Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (10 page)

“Bye!”

Sorbitol, mannitol, and other artificial sweeteners can indeed cause apocalyptic diarrhea in most people, as well as bloating and the kind of cramps that make me reconsider ever having children.

Sugar-free, as it turned out, required moderation after all. I had weeks of life-changing constipation after quitting the stuff (again, where’s
my
sexy young-adult novel?) and from then on only used it during crisis mode. I kept a stash of sugar-free gummies for postpizza binges or the nights before auditions, but the magic of the first few months of toilet euphoria was gone.

From another dance friend I learned about working out in garbage-bag pants. From my junior-year scene study partner I adopted a grapefruit habit that went not unlike the sugar-free experiment. By junior year, Sydney and I had met and become best friends, so when she became an Atkins devotee, I followed her lead without shelling out cash for the book.

“Basically, no bread and all the nuts you want,” she said. That’s how I ended up eating almonds by the sackful for longer than I care to think about. In the grand finale of my high school diets, Sydney and I revived the low-carb concept the following year, and that lasted for a whole whopping week.

In between these fits and starts, I swung back to the Ben & Jerry’s phase, taking emotional eating to new heights. This was the kind of stuff you only read about in the darkest of
Cathy
cartoons: sneaking into Chrissy’s room to sneak nibbles of the chocolate bars she brought back from Switzerland; eating slice after slice of pizza by myself in a local restaurant while hiding from a table of fellow students; picking the dried-out icing off someone’s birthday cake, which they’d left out overnight in the common room.

I did all this because the new diet was coming, any minute. It didn’t matter that there was no one looking over my shoulder or that I didn’t even want the next slice of pizza, my stomach already churning with nausea. When I lived in that cycle, I was constantly desperate for something. Food was both the fuel of that desperation and the white noise that blocked it out. I did it because this endless up and down left no room for me to feel anything else, and that was the only calm I knew. I did it because I had always done it.

We call fat people lazy. They’re not. Fat people are zealous. They will cleave and push and fight harder than anyone. They have been in battle since the day someone poked them in the soft part of their belly or slapped the last piece of Halloween candy from their chubby hand. No one works harder at anything than a fat person works on a diet they believe will make them thin. They’re not stupid, either—another hateful misconception that lingers in the bigoted corners of our cultural consciousness. At eighteen, I could have written a thesis on calorie content and ketones and insoluble fiber, in iambic pentameter if you wanted. They’re not fat for lack of knowledge or effort. Some fat people became fat for a reason (medical, emotional, environmental). Others were simply born to be larger than you might like them to be. But all those chronic fat dieters are fatter for the dieting. They’re fatter because they’ve been failed.

I failed each one of those programs because failure is built in by design. Sure, there are those among us who might drop baby weight with two months on the Zone, but those so-called success stories make up the teeniest, tiniest percentage. You have to look quite closely to see that asterisk: “Results not typical.” The rest of us are lifers.

By the time I graduated, I’d found my footing in school. Grades had leveled out at slightly above average, and I’d been cast in several plays—usually as the grandmother or the sexless spinster, for obvious reasons. I still kept a small circle of close friends, but by senior year I was something akin to popular. Somehow I found myself senior class president and on my way to Boston University. And I was heavier than I had ever been.

On graduation day, I sat with Dad on the back steps of my dorm, freshly dressed in cap and gown. He was so proud of me; did I know that? He loved me more than anything in the world.

“I just hate to see you like this.” He was almost in tears.

“I know. But I’m working on it!” I aimed for chipper but my voice came out strangled.

He nodded. “I want you to be happy. I want you to have a life, sweetie.”

“Dad, seriously. I’ll take care of it.”

He smiled, the anguish in his face so acute. He looked at me like the parent of a murderer, standing by his monstrous child despite her crimes.

In those three years at Walnut Hill, I’d yo-yoed up and down the same hundred pounds. The years after that were much the same as I threw myself, heart and soul, into Jenny Craig, CalorieKing, even one hellish week with SlimFast. If the plan was in a book or written down for me by someone thin and intimidating, I’d commit with the devotion of a saint. Then I’d slip, true sinner that I was. But still I believed and returned to the next diet with a real and renewed faith. Yet, any weight loss I managed was fleeting. In the end, I only got fatter with every round.

It was all true, every terrible thought I had about myself. My mother had been right to be angry and disgusted by my stomach. Of course my father feared for my future, crying at the very sight of me. I was ruined.

I
’m going to have a cookie!” I called to Chrissy from the kitchen.

She didn’t answer.

“I’m going to have one of these cookies!” I called again. “Hey, is that okay?!”

Chrissy stuck her head out of the bathroom door and looked around to see what all the screaming was about.

“Dude, you
brought
the cookies.”

