I Regret Nothing: A Memoir

by Jen Lancaster

Making judgment calls as a mom or dad has to be the toughest job in the world, especially with us childfree types on the sidelines, quietly judging.

  I’m so sorry if I’ve inadvertently contributed to anyone else having regrets.

  Because, honestly, what do I know about raising kids? I can barely discipline my dogs. (But I do keep my opinions off everyone’s Facebook page, so there’s that.)

  Anyway, I’m planning to eat some Yoplait between now and my trip. I’ll use the lids to make medals, like they did on The Office in the Olympics episode. Should I complete this event, I’d also appreciate if someone were to craft a crown of wildflowers and ivy leaves. I don’t know who or how, but again, I’m putting that out there à la The Secret.

  Probably won’t happen.

  I’d request that the girls carry me on their shoulders like a conquering hero, but I’m still way too heavy and also, I won’t have cured cancer or brought about world peace. But I’ll have done something so outside of my comfort zone that I’ll definitely be proud of myself.

  #WINNING

  • • •

  I practice jogging every day, so by the time my girls’ trip rolls around, I feel ready to complete my 5K.

  The universe, of course, has other ideas.

  Our original plan was to run on the beach but somehow the Savannah-bad-travel-juju rears its head again. What’s supposed to be a relaxing seaside vacay turns into a flea-bitten (literally), roach-infested (again, literally), stray-dog-ridden, non-toilet-flushing nightmare that is so aggressively unpleasant that my friends and I end up abandoning our group tour three days into it, heading to the nearest big city.

  Although we probably could have stayed and tried to make the best of the Worst Tour in Christendom, we decided that we’d have the fewest regrets if we simply charted our own course, which is why we now find ourselves about to run crowded city streets, instead of the beach where we were supposed to be staying on our tour.

  Julia, Alyson (a friend from Dallas), and I are all geared up in our moisture-wicking running clothes, with bills stuffed in our sports bras so we can buy bottled water along the way. Joanna, having recently completed her own first 5K, decides to cheer us on from her spot in the café with free Wi-Fi. She and Alex, Julia’s mom, promise to have cappuccinos ready for us on our return.

  We take the elevator down from the little apartment we rented on the fly and hit the street. We start out slowly, intending to add speed once we’re properly warmed up. But within the first five minutes, we realize that our goal of running on these old cobblestone streets is not only impossible due to all the pedestrians, but also quite dangerous.

  Instead of giving up, we choose to adapt.

  In lieu of running a 5K, we end up speed-walking for 10K.

  Never saw that coming.

  Later in the evening, when Julia places the completion medals around each of our necks, I truly feel like I accomplished something significant. While walking a 10K wasn’t my original goal, without having trained, I could never have powered through.

  Never one to allow a triumph to go to waste, I immediately add walk a 10K to my list, taking great delight in immediately crossing it off.

  Which feels terrific.

  And that’s enough for me . . .

  . . . or is it?

  Once I return home (and after all the flea bites heal), I still feel like there’s something left to check off my list, so I lace up my shoes and head downstairs to the treadmill.

  No one’s here in the basement to cheer me on (or offer me a cappuccino) and there’s no prize at the end, but that doesn’t stop me from trying anyway.

  I cue up my best hip-hop running playlist and put a muted episode of Jersey Belle on the television, so I have something to focus on other than the numbers.

  As always, I start off slowly, allowing my muscles the time to warm up. My knees feel better than they have in a long time. I was always so hesitant to work out for fear of injuring them, but it turns out that the more I exercise, the better they feel.

  Yesterday when I undressed for my shower, I noticed something odd going on with my butt. It’s . . . a little bit higher than it used to be, and now there’s some distinction from where my thigh ends and my glutes begin. In no way am I ready to pose for a swimsuit calendar, but that I’ve actually worked hard enough to see a difference is incredibly motivating.

  As my muscles begin to loosen, I quicken my pace from 2.5 mph to 4.0, which is not terribly fast. At all. In fact, I can speed-walk more quickly than I can jog.

