Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (9 page)

In the summer of 1999, I was accepted as a last-minute entrant into the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, a small boarding school in Natick, Massachusetts, where I’d spend the next three years learning Meisner technique and waiting to be old enough to play Harper in
Angels in America
.

I was spending the summer as an apprentice at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival and decided to take on a new regime in advance of my upcoming career as a glamorous boarding school celebrity. The program was somewhat physical, so I figured I could skip the workout plan thanks to tumbling class and afternoons spent hauling props back and forth across the bucolic estate where the festival was held. All I’d need now was someone to tell me what to eat.

Eat Right for Your Type, a popular program devised by Dr. Peter J. D’Adamo, posits that the foods we eat react chemically with our blood, and therefore blood type is the most important factor when it comes to metabolism and maintaining a healthy weight. In nearby Chappaqua, I met with a nutritionist named Francesca, who pricked my finger and pressed the bloody tip to a piece of paper that would reveal my blood type. As we waited for the result, she served me a glass of lemon water and explained the science behind Eat Right for Your Type. There were lectins and antigens and alleles and all those other things that flew over my head in biology—all of which turned out to be the reasons I was fat! (This time
fat
meant a size 12/14.) As it turned out, another reason I was fat was that I was a vegetarian when I should have been eating meat. So, so much meat.

“See, you’re a Type O. You’re a huntress!”

Francesca took out a pad and scribbled out my meal plan for the week, plus a list of supergood foods, neutral foods, and foods that were “basically poison.” My supergood foods were things like beef, lamb, spinach, mozzarella cheese, figs, and mutton.

“Mutton? Like Henry VIII?”

“Exactly! Like a king!”

My neutral foods were pretty Tudor friendly as well: quail, rabbit, barley, and so on. Just no goose—absolutely not. Goose was poison. Other poisons included cabbage, cauliflower, kidney beans, mushrooms, peanuts, and skim milk.

“What about whole milk?” I didn’t even like milk, but I could not contain my curiosity at this point. She closed her mouth and sighed through her nose, consulting a chart on her desktop computer.

“Let’s see…Whole milk is ‘unknown.’”

“Unknown.”

“Right, we don’t have enough data about whole milk and your blood type. But, just to be safe, I’d avoid it. Ice cream and yogurt are on the poison list, so, what do you think, kiddo?”

I THINK YOU SOUND LIKE A FUCKING MANIAC, FRANCESCA. I THINK YOGURT IS YOGURT AND PETER J. D’ADAMO IS BANANAPANTS AND HENRY VIII IS NOT AN IDEAL ROLE MODEL FOR A TEENAGED GIRL IS WHAT I THINK.

Excuse the outburst—that’s just my rational grown-up self, feeling more than a little outraged on behalf of the fifteen-year-old sitting there with a bloody finger and wondering if the A&P carried mutton.

Back then what I thought was,
Wow, if only I’d learned my blood type earlier. All this could have been avoided! Life will be infinitely easier and skinnier from here on out, as long as I can figure out how to eat meat again without crying.

The Type O Diet, as you can see, is a slightly wackier version of Atkins. I purchased D’Adamo’s book and enlisted my Hudson Valley Shakespeare pal, Melissa, as my diet buddy. Though she was already skinny and ate whatever she wanted, she signed on with gusto. Turns out that she was skinny and ate whatever she wanted because she was a Type AB. The chapter on this blood type seemed oddly vague and mystical in comparison to the others. Perhaps because it was a newer blood type, “science” was still not totally sure what one should and shouldn’t eat as an AB. There were some beneficial foods and no-no foods, but D’Adamo seemed to think AB’s could
probably
eat whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t eat too much of it (unlike us ancient O’s who would simply burst at the sight of a mushroom). For no good reason, he added that AB types are often incredibly charismatic and fascinating individuals, noting that John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were both Type AB’s. So, medically speaking, Melissa was the greatest sex symbol of the twentieth century, and I was Henry VIII.

I crept back into meat eating over the course of three months, and by the end of the summer was still following Francesca’s plan to the letter. I was allowed up to five eggs a day, so I typically had an enormous omelet plus five strips of neutral turkey bacon for breakfast. For lunch, I’d ride into town with my fellow apprentices (though we were the kind of teens who preferred the term
apprenti
) Cat, Henry, Derrick, and Melissa. Each day, I bought a quarter pound of lean turkey breast from the deli counter of the local supermarket and four or five plums from the produce aisle. Standing in the checkout aisle, I’d ogle the forbidden, poisonous strawberries with the lust of a barely dry drunk. Outside, I’d sit on a bench with the rest of the group, eating slices of turkey meat with my fingers.

