Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (8 page)

“So, here’s the thing,” Dave opened. “We’ve got a girl—I can’t think why this didn’t come up earlier…”

Maureen took over. “We have a girl on our roster who looks quite similar to you, and she’s booking a number of roles at the moment.”

“What does that mean?” Mom knew what it meant. I knew what it meant at this point, but there was only one way out of this meeting.

“It just complicates things slightly. It means we need to think about whether Kelsey’s a good fit for us right now.”

“And if we’re the right fit for Kelsey.” I suddenly recognized the slick rhythm of their spiel; how often Dave and Maureen must have sung this medley of harsh truths and high fives to get kids like me out of their office without tears. I wanted them to spell it out.

“Do I still get the contract?”

All three looked at me: a child.

“You know what? Sure, you guys take this home.” Dave fished out one of the overcopied documents from a file in a heap of files. “You can have time to look it over and think about it. And we’ll do the same here, right?” He caught Maureen’s gaze. She nodded. No one bought it except me.

If I’d become a famous (or even failed) child actress, you’d already know because it would be the first thing I’d tell everyone I’d ever met. Rainbow Management never called to follow up. The contract sat in a drawer next to our home computer for ten years. Occasionally, I’d stumble over it while searching for a copy of my birth certificate or passport, and it was like finding a relic of an old heartbreak. Each time, I’d return it carefully to the back of some folder, until the summer after my junior year of college, when I finally threw it out. I was in the midst of another New Diet Buzz, this time with Jenny Craig. Having already lost four pounds, I’d hit that stage where I was sure this one was
the
one. Finding the old, unsigned contract felt like a jinx.

After that last meeting at Rainbow, it took only days for me to quit the green-beans-and-yogurt routine. By the end of the month, I’d gone back to my old version of normal eating—one that wasn’t actually all that “normal,” and would only become more extreme in the months and years to come. I’d failed and been failed, and now I had to face the consequences: un-tell everyone at school about my big-shot manager, hang my new size S and XS clothes in the far left of my closet, and find a way to fit into them again. Until I did, I would be irrefutably less than the Sam Fairchilds and Daisy Eagans and all the other thin, pretty, chosen girls.

After the Buzz comes only the fizzle and then the flattening. It’s inevitable, because the Buzz is about anticipation of a brighter, skinnier tomorrow where everything will be new, different, and better—because you will be new, different, and better. And when that first disappointment hits, the New Diet Buzz is over and there is no getting the magic back. From there on out, it’s like trying to get back into a bubble you’ve already popped.

After that first real diet, I gained all the weight back and more. But I’d tasted the manic power of skinny. That first, pure Buzz became the dragon I’d chase for almost twenty years.

I didn’t really stop until the day I walked out of Theresa’s office after my first intuitive eating session. Not until then did I look around and realize what a tangled forest I had wound up in, and how clear the path out was. I strode down the street, thinking,
I want some peanut butter toast, so I’m going to have it! What a world!

It was the New Diet Buzz. Even if this time was really different, that initial rush came on like clockwork, as potent and delicious as it had ever been. I didn’t want this to feel like a diet. I didn’t want to feel this good, because that meant that failure wasn’t far behind. I kept saying that it wasn’t about winning and failing, but did I actually believe that? Was this just a bigger, showier attempt to get the other kids to like me, or did I really want to get my shit together, for real, for me?

Maybe. That was still the best answer I had.

I did know that I wanted some peanut butter toast, though. That evening, I went home and spread Skippy onto two slices of hearty sourdough, the first bread I’d bought in years without doing nutrition-label math. I drizzled on a spoonful of raw honey, added some banana slices and a pinch of sea salt. I pushed a pile of mail to the side of the wobbly IKEA table in our narrow living room, and sat down to eat. No TV, no phone, no e-mail in front of me. Mindful eating would become a challenge in the weeks to come, but for now it was a novel experience, made all the more vivid by the Buzz.

The first bite was like seeing sunlight through your window in the morning just after you’ve been dreaming of it. After all that prelude, the sensory experience was so overwhelming that I felt my glands clutch for a moment as if I’d bitten into a lemon, but a lemon I
really
wanted to taste. I ate, savored, swallowed, and was filled in a way that felt so absolutely good that I was almost embarrassed. In short, I had a pretty good dinner. Maybe my first.

I went to bed still marveling over the thrill of eating toast. I’d only just started, and already this thing had helped me untangle an old and painful knot from the past.
Maybe that’s it?
I thought.
Childhood solved.

Right.

S
o, what kind of diet is this?”

The week I publicly quit dieting, I answered this question approximately eleventy billion times. Everyone from my long-lost middle-school friends to my gynecologist to my dad’s third cousin who hadn’t seen me since I was eighteen months old wanted to know exactly what I was putting in my mouth. And when would it make me skinny? Thank you, Facebook.

