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Pounds
Home with the folks. I lay in my boxers on the white couch, stretched out reading. Mom walked past me into the laundry room with a tub of chocolate chips. Whenever I’d visited she’d stock up on the two pound bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips from Price Club, knowing I love to bake oatmeal chocolate chip cookie bars. When she reappeared from the laundry room, the Tupperware was empty.
“I threw em’ out,” she said flatly.
“What do you mean you threw them out?”
“I threw away the chocolate chips.”
“Why? That was silly.”
“No it wasn’t. Not at the rate dad and I are eating them. I had to get them out of here.”
Annoyed at her drastic measure, I said, “Well, I would’ve used them. I could have taken them back with me.”
“Oh, I didn’t think of that. I guess it was wasteful,” mom said. She felt sorry. I did too. I’m no better at controlling my chocolate attacks.
For me it’s eat half the cookie batter, bike for a few hours, and eat some more. Food and exercise go together in my family. My dad spends two hours at the gym, an hour on the treadmill listening to books on tape, and an hour on weights, alternating days between muscle groups. He gets off keel if he misses more than a day, so the gym workout naturally gets planned into even a weekend getaway. “Nancy, is there a gym at the hotel?” asks my dad about our weekend visiting Dave, my brother, in Seattle. “No, but there’s one a mile away,” says my mom, anticipating the question.
“Do you think they have reciprocity with the Holiday Health Spa?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you call them?”
Dad tells me, “You know, I have two gym memberships. I go to the Bonita Athletic Club. It’s a nice gym. But I’ve kept my Holiday Health Spa membership for all these years for when I’m out of town. I pay under $100 a year for that gym, so I just keep it.”
Back in High School I belonged to the Holiday Health Spa as well. Dad and I would go on Sundays. It was something we could do together. A bond.
Mom, too, has the craze; she just doesn’t spend as much time trying to burn calories. She walks most mornings for about an hour, hills and all, and she keeps a racer’s pace. Her calf muscles are testimony. Mom’s skinny. She’s three inches taller than me and weighs only two pounds more. Everybody in the family knows everybody’s weight. Mom counts fat grams. Last time I rummaged through her freezer looking for the Dole Fruit-A-Freeze bars couldn’t find them. “Mom, you’re out of the frozen fruit bars!” I screamed across the house. She rounded the corner and said, ”They’ve changed those bars. They have ten grams of fat now instead of three per bar, so I’ve stopped buying them.” Figures. It’s not like she doesn’t eat dessert. She just dishes out a small portion of healthy Choice Vanilla Ice Cream and eats it slowly and feels satisfied. Maybe that’s why she only goes to the gym once a week. She tries to build up her flimsy arm muscles, and I reassure myself, “We weigh the same because I’m more solid, more muscular.”
I’m not quite convinced of that. Recently I bought a scale, and like dad, I step on it every morning. While the folks have a totally accurate doctor’s scale, my dad, a doctor, knows how much everybody “should” weigh within a five pound range. I bought the cheapest floor scale at Walgreens, with a red pointer swinging around to land on your weight. Every five pounds is marked by a bold line, while the lines in between are slightly shorter and finer. The tiniest jostling of the scale throws off the scale’s accuracy by a pound or two. Weighing has turned into part of the morning routine. When I weigh myself I only get on naked and with an empty bladder.
Ok, step gently with your foot on the scale. I’d lift one foot, then the other as the pointer almost touched the 125 mark. It’s the upper limit of what dad says is the right weight for me. “I think a good weight for you is between 120 and 125 pounds,” he offered on more than one occasion. Panic. I can’t be up to 125. I must have stepped down too hard and swayed the balance to the heavy side. I carefully step with the ball of my left foot and slowly lower my heel so nothing shakes. I grab onto the metal towel rack above the scale to help place my body onto the scale with as little impact as possible. I place my right foot on the scale in the same manner, without letting go of the rail until both feet are flat. The pointer creeps up as the second foot flattens, and I let go of the towel rack. So what if you’re 125? But then again, the scale’s probably wrong. I’ll just get off and recenter the scale for better accuracy.
That’s better. Step on tenderly like you’re walking on rough pebbles on the beach. It looks like the dial is closer to the finer line, the 124 mark. I lean forward slightly and the scale drops down a pound. I lean onto my heals and it goes back up. I fiddle with placement of my feet. All the way forward, then all the way back on the scale. That makes me 125. Better move forward again. Wait, maybe your eyes lost focus. Squint, bend over to get a closer look. Ooops, leaning over gets the scale off balance. Ok, it looks more like 124. Step off now, and look to see that the pointer is exactly at the zero mark. Good. You’ll just eat one less cookie today and bike another hill.
Instead of another hill I biked the California coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles with my brother, Dave, and his wife, Kris. On this trip, I decided to vocalize how crazy our family is about weight. Dave and I have just accepted that within the first five minutes of seeing our parents after months apart, dad will comment on our shapes. If we’re lucky we get, “You look good. Looks like you’re keeping your weight down.” Occasionally it’ll be, “Looks like you’ve gained a few pounds. Just gotta stay away from those cookies.” I never knew it affected Dave until now. When I told him about my scale neurosis, he said, “I weigh myself all the time!” Kris piped in, “He was weighing himself three times a day and telling me about how he needed to lost weight!” I couldn’t believe it. Maybe there’s some genetic pattern to this weight obsession, and I can’t help myself.
Grandma Freda, dad’s mom, is just as bad. When I see her she says, “You’ve lost weight. You look wonderful.” When we kiss good-bye she makes sure to tell me to keep that weight off. No wonder my two aunts and my uncle obsess about chocolate and exercise routines in their own ways. It’s a Sandweiss thing. As Kris and I biked along she said,
“I’m so glad you said that to Dave about your family. It drove me batty that Dave didn’t think it weird, your family’s obsession with weight. The first thing people say to each other is “How much do you weigh? It makes me wonder what they think of me.”
“I know, it’s not normal. You’re right. We’re crazy.” Talking to Kris made me feel sane. I discovered that Dave and I are just cut from the same mold. It is all a part of our family.
We finished the week-long ride down the coast. We ate Grand Slam breakfasts from Denny’s and Haagen Daz ice cream bars, we pedaled five hundred miles up and down hills, and our legs felt like rocks. We called our folks from Los Angeles to let them know we had made it safely. Dave talked first. “I wouldn’t say we ate well. We ate voluminously. No, we ate at restaurants…” Of course food came up.
I’d been away from the scale for a week and could only gauge my weight by the size of the bulge on my stomach when I sat on the toilet. It was my turn to talk to dad and I said, “It was tough, but I feel strong.” I didn’t tell him that the scale would determine how good I felt…
©Deb Sandweiss, 2008
Deb Sandweiss moved from teaching P.E. at a small school in Oakland to
Carmel Middle School She attended the Summer Institute in 2005 and
continues to write in her free time as well as attend yoga classes,
run, and consume lots of desserts. She can be contacted at debsandweiss@yahoo.com
I can totally relate to the scale thing. I do the same thing when I weigh myself, practically holding my breath, as it may lift me up ever so slightly. On my scale, it helps to step lightly onto it, and sometimes when I seem to weigh too much, I try to step up more lightly. It's silly, and I'm reminded of this every time I go to the doctor's office and they weigh me... always reflecting a few more pounds. Ug.
--Jennifer Marinace ( jmarinace@sthelena.k12.ca.us ) from USA on 3/31/2008; 2:56:33 PM
This Page was last updated: Monday, March 31, 2008 at 12:27:22 PM
Copyright 2008 Digital Paper
Copyright 2008 Digital Paper
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