Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (18 page)

I thought back to the Sunday nights of my dieting days, when I’d spent hours cooking huge batches of carefully calculated recipes, sincerely intending to eat this and
only
this for the rest of the week. There were giant pots of fat-free vegan chili, giant pots of One-Point Carrot Soup, and giant pots of kale and everything. (Anything mixed with kale was made better by association.) Somewhere around Wednesday, the food would become an albatross—a Tupperware ghost haunting my fridge, shaming me for the Indian takeout I’d just ordered and the pounds of wasted ingredients I’d leave to molder in my vegetable crisper until next Sunday, when I’d finally toss it and start all over again.

And then there was the dumpling scenario. Of all the crazy, illogical equations in my head, nothing is more emblematic than the way in which I behaved around dumplings (spoiler: like a lunatic).

Dumplings were Bad, 100 percent. Thick, chewy dough, wrapped around fat-speckled meat that tasted like gristly heaven, dumplings were the first things my eye caught on any Chinese food menu. Fried was not an option. Once, my nanny Karen and I had gone to the movies at a local mall, stopping by Panda Express for a quick dinner before the film. I ate one of the fried dumplings off her plate, and then spent the rest of the night convinced I’d done irrevocable cardiac damage. I was ten.

“You’re not having a heart attack.”

“How do you know? Feel my heartbeat.”

“It’s fine, you’re just amped up because you’re stressing out.”

“Stress causes heart attacks!”

The shushing got so bad that we eventually left the movie theater. I still have no idea what happens at the end of
My Father the Hero
.

Fried dumplings were too delicious to enjoy, but steamed dumplings were allowed for a few years. During my first round with Weight Watchers, I had them delivered three orders at a time, each with an extra set of duck sauce for dipping (duck sauce was not listed in my Points book and therefore had no Points). I ate one and a half orders for dinner, then pulled out the leftovers first thing in the morning, stood in front of the open fridge, and finished the cold, slightly hardened dumplings before anyone else woke up.

But by the time I finished college, dumplings had risen to the top of the Bad list. They were up there with French fries and full-fat ice cream. They were an absolute no-no, unless split with a skinny friend and followed up with an extra workout and at least one full head of kale, spinach, or cabbage. It wasn’t just that I’d ramped up the crazy by then, but also because I’d discovered gyoza.

Gyoza was Good. It was a diet dumpling, with a slightly thinner skin and a little less meat inside—plus, it came in a smaller container. Fried gyoza was allowed half of the time because it wasn’t a big, fat, fried dumpling but just a small, pan-fried little nibble of an appetizer. (Note that “pan-fried” was different from “fried” because someone put the word “pan” in front.) Furthermore, gyoza came from Japanese food restaurants. Japanese food was officially Better than Chinese food, what with all the raw fish and miso soup. Japanese lunch specials came with a side of seaweed salad, whereas Chinese food lunch specials came with a side of an egg roll. Chinese food was for cheat days and Final Pig-Outs the night before the next diet started. Japanese food was for light work lunches and healthy dinners after yoga. (If you’re now worried that I might be racist, rest assured that I share your concern.)

Gyoza was Good but even Better was shumai. Shumai was basically nothing. If you ate shumai you might as well get a Big Mac afterward, because those tiny, thin-skinned balls of steamed shrimp purity guaranteed that you were officially Good for that entire day. You won. By eschewing the dumplings and gyoza and opting for the least-delicious, most miniature food option, you now had bragging rights for the next twenty-four hours, and had earned a trip to the frozen yogurt shop. Perhaps the cashier would like to hear about your very healthy lunch?

The dumpling revelation happened at work. A few months into intuitive eating, I found myself scanning sushi lunch specials online. But that lunch hour was an aha moment the likes of which I was not prepared for. All at once, I got it: dumplings, gyoza, and shumai are the
same damn thing
. They’re slightly different shapes with slightly different fillings, but for all practical purposes, they are exactly the same. Verbal Kint is Keyser Söze, Rosebud is a sled, and I have spent twenty years wringing my hands over appetizers.

