Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (22 page)

Body image is also a nonissue for comedian Susie Essman. In my next life, I want to be just like her. Why? Because she tells it like it is, whether she’s swearing a blue streak on
Curb Your Enthusiasm
or performing stand-up comedy. She’s a woman who really knows her own strength. “As a female comedian, there’s this tremendous balance of power and femininity that’s very difficult to maintain,” Susie explains. “It’s a very masculine art form, it’s a very aggressive art form, and it’s very powerful being up there by yourself onstage. Stand-up is so hard, and I have to be so focused when I’m on stage that I don’t have room in my head to think about what I look like while I’m performing.” I can’t imagine what it would be like to be able to worry only about what comes out of your mouth, not what your body looks like. It just doesn’t work that way for most women on television or in show business. I take it for granted that I am always going to be judged partly on what I weigh and how I look.

“It would be a whole different thing if I was just an actress out there in the marketplace,” Susie acknowledged. “But I’m a comedian. So it’s different. I write everything that I say. I have my own sense of my own power because I’m onstage all the time doing that.” Susie understood what it takes for me to get my job done, and I really appreciated that. “Let me tell you
something, Mika. You sit up there with Joe and Donny and Barnicle, and you hold your own with them. You should feel pretty damn good about that. Because that’s a boy’s club over there, and it’s not easy.”

She also reminded me that it takes a lot more to succeed than a good-looking body, helpful though that is. “It’s been said that a pretty face is a passport,” she said, “but it’s not. It’s a visa, and it runs out fast. Yes, your life is easier when you’re attractive; I absolutely believe that. I think things come more easily, whether it’s standing in line at the deli or whatever. However, you’d better develop yourself, because there’s always going to be somebody prettier, younger, and thinner. Always!”

You’d better develop yourself, because there’s always going to be somebody prettier, younger, and thinner. Always!—
Susie Essman

I know that, of course, but it’s not always at the top of my mind when I am wondering how I look to the millions of viewers who are watching me every day. It’s a way of thinking that needs to be part of our larger conversation, whether it is taking place in schools, libraries, or community centers, on television, or in political and public health circles. If we are going to get healthier as a nation, we need to think differently about body image, weight, and eating disorders. They are all so closely tied together.

M
Y STORY
,
WITH
N
ORA
E
PHRON
, L
ISA
P
OWELL
,

D
R
. C
YNTHIA
G
EYER
, D
R
. N
ANCY
S
NYDERMAN
, K
ATE
W
HITE
,

D
R
. D
AVID
K
ATZ
, D
AVID
K
IRCHHOFF
, C
HRISTIE
H
EFNER
,

S
ENATOR
C
LAIRE
M
C
C
ASKILL
, F
RANK
B
RUNI
, S
USIE
E
SSMAN
,

J
ENNIFER
H
UDSON
, B
RIAN
S
TELTER
, S
ENATOR
K
IRSTEN

G
ILLIBRAND
, P
ADMA
L
AKSHMI
, C
HARLES
B
ARKLEY

A
s we were researching this book, Diane and I got an incredible amount of good advice about smart eating from our women friends (we found a few good men with tips, too). I really appreciated hearing fresh ideas about how to get over my obsession with food and weight. Diane, who has run through just about every diet out there, was also open to new ideas about healthy eating. Sharing strategies for losing weight, or maintaining a healthy thin, makes the journey a lot less lonely. True, at the end of the day, each of us makes our own decisions about what we put on our plates, but there’s still plenty we can learn from others.

I especially appreciated people who were willing to be blunt with me, just as I had been with Diane. My late friend Nora Ephron was one of those. Never one to mince words, Nora
made it clear that she wasn’t very happy with how either Diane or I approached food.

Joe and I had gotten to know the screenwriter, film director, and essayist quite well in the last few years. We’d been working on a project together: a romantic comedy, like others that Nora had already made so brilliantly. What we didn’t know at the time was that Nora was sick. She was so optimistic about beating leukemia that she kept it from most people.

It is a tribute to Nora and her love of her friends that just weeks before her death she sat down with Diane and me to have a conversation for this book. She was as open and direct as ever. “I’ll have what she’s having,” from Nora’s film
When Harry Met Sally
, may be one of the funniest lines ever delivered in a movie, but in real life our conversation with Nora was not as hilarious.

Nora’s fans and friends know what a foodie she was. When I went to Paris a couple of years ago, I got the full Nora treatment. She sent me a file of places to eat and told me what to order when I got there. “I love to eat,” she told Diane and me. “I do nothing all day but think about what I am eating at my next two meals.” I told Nora I think about food all day, too. But I don’t do it with her joyful anticipation of wonderful food. Much more often, it is because I am trying desperately to stick with a tightly disciplined diet that often leaves me wanting more, much more, to eat.

“I’ve been up at night holding my stomach in hunger and crying, trying not to eat,” I admitted to Nora. “And when I break down and give in to my cravings, it is not pretty.”

“Boy, that’s sad. That’s so terrible,” Nora replied. “Food is one of the great pleasures in my life.”

Diane was candid, too, telling Nora how discouraged she had become in recent years about her inability to keep off weight after working so hard to lose it. Nora really drilled into Diane after she acknowledged dropping out of Weight Watchers. “Who told you you could stop?” Nora scolded. “You can’t stop; it’s like AA.” Our conversation took place early in Diane’s seventy-five-pound weight-loss challenge, and she got a little defensive, responding, “I never seem to be able to plan what I’m eating. I’m always grabbing something out of the refrigerator or on the run.”

