The Inevitable Blog Post About Dieting (& more!)

Andrew and I joined weight watchers last week, and we're doing the core plan. This means that we don't have to count points or write down every morsel we put into our faces; Rather, we can eat till we're full from a select group of foods. We can eat any vegetables, healthy oils, fruits, meats, fish, tofu and the like. We may only eat whole brown rice, quinoa and other grains of that nature. If we eat dairy, it has to be non-fat. We joined a week ago tomorrow, and this week has been pretty successful. Although, I don't know how successful just yet, because I haven't been weighed. Although, I would qualify this week as a success regardless of not knowing how much (or even if) I've lost. I feel better. I ate well. It will only get better.

I'm going to do something radical now....

I weigh 248 lbs. Now don't everyone freak out. It's not a big deal either that I weigh that much, or that I'm telling you.

I've taken my NaNoWriMo bar below and turned it into a weight loss tracker. During NaNo, you watched the colored bar fill up the white space. Now, you'll watch the colored bar become empty. Well... not empty. Just smaller, as I lose weight.

248 . Top Weight.

It's interesting how people react to me around my weight. I'll never forget the day I saw my Aunt Carol after a few months time, and the very first thing she said, before even saying hello was, "I'm so upset about how you look". I think her eyes may have even become misty. That was years ago, and at this point, I would probably come up with something great to say (like, for example: "Really? I'm so upset with how you treat me." or "I'm sorry you're so upset. Maybe I should come back later when you're feeling better." or "What could you possibly hope to accomplish by saying something so hurtful? Do you think I don't know what I am, and that when you tell me what you see it all the sudden becomes clear and I'll have a change of heart and run sprinting to the fat farm?" or "You're my aunt and you're just supposed to love me. Not judge me."), but then all that happened was that I quietly scorned her.

Last week I had dinner with my parents, and I told them Andrew and I had joined, and my father said, "That makes me happier than the promotion you wanna know the truth." Verbatim. He was referring to my promotion, of course. Never mind the 50,000 words I just spent a month writing, or the fact that I felt more at home in those 50,000 words than I ever have in the pages of my writing ever before, or that I'm now more sure that writing is what I'm meant to be doing, and that I'm certain beyond a doubt that I have many, many books in me. Books that can change people and help people and do the wonderful things to people that books do when they're true and good. Dad is just happy that I joined weight watchers.

Of course, I didn't tell my father any of that, but how could I? He isn't able to concentrate long enough, it seems, to absorb things like that. Plus, it's just not so comfortable telling my parents things that feel very true to my heart. I guess anytime I let them anywhere near my heart they give it an abrupt thwack, or accidentally turn around too quickly with a big purse over their shoulder and knock all the delicate little things off the shelves. So I keep them out of there, and my delicate little things stay in one piece where I've put them. It's not that I don't want to tell them. The words come up. I begin on a train of thought that could feasibly lead me there, but I back down. I guess what I do is start the conversation off, and open the door, and wait for them to walk through it. More often than not they choose some other door off to the side and we end up talking about draperies or dehumidifiers instead. Woe.

My mother is an extreme creature. She always has been. I remember one of my Polish nannies once told me she thought my mother was "too nervous" and she asked me if I agreed. I was a kid, and understood the word nervous only to mean scared or worried. What she meant was anxious, although now that I know what she's referring to, I guess nervous is a perfect word. At the time I said, no, I don't think so. The woman just shrugged. (As much as I disliked my mother, she was still my mother, and this woman was just a Polish nanny from an agency like all the rest. I didn't like her coming into my home and judging us. All that aside, she was right.) My mother's anxiety has no limits on how it chooses to manifest, and without getting into too many of those methods of transformation, I'll say that she's developed a terrible new behavior. She chooses to... in moments.... (how to describe....)... She just becomes super affectionate all the sudden. In one particulary, please-god-drag-me-across-some-jagged-rocks-at-the-bottom-of-a-quary-
because-it-would-be-better-than-this moment, she came up behind me where I was sitting at the kitchen table, put her arms around me, and in a poetry voice said to me, "I feel so blessed to have you in my life." I responded by picking her up and tossing her through the window.

