Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (3 page)

That dinner was my final Final Pig-Out, though even I didn’t quite believe that yet. When I curled up in bed that night, thrilled for what lay ahead, I still hated my body and feared food. I was still the woman who avoided whole city blocks so as not to walk past reflective glass, and who thought that eating after 7 p.m. was a crime on par with infanticide. I was still hanging around in my bottom, and that was okay. I’d been hiding my whole life—what was one more deep, dark hole? I knew I wouldn’t be in there for long, and anyway, at least I didn’t have to figure out just how I would start climbing out of it yet. Not that night.

All of a sudden, it was morning.

T
here’s a well-earned stereotype about how much New Yorkers love to talk about public transportation. The first half hour of most social occasions consists of everyone taking turns to talk about how they arrived, which lines are delayed this weekend, and a brief, uncertain silence in response to the guy who biked there. The same is true for dieters and ordering food: if you ask me what I did for lunch, you better not have anywhere to be for the rest of the day.

That Monday, back at work, I felt suspended in a kind of limbo. I’d had my Final Pig-Out, but I didn’t have a diet to start. All I had was a grand declaration to not start one again, and while I’m at it, somehow turn that into a compelling column. Now, I had to actually do the work of figuring out how to execute both those things. And since actually doing the work is the worst, I made the completely healthy and nonavoidant decision to order lunch instead. I pulled up Seamless.com, the online food-delivery service much beloved by those of us too
lazy
busy to pack lunch. All you have to do is enter your address and an endless list of restaurants appears, letting you click through every menu in the area without actually getting off your ass. On the one hand, it’s a helpful service. On the other, it’s a deeply codependent relationship unlike anything I’ve experienced with another human being. As I scrolled through the list of options, the usual routine began in my head:

Hold the referrals. I already have a therapist.

Once I’d recovered from the ordeal of eating a lunch that would satisfy my hunger and, far more important, satisfy my need not to be dieting but also not to be eating a burger the day before a photo shoot, there was really nothing left to do but start changing my life.
Fine.

The not-so-fresh start began just like all journeys of self-discovery and transformation: with Google. Entering “intuitive eating nyc” got me the usual billion results and one ad for a weird flat-belly trick. As expected, there were dozens of nutritionists, dietitians, and eating-disorder counselors who specialized in intuitive eating. “Let me help you make peace with food—and your wonderful self!” one nutritionist’s website proclaimed in enormous italics. “Embrace the plate and learn to live again!” high-fived another. With its dreamy colors and loopy fonts, this site was faintly reminiscent of the one I created in seventh grade to curate Leonardo DiCaprio fan fiction.

It is both helpful and unfortunate that we live in an age where one cannot exist as a functional human without a web presence. In all likelihood, these were perfectly capable professionals, but thanks to overzealous website templates, they came off like My Little Ponies. And if I’m honest, I had to get off my extremely high horse. Step one to any get-your-shit-together process is a good old-fashioned ego check. When you need help, you can’t ask for it with your nose in the air…is what I told myself while clicking through website after earnest, pastel website. After all, I did want to “embrace the plate.” I just didn’t want to talk about it.

I found Theresa Kinsella’s site about ten minutes into my search. It had its share of gentle colors and positive affirmations, but there was a marked lack of cheese-ball sentiment, making her stand out like a rose among fake roses. I didn’t choose Theresa for her website, however. I chose her because, out of everyone I reached out to, she was the first to write me back. Thank you, Google.

At twenty-nine, I wasn’t as broke as I’d often been. Ordering lunch, for example, was a relatively recent luxury. But I wasn’t so not-broke that I could foot the bill for my own lifestyle transformation.

A word on free stuff: This is a perk most web and magazine writers enjoyed. But, in general lifestyle journalism, it was also a necessity. If your job requires writing about things and experiences, you have to actually check out the things and experience the experiences. Therefore, a lot of individuals and companies are willing to offer you things and experiences, hoping for press. It may sound ugly and parasitic, and I suppose it sometimes is. But personally, I’d never had my arm twisted as a journalist. Most of the time, people sent me unsolicited stuff like lentil chips or flavored booze along with a breezy press release about how much my readers were going to love it. If I actually liked the free thing, I might use it in a story at some point. If not, I left it in the office kitchen in case one of my colleagues enjoyed pancake-flavored liqueur (it’s real, it’s gross, don’t bother).

For all the free snacks sitting under my desk, I’d rarely actually
asked
for something—let alone something so big. Then again, I had a feeling the column I was about to write would be bigger than anything I’d ever written. Still, Theresa was a nutritional therapist, not a bag of lentil chips. She had all that intimidating “MS, RD, CDN” stuff after her name, so I didn’t want to be less than straightforward when it came to asking for freebies.

