Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (22 page)

I spent my first year at the company wading through keywords, meta titles, and URL structure. It was fun sometimes, like math you do with words (“boyfriend jeans” = 6,600 average searches, but “skinny jeans” = 14,800. Just FYI). But I had a lot to learn, and taking the time to do it meant less time for pitching stories. Still, I pitched whenever I had a spare moment, offering to write a little five-hundred-word essay on my Famous Watermelon Smoothie or a DIY Shamrock Shake. All my freelance stories had been food-related, so I became the de facto Food and Drink editor in my spare time.

Slowly, my job began to evolve into something between SEO editor and food-and-funny-things writer. Gwyneth Paltrow might sell something ridiculous on her website, and I’d pitch an article to be titled, “Gwyneth’s Thousand-Dollar Shot Glass and Other Things You Need This Christmas.” The cronut craze swept New York City, and I spent a summer on breaking pastry news. My stories were sometimes hits but rarely flops, and so I was allowed and encouraged to keep up the dual role. Many members of the team wore multiple hats, but after a year and a half doing SEO and part-time writing at the company, it became clear which hat fit me best.

I became a staff writer in the fall of 2013, just before the Anti-Diet Project debuted. Sure, it was a title change only, but it was a win. For the time being, SEO was still my main responsibility, but I was thrilled that the higher-ups saw my value as a writer. Furthermore, I would now be included as a peer among the more senior editors, helping to develop ideas for the site. Above all, they urged, I should think about what I wanted my role to be on the team next year, because there were big things ahead, and if I kept this up I could be a part of it.

I felt recognized and welcomed. I felt like the fucking American dream. After a few years of classes and relentless self-promotion, somehow I was a working writer living in New York City. Really! With business cards and everything!

I was juggling even more responsibility, but it was responsibility I’d earned, and if I did it well, then this title-change-only would become a real promotion in the coming year. It was a testament both to my hustle and the company’s faith in me that I’d gone from desperate applicant to staff writer so fast. I could not believe my outrageous luck. It wasn’t until starting the Anti-Diet Project that I realized I wasn’t just lucky. I was also good at my job.

“I thought your
GMA
segment was great,” Margaux told me one morning in the office kitchen. Margaux was a truly seasoned editor and one of the handful of senior staff who oversaw my department. She was so senior, in fact, that most of us didn’t even report to her directly, but we constantly craved her praise. Sharp and glamorous, Margaux brought out the mommy issues in
all
of us. It was a pretty effective motivational tool, actually.

Though the show had aired months ago, this was the first time she’d spoken to me about it directly. I know this because I’d literally daydreamed about the scenario in which she might tell me how great it was, how proud she was, and how pretty I’d looked.

“Thank you!” I squealed, my voice coated in
love-me-love-me-love-me
. She’d come in to make a cup of tea as I stood slicing a banana onto peanut butter toast, my current breakfast phase. Something caught her eye.

“Kelsey, why are you eating this?” She picked up the loaf of potato bread I’d brought in to make the toast. “It’s so processed!”

If she wasn’t my boss and I wasn’t so chicken I might have told her that I was eating it because: (a) I liked it. It was soft and a little sweet and reminded me of the tomato sandwiches I used to make every summer as a kid. (b) It was cheap, and I could stand to save some cash after intuitively ordering expensive take-out Vietnamese food almost every night for a week. And (c) I was a grown woman who bought whatever the hell kind of bread she wanted. Instead, I folded.

“I know. I’m sorry, you’re right.”

“Just eat Ezekiel bread!” She shook the offending loaf in the air to emphasize her point, then dropped it back on the counter. I nodded, rapid-fire.

“I know! I like Ezekiel bread!”

And I did! Ezekiel bread reminded me of the past as well. It was the only bread I’d been allowed to eat during the Eat Right for Your Type phase, and even then it was rationed to one slice a day. Ezekiel bread is not so much bread as it is a bunch of legumes and millet smashed into loaf form. It’s hearty and dense, really good if you’re in the mood for legumes and millet. But not so much if what you want is bread.

“So, why are you eating this poisonous garbage?!”

I didn’t know what to say, but running away didn’t seem like a move that would earn me a promotion.

“Because they didn’t have any at my grocery store.”

She held my gaze for just an instant while I mentally scrambled for a better excuse for eating potato bread. Temporary insanity?

“Oh, fine. I’ll let you keep this.” She picked up her teacup, rolled her eyes, and smiled, friends again. “Anyway, yes, congratulations on the segment. You were excellent.”

Was it over? It was over.

“I’m so glad you liked it.”

“You’re so smart and eloquent.” She pressed the hot button on the water dispenser and filled her ceramic teacup, then faced me again, her eyes now gentle and sincere. “I hope you know that.”

“Thank you.”

“And know that
I
know it, too.”

I smiled. I did know it. And I was thankful.

“Next time,” she said, eyes dropping to my shirt, “I’m styling you.”

Margaux whooshed out of the kitchen in two tall, silky steps. I looked from my half-sliced banana to the criminal loaf of potato bread and took a few deep breaths. It felt as if I’d just been fired but still had to go to work.