  I crank up the speed some more and within the first ten minutes, I’m so hot that my whole shirt is damp and clingy, to the point that I have to take it off. I pray that Fletch doesn’t come downstairs to see me running in my sports bra because I suspect he’ll never stop laughing.

  I chug away for an embarrassingly long time, feet thudding on the moving belt beneath me, heart pounding so hard that I temporarily lose hearing in my left ear again. Maybe it’s all the sweat pooling in my ear canals? I eventually find a rhythm and my task becomes slightly easier.

  I have to break up my jogging with frequent bouts of walking to keep myself from hyperventilating. But in the end, I manage to complete the full three point one miles in . . . well, more minutes than you’d think. I’m not about to go posting this Personal Record anywhere because it’s nothing to be proud of.

  And yet.

  I really did a full 5K, which is why I feel completely justified in donning my medal again.

  For I am a champion.

  A very, very slow champion.

  • • •

  Delighted with my 5K checkmark, I feel ready to embrace all sorts of healthy habits, so I don’t laugh when Fletch suggests a juice cleanse. (Although I do highly suspect he’s been reading the lifestyle magazines I leave in the bathroom.) Gina does cleanses before every bikini-based vacation, and each time, I’ve questioned her sanity. But now a cleanse doesn’t seem like the craziest idea in the world, especially when I hear that some guy made a movie about losing one hundred pounds in sixty days by juicing.

  A hundred pounds? In sixty days? Sign. Me. Up.

  “How does a cleanse work?” I ask. “Do we buy premade juices?” Every time Gina’s on a cleanse, she shows up with cute little bottles of clever-sounding drinks.

  “Of course not. Why would we buy anything when we can do it ourselves so much better?” Fletch asks, handing over a stack of diagrams and recipes. “We’ll do it at home. We make five juices a day and we can eat fruits and vegetables for dinner.”

  Two months ago, I wouldn’t even have considered such an idea due to my deep and abiding love of dessert. When I started the 5K training program, I noticed how much more energy I had on the days I avoided simple carbohydrates, so I decided to cut out sugar entirely to see what happened.

  What happened is I dropped ten pounds in a week.

  A freaking week.

  It’s no hundred pounds in sixty days, but it’s certainly a start.

  For years, Fletch and I have been trying to get to the bottom of why I weigh too much. He eats every meal with me and can see that I’m fairly cautious about calories and serving sizes, save for Italian food, such as when I turn into Betty Spaghetti on Bolognese Sauce Night. But since working with Michelle the Nutritionist, I learned to stop piling up my noodles in a big bowl, instead opting for a plate that I fill with an equal amount of fresh vegetables. Same deal with pizza—now I have a salad and I eat one slice instead of my half of the pie. As for the Roman breakfasts, I’m doing more fruit and less cheese. (My new motto is What Happens in Rome Stays in Rome.)

  I thought the issue could be that I was an emotional overeater and I explored this possibility in therapy. My therapist gave me tons of literature about it and the more I read, the less I identified with those ladies in the books who hide in the closet with a bucket of chicken, alternating fi
nger-licking and crying because they hate the fact that they have to eat in the first place. If I want fried chicken, I’ll order it, without a side of histrionics. No judgment on those who do struggle, because I know it’s hard, but for once, this isn’t my actual problem.

  But all summer I regulated my portions and came to terms with the difference between hunger and boredom, and I still couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.

  What I was doing wrong was consuming far too much sugar.

  To be clear, I’m not anti-sugar and I’m definitely still a fan. I happily ate a piece of cake at Laurie’s son’s engagement party, but that’s all I’ve had this entire month, having decided to save treats for special occasions. So, for now, it’s no cupcakes, no gelato, no brownies, no pie, no kidding. I even refused my favorite Momofuku blueberries and cream cookie when I was in New York on business and had only a single cup of gelato on my girls’ trip. I find the fewer sweets I eat, the fewer sweets I want to eat.

  I understand moderation works well for many people, but I’m not someone who’ll ever be satisfied with a single bite of cheesecake, regardless of how slowly I savor it. I either want the whole piece or I want nothing. Honestly, having nothing is easier and I’m all about easy.

