I find myself staying on this diet, two weeks down and my face looks a little slimmer. My sister says at this age, you are invisible anyway. That’s true.

Soup

We are eating a lot of soup as it fills me up. There are virtually no calories if you don’tadd pasta. It is easy to eat soup in the Northeast in winter. We always have a fire going so the house seems cozy. This is my favorite soup recipe, which I learned from Carolyne Roehm. Our library had a benefit, and I and five other women bought lunch with Carolyne Roehm, who lives about 15 minutes from my house in a gorgeous mansion and writes books about gracious living. (Here she is doing a flower arrangement for us.) She was incredibly gracious, and we had a delicious lunch including roasted cauliflower soup. This is so easy – roast cauliflower and garlic with a little bit of olive oil until cooked, peel garlic, add chicken broth, salt, and pepper and blend. The soup is thick and creamy and it makes me feel as though I am having a cream-based soup. (This is not her exact recipe but it works well for me.)

Risk factors

Extra weight is just not good for you. At my age, I need to worry about heart disease and getting diabetes. I am at high risk because my mother died of diabetes when I was little. I hate going to the doctor because I am always weighed. I don’t know what possible difference this makes, but somehow having someone validate what generally only your eyes see – and you always weigh more in the doctor’s office - is devastating. I always act shocked – oh my gosh, how could this have happened! One time I noticed a sign in a doctor’s waiting room (not the current one) that said: “You must be weighed - do not refuse.”

Lately, I have learned a new trick. I close my eyes when I am weighed so I never know what my weight is. My doctor never says a thing about my weight. I think she should, it would probably give me motivation to lose weight. She is probably being kind, after all I obviously don’t need to be told that I should lose weight.

But for me it’s not really about my health. I haven’t had any health problems. But it’s more wanting to be free (once again) from knowing that I have to do something about my weight. I hate things hanging over my head. When you need to lose weight, you always are telling people you need to lose weight. You find yourself saying that to store clerks, relatives, the barrista at Starbucks, the dentist, etc. – yes it’s time to go on a diet. I would like to put this behind me.

My hair

When I get slim, I am tempted to cut my hair very, very short – just for something different. I have had this same hairstyle for more than 10 years. The hairdresser is one place I don’t like to go to when I am fat. There is something about sitting in a chair facing a mirror for 40 minutes with a plastic cape around your shoulder that just doesn’t look good. Last year I was going to a hair salon that used a rubber cap when my hair was being colored. So the cap was squeezed down on your head – like a bathing suit cap but tighter – and she pulled strands of hair out through these holes. It was painful and just horrifying to look in the mirror – I looked like an alien a la Jane Curtin and Dan Akroyd on SNL, just a shorter head and chubbier.

Trading places

My friend, Terry, and I trade places with weight. We are about the same height and same age. In the 20 years since I have known her when I am pudgy, she is thin. When I am thin, she is pudgy. We worked for a surgeon who told each of us what our body mass was in the middle of a meeting. He said he had examined so many women, he could tell just by looking at them. Two years ago when I saw her, she was very slim. I asked her how, and she said she couldn’t eat after 6 pm as it upset her stomach.