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.

GOOD BYE MR. CHIPS AND GOOD RIDDANCE

At the tender age of fourteen, I abandoned hearth, home, tube, and fridge and went off to boarding school for three years.  When I arrived at Williston Academy in the fall of 1964, I was a chubby lad of 160 lbs., but after three months, I was twenty pounds lighter and three inches taller.  The inches were a consequence of puberty; the pounds were victims of circumstance.

Before I wallow in the Dickensian details, it's only fair to note the benefits I received at Williston.  I was given a solid general education with a strong emphasis on writing and literature.  With no TV available, I discovered that there just might be something to this book-reading thing.  I also developed a keen interest of theater since the Drama Club was one of the few places a sports-challenged dweeb could meet girls.

For Williston, like most New England prep schools of that era, was strictly single gender.  Apart from plays, the only contact we had with women came during the occasional Saturday night dance.  These two-hour affairs were more tightly chaperoned than Sicilian mob trials and afforded all the intimacy of a subway platform at rush hour.  Your escorts were chosen by the sole criterion of height, and more often than not, this was bungled.  Many was the night I found myself dancing cheek-to-sternum with some mortified amazon from our sister school.  Prep school may have sharpened my mental skills, but socially, I was one evolutionary step shy of Neanderthal.  As a result, I spent most of my first semester at college gawking at female classmates like a randy village idiot.

The lack of women was only one of many rigors at Williston.  Boarding schools in the 60's came fully equipped with an exhausting and rigidly maintained schedule of studies, athletics, and vicious hazings.  There were daily room inspections, a mandatory dress code, and a dearth of fellow Jews.  Because the school was founded by a dour Congregationalist minister, attending chapel was mandatory six days a week.  To this day, I'm one of the select few of my tribe who knows the words to "Onward Christian Soldiers."

But those hardships were like a week on the Riviera compared to what passed for food at Williston, and I use the word "food" in the broadest possible sense allowed by the English language.

Meals were taken in a large communal dining hall tastefully decorated in Early American Penitentiary.  It could have easily been mistaken for Leavenworth except that the inmates wore blazers and sported more pimples than tattoos.  The room held fifty long rectangular tables, each seating nine students and one faculty member.  Food and drink were served in bulk from indestructible stainless steel platters and pitchers - clearly a time before Martha Stewart had any influence on "institutional" decor.

Like classes, meals at Williston were for instruction, not pleasure.  Apart from providing basic sustenance (dubious at best), the partaking of food was seen as a means to manners, civility, and restraint.  Since the actual food was merely an adjunct to these lessons, it was treated with the same joyless severity as logarithms and gerunds.

However fresh and savory provisions may have been when they arrived at the Williston kitchen, they were soon taken to task by the school's culinary Marine Corps.  Under the stern leadership of head chef Albert Boudreau, the staff didn't so much prepare food as beat it into submission.  Chicken was shaken down and bullied by these gastronomic goons until nothing remained but grease and bones.  Crisp string beans were strong-armed into limp, colorless straw, and potatoes were clubbed into mush right out of the sack.   Serving this stuff wasn't merely an affront to the palette; it was a violation of the Geneva Convention. 

Our biweekly "treat" of roast beef was cooked so far beyond well done that science has yet to find a name for it.  It's as if the recipe came from The Solar Core Cook Book:  "Place meat in preheated oven at 15,000,000° F and roast until nuclei are sufficiently fused."  The remains were then stored in steam chambers until the texture became indistinguishable from an all-weather radial.  Once it was certain no vestige of flavor remained, the meat was cut into thin grayish-white slices and stacked on cold metal trays.  It was served with a brown sludge-like gravy consisting of equal parts beef drippings, butter, flour, flour, flour, flour, and flour.

Another feature of the Williston dining experience was the requirement to wait tables for a three-meal rotation every nine days.  Apparently, it wasn't enough to be nauseated by the culinary horrors tableside, you had to witness first hand how meat and produce could be cruelly transformed into hardened criminal fare.  You also learned the brutal lessons of natural selection as you and forty-nine other crazed students fought with Darwinian fierceness for the clean dishes and silverware needed to reset the tables before you were late for class.

In such a place at such a time, weight loss wasn't a sign of deprivation, but a blessing.