Plus I was pregnant twice, and when you join that community, there is this whole galaxy of new numbers to obsess over (and to be competitive about): “That’s right—I’m already twenty-four-and-a-half weeks pregnant.” “Going to the hospital, I was dilated six centimeters and was over 70 percent effaced, but I still bravely said no epidural.” “You were able to pump just three ounces of milk this morning? Jeez, if I don’t pump at least ten, I feel like these are going to burst—!” That said (and I don’t want to be harsh), I believe that when you are twenty pounds over the weight listed on your driver’s license, police officers should be able to pull you over and give you a ticket. Thirty pounds over, this is false representation, and an actual violation; it’s like failing to report a concealed weapon or a third leg. You may as well put down that you’re the opposite gender or an entirely different species of mammal. Forty pounds over, and you should be immediately deported.
I am kidding, of course. Just a little. To tell you the truth, I have no idea exactly what I weigh these days, as I no longer own a bathroom scale. I banished it a few years ago as a conscious midlife protest against my post-boomer generation—that group of women whose chief contribution to the culture, as Judith Warner suggested in Perfect Madness—was arguably anorexia. I’m taking back the night, ladies. That’s right, I’m lifting up my Hadassah arms and chanting, “My fat body, my fat self!”
Not that I’m remotely what a team of medical judges could call fat. Even though I’m five foot eight—well, -ish. True, I have bad posture and am shrinking—probably even five foot seven is a stretch. Anyway, even though I’m taller than the average American woman (five foot four), I’m sure I must weigh less than the average American woman (162.9 pounds). Just in case, though, to hold myself in check, I keep a couple of pairs of jeans on the floor of my closet like loaded guns that I eye warily, knowing that at any moment I could disturb my equilibrium by trying to pull them on. I don’t try to pull them on, ever, but the threat is there.
Anyway, I’m not too worried because I’ve cobbled together a pretty reliable weight-control regimen based on my four-decade survival of Pritikin (briefly), Atkins, the Zone Diet, South Beach, and even the marvelous seventies diet Ed McMahon espoused called “martinis and whipped cream” (where you can have all the steak, butter, and gin you want, but no carb-filled carrots). Of course, now, thanks to my rigorous training, I can have carbs, too, in moderation (cue light wrist slap).
The secret to getting things back on track (if they’ve gotten off) is to eat just one meal a day. How I do it (when I am doing it) is to ingest nothing but coffee (with milk) starting from the time I get up in the morning until the clock reaches the magical number 5. (Am I sometimes tempted to sleep till noon to shrink the window until cocktail hour? Sure.) At 5:00 P.M., I slowly and mindfully break my fast, although as you can imagine I’m pretty hungry by 5:00, so before dinner along with wine and some artisanal slicings of cheeses, I may enjoy some olives and two or three chunks of salami and just a bit of sourdough baguette (it is eyed very warily and very sternly as judicious pieces are ripped off).
Meanwhile, if I’m going to take a brush to my own canvas here, and begin idly sketching across the white space, I think of my weight as being an entity that generally exists in the 140s, within which 142 feels trim-ish (really, I’d like to weigh 138, but at this point I’m only going to get there via a light bout of hepatitis), 145 is profoundly depressing, and a terrifying reading of 147.9 (I used to have a digital scale that measured tenths of a pound) is practically a reason to leap off a bridge, although clearly the gigantic cannonball when I hit the water may well cause cataclysmic local flooding reminiscent of an action movie by Jerry Bruckheimer.
Because for me the spectrum from nirvana to cataclysm exists within a ten-pound range, as opposed to Mr. Y’s more grandiose fifty-pound spread, I could never do what he did at the eco-spa, aka leap onto a scale fully clothed right in the middle of a huge dinner.
Because I myself am very careful and superstitious about when, how, and why I choose to step onto a scale. I would like some lead time first—at least two weeks—to fast and pray and prepare myself. Possibly some somber journaling would be involved, past-life Reiki sessions with a Buddhist nun, and/or a forty-eight-hour silent retreat. I want to be mindful about my intentions regarding the spiritual journey I intend to go on vis-à-vis seeing a dreaded actual number (absolution? redemption? punishment?).
