[...]... whom? Outside the house I constantly felt as if I was going to get caught not knowing something I should have known—something my mother should have taught me My mother wasn’t up to talking about makeup or men or even small things, like polishing shoes I’d visit my friends’ houses and watch their mothers fuss over them—whether they needed a haircut or whether their 12 The Weight-Loss Diaries T-shirt... hopefully try on the largest sizes at the Gap, give up, creep into Lane Bryant, stand in front of the mirror in a size I cannot stand, and swear it’s the last time I’m going to shop there (And also wish that its bags did not say “Lane Bryant” quite so prominently The bags might as well say “I AM FAT” in blinking neon If they’re so sympathetic to overweight women, can’t they package their stuff in, say,... one was expecting much—at that point it was just another test to cross off the list “See anything?” my father asked the technician casually as my mother lay in the tunnel of the machine, fighting claustrophobia Yes A brain tumor Two of them, in fact One of them so big that her surgeon later said if it had gone untreated any longer, at some point in the not-too-distant future, my sister and I would have... story from the realm of “you can do this” and into the celebrity realm of “well, I could be thin, too, if I had a low-fat chef and a personal trainer”) And off I’d go to the land of women who never have to worry about whether the Gap’s size XL shirt will fit and whether anyone they knew will see them walking into Lane Bryant In the beginning, all went according to script I lost ten pounds the first month,... though doctors couldn’t remove all of the especially offending tumor because it was too close to the hypothalamus and the optic nerve, which meant a millimeter slip of the knife could blind her— or kill her I remember going to visit her in the neurosurgery intensive-care unit, where the condition of each patient got worse and worse as you got closer to the nurses’ station Mom was directly in front of their... just my father One of many cringe-worthy episodes: my sister and I explaining in fits and starts that we had to buy more tampons—that the supply of pantyliners in the closet would not do, because no, you could not just use two of them stuck together My father’s own mother had died of breast cancer when he was sixteen, and in his effort not to keep us in the dark about Mom’s condition, as his father had,... could drag myself up the stairs to my second-floor office, but there was no way I would allow myself to take the elevator If I took the Metro, I tried to beat my time running up all 137 steps of the escalator at my stop (I’d count them as I ran.) When I got home to the studio apartment I was sharing with my (size 10) sister, I’d try on her clothes obsessively, seeing how much closer they were to fitting... stops me from getting too far is the idea of having to find something to wear I need a black pantsuit, and I hate the idea that probably the only one I’ll be able to find will have an elasticized waist.” On a concert: “One of these days, I will find the perfect pair of shoes to wear to the 9:30 Club The bottoms of my feet always hurt after concerts there—you have to stand the whole time Is this a fat thing... get down to my goal I’d get close to it, but by then the months of deprivation would have me primed for months of bingeing The worst the diet-and-binge cycle ever got was two years ago, when I first moved to Washington I’d just graduated from college and was deter- 6 The Weight-Loss Diaries mined to lose all the weight I had decided was holding me back from the life I dreamed of I began on a not-unreasonable... waiting for the phone to ring or who talked about food all day— but apparently I did not fit it I wasn’t relieved I had always wondered whether, if my friends knew about the bingeing and the secrecy, we’d have become friends in the first place After seeing their reactions to the columns, I wondered it more than ever I found myself asking how well you can ever xii Introduction really know another person . y0 w0 h0" alt="" The WEIGHT- LOSS DIARIES COURTNEY RUBIN Copyright © 2004 by Courtney Rubin. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America with my weight and the other with my family about my weight. Most people don’t have the idealized version of themselves star- ing them in the face, but I