Hungry (8 page)

In the preschool years, we tried various subterfuges that we thought they might not notice. Usually it was just a chipper comment, like: “Wow, the lasagna is so good! Is this organic chicken-apple sausage in it? We’re lucky Dad is such a great cook.”

Too often, I imagine, there was an imploring look that said, “Lisa, haven’t you had enough? Jacob, won’t you have a little more?”

Did we deny Lisa a voice, or stifle her needs, at the family table? That is one of the often-mentioned triggers to eating disorders, especially binge eating.

 

lisa:
Dad has an annual holiday baking extravaganza to make gifts for his staff, and a lasagna-size Tupperware container of “extras” for us always ends up in the freezer. I loved donning the personal assistant hat, proud to be the chosen one. Dad is the executive type of chef, not one to easily share the kitchen, but for me he gave up total control. That’s where I got over fearing raw ingredients like the two sticks of butter and pound of semisweet chocolate chips that went into his cookies, which later became my cookies.

Mom was not the most inventive cook although my brother and I most likely did not give her much room to explore. He barely ate anything, while there wasn’t much that I would not try. I’m sure my parents found it difficult to cook meals to please the picky versus insatiable appetite. At restaurants I felt limited by the small portions on the children’s menu. I knew how I liked my hamburger cooked and rarely did I get one from McDonald’s. I preferred the homemade, hand-sculpted thick and juicy patties from the Peninsula Creamery, the one and only diner in downtown Palo Alto. My grandpa also had a knack for making delectable juicy hamburgers, although he often put onions in the meat or served them in an onion roll. I didn’t eat onions—one of the only things I wouldn’t eat.

I also remained set in my selection of ice cream flavors from the neighborhood parlor, Rick’s Rather Rich Ice Cream. I’m not sure if we ever knew the real Rick, but we liked to guess which one he was, the lanky brunet with a mustache or the round, balding elderly man? It didn’t matter. Rick’s was the place for families. We usually saw someone we knew there. More often than not I ordered a junior scoop of cookies and cream, which had a minty undertone in its creamy vanilla base with generous chunks of Oreos. I still prefer my chunks of cookies nestled within the creamy texture of vanilla, but sometimes I branch out into the land of peppermint, mint chocolate chip, or cookie dough. I’m the same way with frozen yogurt—fairly plain vanilla and chocolate, but always with rainbow sprinkles swirled in.

“Let’s have the orange lunch today!” I proclaimed to Mom one sunny Saturday afternoon. My best friend, Feyi, had come over. Like me, like everyone, Feyi loved Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, bright cheese powder sprinkled over bleached white noodles. Mom snuck in some health, by way of carrot sticks and orange slices, on orange plastic plates if they happened to be the clean ones, so that we could have the all-orange lunch or dinner. By age seven, I was making my own. That is, boiling noodles and adding a fat source (butter and milk) with the orange powder.

 

sheila:
In the 1980s, a few grocery stores and supermarkets had little deli departments over by the meat counter, but mostly they were in business to sell the raw ingredients for dinner and other household necessities. Takeout still usually meant metal-handled cardboard boxes from Chinese restaurants. Convenience foods came in frozen packages and boxes that you took home and dropped in boiling water or at least microwaved.

Ned and I are not back-to-the-land lunatics. We allowed processed foods in the house, the occasional soda, and we microwaved leftovers. We had sugar, butter, and chocolate, of course, especially in chocolate chip cookies. As much as we tried to give Jacob and Lisa a love of high-quality food, and in that regard we succeeded, when they were young we weren’t serving snails in garlic sauce or only products found in nature. Our children ate a lot of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, with the scary bright orange powder sprinkled over boiled noodles and butter. (The directions called for margarine, which we did not stock.) Later the noodles came in shapes other than tubes, but that was as far as Jacob and Lisa would bend. They did eat real cheese on bread and crackers, so once I thought what a treat it would be for them to have macaroni and cheese made from scratch. I knew enough to seek out a recipe from Betty Crocker, not Julia Child. On the cover of our well-used 1972 edition of
The Betty Crocker Cookbook
, the fictional Betty looks like a young Lady Bird Johnson, or an old Shirley Temple. Betty’s recipe calls for processed sharp American cheese. I used real cheddar cheese and while the dish got positive reviews from the adults, the children never gave it a chance. They had been imprinted by the Kraft brand and weren’t open to innovation. But even processed Velveeta wouldn’t have saved the mac ’n’ cheese. The children of foodies preferred the orange powder.

