Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (17 page)

I was in the Buzz with someone else this time, riding even higher than I’d been with that very first diet. I don’t mean to say that falling in love was as depthless and cheap as the feeling I got from a new weight-loss plan. It was the most new and life-changing thing that had ever happened to me. But by then, I had lived my whole life in a dieter’s cycle without even realizing it. I should have recognized a Buzz when I saw it, and I should have known what would come next. If I had, perhaps I could have braced us both.

T
he impending arrival of Hurricane Sandy, the worst natural disaster to hit New York City in centuries, sent the entire eastern seaboard into hesitant panic in late October 2012. Though many of us only half-believed in it, wondering if it was all just news hype, we still hit the grocery stores to stock up on canned goods and rushed home to fill the bathtub and hunker down. When the storm hit, I was already hunkered and my cabinets were chock-full of chicken soup. The bathtub was already full, because I’d been sitting in it for approximately three weeks.

In early October, I woke up in the middle of the night with a sore, tender feeling between my legs. I’d spent the day out with friends, walking all over Brooklyn in the Indian summer heat, so I assumed I’d chafed my skin into some kind of rash. My skin has always been fussy and delicate—the kind that welts over mosquito bites and scars if you look at it too hard. But this one was uncomfortable enough to start me Googling in the middle of the night.

Google delivered a plethora of gynecological diagnoses, including everything from Lichen Sclerosis to “swamp ass.” Another word kept popping up too, over and over again, no matter how many times I rephrased my symptoms in the search box. But that couldn’t be it.

Hey, can we reschedule tonight?
I instant-messaged Harry the next day.

Sure, you okay?
he typed back.

I squirmed around on my seat at work, trying to get comfortable.

Yeah, I’m just not feeling great.

Oh no! What’s wrong?

Ugh, it’s a lady thing. I’m going to the gynecologist. Plus, I think I have a cold.

Oh.

I’m not blowing you off, I swear!

Does it hurt?

It’s not too bad.
It was so bad that I couldn’t sit for more than ten minutes.

Is it gnarly?

Oh my
God
.

Uh. I guess, a little
, I replied.

What do you think it is?

Instant message or no, I could sense the tone of a fellow panic-Googler.

I don’t know.

Do you think it’s a thing?

I didn’t need to ask what “a thing” was. Early on in our relationship, Harry and I had done the responsible-adult thing and had the brief but awkward STI/birth-control talk. I had nothing, he had nothing, and we’d both been tested just months before meeting. I’d been sort of thrilled by my first STI panel and the middling anxiety that came with it. But Jared had been the only other guy I’d had any sexual contact with that year, and he had been equally cautious, so it was no surprise that I was a-okay. Harry hadn’t fooled around with anyone in between his last test and meeting me. He’d gone on a few dates with one girl, but they’d only kissed before things fizzled out, and that hardly warranted a blood draw. His sexual history was more extensive than mine, but neither of us was, ahem, worldly.

That’s why I didn’t believe Google or my doctor when they both told me it was probably herpes. Dr. Jameson cocked her head, all sympathy and
tough luck
, explaining that no, it probably wasn’t the atomic yeast infection I’d hoped it was. She took a swab and a blood sample, but it was obvious she knew what she was looking at. Everything below the belt was simply
fucked
. It would be fucked for a week or two, she explained, in more technical terms.

“The first outbreak is the worst one. It will never be this bad again, I promise.”

“But this will happen again?”

“It could. It might not. We also don’t know if it’s HSV1 or HSV2, yet. They can behave differently.”

“I’m just confused. My boyfriend’s last test was negative and so was mine.”

“Well, it doesn’t show up in a blood test right away. It can take weeks, months.” She looked up and gestured her hand at the ceiling as if to demonstrate just how herpes works in mysterious ways.

I left with a prescription for valacyclovir and instructions to take Advil and an oatmeal bath if I got too uncomfortable. They would call me with my test results within a week. On the way home, I sent Harry the first of many grim text messages regarding the state of my vagina and told him to call his doctor.

By the following week, I didn’t much care what the diagnosis was as long as this hell would soon be over. I’d taken three sick days then asked to work from home, still barely able to walk to the bathroom. I had to do something besides lying around going out of my mind with round-the-clock ruminating over what I had, how I’d gotten it, and why me? Honestly. Why me, out of all of my friends, who’d been dating for years, sowing wild oats and falling in and out of love while I went to therapy? How come I was the one who caught something the very
second
I got a sex life? I’d finally gotten the guts to put myself out there for five minutes, and this was my instant punishment for being so presumptuous.
Oh, you think you’re good enough all of a sudden? You expect someone to overlook your piddling little abuse history and your neurotic personality and your big, fat, ridiculous body? Now it’s big, fat, and ridiculous, with herpes. Good luck.

