Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (19 page)

What are you doing? You need those fries. What if this intuitive eating thing is as strange as it sounds and this is just one long binge you haven’t woken up from? What if you really can’t eat fried food or hamburgers in the long run? What if you wake up one day at four hundred pounds and have to spend the rest of your life subsisting on apples
and chia seeds like a macrobiotic squirrel? Surely, you will look back on these twenty-odd fries and wish you’d slapped them out of Jon’s face, taken the plate, and run.

I sat in silence, telepathically apologizing to Jon, Harry, and everyone else to whom I’d flaunted all my great success. The French fries were nothing but a pantomime of victory if that voice was still sitting at the table with me. Undoubtedly, it was. And soon enough, that voice was joined by a chorus of uninvited guests, all loud and mean and drunk on mimosas, ready to trash the place.

J
ohn2John:
Ur a fat n ugly whore! time for jenny craig dumb(fat)ass!!

A couple weeks before Christmas, I came into work early and turned on my computer to find an early present: my very first troll. In fact, there were a handful of comments like this beneath a photo of me on the
Huffington Post
. But John2John, he had a way with words.

The night before,
HuffPo
had published a profile of me, and I’d woken up pumped. And why shouldn’t I? I’d fully renounced dieting, started a successful column, and the whole world seemed to stand up and cheer every time I ate a bagel. Why hadn’t I started eating bagels earlier?! Jacked up on a potent dose of self-confidence, I believed nothing and no one could get to me.

No one except John2John. And pretty much everyone else.

In the last few months, I’d shed so many of my old, destructive habits: no more bingeing, no more constant calculation, no more kale worship. I didn’t miss any of that. There was only one vice from my dieting days that I secretly missed: emotional eating. It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop. But eating was now about physical hunger and cravings, so when I found myself eating for reasons other than those, I just put the food down and walked away. I’d learned not to beat the shit out of myself for every “unnecessary” cookie, because that only kicked off the old cycle of resistance and caving in and, inevitably, more cookies. But that cycle, as it turned out, was half the fun of emotional eating. It also turns out that I wasn’t leaning on it only for the big stuff. It didn’t take a crisis to make me reach for a big bowl of Something Besides This Emotion. It just took a glance at my inbox.

Life was pretty great at the moment, but each day, without fail, I’d hit a minor snag. Halfway through a stressful e-mail at work, I’d catch myself frantically digging around in my bag for a smushed granola bar—again. I’d take a good long look at the bar and ask myself:
Wait. Do you actually want this smushed granola bar from three months ago? Or do you just want to not be reading this e-mail? If you actually desire the smushed granola bar, then, by all means, go for it. But it’s not going to un-read the e-mail for you. So, what are we going to do here?
The bar would go back to the bottom of my bag, and I’d go back to the stupid, stressful e-mail and stupid, stressful reality, which I somehow had to handle without the soothing balm of a smushed granola bar to help me through.

The decline of emotional eating is one of the first recognizable perks you get from intuitive eating. But no one tells you about it, because it doesn’t feel much like a perk. It feels like losing your best friend—the one that makes every situation a little bit easier, never asks anything of you, and has the Thai take-out place on speed dial just in case you should ever have an unplanned feeling. The loss isn’t even voluntary; it just happens one day. When you’re focused on hunger and fullness, savoring meals and tasting every bite, you can’t feasibly look at a smushed granola bar the same way. You can’t shove something into your face to numb out, because food is no longer numbing. In theory, I knew this was a fantastic development. But in reality, I was too busy fussing like a toddler being weaned off the pacifier. Also, masturbating.

How did the big closet-purge go?
Harry texted me one Thursday night.

I looked from my overstuffed closet to the small, abandoned pile of donation clothes on the floor, and rolled over to reply with one hand:

Got distracted. Work stuff.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what everyone’s doing when they’re “working late.”

In the absence of cookies to help me escape the uncomfortable moments (or the boring moments, or the exciting moments, or the just-okay-not-great moments), my brain sneakily sought out any other pleasant distraction it could. I was watching more television, constantly restarting familiar favorites like
The West Wing
and falling asleep to the soothing chatter of Aaron Sorkin dialogue. I was obsessively buying skin-care products, filling the bathroom cabinet with eye cream for nighttime, daytime, and absolutely no reason. And, I couldn’t so much as wait for a light to change without playing Candy Crush on my phone. From a psychological standpoint, I was masturbating all over town.

Still, each day that I got up, went to the gym, and worked on my eating skills was another step out of the woods. I was doing the work. It just felt a lot like work, now.

“I’m, like,
obsessed
with Fun Size Snickers all of a sudden,” I ranted in Theresa’s office. “Should I just be buying the big ones? I eat like four small ones in a day! At my desk, it’s Halloween forever!”

A ten-minute discourse followed, breaking down the moments in which I’d eaten each Snickers, why Fun Size was okay in my mind but full size was not, then finally addressing the monolithic specter of Snickers Ice Cream bars. No matter what the food, all of these discussions ended the same way.

“What do you need to trust this process?”

I instantly responded, “To lose weight by doing it.” Obviously.

She made that universal tongue-clicking sound that means,
Sorry, kid, can’t help ya
.

“Nothing is going to happen until you let go of that one.”

“Okay.” It wasn’t.