We’d become a tight circle of friends in that inevitable way of summer theater programs, but Melissa was my closest friend—meaning I believed her to be a much better person than I was. When her blood type confirmed this as a fact of science, I felt justified in putting her on my pedestal.

She was a year older than me, went to a slightly better school, and bought all her clothes at the Westchester—a mall so fancy it didn’t have
mall
in the name. Even though she didn’t need to be, she was somehow better at my diet than I was. Above all, she didn’t give a shit. (Not giving a shit seems to be the through line of all cool girls since the dawn of man, and none of us shit givers will ever achieve it, for wanting not to give a shit is, in fact, giving one, and therein lies the paradox. We’re doomed to care.) I watched as Derrick and Henry fell goonily in love with Melissa, and then as older cast members developed irresistible, morals-challenging crushes on her sixteen-year-old self, none of which fazed her remotely.
Damn
, I’d think.
You and your sexy blood
.

After each performance of
Titus Andronicus
we’d get in her Jeep and drive to the twenty-four-hour deli for pints of Häagen-Dazs fruit sorbet, eating two at a time, sitting on the curb.

“I don’t think this is what Peter J. D’Adamo had in mind,” Melissa once remarked.

“It’s dairy free!” I’d shriek like the mad tyrant I was, then jam the plastic spoon back into my pint, chipping away at the raspberry ice until my belly burned with sugar and my mouth was fully numbed.

I lost twenty pounds that summer. It wasn’t enough, but it was something, and I was still high enough on the New Diet Buzz that surely it would carry over when I started boarding school. Right?

“I’m fairly certain they have turkey slices in Massachusetts,” Melissa assured me. She’d lost eight pounds from her small frame, but it somehow didn’t register as gaunt or bony. Really, she just looked like she’d gotten a good tan. We hugged and swapped e-mail addresses, making tentative plans to hang out over Thanksgiving break.

By then, I’d have dropped the remaining forty pounds I wanted to lose, found a boyfriend, and been cast in a show. By then, I could join her up on the pedestal with the rest of the ABs, having it all (but not caring about any of it).

Exactly the opposite of all those things happened, immediately. There’s a certain kind of kid who’s ready to fly the nest at age fifteen and is unruffled by the daily rigors of acting and singing critiques in front of their peers. Then there are those of us who shatter at the mere suggestion you might want to try those last three bars again. My first semester at Walnut Hill was a lesson in panic and humiliation.

It wasn’t the school’s fault: Walnut Hill was and is an exceptional type of prep school. There were only two others with a similar model in the country: Interlochen in Michigan and Idyllwild in California. Students not only need to pass muster academically, they must audition for a particular major.

Prep school wasn’t mandatory in my family, but it was the usual route. Despite both my parents’ disregard for their WASPish heritage, and their lack of wealth, education was education. I didn’t have to go, but I had to give it a shot. In the midst of applying to a dozen other traditional prep schools, I had auditioned to be a theater major at Walnut Hill, with a monologue from
The Diary of Anne Frank
and a song from
The Secret Garden
. My middling SSAT scores had landed me on a waiting list, and I’d resigned myself to another perfectly content year at my public school when the acceptance letter arrived along with a package of student information. Academic classes ran morning through early afternoon, I was told, followed by late afternoon and evening study within our majors. For theater students that meant acting technique, vocal coaching, voice lessons, dance, dramaturgy, and occasional special subjects like makeup and set design. After that, we’d be in either rehearsal or tech for one of the five productions mounted over the course of the school year. I mention this rigorous schedule mainly to brag about what a hardcore high schooler I was, but also to highlight the particularly unique bubble I lived in for three years. Mostly bragging, though.

Change has never been my strong suit. I struggle to adjust to a new software update on my phone. So, moving from my childhood home into a chilly dorm room with an even chillier roommate—a Japanese violinist who didn’t speak English but was fully capable of communicating how disgusting I was for not emptying the waste-paper basket every day—felt like a catastrophe. And I’d chosen it.

Food was standard boarding-school fare: Tater Tots, beef stews, pizza-bagel treats on the weekends. There was always a fruit bowl sitting on the sidelines and a meager salad bar, frequented mainly by dance majors. But given the choice between pizza-bagels and an orange, I think any respectable teenager would ignore the fruit.

The quality of the cafeteria aside, my brain clicked into Away Mode. Eat Right for Your Type went out the door for logistical reasons (high school dining halls don’t generally cater to Henry VIII) but mainly because Away Mode meant time to eat. Growing up, it had been my habit to stock up on treats and indulgent second helpings whenever I was out of the house, or simply out of sight of anyone I knew. At Walnut Hill, I was away from home for months at a time and felt—or truly wished to be—invisible to everyone.

