Weight watcher
How the decision to shed 20 pounds drew Ian Brown into the all-consuming world of calorie counting, self-denial and a nutritionist named Barbie
Monday: 205 pounds
The triggering incident that forced me to admit I have to lose more weight was the first game of the Blue Jays series against the Rays – specifically the Sportsnet television show Tim and Sid, starring two young men I admire for their wit and knowledge.
What I didn’t admire was their necks. Their necks had become large bibs beneath their faces. Seeing the band of bap that bulged beneath their beans like an Elizabethan ruff, I was reminded of my own.
That night in the bathroom, I took a long look at my own body. I don’t have a pot, or much of a bib, relatively speaking. The problem is the back of me. It is as if another, secret human being, another layer of flesh, has clamped itself onto my back from neck to knee, and is now subsisting on my body as a supracutaneous parasite. The extra man is most noticeable above my hips, where a kind of poorly planned, non-architectural extension resembling a mattress pad has been built onto the existing structure.
This morning, first thing, I made an appointment to see a nutritionist. She offered me a slot on Friday, but I begged for Thursday, fuelled as I am by the fierce resolve of the penitent.
Research says that people who commit to weight-loss meetings or use nutritionists – which is to say, people who can afford a nutritionist – lose more weight. The rich not only get richer; they get thinner.
The nutritionist’s name is Barbie Casselman. Last spring, she helped me drop from 213 pounds – the most I’ve ever weighed – to 199 pounds. I was aiming to shed 20 more, but summer intervened. I took a cruise down the Danube, through Hitler’s homelands, with my mother-in-law. Drinking was essential.
Now I am afraid to see Casselman again. This is not uncommon.
Tuesday: 205 pounds
Weighed myself this morning, dry, naked and empty: 205. Ack. Perhaps my scale is broken? According to the Body Mass Index, I should weigh no more than 179 pounds – six pounds less than the goal Casselman is recommending. My body, she says, might not let me go lower. Even at that weight, I think I’ll look like a cadaver.
Casselman’s regime entails twice-weekly weigh-ins at her office and maintaining a food diary of everything that goes into my mouth, all the while adhering to a calorie-reduced, balanced diet.
Why is it so hard? The theory of losing weight, according to Casselman, is simple. An average person living a sedentary life might need 10 calories per pound to maintain her or his weight and energy. Someone like me, who exercises three times a week, needs 12, in Casselman’s estimation. So, at 200 pounds, I need 2,400 calories to maintain my weight. At the same time, 3,500 calories equals one pound of fat. So if I need 2,400 calories a day, but eat only 1,800, after six days I will lose a pound. Casselman hopes for two pounds a week – although it can be more early on, with water loss.
“That’s what the science says,” Casselman informs me on the telephone. But I find eating is as psychological as it is physiological. Consuming carbohydrates, for instance, produces serotonin, which makes me feel (briefly) better – hence the doughnut fix when one is facing a deadline. (One could produce serotonin by exercising, too, but the doughnuts are right there.) And the quick fixes add up. “If you eat just 100 extra calories a day, that’s 10 pounds a year,” Casselman reminds me. Twelve cashews are 100 calories. A glazed doughnut is 260 calories. No wonder she sees as many as 50 clients a day.
My new daily regime permits six 75-calorie servings of protein; eight 70-calorie servings of starch; three “limited” (or starchy) vegetables (40 calories a pop), but unlimited quantities of non-starchy ones; three servings of fruit (three oranges, but only 1½ apples); and three teaspoons of butter or oil or other fat. It’s roughly 1,500 calories a day, although Casselman gears that low, assuming everyone underestimates their intake. A four-ounce glass of wine – a tiny glass of wine! – takes up one of those starches, or two of those fruits. “When you’re on a diet,” a pal said recently, “you can either eat or drink. But you can’t do both.”
Wednesday: 205 pounds
Like someone who cleans their house before the cleaning lady arrives, I am predieting before my first meeting with the nutritionist. I now understand how we make 200 food decisions a day. For breakfast I eat half a bagel; 1/3 of a cup of Greek yogurt (85 calories – I usually buy the non-fat, non-Greek kind, which allows me to have three-quarters of a cup for the same expenditure of calories, but my daughter prefers the thick stuff) with a peach and some low-fat (that is, artificially sweetened) syrup. Artificial sweeteners may do horrible things to rats when they consume dozens of packets a day, but I tell myself I am not a rat.
But these efforts come to naught, because for dinner I make (delicious) farfalle with corn, the kernels cut from three cobs and sautéed in four tablespoons (four times my daily allotment of fat!) of butter with scallions and then puréed and augmented with half a cup of grated Parmesan, no wine, two non-fat popsicles (80 calories) and – this is my weakness, apart from pasta, wine, cheese and sausages – two squares of marzipan-stuffed chocolate left over from the Danube tour. I justify them because I rode my bike, fast, for two hours this evening. But Casselman says that while exercise “is good for mental health” in that it quiets the body, “80 per cent of weight loss is diet.”
To distract myself from feeling hungry mid-morning, I cruise the Internet. Weight loss is a $20-billion-plus business, driven by shame on the one hand, and the false promise of weight loss with no sacrifice on the other. More than 110 million people in North America are on diets at any given time, 85 per cent of whom are women. There is a Writing Diet (“Write yourself right-sized!”) and a Premium Cleanse. There is a Pinterest page filled with “inspirational” weight-loss slogans such as “Do it for the ‘Holy shit, you got hot.’” If I actually lose weight and someone says “Holy shit, you got hot” to me, I will blind them with my thumbs.
