Reflections After My First Week on a Liquid Diet
Including a plea to give full respect to losing "water weight."
There’s already less of me!
A little over a week ago, when I weighed in at the clinic to start this medically supervised liquid diet, I was at about 230 pounds (give or take a corned-beef sandwich). Starting Week #2 — last Friday, July 21 — my scale said I weighed 222. Which, by my quick mental calculations, means that I lost 8 pounds that first week.
They’d told us that initially we’d mostly be losing “water weight” — a phrase that slightly bummed me out: it just sounded like it was less impressive than losing, say, “fat weight.” But isn’t losing any weight really good?
It certainly feels good. (I’ve actually lost another 1.1 pounds since Friday — but who’s counting?) I performed two of my solo shows over this past weekend, and I could move so much more easily onstage than previously.
Actually, I almost feel too good! I’m used to eating such big meals that I kind of knock myself out. Post-meal, I’ve tended to do a lot of napping. But now, eating six of these tiny (160 calorie) meal replacements spread over the course of the day, I never end up feeling bloated (to put it mildly!). In effect, I have more active hours each day. Which creates a new challenge: What will I do with those hours? (So far, I’ve been doing a lot more reading. Just finished a really cool, highly weird book: The Liar, a novel, first published in 1942, by a Danish author named Martin A. Hansen.)
Something else has been happening, too: As the weight has been coming off of me, buried memories, and emotions, have been rising to the surface. It’s like how permafrost has been melting off in places like Siberia, uncovering long-frozen baby mammoths.
These days I can feel what it was like for me as a young mammoth — er, overweight human. Going with my parents to clothing stores and only being able to select from the “Husky” section. Being bullied at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, like the time at recess when everyone else in my third-grade class took a turn knocking me down and then watching how long it took me to get back up. (Okay, maybe some of the bullying may have been because I was a Jewish atheist — but honestly, I think it was just because I was chubby and awkward.) My mom telling me, when I was eight or nine, how handsome I’d been when I was younger, before I had put on the extra weight: “You could have been a child model!” Even my dad, who rarely criticized me, looking me up and down one day when I was a teenager and saying, “You could stand to lose a few pounds.”
I tried! Starting when I was a kid, I went on so many diets! The Drinking-Man’s Diet (even though I didn’t drink); while I was on it, I once became so lightheaded that I fainted while playing a scale at an oboe lesson. (Fortunately, my beginner’s instrument was made out of plastic: it just bounced off the floor and my teacher caught it.) The Scarsdale Diet. The Grapefruit Diet. The apocalyptically named Last Chance Diet. Weeks of fasting. The Atkins Diet (so greasy!). As recently as this January, as I tried to reverse a huge sudden weight gain, I went back on the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet, which I’d stayed on for a few years in my 50s; this time I quickly lost a few pounds, but then I hit a wall and even gained back a few of them. The weight has always come back, and then some. (Which isn’t to say that these diets — and many others — haven’t worked for other folks!)
Going through my life as a large-ish person, I’m used to taking up a certain amount of space — and, along with the drawbacks (Economy Class seats!), there’s a real comfort in that. My girth has been my fatty armor, against assaults from both within (that constantly self-lacerating inner voice that mostly shuts off when I’m conked out after overeating) and without. (By eighth grade at Cathedral School, I’d gotten too big for even the toughest kids to knock down.) Now, after a week or so of becoming incrementally less large, I feel a bit more vulnerable. Well, okay, a lot more vulnerable. Over this past weekend, as I ran lines to prepare for a performance of Red Diaper Baby, an old monologue of mine that recounts my childhood, it kept hitting me how almost everyone I talk about in that show is now gone. I burst into tears — first as I was rehearsing, and then as I was performing the show.
And this is after only one week on this diet!! What will I be like after 30 weeks, when (presumably) so many pounds of permafat have been burned off? I could become the most emo 64-year-old on the planet!!
No matter what happens, I promise to keep you apprised. But right now, I have some more water weight that I need to, um, offload.
You're doing it! Successfully! Yay! and as always, thank you for your humor!
As someone who has taken off chunks of weight at a time, I'll offer these tidbits: People may ask you if you're alright, or do you have some illness, that you've gotten so thin. or even, "I didn't recognize you." The trick is to learn to take it as a compliment.
NYRB Editions are always good for an interesting read. I must look for this one.