the weight and the loss

Once more, I have cheekbones. They’ve returned or, to be more factually accurate, they haven’t. They’ve always been there like twin hillocks hidden under the snowy cover of my adipose tissue. The spring has sprung; the snows have melted, and the cheekbones have become visible again.

Which is all a purple way of saying that I have lost weight. I have lost weight and I have done it on purpose. For the past six, almost seven, weeks, I’ve been dieting, a word I hate with passionate abandon. I have also been working out, a term I loathe for its blind punnery. We work out issues, we work out with weights, we undoubtedly work out issues whilst we work out with weights, or on the treadmill, while boxing, when we do yoga, or any number of other dumbly physical activities. But diet I have been and working out too, in several senses of the term.

I am counting calories. I use a computer program, and I dutifully enter every food, its calories and its fat content. The program tells me how many calories I’ve eaten (1,238 today) and how many grams of fat (36). When I go over my allotment in either, it flashes red. It’s very stern for being a great big fiction. Only were I to measure my sustenance out gram by gram and milliliter by milliliter would I have the truth. I can live with the fiction.

Michel Foucault’s eternal canonical life was made on his tenet that prohibition of sex created an unavoidable “incitement of discourse” about sex. The same, I’ve found, is true about dieting and food. It’s less that I want to eat everything that crosses my mind. Indeed, I seem to have commenced my diet at precisely the right moment. I felt pain; I bought cookies; I ate the cookies of pain; I felt more pain: I realized this cookie-pain chain wasn’t working any longer. I stopped; I started a diet. But if I don’t desire food in the way that led me to snowcapped cheekbones, I still nonetheless constantly think about food.

All day, every day, food is at the forefront of my mental conversation.  What I’ll eat, when I’ll eat it, how many calories it has, and how it fits with everything else I’ve eaten that day. It’s a great, big, apparently very pleasurable, puzzle that I put together each new day, all day long, because I eat four or five times a day, every three to four hours, like clockwork. It is all incredibly boring and immensely engrossing as only complex math problems can be. I carry food with me when I leave the house. I feel like a refugee fleeing her metabolism.

I once counted calories before. I was thirteen. It was the summer before eight grade and my parents had sent me to spend a few weeks with one of my father’s oldest friends in Greenwich, CT. The wife in the couple had a slight issue with control, and she saw in me yet another new project. She taught me to count calories. Each one, all day, every day. A Nilla Wafer + a banana slice + a dollop of Hershey’s = 42 calories. A bowl of cereal + skin milk + a slice of toast = 280 calories. I did a lot of math that summer. By the time I left that house, I’d lost about twenty pounds and gained valuable precision in addition.

My mother has spent her entire life counting calories. Her Chabad-Lubavitch calendar shows a cheerful image of Jewish life on top, but below every single day waits patiently until she fills it in with a number. My mother’s day isn’t complete without adding her daily food fiction and plotting these numbers in red ink, like so many little empirical stop signs. It’s what she does. She’s done it since I was old enough to recognize numbers, which is, at this point, a long time indeed.

There are two big upsides to all of this planning, adding, plotting, carrying, graphing and dieting. The first is the self-evident one. I have lost weight. I can wear jeans that I couldn’t get up over my hips a year ago. Salutations have been made to bones I’d lost and nearly forgotten: cheekbones, ribs, knees—my hipbones will be next; that will be very exciting. So there’s the weight loss part. The other thing is that when you are dieting, everything you eat is the best thing ever. It’s like going to bed and waking up   Samuel Pepys, who was always eating the best meal he ever had (when the Great Fire of  1666 threatened his home, Pepys made sure to bury with his treasures both a wheel of Parmesan and his wine, a decision I can fully endorse). Hunger, it turns out, is the best sauce for supper. Also breakfast, second breakfast, lunch and snacks.

