Hold the bread

I lied to myself for almost an hour about the washing machine, but I knew the truth. It was the bread. With me, it’s always the bread.

I can be sitting in a restaurant at a table tucked away in a corner, and I can tell you where every piece of bread in the restaurant is at that exact moment. I have what scientists and researchers might call Enhanced Bread Awareness. Some of you reading these words have some bread in your hands (or nearby), and I swear to you that I know who you are and what kind of bread it is.

So as a person who often arrives early to a lunch date in order to eat all of the bread in the basket, orders another basket, and then acts as though it’s the first basket when the lunch companions arrive — well, I knew when I started to slide the trousers on that a bad surprise was on the way. There’s a moment, when the pants are on but still unzipped, when it’s clear from the distance the two sides need to travel in order for button to meet buttonhole that the only strategy is to lie down.

It’s sort of like when you use a credit card you’re pretty sure is maxed out. You hand it over and have them slide it through the thingy and wait apprehensively for the machine to beep and start printing the receipt. And when it doesn’t, you don’t think, “What the devil? Well, that’s a surprise. I wonder what the computer glitch is?” You think, “Oh, yeah. They’ve noticed that I skipped paying them last month.”

But I squeezed into the trousers anyway, hoping that a combination of stretching and body heat would do the trick. An hour or so later, I met up with a friend, who looked at me and said, “You look good. Have you lost weight?”

Now, there are a few ways to interpret that. The first way is simply that this person is trying to destroy me. They prefer me bloated, tired, and pre-diabetic, and they’re gaslighting me into ballooning up again. Tell a fat guy that he looks like he’s lost weight, and you’re giving him the green light to supersize everything. This is an example of a mean person saying a nice thing for a mean reason.

Or, possibly, the moment he saw me, he thought, My God, what happened to him? But his instinct for politeness and gracious conversation immediately took over, and his reactive brain immediately concocted an absurdly bald lie.

People are terrible at making up lies on the spot. When it’s caught in a trap, the brain usually resorts to the most obvious and transparent option, which is to say in an emphatic and enthusiastic way the exact opposite of what it’s thinking. You know you’re looking old and sick whenever someone says, “You haven’t changed a bit! You’re looking so well!” This is an example of a nice person thinking a mean thing and then saying a nice thing to cover it up.

But what I think was really happening was this: My friend noticed a change in my appearance and couldn’t quite decide which direction I was moving in. Was I fat and getting thinner or thinner and getting fatter? He knew something was different but couldn’t quite remember exactly how I looked a few months ago and arbitrarily decided to come down on the losing-weight side rather than the gaining-weight side. He chose to think I was getting better. I knew I was getting worse.

This is an example of a nice person saying a nice thing for nice reasons, but like all good deeds, it had unintended effects. The moment I heard my friend ask if I had lost weight, I knew I was looking very, very fat. When we sat down for lunch, I waved the bread away. When the waiter came, I ordered a salad. Since then, I have done an excellent job of getting the weight off. Putting on my trousers is no longer fraught with suspense and shame.

In order to lose weight, I have discovered, you need your friends to tell you that you look good — because you’ll know they’re lying.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.