Posted: Jan 9, 08
11:48am
I just read a book called Rethinking Thin that talks in an interesting but not inspirational way about how no matter what diet you follow and no matter what your resolve, the weight goes back, because your body wants to be at its “set point.”The book talks about the body’s nefarious ways of readjusting its metabolism to defeat dieters and how almost all weight lost is regained.
My husband Bill, elated at his new slim outline. swears that will never happen to him. He’s the cookbook publisher at Chronicle Books, and is the editor of a diet book called The Wine and Food Lovers Diet. I suspect it’s just a slower and less draconian form of Atkins, but Bill’s lost 18 pounds on it in the last year.
Now I’m on it. For one thing, Bill does all the cooking, so I don’t have much choice. For two, you get to drink wine. We brought about 1100 cases of the stuff up here—we’re staying in Lake Tahoe for the summer in a house on a meadow. I’m sure we’d lose faster if we didn’t drink wine, but then, as Bill reasonably points out, we wouldn’t be able to drink. In fact Bill and I wonder if we should go off wine and beer for two days to get unstuck.
I started the diet around June 20 and have lost five pounds of the ten I’d like to. There’s a scale here that measures not only pounds but ounces. Up six ounces! Fuck! Was it the the pack of sugarless gum? The lettuce wraps at Riva’s? Next day, down four ounces, and I sprint off to Ross to buy their entire stock of size 6 shorts—one pair. Now I feel silly in them, a cow squeezed into the shorts of a five year old. Do they carry caftans at Ross?
It’s fun, I don’t have any illusion, at this point in my life, that I will not go back to what my body wants to weigh. Those illusions--
I have never once lost a pound on any protein diet, going right back to when I was 14 years old and peed on those little sticks in the bathroom, without ever once getting them to turn purple (being in ketosis, I am now remembering it was called). Pooping was a memory. I did put ketchup on my eggs, and allow myself whipped cream.
I tried Atkins again about three years ago. Bought the chunky peanut butter bars with Atkins Advantage written on them. “Mavis!” (my cashier calling to the next cashier over). “She’s doing the diet!” “I lost ten pounds on that,” a pregnant woman behind me said.
I didn’t. Not even one.
Took me so long to understand that the way to not eat was to eat. When bill goes out of town, I immediately stop doing anything about dinner—and pick at stuff all evening, the way the kids remember me doing (“you never ate with us, Mom”) and gain weight. From not eating.
women spend their WHOLE LIVES trying to lose weight, no matter what they weigh. A constant niggling form of unhappiness. Over the years I realized I knew I was upset about something—a man who didn’t call back-- when I found myself plotting to lose five pounds. Finally figured out hat I couldn’t stand that helpless feeling—someone doing something to me without my being able to do anything back. Losing weight was a way to take back the power. Great. It really is one of the only forms of power that we really have—to control our bodies, I mean. He’d be sorry! I’d be lovely and thin and strong, and the whole world would want me.
On the other hand, this small unhappiness must keep larger unhappinesses at bay. I always think of Peter, a book rep, pudgy and 40ish, practicing the same piano pieces over and over until you wanted to throttle him, who obsessed about his weight. Would meet you at the door with a confession about the hot chocolate he’d had, and agonized over every mouthful of everything. And thereby contrived, it seemed to me, to not notice he was alone, only renting a room, without lover or family.
My diet secret, which works only every few years, is to travel abroad with my sticklike twin sister Adrian, an approach that’s always good for ten pounds, although she just gets skinnier herself. If I weighed only five pounds she’d go down to zero, just to spite me.
I am willing to give up my identity as a fruit pig and candy eater for the summer and join him on the diet.
But who on a diet thinks they will have to get back into the carton of fat pants on the closet shelf?
People like Bill and me are the lucky ones, going up and down in a normal range, probably because our parents did, and should just shut up.
Been following the advice of this book for six months now, eating more than ever, and still the 15 pounds I lost stays off. First time that's ever happened!