“I can’t, like, pay you, though.”

We’d met at a Midtown Starbucks where I’d given her the highlights: Disordered eating! Wretched body image! Let’s kick this thing once and for all so I can get started with my life, and also not be fat anymore!

She got it. Since she’d been working in the world of disordered eating for years, my story was even older to her than it was to me. Furthermore, she was as pissed off at the diet industry as I was, and just as eager to get the message out there. Theresa had degrees and experience, as well as a superchipper vibe that remained entirely free of bullshit. She was nice and optimistic and no-nonsense, a tart slice of Midwestern cherry pie.

Theresa explained a little bit about her process, which sounded a lot more like therapy than the many rounds of nutritional counseling I’d been through over the years. She’d walk me through the phases of becoming an intuitive eater, specifically related to my needs and history with eating. I’d gone through all of my Food Issues with regular therapists before—along with all the other capital-I Issues—but Theresa’s work kept a tight focus.

“I don’t need to hear about your sex life, for example. Unless that relates to food somehow.” It kind of did, but maybe Starbucks wasn’t the place to get into it.

Our first official session took place just two days later. In the past, most of my consultations with nutritionists had taken place across big, scary glass tables, often decorated with correctly portioned food models, but Theresa’s Midtown Manhattan office was comfortable and prop free. The two-chair setup was familiarly shrink-y, and with the gusto of a well-seasoned couch crier, I plunged headlong into the dirty details of my dieting past. And, well, present.

“Except now, I’m just doing Weight Watchers.”

“Right,” she nodded. “Weight Watchers is a diet.”

“Yeah, but I guess I always thought of it as more reasonable than, like, Atkins or Eat Right for Your Type and all that.”

I thought of a Sunday the month before when I’d woken up already ravenous with sweet-salty-everything PMS cravings. I decided to blow all my Points on an 11 a.m. bowl of ice cream, then subsist on Points-free apples for the rest of the day.

Theresa shrugged. “That’s just marketing. It’s a diet.”

My world rocked ever so slightly off its axis but I nodded. “Right!”

We forged ahead, Theresa asking about how I decided when and what to eat, how much I thought about food, and what my goals were for this process.

“I don’t want to obsess over food anymore. I want to learn to eat like a normal person.”

Saying this, I felt my own pastel colors bleeding through. I was supposed to be the new me—no longer a scared little fat girl hiding in the pantry with a handful of chocolate, but a confident plus-size woman taking control of her life and hiking. Five minutes in that chair and the baby-blue truth came out. I dropped my precious ego and kicked it under the chair.

“I realize this isn’t working and it’s never really worked. I just want to eat normally, and I don’t think normal people need an app to tell them how to eat. I want to be healthy. I don’t know if I’m meant to be skinny and I don’t
need
to be skinny, but this”—I threw my hands up at myself, uncomfortable in too-small clothes, shifting around in my chair to try to find a position that would somehow hide my stomach and my upper arms—“this doesn’t feel like my normal. I want to find that place.”

Theresa nodded, and I realized my eyes had filled with hot, stinging tears. And that there was a box of tissues on either side of my chair. This woman knew what she was doing.

“I just don’t want to do it anymore. I want to eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full. And to not be fat.”

She wrote something down, and I worried I’d misspoken. First session or not, I prefer to be an A-plus client.

“I mean, find my normal weight range.”

She looked up from her pad. “And what if this is your normal weight?”

I side-eyed the tissue box.
Is she for real?

“I don’t think it is.”

“How do you know?”

“I guess I don’t have any proof except that I didn’t get here by ‘normal’ eating.”

“Okay.”

She waited. Theresa was a waiter, not a give-you-the-answer-er.

“So, I imagine that when I eat normally, I’ll lose a lot of weight. Some weight.”

She nodded and wrote a brief note. I eyeballed my old friend Tissue Box again, looking for answers. Was it too soon to quit this whole thing? Too late? Theresa looked up.

“What would happen if you didn’t?”

“I would be surprised?”

Screw this. Weight Watchers was fine. I’d start again tomorrow. Jennifer Hudson did it and now she has an Oscar. Or vice versa, but hey!

“Okay. I’m not saying this is your normal weight range, but I’m just posing this hypothetical: Say you went through this whole process and you”—she paused to consult the pad—“no longer obsessed over food, maintained health, ate when you wanted to, and stopped when you were full and everything else. What if you achieved all that and didn’t lose a single pound?”