Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (34 page)

Research backs up the omission of artificial sweeteners from these food plans. Rats at Purdue University that were fed yogurt sweetened with saccharin ate more than rats that ate natural glucose, although the saccharin-eaters’ temperatures didn’t rise as much, showing less active metabolisms.
¹¹⁰
Artificial sweeteners, while containing few calories, increase hunger and stimulate insulin, messing with the body in the same way as cane sugar.

Is this why the Angry Fat Girls have relapsed so often? Or did the other items on Kay Sheppard’s prohibited food list lead us astray? I don’t use a lot of the following, but I don’t ban them, either: butter, sour cream, cream, cream cheese, dairy products over 2 percent fat, hard cheese, ricotta cheese, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, bananas, grapes, cherries, fruit juice, mangoes, popcorn, rice cakes, gum, chocolate, and caffeine.
¹¹¹

Katie would have gone to hell before breaking her McDonald’s Diet Coke habit or Starbucks Venti with skim milk, which she considered sufficient for her breakfast dairy.

One of my sponsors had found recovery by staying at Kay’s Place, Sheppard’s in-home rehab. Monica has since relapsed and gone on to another twelve-step-based food plan, but when we talked about her eighteen months of living with
The Body Knows,
¹¹²
she recalled wistfully her “beautiful, beautiful weight loss.” Monica compared Sheppard’s plan to the Bible: people take a piece of it and turn it into something so literal that you are straitjacketed into resenting everything else. “I used Crest when I was staying in Kay’s home.” She laughed. “It doesn’t say anywhere that you have to use sugar-free toothpaste.”

So why did Monica relapse? She’d been clean of sugar, flour, artificial sweeteners, and full-fat anything for more than 540 days straight. She’d lost sixty pounds. She was, more often than not, positively beaming with her new way of life.

One afternoon, at lunch with a close friend who knew about her food plan, Monica’s cell phone rang. It was her oldest friend calling to tell her she had ovarian cancer that had metastasized in her liver and kidneys. Monica spoke supportively of treatments and booked a flight to Florida the next week. She told her lunch date about the crisis, picked up her plate, and went to the buffet. It took a long time to fill her plate because first she walked around the tables grabbing things—rolls, chicken wings, brownies, cubes of cheese, onion rings, fried wontons—as quickly and furtively as possible. Then she piled her plate high and gave her friend a look that said
don’t go there
and dug in. A couple of days later, Monica walked into her very strict eating disorders group therapy session swigging from that equivalent of Pandora’s Box, a twenty-ounce bottle of Diet Coke. She shrugged at her therapist and fellow analysands and broke down in sobs that were about her friend and whether she’d get kicked out of group but not about the brownies or the Cap’n Crunch cereal she’d eaten that morning.

She never got a sustained abstinence back, she regained her weight, and she lost not all of her belief in Kay Sheppard’s food plan, but the essential spark that makes it work on a mental and physical level.

Monica may have already shot the moon running her own business that keeps her traveling, being a surrogate mother to her siblings, dealing with her own deep-seated grief at losing her mother at the age of twelve, and the death of her husband after less than a year of marriage. She may have laid all of her hormonal/neurotransmitter cards out on the table and been trumped with the news of the impending loss of her dearest friend and the extraordinary effort she would be exerting in escorting her caringly, lovingly, and with dignity from this world.

Had the promises of no cravings and an elevated mood failed in the face of sorrow and stress? And why, if that Baby Ruth candy bar has elevated my feel-good, feel-calm, feel-full serotonin levels, do I want three more?

None of the studies in addiction that I read addresses the possibility that people turn to and become dependent on sugar and refined carbohydrates because they don’t manufacture or utilize enough of those feel-good chemicals
in the first place
. This is different from trying to feel “more better.” It’s an attempt to not feel the gray monotony of a chronic depression that has dogged some of us for as long as we can remember. Our brains were broken early. We live in a state of hopelessness, being pissed off, inadequacy, anxiety. We eat to forget, to get that serotonin-endorphin-dopamine chain gang pushing down the awareness of the bare existence we feel we live in.

