Free The Weight-loss Diaries by Courtney Rubin Page A

mother’s long-term memory that have been left intact, like the one house on a block left unscathed after a tornado has turned all the others to rubble. At
    The Rest of Week 1
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    least one Sunday a month, when I feel like I really, really need her but deep down can admit that I’m probably not going to get what I want from her, I try to get her to tell a few stories from her childhood that I know she likes and remembers. How as kids, she and her brother, my uncle, used to make a fuss when my grandmother made fish for dinner, sailing up the stairs making a big production of holding their noses. Or how she and Uncle Dennis got my grandparents out of the house so they could get things ready for a surprise anniversary party. I know these stories by heart, but I want to hear her tell them. What I love to hear is the sound of her voice—more animated than I seem to have ever known it, as if she’s remembering not just the event but once again feeling the feelings that went with it. I cocoon myself in her voice, shutting out the knowledge that she’s anything less than fine, for as long as the story lasts.
    But the second she finishes, the spell is broken. Though I’ve felt it a zillion times before, there’s a fresh sensation of missing her, and I inevitably get off the phone feeling worse than ever.
    Lost four pounds this first week, which I, Ms. Glass Is Half Empty, have somehow managed to turn into a negative. In diets past, I’ve lost seven and eight pounds the first week, so four pounds is a major disappointment. After all this effort, I want more. I feel I deserve it. And it makes me cranky to think that this is probably the most I’ll ever lose in a week—soon it will trickle down to half a pound, then nothing, then maybe even a gain.
    Four pounds is not enough, nor is the fact that I’ve gotten through one week. It’s not long enough for my new eating habits to be automatic, not long enough for the kinds of stunning results that would give me resolve of steel—
    and just long enough to feel as though all my effort is going to go up in flames (or cheesecake) any minute, the way it always has in the past.
    It’s not that I haven’t been successful—I have, at least according to the scale. But one of the greatest ironies about trying to lose weight is that after all these years of fixating on the numbers, all of a sudden they don’t matter much. What I really want is to look in the mirror and see the difference, and I don’t. Not yet.
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    The Rest of Month 1 (January)
    There’s something about dieting that makes your body public property, the way I’m told it is when you’re pregnant. Everyone has nutrition advice, and the bag of baby carrots always open on my desk seems to be a neon orange sign that announces I’m dying to hear every last well-meaning-if-often-annoying word. This friend did the Atkins diet. That one swore off French fries. This crony of somebody’s mother gave up everything white—no flour, no sugar, no mayonnaise. And surely I must know that a red-carpet pileup of celebrities swear by the Zone?
    If I had my choice, I wouldn’t tell anyone I’m on a diet. But you can’t suddenly begin eating radically differently than you have in the past and expect no one—particularly when your friends and colleagues are journalists—to ask. So I’ve just been saying I’m trying to eat healthy, and avoiding the words weight and diet because both always seem to be a cue for women to start talking about how fat they are, which is very annoying when nearly all of them definitely are not. “Eating healthy” doesn’t seem to flip quite the same conversation switches, yet most everyone understands that it translates as “losing weight,” the way women understand that when a man says, “I’ll call you,” he means “How’s never? Does never work for you?”
    I’m just over two weeks into this diet—um, eating healthy—thing, and the scale says I’ve