She closed the door and I smacked the heel of my palm to my head, cringing at yet another socially awkward gaffe. Since I had started intuitive eating, everyone I came into contact with—baristas, the pharmacist—was subject to this new habit I had of making grand eating proclamations. But Harry and my friends bore the brunt of it.

My three closest friends were the ones I made in high school: Chrissy, Debbie, and almost-saw-me-pooping Jon. I didn’t know if that was healthy or not, but it was nice to know there were three people in the world who’d known me as a fifteen-year-old and still liked me. Because the universe is a sitcom, we wound up spending most of our twenties within shouting distance of each other. Chrissy and Jon were roommates, sharing a big, white loft by the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Debbie’s apartment was just three blocks from mine. It was my actual deepest fear that one of us would one day move to another borough.

I’d come over to make dinner with Chrissy while Jon was out with his new boyfriend. It was an old routine: We’d catch up on each other’s weeks while chopping onions for pasta sauce, then eat dinner in front of a horror movie or a saccharine romcom. Jon would inevitably come home in time to roll his eyes at the last twenty minutes of our movie, then we’d all sit around and gossip, breaking off pieces of Swiss chocolate bars from Chrissy’s stash.

But, this time, I’d brought cookies myself. Creating a sense of “food security” was a vital step in the process. I made sure any food I had an inclination toward was readily available—especially if it was something formerly forbidden. The idea was that by making cookies constantly accessible I would stop my brain from treating them like manna from heaven. It was a pain in the ass, hauling cookies everywhere, but I knew it was a necessary part of the deprogramming.

By now I understood it was the diet cycle that had made me the kind of lunatic who’d pick the frosting off of other people’s birthday cakes then turn around and live on green-grape rations for a month. It was a miserable trap I’d been stuck in for decades, and finally breaking out was the greatest thing I’d ever done for myself. So, why did freedom feel so awkward?

Those first weeks of intuitive eating felt too good to be true, but also crazy and out of control. Nothing was off-limits. I was a kid in the candy store, and the candy store was
everywhere
. With every food suddenly on the table, I’d be lying if I said the first thing I desired was a baby carrot. No, I’d been let off the leash and was grabbing for everything I’d slapped my hands away from for decades. Food security was only part of it. Above all, I had to learn permission to eat. That permission is the foundation of becoming an intuitive eater. It was now my job to realize I could eat anything. I was fat and I could eat anything. It was wonderful and fulfilling. It was alarming. It was also mainly carbs.

“Oh, I’m hungry!” I’d announced to myself at work in a little whisper-shout. “What do I want to eat?”

There’s no rule about speaking out loud in intuitive eating, but in the early days when I still couldn’t quite get my head around the concept, I found it helpful to talk myself through it like a gentle kindergarten teacher. “You want a hot chocolate? Well, let’s get you one!” I might cheerfully mutter while passing Starbucks. “How does sushi sound for dinner? No? Eggs on toast it is.” When you’ve spent your whole life being ashamed to eat at all, expressing those needs and desires is new and weird. (Talking to yourself is empirically weird, too, but you’ve got to pick your battles.) Eating a cookie in front of someone felt like breaking a rule, and asking for one, even from myself, felt criminal. I needed to bank as many moments of permission as possible. Vocalizing these instances (i.e., meals and snacks) was a radical act, even if it meant whispering to myself at work, or boldly declaring my intent to eat a cookie while my friend was just trying to use the bathroom.

“What do I want to eat?” I whispered to myself one early afternoon.

The answer was French onion soup and mashed potatoes, loud and clear. I opened Seamless, who no longer spoke to me as much, now that I was speaking to myself, and found a restaurant that had both. The day before I’d had pizza for lunch and pasta for dinner. The day before that had been similarly starchy with fried rice, corn chips, and rye toast in the mix. There’d been other food groups as well, but it was scary how much I desired carbohydrates. I was actually scared. I lay in bed at night wondering if I had made a massive, public misstep and now everyone would watch as I ballooned to even greater girth on a diet of intuitively eaten bread, noodles, and Triscuits. Holy hell, though, Triscuits were good.

“I feel like I’m physically addicted to carbohydrates.”

Years of therapy had taught me that if you want to say something a little bit crazy and still sound like a reasonable person, start the sentence with “I feel.” It’s a great trick both for conflict resolution and confessing to an irrational belief that you’ve developed an actual addiction to crackers.

“Okay! Why do you think you’re addicted to carbohydrates?” Theresa seemed game for this fresh lunacy I’d laid at her feet.

“Because I’m eating them a lot.”

She looked down at the record of meals I’d handed her. I took a deep breath.

“Yeah, there are carbs on this list.”

“It’s too much, right? Like, it’s crazy.”

“What day felt the craziest?”

“All of them. Yesterday, I guess.”