I would like to perform the act first thing in the morning, in the darkness of dawn, say, before ingesting any solids or liquids or even air. To this end, preparation may be required: several preliminary trips to the bathroom to ensure total drainage, careful drying of hair (if a shower is taken, which I think sometimes adds weight, dewy moisture), the removing of a gold chain around my neck or other such poundage-increasing items such as a hair scrunchie or ring.
Also I think, as with the high jump, one’s scale work benefits from a careful and well-thought-out physical approach, from the left, from the right, straight on, counterclockwise, a few small steps and then one leap, or perhaps many long steps and then sort of gingerly oozing onto it so as not to wake the monster waiting below. There may also be consideration as to how the scale is positioned à la north, south, east, and west because of magnetic polarities.
• • •
THAT SAID, I have been working out hard now for almost five weeks, so I’m quite curious about the amazing metrics of my new rock-star body.
Because of my new musculature, including my greatly strengthened lats, it’s hard to tell from my clothing, which is not terribly loose, how much weight I’ve dropped. I am thinking this is a time when the only way you can measure concrete results is to track your actual weight loss.
So I exhale deeply to get all the air out of my lungs, I step onto the locker-room scale—it’s one of those old-school Detectos—and move the bottom weight to the left as I customarily do, to 100, causing the top arm immediately to seesaw up with its usual jailhouse-door-slamming sound. With a vague, breezy sweeping motion I slide the little weight to the right, through the twenties, thirties, forties, and . . . and . . . and . . . ? The weight is all the way to the right; if it went any farther it would actually fall off the Detecto—
And the top arm doesn’t budge.
For a moment, as if in a paralyzingly complex high-school lab experiment, I literally can’t process what I’m seeing. If the little weight is all the way over and the top arm doesn’t budge from where it’s slammed all the way up . . . ?
In dawning horror, I do something I’ve never done before. After sliding the little weight back to the left again, in slow motion, like a whipped dog I chunk the bottom weight from 100 to 150. Still the top arm remains grimly affixed, metal on metal. After cautiously pushing the little weight to the right, with fussy, feathery, erratic motions akin to blowing a child’s fragile sailboat across a lake, when the little weight hits 7½ or even possibly 8 (but I think what I’m going to call it is 7½), the top arm finally relents and wobblingly floats down. A hair.
By my calculations—and I could be wrong—the scale reads . . .
What is it—207½? 302½? No, no, no.
What?
157½.
I must hack off a limb immediately.
THE CULPRIT can’t be my failure to exercise, given my Kettlebelling so frenetically and all those reverse Kegels.
It can’t be my eating habits, which are—essentially—the same. The exception is that some carbs—like rye toast, for Pete’s sake, a single slice of rye toast!—have been allowed. As per my trainer’s advice!
But egad, the list of things I haven’t eaten: pizza, birthday cake, Chinese food—my God, Chinese food is the most fattening stuff on the planet! Even with Mexican food you may see a piece of lettuce somewhere, and with Italian food you may see an actual tomato. Chinese food has no unmolested vegetable. Chinese food is like the baccarat table. If you’re even going to set foot in a Chinese restaurant, it’s like a five-thousan
d-calorie minimum (“Oh, and have you had the ten-thousand-calorie shrimp?”).
For a wild moment I consider blaming it on the fact that half the TVs at Equinox are increasingly turned to the Food Network. Bobby Flay, Giada, Big Daddy. Everyone is melting butter, grating Parmesan, sloshing in olive oil, dicing pancetta. The Barefoot Contessa practically cannot get into her summery backyard picnic tent. Did you see that episode where, holding a fudge brownie crowned with vanilla-bean gelato, she actually capsized backward into that tent?
The point being, unless I am prepared to refinance for thirty years fixed at a 10 percent higher weight, things are going to have to change. Really change.
The culprit must be menopause.
So I turn to my stack of menopause books. Wasn’t there a special menopause diet book? Okay. Here it is: Menopause Reset!: Reverse Weight Gain, Speed Fat Loss, and Get Your Body Back in 3 Simple Steps.
Game on! Pilot pen out.
