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 sync—at 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 easiest—french 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 chocolate—just 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 toe and as someone else began lowering the blanket from my groin. A short and chubby nurse leaned over the table nonchalantly.
“I have to shave you,” she said, brandishing the razor.
There I was—control fiend, workaholic, and nurturer—prostrate on an uncomfortable table, completely dependent on doctors and nurses who were giving me a free “Brazilian.” Dean Koontz and Stephen King combined couldn’t come up with a more horrific scenario.
The first nurse had given up on the initial vein she had chosen and was hunting for another, this time in my forearm. “I used to be real good at this,” she muttered, as I tried not to squirm. Finally she gave up and asked the doctor to try his hand at it.
“You have one last chance,” I warned him. “And then I’m outta here. I’m not a pincushion, you know.”
He didn’t look too worried. He knew I wouldn’t get far. In one swift motion, he threaded the IV into my vein. Pay dirt. I don’t know what was in the IV, but I soon stopped shivering. My relief was short-lived, as the chubby nurse poked a syringe into my IV tube and squeezed. An instant, blood-chilling sting suffused my arm.
“Benadryl.” She shrugged as I yelped.
“If you say ‘I told you so!’ we’re history,” I had said as I glared at my husband. The last thing I wanted to do was give this husband of mine—the one who preferred salad to his own birthday cake—the satisfaction of being right.
He had shrugged helplessly before he was asked to leave the ER And now, here I lay on the table in the freezing cold cath lab as two doctors, dressed in matching turquoise scrub suits, huddled over my pelvis. She was blonde and blue-eyed. He was tall and slim. They looked like Dr. Barbie and nuclear cardiologist Ken, getting ready for a heart-stopping adventure in my femoral artery.
“This is the only part you’ll feel,” Dr. Ken promised. Pain spread through my pelvis as he injected me with a local anesthetic.
Then I felt the sickening sensation of blood dripping down my hip and over my inner thigh. The doctors were studying the screens as they threaded the catheter up toward my heart. They talked to each other in hushed tones. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. I would have liked to know more about the procedure and what they were looking at, but I didn’t want to sound the way my kids do when we go on a road trip.
“Hey, Docs, are we there yet?”
I felt like a live cadaver as Barbie and her friend whispered to one another. My feelings of helplessness awakened my worst fears, and my fertile imagination began to work overtime. I imagined their hushed conversation.
“The stupid fool has obviously been eating french fries more than once a week.” Dr. Barbie wrinkles her nose in disgust. I’m shaken out of my reverie by the real sound of Dr. Barbie’s voice.
“In a few seconds you’re going to feel a burning sensation in your chest. That’s the dye we’re injecting. It will spread to the rest of your body after it goes through your heart.”
Burning? Try searing, flaming, incandescent, ablaze—those words more aptly describe the sensation of the dye going through my system. My heart was afire and the rest of me wasn’t far behind. The fire spread to my groin and feet and arms. Then my heart started skipping beats. Am I dying? Is this the “big one”? I’m choked with fear and I think of my children. I’m never going to see them again. I’m going to expire here in the cath lab.
“That’s going to stop soon,” Dr. Barbie assured me. How did she know my heart was doing those things? “How do you know it’ll stop?” I asked her.
“We’ve got it under control,” she responded.
Was this a hospital or a medieval torture chamber? What’s next, the rack?
I must have accidentally voiced my thoughts aloud because she replied, “Wait, you haven’t even seen the recovery room.”
“Good news, though,” she assured me. “Your heart is just fine. There’s no blockage in any of your arteries.”
Thank you, God! I was a death-row inmate receiving a presidential pardon. I thought about the saucy Chinese food, eggplant-topped pizza, enormous kosher deli sandwiches, mounds and mounds of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby-Hubby ice cream, french fries, french fries, and more french fries I had been desecrating my body with. I didn’t deserve a second chance, but somehow I’d gotten one.
I didn’t even wince when the nurse pushed more Benadryl through my IV tube.
For me, suffering through the angiogram was like peering through a window into my future. If I continued the way I’d been going, I was bound to end up back in the cath lab someday. Maybe it would take twenty years, or maybe forty, but somehow I knew I’d be back and that next time I may not get to go back to work the next day.
It was at that precise moment that I invented the “I Never Want Another Angiogram (as long as I live) Diet.” It’s simple and easy to follow. There are no gimmicks, pills, or magic potions. Eat healthy, eat right, and when you’re tempted by Junior’s Cheesecake, crispy french fries, or mouthwatering Belgian truffles, reread this chapter and visualize the cath lab. Imagine just for one moment the feeling of hot dye burning through your veins. That was me, but it could just as easily have been you. No diet works without a powerful motivator, and I for one am not likely to forget that angiogram anytime soon.
That angiogram started me on a program of self- realization, and the self-realization led to a drastic lifestyle change. I realized that losing weight is not about food at all. The key is changing your attitude—hearing the wake-up call and deciding “enough is enough.” I was ready to be thin. No more excuses for gaining weight or staying unhappily static. I took responsibility for my nutrition, my fitness, my overall health, and...
