Chicken Soup for the Dieter's Soul Read online

  Remember the “F” word. (Not that one!) During your meal, focus on friends and family, not feasting. It’s not your last meal, so enjoy your company and the conversation.

  Tricia Finch

  Sit-Ups Till Your Eyes Pop Out

  Worry is a misuse of the imagination.

  Dan Zadra

  The day was glorious, warm and fresh, the sky a clear Wedgwood blue. I was out for my morning run through the forest preserve, feeling vibrant and strong, breathing in the smell of new leaves and sunlit air. My electric-orange running shorts were cut high, showing a lot of leg, the black jog-bra cut low, showing a lot of skin.

  When my shoelace came untied, I crouched to retie it. That’s when I saw it. A fold of dimply flesh hanging over the waistband of my shorts. I gasped and shot up, arms high as if being robbed, looking at my belly. It was gone. Oh, thank heavens, I thought, it had just been a hideous hallucination. So I bent to finish tying the shoe, and there was the blasted thing again.

  I had been blessed with thin genes and was one of those women who other women regarded with envy as I packed away unladylikemounds of food and never gained an ounce. I naively thought itwould last forever and Iwould die an old woman with firm breasts, a tight butt and flat stomach.

  The offending flesh shocked and appalled me, and I knew I’d have to get really serious now, so along with running, I took up aerobics, step-classes, spinning and Pilates. I started strength training and a new routine of leg lifts, curls and squats. I bought an Ab-Blaster.

  At brunch one day I laid out my new exercise regimen to my friend Judi.

  “This has to be obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Judi pronounced. “You already look too good. Here, eat some of my eggs Benedict, you sicko.” She pushed the gooey plate toward me. “If you get any better, I can’t be friends with you any more.”

  Judi’s idea of exercise was getting out of bed in the morning, and her idea of a healthy diet was a green salad and Diet Coke with her fettuccine Alfredo and chocolate mousse.

  “I have to work on my stomach,” I said. “I want six-pack abs.”

  “Hah!” Judi said. “I can just see it: you, in an ad in the back of a women’s magazine, seventy years old, face wrinkled like linen on a hot day, but you’re standing there in a string bikini, all buffed out with those six-pack abs.”

  “That won’t happen,” I said. “I’ll have had a facelift before the photo shoot.” I dipped a piece of pineapple in low-fat yogurt but felt faint from the aroma of eggs Benedict wafting up my nostrils.

  “You’re fifty years old. You can’t get a six-pack when you’re over fifty unless you go to a liquor store.”

  “Sure I can,” I said. “I just have to work harder.”

  “Didn’t we always say we were going to grow old gracefully?”

  “Yeah, when we were fifteen. We also said we’d never spank our kids in the grocery store and we’d never use a cell phone and we’d never turn into our mothers.”

  Judi shrugged, pulled back her plate and took a large bite, dripping with hollandaise.

  “Look at Cher,” I continued. “Look at Goldie Hawn. Every time I see Goldie’s flat stomach in one of her little body-skimming evening gowns at the Academy Awards, I want to scream. She’s older than I am. If she has a flat stomach, I can, too.”

  “Those women spend more on plastic surgery than we spend on our mortgages. Get real. No one’s exempt. We’re all getting old. Let’s do it with some dignity.”

  I considered Judi’s words as I immersed myself in my new training program. What does aging gracefully mean, I wondered one day as I did twenty extra squats. Letting yourself go? Giving up? I ran an extra mile that day.

  On the day I finished fifty crunches and thirty-five leg lifts, I heard Judi’s voice in my head: “No one’s exempt. We’re all getting old. Let’s do it with dignity.” And when I finally worked up to sixty-two reps on the Ab-Blaster (shooting for one hundred) I collapsed, gasping, wondering where this was getting me. The belly-roll was still there in spite of my punishing efforts. I could probably do sit-ups until my eyes popped out and that flab would sit there, unperturbed, mocking me.

