The Eating Instinct by Virginia Sole-Smith

Author:Virginia Sole-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Six

Bypassing Hunger

I’m in a dietitian’s office, located within a bariatric surgical suite, housed on a quiet floor of a large hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. The room is tiny, with bad fluorescent lighting. It’s dominated by a large bookcase filled not with books but with empty yogurt containers, flattened granola bar boxes, and rinsed-clean protein-shake bottles. It’s as if somebody went on a very low-calorie snacking spree and then preserved all the packaging as a souvenir. The dietitian who works in this office uses these packages to illustrate to clients how to put together what she considers a proper meal. But this particular client, a thirty-six-year-old special-education teacher named Gina Balzano, doesn’t really need the lessons.

Gina, one year out from her gastric bypass, has invited me along on this checkup so I can see how it feels to be an “After” in the world of weight-loss surgery. Her dietitian, whom I’ll call Ramona, is a tall, thin woman dressed in shades of brown. “She’s the one we’re all scared of,” Gina tells me before the appointment. “We” are the other patients she bonded with in her support group. And I can see why Ramona triggers their anxiety; she’s unsmiling and pecks skeptically at her keyboard as Gina lists out everything she now eats in a day. Breakfast is an egg muffin, a batch of which she makes once a week from half a dozen eggs and assorted vegetables. Around ten, she eats one Chobani Simply 100 Greek yogurt. “Do you know that brand?” Gina asks Ramona, who nods, flicking her eyes over to the case of yogurt cups. “Oh right, of course, you probably have five over there.”

Lunch and dinner are Blue Apron meals; Gina cooks one each evening to share with her husband, then packs up the leftovers for the next day’s lunch. “I get meals that are between five hundred and a thousand calories for a traditional portion and then I third it for myself,” she says. “I eat three or four ounces of protein and the vegetables, and maybe a tablespoon of the starch. I don’t like to waste room on the starch, I’d rather have the vegetables.” Her afternoon snack is half an Atkins protein bar.

Gina also admits to having had two alcoholic drinks in the past month, which Ramona records with a frisson of disapproval. Gina tells me later that she also eats a small square of dark chocolate every night. “Because I want to feel like a human,” she says. “But I didn’t think Ramona needed to know that.” Gina doesn’t track her total calories, but in general, she shoots for half the portion size listed on any food label. Before her surgery, Gina usually ate three big meals a day: a breakfast sandwich and coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, some other kind of fast food for lunch, and then a home-cooked dinner. “Now I eat smaller portions but way more regularly,” she says. “It is so much better than being hungry all the time or gross full right after I eat, and then starving for hours.

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