Oh, I told everyone.

“Dumplings and gyoza are the same thing. Did you ever think about that?!”

“No, not really.” Harry turned around at his desk later that night. He was busy working on a freelance assignment, but by then he knew the tone that meant
Turn around so I can astound you with my latest food discovery and all my feelings about it
. It was kind of a loud tone.

“You never realized that?! They are!”

“No, I know that they are. I just never thought about it.”

This is the problem with dating someone who has absolutely no food issues beyond a mild dislike of fennel.

With this first epiphany, the walls of Jericho came swiftly tumbling down. If dumplings and gyoza were pretty much the same thing in slightly different forms, then neither of them possessed the Good or Bad powers I had so fervently believed in. And if that was true for dumplings, then what other foods might be similar false idols (and demons)?

While it was thrilling to eat Chinese food without risking damnation, the miracle was unsettling. All those old rules had created a safe, knowable structure, one that I relied on to guide me through every meal and snack I encountered. They’d given me both a line to toe and a comfort zone to hide in.

One icy Sunday, I decided to poke my head out: I ordered a burger, with French fries.

I won’t walk you through the advanced calculus I’d previously applied to every encounter with a fried potato stick, but not so long before, French fries had been the immortal tsar of my Bad Food list, and as such I treated them with appropriate fear and respect. Ninety-five percent of the time, I ordered a salad with my hamburger or avoided the meal altogether. If I deliberately ordered French fries, it was probably an occasion of deep despair and/or drunkenness—or the night before the new diet.

But this was a sober midday brunch with Jon at DuMont, the same restaurant from which I’d ordered my final Final Pig-Out meal. I hadn’t faced that particular burger since; it felt as though I was visiting an ex-lover to pick up a box of stuff, bringing my friend along for moral support just in case the burger got passive-aggressive or tried to pick a fight with me.
(Except, no, Kelsey. It’s just ground meat and potatoes. You can pick a fight with ground meat and potatoes, but they can’t pick one with you. Oh God, please stop yelling at them, you’re in a restaurant.)
I’d come prepared with the axioms of intuitive eating in my back pocket: I have a right to a satisfying meal; I have permission to eat French fries; eating French fries will not compromise my ethics or diminish me as a person.

“Can I get the burger, with onions and mushrooms?”

“Do you want fries, salad, or onion rings on the side?”

Oh fuck, onion rings? No. One crisis at a time.

“I will have the French fries, please.”

It had taken days of preparation and a test run to let me look a waiter in the face and utter that sentence with direct eye contact. A week before the brunch experiment, determined to tackle these triggering foods, I had sat in Theresa’s office and held a potato chip in the palm of my hand. The potato chip was like a less intimidating French-fry tsar—the tsarevich. It was the perfect tool for this exercise. Developed years ago by legendary mindfulness master Jon Kabat-Zinn, it was known by his students as the Raisin Meditation. Kabat-Zinn gave each of them a single raisin and instructed them first to look, then smell, then put it in their mouths. Next came the phases of feeling the raisin on one’s tongue, then slowly biting it in half, and eventually, finally, chewing and swallowing. Each phase required long moments of observation both of the object itself and any mental or physical reaction the students had to the raisin. It took for-ev-er.

In my own version, I brought in a bag of Cape Cod potato chips, and Theresa guided me through the meditation over and over again. I stared at a chip, noting its bubbly surface and vaguely translucent yellow color. I smelled its salty, greasy, almost earthy aroma and felt my mouth and stomach react.

“In your mind, gauge your level of hunger and then your level of desire for the chip, on a scale of one to ten.”

I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. My salivary glands lightly ached behind my tongue.
I want you
, I told the chip.
I am an eight for you right now. And yet…

“Notice any judgments you are making about the chip,” Theresa prompted.

