The Heavy (3 page)

In 1984, a trio of female researchers published an article called “Women and Weight: A Normative Discontent.” The title reflected their conclusion that for American women, being unhappy about their weight had ceased to be an anomaly and had become the norm.

Things haven’t improved since.
After conducting a study of women ages twenty-five to forty-five in 2008, Cynthia Bulik of the University of North Carolina Eating Disorders Program found that 10 percent of the women she surveyed qualified as having an eating disorder, while an additional 65 percent exhibited milder, subclinical levels of troubled eating.

Bulik observed, “It is almost expected that a woman—any woman—is dissatisfied with her body and is trying to lose weight.” Obviously, there are exceptions. But each year, approximately forty-five million Americans go on a diet. Inevitably, I’m one of them.

It’s been that way since I hit puberty, when I became aware of how my body looked and ashamed of the extra weight I was carrying. Prior to that, my relationship to food and my weight had been fairly unremarkable.

My two sisters and I grew up in a house where food was not a big deal. There was no overt focus on nutrition, but the meals my parents prepared for us were healthful and well-balanced, at least as the world understood balance and the food pyramid thirty years ago. Breakfast was generally a quickly downed bowl of cereal before the school bus came. Sure, we were into Lucky Charms instead of steel-cut oatmeal, and the milk was whole, not skim. But we weren’t scarfing down fast-food breakfast sandwiches or “Breakfast Bake Shop” Hostess donuts either. I did try to make the argument that since these greasy or sugary confections were being marketed as a breakfast food, it was only fair for us to consider them as such, but to her credit, our mother didn’t buy in.

The lunches we brought to school might include a turkey sandwich and fruit, or a soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Dinners often began with a half grapefruit or a salad and always contained a protein, a starch, and vegetables.

We were chided for eating too quickly or too messily, for not finishing our vegetables, or for tipping our chairs back at the dining table. But we were not pressured much to eat more or eat less. No one had a health or weight problem when we were little, so food was just food.

I developed a sweet tooth at an early age and could generally find something in my house to satisfy it. There might be something as decadent as a box of Devil Dogs on the corner of the
kitchen counter or a box of Oreos in the pantry. More often, the choice was between an Entenmann’s Walnut Danish Ring—which I strategically cut for myself to get slices that were heavy on the icing, light on the walnuts—or a freezer burn–ravaged carton of Breyers ice cream.

As we grew up, my sisters developed an enthusiasm and respect for food. They enjoyed eating, cooking, and talking about food. But they did not obsess over it. Their weights were generally stable, and they didn’t worry about how their bodies looked any more than the average female did.

I didn’t pay attention to my weight until junior high, when I started to get a little heavy.

My weight gain was understandable, given my activity level and how much I ate. A poor athlete and a lazy person, I exercised only when forced or when I felt it behooved me to try to act more “healthy.” I preferred to spend my time reading, writing, or watching
Tic-Tac-Dough
on TV.

I loved eating. And more was better. A latchkey child, I made my own after-school snack, and usually cooked up a pizza muffin or two, followed by a Twinkie or two. My real weakness was peanut butter. On toast, with jelly, or straight up on a spoon—I could down a half cup of the stuff within minutes. At 760 calories and 64 grams of fat for that half cup, it was a dangerous relationship.

At dinner, I would often eat until I felt stuffed. I couldn’t understand why someone
wouldn’t
eat as many pieces as possible of delicious, golden-brown chicken Parmesan with tangy tomato sauce and slightly browned, melting chunks of mozzarella. It was there, it was delicious, I didn’t have to pay for it (at least not financially—
the pounds incurred were another story). Later, I’d dig into the RingDings with the same lack of restraint.

I’ve spent a good number of hours considering whether there was some emotional component to this eating. It’s conceivable that loneliness, insecurity, or boredom contributed to my habits. But I truly believe that my overeating was largely due to my love of food and lack of self-control. With minimal supervision in a household with two working parents, and no formal instruction on what constituted appropriately sized meals and snacks, I just followed my appetite, which was expansive, and directed at the worst possible targets: high-sugar, high-fat comfort foods.

