Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (21 page)

On Christmas morning, I flew to DC to spend the holiday with my dad and his girlfriend, Nancy. The flight was delayed about three hundred hours, and so I ended up taking sad airport Instagrams and texting with my Jewish friends in the terminal wine bar for most of the actual holiday. But I knew I’d exhale a little bit when I got to Washington, and put a few hundred miles between me and the Harvard Club.

In my dad’s house, I was never a grown-up if I didn’t want to be. One blessing and curse of growing up without one of your parents around is that they’re always in a hurry to catch up on nurturing. My dad still struggled with letting me buy my own shoes, sure I could neither afford them nor determine my own shoe size without adult supervision. In most ways, being treated like a kid drove me up the wall, but I relished the freedom I felt to laze about and read for hours when visiting Dad’s house. His couch was the only place I ever managed to take a successful nap. And, cranky fusspot that I was that December, I really needed one.

I was sick of changing my life. I was tired of having to think about this food-body-fitness stuff all the time, and I was certainly tired of feeling about it. I didn’t want to do this anymore. Why did I have to “do” normal eating and exercising, when everyone else just could? Why did this problem have to be my problem? Why couldn’t I have become a drunk like everyone else in my family? They make movies about people who quit drinking! No one is going to make a movie about me eating a bagel and not freaking out about it.

Oh yeah, I needed that couch.

I’d impulse-bought a stack of books at various Hudson News kiosks while waiting for my flight at JFK, including Cheryl Strayed’s
Wild
and Heidi Julavits’s
The Vanishers
, and shoved them in my overnight bag with my half-read copy of
Intuitive Eating.
I’d brought it along, planning to finish it over the holidays, but instead I ignored it, and dived into
Wild
as soon as I got to Dad’s. Reading Strayed’s memoir for three-hour stretches, I felt suddenly grateful that my own self-realization journey wasn’t taking place on the Pacific Crest Trail with a hundred-pound pack on my back. John2John chimed in:
But ur self-realization is just a sad attempt you emberassing looser.
Next to him, my mother folded her arms and said nothing.

“Any idea of what you’d like to do today?”

Dad came through from the kitchen, eyebrows raised expectantly, to find me mashed into the corner of the couch under four blankets.

“Holocaust Museum.”

When I wasn’t reading eating-disorder books as a kid, I went for novels like
Number the Stars
,
The Devil’s Arithmetic
, and
Maus
. I was just one of those kids. I may have been an extreme case, but the volume of YA Holocaust literature out there leads me to believe there is a group of “those kids” out there.

I’d dragged my dad to the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum when I was nine, but we’d never been back. It was an intense and gutting experience that most people didn’t feel the need to do twice. But after four days of post-Christmas ennui, I guess the Holocaust Museum didn’t sound all that bad to him. Plus, we could go to Bertucci’s after.

There’s no real way to describe the experience of walking through the permanent exhibit of the USMHM, except to say that it’s disorienting and transporting the way that all good museums are—but more visceral and terrifying than any other I’ve seen. We entered with a line of hundreds of visitors, and immediately lost each other. After five minutes of looking for Dad and Nancy, I gave up, and I knew they had, too. There’s simply no way to keep an eye out for your dad while standing in a room filled with shoes stolen from prisoners upon their arrival at Auschwitz. All I could do was smell that leather and rubber and fabric in the air. I looked down at broken high heels and loafers misshapen by bunions. I knelt down to look closely at a tiny, shining buckle on a sandal strap. I thought about sandaled feet at Auschwitz. I could hardly make myself keep walking into the next room of the exhibit. It seemed too important to stand there with those shoes and really look.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to draw a parallel between my diet problems and the Holocaust. Seriously, people. I’m not a fucking maniac.

Self-care is a funny thing. For some people it’s funny movies and twenty-minute massages in those awkward face-holding chairs at the back of the nail salon. Some of us prefer three hours of relentless genocide remembrance. Others do the
really
healthy thing and reach out to talk about what’s bothering them. I wasn’t ready for the really healthy thing, but I sensed with equal dread and relief that I was on my way. I’d call a friend for the next problem (unless there would be no more problems, ever, fingers crossed!). For now, I’d at least have to tell myself what was bothering me:
I’m scared that this won’t work. I’m afraid of making a fool of myself in front of everyone. I’m worried that I’m too broken.