As expected, my swab came back positive for HSV1 but the blood test was negative. That meant I’d definitely gotten it from Harry, and recently. His own doctor confirmed that his last result was indeed negative, but when he drew blood this time, it was positive. That girl he’d gone on a few dates with had likely passed it on to him without even being aware that she could do so just by kissing. Statistically speaking, she probably didn’t even know that she had it. She probably thought she had “cold sores.”

Every day, I soaked in an oatmeal bath, the only thing that took the slightest edge off. I alternated aspirin, Advil, and Tylenol so I could be on pain relievers all day and night.

“That’s fine,” my doctor told me. “You’ll be over the hump soon.”

I’d wound up in my primary care doctor’s office the day after the gynecologist, when every gland on my body had swollen up and white spots appeared on my tonsils. Tonsillitis was the cherry atop this disgusting sundae, he explained. Normally, the first outbreak came on the back of some other sickness, grabbing hold of the body when the immune system was low. To me, it just felt like a secondary punishment in case I ever thought about leaving the house again.

“It’s to be expected,” the doctor said. “But, I promise, it will never be this bad again. Really.”

Over and over, the doctors (and my old pal, Google) comforted me with these facts. It would never be this bad again, and the outbreak would be over soon.

Hurricane Sandy hit when I was on day
ten
.

You guys gonna have some hurricane sexxxxxx?
Jon texted me after the mayor ordered everyone to go inside or evacuate. No, I was not going to have any hurricane sexxxxxx. I was barely capable of peeing. But I was sick of the sight of my own apartment, so I taped up the windows, put the cat in a carrier, and transferred my sickbed to Harry’s. We’d stopped talking about moving in together as soon as my crotch crisis became the sole point of conversation. He was still the one I wanted to ride out the storm with, but when I thought of the couple we were just weeks prior, fantasy apartment shopping and haggling over theoretical couches, they seemed like very different people.

The days we spent inside together during the hurricane were strange and quiet. Neither of us had been through this as individuals, let alone as a couple.

We heated soup and watched movies at night. I hugged him tight when the pain got bad and let him whimper
sorry
s into my hair. I assured him that I wasn’t angry. We’d both done the responsible thing; it just happened. We stared out the window, watching the storm blow New York City apart and waited for the moment when the lights would go out.

We were so lucky. As horror stories of obliterated buildings and people drowned in their own homes came quietly through the radio, we stepped outside into a warm and humid evening in Park Slope. It was the first time I’d walked more than two blocks since the outbreak hit, but like everyone else in New York, we just wanted to see what the city looked like. The sidewalk was thick with families: children frantic with pent-up energy and weary parents who’d been cooped up with them for days, all of us pointing at every fallen twig as if we understood the devastation that had savaged those other neighborhoods and families and children in our city, who no longer had homes to go back to.

Harry and I stepped into an empty Greek restaurant and ordered some appetizers. The wallop of tonsillitis, antibiotics, and pain had killed my appetite, and for weeks I’d been nibbling on sick-day foods.
Best diet ever
, an old voice in my head chimed in from time to time. I shot back:
No diet will fix this.

“How do you feel?” Harry asked.

“Okay.” I felt sick. One bite of oily eggplant and I would vomit.

“Do you want to go home?”

“I just need to sit for a while.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I mean, yeah. Of course it hurts.” I looked around the restaurant and back at him with shut-up eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because we went for a walk, I guess?”

“It’s fine. We just shouldn’t have gone so far.”

We sat in silence for ten minutes, Harry eating and me watching him eat. Normally, my chattiness balanced out his quiet nature, but I couldn’t think of anything we hadn’t talked about or anything I wanted to say.

That night, he scooted up behind me in bed. For weeks I’d been so raw that even the fabric of underwear felt like a serrated blade against my skin, and cuddling had been out of the question. But now I’d passed the peak of the outbreak, I was sure. Though all that meant was that the blade had finished slicing at me, and now I had to tend to the open wound that covered everything below my waist. I edged away from Harry.

“Too much?”

“Too much. I can’t yet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Will you stop?”

“I’m not even touching you.”

“I mean stop apologizing. I’m not mad at you.”

Harry didn’t say anything. And I didn’t fill the silence.

I want so badly to go back to that night and tell my sick and wretched self to turn around and take his hand. I want to tell her it’s okay to take the space to be comfortable and to heal, but she doesn’t need to do it alone. I want to tell her that sometimes you don’t get the chance to jump off the cliff; that sometimes you’re pushed, but either way you hit the bottom.
This part is just the falling
, I would tell her.
This part is the worst.
It would take months to heal physically. It would take many more months of shame and real hatred of my body, this spoiled, bestial thing that had turned on me again and again. It would be a full year before I decided to stop punishing my body for all its many failures: for drawing attention, for helping me hide, for keeping everything good just out of reach, even when it was lying in bed next to me.

