Truffling with Exhaustion

Remember when I wrote that I was going to bump my calories, and that if I gained a little bit of weight, that was all right? Well, I was full of shit.

I have a balance scale at home, and for twenty one weeks, I watched the lever descend. Sixty-one pounds disappeared this way, the bar inching backwards every week. Since I switched to the New Plan, the bar has resumed its ascent with great enthusiasm, and by day 3, I had gained 2.50 pounds back. I haven’t gained it really, but that’s hard to remember when my New and Bigger weight jackhammers through my skull all the live-long day. One-ninety-two-point-five. Say it with me! One-ninety-two-point-five.

I’m not sure how long this new and irritating gain will last, and I’m not sure how to fix it. Despite eating much more than before, I’m still in a constant state of hunger. How is that possible? I refuse to believe that my metabolism has skyrocketed so quickly and so dramatically that it wolfs down every bite in 20 minutes and then starts banging on my stomach for more. But metabolic rate notwithstanding, that is what’s happening.

As a result of my New Plan/Hunger, I’ve become hypersensitive to food. I’m like a straight guy in a strip club on a Saturday night. Things appear before me, they’re waved in front of my face, and all I can do is open my mouth to protest and then snap it shut to keep the drool from soaking my shirt.

All around the office, there are little buckets of Snickers, little displays of mini-M&Ms, and the ever-popular Tray of Leftovers stacked in the break room. I go in to fill my coffee cup, and I’m accosted by raspberry danish, bagels with flavored cream cheese, and the face-slapping insult, petit fours. Are you kidding me? When the executives at this place have their 5-hour staff meetings, they get Potbelly’s for lunch, and that’s only if the meeting goes past 1pm. People just don’t spend money on each other around here, and they certainly don’t spend it on staff. We at the peon level deem ourselves lucky that we don’t have to bring our own toilet paper to work, and yet somehow there are petit fours in the break room. I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong.

I’m as festive as the next recovering fat person when it comes to Food as Entertainment, which is to say that I’m about as joyous as a vegetarian at a steak house. White sugar lures me like a temple priestess and then leaves me panting at the altar after she’s had her way with me. Food is everywhere, the temptation is everywhere, and--here’s the pants-kicker--I seem to be the only one aware of it. I’m the hero in the horror film who sees the ghost nobody else can. People actually sit at their desks with bowls of snack-size candy bars and don’t eat them! I know this because the guy who sits across from me does this every day. I’m completely riveted by this guy. He’s a stereotypical skinny person who acts as if that tureen of Snickers is just another pencil cup, a decoration on his desk, an accessory to keep until month-end, when it has to take up temporary residence in the overhead file bin.

Every day I stroll over and invent some inane question to ask him, just so I can bowl-ogle. Days pass before a dent appears in the heap. Sometimes he’ll go a whole week without having even a single bar. How can he do that? He’s not the only one, either. A co-worker of mine dumped the entire contents of her children’s trick-or-treat stash on the side of her desk and left it to the general public. When I asked her how much of it she’d eaten herself, she looked at me as if I’d suggested we roast chestnuts on her laptop. “I haven’t eaten any of it,” she sniffed at me. “What kind of example does that set for my kids? Besides, I don’t like candy.”

So many things wrong with that answer.

First of all, unless her children are (a) older than she is, and (b) gainfully employed in the cubicles around her, they won’t know what she eats anywhere, let alone at the edge of her desk. Second, is she high? There is chocolate in that pile! I could understand ignoring the hard candy or the tubes of tarts, but what about the Reese’s miniatures? Or the almond kisses? Can’t you see that PEANUT BUTTER TWIX?!

See, this is why I don’t trust women who wear anything smaller than a size 6. They live in my world, but they are not of it. I don’t eat candy just like they don’t eat these things, but we avoid it for very different reasons. The “teenies” don’t want the treats, but I do. I crave them, and it is only through sheer will, a good loss so far (current gain notwithstanding), and the complete abhorrence of the idea that I’d have to tell my WW buddy that I’d had candy that keeps my indulgence at bay. It works for me, but more often, I work for it. I work for my weight loss, and I mean that in the sweating, gasping for breath, hauling-myself-up-over-the-mountain way. Every pound fights me, and I must box my way past every tidbit. These temptations used to vanish when I dieted, but no more. My metabolism and my PMS conspire against me.