“Perhaps you have fewer serotonin neurons than most people. Perhaps this condition was inherited…Perhaps the factory [at the neuron of tryptophan] isn’t working well or maybe tryptophan isn’t getting to the factory in sufficient quantities,” author Anne Katherine hypothesizes from the findings of Benjamin Caballero published in the
International Journal of Obesity
.
¹¹³
Or, if I can offer a sugar addict’s observation, increasing my sense of calm and well-being is more seductive than satiation or even engorgement. I eat more in order to feel less.

Once upon a time, I lost 188 pounds, got a new job at double my previous salary, sold a book for a respectable advance, received more than respectable reviews for it, had a couple of actual, well-meaning boyfriends, and overcame my fear of sweating in the public space of a gym. I couldn’t stop crying. My psychiatrist put me on Zoloft and Wellbutrin. I weighed 150 pounds and I wasn’t eating sugar. It had been four years, in fact, since I had eaten any but naturally occurring sugars and my limited amounts of saccharin. My psychiatrist has increased the dosages as we’ve gone along, adding Klonopin when my social anxiety became clearer to both of us.

What do you do when you’ve ceased self-medicating a depression that you were born with, gone on to change some huge negatives in your life, then moved on to prescribed medication because you’re
STILL DEPRESSED
? I confess I don’t know what Joan Ifland means when she swears, “We may still experience depression after replacing reactive foods, but it will be related to a real event, and not a chemical state.”
¹¹⁴
Monica—and Katie and I, who are the Angry Fat Girls who have forsworn sugar and flour for long periods of time—ultimately reacted to real depression-spiking events the same way we did before we had twelve-step support and tools, therapists, antidepressants, and really cool clothes. The antisugar/anti–artificial sweetener pundits do not address what happens when the sugar addict gets clean, gets those transmitters firing on their own or with psycho-pharmaceutical help, and still has patches of wanting to cry all day or crises that she can only deal with by reaching for the M&M’s.

Late in January, in lieu of writing a real post on my personal blog, I copied and pasted the daily tenth step
¹¹⁵
inventory I did for my sponsor each night.

Lindsay, interested in the steps from the time she started reading about codependency, and so often the unwitting muse of this book, suggested that we all do the inventory on a closed blog. Wendy and Mimi agreed. We four had created the small phenomenon of Angry Fat Girlz and sharing how much we ate was sort of like being in a gym dressing room together—we already knew what jiggled when we were on the treadmill and what we looked like in bathing suits, so why be coy when changing our clothes? We deleted some questions that specifically pertained to my twelve-step program and added others that addressed problems we needed to work on.
¹¹⁶

I asked to include Katie in the exercise. It would be good for her, I thought, to have more community and to look at what she accomplished each day rather than at the lifelong spectrum of what she regarded as her failures. She accepted our invitation but checked in only once to compliment us on our thoroughness and to apologize that she wasn’t up to the task. I think she was frightened by giving away too much of herself and of the notes of encouragement, solace, and occasional bossiness we posted on each other’s entries. I think as well that her diffidence about the inventory was the same diffidence she had about Lindsay, Mimi, and Wendy. She could only trust one person at a time.

We shared days when our food was spot-on and days when we train wrecked. On train-wreck days, we began to see, our lives had not stopped and we had not stopped contributing to our individual communities. My dogs still got exercised, and Wendy organized the luncheon her boss was giving for the incoming dean of arts and sciences. Any one of us might have eaten Pop-Tarts, but there was clean laundry and a really good book we finished reading and offered to send off to a friend with similar interests. One of the riskiest issues in losing weight was partially absolved in those sixteen questions. We were more than what we ate. We were also hardworking, respected, loved, observant, kind, intelligent, communal, and in process. And we had friends who sympathized and gave gentle advice. I would wish the feeling of the inventory’s ongoing dialogue for anyone trying to lose weight or see themselves beyond their weight.