Menopause Reset! promises—thank God—a nutritional miracle cure for that mysterious spare beach floaty that arrives after forty. Menopause Reset! contains some startling, amazing information, all of which is new to me. To wit: When a forty-something woman begins to notice weight gain, her first instinct might be to panic and to start denying herself. But no! Wrong! Things have changed! Your metabolism is now so slow that even if you literally fast, your body will go into such a hysterical shutdown “I am starving!” mode that the weight will continue to fly on. I still remain bewildered that Demi Moore, while depressed about Ashton Kutcher, drank champagne from morning to night and continued to become ever more skeletal (which I know thanks to Equinox TV). Champagne is carbs! It’s as though Demi Moore loses weight and I put her weight on, via some kind of Stephen Hawking–type wormhole.
The secret, then, is to eat many tiny meals constantly, like every two hours. But alas, in the horrible new metrics of midlife, each of the following (what the—?!) constitutes a meal:
MEAL NO. 1 (8 A.M.):
2 tsp. nonfat yogurt
MEAL NO. 2 (10 A.M.):
3 almonds (unsalted)
MEAL NO. 3 (12 P.M.):
2 oz. low-fat barley soufflé (see Appendix D)
MEAL NO. 4 (2 P.M.):
small bell pepper
1 tsp. flaxseed
Eaugh! There is no help for it but to go to the pile of books in the garage and pull out my old tried-and-true Zone Diet, by Dr. Barry Sears.
Because I know dining at home will not be harmonious if I face a lean chicken breast while Mr. Y tucks into a massive tureen of cheesy lasagna, I request that Mr. Y try it—or some form of it—with me.
“A diet?” he asks warily. “What kind of diet is it?”
“It’s not too punishing,” I say. “It’s mostly about cutting out starches like rice and bread.”
“Oh!” he said. “Then I’m fine. Look at this breakfast—totally healthy.” He is stirring honey into some strawberry yogurt, into which he has mashed a banana.
“We-e-e-elll,” I say. “It’s just that—”
“What?” he stops. “It’s low-fat yogurt. Does it have to be nonfat?”
“No, no, no, honey,” I say. “I have to double-check, but I’m pretty sure a banana is off the glycemic index. And honey. And strawberry yogurt because the fruit has carbs. There is just this weird list of, like, carrots and bananas and butternut squash that are glycemically verboten.”
Mr. Y’s stirring movements become jerky with barely contained rage. “What?” he snarls. “Give me that book!”
He returns an hour later. He admits, to his own surprise, to being very impressed with all the science involved, including a lengthy section parsing glycemic indexes that I myself have never in my life been able to get through.
Game on!
WE ARE off to our local Whole Foods. Adjacent to the death star of the Equinox, ours is the largest Whole Foods west of the Mississippi, with two escalators and its own hemp clothing boutique.
The bins of quinoa beckon. The wheatgrass juicer hums.
We push our middle-aged noses eagerly forward into the organucopia.
“Omega-3-enhanced flax!” Mr. Y exclaims.
“Nonfat Swiss cheese!” I cry out.
“Tofu smart wings!” he says in awe.
“OMG,” I breathe. “Look at this! Here it is, finally—zero-calorie, zero-carb noodles!”
This appears to me to be a giant breakthrough in Western civilization.
I mean, after literally decades of dieting, I do happen to know that whatever diet you’re on, be it Cave Man or South Beach or Weight Watchers or Zone or even Ed McMahon’s “martinis and whipped cream” diet, you can’t eat pasta. Pasta is consistently out. And I love pasta.
But if we can split the atom now and enjoy carbohydrate- and even calorie-free pasta? Weighing a mean and lean 125 pounds? This will be almost too easy!
We cart home all our amazing treasures. Thanks to modern technology, Cajun seasoning, and a chain of mysterious Whole Foods mini-agribusinesses, we can now start building our own entire, separate, gastronomic zero-carb Shadow Kingdom empire.
I lay out my sassy new collection of nonfat cheeses. There is nonfat Swiss and nonfat cheddar and nonfat pepperjack and something arrestingly called nonfat Mexican Blend. I find that, if you squint your left eye a little when you bite into it, it does taste pretty cheesy. Kinda. Sure, to be fair this cheese does not melt—one hour in the oven and it looks less melted than vaguely perturbed, as if it would like to break out into a sweat but it can’t, because of the Botox.
But no matter. Cheese! We’re eatin’ cheese!
