I was starving and ready to chomp on the chipboard laminate of my desk, so I decided to walk to the vending machine on the far side of the building instead.
The dieting gods might have been on my side when the vending machine down the hall from our office broke at the beginning of the year. The Snickers bars did seem to snicker at me as I walked to the ladies’ room. My mother was hiding her ice cream under the frozen green beans at home, but I couldn’t expect my coworkers to place a black veil over the vending machine’s glass. After it stole one too many quarters from the employees, the malfunctioning machine was hauled off and never replaced.
However, there was another vending machine two floors down on the other side of the building. I didn’t think it sold cheese sticks, but at least I would burn ten or twenty calories walking there. Out of all the sugar-soaked, carbohydrate-crammed items available, the animal crackers seemed to be the best choice. I dropped my eighty cents into the slot, entered my selection into the keypad, and ... my crackers were pulled into a hostage situation with a dull wire coil. Ever since I saw an episode of The West Wing that claimed more people are killed each year by vending machines than by wolves, I’d been hesitant to rock or shake a machine to get an item. So, I inserted another eighty cents to get my crackers. As a bonus I also got the item that was right behind them: the Chips Ahoy Chocolate Chip Cookies.
It wasn’t just raining chocolate chips, it was raining chocolate-chip cookies.
I ripped open the plastic bag and scarfed the cookies before I could find time to wonder how long they’d been sitting behind the herd of crackers. I could have left the cookies in the bin as a random act of kindness (unless the next customer was dieting too, in which case it would be a random act of meanness). But my philanthropic side was caught in a headlock with the money-conscious part of my brain, the part that had gotten me out of debt after two years of scrimping and saving. I didn’t even know what “scrimping” meant, but I had done it. I couldn’t deal with the fact that I would have wasted eighty entire cents if I didn’t eat the cookies. I had an amazing ability to rationalize things I knew I shouldn’t be doing.
If I had been prepared enough to bring breakfast, or if I’d had time before work to buy something to eat, I would never have gone to the vending machine in the first place. It was a chain reaction that started in the morning when I skipped breakfast and ended with a three-car pileup in front of the vending machine. The only real crash was the very real sugar crash I experienced an hour later. I was relieved I hadn’t eaten my desk because I really wanted to take a nap on it. I felt crappy when I ate crap, not just from the guilt but from the food’s effect on my body. It was difficult to remember how good I felt until I wasn’t feeling that good. I needed the contrasts to remember.
Around the same time, boxes of cookies started showing up in the pantry of our house. When my mother decided to move to a two-bedroom apartment several years after the divorce, she had to clean out the attic, the basement, the two-car garage, the shed, the workshop, and the patio, sort through all the junk my father had left behind, and sell all the major appliances. After purging our possessions, she needed to binge. I would never be so cruel that I’d ask someone to stop buying chocolate, but I did ask her to keep it out of my sight. I had accepted I was weak willed when it came to certain foods; I just had to work around it. If I opened the freezer to unexpectedly stare down a tub of mint chocolate ice cream, it was like being mugged on the way to work. I wasn’t expecting a battle, but now I had to put up a fight, dig fingernails into flesh. Most people recommend that you don’t fight off muggers, just give them your wallet. Typically I wouldn’t put up much of a fight with the ice cream either.
One day she left a package of Oreos on the shelf right above our garbage can. I snacked on two cookies in the short amount of time it took to turn over the blue plastic package and realize I’d just consumed seventy calories. That was more than a serving of my light yogurt, inhaled in less than a minute. I experienced the food equivalent of buyer’s remorse, though I resisted the urge to toss my cookies.
Policemen are trained not to draw their guns unless they are prepared to use them. I decided I wouldn’t bring any food into the house unless I was prepared to eat it.
It was strange living on my own again. I was a loner, but I still got lonely or bored sometimes. And here I was. Alone. In the apartment. With all the food. The only barrier between my newly decorated living room and the kitchen was a counter with bar stools. It took only six steps to grab a bowl of sugar-free pudding and two containers of fat-free vanilla yogurt topped with generous helpings of Go Lean Crunch. It was slightly reassuring that I pigged out on diet pudding instead of a pint of ice cream, but I’d still overeaten. I don’t think those six steps burned off even a sixth of the calories I consumed. The food didn’t fill the emptiness inside, either. I needed to keep busy. I could dress up my garden gnomes on the windowsill in Barbie clothes and put on a drag show for my She-Ra action figures. I could just go be bored on the trail instead of in my kitchen. Or I could attempt to accept that it was okay to feel alone or sad sometimes and that I didn’t need to bury my face in a bowl of pudding to suffocate the feelings. I liked the sound of the drag show better.
The kitchen was also home to a dangerous appliance—the breadmaker. Years earlier when my mother had bought the white, rectangular box that hogged valuable real estate on the kitchen counter, I had laughed. I didn’t see the point of buying a machine to make something that you could buy for a couple of dollars at the grocery store. But when I started dieting, I started making a loaf of whole grain bread every weekend. My mother was now the one laughing. The scent of freshly baked bread was better than any air freshener. I would snack on warm slices before the loaf had even cooled down.
I ate a lot of slices. Actually, I’d eat a whole loaf in a weekend. Whole grains can be good for you, but eating a toaster-size block of bread every weekend is probably too much of a good thing. When I lived with my family, they’d eat about a third of the loaf, but when I moved out I was doing all the digesting. Each time I told myself I wouldn’t eat the whole thing, and then I’d do it anyway.