When Lisa was born a lusty eater, Ned didn’t exactly panic, but it did bring up serious dormant fears. Ned’s sister, Elaine, had long suffered for her weight, and Ned wanted to avoid all of that for Lisa. Ned was husky as a teenager, but Elaine has considered herself fat since birth.

We inherited the creaky bathroom scale that used to torture her. I’m not sure the spring-loaded metal antique, black with white speckles, was ever very accurate, but at some point I put it in the garage. Ned and I could find it, but not the kids. Then we couldn’t find it either and by the time we did, it was so rusty and cruddy that we threw it away.

I like not having a scale. Considering our middle age and enjoyment of food, Ned and I are resigned to a gradual gain into medium well-rounded senior citizenship. If only our retirement investment charts showed the steady progress of our weight charts.

When Ned’s waistbands seize up, he has been known to panic and eat cabbage soup for three days. He cooks up a five-quart pot that smells like the compost pile to start with and gets worse with reheating. After a few days it goes down the drain, but he feels lighter.

My weight-loss method is to exercise more and drink less. I love wine, but it stokes my appetite, so I rarely drink before a meal. Wine also fogs the short-term memory of what I’ve just eaten. A few dry days usually restore order. Until recently, I weighed myself maybe four times a year, at the Y and in the office of our internist, who takes a realistic position on weight and keeps a close eye on Ned’s constellation of health issues: hereditary heart disease, high cholesterol and blood pressure. However, the gym got a new electronic scale and it gave me five less pounds than the old one, so now I check more frequently.

In an article titled “The Diet Secrets of Slim Women,”
Shape
magazine claims that once-a-day weighing provides positive reinforcement. I guess this is true for the rare person who doesn’t obsess about weight. But if you’ve put on a few pounds, the focus on numbers can make you feel so much worse. What’s the point? All of your efforts are failing, so you might as well eat. It’s an unintended consequence and it doesn’t make sense.

That’s why constant weighing is counterproductive for most of us. I like the set-point theory, which holds that everyone has a weight we’re basically destined for, and within a few pounds of that, who cares? I know this is easy for a happily married, middle-age person to say. But the scale only causes trouble. If I register more than a slight increase, what I’ve already suspected when putting on my jeans, I get anxious and eat too much. If I weigh less than I thought, it’s party time! Again I am likely to overeat.

Ned’s sister, Elaine, has the same depraved reactions to weighing herself as I do, yet she climbs the scale at least once a day. Elaine has never been huge. But she’s always felt like she was, so reality doesn’t matter.

Elaine’s lifelong devotion to weight loss intersects far too often with what Judith Moore described in
Fat Girl
, the seminal over-eater’s memoir. An extremely unhappy childhood led Moore to believe “that inside every fat person was a hole the size of the world.” To compensate, “I built walls of fat, and I lived inside.” Elaine’s early life was not nearly as crushing, but there are similarities, and they had an unintended trickle-down effect on Lisa.

Moore wrote, and Elaine agrees, “I never do not know what I weigh.” And Ned has never known a self-confident older sister. He was born when Elaine was three years old, and already her size had been discussed at family gatherings in San Diego. Next to her cousin Ronda, Elaine was a giant. Girls were not supposed to be giants.

My sister, almost three years younger, had only a mild case of body-image issues. Still, I was glad it was Nancy and not me getting that kind of attention. In our families, even during Ned’s husky phase, he and I were the children who could eat whatever we wanted. For both of us, our sisters’ struggles, however imaginary, became cautionary tales. Let’s avoid that glare, for ourselves and then for our children.

Ned had bulked up in high school and through college, nipping one hundred and ninety pounds and a portly Jerry Garcia look, before taking up jogging and healthier food. He tried not to think about Lisa’s similarities in body type, not to revisit scenes from his childhood when his sister suffered for her size, but it was like trying to push back the ocean. Elaine cuddled baby Lisa and cooed, “She reminds me of me.”