I want to tell that girl she’s just going to have to fall down through the stratosphere of all that sadness before she lands hard on a pile of leaves in East Hampton on another warm October day. Then she’ll be ready for the long walk out of the woods.

I
’d been doing intuitive eating for almost two months when I finally learned how to eat pizza. A week before Thanksgiving, Chrissy and Debbie came over to my place to eat dinner, watch a movie, and paint our nails. It was the only group ritual without Jon, who couldn’t sit through a romantic drama without heckling. Often, we heckled, too, but when it was just the three of us, we took the opportunity to whip out the nail polish and take Christian Slater movies very seriously.

“What are we eating?” Debbie asked upon arrival.

Since I’d started intuitive eating, group meals had become a minefield. On a diet, I could plan out my calorie budget in advance to account for whatever cuisine we had chosen (because I had always insisted on planning in advance). I could review the menu of the restaurant or choose the recipe we made, making sure to find something on my Good list, if I was being good. If I was being bad, then we just got pizza. Now that I was allegedly allowed to eat anything, the lists were out the window. Still, every time a formerly Bad food came to the table, it was like trying to reconcile with an unfaithful lover, unpacking the problems of our past and trying to see where it all went wrong. At a dinner table, in front of all my friends.

“Could we maybe order pizza?” Chrissy asked.

And I thought,
Okay, pizza. Let’s do this.

The Christmas before I turned twelve, I opened my stocking to find a rolled-up issue of
Seventeen
along with a year’s subscription to the magazine. Shortly thereafter, all the paper towels in my house disappeared.

Save an easy 500–800 calories by blotting the grease off your pizza with a napkin before you dig in.

Some people can quote Rilke from memory, or recall their favorite Shakespearean sonnets on command. For me, this remains one of the most resonant passages I have ever read. When I’m doddering around in my nineties, it won’t be memories of torrid trysts or curses on ungrateful children that I mumble at the nurses all day, but rather this fat-fighting tip from a teen magazine with Jennifer Love Hewitt fake-laughing on the cover.

It was the single greatest revelation a chubby preteen could have. By simply dabbing away the grease, I could somehow make pizza “safe.” It wasn’t even really pizza anymore, not after ten rounds of pounding on the slice with a fistful of Bounty. Now it was simply bread and sauce and slightly dried-out cheese.

Pizza blotting soon became everything blotting. If I could perform this oil alchemy on pizza, then why shouldn’t it work on every fat-containing item on my plate? Chicken breasts got the pat-down. Potato chips were lightly squeezed with napkins in between my fingers. French fries were gently smashed out of shape, but no bother. Now they were even less like French fries and I could safely eat them without the sickly fear I felt while eating an “unsafe” food in front of people. I might have looked like a malfunctioning robot, frantically trying both to clean and pulverize my food, but at least I wasn’t a fat girl getting fatter.

This trick wasn’t the only tip I embraced over the years in order to make food safe. I spent one weekend drinking barely diluted vinegar before each meal, then decided to make it an all-day vinegar cleanse of my own design. By Sunday, both the paper towels and the toilet paper were gone.

Over the years, I amassed a startling array of magazine knowledge. I ran bowls of ice cream under the tap after half the serving was gone. I dumped heaps of black pepper over birthday cake after I’d taken five bites. I ate apples before lunch to fill my stomach, and then finished the meal with coffee to kill my lingering appetite. I mixed psyllium husks into Diet Snapple Lemon Tea and guzzled one down in the morning and at night both to block sugar absorption and to clean out my system.

Lest you fear I’m advocating
Seventeen
as a viable medical journal, I do now realize all of this is bullshit. Psyllium makes you poop, and three cups of black coffee gives you a stomachache. And that pizza you’re dabbing within an inch of its life is still pizza. You are eating pizza. Learn to live with it.

After years of reinforcement, the Good and Bad system had become the bearing wall of my eating habits. Doing intuitive eating meant it was now my job to knock this wall down. I chipped away at it with each meal, inching my way toward food neutrality like a prisoner, tunneling toward sweet freedom. One day, I would be able to eat like a human. Until then I would use all the dramatic metaphors I needed to tackle pizza. Wait, no, not pizza—my pizza beliefs.

Since I had lived much of my life in the universe of disordered eating, various foods had taken on powerful personalities and intentions of their own. Trying to see them as anything else required a kind of couples counseling between me and the meal on my plate.

