Joining the Thin Club Tips for Toning Your Mind After You've Trimmed Your Body

ONE Against All Odds How I Made the Journey Downscale The Question I Get Asked Most: How Did You Lose the Weight? HINT: It's Not About the Diet! For years I had turned up my nose at the mere thought of a diet. I was, without question, the most unmotivated person on the planet. Once in a while, though, life has a strange way of giving you a well-placed kick. Mine came in the form of an angiogram. The day I sat in a wheelchair, in a bleak foyer outside the operating room suite, I was forced to face the consequences of a lifetime of neglect. I was barefoot and my thin hospital gown was barely covered by a threadbare hospital-issue blanket. My forty-year-young heart just couldn't be clogged. True, it had been broken once or twice many years before, but clogged arteries? The doctor I hadn't seen in three years had obviously thought I was doomed. I had been getting "arm squeezes"pressure that started in my left arm and radiated into my chest. I was finding it hard to walk, go up steps, and exert myself at all. One day the pressure got extreme and I went to the doctor. He gave me an aspirin and checked me into the NYU Emergency Room. He thought I might be having a heart attack. OK, so I'm a workaholic. I see myself more as a "precision-timed juggler," keeping my three children, my busy public relations business, my radio show, my writing, my then husband, and all the other flora and fauna of a late baby boomer's life somehow in syncat least most of the time. Time for myself rarely enters the picture. When I do find a moment to rest, I usually remember something I forgot to do, like go to the bathroom. Taking long walks in the woods? That's for narcissists! I could never be so ridiculously indulgent! Exercise class? Another time-waster. Or so I thought then. Until the angiogram, I always ate on the run, grabbing whatever was easiestfrench fries, pizza, pasta, any kind of bagel, cake, or muffin. Salad took way too much time to shop for and even more time to prepare. And it tasted yucky. I watched the scale topping out at 220+ pounds, but I didn't much care because I never even had time to look in the mirror. And when I did, I never saw myself as fat! But now I was seated on a gurney in the Emergency Room of the hospital, and a cardiologist pulled the privacy drapes around me. "If you let me out of here now, I swear I'll never eat another french fry," I pleaded, not quite sure I could ever make good on that promise. "I'll even give up chocolate." "Heavens, you will not give up chocolate!" he laughed. "You can still have chocolatejust not a whole lot of it!" So here I was, awaiting an angiogram and wondering how the outcome would affect my life. And how many Valrhona chocolates were left in my future. "Don't you have slippers?" The nurse looked at my bare feet. "I came straight from work." I shrugged. She found me some paper booties, and I shuffled from the gurney into what looked like an operating room and felt like a meat locker. I began to shake from the cold. She helped me onto an even colder table and barely covered me with the thin blanket. In spite of the blindingly bright lights, I was shivering and my teeth were chattering. Another nurse wrapped a tourniquet around my arm, tying it shut with the snapping of rubber against rubber. "This will pinch a bit," she warned as she stuck me with an IV needle. "Dang," she swore as she missed the vein. She maneuvered the needle around, causing shards of pain to course through my arm. I jumped as someone clipped a pulse monitor to my toeLederman, Judith is the author of 'Joining the Thin Club Tips for Toning Your Mind After You've Trimmed Your Body', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307341464 and ISBN 0307341461.