Secrets of a Former Fat Girl (19 page)

You weren't expecting to hear
that
, were you? But what I mean is, order an appetizer instead of an entrée, not in addition. The reasoning: Today's appetizers are the size of yesterday's entrées, so by ordering an appetizer, you're more likely to get a reasonable portion (with the exception of appetizers meant to be shared, like mountains of nachos and fried mushrooms). And many times, especially at white tablecloth restaurants, the appetizer menus are actually more interesting than the entrées (that's the foodie in me talking). Order a small salad to start if you want and then ask the waiter to bring your appetizer selection with the entrées. I've never had a waiter turn up his or her nose at that request.

Hit the convenience store.

Don't expect to suddenly stop needing Cheetos. Changes like that take time. If you absolutely must have a bag, swing by the Stop 'n Go and get the single serving size (
not
the Big Grab). The convenience store is also the perfect place to get
one
Tootsie Roll or
one
Reese's Peanut Butter Cup the size of a quarter (look for them near the checkout) instead of a bag you'll be tempted to polish off in a couple of sittings. The convenience store makes portion control, uh, convenient. Use it.

Practice safe snacking.

It may be cheaper to buy the big box of Wheat Thins than the preportioned 100-calorie packs, but what do you want more: a bigger bank account or a smaller dress size? Stop buying in bulk just to get a bargain, thinking you'll be able to cut yourself off at one portion. Remember, you are not like other people. Remove the temptation altogether by buying preportioned snacks. In the last couple of years, food companies have smartened up to the fact that individual servings of crackers and cookies aren't just good for kids' lunch boxes; they're great for adults with calorie control issues, too. Many companies have introduced snacks such as crackers and “cookie crisps” (aka lower-fat versions of Oreos and Nutter Butters) in the individual 100-calorie size. They can help you snack smarter. Another option is to buy those tiny snack-size Ziplocs and create your own individual portions. If you think you can do that without slipping extra into each bag (or into your mouth), go for it.

Discover frozen dinners (if you haven't already).

Frozen dinners are great for controlling portion size, especially for working lunches at your desk, because there's not much food around to supplement your supper. The “healthy” brands, such as Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, and South Beach, all feature some pretty decent dishes. (I like Lean Cuisine's Asian entrées in particular.) You typically get larger portions for fewer calories than you would with a non-diet-conscious line such as Stouffer's or Amy's (which features organic foods). But read the labels for calories and fat content; some of the Stouffer's and Amy's entrées are only slightly higher than the diet lines and could be tastier and more satisfying.

Don't be afraid to obsess.

Here's the thing: You have to obsess to some extent to break out of those Fat Girl eating habits and shed the Fat Girl mind-set. By obsessing I mean measuring, weighing, keeping a calorie tally. I mean using INO out the wazoo. I mean setting rules about what you will and will not eat and how much, like the weird little rule I use to keep myself from munching my way through a whole basket of tortilla chips and salsa. You will get flack for this from outside observers; I'll get into that more in the next chapter. But trust yourself, trust me, and trust the Former Fat Girl program: You have to take the hard line if you want to reach your goals physically and personally. That said, food obsessions can become disorders; there's no doubt about that. If you think you might be going over the edge, see the sidebar on Chapter 5 to decide for sure and get help.

Don't be distracted by the diet debates.

It's hard not to get caught up in the arguments over which weight loss program is best, especially because you've probably had personal experience with many. You want to believe there's another way, a better way, a gimmick that will make it easier. But here's the reality: There's always going to be something new or at least a new take on an old concept. And it's highly unlikely that any one approach—low carb, low cal, low fat, or low sugar—is going to emerge as the clear winner. Trying to follow diet trends and sort fact from fiction will only confuse you and keep you from focusing on your own journey, which is (remember?) more about how and why you eat than what you eat.

I didn't know this, either, until the day Kim dropped that little bomb on me so many years ago. I needed Secret #5 to drive home that point, to make it clear that I had issues with food that other people didn't have and that expecting myself to find some cookie-cutter diet that would take the weight off for good was just an exercise in frustration. Secret #5 helped me—and will help you—zero in on the particular challenges of losing weight when you have Fat Girl baggage and figure out how to deal with it.

