The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl (3 page)

Something inside me shut down. I drifted through my days feeling numb and detached, as if my body was made out of lead. I’d stare into the distance in my classes, unable to focus, often forgetting where I was. I couldn’t sleep and would binge in a trance. But still I pushed on with my studying, anxious not to disappoint.

When my final exams started, my head felt like it was packed with cotton wool. I sat down in my Modern History exam, looked at my paper, and none of the questions made sense. I’d been up studying until 3:00
A.M.
I stared at the blank page and cried silently for two hours until it was over.

Somehow I still scored well in my other subjects and got into my course. Eventually the fog lifted, perhaps because I knew I was moving away. I chalked up that strange period to exam stress.

By then I’d been working at KFC for three years, and my uniform had gone up a size each year. Mercifully, I went off to university just as the side seams split on my size 16 pair of the Colonel’s black trousers and I’d reached the last notch on the drive-through belt.

In 1996, I started my journalism degree weighing in at 224 pounds.

I’d always known I loved to write more than anything in the world, so a journalism degree seemed to be a way to write and possibly get a job at the end of it. The only problem was, I turned out to be the world’s most rubbish journalist. I could write, but I lacked the requisite passion for news. I hated interviews. I hated waddling into courtrooms or hassling people for quotes. I had an irrational fear of telephones, as though people could sense my fat over the line. My fellow students were brash, confident, and opinionated, but I just wanted to be invisible. I could barely fit through doors, let alone kick them down in pursuit of a good story.

So I had exactly zero of the qualities required to be a good journalist, but there was no way I could call up my mother and tell her I’d made a terrible mistake. I already felt guilty for all the money she’d spent getting me to university, and guilty for getting away from the farm when she and Rhiannon were still there.

I muddled my way through my degree and spent the three years with a sense of impending doom. The ambitious writer in me longed to write for the campus newspaper or try out for the student radio station, but the Fat Girl was more convincing: Who’d want to listen to a blob like you?

Instead I concentrated my efforts on accumulating a shocking amount of weight. My university was in Bathurst, a big town an hour away from home, so I embraced my newfound freedom and the wider selection of fast food outlets. I made a halfhearted attempt to diet for the first month, but then one night at the supermarket I wandered down the frozen aisle and picked up a tub of ice cream. I can buy this, I thought. I can take it home and eat it all.

I’d never eaten ice cream straight from the tub before. There was no one to tell me to slow down or that I’d already had quite enough. Gleefully, I shoved it into my mouth, loving how it made everything feel cool and calm inside my chest.

Soon I was revisiting every forbidden food from my childhood, in ever-increasing portions. I’d drive the three blocks to the supermarket and pace the aisles, delirious with the possibilities. I’d buy family-size bars of chocolate and demolish them in one sitting. I’d spend an evening toasting my way through a whole loaf of white bread. And then Ferrero brought out their Simpsons collectable Nutella glasses. I fully intended to stop at Homer—after all, how many glasses does a student need? But within two months he was joined by Bart, Krusty, Maggie, and Lisa. I told everyone I scraped the Nutella into the bin, but I’d scoffed it all, straight from the jars, until my throat hurt.

On my first day of classes, I met Peita and Belinda, who became my closest friends throughout my degree. We’d drive laps of the Mount Panorama racing circuit, swap mix tapes, make sarcastic comments during
Days of Our Lives
, and just laugh at the world. When we were together I could block out all my loathing and guilt and doubts about the future.

But I tried to confine our friendship to daylight hours. I was terrified of the ubiquitous university activities like bar nights and pub crawls. My body was not designed for dancing, flirting, and snogging random strangers. I took up too much space on a dance floor. I hated just going to the bathroom, awkward in my elasticized jeans while everyone else clustered around the mirrors in skimpy outfits. So I’d hide in smoky corners, feigning merriment and trying to make my drink last for three hours so I wouldn’t have to get in everyone’s way in the queue for the bar.