  I lay on the floor, mopping my sweat-soaked hair. And then I got up, grabbed the Ab-Blaster furiously as if it had bitten me and took it out to the trash. I vowed to accept being fifty-something with all its consequences: excess hair where I didn’t want it, thinning hair where I did, drooping breasts, sagging butt and the inability to focus on my eyelashes as I tried to coat them with mascara. I would be happy with who I was and how I looked now. I would. I really would.

  I opened a Diet Coke and drank thirstily, looking out the kitchen window, breathing in the smell of the sunlit air. Something moved by the garbage can and I frowned and squinted. Someone was picking up the Ab-Blaster. Hesitating for only a split second I rushed to the door and threw it open with a thwack!

  “Hey!” I shouted, running out. “Leave that alone. I need that!”

  Samantha Hoffman

  Chocolate Is Not the Enemy

  He can inspire a group only if he himself is filled with confidence and hope of success.

  Floyd V. Filson

  It wasn’t yet 7:00 in the morning and already I was chain-eating lime chili tortilla chips. I stood at the kitchen counter, emotionally hung-over from yet another fight with my boyfriend. I was crunching the anger, salting the wounds. Crunching and salting with bites of chocolate for good measure. I couldn’t stop. Even the tortilla chip bag had a wickedly furious crinkle. I couldn’t eat fast enough to block the tension of not wanting to abandon my relationship, not knowing how to go on. I was broken, a whir of helplessness, powerlessness. This echoed my drinking days. Twelve years I’d been sober. How did I get this way with food? This had to stop. Had to stop! What had been an occasional binge followed by days of deprivation had become a near-daily nightmare.

  A prayer flashed through my mind, one that my friend Marti Matthews shares in her book, Pain: The Challenge and the Gift. It goes like this: “Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!” Which, she suggests, can be repeated with hands thrown in the air.

  I repeated it silently all the way to a breakfast with one of my best friends, a bearer of wonders and wise words. While I collected myself, she whipped out a flyer from her bag and slapped it on my empty plate. “Taking Your Own Shape: Explore Your Relationship with Food and Body,” it said.

  What? Oh my God. The most important part of praying for help is recognizing it when it arrives. Darn, I’d have to go.

  The class was intimate and scary. Six women sitting on couches. That first night, I felt like someone who’d arrived from another planet with a “Waiting for Instructions” note pinned to my soul. Please tell me what to do and when to do it. Give me the whole calories in/calories out regime with a few collages thrown in to express my creativity and no one will get hurt. Now!

  Instead, we talked. And we listened. We talked about our bodies—what it felt like to live in them.We shared our love and lack of love for others and ourselves. We set no weight-loss goals.We suffered no weekly weigh-ins or calculations of the foods we ate, and in what proportions. Got no stickers for eating right. Or scowls for eating wrong.

  In fact, Dr. Becky Coleman, our teacher, said there was no right or wrong, only alive and less alive. She needn’t have told us. She radiated acceptance. She embodied an invitation to a whole new level of living that was spacious and expressive. She’d weighed 300 pounds, not once, but twice. Eight years ago, she lost 170 pounds and has never found them again.

  How strange. My body was a Frankenstein to me, out of control, hunted and feared by the villagers. Becky practiced compassionate experimentation. Explore your weight. Don’t condemn it. Perhaps hunger was a message from your deep, wise self. What if your body generously expressed what you were afraid to? Well, if my body was speaking, it was mumbling, that’s for sure. Maybe because its mouth was full.

  One evening we introduced our “Favorite Food Friends” to each other. A vegetarian br
ought a huge plate of steak and french fries. I showed my old faithful Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby ice cream. Chocolate-covered peanut butter–filled pretzels tucked into vanilla ice cream. I’d met Chubby Hubby years ago when my then live-in boyfriend moved away. It was everything: salty, crunchy, soft, sweet. Thanks to Ben and Jerry’s planet-friendly ethics, I could save myself and the world at the same time.

  “You say you crave variety,” said Becky. “Interesting variety in that carton.” She invited us to experiment with our food friends. Did we reach for them in anger? Sorrow? What would happen if we held the tension that triggered the craving just for a moment?

  The next time Chubby Hubby called, I paused with spoon in hand. I let my body experience the ache for peace with my lover. Then I ate the ice cream.

