By Jove I Think She's Got It

There’s a little bit of Eliza Doolittle in This Thing I’m Doing (and if you think it’s because I’ve got that awful Madonna I’m-American-trying-to-be-British accent, please kick me. Hard.) I’m a binge eater trying to squeeze myself into the corset of a “normal” eater. And nowhere is this more difficult than on a vacation.

Foodwise, I do best with routines, and I can – and do – tend to eat the same things repeatedly. (I’m not the only one – a nutritionist years ago told me most people eat the same 14 or so foods.) And because I live alone, I’m usually free to eat what I want, when I want.

Not so on vacation, where generally there are other people’s likes/dislikes/hunger levels/sleeping patterns (hello, breakfast!) to contend with. There is my own deep-rooted fear – slowly being dug out, but very slowly – of people seeing what and how much I eat for days on end, plus my fear of whether it’s normal to be hungry when we’ve just eaten X, and only about Y hours ago. And if I am hungry, can I admit it? And finally, there is fear around vacation eating. Much as I’d like to allow myself treats – and as much as I know I need to allow them – it’s hard to let go, even a little bit. My trousers usually feel tighter immediately, my head spins, and I start to fear what other things I might eat. Besides, I feel like I have even less leeway than usual, because all the eating out one does on holiday leaves you with even less of a calorie buffer zone.

But I did fine this weekend in Cornwall – both in terms of what I ate and how I (thought I) handled it. (Of course, this is before I have a peek at the scale tomorrow, but my new motto is -- or I'd like it to be -- that the scale is just a five-second snapshot of the 604,800 in the week.)

I had hand-made Cornish ice cream on Friday afternoon, and half a bottle of sparkling wine from a local winery I love, then passed on pudding at dinner, although of course my size 2-friend had one. Saturday I wanted a Cornish pasty -- I adore them, despite being unable to stop thinking that a pasty belongs in a strip club -- but kept finding only cheese ones (my stomach seems to be objecting to dairy overload, and I didn’t want to test it right before my surfing lesson* – yes, my surfing lesson!). Had to eat before lesson and food options in small towns limited (as was time), so ended up with a greasy steak pasty of the crappy variety I could have bought from a corner store in London. I managed not to be too cranky about it – or worse, binge later out of crankiness (as I embarrassingly have done in the past – binged literally because I didn’t get to eat what I wanted). Nor did I spend too much time obsessing about calories of said pasty and being cranky that I’d wasted them on something that wasn’t very good.

Saturday night all the puddings sounded delicious, but we were in a small-town pub that was very decidedly not of the quaint variety serving home-cooked food. My meal had been very average, and I didn’t want to eat an average pudding. (Size 2 friend had pudding again – on top of the huge cheese pasty she’d had earlier, the chocolate bar she had after surfing lesson and the huge English breakfast she had that morning while I was having my poached eggs on toast.) Besides, I was banking on pudding Sunday, when we had a lunch booking at Fifteen Cornwall.

Yesterday we did a walk in Cardinham Woods, then headed to lunch, where I’d given myself permission to order whatever I wanted. Fifteen had a special three-course meal for ₤24.50, but I wasn’t so thrilled with any of the starter choices – or, more importantly, the puddings. Sixty pounds ago I never would have dared do this, but I said to my friend – who can be extremely cheap – that the prices weren’t outrageously different if you didn’t do the deal, and that I wasn’t crazy about any of the puddings. She grimaced a bit, but didn’t say anything. So I had a lovely ginger parkin with butterscotch sauce and clotted cream -- from the regular, pricier menu. (And it was well worth it.)

We took a little walk along the coastal path afterwards, and I tried not to think too hard about how tight my jeans felt (and mostly succeeded). My mind flitted briefly to what I would say if I was hungry what seemed to me to be too quickly after a three-course meal. (I wasn’t.) In the gas station I bought a banana to stash in my handbag just in case.

This morning I got up and ate a normal breakfast – didn’t even think about trying to cut back, the way I might have in years past. When we stopped at a rest stop midmorning, size 2 friend had apple cake so greasy you could see the spots through the waxed paper. I was tempted, but I ate some berries and drank my water.

I adore Cornwall, but it’s good to be back.

*I'm sure I can't be the only person who has noticed that a wetsuit could just as easily be described as a neoprene catsuit, and is about as flattering.

Disbelief

Hoping to get some advice on what size to buy, I e-mailed a knitwear designer whose stuff I love with my measurements. My actual measurements, not my driver’s license/maybe when I lose another 10 pounds/wish-I-were measurements.

She wrote back: “You could be a small or a medium.”

A small?

A small!

Snapshot

I started so many posts about my food this week, but I haven’t been able to finish them. I guess it’s because – not quite six months after I finished my therapy for binge-eating, and a little over eight months into This Thing I’m Doing – I can’t say anything that feels like there should be a period at the end of it, only an ellipsis or a dash. Or maybe it would just end abruptly in the middle of a thought. You get the idea.

On Tuesday I didn’t finish my Magnum, Wednesday I ate my first fresh peach in 11 years, and several times during the week I struggled with this unreasonable anger when the server at Wasabi didn’t fill up my lunchtime container of rice to the tippy top (and anger again yesterday when my friend was served twice as much cheese as I was with our ploughmans at the pub). Call it a snapshot of my ever-evolving relationship with food.

First, the Magnum.

Few things say "summer in England" to me quite so much as a Magnum bar. I don’t crave them much when it’s cold out, but I could – and during certain weeks of summers past, did – eat them every day.

It’s been a cool, wet summer in England, but my thoughts have turned to Magnums anyway. I remember having a conversation with the Fig about them, for starters. And lately I keep seeing them – they are everywhere, in every newsagent on every corner – and telling myself: "When it’s warm, I’ll have one." (I should say for the record that my rule on foods like Magnums and Ben’s Cookies is that if I think about them enough, I go and have one.)

Tuesday was the first day in recent memory that there was no rain. It was warm and sunny, and despite my best efforts, I’d been hungry all day. Which made me even edgier and more binge-prone than I already was.

I got off the bus a few stops early, planning to buy plums for dessert. (I’d eaten my sushi on the bus – I was that hungry.) But the plums looked unappealing. That’s when I spied the Magnum freezer, and thought: "Oh, why not?"

As I walked home, I ate my Magnum in my usual style – first eating off the chocolate coating, then moving on to the vanilla ice cream. Which tasted, I realized, like creamy whipped chemicals. (This is what I have been dreaming about?)

I kept taking more bites, thinking: "Let me just try again, and maybe then it will taste like the delicious I-must-have-you-every-day Magnum of my memory."

The bar half gone, and still I kept eating, you know, because that’s what I do with food – I finish it.

My head spun the way it did when I binged – the self-loathing still intact enough for me to be furious with myself for continuing to eat the bar, and panicked because I couldn’t stop.

I paused. I realized I couldn’t throw the bar out because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t – of what I might buy and eat otherwise.

I threw the remaining third of the bar away without difficulty and went home to think about it. The only times I’ve ever stopped eating anything like ice cream have been either because I was post-binge full, or in mid-binge, putting the ice cream down to eat something else instead – something that deep down somewhere I am convinced is going to fill whatever empty hole I was trying to fill. (In all those years, I never did find the magic food, of course. I just kept bingeing.)

I feared that evening I might feel cheated and angry – the way I felt as a child when my mother promised dessert but then didn’t end up serving it. But then I thought: I’m 32 years old, and if I decided I want something – and, per rule above, I think about it enough – I will go and have it.

Now, the peach and the rice (and cheese).

It seemed somehow fitting the day after the Magnum revelations to go and eat a fresh peach. I haven’t eaten one since 1996, aka the Summer of 1,000 peaches, when over a period of weeks I whittled my calories from 1,200 down to three peaches a day. I’d run for an hour every day, and I’d go to bed with my fist pressed against my stomach, sickeningly pleased with how hungry I was.

Why peaches? Because of my obsessive tendencies I try not to look at calorie charts any more, so I can’t say this for sure, but… if I recall correctly, peaches were chosen over nectarines because they are approximately the same size but have half the calories. Yes, that is the state of mind I was in at the time. (It’s a state of mind that every once in a while – at my heaviest – I would rue that I couldn’t return to.)

As for the rice and cheese: I’m still working on understanding this unreasonable anger I feel when I’m given not quite a full portion of something, or not as much as someone else. I think part of it is a holdover from when I was child and I knew that one portion was all I was getting; my mother wouldn’t let me have seconds because of my weight. As for my feelings when my portion is smaller than someone else’s – I think that must be partly fear and embarrassment. I worry that I’ll still be hungry, and whether it would be OK to have more even if the other person doesn’t, because surely I can’t point out that my portion was smaller. I worry that I’ll finish much more quickly and be embarrassed about my empty plate – or that I’ll sit there and eat things I shouldn’t just because I’m still sitting at the table.

I worry, therefore I am.

Caught in the Act

So I’m on my way to yoga – yoga mat on my back just like one of those people I always hated, all smug in their “aren’t-I-healthy-ness” – and I spy our intern sitting at a table in the atrium of our building, eating her lunch and reading a book.

I wave and keep walking (I'm late), thinking: “Wow, I really should be better about bringing lunch – it would be so much healthier and cheaper and I could read an actual book, too. And isn’t it great that she leaves her desk for at least an hour every day?”

When I get back to my office after yoga (can we just pause to note how ridiculously, pathetically thrilled I was to be pointed out as an example in class again – “Here’s a little something I made earlier,” the instructor joked, pointing to me as she explained a posture to a beginner), there was an e-mail from the intern. Who, for the record, is an incredibly sweet, polite – and slim, as in skinny-jean-wearing-slim – Southern girl.

The subject title was a joke reference to the title of a celebrity spotting column we run on our web site. And the message, in part: “You made me feel guilty! I was eating Walkers [potato chips] while you were going to yoga. You are so healthy.”

I laughed out loud, thinking of how many quadrillion times in my life I’ve been convinced that someone was noticing that I was eating cake or chocolate (and judging me for it). I promptly walked out to her desk to tell her that I hadn’t even noticed what she was eating – that I’d been too busy admiring her organization (enough to bring lunch) and intellectual use of her lunch hour.

She smiled. We laughed. My (male) colleague wandered out and wondered what all the kumbayah-ing was about.

As if he could understand.

Funhouse Mirrors, Again

On Friday – despite the fact that I’m still up a pound – I could fit into a dress that didn’t button last month. This morning I saw a friend I haven’t seen since March, and her mouth literally dropped open as I approached her. And this afternoon I saw another friend I haven’t seen in a month who told me I was looking very slim.

And yet this weekend I’ve felt huge. It kicked off with seeing my current weight as a start weight in a diet magazine, carried on through trying on clothes for last night’s date and his subsequent teasing me about my sweet tooth (though actually I’ve consumed no sweets in front of him), and continued through today, where I sat at the ballet feeling how big my stomach still is, yet thinking how incapable I feel of losing much more weight. I am no more than seven pounds above my lowest adult weight ever -- and ten pounds away from the top weight in the "normal" range for my height -- so why do I feel so fat?

To be honest, it isn’t always like this. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think that I look OK… but then I remember the times I looked in the mirror 60 pounds ago and also thought I looked OK – an illusion often shattered by seeing photos of myself.

So when do I trust what I see in the mirror?

* * *

Last night was Date Two with the English internet consultant, and probably the final one. We saw Sherrybaby (his pick) – and possibly the only thing more depressing than that film would have been seeing it alone on a Saturday night.

Dates where I struggle to connect are binge triggers for me – they make me feel lonelier than I would have had I stayed home alone. I had the presence of mind to quit drinking halfway through my second glass of wine, because I knew I’d be flirty if I finished it, and I didn’t want to do that to a perfectly nice guy – or to myself.

We did have dinner, but I could have sworn my stomach was growling as I headed home. I flashed back to a binge I had after another uninspiring date with a perfectly nice guy a couple of years ago, and thought briefly – wildly – where I should go and what I should buy.

Then I came home to finish the package of cherries and the grapefruit in my refrigerator, and went to bed.

Sliding Doors

Today I walked upstairs to our “canteen,” as they call it here, someplace I hardly ever go because I choose to get lunch elsewhere. There’s a coffee bar there, its counter lined with glass jars of cookies: sugar, sugar with M&Ms, chocolate chip.

I tried not to look at them too closely, or to notice what, exactly, is in the ice cream freezer during these binge-susceptible days. But I could see myself clearly eight months ago (for the record, today marks weight months of This Thing I’m Doing), wondering if I dared buy them yet again, and probably cramming them in my mouth on the stairwell, hoping I wouldn’t bump into anybody. It’s been an unusually cool and rainy summer in London, but I could see myself, hot and lethargic and disgusted on a Friday afternoon where I don’t have plans for the evening, gearing up for a binge.

The doors clicked shut. I bought my diet Coke (I’m drinking it occasionally these days) and banana.

* * *

Last night I went out with the English lawyer. The first part of the evening was fun, though nerve-wracking in that way it can be when so much time has elapsed since the first time you met that you can barely remember what he looks like (less cute and did you really not notice his teeth?), yet you’ve exchanged so much e-mail that your virtual relationship is ridiculously far ahead of your actual one. (I learned that last bit the hard way during my brief experience with online dating a few years ago, but how quickly I forget.)

I’m shy about swapping intimate details with even my closest friends, so I’m going to be deliberately vague here, but… He got sick at an extraordinarily odd, ill-timed moment – a moment that just seems ripe for some kind of punch line, if only I could come up with it. For several reasons – namely several glasses of Rioja without food, in that time-honored British date tradition – it wasn’t my finest hour, either. When he texted to apologize – very sheepishly – today, I proposed we call it a draw. He sent an e-mail saying he’d left “the worst possible impression” and that maybe it has more to do with injury to his ego, but that he wasn’t sure how that “figures through with things,” and that he needed to think about it.

I think that’s the end of that one. Door No. 2 closed. Going out with the internet consultant tomorrow night. Suddenly the fact that his e-mails are short and confined to logistics of meeting up seems quite the plus.

Back in the Game

As of this morning’s weigh-in, I’ve lost four of the five pounds I put on in the Paris/birthday/Spain eat-in. I suspect some of that was water weight, but really, who cares? (Also, bizarrely, the weight has apparently come off my chest – I can now button the top button of a coat that was a wee bit too small even when I was down that last pound – instead of my stomach.)

I am relieved, though I still don’t feel on solid footing just yet. I have this constant low-level background noise urge to eat – and keep eating – that I haven’t had in months, and I’m honestly not sure where it’s coming from. On one hand the low-level urge means it’s not too difficult to resist, but the fact that it’s constant makes me fear the eventual erosion of my defenses.

* * *

So I returned to work today – after a day home sick (and I really was sick) finishing Harry Potter before it was spoilered – to find an email from the American guy, saying he was being really slack and should be making time to see me but was totally snowed under and maybe drinks next week. Ugh. “Should.” Yes, for the 30-kajillionth time, I have read He’s Just Not That Into You (or at least, skimmed an excerpt of it).

Never able to just leave things lie (except with the Fig, where I have resisted any further urge for contact), I hit reply and wrote that neither of us needed more obligations, and that I certainly didn’t want to be one. I didn’t even read it over, the way I normally would. I just clicked “send” and figured that was the end of it.

He responded, saying “should” was a bad word choice and that he didn’t feel obligated at all – just was “trying to convey my current sense of lame-ness” and that he’d be in touch when he got back from Amsterdam next week.

I won’t hold my breath. (And yes, I’m fully aware that there would be no need for him to write about lameness if… well, see “He’s Just Not That Into You.”)

I found all of this especially amusing considering today I was invited to appear on a British TV show to talk about why British men appeal to American women, and the differences between British and American men. (Serious Journalist – caps intended – that I am, I declined politely. The minor breakout on my face and the fact that I hadn’t blow dried my hair had absolutely nothing to do with it.)