Despite myself, I managed to make a few friends, Debbie being one of the first. She was an art major and a day student with her own car. We’d sometimes drive into town for lunches at the bagel shop, or anywhere she felt like—any off-campus food was my greatest delight. Chrissy was also an artist and one of my only friends in the dorm. She was from Switzerland and we quickly bonded over homesickness and fear of our respective roommates.

That first year, I couldn’t handle the nonstop energy of teenage artistic expression, combined with the constant tension of audition-performance-audition-performance. Then, there was the actual school part. In acting class, this edginess worked in my favor. I was your girl if you needed instant crying or a good chair throwing. In class, I perfected the role of Hedda Gabler Having a Panic Attack. But I wasn’t cast in anything that year, to my great embarrassment.

Still, that did leave many of my nights free in a half-empty dorm. Whenever I didn’t have tech duty, I retreated to my room to sing along with musical theater recordings. This habit was discouraged by teachers, the point being that none of us was Patti LuPone and “practicing” along with her voice would only lead to poor imitation. I followed the rules when rehearsing my songs assigned for class, using only a cassette tape of recorded piano accompaniment. But alone in my dorm room, all bets were off. I flipped through my album of Original Broadway Cast recordings and spent the night singing myself raw with the kind of stuff that’s only acceptable to sing if you’re at musical theater boarding school, or you are, in fact, Patti LuPone. I did the standards:
Les
Mis
,
Into the Woods
. I went for smaller, cult hits like
Songs for a New World
. I wasn’t above doing Disney. It is a fact that I was once punished for waking up a neighboring dorm by singing “Part of Your World” with my window open. It was not my first offense.

I couldn’t binge on musicals when my roommate was home, so on those nights, I’d reserve the dorm television and pull out my
X-Files
VHS boxed set. There was a local deli that delivered pints of Ben & Jerry’s, but the delivery minimum meant you had to order two at a time, which saved me from the embarrassment of actually deciding to order two at a time.

I went home for Columbus Day weekend and no one said anything. Mom seemed happy to see me. My stepdad asked about classes. Everything was normal, except for their faces. It was the first time I recognized the look—the one that all of my tribe knows so well. We fear it as we step out of cars to see long-lost friends, or walk into the family Christmas party, holding our stomachs in until we sit down and exhale. I saw them all see me, make note of something, then deliberately close up.

That weekend, Melissa came over to watch a movie on the beanbag chairs in our basement. I searched her face for the look but never found it, either because she didn’t care or because she too was occupied with her own new school year. We split a bag of Reduced Fat Oreos, and I listened to her chat about her new maybe-boyfriend and the plans she was already making for college. College. I was inches into my sophomore year of high school and barely hanging on. College seemed like a terrifying, distant planet that I would never see until I’d gone through astronaut training.

The idea of a boyfriend felt just as remote. At the time, Walnut Hill had somewhere around two hundred students, and the heterosexual male population was the smallest minority on campus. The handful of straight guys were all dating ballerinas; the best that all the other straight girls could do was lust after their gay guy friends or take a stab at lesbianism and hope like hell that it took. I was good at the gay-guy crush thing, but even if I’d been interested in dating a girl, it had taken all my chutzpah just to try to be
friends
with some of them. It was infinitely easier just to hole up with Fox Mulder and two pints of ice cream every night. But Melissa’s story of real-life car kissing and sexually charged AOL Instant Messaging made me wish I’d at least come up with a pretend boyfriend to talk about. I’d never felt so far away from a friend.

After Melissa left, I sat around with the Oreos, clicking aimlessly through channels and resent-fantasizing about her ever-more fabulous adulthood and my own worminess. Mom came through to fetch a load of laundry, and as she turned to head back up the stairs I finally said to her back:

“Do I look like I’ve gained a lot of weight?”

She stood on the stairs for a moment, her back still toward me.

“Yes.”

She went upstairs. I went back to the television, bathed in a new and nauseating truth.

I was really fat now. I didn’t dare weigh myself anymore, but I’d slowly transitioned out of my regular clothes and into a daily uniform of black sweatpants and loose T-shirts. At school, it was easy enough not to see red flags like this—sweatpants were “movement clothing” required for all acting and dance classes. I had no parent eyeing my plate, and the few friends I had were new and not about to say, “Get a grip, fellow-classmate-I’ve-known-for-eight-weeks.”