  Instead of slapping my thighs and cursing my willpower, I became curious. So there really were emotions trying to emerge between bites. My body relished the pauses from chips and chocolate. Attention at last! I began to enjoy feeling fluid and elegant instead of leaden. Twenty pounds fell away. Discovering that my cravings, my clenched heart, my anxious belly had answers for me was like being lost and panicky in the woods and discovering the trees could speak. Now when trees speak, I listen.

  Jan Henrikson

  A Can of Peas and a Jog Around the Block

  Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.

  Calvin Coolidge

  One summer day, a dozen years ago, I stood at my living room window and watched two women walk by on the sidewalk. They were both young mothers and each pushed a stroller while holding a toddler about the same size as Dana, my then two-year-old daughter. It struck me how alike the women looked—heavy and slow, with untucked, oversized T-shirts covering ample butts and bellies. Then my window became a mirror, and I saw myself. I looked just like them.

  In that instant, as I stood there in my untucked, oversized T-shirt and elastic-waist shorts, I knew I had to make some changes. God was hitting me over the head with a giant foam hammer: “This is an epiphany, Lori. Run with it.” And that, more or less, is what I did.

  I’d always been a tiny person, never needing to exercise and able to eat whatever, whenever, and remain trim and petite. I’d even come out the other end of my first pregnancy smaller than when I went into it. I’d had a hard time just holding onto my first child, a boy. After seven months of nausea, projectile rejection of almost all food save Cheerios and Dannon yogurt, and a stint in the hospital hooked to a nasogastric tube that delivered protein drink through my nostrils to my stomach, my Adam greeted the world two months early—four pounds and able to fit in the palm of my husband’s hand. When we took our tiny fighter home after his stay in intensive care, I weighed five pounds less than I’d weighed in high school.

  Dana stayed in the womb a week beyond the due date. While I carried Dana, she and I ate. About every twenty minutes.With Adam, I felt sick if I ate.With Dana, I felt sick if I didn’t. I embarked on a nine-month, nonstop eating orgy. Steak, peanut butter, baked potatoes with sour cream, hot fudge sundaes. Deli meat, frozen pizza, Cheez-Its by the boxful. Oreos, burritos, chocolate and butterscotch pudding smothered in Reddi-wip. I slept with a loaf of bread next to the bed.

  When Dana was born, healthy and beautiful, I was big. And stayed big. And pretended I wasn’t. Had God sent the two strolling mothers any earlier, I wouldn’t have been ready to receive the message. Being in denial awhile had allowed me to keep eating doughnuts, corned-beef hash and bacon while rationalizing the weight gain as a normal, perfectly acceptable stage of motherhood.

  Upon my epiphany, I resolved to effect a wholesale, cold-turkey conversion. I knew exactly what I had to do: eat less, eat well, move more. Forever. And it’s the forever part that made the whole thing easier to swallow.

  Were I to put myself “on a diet,” I knew I would fail, ultimately if not right away. I needed to replace “diet,” a short-term, emergency-infused concept, with “life,” hopefully long and good. I would never be on a diet. I’d be on life.

  This gave me more time to succeed. A diet would demand results in a few weeks. Life gave me more time. All the time in the world.

  A diet would have me devote a finite number of weeks or months to counting, measuring and portioning, allowing me an extra gram of sugar here and there so I could live a little. Life, on the other hand said, “Don’t live a little, live fully. Use common sense to live well. You know what’s good and what’s not, so, most of the time, just do what’s good.”

  And a diet would address only what I took in. But life offered the chance to play with energy, experiment with taking it in and burning it off. A diet held no challenge: Here, eat this measured thing. Life said, “Have some fun. See what happens when you eat a little and burn a little. Or eat a lot and burn a little. Or eat a little and burn a lot. Or eat a lot and burn a lot.” What fun! Like being a scientist. Diet? Every day is grapefruit. Life? Every day is different.

  So I banished “diet” from my mind-set and lexicon and focused on life. I resolved to do three things: center my meals around plants, choose healthy calories over bad or empty ones, and move for at least twenty minutes a day.