On the way home, I began to cry in silence in the backseat of my dad’s car, feeling like a child. Crying is a good thing as long as you’re crying in the right direction. I’d never been good at that, always staying dry-eyed during an actual crisis then falling apart over a typo in my essay. But, in the car that day, I knew what the tears were for. Shaken loose by an afternoon faced with true, horrific tragedy, I was having a good cry over my own, small, shitty history—and the realization that no smushed granola bar could make it better. I cried about my cross-wired brain, and how hard it would be to fix. I cried over my lousy, mean mother, because that’s always a good direction to cry in. And, fuck it, I cried over John2John.

I’d never be able to stop the nonbelievers from doubting me. Haters, as the saying goes, are gonna hate. But I had plenty of ammo to toss at those doubts, whatever direction they came from. I had my French-fry success story and the Jon Kabat-Zinn meditation that worked magic on any food I applied it to. I had the fact that I had made it to the gym five days a week for the last two months without missing a single day. I had my best friends’ numbers in my phone and my dad in the front seat, willing to listen to me moan for at least an hour. All I had to do was, ugh, reach out.

We got home after a quiet lunch, and after changing back into my pajamas (which I called “loungewear” in the daytime), I headed back to the living room. I looked at my book pile. I looked at my blanket pile. I looked at the butt-shaped divot in the corner of the couch. I put
Wild
aside for the time being, feeling Cheryl Strayed clap me firmly on the back, fellow traveler that she was.
On your feet
, she said with a smile. Or maybe not. I had to stop listening to these new voices in my head if I ever wanted to get anywhere. There were plenty of the old ones still echoing around in there, and I needed all the quiet I could get.

For the second time, I signed up to trust myself, and the wisdom and strength of my own body and mind. Sometimes you need to make a promise twice. I sat down and I picked up
Intuitive Eating
. There was only one road out of this mire, and it was me. Only one friend to walk beside, and it was me.

M
y trainer, Stephanie, was a nice lady, but I was pretty sure we were going to end up in a fistfight one day. There’s no way you can 100 percent like the person who makes you hold a plank position at 8 a.m. while she counts down the longest minute that has ever passed in the history of recorded time.

“Forty-five seconds,” she said.

I thought about my bed. I thought about my cat just lying there on top of it, starting the first of the eighteen naps he would take that day, not in the least bit worried about his core strength. I hated my cat.

“Thirty seconds.”

Stephanie sat in front of me on a medicine ball, gazing calmly at her stopwatch while I panted through fluted lips, silently begging for a neck spasm or an earthquake, anything that would give me a reason to drop this plank early and lie flat on the floor until civilization collapsed and Equinox Tribeca was reclaimed by the earth. That’s about how long a recovery time I would need. And after that, I wanted a smoothie.

“Twenty-eight seconds.”

Now, that was just ridiculous and cruel. If she was going to give me a time check every fifteen seconds, she shouldn’t be tossing out numbers like twenty-eight on a whim. How would I ever trust her again after this?

“Ten seconds—oh no, I’m sorry. Fifteen seconds.”

You did that on purpose. You knew how much those five seconds meant to me. This is how it begins, Stephanie. And it ends with you and me in a parking lot,
Fight Club
style, and I’m Brad Pitt except that I exist and…and, oh my Christ is it ten seconds yet??

“Ten seconds. Why is Kevin Spacey dancing?”

Kevin Spacey was indeed dancing on the television screen above us. It was either a morning news show, or I’d slipped into in a moment of plank-psychosis.

“Five seconds.”

Doesn’t she know I’m not ready for this? When I come out of this plank, fall to the ground and literally expire before her eyes, she is going to feel so bad. “Cause of death: plank-related complications,” the coroner will say, and then Stephanie will go to jail and I will be buried in an empire-waist dress that hides my untoned core.

“And, time.”

Stephanie made me do a lot of things I didn’t want to do, but
did
want to do: Cycle, power-walk, take ten thousand steps a day. When I decided to make this health-and-fitness overhaul, I knew the fitness part would take a different kind of coaching than that which I needed for eating. With eating, I needed someone to say, “Try this, and see how you feel, and let’s talk about it. Then let’s talk about it with your therapist.” With fitness, I mostly needed someone to say “Forty-five seconds” while I gasped and struggled through a plank. We both already knew how I felt about it.

