Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (24 page)

My doctor seemed to appreciate Dad’s information, saying he hadn’t given it much thought. I should have wondered what, exactly, doctors knew, in the early 1990s, about obesity. Wasn’t anybody comparing lipids, investigating how the two heads of Janus connect?

The principles underlying extreme dieting are rapid success and simplicity: either don’t eat, or eat anything and get rid of it. The common denominator between it and the more reasonable plans the five Angry Fat Girls have succeeded with is simplicity. In looking over the
Consumer Reports
and
Medical News Daily
lists, I’m struck by how much research and expense a follower of some of the other plans has to go to. Ornish and Perricone have each published eight books and Barbara Rolls has two Volumetric books to her credit.

If you want to be overwhelmed, try researching the Atkins diet. Robert Atkins published over a dozen low-carb guides and the Atkins Health and Medical Information Service has followed up with numerous others.

For each plan, there are cookbooks and journals, Internet bulletin boards and chat rooms, branded products and special services, making them as expensive as a hospital fast or the diet groups, each of which has its own books, products, and services. Cooking can be complicated, especially in a family where not everyone is participating. The Zone has come up with a solution. The Zone Seattle, for instance, will, for twelve hundred dollars a month, deliver three meals and two snacks to your door each day, removing the sticky problem of choosing what Zone recipe to make that will also feed your eight-year-old.

This explains some of the popularity of Nutrisystem (which delivers fix-yourself meals for around three hundred dollars a month), the Diet Center (based on lots of supplements, “fat burning appetite suppressing thermogenics,” and à la carte meal makings for which an entrée is about two dollars per serving), and Weight Watchers (which has gone in for snacky stuff available at the grocery store and a tie-in deal with Applebee’s).

None of the Angry Fat Girls is rolling in money, nor do we have excess time for intense shopping, preparation, appointments, or research.

One day, a fellow blogger, Cherry, was considering going out to buy Bob Greene’s new book. Instead, she decided to make a list of all the diet “loot” (books and DVDs) she has around the house, exclusive of specialty diet cookbooks. This is what she came up with.

Cherry’s library isn’t special, but she is for having broken it down:

And so, not having the patience to learn ourselves into a Pilates body, and having tried other methods and found ourselves ill, gaining weight, or white-knuckling, we’ve settled on what is familiar.

The
Consumer Reports
panel says that familiarity does not breed contempt: “Since variety stimulates the appetite, the more monotonous your diet, the less you’ll eat.”
⁶³
Some experts recommend that dieters have stock meals twice a day and vary the menu for the third.
⁶⁴
I nodded when I read that. I eat from one of four grains at breakfast and almost always the same lunch.
⁶⁵
I have seen this in Lindsay, Mimi, and Katie’s menus, too. Breakfast and lunch are “deadline” meals, with obligations looming. Lindsay and Mimi often pack their lunches, which have limitations that encourage repetition. Lindsay and Jalen trade off cooking dinner, while Mimi and I shop and cook in volume over the weekend. Our dinners are often the same thing several nights running.

Mimi was the blogging cook among us. Her recipe for Crock-Pot steel-cut oats has gotten the most hits of any topic she has posted (more than four thousand in its first ten months).
⁶⁶
When Mimi blogs about her Sundays in the kitchen, I’m tempted to propose marriage—especially because the food she makes is shy of sugar and flour and has those nifty Weight Watchers points accounted for. The backbone of her week’s menus falls back on certain dishes: black bean and corn salad, edamame bean salad, applesauce, pudding/yogurt, her famous sweet potato and apple casserole, and ground-turkey spaghetti sauce.

Weight Watchers wasn’t always that way. Mimi’s first experience, over thirty years ago, had no variation in the meals participants were required to fix for themselves. “I asked for a Weight Watchers membership as my college graduation present. I followed it religiously for a year. That was in the days when you had to eat liver once a week, but I did it. I lost seventy-five pounds.”

It was Mimi’s first and last experience of shopping in the misses’ sections.

Wendy reposted her profile on Match.com, Yahoo!, and Craigslist, and heard from a string of men who made her snicker even as they pissed her off. One man wrote that he was sixty-five years “young.” Another asked her to go on a ten-mile bike ride—but his profile stated that he weighed 130 pounds and didn’t want to date a woman who weighed more than 140 pounds. She had specified her age requirements as being within five years of her forty-seven and put up several recent photos of herself, clearly weighing far more than 140 pounds. Were these guys mass emailing every new posting without looking at profiles? Such indiscriminate responses stripped her of all the special-ness—her sense of humor, her wide cultural interests, her willingness to take on new challenges like swimming and jewelry-making, her red hair, green eyes, and great smile—that she had carefully crafted in her profiles.