  When the time came for my first postconversion meal, I opened the fridge. I wanted to plant-center my plate, but there wasn’t a fresh fruit or vegetable in that whole Kenmore. I opened the cupboard and took down a can of peas. I found an onion, sautéed it in olive oil, threw in some chopped garlic and lemon juice and folded the mix into the peas. I poured a tall glass of orange juice, sat down on my deck and tucked into this humble, healthy lunch that would change my life.

  The next morning, I dug out an old pair of sneakers, pulled on my elastic-waist shorts and oversized T-shirt and went outside to move. I started out walking but soon found myself lifting my feet high enough off the ground to approximate a rude form of entry-level shuffle-jogging. That first day, I made it once around the block. I felt like I was going to die, but I knew I’d run the race of my life.

  Now, after years of salads, fruit, fish, chicken, whole grains and the occasional Oreo or Dairy Queen cone, I wear high school–size jeans and have long since given away my elastic-waist shorts.

  And that energy experiment? My favorite take in/burn off combination is “eat a lot and burn a lot.” That’s what I do when I train for a marathon. I’m preparing for my sixth.

  Lori Hein

  Take Two

  Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

  John Quincy Adams

  There is something about everyone they’re not happy with. Maybe it’s their weight, hair, eyes or skin color, their shoe size, job situation or relationships—any number of things.

  For me, it’s always been my weight.When I hit puberty I sprouted a chest, a butt and a little gut all at once. I became aware of things I never had before, in places I never thought of before. I became increasingly self-conscious.

  Some girls chose not to eat. I chose the opposite and began eating too much. My appetite sky-rocketed, but I looked fine, until I hit eighteen. Then it was as if gravity had something against me at an early age. I was making bad eating decisions, was depressed and cared way too much about what people thought of me.

  Eventually my weight became an obstacle in the way of happiness—or so I thought.

  It took many years of these bad eating habits for me to end up considerably overweight. I would diet, crash diet, nose-dive diet; if there was a diet out there, I was on it. I tried about everything but eating tofu with tweezers! (Don’t think I didn’t consider it though.) And I would lose weight, only to gain it right back, and then some.

  A constant frustration for me was the emphasis that society placed on being thin. Thin is beautiful. To those of us who aren’t, we must resolve to lose weight and be healthy and live happily ever after. That moment of fortitude vanishes the minute the delivery boy, holding the extra-large pepperoni pizza with extra cheese, rings the doorbell and you
think,Well, I paid for it; I might as well eat it! which is exactly what I would do. Then I would feel terrible about my lack of self-control and cry.

  Of course I comforted myself with a double-dark chocolate candy bar, or two or three, which worked until I read the nutrition label. Imagine my shock to discover my delusion about chocolate being a vegetable. Hey, it comes from a bean, and beans are vegetables, aren’t they? The justification and rationalizations never end.

  On a day I resolved to lose weight and be healthy, I would consume over 4,000 calories! I know I was in the junk food line a little too long when they handed out those metabolisms, but even the women who pack it away and stay tiny wouldn’t last long at that rate. I was living in an endless cycle of guilt, unhappiness and failure.

  I would make jokes about myself so I’d feel less self-conscious about the way I looked. I would tell people, “I should put stickers onmy holster hips that say, ‘Caution, wide turns.’” Or how about this one: “I get applause when I run in gym class. My thighs slap together so loud it sounds like everyone’s clapping.” After all, my attitude is based on 10 percent of what life hands me, and 90 percent of how I react to what life hands me.

  It didn’t occur to me until later that, like almost everything in life, happiness is a choice. I made some bad choices in the food I ate, and how much of it. Now I have to reverse the process. In the end, it isn’t about crash diets or what society thinks—it’s about learning to have a diet. Everything we eat is a diet, and one secret is to keep things in proportion. Another is choosing to be happy with what you have—no matter how much more of it you’ve been given.

  God, my husband, and the prayers of many family and friends are the reason I’m able to put life into a different perspective today. Society doesn’t define happiness— especially mine. I no longer let it. What we do with our lives and bodies is up to us. I had to change my attitude before I could change my eating habits. There are certain things about myself that I can’t change, but the things I can, I am learning to be less obsessive about and more patient with.