But as you begin to adopt the Former Fat Girl way of eating—logging your meals, reading labels, pushing the bread basket away, and piling on the veggies—people are going to notice, and their reactions might be less than supportive. Secret #6 arms you with fixes to keep you true to your plan.

Secret #6: Protect Yourself from the Pushers

I
was a major carnivore when I was a kid. Back in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, the only people who went totally meatless were—gasp!—hippies. To our middle-class minds, abstaining from meat was a mark of deviance, evidence of a mind corrupted by marijuana and God knows what other controlled substances. At the very least it was just plain weird. No one in his right mind would refuse a platter of beef tips swimming in gravy or a juicy quarter-pound burger or a crispy fried chicken leg. In my world, dinner simply wasn't dinner without meat.

When I'd come home for the weekend during college, my dad would throw a couple of steaks on the grill as kind of a welcome home feast—a real treat when all you could afford on your student budget was ramen and boxes of mac and cheese. As the guest of honor, I'd get my pick of the platter. I always went straight for the cut with the thickest glob of fat along the edge. I'd carefully trim it off and pop the fat in my mouth. The rest of the family, who in my estimation didn't have palates sophisticated enough to appreciate the fine flavor of charred animal fat, would pass me their trimmings. Lucky me.

I tell you this not to disgust you (although I'm pretty sure I have) but to show you how completely alien I became to my family and friends when I stopped eating meat altogether a couple of years into my journey to Former Fat Girlhood. That was in the late 80s when the dangers of saturated fat had begun to ooze into the mainstream, and people began for the first time to realize that the fat that I so savored can plug up arteries like a hairball in a drainpipe. It was also around the time when weight loss gurus started counseling that counting fat grams was more important than counting calories. (Millions of pounds of Snackwell's cookies and one obesity crisis later, we know they were wrong.)

Anyway, in my own personal battle against dietary and bodily fat, I decided it was easier to banish meat altogether—beef, poultry, pork, everything but the leanest of fish—than try to downsize. Plus, when I really thought about it, I'd rather spend my precious allowance of calories on the carbs I so craved than on a hunk of sirlion. Well, you would have thought I'd had a sex change operation from the way my family reacted. They simply could not recognize this lap-running, dessert-shunning, pseudovegetarian as the daughter/sister/friend they had known all those years. They didn't know how to feed me anymore, and for my parents it almost meant they didn't know how to love me anymore.

Think about it: Those weren't just T-bones my dad was serving during my weekend visits. They were love letters. Dad isn't anywhere near the stereotypical absent workaholic father, but he isn't the most emotionally communicative, either. He was using his Weber to show me how much he cared about me, how much he missed me, that I was still his little girl. And what did I do? I sent those thick, juicy, medium-rare expressions of his affection right back untouched. My meatlessness was the ultimate rejection.

I, of course, was oblivious to this stuff at the time. I was all wrapped up in working the Former Fat Girl program, trying to maintain the momentum I finally found through exercise, through INO, and all that. So I was completely unprepared for my parents' response to my whole new way of eating: They pushed. The first time I turned down the welcome home barbecue, they looked at me, stunned. It was like the air was sucked out of the room, like I'd uttered an ancient magical curse in some nonsensical Beelzebubian tongue. “Are you
sure
?” they asked. “What will you eat? Don't be silly. Just have a little.” When I said no to spaghetti and meatballs, it was the same thing. When I didn't refuse a dish outright, they tried to heap a larger portion on my plate, almost desperately. They couldn't take no for an answer. Like a guy turned down by the woman of his dreams, my rejection only made them try harder. At every turn they tried to talk me into a slab of steak, to tempt me into going back on my word. It wasn't just meat, it was everything: our family's favorite cheesecake, the Entenmann's coffee cake I so loved, the creamy cheese dip we had on holidays.