  Looking at my food choices through the scrim of therapy and nutritional counseling, I realize that dessert is more than just flour and frosting. For me, dessert represents the few golden hours in the evening when we’ve both finished all the day’s tasks and we’re finally able to hang out together on the couch in the TV room. Dessert is my reward for having met my goals during the day. Really, dessert is an event rather than a specific item.

  Turns out I’m fine subbing a bowl of raspberries with a splash of cream for a pint of Graeter’s Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip during So You Think You Can Dance. This way, when I do have something like special-occasion engagement cake, I can enjoy the whole damn thing without a twinge of remorse. I can’t say if this approach would work for anyone else, but for me, that I’m actually amenable to a juice cleanse is evidence of stratospheric progress in all things food-related.

  “Since when do you want to do a cleanse?” I ask.

  “I read about how cleanses are supposed to reset your metabolism and enhance your taste for fresh food. Sure, you’re eating better, but now I’m sucking down everything you left behind. At this point, I’ve had so many Grasshopper cookies that I’m going to turn into a Keebler elf.”

  (Sidebar: I prefer the Keebler Grasshopper cookies to Girl Scout Thin Mints because (a) they’re better and, (b) I’m not a fan of tracking down little girls for any purpose.)

  I say, “Fair enough. Want to start tomorrow?”

  Neither one of us has reason not to begin, so we head to the grocery store for supplies. The list of fresh ingredients fills an entire sheet of notebook paper and by the time we reach the cashier, our cart is overflowing with beets and Swiss chard and sweet potatoes. As we fork over what we’d normally spend for a week of food on three days’ worth of fruits and veggies, a thought occurs.

  “Do we need a juicer?” I ask.

  “We have one,” he replies.

  “No, we don’t.”

  “We do.”

  “Believe me, nothing happens in our kitchen I’m not aware of. I assure you, we are juicer-free.”

  He insists, “We have a juicer. You used to use it to make that banana ice-cream stuff.”

  He’s referring to the Yonanas ice cream maker I bought a couple of years ago when we attempted the Paleo diet. The device turns frozen bananas into creamy soft-serve, which sounds really healthy until you do the math—one non-sad-sized serving of banana ice cream takes four to five bananas, which is almost five hundred calories. For that many calories, I may as well have regular ice cream.

  Or a Burger King Whopper.

  “That’s not a juicer,” I say.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Basically, a waste of fifty bucks.”

  “Oh. Do we need to buy a juicer or can we just use the Vitamix?”

  I do a quick Google while we wait in line and confirm that our Vitamix should work. “Says we’re fine, particularly because we’ll get the benefit of all the fiber, too.”

  “Then I guess we’re juicers now.”

  • • •

  I’m in charge of making the first round of juice because Fletch has a conference call. Our fridge is overflowing with produce and I have to open a dozen plastic grocery bags to find the carrots, apple, and ginger for the first drink. Although the instructions say to juice and pour over ice, I core the apples, dice the carrots and ginger, and dump the whole lot in the blender. I press the ON button and wait for the magic to begin.

  I envision sitting at my desk, quaffing delicious and nutritious smoothies, as my body becomes stronger through the antioxidant intake, all my excess poundage simply melting away.

  What I don’t anticipate is the logjam all the carrots create in the Vitamix. Smoothies normally blend nicely because they contain milk or other liquid, whereas this is nothing but a pile of choking hazards. I spend the next twenty minutes poking at the cache of veggies with the end of a wooden spoon. The Vitamix makes terrible noises under the strain of trying to liquefy the carrots, so much so that I receive a text from Fletch asking, “That your friend in the wood chipper?” I end up pouring a little water into the mixture to prevent motor burnout.

  When the first drink is finally blended, the sheer volume of it all takes me aback. I figured I’d be left with about ten ounces once everything processed, but what I have here is a quart of . . . homemade soup? I take my first sip, expecting the cool, creaminess of a regular smoothie, slightly sweet from the apple, which is very exciting. Because I’ve had so little sugar, even blueberries taste like Jolly Ranchers to me right now.