Sometimes we fooled ourselves a little bit. Mimi was summoned to Johns Hopkins on January nineteenth and twentieth for a series of grueling interviews that included the director of Welch Library and the director of emergency medicine, one of her areas of expertise. She knew she’d done well and in answering “What did I do for
myself
today?” she wrote that she “ordered French toast for breakfast instead of a healthy one. I just wanted it—but I left some on the plate when I was full.” Being frank about our food was to recognize what was right or wrong with it.

Our foibles revealed themselves day after day. I rarely dressed in anything but sweatpants and hairy, holey sweaters, and often didn’t bathe for two or three days. Wendy could always find something to say about feeling feminine, and if it wasn’t about how much her clothes cost it was, “my size 16 silk skirt and my size 18 jacket.” Mimi revealed the girliness that underlay her status as a wise woman: rabbits were bunnies, cats were kitties, her clinginess to anything pink. For Mimi and me, the peek into married life was fascinating if bewildering when Lindsay said she felt loved when Jalen told “me how good I looked in my workout clothes. Apparently sweaty is somehow sexy to him.”

We illustrated our entries with images from the web or photos we’d taken. It had a scrapbook quality of four women who had decided to emerge from the shelter of their weight-loss programs, weight, dress sizes, or jobs. Writing our food down made what we were doing (or not doing) real to each other and to ourselves, and it made us take our daily lives beyond our food more seriously and self-consciously. Knowing we’d sit down to tell the stories of our days made us live more in the moment. Picking up a piece of trash or listening to a friend’s boyfriend problems became more satisfying because we knew we’d write it up under “What did I do for someone else today?” We grasped at the shape of icicles or laughing babies to answer what we enjoyed that day. We also had the chance to see that we were more than the food we ate. Day by day, we had improved our worlds in small ways; we were supported by each other despite the Fritos; we could take pride in doing the laundry or calling our parents.

In anticipating the questions, we were forced to look around and be ready for the moment. It was an exercise in authenticity, and Lindsay was the most faithful writer.

Getting abstinent when I got back from Christmas in Arizona was a relief after being so out of control, but soon enough I found myself wanting a little night smackeral after the day’s frustrations of dogs, the cold, and this book.

My book was, to borrow an expression from Wendy, stuck like white trash on Velveeta. I had three dozen interviews and a few pithy quotes, and I’d written two chapters about my relapse, but now I was reduced to writing figure eights, good technical feats but hardly the crowd-pleasing triple-lutz that wins medals.

I raged about this to Lindsay in our morning phone calls. “I’m a funny writer,” I said. “I’m a personal writer. I have no credentials to give advice about this or that.”

She agreed. Those were the things that had drawn her to me through
Passing for Thin
.

“I’ve got all this crap about how regaining weight is the perfect Aristotelian tragedy. I’m gonna scrap it. That’s the only thing I know I’m going to do writingwise. What about you?”

“I need to transcribe an interview with a guy who used to be the editor of the
Texas Observer
. He had great stuff on Ann Richards. I’m working at IT today, so I can only do a little after work, but I can start.”

One of the things I admired about Lindsay and Wendy was that they didn’t binge work or binge procrastinate. They knew how to put twenty minutes on the elliptical trainer or in getting the first five minutes of an interview onto paper and then move on. I seemed to need wide blocks of time to do anything, and I approached work—writing or walking dogs—with such a pounding heart and nervous stomach that I usually took half a Klonopin in order not to jump out of my skin. I wouldn’t need chemical calm that Thursday. Deleting how spectacle and diction help make the woman who regains weight a tragic heroine wasn’t a challenge. It was merely pathetic.

Another tombstone-skied day. Lindsay called, huffing against the cold as she walked to campus. “So how cool is it that Mimi got the job?”

“I’m
so
excited for her,” I said. Mimi had emailed everyone she’d ever known the day before with the news that she’d been hired with a hefty raise by Welch Medical Library. “We should send flowers.”

“Good idea. Can you order them and let me know how much to send you?”