Food became my preferred companion. I kept a handy stock of excuses to avoid socializing, like urgent shifts at my part-time job or babysitting emergencies, and as soon as I was alone, I’d eat. I’d do the rounds of the drive-throughs and take-away shops, picking up fries here, a burger there, a dessert from the other side of town. I was careful to spread my purchases around so I wouldn’t be identified as a “regular” anywhere. Sometimes I’d pull into a dark street and gorge in the car, trying to ignore how my stomach was closing in on the steering wheel. Or I’d come back home and keep my eyes glued to the television to distract myself from how much I was shoving away. I ate swiftly and urgently. Taste was less important than the texture—the fries jabbing the roof of my mouth, the salt stinging my lips, the grease filling up my insides. It was intimate, soothing, and exhilarating all at once. It was an event.

But soon enough the trance would break and I’d register the oily wrappers and the crumbs clinging to my belly rolls. And then came the shame and disgust.

Once again I didn’t choose my part-time jobs wisely. First there was the coffee shop, with endless cakes and cookies and siphons of whipped cream that I longed to squirt directly down my throat. Then I saw a vacancy at the local fish and chip shop. Of course, they gave me the job; I was a veteran of the deep-fat fryer. It was only two blocks from my house but I drove to every shift. My boss was generous with the freebies too, and on a student budget, I pounced on all the hamburgers and chips and oily potato cakes, even though my trousers screamed at me to stop.

By the time I finished my degree at the end of 1998, I weighed 294 pounds and was a size 20. For a while I convinced myself that I was just tall and curvaceous, but I’d lost all definition. My waist, hips, and boobs blurred into one gelatinous heap of flesh.

Six months after graduation I was still in Bathurst and living alone. Peita and Belinda were now bona fide journalists, but all I had was my lucrative fish and chip gig. I felt the fog closing in again. I’d spent the past three years burying my fears in food, becoming increasingly isolated and withdrawn. But now that my friends had left, there was no need to keep up the pretense. I was so ashamed of my size that I was afraid to go out in public, so I’d stay home and binge or sleep, only venturing out to work, the supermarket, or the drive-through.

By then Mum had finally left the farm and was taking a strong interest in my job search. She was also reading a lot of self-help books, so she’d post me job advertisements with encouraging annotations: “This sounds like you!” and “Go for it, girl! Best of luck!”

But I felt smothered by the weight of her expectations. I’d done internships at newspapers and glossy magazines, squeezing into my size 20 Kmart suit and nauseous with panic. I knew I didn’t belong in that world. But what else would I do? I couldn’t waste all the time and money she’d spent on my education.

I’d divide the advertisements into two piles: Apply for These and If Mum Asks, Pretend I’ve Applied for These. But I was forever forgetting which ones were which. She’d drop in to visit and ask how the Search was going, and my brain felt tangled up with all the lies. I was exhausted from just trying to create the appearance of normality. I’d hide the dirty dishes inside the oven and pile all my unwashed, ill-fitting clothes into my car.

One time I got an interview in Sydney and had to ask Mum for money to buy a new suit because I’d outgrown the one she’d bought me just three months before. It wasn’t until they asked to see my writing portfolio that I realized I couldn’t remember the name of the magazine I was interviewing for. And I’d left my press clips on the bookshelf back in Bathurst. Afterward, I ate three Crunchie bars in quick succession, sobbing at the bus stop and showering my new suit with honeycomb.

I was overwhelmed by disgust and disappointment but my mind felt too soggy to stop it. I shut down completely, not answering the phone and closing the blinds so it looked like I wasn’t at home. I spent my days sitting on the kitchen floor crying, or staring in the mirror and fighting the urge to smash the glass.

One night I was at the supermarket, looking for instant mashed potato and canned peas, because by then I couldn’t even muster the energy to chew. I wandered the aisles for an hour, blinded by tears and panic because I’d forgotten what I’d come for. And then I looked down and realized I was wearing my pajamas.

Finally it was Mum who reached out, in her own indirect way. In her latest bundle of job adverts she slipped in a photocopied magazine article titled, “Are You Depressed?”

I sobbed as I read it, sitting on the kitchen floor in a shirt still crusty with last week’s fish batter. She called me that evening and said, “Shauna, are you OK?” and finally I broke down.