Theresa ruffled through the printouts where I’d listed all my meals and snacks over the course of the week. It was different from a food journal (that was why I called it an “eating record”), because a “food journal” was something I’d kept while on a diet. The point of recording my meals was now an act of exploration rather than regulation. Each time I ate, I noted down my level of hunger beforehand and fullness when I was done, using a scale of 1 to 10. I wrote down any feelings or struggles I had with choosing a particular food.
I really want a hamburger but I feel like I
should
have a turkey burger. I guess I have a belief that beef is Bad and turkey is Good.
I noted any discoveries I had with a particular eating experience.
Got a couple orders of fries to share with the table, then ended up panicking and eating them all. Lesson learned: order
only
my own damn fries next time.
It was helpful to see the patterns I’d fallen into over the years, as well as all the little anxieties I felt in different eating situations. Still, each time I handed over my eating record, I felt momentarily certain that Theresa would take one look and call the police. “She’s gone mad! She ate cookies and frozen yogurt on the same day!” And yet:

“Okay, yesterday you had an egg-and-tomato sandwich for breakfast.”

“Yes, on bread.”

“Did you want the sandwich? Was it satisfying?”

“Yes, definitely.” Breakfast was the easiest part of my day. Any dieter knows that clean-slate feeling that comes with a new morning. I crushed breakfast, intuitively speaking.

“For lunch you were at a six for hunger and you had pad see ew, then hit a six for fullness.”

Her voice was entirely neutral, but I winced. I felt caught in the act, ordering Thai food with no excuse. It wasn’t my birthday, I wasn’t famished, and I had had breakfast. I had been just regular-hungry, and pad see ew with broccoli and chicken sounded great. In the notes I’d written “lots of broccoli,” as if the extra greens would somehow negate my plate of big fat, starchy noodles.

“Do you have permission to eat carbs?” Theresa responded off my look.

“Yes, I have permission to eat carbs.” I wasn’t rolling my eyes, but I really wanted to be rolling my eyes.

“Because you don’t sound like you do.”

“I have permission to eat them, but I don’t want to be a crazy carb monster, no!”

That was the moment I heard just what a “crazy carb monster” sounds like. Whether it was overeating or trying to restrict, obsessing about food was still obsessing about food. There was no crime in a two-carb meal or a pizza-and-pasta day. Sometimes, it just happens. And, sometimes, you’ve been terrified and tantalized by the thought of processed flour for so long that when you’re finally allowed to eat it, you go a little crazy for a week. The trick was not to frantically jerk the steering wheel in the other direction, trying to correct. For once, I had to let go and trust that balance would come naturally, because I was not, in fact, a car.

That day in Theresa’s office, I didn’t really believe it yet. But I’d already taken the leap of faith. I had to stop fighting the fall.

I ate the carbs. I talked myself through every cracker and tortilla chip and baked potato (not just sweet potato—russet, the real deal). And I enjoyed them. I took lunch away from my desk and twirled udon noodles out of vegetable soup until I was satisfied, then I put the rest away and got back to my day. I made bowls of whole wheat pasta with fresh lemon and basil for Harry and myself, not because I wanted “healthy” pasta but because I enjoyed the grainy texture. I proclaimed each cookie with pride. When the freak-out thoughts came up, I appealed to the carb monster with reason:
If you can’t trust me yet, trust Theresa.
And I waited. And one day, much sooner than I expected, I was hungry and the answer to that hunger was: scallops.

It took two weeks. Two weeks of teaching myself permission to eat carbohydrates, and my brain got the message. There was no need to hoard it and no one would take it away. I could eat scallops on a bed of sautéed spinach for dinner and enjoy every bite. There was no need to fear that it would be only lean fish and greens from here on out. Learning that, not just in my mind but also in my body, made the pasta and the scallops both so much more delicious. I could finally eat them both with a sense of calm. I could pick up my fork and put it down, push the plate aside and take it back. I could get second helpings or I could leave whatever I didn’t want on the plate.

It was just the first of many firsts. I’d have to learn permission dozens of times: unlearn to fear dairy and French fries, and then go back and do carbs all over again. But I had an experience in my back pocket now, and I could pull it out to look at during the darker, tougher months to come. I knew that I was capable, a little less monstrous than I’d been a month before. It was the beginning of trust.

There was one more thing in my back pocket: my phone. In it, I wrote little discoveries and weekly goals during all my sessions with Theresa.
Prioritize dinner—don’t skip. Do I associate Starbucks with depression? Consider.
During the Great Carb Freak-Out she said one thing in particular, which I quickly thumb-typed into an e-mail and sent to myself for safekeeping. I still look at it on days when it’s exceptionally hard to just believe and let go. I share it with you not because it’s gentle and kind and makes you feel good, but because it’s true. Theresa’s not a sentimental lady—she’s a coach, and a woman of science. So, when you say it to yourself, say it in the voice of someone who’s not fucking around:

“No one is broken. I’ve never met anyone who was broken.”