Thank you, me, in fact. I’d written the first installment of my new column, the Anti-Diet Project, just days after meeting with Theresa for the first time. I watched with a tearful hybrid feeling of excitement-horror-glee-nausea as click after click drove my little post to our top story of the day. It was essentially a longer version of the missive I’d thumbed out on the bus when pitching the column to my boss:
No more diets! Who’s with me?!
A lot of our readers were. I wasn’t the only one who was sick of feeling fat and disgusting and also completely incapable of getting it up for yet another bullshit eating plan. Though I wasn’t surprised, I still didn’t expect all the feelings that slammed into me when I saw the hundreds of people sharing the story and saying, “I get you!”

And I didn’t expect just how many people really, really
didn’t
get me.

“I read your post and decided to have low-fat tomato soup for lunch instead of a big, fatty sandwich! I had a cookie after (bad Mrs. G!) but I’ll try again tomorrow. Look at that—you helped me already!”

This Facebook message popped up within hours, from an old middle-school teacher with whom I already had an uncomfortable social-media relationship. She’d once commented on a photo of me in a cocktail dress, saying “Sexxxxay!” This, from the woman who once scolded me for getting “too flowery” in an essay about the American Revolution.

I didn’t need to know about your lunch, Mrs. G. And, no, I didn’t help you. If you wanted a “big, fatty” sandwich I would have told you to get it, and instead you got the opposite. While it’s true that I used words like
fat
and
weight
in my post, I also used about two thousand more, none of which told readers
not
to eat anything. So don’t lay that tomato soup on me, because (hang on, I need another soap box. Okay, I’m ready:) intuitive eating is not a diet.

Intuitive eating sounds like something one might say with air quotes. No matter how commonsense it really is, each time I tried to describe it, I came across as a new age zealot, or someone at high risk for cult recruitment.

“It’s about learning to eat the way you did as a small child. You didn’t worry about carbs when you were three. You just ate what you wanted when you were hungry.”

“And that’s a good thing?” Debbie asked. We’d met up for dinner after work. It was one of many conversations I’d been having with close friends, disclosing my new lifestyle. Some were instantly supportive and others vaguely concerned. Debbie, my good friend since high school, was a psychologist in training, so her first response was a question.

I had my answer locked and loaded.

“Absolutely!”

She eyed the basket of oily corn chips between us at the table.

“Think about it. It’s really the worry and the restriction that makes you eat an entire basket of chips.”

“Interesting.”

Not good enough. I launched in, determined to win her over.

“Okay, imagine if I said, ‘Have all the chips you want, there will always be more chips, no one will ever take chips away from you,
and
eating chips is completely okay.’ If you really believed that, you’d probably just have a few and be satisfied, knowing you could have more whenever you wanted.”

She tilted her head thoughtfully, considering the chips. For a moment, I wondered if I wasn’t just wrong but crazy.

Finally, she nodded.

“Yeah, okay. I get it.”

Despite the fact that even I couldn’t quite believe it yet, the validity of intuitive eating still speaks for itself. Before authors Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch (both nutritionists and dietitians) named it as such, the concept of the un-diet had been brewing for decades. Ever since dieting became a pervasive, insidious theme entrenched in our cultural consciousness, there have been those who realized that it didn’t work—and, in fact, it did more harm than good. Most rational people, if they really think about it, know that dieting is unsustainable and unhealthy. “Intuitive eating” is simply the formal name of the philosophy that teaches people with food issues how to eat normally again. Anyone with basic intelligence can see that our bodies are born with the full capacity to feed themselves properly, and that all the information we need to maintain a healthy diet comes from common sense and our own internal signals.

The tricky part is actually hearing those internal signals and following them. Even those rational, intelligent people live in a world full of loud, constant messages screaming, “Food: You’re doing it wrong.” And, why wouldn’t we believe it? It’s not as if everyone on earth is healthy, fit, and perfectly happy with the way they look. It
must
be our fault; our brains and bodies are the problem, not the solution. Someone else must have the answers. So, when some hustler comes along with a glossy spokeswoman and a high-shine book cover, we want to believe their promises. I know I did, every time.

I joined Weight Watchers for the first time a month before starting eighth grade, along with my mom. She wasn’t overweight, at least not like I was, “but I could always stand to drop a few,” she said.

Earlier that same year she’d sat me down to tell me about the nightly meetings she’d been going to for the last few months. We’d never had one of those formal parent-child talks I’d read about in books, and for a moment I expected her to tell me she was dying. But no, she was an alcoholic. And going to those meetings was how she would get better. Up until that moment, I’d never suspected she was an alcoholic, let alone one who’d fallen off the wagon. The concept of alcoholism existed only in the realm of fiction and redemptive movie endings. The drinking that went on in our house was just what grown-ups did. Finding out my mother and my father, who confirmed his own long-term sobriety that night on the phone, were both in Alcoholics Anonymous filled me with shaky relief. In the months to come, Mom would take up Pilates and evolve into the thinnest, blondest version of herself; the kind of mom who picked you up on time in a tidy car, looking lean and casually cool in yoga pants and lipstick.