As Lisa grew, Ned couldn’t help measuring her against Elaine at each age. He had to wonder, would she be as miserable? He tried to focus on buying and eating healthy foods, and getting exercise himself. Ned would be relieved when he noticed differences. Elaine never played sports, Lisa did. Elaine ate with both hands, Lisa usually didn’t.

I didn’t understand Elaine’s low self-esteem. She had great professional success as a teacher, a close family, and a tight, supportive group of friends that anyone would envy. She is very kind and took great care of their mother, who was widowed young and lived five minutes from Elaine’s house. Yet she says, “When I think about myself, ‘I’m fat’ is what always comes to mind first.” Until Lisa became bulimic and Elaine saw what that meant, she wished she could purge. She wished that she had the strength to stick her finger down her throat and stand over a toilet.

One weekend when Elaine came for a visit, I asked her to sit down and tell us how weight became the defining issue of her life. It would help us understand what happened with Lisa, how memories Ned pushed away may have crept back in and inadvertently affected how he treated Lisa. Ned and I were surprised and pleased at how ready Elaine was to tell her story. As if she’d been waiting for years. She began, “I don’t remember ever feeling hungry. Or full.”

 

 

 

Elaine was seven pounds, three ounces at birth. That is, normal. Her parents lived next door to both sets of grandparents until she was two and a half, and she felt surrounded in love. Grandma Sophie had lost her only daughter and was particularly thrilled when Elaine was born. But being next door also meant more than enough attention for one shared grandchild. Two or three grandparents babysat Elaine every Saturday night. With so many arms to hold her, she didn’t walk until she was eighteen months old. The family worried that there was something wrong with her legs.

In the seat of power, the kitchen, Grandma Pancake (Sophie) was always baking, always something sweet. The other was Grandma Soup. Whether because of being intimidated or a lack of interest, and later, economic hard times, Elaine and Ned’s mother, Tilda, never really learned her way around food. She was a terrible cook. A common dinner for them growing up was Campbell’s soup, iceberg lettuce salad, and a can of string beans or creamed corn.

Elaine was always chubby, everyone agrees. Sipping tea in our living room, she remembers, “When people looked at pictures of me as a baby, they would say, ‘Oh, look at those pulkies (fat legs)!’” At least that’s the part she heard. When people would say, “You have such a nice smile,” Elaine took it to mean, “It’s just too bad you’re so fat.”

One day in fourth grade, Elaine’s whole class went to the cafeteria to be weighed. There was a scale in front and a teacher calling out each student’s name and weight. (Judith Moore recalls a similar torture in
Fat Girl
, but at her school it happened every month. Moore was the only second-grader who needed the metal one-hundred-pound weight to be clanked into place.) The day Elaine, age nine, saw that scale, she started crying and couldn’t stop. Her mother had to come pick her up from school. Also in fourth grade, Elaine started menstruating, which was considered very early at the time. By sixth grade, she came close to her full adult height, five-foot-six, and towered over her classmates. There was no place to hide.

Like Lisa, Elaine sneaked food at night. Both ate ice cream out of the carton. And both resented the rest of the family. Everybody in the family loved sweets, but Elaine was the only “fat” one. When the Himmels went to their favorite restaurant in San Diego, Elaine longed for the “Fudge-anna,” a hot-fudge sundae with banana, but she knew not to ask for what she wanted. Every time, she ordered sherbet. Unlike Lisa, Elaine has always been compliant and anxious to please, anticipating what others desired of her.

At age ten, Elaine was taken to a mysterious new doctor, with offices all the way downtown. Dr. De La Marquis prescribed the diet pills that Elaine took until she was at least twenty. She didn’t take them continuously, and they didn’t do much for her weight or self-esteem, but they did help her study. They were speed, after all.

In high school, Elaine didn’t date, and in college, she didn’t get asked to join a sorority. She felt like a failure. All her social problems, she was sure, were caused by her weight. She told herself, “If only I could lose weight, I’d look better in clothes and have dates.” And then get married and have children and life would be beautiful.