I’ve never been indifferent to chocolate, though I have spent years pretending that I was. Over the course of my life, I have had occasion to entertain. I do the standard hostess thing and over-buy everything, from pre-appetizers to dessert. For some reason, the dessert always stays behind: most likely because I’ve stuffed my guests with avocado wraps and porterhouses until their intestines bulge, but also because I am the unlucky chocoholic soul who has friends that ‘just aren’t into sweets.’ Sometimes I just can’t catch a break.

Anyway, at night’s end, I and my roommate would wrap up the extras, taking care to label anything in foil, and then put the chocolate cake or the tin of cookies under glass, angling my track lighting to spotlight the very delicacy I wanted to forget about.

I did well enough avoiding it that night: after all, I’d stuffed myself along with my guests, and drunk a substantial amount of alcohol besides, and I so I simply could not have eaten anything more. Besides, invariably, “Roomie” would be sitting with me, and I was not about to scarf chocolate cake an hour after everyone else had departed from my Engorge-A-Thon.

The next morning, though, I would find myself inevitably in a Bill Cosby video, cataloging the ingredients in chocolate cake so I could justify having some for breakfast. “Eggs! Milk! Wheat! I can do this. I’ll just have a small piece. It’s no big deal. Roomie can have the rest.”

But enter the Sweet-Toothed Dragon, and a slim breakfast slice became a thicker second piece once “Roomie” left for work. A third slice would come off at mid-morning, and on an on, until half the cake had vanished. Terrified at having to explain myself, I’d spend the rest of the afternoon finishing it off, and then I’d chuck the plate into the sink to wash it, tie up the trash (even if it was empty), and when Roomie got home, I’d proclaim that I’d been too tempted to have it in the house, and so I threw it out.

Exhausting.

So now, whenever I have to see Candy Desk Co-Worker, I tell her to come to me. She has a crush on a guy who works on my floor, so it’s easy to lure her over. I can then spend the duration of the meeting pretending that there’s nothing to see on her desktop. Or at least nothing I’m willing to risk getting caught over. I’m very ‘out’ about my weight loss at work, and it just wouldn’t do to have someone see me face-down and chomping the still-wrapped squares off this woman’s desk, like a well-dressed and psychopathic Pac-Man.

It still infects me sometimes, though. For all my pretense at normal and being ‘over’ sweets, my brain taunts me with sounds and memories until I’m sure that I’m oozing cocoa and that there is more corn syrup than blood circulating through me. When I’m talking to my coworker, or torturing myself by standing at the untouched Snickers bowl, my mouth bubbles, longing to talk about those sugared lovelies, rather than whatever work-related thing I’m supposed to be discussing. My words come out normal, but only by sheer determination. Left to my brain’s devices, my speech during one of my choco-tacks would read something like this:

“So, Snickers, have you truffled the almond bark with the capital fondue? You should. If Godiva included caramel-cashew and the fudge accruals, you could peanut butter cup the double-stuffs, and you’d have a cupcake full of petit fours left to show the boss.”

Exhausting.

At least in the day it’s taken me to write this, I’ve shed a bit of my 2.50 gain. I’m 191.75 pounds as of this morning. I’ve even done a road trip in the interim, where I only ate half an apple, a few cups of (nearly) fat-free popcorn and 2 zesty pickle spears, instead of my standard Colossal Case of Vanilla Sandwich Cremes. I drove 400 miles with 2 men in the car, I had to stop 3 times for potty breaks, and I saw my mother. That should have left me with a pounding headache, early-onset PMS and enough stress to chew my fingernails all the way down to the first knuckle. Instead, I feel pretty good.

Of course, I’m still hungry. But I’d rather be rumbling than grumbling. Well, not really, but I’m trying for the Zen thing here. Right now, it’s the closest thing I can get to yoga, apart from stretching my hands to my laptop keyboard. But at least there’s nothing at the end of my desk.

A the E(xhausted)