After the closing, my mother’s Realtor gave her some gifts: bread, that the house may never know hunger; salt, that life may always have flavor; and wine, that joy and prosperity may reign forever. I don’t know what she did with the salt, but she kept the wine and gave me the Hawaiian sweet bread mix. I did own the bread machine after all. I poured the powder into the metal mixing pan and then clicked it into the belly of the appliance. I would bake the bread and give it back to my mother. Of course I would. I was doing her a favor.
After my third slice, I decided I needed to evict the remaining bread from the apartment. Wrapping the loaf in a thin plastic produce bag and tying it firmly shut with a knot, I grabbed my car keys and hustled downstairs to the parking lot as if the bag’s contents would explode at any moment. With a click of a button on my key ring, the trunk popped open and I tossed the bread into the back, next to my milk crate of spare oil and fix-a-flat. I slammed the trunk shut, imprisoning my great temptation so I wouldn’t find myself idly cutting off a slice while it sat on the counter.
Then I left my car at the dealership across town.
I’d have to
walk ten miles to eat the bread, which was just as likely as flying to Hawaii for a loaf. I hadn’t intended to move it across town, but when my car stalled out at a stop sign, I left it overnight to be inspected and forgot about the bread. I didn’t want to view food as dangerous, but there was no denying that some foods overrode the center of my brain that told me to stop eating when I was full. Normally my eating habits were similar to the action of the conveyor belt in the checkout line of the grocery store. It automatically scrolled forward until a box of oatmeal or a can of olives broke the infrared beam to stop the motion. Normally I would stop eating when the beam was tripped and I was full. When I ate bread, the beam in my mind didn’t get tripped, and I wanted to keep eating and eating even though I knew I should switch off the conveyor belt shoving food into my mouth. I just couldn’t find the off switch.
When I mentioned my bread problem on my blog, a reader named Ros came up with a brilliant solution that was obvious in its simplicity. “I keep it in the freezer and pop it in the toaster when I want it.” Why hadn’t I thought of that? Now I could eat bread that didn’t smell like antifreeze.
At the end of a long day, I dropped my purse in the hallway and entered the kitchen to feed my cat. I wondered if he’d noticed that I’d lost weight. There sure was less of me to curl up on. His tail started twitching as I peeled back the metal lid of his wet food. He kept poking his nose into the can as I scooped out the ground-up bits of animals that I didn’t want to know the names of. I scraped all around the edges and whacked the remaining sticky clumps into the bowl with a few thumps.
And then I licked the spoon.
It was only when the meaty mess was sticking to the top of my mouth that I realized what I had done. All those years of licking the beaters clean of cake mix and scooping up wads of chocolate-chip cookie dough on the sly must have created an automatic response in my brain. I’d run down a well-beaten path in my neural pathways that said: Serve food, lick spoon.
Since it was already in my mouth, I figured I might as well swallow. This is a philosophy that I apply only to food. Surprisingly, the cat food didn’t taste that bad. But I wasn’t going to be making any cat food pâté recipes either. At least I had bought the diet variety.
I wondered how many other food choices in my life were made when I was on autopilot. There had been times when I’d grabbed a peppermint candy out of a dish on a receptionist’s counter simply because it was there. I would usually finish all the food on my plate whether I was still hungry or not. When I ate at an Italian restaurant with my family, I told myself that just because the server put food in front of me didn’t mean I had to eat it. Then I’d hide a slab of garlic bread in my stomach for safekeeping. I considered sneaking excess food onto my companions’ plates when they weren’t looking or throwing it at other patrons who were yapping on their phones too loudly.
At least I had a reasonable explanation for snacking on Savory Salmon with Hairball Control. It would have been a stretch convincing anyone it was an accident when I pigged out on an entire batch of apple cinnamon muffins. They were made with Splenda, which has zero calories but not zero guilt. Sitting at work, staring at the glare on my monitor, I thought, “I’m going to make muffins when I get home and eat far too many of them.” And then I did. At least I had follow-through.
After I ate my muffins, I lay in bed with the painful feeling of being too full. I wished I was just at my goal already. Then a binge like this wouldn’t be as bad. The muffins would have the same amount of calories whether I weighed 220 pounds or 160, but if I were just under my goal weight it would be like dipping into my savings account to pay for a shopping splurge instead of accumulating more calorie debt. The temporary pleasure was gone, leaving remorse to be sucked into the vacuum it created in my conscience. The muffins had tasted good going down, the apple chunks juicy yet crispy, the cinnamon and Splenda sweet and delicious. But now I didn’t feel so good. I thought I might throw up, from binging or from self-disgust, I wasn’t sure.
It was as if a child had grabbed my hand and was using it to smack my face repeatedly while chanting, “Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?” I should just get over it already. I was doing so well the other 95 percent of the time. Focusing on the 5 percent that I screwed up was like getting upset that I didn’t have a perfect SAT score. I couldn’t change the past, and I didn’t live in the future. I could control only the here and now. It sounded good in theory. Now if I could only get myself to live this Zen philosophy.
I wasn’t a 100 percent perfect dieter. No one was. If I fell out of bed, I wouldn’t call myself a failure at sleeping. I’d get up and make a note to sleep toward the middle of the bed. My mother liked to say I was a work in progress. It was hard to progress if you were always perfect.
It was also hard to progress if you were in a weight plateau. I hated the word plateau. It was hard to spell. Didn’t the French fear a vowel shortage? My weight loss had followed a boom and bust cycle in the past. I frequently lost a lot of weight the week of my period and then held steady for the next three weeks. Then I’d descend again around the next time of the month. Now I was just stalled.
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.1 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.2 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 willin
g 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.3 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.
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