Mimi and I began getting twice-a-day phone calls on weekends from Wendy, who assumed we’d be home. It made me curse cell phones. They’re scalpels to someone who likes silence, and most weekends I was boarding a dog and writing. Mimi, Katie, and I disliked Saturday night as much as any single woman, but we were more catholic in our unhappiness. We wished we had a best girlfriend who lived nearby to go to the movies with or that we were more motivated to go to the movies alone; we were stressed and tired from our weeks, which added to the lack of motivation; we enjoyed most of our weekend until Saturday night crept up on us, a purgatory we had pretty much forgotten in the intervening seven days. I disliked them because I was so often in prison with a second dog that was suffering homesickness. Prison is not good for my eating. I start to feel like I deserve instant gratification because there’s no other gratification I can get away for. For me, food
is
instant gratification.

And yes, too often we have felt we deserve something for being alone. And too often we’ve gone grocery shopping and brought home either legal-but-lethal or criminal
⁶⁷
food. But we didn’t take our Saturday nights alone as personal failures. “I hate not being very important to someone,” Wendy told me when I congratulated her on a second half-hour visit to the gym at seven thirty on a frosty November Saturday night. “I know I’m not unimportant, and it’s just a night out of the weekend. But…” She sighed heavily. “Not a word from the Invisible Man. I don’t get why he wants to go to this Thanksgiving thing. He says I should be dating other guys, that he’s too busy to call me, so what’s the point? Is he that desperate for a meal?”

“I dunno, honey. I’m not in a place right now where I can deal with men. You’ve been hurt twice, badly, in the last year. You might feel better if you didn’t date for a while.”

Lindsay, Mimi, and I kept making the point that until she was comfortable enough to make herself happy, she wasn’t going to “find” happiness in a man. Wendy knew this—intellectually. Then the cycle would start over. For her, Thanksgiving brought the threat of candles glowing in every Williamsburg window, fairy lights on High Street, and miles of pine boughs and red velvet ribbons.

“It sucks to live in a place that’s famous for Christmas,” she complained. “You can’t leave the house without seeing couples, couples, couples. Parties, parties, parties.”

“I live in New York,” I said. “I know what it’s like, believe me. At six o’clock at night, it seems like everyone is dressed up in black velvet party dresses and high heels and furs, stepping into town cars. I’m schlepping back from the last dog of the day in sweatpants and a camouflage flap hat and haven’t showered in two days. It’s a hard time. You just have to make
your
night to dress up and be one of the lucky people. It doesn’t have to be for a guy, you know.”

“I know. But when I was a kid, and even now, I feel more rejected at Christmas. I always identified with
A Charlie Brown Christmas
: ‘I know nobody likes me. Why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?’”

I wasn’t surprised to read in her blog the next day that she ordered a pizza. “It was low fat,” she wrote. Mimi called me on Sunday night to tell me the upshot of my attempt to assure Wendy she could find or invent an occasion befitting Williamsburg’s glories. “She said it was a tiny pizza. Smaller than a dinner plate and no more than 660 calories. Then she felt sick afterwards.”

“Ah,” I said. “The old ‘It was good to be reminded of that feeling’ justification. Right up there with ‘I got the craving out of my system.’”

“And ‘I threw the last part away,’” she added.

“Along with ‘I’ll skip breakfast tomorrow.’”

“Don’t forget ‘At least it’s out of the house.’” We snickered and went on to discuss the annual what-do-I-get-my-parents-for-Christmas dilemma.

Sometimes the best way to pull out of a food tailspin is to get a new bee in our bonnets, one we feel we have more control over and that will distract us from the desire to eat. Wendy is a champion at that.

Don’t get me wrong: any one of us could be be obsessing over one thing or another at any moment. The difference is that we get through manias—Katie devotes herself to the latest television show or social networking website like a compass stuck at true north, Mimi replants her tiny herb garden according to each full-moon candle spell, I had an eBay quest at least every other month, Lindsay checks job listings at the Association of Higher Education several times a day. A mania lasts a week or a month and then it’s over. You can, with effort, limit it, the way Mimi and I played too many dumb computer games when we didn’t want to think—one of the addict’s best options to avoid using her drug of choice. Obsession, on the other hand, is static, a constant and clawing state of mind, another symptom of holes in the psyche. Obsessions and manias are invaluable signs of where and how incomplete is the ego.

Wendy shopped. Each change in her body was a reason to get more, stretching her finances another centimeter they could barely accomodate. Every other post she wrote for her blog discussed trying to deal with the bins and piles of clothes in what could have been her dining room. She was a Goldilocks who couldn’t decide what fit.