I never became extremely fat. I was always able to wear regular sizes, and no doctor ever said my health was at risk because of my weight. But by eighth grade, I was definitely heavy enough that you’d notice it. I was legitimately chunky. Plump. Zaftig. And I hated it.

So I tried to lose the weight by eating as little as possible all day until my willpower gave out. When it did, I had trouble eating normal amounts of food. By age thirteen, I was constantly engaged in the classic dieting conundrum of mind over matter, willpower versus appetite, id against ego.

I tried everything to get my weight down. I set my alarm clock for four-thirty in the morning to go jogging and bike riding before school. That fitness kick lasted two days. I rode my bike to the supermarket and bought a packet of diet pills. The purchase felt thrillingly precocious and transgressive, like buying alcohol while underage, except in this case, no one asked me for ID at checkout. I didn’t tell anyone about my stash of capsules, though their existence likely would not have raised eyebrows. During those years, diet pills and other appetite suppressants were hawked on TV at all times of day (I still remember the tag line from a commercial:
“I lost
weight
with Dexatrim, and I feel
great
!”). In my suburban community, they were practically on the same level as antacids. I occasionally popped one before school, in hopes that it would help me with my plan to eat nothing all day. It didn’t.

There was lots of educational talk about eating disorders during those years, both at my school and in the media. It was through that outreach that I learned that sometimes girls took laxatives to lose weight. So I tried it. At the supermarket, they were helpfully and suggestively located right next to the diet pills, and even came in a kid-friendly chocolate-bar format. While they did perform as advertised, the severity of the result (and the disgusting flavor of the “chocolate”) were such that I didn’t do it again.

At my most desperate moment, I took an emetic in order to make myself throw up after a slightly out-of-control eating session. But generally, my efforts to reduce my size were confined to the Sisyphean task of adopting any calorie-reduction regimen I heard about. I undertook the most ridiculous one at a summer program during high school. It promised five pounds of weight loss in exchange for three days of eating only two eggs, an orange, and broiled chicken. On the morning of the fourth day, I fainted in the hallway of my dorm. That episode prompted a visit to the campus counseling office, where I was referred to a therapist in my hometown. I embarked on a short-lived series of sessions with her, which I didn’t mind, but which had minimal effect on my behavior.

At my competitive high school in a well-off, high-achieving community, I was hardly the only kid struggling with eating issues. I would say at least half of the girls in my school were dieting in some way. There was a girl in my grade—popular, smart, accomplished, pretty—who had to be hospitalized for anorexia.
Another girl—happy, well adjusted—would coolly saunter to the bathroom to make herself throw up after eating a big lunch.

Awful as it is to admit, I sometimes wished I could be more like these girls. It was almost a sign of maturity to have an extreme weight loss strategy. One was successful enough in her weight loss efforts to have to be hospitalized for it. And the other so seamlessly and effectively integrated her food neuroses into her day that it hardly seemed like a burden to her. I felt I had the worst of all worlds: starving all the time unless I was gorging on food and feeling bad about myself; lacking both the willpower not to eat
and
the level of commitment necessary to purge; thinking about food and weight constantly, yet still being (in my opinion—and that of a few adults who had the audacity to comment on my physique) chubby.

Then, finally, I was ready to try that quaint, mainstream solution to weight loss: a reasonable diet. An offhand but searing comment from the guy who cut my hair—something along the lines of “You’re getting heavy. You should lose weight”—prompted me to join Weight Watchers. After a couple of months of dedicated adherence to the program, I’d dropped the ten pounds that had stood between me and a normal weight, and I was delighted.

Except as soon as I went off the diet, my eating habits reverted to the patterns that had made me overweight to begin with. And so I set to work to lose the pounds I’d regained, reverting to the now-familiar cycle of overeating and deprivation. I wasn’t heavy anymore, except by my own standards, but my desire to keep the weight off was as fervent as ever.

My relationship with the scale was a close and intimate one, and I would step onto that thing at least once a day. Most of the time, my mood was at least in part determined by what the scale said.

I grew up in an age when the ideal female form was fairly tiny. As a teenager, I worshipped Madonna, and watched as the attractively fleshy body with which she debuted in 1983 morphed, within a few years, to the more ascetic and sinewy appearance we associate with her today. In the ensuing years, the connection between beauty and voluptuousness of any kind grew weaker and weaker until we reached the 1990s, and it was Kate Moss time.

I adored fashion, and glossy magazines helped shape the unrealistic goals I had for my body. I felt there was no point in having cool clothes if you weren’t thin enough to look good in them. But that era’s catsuits, tube skirts, and midriff-baring tops were not suited for my build. I saw it as an affront to fashion to be as flabby as I was. Fashion’s shift toward “curvier” models such as Gisele Bündchen provided little relief, as it merely replaced the ideal of flat-chested skinny women with one of slightly less flat-chested skinny women. Yes, thanks, that is
so
much more attainable.

Like today, people back then complained about the unrealizable ideals girls were supposed to aspire to, and how “no one really looks like” the women in magazines and on TV. But I felt that wasn’t true. I went to school and camp with hundreds of upper-middle-class girls from the New York metropolitan area, and let me tell you, most were thin. The kind of accidental, unstudied thin that comes from being young and metabolically lucky. The kind of body and carefree mind-set that, even when I wasn’t heavy, forever eluded me.

Even when I succeeded in (temporarily) knocking some weight off, I still didn’t like how I looked. But I was also embarrassed by how much I cared about my weight. I considered my focus on my body akin to being obsessed with tanning. So trivial, and an utter waste of time. Sure, I was a good student, participated in a well-rounded slate of extracurricular activities, and had many good
friends. But food and my weight always occupied a disproportionately large place in my thoughts.

I did manage, for one fleeting moment, to succeed in getting my weight down to 100.5 pounds (I’d been hoping to reach 100). But generally, I stayed within a few pounds of 115. Which was a completely reasonable and even attractive weight. But on my build, it wasn’t “thin,” which is what I wanted to be. So I kept fighting nature.

When I left home for college, I happily realized that I’d grown out of my food issues a bit. My focus on my weight became less consuming, and I was not so different from the other women at school. I wasn’t thrilled with my body, but I didn’t hate it so much anymore, either.

I was also starting to understand that certain things about my appearance were never going to change. No aerobics class was going to reshape my hips. No amount of weight training was going to get rid of the fat padding my inner thighs. To ameliorate my discomfort with my body, I dressed very strategically. I was blessed with calves that even I didn’t think were fat. And so I took to wearing thick black tights with a dress or a short skirt and an oversized top. I wore this uniform pretty much every day from the end of high school through my late twenties. I mean
every
day. Ninety-five-degree summer day? Black tights and a skirt. Snowstorm in the dead of winter? Black tights and skirt.

In a way, it was a form of accepting myself. I was working with my flaws, not trying to eradicate them. But I resented these self-imposed limitations. To me, being thin represented freedom. Freedom to wear whatever I wanted. To raise my arm without
worrying about pulling my shirt down over my stomach. To lean over without feeling a roll of fat fold around my midsection. To put on a little black dress and head out to a party without having to suck in my gut the whole night. It meant having nothing to hide.

Junior year, I suffered a weight gain of thirty pounds, attributable to a pint-a-day addiction to Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream. I needed to get that weight off. But I wanted to eat what I liked. And I didn’t want to have to exercise much. So I adopted a diet that entailed eating only moderate amounts of my favorite foods, forgoing any superfluous fruits, vegetables, and proteins along the way. I’d have a daily breakfast of some small sugary treat (a slice of pound cake or an ice cream bar), then down an entire box of mac and cheese or a slice or two of pizza for dinner. And I returned to my normal weight.

When I’d spend time with my family, my sisters joked about my eating. One of them would cook a healthful dish while I’d break open a box of cookies, and each of us would mock the other. To me, it was lunacy to pass up a food you loved for one you liked less just because the latter one was more healthful. To them, having an occasional Cinnabon for dinner was bonkers.