“
Diets
are about weight loss. This is about changing your relationship with food, remember? Weight loss is a natural side effect if you have excess weight to lose, and we welcome that!” She gestured to my weekly eating record. “When all this becomes instinct, your body will settle into its normal range. But the people who can’t shift the focus off of weight…” She shrugged. “Well, it takes a lot longer for the process to really begin.”

“Okay.” Fiiiiiiiine.

It took a few rounds of this conversation before the uncomfortable truth finally began to sink in: Just because it wasn’t a diet didn’t mean it wouldn’t be hard. I didn’t want to waste time fighting a counterintuitive battle. I’d signed up to trust myself fully, allowing for the necessary phases of rediscovering food and learning how to eat and enjoy it. If that meant I wouldn’t lose any weight right away—even if I
gained
a few temporary pounds—I could handle it. But I couldn’t handle much else.

Aside from the loss of my old friendship with food, there were still other challenges I had to grapple with. And by challenges, I mean, like, living.

Despite all this profound and incredible work I’d taken on, I still had to manage all the other stuff a person’s expected to do in order to be a legitimate member of society. Though it seemed entirely unfair under the circumstances, the patron saint of juvenile adults did not appear to do my laundry and change the cat litter. I still had to deal with looming deadlines at work and arguments with Harry or my friends. I still had PMS and that credit card bill I had forgotten about. On top of everything else, I had John2John and his fellow idiots keeping my (fat) ass in check.

“Love the
HuffPo
piece, Kels!” my friend and fellow editorial staffer Cameron called as I swanned into the office. She got up from her desk, all bangs and leather skirt, and quickly scooted over to mine (surely, to tell me in detail just how much she
loved
the
HuffPo
piece). I smiled and shook my mouse, a window-cluttered desktop overtaking the screen.

“Just, maybe don’t read the comments? I don’t think they really get it.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s the Internet, whatever. Everyone’s ugly online.”

“I know. But these are just stupid. There’s no point in even getting into it.”

“Totally. I’m too slammed for trolls today, anyway.” But also, I was lying.

I skimmed the profile, taking mental note of each complimentary phrase to save for later, when the laundry pile loomed and life wasn’t looking as rosy.
Remember, you are a “body-positive inspiration.” You can handle this.

Then, I clicked directly to the part that really mattered: comments. John2John’s screed sat firmly beneath my grinning face. While he had his detractors, the guy appeared to being leading an entire army of me-haters. Some of them could even kind of spell:

Finally! Another excuse for being fat and lazy! Wonderful!

I’m sorry but thin is beautiful and you are just an emberassing looser.

Sad attempts at self realization. This chick is trippn.

Garden-variety assholes. I gave my screen the finger and went about my day, only pausing to think about them every twenty minutes or so.

The comments section of my own column had, for the most part, been glowing. Those were loyal readers who’d been with me from the start, the original bagel cheering section. But still, every time I mentioned something like finally being able to enjoy a hamburger
and
a side of French fries, there would always be a few folks reminding me that cavemen didn’t eat burgers and fries, so maybe I wasn’t eating so “intuitively” after all. These were the comments that stuck in my brain, adding fuel to the fire of my own doubts. Was I really getting better? If my old fat-girl clothes still pretty much fit, could I actually be getting healthier? How was it possible I’d begun working out five days a week and nothing that impressive had happened in the mirror? As the column got more popular, my audience grew, and I didn’t really shrink. I began to wonder:
Was
I trippn?

I came home late that night, hungry for comfort food. I plated up my softly scrambled eggs and buttered bread, then sat at the table in the narrow blue hallway that served as my living room. The apartment was quiet save for the barking of my neighbor’s Great Dane echoing up the airshaft. It was my first undistracted moment since I’d eaten an undistracted lunch. I allowed myself a pat on the back for giving myself this “satisfying eating experience,” as Theresa would call it. It was a perfect meal for me at that moment, and I left the table full and satisfied, but not stuffed.

Worn out from a day of not eating smushed granola bars, I left the dishes in the sink and headed straight for bed. Well, TV in bed. But, before I could even reach for the remote, my heart began to race. I lay flat on the unmade sheets and quilt, placing a hand to the top of my abdomen to feel the space between the arcs of my rib cage—a habit from my nightly childhood exercise ritual. In years past, that space had been the barometer for how well my day had gone, and now I heard the same old questions come to mind. Was it convex? Could I feel the hard edge of my ribs? Or was it full and bloated, brimming with all the mistakes I’d made in the last twelve hours, the worst of which was eating dinner at all? It was almost 9:00 p.m. when I finished that last bite, and now I’d have to lie around with all this protein, fat, and processed carbohydrates lingering uselessly in my stomach. That kind of meal was allowed only in the morning, and only if I was definitely going to the gym, if not the gym
and
a yoga class. Dinner was supposed to be eaten by 6:00 p.m., 6:30 at the latest. Furthermore, it was supposed to be green.

For years, my dinner procedure was to chop up an entire head of green-leaf lettuce, add two tomatoes, throw in a soft-boiled egg, and douse the whole thing in fat-free dressing and vinegar. I’d eat the entire, enormous salad out of my largest mixing bowl, sitting on my bedroom floor, two feet in front of the television, like a ten-year-old whose babysitter had fallen asleep. Then I’d lie on my bed, bloated with the hollow fullness of raw, wet greens and not much else. On those nights, when my stomach felt achingly full, at least I knew it was full of basically nothing. But tonight, three eggs and a slice of bread had me sweating with panic as I groped at my middle.