It’s all a little weird to me, really, this sense that I’m content with the diet because, hungry or not, I am content. Odd, strange, even eldritch, but content, if mildly obsessed. I’ve been meeting my emotional needs with food for so long that to now be meeting my emotional needs with emotions (and my food needs with food) feels like speaking in a strange language. I can’t quite wrap my tongue around it, and yet there is pleasure in the process. I’ve also always felt such a wilding despair at dieting, such a resentment and such a rage, that it’s weird for me that those feelings too are gone. All I feel is that this is right and that I like avocado in my salads. Weird, but freeing.

I don’t know how long this odd détente with my appetites will endure. I almost feel as if I’m skidding along updrafts like a kite, and the drafts might keep me aloft, or they might betray me and I’ll fall, thudding gently when I hit the ground. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m learning how better to take care of my insides and my outsides, and maybe I’ve realized that cookies of pain taste not like sugar and chocolate but of ashes and loss. I’ve realized there are much better tastes to have in my mouth. Triumph is good. Pride is quite nice. And with a little soupcon of self-love, it’s even better.

Comments

[cherub]

cookies of pain - true say!

i am with you on every word here. feeling much better about myself lately as well, after dieting pretty consistently for a few months. kudos to cheekbones and better-fitting jeans.

[aag]

Oh I'm so glad you've left in the second breakfast. It's the most important meal of the day.

[Carl]

Congrats on the loss, discipline is good in moderation or moderation is good when disciplined, or else it takes over our lives. Nice to see PDT back.

[Jack B]

Glad to hear you are doing well! Post a picture!

[chelsea g.]

Thanks you all. Yeah, AAG, I don't skip meals. Especially that crucial second breakfast.

And I'm considering pictures. Maybe for my birthday in November. I want to give myself time to grow into this new shape. Nothing says Happy 47 like tasteful semi-nudes.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

[1st Republic 14th Star]

Cookies of pain -- what a powerfully descriptive phrase!

Those are Milanos, aren't they? Brussels used to be my weakness. And Pirouettes. And shortbread -- Walker's, not the low-grade stuff. And Girl Scout Cookies Thin Mints. And...

Former Class Clown, emceeing at class reunion: "And the winner for most weight gained... Homer Simpson! How did you do it Homer?"

Homer: "I discovered a meal between breakfast and brunch."

[Lilly]

Hopefully, it's not just the weight you lose but the health you gain. Count it in years, new quantities of energy, discipline, happiness, or strength. Just know that as your faithful blog reader, I will never know what you look like, but I can definitely care about your health. So, a votre sante!

[minstrel hussain boy]

do recipes and food porn writing work like sex porn when celibate? if not, look away, here's what i made for the weekend.

i started with a quart of field fresh organic strawberries. i cleaned, hulled and sliced them. i sprinkled them with raw sugar (which had been stored with vanilla husks), two tsp vanilla extract, 1 tsp almond extract, 1 oz chambord. that was covered and left to macerate in the fridge overnight. next morning i went to town on it with a hand masher and turned it into goo.

i beat 4 eggs until lemon colored, i scalded 2 cups heavy cream and 2 cups 1/2&1/2, tempered that into the eggs, 3 tbsp cake flour, added in the strawberry goo and mixed well.

froze it in the ice cream maker. the resulting ice cream is totally decadent. smooth, delightful flavor, and the mouth feel is silk. cold, icy silk.

[Lori Perkins]

The Fiction of Food for Females would make a great short story.

[m]

I wish so that we could divorce food and weight from emotions that have little to do with them. When I was younger and tragedy struck neighbors brought over food to help, so you didn't have to cook or shop. Now whenever something happens friends offer to slather my invisible wounds with Haagen Dasze. I feel like even though food has always been emotional, those emotions are changing.

I too have been dieting, feeling good about myself. Until yesterday, when I went into a shop, looked at a dressed, and the woman behind the counter said "We have that up to extra large, if you want to try it..."

I weigh 114 lbs. Suddenly, I hate food again. Why do we women do this to each other?

[Roberta]

I'm new here. That was a marvelous piece of writing.