Never mind that the health benefits are beyond argument – lower blood pressure, cholesterol, stress, risk of diabetes. The strange thing about the online Diet World is that it never mentions what is actually required to lose weight – discipline, which is what makes losing weight satisfying. You think it’s because your old pants fit again (the benefit most often cited by dieters), but underlying that symptom is the fact that you withstood the lure of the world. You have to “embrace the hunger” (Casselman’s line). “It requires discipline,” she says. “It requires constant vigilance.” It’s the ancient reward of stoicism, of being indifferent to pleasure and pain.
Thursday: 204 pounds
My first appointment, postsummer, with the nutritionist. Casselman calls my name and, as I step into her temple of doom, asks how I have been faring, weight-wise. I always say things have gone badly: That way, if they have, and I am up, not down, I will at least have displayed self-awareness.
I empty my wallet, glasses, keys, phone, notebook and change, every gram of extra weight, onto a chair. I remove my shoes and stand on the scale. First disappointment: She has to move the main weight higher, into the 200-plus zone. I am 204 pounds.
She is not. At 60, Casselman is five-foot-two and 98 pounds. Forty years ago, at 20, studying nutrition at Ryerson, she weighed 131 pounds. A doctor suggested she lose some weight, and she did, permanently. She is ferociously disciplined. Her clients repeat a legendary story: Casselman once ate Chinese food, after which she gained four pounds (oil plus salt, which promotes the retention of water) and never ate Chinese food again.
“Have you been weighing yourself?” Casselman asks. Not before this week. “One of the things that is most important, not just for weight loss but for maintaining the loss, is weighing daily,” she reminds me. (Diets date back to Hippocrates; the bathroom scale was introduced in 1913.) “Because there is just this denial that sets in if you don’t, that your weight isn’t going up.” Also, I have to keep a food diary. People who keep their diaries assiduously are like people who wear Fitbits: “They want to be accountable.” Ow.
But the visit has a bracing effect on my day’s eating. Lunch is a chicken breast and a cup of not-too-oily Shanghai spicy noodles, and two plums. Dinner is eight shrimp roasted with half a head of broccoli in some olive oil, and three low-calorie popsicles. I feel hungry watching television (Vikings, season three: They eat with their fingers), but virtuous and lighter, at least until I break down and have a bowl of Cheerios and 2/3 of a cup of 1-per-cent milk.
Friday: 203 pounds
The day starts well! I fry an egg in olive oil to go with half a small bagel and an Americano for breakfast, which gets me to lunch, a roasted red pepper stuffed with cheese and (more) egg, and two plums, purchased at Fresh & Wild(ly expensive), the local hipster supermarket, for $14, Jesus save me. All I can think about is my next meal. This being Friday, with my wife ensconced at the Toronto International Film Festival, I have a glass of wine and read William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner on the way home. But the wine lowers my resolve and stimulates my appetite, and I order a takeout burrito for dinner. I hold the cheese and the rice and the sauces, but then Johanna arrives home, and because we have both forgotten it is our 27th wedding anniversary, we go for a drink at a nearby Mexican place, and Johanna orders plantain chips and pork ribs and cod tacos, which I of course help her eat, which in turn makes me silently curse her for sabotaging my diet. She is not sabotaging my diet, but I refuse to be held accountable. Still, no one who eats or drinks wants anyone else to stop eating or drinking.
Saturday: 203 pounds
Today is a rare day in dietetic eating – tasty, as well as healthful. Light ricotta and fresh raspberries on half a Montreal bagel for breakfast; an incredible tomato sandwich (because there were excellent tomatoes at the market, whose bounty otherwise made me feel like a Calvinist trapped in a Roman orgy) on toast, rubbed with half a clove of garlic and the cut face of half a tomato, striped with light Hellman’s and some olive oil and – this is not on the diet – two strips of Danish back bacon, drained to a Gobi-like dryness. Two superb nectarines. I want to go for a long, fast bike ride but can’t because I spend half an hour a day writing down (or, to be entirely accurate, racking my brain to remember and then writing down) what I’ve eaten, how much of it I’ve eaten, what it consisted of and how many calories that might possibly be. Keeping a food diary may be key to losing weight, but it’s as painful as balancing your chequebook three times a day. But that’s how I know dinner is two fried eggs and some garlicky chard (I am allowed chard til the chard cows come home) on polenta (broth, not milk) followed by another popsicle. Followed by my now daily two sinful squares of chocolate.
Sunday: 202 pounds
Stupidly, I drink Diet Coke and not enough water, which leaves me dehydrated (and therefore hungry), and fail to eat enough protein at breakfast and lunch, which digests more slowly and would have evened out my blood sugar at the end of the day; in its place, I fall prey to a bag of baked vegetable chips, 240 calories for 35, empty carbs that make insulin, which in turn makes it hard to get fat out of my cells. It’s all very scientific. But I redeem my indulgence with a fantastic salad of thinly sliced heritage tomatoes, figs, toasted pine nuts and half an ounce of Roquefort in a balsamic and olive-oil dressing. Spectacular. Of course I ruin it with more chocolate. Casselman says I should brush my teeth at 7 p.m.: “Nothing tastes good after toothpaste.” But it makes me feel like a seven-year-old.
Monday: 199 pounds
Despite my lack of discipline, at my next weigh-in I’ve lost four pounds. A true stoic would be less ecstatic. Only another 25 (12 weeks!) to go. Self-denial is a snap, and the fat fellow on my back has surely been given his notice. Then again, I’m probably delusional. It’s probably just water. I’m back to where, a summer ago, I started.