Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (11 page)

B
y my late twenties, I’d blown through half a dozen IKEA dressers, none of which could bear the emotional weight of my T-shirt collection. Each time I tried to purge that middle drawer, I found another too-small top I was saving for the future, or a threadbare tank that still smelled like the past. But times had changed, and now I was letting go of both those things (right?).

One night, I scooped out that jammed middle drawer and began tossing items across the room. Urban Outfitters button-down with fringe down the middle? Gone.
Godspell
T-shirt, circa second grade? Probably not going to fit into that without a time machine. I’d only gotten through the sedimentary level before I found the baseball tee.

It was chilly in my bedroom, one of those weird, transitional nights where it’s cold enough for a jacket, but not cold enough for the radiator to kick on. I took off my fuzzy sweater anyway, and pulled on the gray and green XXL top, sniffing the collar. It didn’t smell like anything but the fiberboard drawer, but that sucker wasn’t going anywhere.

Since that first diet at age eleven to the last at twenty-seven, my successes had been moderate: ten to thirty pounds. Only once did I pull off transformational weight loss—magazine-cover, before and after photos weight loss. It was the most strenuous diet I’d ever attempted, and by far the most instantly effective. I’d gotten that baseball tee the week it started, and a few months later, it was down to my knees.

The summer after high school I landed an internship at the most important corporation in New York, America, the universe, the mind of God: the production office of
Sex and the City
. In 2002, there was no higher calling than to fetch, carry, copy, and file for those be-heeled ladies and the staff that put puns in their mouths. I’d been out of high school for approximately twenty-six hours before reporting to the wildly unglamorous production office in Long Island City, Queens.

My first impression was how overdressed I was. After three years of living in jazz sneakers and a promotional
Chicago
T-shirt, I’d opted to wear a pencil skirt with a button-down and the kitten-heel shoes I hadn’t seen since my prep school interviews. As it turned out, I’d have been better off in my jazz sneakers. Production interns don’t wear heels. Stupid production interns do.

Getting off the subway on a sweaty June morning, I walked three blocks in the wrong direction, turned back, and then paused in front of an open garage where two mechanics were chatting under a raised car.

“If I keep walking this way, will I hit Twenty-Second Street?”

They stopped talking to look at me, nodded briefly, then went inside. Most New Yorkers like to show off their knowledge of streets and subway routes, but some have seen one too many interns. I reflexively yanked my shirt down over my stomach, and turned to keep walking, when a short blue bus pulled up alongside me, immediately discharging a large group of men—some old, but mostly quite young, and all in widely varied attire. It was at this point that I noticed the large block writing across the front and back of the vehicle:
NEW YORK CITY CORRECTIONS DEPARTMENT: RIKER’S ISLAND
.

I spent a full minute gaping like the stunned, suburban fish I was; it was then that I realized in my entire life spent in and around New York City, I’d never once been to Queens—unless you counted the airport. I turned away and headed in the direction of what I hoped was Twenty-Second Street.

“Hi, sorry, you don’t have a desk.”

This was Mike, one of many guys in baseball hats who would tell me what to do for the next three months.

“Oh, that’s fine. I don’t need a desk or anything,” I answered automatically. I would sit on the floor as long as I could spend the rest of my life bragging about the summer I spent sitting on
Sex and the City
’s carpet.

“We’ll figure something out. Follow me.”

Mike showed me around the production floor, pointing at different soundproofed rooms and tables littered with scripts and empty soda cans. Here was a line of potential blondes the
Sopranos
team was auditioning in one of our conference rooms (“our!”). Here was costume designer Patricia Field’s wardrobe room and a pile of bras that needed to be returned (bras!). At some point I felt the beginnings of a blister as my left heel rubbed against a shoe it hadn’t worn in four years. But I power-limped across that entire floor, because I had only two goals that summer: to lose weight, and to make everyone at this job love me more than their own children.

Finally, we entered a large kitchen-cum-copy room. On the fridge was a photo of Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson. Against the wall were hundreds and hundreds of multicolored scripts, stacked nearly to the ceiling.

“So, I guess we’ll start you here.”

“Where?” I asked, looking at the Liz Taylor–Michael Jackson photo.

He gestured to the wall.

“These are the scripts we’ve already shot this season. We need to get rid of these copies for security—eBay and everything.”

“Okay, great!”

A bonfire, perhaps? A landfill? I was full of ideas already!

He pointed to a small personal office shredder next to the Xerox machine. “You know how to use these things, right?”

Nope.