I’d become a gym-before-work person, against all odds. It was the only way to make this work without breaking the promise I made myself to maintain a social life. It was doable; I
could
get up a couple hours earlier, and moan all the way to the subway at 7 a.m. I could become a morning person, but I’d have to be a grouchy one. You know those power moms and elite businesspeople who run eleven miles before the sun comes up? No? Well, they exist. I’ve seen them leaving the gym, freshly blow-dried, just as I stumble in looking like a psycho in hole-worn leggings, which is exactly who I am before 8 a.m. I’d never be a power-anything at that time of day, except maybe a power-whiner. But when my early-morning rendezvous with the treadmill was over, I’d be wide awake and proud of myself for being a slightly bigger badass than I was the day before. That was the story I told myself as I left the gym and walked to work with soaking wet hair. I could work out, shower, and throw some makeup on, but blow-drying was too much to ask.
You are a badass who does not have time to blow-dry.

Stephanie was not just my trainer in real life; she was also my trainer on TV. One morning, the
Good Morning America
team came to film me at the gym and the office for a segment on the Anti-Diet Project. A producer had spotted the column in her Facebook feed a few days prior and wondered if I might like to talk about this newfangled “intuitive eating” thing. How was this whole “permission to eat” working out for me?

The truth was, it was working out great. For all the little bumps and even the enormous potholes, I had to admit that quitting dieting was officially not a disaster. Food was becoming simply food. Slowly, my desires had begun to balance out. As the cold weather descended, I craved rough and crunchy winter vegetables, a well-cooked steak, and Harry’s hot toddies with extra cinnamon. One week I rediscovered clementines, a fruit I used to avoid, remembering the childhood Saturdays when I’d blow through an entire crate. Now, I’d have two or three as an afternoon snack and put the rest away, knowing, finally, that I could always have another later.

I still side-eyed every spontaneous craving with suspicion:
Do you really want that sashimi salad/chicken burrito/strawberry smoothie with a side of Baked Lays? Okay, your call, but I’m watching.
Watching for what, I wasn’t sure, but vigilance was a dieting habit I had yet to release. That was okay, though. Kind of.

“Can you be a little patient with yourself?” Theresa asked, week after week.

“I am! I just want to stay on the right track.”

“You realize that’s a pretty diet-centric sentence. There isn’t really a ‘track.’”

“Right, of course. I know that. I get it.” And sometimes I did. Then I thought of my face on television.

Here’s how I looked on
Good Morning America
: fine. I was a little shiny under the hot lights and was wearing someone else’s jewelry, but when I watch that video now, I can see that I look absolutely normal. I look good! I look like a fat girl who’s just been let off the leash and discovered that salad isn’t a punishment and French fries aren’t the crime. God, I wish I had that line back then. Back then, I said something like, “Kale sometimes tastes good, did you know?!”

The story was set to air around 8:15 on a Thursday morning, when Stephanie and I had a training session. As part of the shoot, she’d taken me through a mock workout for the cameras. It was pretty faithful to our usual routine, except that I had on two inches of makeup and my hair looked
amazing
.

Midplank, I saw my face pop up on the television screen above the rowing machines.

“It’s on!!!!” I whisper-screamed and hopped up to stare at myself. The opening shot had me standing in front of a counter full of food, pointing at a piece of pizza and making some kind of gesture to indicate how totally cool I was with pizza now. I watched in silence while the Closed Captioning blocks reported that I was “an Internet writer who says she’s tired of being fat.” Fair. The clips and sound bites were condensed in such a way that it kind of made intuitive eating sound like a diet—clapping for the kale, finger-wagging at the pizza—but that was okay, too. The important thing in that moment was that I was on TV. It actually wasn’t that important to Stephanie. When the segment was over, she pointed to the ground.

“Plank, please.”

