Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (2 page)

T
he Jitney dropped me off in the middle of Midtown, and I inched the rest of the way home in a rush-hour cab ride, vibrating with anticipation. Flying up the stairs of my building, I plopped down my bags, kicked off my sneakers in a little performance of glee, and dug out my laptop. In just a few weeks the first snow would arrive, sealing the city in a frozen crust, but that evening my bedroom was hot with autumn sun and I shoved a window open. The ice cream truck was parked downstairs playing an off-brand version of “Turkey in the Straw” but for once I didn’t wish for an assault rifle. I had books to order and people to call and then: the Final Pig-Out!

I’d been in Williamsburg for seven years, but not fancy Williamsburg. Not the part historically identified as the source of all insufferableness and mustaches. Considering my yoga-pants-based wardrobe and abiding love of musical theater, I was never in the running for true hipsterdom, nor have I ever lived in one of those luxury buildings that comes with a meditation studio. I shared a long, narrow fourth-floor walk-up with a roommate I met on Craigslist a few years prior. The block was loud, and the living space was small, but the bedrooms were big and airy, and when I woke up in the morning I could lie in bed and watch the J train chug by in the distance, heading over the Williamsburg Bridge. I got a constant, geeky thrill knowing that I lived in the same neighborhood as Francie Nolan, the heroine of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
. Who cared about its reputation when I got to live in the setting of my favorite childhood book—even if I did have to call 911 to report gunfire every now and then?

Sprawled across the unmade heap of rose print sheets on my bed, I flipped open my laptop and immediately ordered
Intuitive Eating
, using my boyfriend’s account to exploit his free-shipping perk (all couples do this, yes?). Harry lived in Park Slope, an actual fancy neighborhood in Brooklyn, ten subway stops away from me. We’d been together for over a year, and though most of our coupled friends were somewhere between the moving-in and planning-babies phases, we just weren’t there yet. In fact,
I
just wasn’t there yet, and Harry, my sweet and patient first love, gave me the space to not be. It was typical of our dynamic, him being boundlessly generous and me requiring boundless generosity. Things weren’t entirely one-sided, but it was pretty clear which one of us was the designated freak-er out-er.

I hit “Confirm” on the order and texted him to send me the confirmation e-mail IMMEDIATELY, please, love you.

Hey there
, he replied.
Are you back?

Yes! Can you send?

Yeah, forwarding now. How was the trip?

AMAZING.

Are you up for dinner or are you beat?

Too beat, need an early night. Call you in a bit?

I
was
beat, but I was pumped, too. I was up, up, up, with adrenaline and nerves and then worn out by adrenaline and nerves. Plus, I had dinner plans already—and no one was invited.

Along with Harry’s forwarded e-mail, there was another message in my inbox. My editor in chief had approved the column idea with a big, exclamation-pointed “Yes!” It was official. Not only would I change my life, but I would also do it in public. I would name it. It was all new, newer than any new diet because, for once, it was
actually
new. Adrenaline, nerves, sleepy, adrenaline, nerves, anxiety, panic, thrill, wonder, hope, hope, hope, anticipation, excitement: time for food.

I knew this wasn’t a diet I was starting. I remained firm in my done-ness, and yet the excitement and thrill of the new plan was still there, urging me to go all out. Despite the fact that I wasn’t going to be starting Jenny Craig or CalorieKing tomorrow, there was a “tomorrow” to look forward to. And I wanted to have my night before. I wanted my Final Pig-Out.

I don’t know what you call the night-before-new-diet ritual, but for any dieter, there is one—and those are the best nights of our lives. For a brief window, there are no rules. The idea is actually to break all the rules at once. You order a pizza or greasy Chinese. You buy a tube of cookie dough and maybe some wine. If you do it alone, you put on the junkiest TV you can find, because no one wants to watch
Charlie Rose
while they’re eating chicken wings and pudding out of a mixing bowl. If you do it with a friend, then the friend becomes your partner, goading you on and nodding with real and gleeful horror when you say, “Fuck it, mozzarella sticks, too.”

It’s a last hurrah, and in a way it works. You wake up the next day bloated and ashamed, and the idea of living on green juice forever sounds just about right. But that feeling lifts somewhere around noon when somehow you’re hungry again, and suddenly you have to tangle with food on a diet rather than food on a binge. By then you’re riding high on the New Diet Buzz, and that carries you through the early days until you plateau—then you stumble, then you fall. Then it’s time to start over again, and that means calling the pizza place.

I’d been Final Pigging-Out since my first diet, but I didn’t have a name for it until somewhere around my twentieth. During our senior year of high school, my friend Sydney and I planned to start a low-carb regime right before graduation. This was the spring of 2002 and you’d be hard-pressed to find anything as universally reviled as a basic carbohydrate, except
maybe
Osama bin Laden. I was irrefutably fat, while Sydney was of completely average weight, but she was heading to a summer theater and dance intensive, and I was going to be a production intern at
Sex and the City,
so both of us needed to lose a million pounds ASAP.

“Should we go downtown for dinner, then?” Sydney asked as we plotted skinny-girl plans in her room. She lived in a dorm across campus from mine on the cozy grounds of our small boarding school. It was May and hot as actual hell in every room of the old New England buildings.

“China Village?” I asked hopefully.