The doctor peered at me over the top of her glasses, and I wondered if she could see right through me. Mum insisted I seek medical attention, but I worried that no matter what I said the diagnosis would simply be, “
Fat!
”

“Have you ever experienced feelings of hopelessness?”

“Yes.”

“Constant fatigue?”

“Yes.”

“Loss of appetite?”

“Ha!”

“Suicidal thoughts?”

“Never.” I started to laugh.

The doctor looked up from her checklist and frowned. I decided not to explain that while trapped in the depths of despair I could never kill myself, because I couldn’t bear the thought of a mortician looking at my naked, obese corpse.

She agreed with Mum that I was clinically depressed. I should have been relieved to have a name for years of shitty feelings, but it seemed like a fancy excuse for my complete inability to get my act together.

But the antidepressants restored me to a fuzzy level of functionality. Soon I was getting out of bed before 2:00
P.M.,
and I even opened the blinds. I saw a counselor who probed away at childhood memories, but I was reluctant to talk. And somehow I managed to get through two months of sessions without once mentioning my weight.

Things started to come together. I finally admitted to Mum that journalism wasn’t for me, and in mid-1999, I moved to Canberra to begin a six-month diploma in digital publishing. I wasn’t put off by the capital city’s dull reputation; to me all the government buildings and clean roads felt controlled and orderly, like I desperately wanted to be. The course was a safe option too—it indulged my creative side but I was safely hidden behind a computer screen.

It was also sufficient to convince my mother, my counselor, and myself that things were moving in a positive direction. My studies went so well that I scored a great job before I finished the course: a Web editor with an Internet start-up company. Finally I was gainfully employed and financially independent. On the surface it looked like a complete transformation.

But I didn’t stop eating.

Six months ago Rhiannon moved in with me. She’d spent a year in the U.S. and returned to Canberra to finish her degree. She came into my life like a cyclone, strong and confident with exotic tales of her life in New York and Chicago. She’s two years younger than me but has always seemed to be made of stronger stuff.

“As soon as I graduate and earn some money, I’m going back overseas,” she declared. “There’s a whole other world out there, Shauna. There is life away from that farm.”

It shocked me to hear her mention the past. Despite growing up under the same roof, we’d never talked about what was going on, mostly because we were always hiding away in our separate rooms behind almost-closed doors. We ate our meals and did our chores but otherwise avoided the main thoroughfares of the house.

On her first night back in Canberra, we got McDonald’s and shared a bottle of wine, sitting on the living room floor.

“Does this feel weird to you?” Rhiannon asked suddenly. “Sitting here in this silence?”

“You mean this genuinely peaceful silence?”

She laughed. “Yeah. That one.”

Finally, after twenty years, we were talking and comparing notes. Part of me had always wondered if I’d just imagined things were bad, if it was just my messed-up head interpreting events that way. But as we talked over that bottle of wine, I was relieved and comforted to hear my memories being confirmed. Rhiannon made me feel I could stop pretending that I didn’t feel bad about it. And the stories of her overseas adventures seemed to prove it was possible to move forward. For the first time I felt a tiny spark of hope that my life could be different.

Last month Rhiannon and I visited Mum in Cowra. I found an old photo album with thirteen years of my annual school pictures, carefully arranged in chronological order. As I flipped through the pages, I was completely shocked to see a perfectly normal-looking kid looking back at me. Where were the hideous thighs I remembered? Where was the belly? I just looked like an ordinary, freckle-nosed, red-haired child.

It wasn’t until the Year 11 photo that you could see the childhood chub turning into proper fat. But I’d thought of myself as repulsive since I was five years old. How did this happen? Why did Mum put me on all those diets? Why did they tell me I was fat when I wasn’t? I’d spent my entire childhood letting my self-loathing dictate everything I said and did. If I hadn’t carried that belief for all these years, would my body have turned into this massive, impossible mess?

It wasn’t until that moment I felt the anger. I’d dulled my emotions with food for so long that I’d blocked out all the pain, but now I just wanted to point the finger. Perhaps I felt brave knowing Rhiannon was there to back me up.