It became a kind of tug-of-war: me on one side, struggling to pull myself out of my old Fat Girl life, and my family on the other, anchoring me to the place I was trying to escape. And it pissed me off.

Think about it: The decision to quit meat was far from easy. I mean, I was the one who gobbled down not just the steak but the fat, too! It had taken me miles of running, millions of mantras, hours and hours of soul-searching to get strong enough to utter the word
no
and mean it. So you can imagine how I felt when I finally mustered up the will to pass up a slice of roast or a wedge of cake, only to have to deal with someone asking, “Are you
sure
you don't want any?” Not once but again and again and again. Every time they repeated the question, I could just feel my willpower weakening, just as a rope stretched beyond its limits begins to unravel and break, strand by strand, threatening to give way completely at any moment. “
Of course
I want some!” I wanted to yell. “But
it's not an option
!”

There were whispers that maybe I was developing some kind of eating disorder. The thought was ludicrous. Didn't they see that I already had one? I had been abusing food and abusing myself with food my whole life. My efforts to control the Fat Girl impulses that had essentially defined me were so out of character that the people around me didn't know what to think. But that was exactly the point. With my actions, with my running, with my “It's not an option,” with my weighing and measuring, I was redefining who I was. What was out of character before was now in. And my parents, my siblings, and my friends just didn't get it. At least not yet.

They became Pushers—you know, like the guys who stand on street corners near the middle school offering contraband to innocent little kids lugging 50-pound backpacks and listening to God-knows-what on their MP3 players. My dad kept grilling the steaks, and my mom kept piling my plate with spaghetti and meatballs. And, at least at first, I was angry. Why didn't they want me to be happy?

This was not my first
encounter with a pusher. My nana, my dad's mother, was a pro at it.

When I was in junior high, around seventh grade, I spent two weeks with Nana one summer that did a real number on my Fat Girl psyche. The family I babysat for, the one with the four kids, used to travel every summer to Washington, D.C., and Maine to visit relatives. The mom would fly up from Houston first with the kids (she didn't work, so she could take a longer break), the dad would meet them for a week or so, and then they'd all fly back together.

During one such trip, when the mom was pregnant with her fourth child and flying solo with three toddlers, their plane had to make an emergency landing, and she vowed never to fly again. So when the next summer rolled around, the family called and asked if I'd be up for a road trip. I'd keep the kids occupied in the car as the mom drove. We'd part ways in D.C. The dad would meet them later, as usual, and they'd all fly back together. Meanwhile, I would hop a train to visit my relatives in New York—Grandmom, my mom's mother, and my aunt Helen—and Nana in Philadelphia. Then I'd fly back to Texas alone.

It sounded like a great adventure. Helen was like a big sister to me, and she and her family lived close to the beach on Long Island. I had no doubt I'd have a blast there. And Grandmom lived in the city, so I'd get to hang out in Manhattan during my stay with her.

The only catch was that I'd have to give Nana equal time. At first glance you'd think Nana was the quintessential “fun grandma.” In her cat-eye sunglasses she putted around town in a black '68 Camaro with a white racing stripe, not exactly what most sixty-something widows drove back in the mid-70s. She loved a good joke (even off-color ones, most of which she didn't completely get), and she was quite the party girl, always having luncheons and gatherings with a group of friends she referred to as “The Cousins,” many of whom weren't related to her at all.

Nana might have been all fun and games with her friends, but around me she was a different person. She was hypercritical: From the clothes I wore to the foods I liked to the way I made my bed, Nana had an opinion on everything, and she didn't hesitate to share it. She wanted everything her way—no discussion, no dissension. Once when I was maybe four or five, I brought my favorite stuffed animal at the time—a two-foot-long floppy green snake—on a visit to Nana's beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey. Now, I can understand why a faux reptile might not seem to be an appropriate companion for a little girl, but Nana took her disapproval to the extreme. You'd think I was carrying around a shrunken head for all her nagging me to get rid of the thing—which, in fact, only made me cling tighter to it. So what did Nana do? She threw it out the window
in front of me.
She didn't hide it while I was on the beach, to see if I noticed it was gone (you know how fickle kids can be about toys); she didn't try to get me to trade for some more acceptable stuffed animal species. And, to make things worse, Nana's throwing arm wasn't good enough to clear the porch roof below, so there my poor snake landed, out of reach, to wither in the summer sun as I kept vigil.

