I WAS A GRAMMAR SCHOOL KLEPTO

It's hard to know why a man turns to a life of crime.  A broken family?  Grinding poverty?  Hanging out with the wrong crowd?  Or maybe he's just a rotten seed, destined from birth to be a blight on humanity.

I have no excuse.  My family was stable and loving, we were solidly middle class, and my friends were harmless dorks.  The biggest hardship of my youth was hay fever.  The mean streets of Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, and Murder Incorporated were a world away from my idyllic New England home.  So I must have been born bad; nothing else can explain the reign of terror I visited on my second grade class.

It started innocently enough.  In the spring of 1957, my class set up a beautiful miniature farm.  It had a farmhouse, barn, and silo made from construction paper, and a large population of plastic poultry and livestock.  Within a few days, that population started to dwindle.

Why cattle rustling?  Because like most fledgling criminals, I was burdened with a first-class set of model trains.  My layout included a farm which was not nearly as well stocked as the one at school.  I figured that I would borrow a couple of cows and return them the next day.  Even though I forgot to bring them back, nobody seemed to notice.  That afternoon, I lifted three chickens and a goat.  I just lingered a while before heading out to recess, and when the classroom was empty, I stuffed them in my pocket.  As before, there were no repercussions.  Even my parents seemed oblivious to my farm's sudden productivity and my remarkable success at animal husbandry.

I grew headier with each heist.  I soon left the farm behind and started moving small school supplies - rulers, scissors, and the like.  But even the thrill of unlimited paste wasn't enough.  I got greedy.

As part of a science unit on weather, our teacher, Mrs. Pierce, constructed a milk carton anemometer.  We took it outside one windy day, and she timed the blade rotations with a gleaming silver stopwatch.  It was love at first sight.  I had to have it.

I spent that night in feverish preparation, devising a scheme so diabolical that Sherlock Holmes himself would be baffled.  At exactly 2:55 the next afternoon, as school was letting out, I asked Mrs. Pierce if I could see the watch.  When she left the room for a moment, I bolted.

Ingenious, no?

For the next few hours, I went into a timing frenzy.  How far could I run in a minute?  How long could I hold my breath?  What I should have been timing was how long before the jig was up, because soon after, I dropped the watch on the sidewalk and broke the crystal.  I could no longer tell Mrs. Pierce that I simply forgot to give her back the watch before I left school - the linchpin of my scam.  Despite this setback, I was determined not to crack, to play it cool as long as I could.

Which turned out to be not that long.  When my father came home from work, he found me banging my head against the side of our porch.  He asked what I was doing, and I said, "Trying to kill myself."  Keen observer of human nature that he was, he got suspicious.

After a call from the school, he had the facts but decided to sweat it out of me anyway.  When my father got seriously angry, he would speak softly and slowly, but with menacing intensity and volatile sarcasm.  He also possessed an extremely potent version of the hairy eyeball which could extract a confession faster than the Spanish Inquisition.

"I understand you got a stopwatch at school today."

Deny everything.

"A stopwatch?  What stopwatch?"

"How about the broken one we found in your jacket."

Oops.

"Where did you get it?"

"My teacher gave it to me."

That was true.

"Why did she give it to you?"

Uh oh.

"She gave it to me for being a good student."

Even at seven, I knew I was in it deep.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Deeper and deeper.

"Well, we'll just have to call her up and thank her for giving you such a wonderful gift."

He reached for the phone.  I folded like an origami crane.

"Wait a minute!  Let's talk."

Game.  Set.  Match.

Justice followed swiftly.  I received a thorough spanking, lost a few month's allowance to pay for the watch, and was forced to apologize to Mrs. Pierce.  I'm convinced that only part of the punishment was for the theft; the rest was for the dimwitted way I'd committed it.  My father, who'd led a fairly wild youth on the streets of Paterson, NJ, was likely more embarrassed by my ineptitude than my criminality.