Okay, I didn't. But I did feel violent, and if I were a different sort of girl I may have pushed her or something. So, the other night over dinner, when I was gingerly opening the aforementioned doors, she called upon what I'll call "a surreptitious face of motherly pride". See, what happened was, she called up the face store before dinner, and asked for something that "looks like I'm trying to mask pride" and they gave her the face she was wearing while I started to talk about writing. It was this phony, contrived...thing... that she slipped on. It was obviously just not possible for her to listen to me and respond with decent questions that might actually get us further into something that mattered. I skimmed the surface (of the surface) of my experience of being in a cottage writing, and she put on a face that said she was so overwhelmed with motherly pride that she could hardly contain it, and then we were a happy family who shares and communicates. See how that works? I speak. She feels good about that. She lets me know without letting me know. Then everything's great. Simple! A magic formula for familyness. Brilliant. Standing O, Mom.

Next topic, they're planning to paint the apartment. I suggested color. She said no. They'll stay with bone.

This is why I don't go to dinner with them. They can go out with their friends, and they can talk about home decor, and doctors and lots of other nothing, and they can drink too much and go home happy.

One thing my mother knows better about, though, is mentioning my weight. She doesn't talk about it. It's one line she somehow knows not to cross. I wonder how that is.

Even Andrew told me he worries about my weight. Would you believe it?! I should first say that Andrew and I speak wholly candidly about our various weight concerns. I've gained more than 50 lbs since we've been together and his love/attraction/happiness with me hasn't waned in the slightest. (I guess I've been lucky that way. I've gained weight in every relationship I've ever been in and they've never said anything. Across the board. Except that idiot John who I cheated on. With his best friend. ha.)

Obviously, Andrew and I joined weight watchers together, so it's no secret that in our home and in our little family of two we make poor food choices. We're historically two food addicts of the worst fucking variety, and we're of a similar breed. We've both always been attractive, regardless of how heavy we are. We're that specific branch of fat person where it's sort of irrelevant to the people around us because of how we are as people, and because our genes handle the weight well. I have these huge tits and great hair and I'm bawdy and funny and comfortable enough so that people manage to see past it. Andrew is... well, he's him. And no one can help but adore him. Plus he's got that big-guy teddy-bear gentle-giant combo that people love to fall for. So we're kindred in that way. And what goes along with our particular breed of fat-but-it-doesn't-matter is that we each have our secret repositories, full of moments of fat-related humiliations and disappointment. Mine have made me edgier, more prickly and less forgiving of people of all varieties who are assholes on every level relative to fat or not. His have made him more tender, more compassionate.

We share these things, and we talk about them. My bagged weight-watcher-safe tuna sandwich on diet bread that my mother would pack for me to take to school in 5th grade. His traffic-cone-orange thermos filled with reconstituted skim-milk that his mother would send him off with each day. Yup. We talk about our lovers, and who we think ultimately didn't work out because of something ultimately related to our weight, and how we felt about ourselves. And we talk about how our weight affects our relationship. I once asked him if he'd still love me if I were 500 lbs. He said he believed he would, and then asked me if I would still love him if I were 500 lbs? It's probably one of the the best questions anyone's ever asked me.

So anyway, Andrew the other day said to me that he, too, worries about my weight. When I looked appalled and clutched my heart, he reminded me that I'm always begging him not to die. He's 13 years older, and it's something that concerns me. I want him to be fit and young so we can be old together. I wouldn't particularly like to wheel him around and feed him gruel and all that. So the other day, he said that I'm young now, so I'm limber and have energy, but in a few years if I stay heavy it will change. And he's right. He's right.

So here I find myself, on weight watchers. Again.

Two years ago I lost 70 lbs. I lost 70 lbs and then had sex with everyone in New York. It was an interesting time. It was a great time, actually. (I think a lot of people would chalk my behavior up to low self esteem or acting out or losing control. It was nothing of the sort. I was finally just able to be myself. It was amazing.) And at the time, I thought (and said out loud on various occasions) that I thought I would die if I ever gained it back. Well I have gained a great deal of it back, and I'm not dead. Not even close. And if nothing else, I've learned that.