And it’s not only cheese. How about some nummy mashed potatoes? Okay, it’s actually pureed cauliflower with just a plop of nonfat ricotta. And some nonfat Greek yogurt. But still virtually the same.
Mr. Y comes up with his own innovations. With the careful precision of a surgeon, he takes some tofu-based smart wings, towels off the nasty red sauce, and combines them with fairly thinly sliced portobello mushrooms. Mix it all with Greek yogurt, and you’ve got something that approaches beef Stroganoff! All this goodness goes on a hillock of shirataki mushroom noodles—just twenty-five calories, people: twenty-five!
It is true that these zero-calorie noodles, when heated, exude a liquid that smells fishy, and that they are oddly springy in texture. Sauce doesn’t adhere but rather slips and sluices off, as though the noodles—like frightened amphibians with sperm tails twitching—are trying to swim away.
Who cares if witty people like Merrill Markoe feel that these “noodles” taste like “heavy water”? Or if the Pulitzer Prize–winning food critic, Jonathan Gold, says about shirataki: “That’s why the Japanese call it the devil’s foot jelly”?
I say fine. As long as it’s not a fat foot.
MR. Y and I believe we are geniuses. We have discovered El Dorado. We have become one of those couples who tell everyone about their amazing diet—the delicious innovative meals we are making, and how we are never hungry. Mr. Y is dreaming of inventing a pizza crust out of zero-carb seitan—if you don’t know what seitan is, walk away. We are going to write a cookbook! We are going to build an app! We are going to be zillionaires!
Herewith, in handy tear-out format, is a short list from our new miracle cookbook:
Pastaless Lasagna! (It’s done with eggplant)
Meatless Beef Stroganoff! (It’s done with tofu chicken wings)
Mashed Faux-tatoes! (It’s all about pureed cauliflower, my friends, all about pureed cauliflower)
Sans-Souci Asian Noodles! (Never mind if they are made of wheat flour and algae and taste like a foot—throw on some basil and mint leaves)
Double Down My Deviled Eggs! (It’s all about pureed cauliflower, my friends, and mustard and scallions and then again pureed cauliflower)
Holy Christ! This 30-Calorie Portobello Mushroom with Nonfat Feta Cheese and Capers Is So Damned Filling I Literally Never Want to Eat Food Again, and I Mean It! (No further explanation needed)
Egg-
White Omelet with Scallions AGAIN?! It’s Christmas!
Deviled Egg–Like Things—did I say this already?
Sort of an Omelet!
We begin to notice now how we are starting to use a dollop of Greek yogurt as a garnish for everything. I lotion it into my heels, I rub some into scratches in our wooden floors, I put some into the choleric Volvo—and it has never run better!
A WONDERFUL thing occurs. I am fat-friended! By Isabel, busily improving our lives via computer once again. Yes, the missive is rather generic in tone—“Hello Sandra, I’m using Lose It!, a free Web site to help me lose weight. I’d like to add you as a friend so we can see each other’s progress using Lose It! Once you set up your free account, you can start using Lose It! too!” Yes, I know it is suggesting that I am fat. But I have been friended by someone my own age! Fat-friended but friended nonetheless! Maybe this social networking thing has an upside after all.
Loseit.com turns out to be this handy free Web site where you can track your weight, calorie consumption, and amount of time spent exercising until that glorious moment 4 or 16 or 47 or 112 weeks later when you reach your goal weight.
Because fat friends can constantly check one another’s pages, they can keep one another accountable for what they eat. Nice! Here is a brand-new midlife pick-me-up. Put it right up there with refinancing (and hey, where’s my digital pedometer?)! I go on loseit.com immediately, so eager am I to log my breakfast.
In case you have not joined the magical world of fat friends and hence somehow missed my posting, let me review. Two Thursdays ago, around 10:17 A.M., I had one-third of a cup of nonfat Greek yogurt, okay? A half of a small Gala apple cut into it, and, yes, people, because I know it’s good for you, although I don’t remember why, a tablespoon of flaxseed. For a total—bing! loseit.com instantly totaled it up for me—of 133 calories.
You have to admit, a pretty impressive breakfast. I thought it looked pretty great on the page. I hated to add anything to my entry. So I didn’t.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 10