China Village was the gross but good place that almost no one ordered from. If you wanted Asian food, you got take-out from Da Mei, the Thai/Vietnamese/sushi restaurant with cloth napkins and lacquered chairs. If you ordered from China Village, the place with sticky floors and a bench outside, you’d better have had some kind of severe PMS-breakup-college-rejection excuse. But the lo mein was outrageous and, after all, Sydney and I were going off all carbs (and most fat, we decided at the last second) first thing tomorrow. So, one way or another I was going to get some outrageous lo mein in my face, plus dumplings and General Tso’s.

Sydney barely hesitated: “YES. Lo mein. Now.” She was my partner. We bounced down the hill and into town, high on the thrill of badness.

Over dinner on the bench, we talked about how amazing this diet was going to be for our summer plans, and eventually our college experiences and lives in general. Low-carb was the way to go. Our bodies didn’t want all this (OMG, delicious) processed garbage. Our bodies wanted to go into ketosis and burn fat and protein, or something like that. It would feel
so
good. I don’t recall exactly what we ate that night, only that we ate everything. Years later, when we were postcollege roommates, Sydney would ask, “Remember the time we ate an entire Chinese restaurant?” I laughed and nodded. I did remember. “The final pig-out,” one of us had declared, surveying our heap of empty aluminum containers. And I thought of how we crossed the park afterward, stuffed and lethargic, to order ice cream sundaes at the Candy Cone.

Sydney and I made the low-carb thing happen for a week or so, but graduation excitement soon trumped all concerns of skinny days to come. There were midnight walks to Dunkin’ Donuts and tearful good-bye dinners. Nobody wants to hear “I need dressing on the side” in those moments, nor do you want to waste your breath on dressing instructions. You’ve got song lyrics to quote.

Lying belly-down on my bed in Brooklyn, clicking through dinner options online, I kept interrupting myself with thoughts of that night back at boarding school with Sydney. It had felt so fun and so icky, but more than anything it had felt necessary. It bonded us together as a team and bound us to the diet we’d start in the morning. Our shared complicity in such a disgusting event guaranteed our penance for the next day, at least. And of course there was no greater taste than the food we’d soon be quitting. I don’t believe, as some do, that disordered eating and alcoholism are equivalent afflictions, but the binge is one crossover that cannot be denied: the Final Pig-Out or the last bender. What is more relished and regretful?

I called DuMont, a bistro-ish joint in Williamsburg, and ordered my favorite burger with American cheese, sautéed onions, mushrooms, and a side of fries. And onion rings. I didn’t really feel like a glass of wine but I poured myself one anyway. I was going to do it one last time, even if it was on this small scale. A cheeseburger wasn’t an entire Chinese restaurant, but it was big and heavy with the same secrecy and meaning of that night in high school. When my takeout arrived, I turned on Netflix, which suggested I might enjoy watching
Fanny and Alexander
. (Of course, I never would. I just couldn’t delete it from my queue, for the same inscrutable reason I couldn’t unsubscribe from
The Economist
.) I scrolled past TED Talks and ’90s Disney cartoons, finally settling on a
30 Rock
rerun because the show felt like the right mix of silly and grown-up—and probably also because it stars a binge-eating woman. She’s a binge-eating woman who’s, like, a size 4, but Tina Fey can have that one.

My food was there and then it was gone. I’d eaten every bite right down to the lettuce and flavorless tomato slice. I was stuffed in a familiar way, but the usual anxiety didn’t rise to meet it, because I knew that tomorrow something would change. Something had already changed, and this dinner was the dying breath of something else. It was nostalgia on a deep, dark level, and the child and teenager and young adult who’d gotten so used to this routine whispered, “Please, please don’t give up. Let’s eat more cheeseburgers and watch television and Google ‘Nutrisystem’ until we fall asleep.” But I didn’t have it in me anymore, and the discomfort in my gut reminded me why. I didn’t want my life to be a series of nauseated spells or hunger pains. I wanted to turn off the television, or at least be able to turn off the television without worrying what might happen in all that silence. I finally had a real life in my hands and I wanted to hold onto it. That meant letting go of food. It wasn’t a new beginning. But it was a beginning nonetheless.

It’s not that I wish I hadn’t done this, but like the desire for the Final Pig-Out, the shame of it is still there, too. There are many moments I wish I hadn’t
had
to go through in this last year, because they’re not all triumphant. I want my story to go up and up and up. But from the moment I hauled myself up off the ground in the woods, things were never quite so perfect and crystalline—so East Hampton—again.

Life on a diet is linear: You begin, you lose weight, and you’re done. Then it’s on to the mythical “maintenance” mode (which is also dieting, but for eternity. Congratulations?). From the moment you quit, you feel like a train that’s jumped its track. You careen up and down over unfamiliar hills, you turn back toward valleys you’ve seen from only one perspective, and you pause for the first time, nervous and thrilled to realize that, in fact, you are not a train but a human being. Human life is, unfortunately, a lot more difficult than train life, but at least it’s real. Forget “happy” and “whole” and all those other simple things we’re supposed to aim for every day when we wake up. Those things are truly wonderful, but if you’re not careful, they can become another way of saying “perfect.” And I hope we can all agree that aiming for “perfect” is nothing short of bananapants. “Real” is the best you can shoot for.