Four hours later I was sitting on
Sex and the City
’s carpet, about twelve inches into the thirty thousand inches of script I’d shred that summer. By the time Mike came back to check my progress, I’d read the line, “You have slept with eight men and we’re still on appetizers” six times and wasn’t even close to sick of it.

“How’s it going?”

“Great!”

“So, listen. Around two, can you set up some snacks on the kitchen table?”

“Of course. Just, whatever’s in the cabinets?”

“Yeah.”

“I can do that.”

He didn’t leave.

“So, listen.” He locked eyes with me and reached into his pocket. “I’m going to give you the key to the chocolate closet.”

He held out the key, a little. I got off the floor, though his tone seemed to indicate that perhaps I ought to kneel.

“Okay.”

“We don’t usually give interns the key to the chocolate closet. We’ve had some problems. Be careful, all right?”

I assured him I would be. I did not take this responsibility lightly. I respected the chocolate.

“Do not share this with anyone, and put anything that’s not eaten back in the closet by the end of the day. Then you
lock it
. Listen, seriously.”

He gave me the key and took off. I looked around the kitchen trying to identify this hallowed cabinet. Immediately my eye caught the tall, skinny white closet in the corner, separate and padlocked.

I approached, glancing once over my shoulder, lest Mike appear to steal back his precious. I slid my key into the lock and opened the door.

“No carbs and no refined sugar. You’re done with those.”

“Okay.” I nodded, hard.

Judy sat behind her desk in a small, elegant office high above East Sixty-First Street. Just behind her was a knockout view of the Queensboro Bridge. Judy terrified me. People with bridge views mean business, and Judy had earned that window.

“You can start the day with some Fiber One, but no more than half a cup.” She looked up from her large, yellow legal pad and locked eyes with me:
You got me?
I nodded and threw in a hearty thumbs-up for good measure. Judy went back to writing out my meal plan. “You can have an apple with that, too, if you need one.”

I’d found Judy through my doctor, and though her respected roster was jammed with clients already, I’d managed to squeeze in a quick appointment within days of calling. I’d lost weight with nutritionists before, responding well to one-on-one instruction from scary ladies writing out meal plans specifically prescribed for my brand of fatness. So, upon arriving home from Walnut Hill, my first order of business was to get myself into an office like this, and find a new scary lady with a notepad who would write down exactly what and when and how I should eat, forever. Judy had, by far, the scariest demeanor and the biggest notepad of any nutritionist I’d ever met. I was thrilled.

One thing Judy and my doctor both agreed on was my blood sugar. In high school, I had been diagnosed as having a borderline case of insulin insensitivity, probably as a result of polycystic ovary syndrome. It’s a relatively common issue among women, and my case was largely asymptomatic, except for the insulin issue. What it meant was that I wasn’t exactly borderline diabetic, but I was borderline borderline diabetic. It wasn’t clear to me if my weight was the cause or the result of this issue, but everyone agreed that going on a diet would fix it. Over 220 pounds, I was bloated with boarding school and all the big fat feelings I’d eaten there. I deserved this ass kicking, and Judy delivered.

“When I say four ounces of white-meat chicken,” she said, scribbling out my lunch plan on her pad, “I mean four ounces. Measure it before you eat. It should be about the size of your palm. Well, not yours, but my palm.”

I glanced down at my hands, which were apparently the size of personal pan pizzas. I looked back up at Judy’s, held up in a tight, narrow high five, as if saluting a dictator.

“Got it.”

She moved on to the afternoon and evening, detailing the handfuls of raw almonds I could snack on at 3:30 p.m. and the dinners I could finish with a half cup of fat-free, no-sugar-added frozen yogurt, or a side of ten to twelve raspberries.

“What about grapes or other berries?”

Judy’s pen stopped abruptly. She turned a gaze of flattened anger up at me.

“Grapes are just sugar. You might as well be eating a pile of gummy bears.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I really was.

“Kelsey, you’re young.” She put down her pen for a moment, and I braced myself for more eye contact. “This is only going to get harder and harder. When you’re twenty-five or thirty-five, losing this weight will take much longer. You need to do this now. I beg you.”

She begged me. Judy, with her bridge view and notepad and four-ounce palms, was calling to me from the other side of something. I was suddenly that schlubby not-as-rich-kid in the sixth grade, being given my one shot to hang with the size-zero girls. I really could be one of them. I just had to make an effort, lose the belly, and figure out how to do stuff with hair accessories. Or I could languish. I could be a dumpy twenty-five-year-old and a lonesome thirty-five-year-old, and after that, who knew? Sweatshirts? Bed sores? An actual death by chocolate?