And so with chastened heart and sore behind, my career as an evil mastermind came to an end.

NOW THAT YOU'VE LOST WEIGHT, WHO ARE YOU?

Congratulations!  You've made it!  There is no more glorious moment in life than getting on a scale after months of dieting and seeing your target weight in the window.  It's winning the Nobel Prize and heavyweight crown on the same day the Sox take the Series and Juliette Binoche invites you to bed (assuming you're a prizefighting physicist from Boston who's smitten with Juliette Binoche.)  Now that you've reached the pinnacle, what's next?

Start by soaking up some adoration - you've earned it.  Let words of tribute and laudatory speeches fill your head until it bursts from the pressure.  Glory in the discomfort of naysaying colleagues who once ridiculed your efforts and now betray their hypocrisy with oily praise.  Treat compliments from overweight friends with a shrug and assure them that they could do the same if they wanted to.  It's utter malarkey, but it provides them with a reprieve and earns you a merit badge in humility.

Given your accomplishment, you are allowed to do some bragging without tarnishing your halo.  This can be subtle and non-verbal, such as wearing tight clothes to your final Weight Watchers meeting, or more overt:

"Really, Officer, I was doing forty-five in a school zone?  Because that's how much weight I've lost."

Yes, revel in this moment because it's over in a heartbeat, and once it's gone, it ain't comin' back.

People will quickly accommodate themselves to the new slimmer you.  Their praise will fade, and as long as you stay at your current weight, it will no longer be discussed.  But there will always be an undercurrent of jealousy and a lethal lode of suppressed schadenfreude waiting to erupt the minute your self-discipline shrinks and your waist expands

After all, you're expected to keep the weight off.  All the effort you put into reaching your new size is now required just to keep you there.  The term used by the diet community is "maintenance," which is like referring to Marine boot camp as an invigorating spa treatment.  Maintenance is going to the dentist twice a year and changing the oil in your Camry.  What's demanded of you is a life of constant denial and perpetual vigilance, all without the benefit of friendly encouragement or positive reinforcement.  You're already trim; nobody cares.

Further, you've lost the support of your diet plan, that rigidly defined program that got you here, and you've reawakened those demons who were previously soothed by your overeating.  The temptations of the world didn't disappear because you were losing weight and righteously avoiding them.  Burger King flourishes, potato chips are as popular as ever, and Hostess hasn't gone out of business.  That sound you hear?  It's the footsteps of your old weight hunting you down.  Don't look back.

In short time, the joy of the new you is replaced by the fear of becoming the old you, and it's not idle paranoia.  You should be very afraid; the statistical rate of recidivism among dieters is somewhere near 90%.  And even if you beat the odds and remain steadfast, your anxieties will quickly spread from the physical to the existential.  For once the blush is off the rose, it's not so easy to figure out who the rose is. 

At the same time you were losing part of yourself, you were also losing part of your self.  If you were heavy for an extended period of time, it's likely that your personality and behavior were informed by your shape.  Maybe you were defensive or withdrawn in response to your weight, or you possessed an oversized persona to match your oversized bulk - the Chris Farley Syndrome.  As you became thinner, your need for these character traits also diminished, confusing your emotions and blurring your identity.  By the end of your diet, you might not know who you are anymore.

An old friend who lost over a hundred pounds a few years back, said of his transformation:

"Everything changes along with your shape, how you move, sit, get in and out of a car, and ultimately how you perceive yourself.  You're a different person, but that person is an alien, someone you're not totally comfortable with."

He eventually regained the weight.

If you're unsure of who you are, your friends and family are even more bewildered and often resentful.  You've changed the comforting role you played in their lives and taken away whatever superiority they felt because of your former girth.  If you were boisterous before, they miss your constant antics and bonhomie.  If you were introverted, they now dislike your good humor and optimism.  They've remained the same; who are you to rattle their world by becoming someone else, even if you don't know who that someone is?

Congratulations.  You've made it.