I know you to be a willful, greasy lover. You got that shiny surface in the bowels of a deep fryer. Look at yourself—you are barely potato anymore, processed into the crispy, bubbly beauty in my hand.

I placed the chip on the center of my tongue and closed my mouth around it, slowly. I felt the surge of salty flavor flare across my palate and then fade into dull, vegetal blandness. I tasted and tasted and tasted. Finally, I bit the thing in half, and held it again. I looked at Theresa, my mouth cupped around this single chip that was my current universe, and then closed my eyes. I could see it on my tongue, a crumbling heap of flakes. It tasted like nothing so much as plain potato now. Slowly, once I’d absorbed everything a person could get out of a single potato chip, I began to chew. Even then I noted subtle flavors changing, the texture evolving between my teeth, and my body’s reaction to this food. Given a full six minutes to register a potato chip, my system had risen to excitement, experienced the full reality of the food, and, finally, lost interest.

It was just a potato chip. It was not some evil, greased-up bad boy calling to me from the hood of his car. It wasn’t calling to anyone, because it was an inert object and not an animate being. I was the fantasist essentially playing make-believe with a snack food instead of a doll.

I ran through the meditation twice more with a chip, and by the end of the third one I couldn’t have cared less about the thing.

“It’s just a chip! I’m hungry, but this isn’t going to do anything for me. I have no real desire for this. I desire a sandwich.”

Theresa nodded, that kindergarten-teacher look back on her face.

“It’s just a chip. You’re right.”

“I know I’m right!”

“So, what do you think about the French fries?”

I thought I was ready. Ish.

“I will have the French fries, please,” I told the waiter.

When our meals came, I took a breath. Part of the intuitive eating process was starting a meal by eating the thing I wanted most on the plate. After years of opening meals with dry side salads, it still felt crazy—like ordering dessert before dinner. Oh God, would I have to start ordering dessert before dinner?

I dug into the fries while Jon chatted away, unaware of the revolutionary brunch demonstration I was leading across the table.
We’re here! We like fries! Get used to it!

They were good—certainly better than a snack-size bag of potato chips. I made a mental note that they were hot and salty, that my desire and hunger levels were both high, and that, in fact, my burger looked pretty great, too. I picked it up and took a bite. I chewed and swallowed and did it again. At one point during the meal, I was even able to engage in conversation, like an ordinary person having brunch with a friend. After about ten minutes, I looked down at my plate and realized I was done. The burger was nearly finished, but in a twist ending, there were at least twenty fries left on my plate.

I looked at them, edging on panic at the sight of this tableau. Never, not once, had I ordered fries and not finished them. If you and I were out to dinner and you ordered fries as well, I’d eat all of mine and then coquettishly ask for a few of yours. Fries on the table went into my mouth, period. But now my hunger level was nil and, though I couldn’t quite believe it, so was my desire for the remaining fries. I took one last bite of a fry, just to be sure. They didn’t taste the same as they had ten minutes ago. They were fine, but not great, an entirely neutral food. I was wholly sated with their crisp, salty flavor. To eat any more fries now would only take them from neutral to gross. I didn’t want them. I was done.

“I’m done with my fries!” I bellowed in Jon’s face. He started, looking down at the fries I was so incredibly done with.

“Okay. Well, I’m still working over here.”

His mac and cheese was half finished, but this was about
my
brunch.

“Great! I’m just saying, like, I am not going to eat those fries. I could, but I don’t want to.”

Jon looked at my plate, then at me, with a little sideways smile.

“Then, can I maybe have a few?”

As Jon picked off my plate, I came down from my not-finishing-the-fries high, looking around the restaurant, not sure what to do with myself. That’s when the slightly less exciting revelation came creeping through the back door of my mind: Part of me
wanted
to want them all. Listening to my body, I could easily stop eating fries halfway through the meal. But from my brain still came a trembling whisper, breathing hard into my ear: