After Week #2 on My Liquid Diet: Getting Real

Is my authentic self in here somewhere?

My daily food chart for Week #2.

So first things first — the deets after my second week on this liquid-diet thingy (previous installments are here and here):

• Starting Weight (7-14-23; also Bastille Day, so give or take a head): 230 lbs.

• Weight at Beginning of Week #2 (7-21): 222

• Weight at Beginning of Week #3 (7-28, last Friday): 218.4

• Total Weight Loss So Far: 11.6 lbs.

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In our household, we do a fair amount of reality-show watching — and on the American ones, in particular, there’s frequently a point (say, a few weeks into the competition) where a contestant will confess to the camera something along the lines of, “Things are getting real!” Meaning that the competition, having presumably weeded out some of the weaker participants, is now entering a more intense phase.

Well, early in the third week of my diet, I have now entered the getting-real phase. They’d told us to take it easy the first two weeks, as our bodies — and minds — would be adjusting to the shock of taking in only 960 calories per day. To a large extent, I did okay with that: Heading into the diet, I’d kind of battened down my mental hatches, preparing for the turbulence of 30 belt-tightening weeks. I was expecting to feel hungry — and I have felt hungry, but it’s been manageable. Yesterday, coming out of my weekly performing gig (parenthetical self-promotion: Citizen Brain in Berkeley has been extended through Aug. 26!), as I got on my bike to go home I was hit by some powerful, enticing smells coming from the restaurant directly across the street from the theater. It was like a tsunami of savoriness, and it felt like it was trying to grab me in a bear hug and pull me into the eatery. Two young people (I find I’m using “young” these days to describe anyone under 60, but these looked like college students) were sitting outside the place, chatting while eating from bowls that looked impossibly full of impossibly delicious food. I resisted focusing on those dishes for more than a moment or two, but they looked like something that some evil spirit, hell-bent on derailing me from my diet, might have concocted: one looked liked a scrumptious mound of combination fried rice, and the other could have been pasta with meat sauce, including chunks of sausage or something. As I rode away, I was thinking about how unlikely it was that a single restaurant would have both of those meals on its menu — so it was probably some sort of food-mirage. But I reminded myself that, in any case, I was on this long-term mission (in reality shows, they love to call it a “journey”) to lose a bunch of weight, get healthier, and feel better.

And I have been feeling better — a lot better! I noticed something this past week: it’s become easy to tie my shoes. For years now, it’s been a trial for me to bend down and do this simple thing. While tying the first shoe, the act of folding myself has caused me to become breathless, to the point that before going on to the next one I’ve had to sit back up and take in several gulps of restorative oxygen. But now, just a couple of weeks into this diet, I just tie my shoes — no problem! This feels huge to me — and I’m so excited, going forward, to discover more activities that have been difficult for my overweight self and may become beautifully ordinary.

Appreciating the beauty that ordinariness can have is, I’m learning, a profound challenge for me. I was raised to aspire to greatness in pretty much all my endeavors, even though it became clear early on that in many areas I was actually sub-average. Starting when I was a small child, my communist father told me that I was going to lead a communist revolution in the United States. (Um, I haven’t.) He’d also say, while I was happily reciting my times tables to him on the subway, that I’d be the greatest mathematician that the world had ever seen. (I hit the wall at freshman calculus in college — and wow, was that a hard phone call to make to him. To his credit, after a long-ish pause at the other end of the line, he said, “So what do you want to do now?”) My mother’s stated expectations for me were less grandiose — in part, perhaps, because she was so hyper-focused on her own goal of becoming a successful writer. But it was clear that, to her, it was important to be great — to the extent that not being great, or famous, felt to her like a kind of death. I think that may have been, at least in part. to compensate for a childhood of feeling underappreciated by her own parents (especially Grandma Dora, who never got over the childhood death of my mom’s adored older sister Cyril).

This is the powdered, just-add-water soup that I’m slurping as I write this post (meal substitute No. 4 of 6 for today). Does “naturally flavored” mean that it actually contains authentic “Joe”?

And if I’m being honest, my resistance to appreciating the ordinary, the quotidian, has also come from somewhere inside myself. Though how do you tease out your “authentic” self from all the people and experiences that have influenced you? For a few years, in my late 50s and going into my 60s, I had a great — great — therapist. After years of kissing a number of psychotherapeutic frogs, I’d found The One: brilliant, kind, funny. At the time, I was deep in a depression — it was so bad that my wife had to drive me to and from the appointments, even though his office was within walking distance. Early in each session, I would exult in the fact that we had most of our 50 minutes together still to come. But then, at the end of each session … oh, it was brutal to say, with forced casualness, “See you next time!” Outside of his office, in those days, I almost couldn’t function. But in our conversations together, we were embarked on a thrilling … okay, I’ll say it: journey! We were trying to discover my authentic self: specifically, who I might be if you took away all the people I was trying to be — personas who could please my late father, my mother, my audiences. Sometime during COVID, my therapist retired (allowing me to deploy this one-liner to him: “Was it something I said?”) — but I’m still trying to identify the real me, if such a being even exists. And my focus right now is on who I am — how I am — when I experience everyday things.

Greatness may be cool, but have you ever tied your shoes without gasping for breath? It’s awesome!

Folks, things are getting real.