Back at the office, though, I was a momentary rock star—at least, in my mind. As the least fashionable person at a fashion-centric company, I’d always been conscious of myself as a slight disappointment to my coworkers. I got plenty of kudos as a good writer and resident funny-gal-at-the-office, but line me up with my flat-ironed, designer-pursed peers, and one of these things was not like the other. I had no qualms about showing up with my hair in a wet bun and a dry-clean-only sweater that I’d hand-washed in the sink. I wasn’t like a hobo or anything, but if there was a hole in the armpit of my dress, I was still going to wear it. Who’s waving their arms around all day, anyway?

But that morning, I felt untouchable. I left the gym and strolled into the office in un-blow-dried hair and an Old Navy button-down. I logged onto ABC’s website to watch the segment again, with audio this time. That’s when my heart started glugging in my chest, a sick arrhythmia begging me not to click on the Play button. When I’d first seen the clip on the gym television, I’d been stunned and giddy, but something inside me had gotten a good look at my big moon face filling up the TV screen and never wanted to see it again.
One time
, I promised.
You have to watch it one more time and then you never have to again.

Click, and there I was: My thick thighs walking up the stairs, my chunky fingers typing on a keyboard, a double chin bulging out below my enormous melon-head as I smiled and laughed at the correspondent.
Good God, promise me you’ll never laugh again.

It was a pretty lousy five minutes. When it was over, I mentally vowed to find the best double-chin surgeon in New York City. Then I clicked away from the website, put headphones on, and shoved work into my brain. It was just another Thursday, my hair was wet, and I had trending keywords to review.

When I first joined the staff of Refinery29, it wasn’t as a writer but as the SEO editor, a position I willingly fell into. Since college, I’d been working in various film-related assistant gigs, while tinkering with screenplays and busting my ass on getting thin. I had far-off dreams of being an indie auteur like the female directors I assisted, but it took a few years to realize that I wouldn’t just evolve into one by hanging out with them. And, if I was honest, hanging out with them was just as important to me as the dream itself. Being an assistant meant I spent all day seeking approval from cool, famous older women. It was like having mommy issues was my job.

I was assisting a female CEO in the business end of the industry when I finally decided to take a stab at writing. I had stories to tell, but finally realized that screenwriting wasn’t my strong suit. If I wanted to get into print or online writing, I had to play some serious catch-up. All my peers had been cutting their teeth on personal blogs and entry-level gigs for years, while I’d been busy counting Points and fetching other peoples’ lunches. So I created my own crash course, taking classes at Mediabistro, Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and anywhere else with a decent reputation and discount code, scrambling to grab all the skills I’d need in order to apply for any job at any website. Next, I spent a year pitching myself to anyone I knew with a connection to the industry, picking up freelance work here and there. I got a weekly film-humor column at the blog on SundanceNow, the online streaming branch of the Sundance Channel. It appealed to the part of me still desperate for indie cool-kid credibility, and even when it became clear that approximately no one was reading the thing, I didn’t care. I had an extra hundred dollars in my pocket every week and a writing gig on my résumé, and I got to work with a legitimate editor who didn’t care that our audience was largely imaginary.

“You’ve referenced
Heathers
three times in the last month. Moratorium on Winona Ryder movies for six weeks.” He didn’t let me half-ass it.

The first thing I wrote for Refinery29 was a freelance food story on easy French cooking that I’d spontaneously pitched to a friend of a friend at a Christmas party. I shot the pictures on my phone using my radiator and bedroom windowsill as a set. Somehow, they liked it. As ever, a little bit of attention just made me want more. Refinery29 kinda liked me, so I’d do anything I could to make them fall in love. I applied for three separate full-time positions at the company, all entry-level, each a major pay cut, and none of which I was entirely capable of actually doing. Still, after months of on-and-off interviews with senior-level editors, someone must have gotten tired of seeing my résumé. There were no writer gigs open, but I was decent at SEO—aka Search Engine Optimization, or the fine art of making your content super-duper Google friendly. Might I be interested in that? they asked. I was willing to make it my heart and soul if it meant getting a foot in the door at such a popular publication.

It was hard. Changing gears is always hard. I joined the company during a time of rapid growth, and every day was punctuated by some new milestone or discovery or pivot. It was technically a start-up, but it was still the biggest office I’d ever worked in, and new employees joined every week. It was both exhausting and energizing, and even if I sometimes felt like an underdressed newbie, I mostly just felt lucky to be there.