I’d known what my mom would say when I asked her, and I’d known how I would feel when I heard it: shocked and hurt and humiliated. That was the magic emotional formula that launched me into any diet. When I returned to Walnut Hill, rather than going back to Weight Watchers (how would I get to meetings?) or Eat Right for Your Type (where would I find mutton?), I decided it was easier to do exactly what the skinny girls did. For the next three years, I did everyone’s diet.

From Hannah Liebman I borrowed a Diet Coke habit that we both suspected and possibly hoped would lead to an Actual Coke habit by the time we got to college. Hannah was a star of the theater department and my sometimes-friend, particularly when it came to diet-tip sharing. She was talented and madly confident, but aware that her buxom body worked against her as a dancer; Bob Fosse left no room in his choreography for belly or boobs. I already knew I was not
Chicago
-bound, but I wanted the flat-panel body of a chorus girl anyway, and I gratefully accepted the little grainy pills she tipped out of an Aleve bottle and into my palm every afternoon. When Dexatrim was recalled for containing a stroke-causing ingredient (something like “phenynleflekrnenagucosamine”), we bemoaned the loss of our sleepless nights and occasional heart flutters, briefly switching to Dexatrim Natural (i.e., Dexatrim Boring). Then Hannah went on a family vacation to Mexico and came back with a purse full of possible stroke risks. Problem solved.

From Beth, a dance major in my dorm, I learned about sugar-free candy. Beth was diabetic and while she’d watched many of her fellow dancers suffer through the endless, cyclical grip of anorexia, she struggled with her own complicated health issue. She was long and thin and muscled, like the rest of them, but would never be as small as those furious pixies, the “bunheads,” who typically played the Sugar Plum Fairy role in our annual
Nutcracker
run. She was a solid Snowflake, smiling in the second row.

Dancing all day while maintaining level blood sugar is a complex challenge that requires constant testing and dosing and math. She had candy and juice for low-sugar emergencies, but when she wanted to take the shuttle bus into town for a movie, she packed a bag of sugar-free gummy worms or diabetic-friendly peanut butter cups.

Beth’s minifridge had a seemingly bottomless supply of food, so when I asked to try her gummies, she tossed me a whole bag. We were sitting on the floor of her room, studying for a Biology test.

“They’re good!” I chirped, genuinely surprised.

“They’re okay,” she replied.

In truth, the candy was a little hard to chew, and the sorbitol sweetener left a bitter glaze in my mouth. Still, I pressed on:

“No, I really like them!”

“Just don’t eat the whole bag. You’ll shit your brains out.”

Oh really, now?

I stocked up at the local drugstore and took to eating sugar-free candy after each meal, even if I’d had dessert (I’d almost certainly had dessert). It was the equivalent of a purge, except I didn’t have to call it that. There was no scary, messy toil of vomiting, only many an uncomfortable evening on the toilet. My dorm was connected to an administrative building, so rather than use the very public stalls near my bedroom, I spent hours in the privacy of the staff bathroom, sitting and waiting, feet going numb, until I was sure it was all over. Why didn’t other people know about this?! Of course, they did—they just didn’t write sexy young-adult novels like
The Best Little Girl in the World
about it, because no one pictures the Best Little Girl in the World as a fat, anxious theater nerd, shitting her brains out in a bathroom stall.

The sugar-free trick backfired after a few months when I wound up having to rush out of class for a not-so-private session in an academic building. Our student bathrooms were coed, and the tops of the stalls were so low it was obvious they’d been purchased for an elementary school. One of the few close friends I’d made was Jon, a six-foot-four theater student with whom I shared an equal love of
The X-Files
, Ani DiFranco, and Stephen Sondheim—not to mention a class schedule.

It’s moments like this that make me believe that God exists and is, in fact, a mid-’90s sitcom writer. Kelsey enters stall, drops pants, and sits down. Enter: Jon.

“Oh heeeey!” He peered down at me from a neighboring stall as I clenched my butt cheeks and smiled with the force of a thousand suns.

“He-heeeeey,” I eked out.

“Oh God, I can’t pee when you’re looking at me,” he said.

“So don’t look at me!”

“Okay, okay. I’m looking at the wall.” He stared at the tiled wall and then cracked up.

“I can’t! You go first!”

“Ha. Ha-ha. I can’t, either.” Because I’ll have to change schools, if not planets, after.

“Come on, please?!”

“Pee now, you pee now!”
I didn’t scream so much as growl into my lap, but the voice that came out of me was enough to reverberate off the walls and get Jon to start peeing immediately, then flush, wash his hands, and get the hell out in under forty seconds.