Kale was the good and righteous superhero of the produce section. Whether sautéed, steamed, or raw, eating kale made me a Very Good Person. If not quite transformed into Gwyneth Paltrow, I was at least behaving Gwyn-ish. While filled with those saintly greens I could walk to work with my head held high.

“I made the best kale salad of my life last night,” I told anyone who would listen.

In the old days, any poor bastard who happened to wander into the office kitchen while I made a cup of coffee got an earful of my dinner. I’d give them the full rundown on the apple, cranberry, and avocado I dressed the salad with, and how I’d only needed, like, a teaspoon of oil in the vinaigrette because I found this really nice whole-grain mustard and that made it thick enough, and oh, okay, have a good one!

Some foods, on the other hand, I never talked about. These were the burgers I ate in front of the television after having a lousy day at work. There were the brownies I baked and ate right out of the pan in my kitchen the day I found out my apartment had bedbugs. There were the egg-and-bacon-on-a-rolls that I bought outside the subway and scarfed down on my walk to work, eyes constantly scanning the street to make sure I didn’t bump into a colleague. Then there were all the not-kale things I simply ate because I really, really wanted to. All those foods were without virtue, both representing my inherent lameness and further making me a Very Bad Person. No one wants to hear about those things.

Guess what? No one wanted to hear about my kale salad, either.

“Was a kale salad what you wanted in the moment?” Theresa asked me one Thursday afternoon.

She’d just finished reviewing my weekly eating record. I’d finally gotten the message that she wouldn’t actually put me in a carbohydrate time-out if I reported eating baked potatoes two days in a row, but my week still reflected a fair amount of my old Good foods.

In my enthusiasm, the notes had become a little extreme. I logged every detail and feeling I had about a meal—and that could be anything from Thanksgiving dinner to the peppermint I ate after brunch one day. I wrote five-hundred-word essays over considering oatmeal for breakfast: how I associated oatmeal with both childhood and healthy eating, but also I just wanted it because it was cold out, and though at first I struggled to choose between topping it with almonds or raisins, I suddenly realized I could have both, and so I did!!

“I pretty much wanted the salad,” I told her. “I had some chips afterward, but I probably could have ridden out that craving. I know it’s okay that I gave in, but I also know that I probably would have been satisfied with just the salad, so, I’m really sorry.”

She made a face as if perhaps it was strange to be apologizing for the illicit consumption of six corn chips.

“Uh, it’s okay. Why are you sorry?”

“Because I ate the chips and I didn’t need them.”

She pointed to my page of neatly organized notes. “Do you see that you hadn’t had any carbohydrates since breakfast? Your appetite was telling you something.”

Silence. Blinking.

“You know your body and your brain need carbohydrates, right?

“Oh, yeah. But no one needs corn chips, right?”

“Okay.” She shrugged and nodded like a patient kindergarten teacher hearing me out as I argued the legitimacy of Santa Claus. “So, what would have been an acceptable substitute?”

“Baked chips.”

Here’s where the bonus round of crazy comes in. By the time I landed in Theresa’s office, I’d created subclasses of Good and Bad foods and the various scenarios in which they could be made Better or Worse. It was the rationale behind baked-chip logic and the formula that made a cabbage side dish cancel out a hamburger. While I’ve never gotten higher than a B– in any kind of math class, I’d managed to generate an internal flow chart of various food values, which I unconsciously whipped out whenever I had a menu in my hands. Brunch, for example:

The omelet comes with hash browns or salad. If one gets the hash browns the omelet must have no cheese, and there must be an additional green vegetable. The hash browns may be eaten, but at least one-fourth must be left on the plate. If one gets the salad, the omelet may have cheese
or
a meat, and one must eat the greens first while describing last night’s epic kale salad to brunch companion. Two tablespoons of milk are allowed for coffee, but one must inquire if skim is available. If not, the milk ration remains the same, but one-fourth of the omelet must be left on the plate. One slice of toast is allowed if it’s buttered, but two if the toast is only topped with preserves. (
Not jelly.
Preserves have seeds and jelly is purple. Jelly is for children. Gwyn-ish grown-ups eat preserves, confits, and no-sugar-added jams.) If one eats only half of the omelet, toast,
and
hash browns then one may have a frozen yogurt later and Instagram it.

Maybe most adults have instincts to keep their meals healthy and balanced. Perhaps they naturally choose between hash browns and cheese in their omelets, simply because they don’t feel like quite so heavy a meal. But those people were as mysterious and unfathomable to me as child chess prodigies. I could not simply stroll into brunch and wing it without a protocol firmly in place. Even after months of intuitive eating practice, I still found myself looking around the restaurant as I ate:
Check out my toast, y’all! It’s got butter and jam and I’m just eating it like whatever! They didn’t have rye so I’m having wheat, but that’s cool, amiright? I’m right, right?