Together, we attended weekly Weight Watchers meetings in a conference room at our local athletic club where Janis, a snazzy, short-haired, fifty-something ballbuster led us through weekly weigh-ins followed by thirty-minute lectures she’d written out with multicolored highlighters on giant white easels.
Beating the Holiday Weight Gain
or
Things to Do Besides Snacking
were typical challenges we all worried over, and once Janis had gone through her plan of attack she opened the floor to suggestions.

“Pack a low-Points snack you can bring to the office, like celery sticks,” one woman offered.

“Sure, I mean it’s still snacking,” Janis replied. “But it’s better than hitting the vending machine.” She listed our ideas under hers in another bright marker.

“Get a manicure!”

“Love it. Get a manicure. Keep those hands occupied.”

I raised my hand for the first time. As the only non-mom in the room, I generally kept my hand down during meetings, but for once I had a suggestion that wasn’t already on the list.

“Sometimes I try reading.”

“Okay,” Janis said with a smirk. “Anyone else think, ‘Oh, I’ll just read a
book
?’ when they get hungry?” The group chuckled, but she shrugged and added it to the list anyway. (Sor-ry, Janis. Seemed a lot more reasonable than running out for a manicure every time a cookie craving hit.)

At thirteen, I was officially chubby, but looking back, I was by no means grotesque. I was pretty cute, in fact. And, having just transferred to a new public school where I quickly made new friends, I was cute
and
noticed for the first time. It was great and new and weird. I had crushes on people and other people had crushes on me! The latter experience was so bizarre and alarming that I ended up taking one poor, confused boy to the student counselor’s office after he passed me a sweaty note professing his love.

I had responded to this culture shock (and the thrilling new phenomenon of cafeteria French fries) by promptly gaining eight pounds. Weight Watchers seemed like an ideal solution. It turned every food into Points that I could easily plan my day around, and gave me a scoring system for how well each of those days had gone. No matter how badly I had flunked the science quiz or how not in love with me Sean Damico was, if I stayed within my points by the end of the day, it had been a great one.

I lost thirty-six pounds that first year on Weight Watchers. Back then, the Points system was calorie based. (This was a simpler time, before low-carb and Paleo and the armies of antigluteneers.) Therefore, I achieved this weight loss mainly with breakfasts of Carnation Instant Breakfast (2 packets of mix + 1 cup skim milk), and lunches of prepopped fat-free popcorn, fresh grapefruit, and a bottled Starbucks Frappuccino—the skinny girl’s greatest indulgence in 1998.

My mom had invented a handful of chickpea-and-tofu-based dishes when it became clear that I wasn’t just being dramatic about being a vegetarian. Therefore, dinner became my main source of actual nutrition, though my preferred evening meal was two Boca Burger patties and a huge pile of ketchup.

Just as it had in sixth grade, the magic of skinny proved real and verifiable. This slightly thinner version of me was allowed to be a real girl. I ordered pastel slip dresses from the Delia*s catalog and learned to match my shimmery lipstick to my shimmery eye shadow. I took my first and last Home Economics class (they called it “Life Skills,” but no one’s buying that when you’re being taught to iron) and sewed my own Halloween costume—a replica of Claire Danes’s angel dress from
Romeo + Juliet
.

“You look hot,” Sean Damico, my one true crush, said, pressing me against the soda table at Allie Janecki’s Halloween party. He reached behind my back and pulled the fabric of my angel dress taut against my body, then gave my torso a long, hard appraisal. He traced an hourglass in the air and shrugged. “Borderline sexy.”

For years to follow, I played this scene over in my head, imagining the thousands of different things I might have said or done next. I’d never been pressed against anything, or looked at with even casual lust by someone I actually wanted. All at once, I was speechless and thrumming with adrenaline, staring at his half-mast eyes while he waited for my reply.

I rolled my eyes. “You don’t have to be nice to me.”

“What?”

“You don’t have to say stuff like that.”

“Okay.”

“I know Allie told you to talk to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.”

He picked up his soda cup and leaned in close to my ear, shouting louder than the music required.

“Jesus. Next time you can just say ‘THANK YOU.’”

I made it through the school year counting Points before the magic of Weight Watchers fizzled and the weight slowly crept back. Sean started dating another girl who liked him so much she’d scraped his initials into the back of her hand with a paper clip. By the middle of ninth grade, I was up to my old weight plus twenty pounds. The Juliet dress hung in my closet next to my eleven-year-old skinny clothes. The soda-table incident remained the highlight of my romantic life.