  The flavor isn’t what’s disturbing, largely because the front of my tongue is numb, having scorched my taste buds earlier on the boiling glass of required hot lemon breakfast water.

  The problem with this “smoothie” is twofold: First, the texture, which is somewhere between baby food and oatmeal-laden vomit, and second, the temperature. Instead of being frosty, the concoction is lukewarm from having run in the blender for so long.

  I deliver Fletch’s bucket-o-juice just as he’s hanging up the phone.

  “What is this?” he asks, his eyes growing wide.

  “Breakfast,” I reply, spinning on my heels before he can argue with me.

  I spend the next two hours trying to choke down my “juice,” finally employing a straw. I feel like I’m drinking from a trick glass as I can’t seem to pass the halfway mark, although that’s probably because I have to keep adding water to thin it out enough to operate the straw.

  Fletch is convinced that I somehow read the instructions wrong, so he volunteers to make the midmorning juice, which is a blend of cucumbers, celery, apples, ginger, lemon, and kale. Save for the kale, which is my favorite salad addition, I’ve enjoyed many fine beverages from these ingredients. Bloody Marys are brilliant with the addition of a splash of celery juice. (But not Clamato. Never Clamato.) Cucumber martinis could not be more light or zesty or refreshing. I’m mad for all things lemonade, and you can’t go wrong with apple juice, so I anticipate the next round will be better. Besides, I probably did do it wrong, as I’m not the best at following directions. I always get dyslexic reading recipes and then end up trying to stir in baking powder after I’ve already poured the cake batter in the pan. (I bet this is what went wrong with my Christmas cookies.)

  Fletch is in the kitchen for at least as long as I was, Vitamix churning away, and when he comes upstairs with thirty-two ounces of fibrous army-green juice in a massive tumbler, I fear for the worst.

  I take a sip, swishing the juice (which is the consistency of lumpy toothpaste) from one side of my mouth to the other in an attempt to identify the overpoweringly familiar flav
or.

  “Did you . . . wash the kale leaves first?” I ask.

  “Was I supposed to?” he replies.

  Argh.

  “We need to buy a juicer,” I reply. “Like, today.”

  After adding a pinch of salt, I manage to put away a decent portion of the midmorning juice, profoundly confused as to how the ingredients that mesh so nicely on a salad plate can go so horribly awry in a glass. When I pull in a mouthful of grit, I decide I’m done. Libby, normally so anxious to bat cleanup, slinks away when offered the remains of the dirt daiquiri.

  The lunchtime gazpacho juice is what breaks me. Normally, I’m never one to shy away from an onion. A big red Bermuda on my backyard barbecue burger? Yes, please! Diced and tossed with balsamic, feta, watermelon, and tomatoes? My favorite! Nestled in sour cream on top of a bowl of chili? The best! Fried, sautéed, or au gratin? I live for you. But blended into a diarrhea-colored sludge with parsley, red peppers, and cucumbers?

  I can’t. I try, but I just can’t.

  Fletch can’t either. He starts to research juicers and ends up in such analysis paralysis that we miss our afternoon snack of pureed clementines and Swiss chard.

  Damn.

  Desperate to get as far away from our Vitamix as possible, I head down to the treadmill and jog, the whole time pretending I’m running away from a river of hot, roiling compost water.

  When I come upstairs an hour later, I find Fletch in the kitchen, marveling over a partially eaten apple.

  He holds the Golden Delicious up to me, all Garden of Eden–style. “You can just eat the fruit. Did you know that? You can just bite it and chew it and it tastes really good,” he tells me.

  We end up ordering a Hawaiian pizza for dinner and it is freaking delicious.

  We regret nothing.

  • • •

  “So the next day I go out and find that I can purchase premade cleanse juices, which is actually cheaper than getting a juicer, buying all the veggies, and trashing my kitchen,” I tell everyone. “Plus, the juice tasted like cocktails. Win, win.”