Eating Ice Cream With My Dog Read Online Free PDF Page B

more young Labs to jerk me around, I didn’t know the menace of the streets. There is a bloodthirsty Akita two blocks down, and there are chicken bones in gutters; joggers swing their arms crazily on the Promenade, and there are babies who don’t understand dog kisses everywhere.
    Another truth is that by not eating sugar during the day, there was a slight chance I wouldn’t at night. In truth there is hope.
    But after arguing with dogs, my hands rough from exposure to four months of winter, my back and hips aching, I spent my nights in the pacifying arms of Entenmann’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Cinnamon Life Cereal, European rice pudding, and the occasional order of Fascati’s chicken Parmesan with garlic bread.
    You’d think my awareness that eating makes me drunk and non-reactive, that my dog has learned to eat neatly from a spoon and fork, would be red flags for how indiscriminate my reasoning had become. It wasn’t. Something as quiet and unfunny as a fact—a number—would have to knock me back to the truth of myself.
    My résumé is full of facts that dance crazily across a contrary map of truth.
    Take, for instance, the fulfillment of my lifelong desire to publish a book. I had no subject for a book until I lost 188 pounds, going from a size 32 to a size 6, after forty-two years of obesity. It was sold and published. Destroying the satisfaction I should have taken from years of my writing apprenticeship took cunning and craft.
    But I did it. By the time I sat next to Bob Greene while Oprah grilled Winona Judd on the whys and hows of her rotundity, my upper arms and breasts felt like overstuffed sausage meat in my size 16 red velvet dress. I had terrible gas from the chocolate-covered almonds I’d eaten the night before and was full of resentment because sharing the green room with Bob Greene meant I didn’t dare eat the pastries they provided for guests.
    Needless to say, the camera did not turn to me for my thoughts on the matter.
    My opinion would have made for terrible viewing. You can lose weight, Winona , I would have said, but you’ll gain it back.
    Still, I think that pontificating with Hoba Kotb on the Weekend Today Show about how much better my life was with 188 fewer pounds to heave around, then watching my Amazon rating go to twelve that afternoon while eating an entire key lime pie, is guerilla sabotage raised to a high art, don’t you?
    Some few weeks after the dogs’ and my ice cream social, as March made its false promises, I house-sat two Italian greyhounds. As I waited for them to pick at their food, I wandered around the apartment looking at knickknacks and art choices and the absence of a bookcase. (I wasn’t snooping, in case you wonder about dog walkers coming into your home. I have enough trouble with the privacies and troubles of my own life to creep into anyone else’s.) There was a scale in the bathroom. While the dogs jetéed merrily around my feet, I decided to step onto the scale.
    Foolish, foolish me.
    The digital readout settled squarely at 250.
    My one-hundred-pound gain cracked the air. Smoke curled from my toes where they framed the infamous number. The once-adoring greyhounds turned into creatures from Hieronymus Bosch swarmed up my legs like hungry accusing succubae. I’d ignored tsking mirrors and grouching body aches, but the scale spoke the fact.
    One hundred pounds in three years. Before that, four years of dieting and maintaining, an adventure that commenced on March 9, 1998. That morning on the borrowed scale was March 11, 2006.
    I had lost my body. In getting so big again, I had shrunk to planning the next binge. I stepped off the scale not as Frances Kuffel but as One Hundred Pounds in Three Years Kuffel.
    I had only one option: I was going to have to rescramble the facts and lose this weight and, somehow, get my self back into living color.
    I’d gotten thin through the confederacy of a twelve-step program I fondly call the “Stepfords.” My original sponsors,