You can see why I wasn't exactly crazy about staying with her for two weeks
alone
—no brother or sister or parent as a buffer. I felt like a delinquent being shipped off to military school. But there would be no road trip to D.C., no New York holiday, no I'm-so-grown-up plane trip alone if I wasn't willing to do the time at Nana's. So I packed my bags.

I'd like to say that it was better than I had imagined, but it wasn't. It was worse.

To be fair, Nana took me sightseeing, just like Grandmom and Helen did. Our itinerary was like something out of a Greyhound Bus tour brochure: We hit the Liberty Bell, Betsy Ross's house, Gettysburg—all the historical highlights. We ate stuffed crab and oozing, creamy Lobster Newberg at her favorite restaurants. We shopped at Wanamakers. We partied with selected cousins.

Why was I so miserable? The main problem—beyond the critical comments I knew were part of Nana's MO—was a little game she used to play, a game my dad refers to as Feed the Monkey and Watch Him Sh*t. Nana stocked her house with all kinds of junk food; she loved the stuff, candy especially. She would offer something to you—ice cream, doughnuts, cake, cookies, candy—push it on you, urge you to take more. And then, maybe a couple of hours or a day later, she'd say something like “Aren't those pants getting tight on you?” or “I think you've gained weight since you got here!” After that, she'd turn right around and ask you if you wanted a scoop of vanilla ice cream in your half cantaloupe—at
breakfast
—or a little more Coffee Rich (the nondairy half-and-half-like stuff that had as much fat in it as the real thing) on your cereal or a brick-size slab of crumb cake from the bakery down the street.

Once during my visit she took me to a 50s-type diner where the specialty was massive burgers and old-style ice cream fountain goodies, such as the gargantuan hot fudge sundae she urged me to order. As we were leaving, she said, “I probably shouldn't have let you have dessert, but I saw how your eyes lit up when the waiter walked by with one of those sundaes. I never
imagined
that you'd eat the whole thing!”

I burned with shame.

There were candy dishes all over the house: one for Hershey's Kisses, one for hard mints the color of blue topaz, one for M&Ms, and one for those caramels with the swirl of white sugary stuff in the middle. I don't have to tell you what happens when a kid encounters a candy dish: I took it as an invitation to indulge freely and frequently. After all, why would Nana put the stuff out if I wasn't supposed to eat it?

So I did. I started with the chocolate. I tried to nibble, not gobble—I did have
some
manners. When I had eaten about half of the M&Ms, I began working on the other candy. Maybe, I reasoned, my gluttony would be less noticeable if all the dishes were half full (the same logic I used to justify trimming away at a sheet cake, to even out the row). Of course she noticed. And of course she cared. And Nana wasn't the type to tiptoe around it, either. She was quick to point out the number of candy wrappers in the trash, the growing roll at my waistline, and my “astonishing” appetite for sweets.

But she kept refilling the candy dishes anyway. She kept buying the cookies and making the bakery runs. She kept pushing the junk on me, tempting me, testing me, and I failed every time. I resorted to sneaking the stuff upstairs to my room whenever I could, shoving it into my mouth when no one could see.

Even now, the self-assured
Former Fat Girl that I am, it still hurts to remember how confused I was at the way Nana treated me. That summer vacation caused a rift in our relationship that lasted for years, and it only compounded the shame I already felt.

So you can see why I might have had some flashbacks when family and friends started with the pushing. Why, I wondered, would they want me to stay a Fat Girl forever?

Once I understood the whole “You are not like other people” thing, I got it. It wasn't that the Pushers wanted me to remain a Fat Girl because they didn't think of me as one in the first place.
I
was the one who wasn't content with the person everyone else saw from the outside—the way I looked, the way I acted. They just loved me for who I was.