Nora would have none of it. “That’s just an excuse,” she countered. “You say, ‘I’m always on the run and I can’t plan my meals,’ as if we are living in a place where we can’t pick up the phone and get anything delivered to us in five minutes that’s healthy.” I cringed, knowing that Nora was right, but also that it was painful for Diane to hear. “I know how Diane is hurting right now because it is not that easy for her,” I told Nora. “Having said that, she
has
to do this. This she and I have decided.”

Nora agreed. “Well, we know it’s not easy, but we also know that you can do it, Diane, if you just trust yourself to stay with it. Let’s say you made a commitment that you would stay with it for a year. Right? I swear to God at the end of the year, you will have changed your eating habits.”

That’s what we are both trying to do, and Canyon Ranch nutritionist Lisa Powell reminded us why it is so important. “The number one complaint in a doctor’s office these days is lack of energy,” she says. “I don’t expect my car to run if it doesn’t have
the right fuel. How can I expect my body to have energy and to feel good without the right fuel?”

I don’t expect my car to run if it doesn’t have the right fuel. How can I expect my body to have energy and to feel good without the right fuel?

—Lisa Powell

Getting enough sleep is a part of fueling the body properly. Dr. Cynthia Geyer, medical director at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, Massachusetts, says that without adequate sleep, we become more stressed and that, in turn, makes good habits harder to sustain. “The very things that you might do to help yourself stay healthy kind of go out the window when you’re stressed. You gravitate toward comfort foods; you forego your exercise, because you have to put the pedal to the metal and get your work done; you get sleep deprived.” That becomes a vicious circle, Geyer said, and “you’re hungrier, more stressed, and more resistant to insulin when you’re sleep deprived.”

Diane and I are persuaded that whole, fresh food is the fuel that powers us best. Staying away from supermarket and restaurant foods crammed with sugar, fat, and salt is rule number one. Unprocessed food is not always the easiest to get, especially if you eat out a lot, and it can take longer to prepare at home, but it’s almost always the best. “There are no bad whole foods,” declares NBC News medical editor Nancy Snyderman. “The bad foods are the ones that are manufactured and have words on the labels that you can’t pronounce. You wouldn’t purposefully eat arsenic. So why would you purposefully eat bad food?”

Beyond an emphasis on whole food, there is no one-size-fits-all diet that will work for everyone. Some people seem to do better increasing their protein and reducing their carbs, while others decide that a vegetarian or vegan diet is the best strategy for them. There are some tried-and-true techniques that help many people, but you’ll have to pick and choose the ones that suit your own lifestyle and keep the cravings to a minimum.

For me, healthy eating is a matter of finding equilibrium. The diet that works best for my body seems to be a very careful balance of fat, protein, and carbs. The challenge I face is how to eat enough of the right foods so that I keep hunger at bay and maintain control without giving in to episodes of insane overeating. Kate White described her approach while at
Cosmopolitan
, which seems sensible to me. “I’ve really limited the amount of sugar in my diet, and I eat a certain amount of fat and protein. If you sit down to a dinner that involves chicken and cauliflower that has been roasted with some olive oil, and then something else, you’re so satisfied that it’s really hard to get a craving going.”

What you should not do, of course, is latch on to every new food trend, or become a “serial dieter.” Jumping from one diet to the next and the next and the next is “magical thinking,” says Dr. David Katz. “There is no real magic, and people do actually know that,” he told us. But “they turn off their common sense because their common sense tells them, ‘The only way I’m going to lick this problem is to figure out how to eat well and be active, and since that’s too hard I need an alternative.’ They get involved in one boondoggle after another, with the Jiminy Cricket inside their head saying, you know this isn’t going to work. But they drown that voice out.”

Eventually, we have to start listening to that voice, because reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is a lifelong struggle. Anyone who has ever carried a lot of extra pounds probably has food issues that are likely to keep surfacing, at least from time to time. “This is not what people want to hear, but I strongly believe if you struggle with weight, you will always struggle with weight,” said David Kirchhoff of Weight Watchers. “This isn’t something you cure after twelve weeks.”

I strongly believe if you struggle with weight, you will always struggle with weight. This isn’t something you cure after twelve weeks.

—David Kirchhoff

Kirchhoff has a term,
acting like a dieter
, for the short-term approach. “The weight comes off, you look better, you feel better, and you kind of get cocky. And you say, ‘Awesome. I’m going to go back to my old life’ and you regain the weight.”

What we need instead is to make lasting changes. Christie Hefner, executive chairman of Canyon Ranch Enterprises, quotes from a line she hears often at the well-known health and wellness spa. “Canyon Ranch has an expression I love,” she says. “Diet is a noun, not a verb.” In other words, diet is a way of conducting ourselves over a lifetime, not an action to be taken at a given moment.

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill eventually reached the same conclusion when she committed to losing fifty pounds. “Before, I was losing weight for an event, or I was losing weight for my wedding, or I was losing weight because I had just had a baby, or I was losing weight because I wanted to get into a pair
of jeans,” she admits. As Claire moved into her late fifties and required knee replacement surgery, her motives changed and she saw weight loss as a path toward “a full and fun and long life. I think it was age and feeling a sense of urgency about my health.”