From then on, I tried to eat out of sight. It wasn’t just Margaux; many of my colleagues were gluten-free or Paleo or on Day 300 of a nine-year cleanse. The fridges were filled with dark green bottles, marked up with initials so no one would accidentally drink someone else’s green juice and incite a knife fight in the office. There were a few rogue eaters. My desk-mate kept boxes of Easy Mac under her desk, and everyone’s diets went out the window if someone suggested getting Chipotle for lunch. This was a unique and innovative team, no question. But, in terms of food, it fit the fashion-website mold to a T. Staffers dressed well and ate weird. And then there was me.

There were few food rules in my new routine, but undistracted eating was one of them. Removing work, GChat, and Internet gossip from my lunch hour was a pain in the ass, but it did help me to taste food more, sense fullness approaching, and learn to actually
eat
rather than shove a burrito into my face until it was gone. At work, however, it served another purpose: hiding.

Yes, it was a healthy habit, taking the bowl of udon away from my desk to find a little nook in the lounge area where I’d sit quietly for ten minutes, engaging with nothing but lunch. But it also kept me hidden from the casual glances and commentary of colleagues. Someone might see me slurping up noodles and say, “Oh my God,
what
are you eating?” and I’d freeze, waiting for another potato-bread lecture. But, more often than not, they’d follow up with, “It looks incredible.” I’d watch them walk away in cool shoes to eat a cool lunch, then look at my delicious noodles and wish I’d been craving something more on-trend. Maybe
raw
noodles.

Nobody else ever picked on me for eating anything, but my self-consciousness knew no boundaries. Neutral or not, any comment on my meal made me feel like that little kid, caught in the pantry with a handful of chocolate chips. Enjoying food in public was strange, to say the least. Here I was, eating udon noodles, devil-may-care. What a pioneer I was: a fat girl in Keds, having lunch in front of God and everyone.

Except the “fat girl” part seemed to be changing a little. The same old digital scale still idled under my bureau, though I hadn’t stepped on it in months, knowing what a seductive little trigger it was. When I was dieting, my whole day had been dictated by those numbers, and in my self-conscious state, I could easily slide back into that old habit. Stephanie did routine physical assessments of me at the gym, but I just looked at the ceiling while she recorded my weight. Whatever the number, it wouldn’t be right. I wanted to be the kind of person who wouldn’t be thrown into a tailspin by the bathroom scale, but the best I could do was acknowledge that in fact, I absolutely was. So, I looked at the ceiling then stepped off the scale, trying to read a number in Stephanie’s face.

There were numbers I could enjoy, though. In the few months since I’d quit dieting and begun a regular fitness routine, my blood pressure had normalized, my resting heart rate had dropped, and my body fat percentage had taken a serious hit. To the naysayers, the diet peddlers, and the nasty voices in my own head, I said:
How do you like them apples?
Those stats were a balm on my anxious doubts and a real piece of proof that intuitive eating hadn’t led me to overdose on pizza.

I wasn’t trying on my skinny clothes yet, but my wardrobe had nearly doubled as I began to fit into my slightly-less-fat clothes. It was such a subtle shift that at first it barely registered. When it did start to sink in, I actively tried not to get too excited about it. Excitement lives right next door to anxiety.

“You look great, dude!” Chrissy announced one night when we met up for dinner at a little Williamsburg bistro tucked under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She’d been away for over a month, overseeing her work in a group art show.

“Aw, thanks,” I demurred. Compliments were the worst.

“Seriously!” she added with a double thumbs-up.

I thanked her again, and then ducked my head into the menu, a little nameless knot of something curled up in my chest. I couldn’t decide what to get. If I got the pasta, I wouldn’t have any protein and would probably need a snack later. Steak frites sounded great, but it also sounded really heavy, and it didn’t come with greens. I needed greens, suddenly, urgently. The spiral commenced: Why did the scallops come with béarnaise sauce? Scallops were supposed to be clean and light, not drowned in buttery goo. Maybe I could get the scallops but with the sauce on the side and greens instead of potatoes? Would they do that in a place like this? This looked like a no-substitutions kind of restaurant. God, fucking Williamsburg. Why did I live here? The waitress approached with a friendly hello and I almost jumped out of my chair.

I ordered the steak frites and ate every bite in under five minutes.

“Congratulations, you have been named a Body Image Hero of 2013!” The e-mail press release detailed an eleven-person list of women who’d “spoken out about how we treat women’s bodies, and why standard beauty ideals are failing us.” I’d come in at number nine, right between Jennifer Lawrence and a plus-size Barbie doll.

By mid-winter, a lot of things seemed to have happened at once. The Anti-Diet Project had been written up by a handful of media outlets, I’d been interviewed about my revolutionary decision to eat like a normal person, and now I was a hero. Those first few instances of praise and recognition were thrilling and novel; I could post them on my Facebook page, accompanied by some self-deprecating witticism, and not look like a total braggart. But seeing my name next to the word
hero
made me feel like the nerd who gets named prom queen as a joke. I wasn’t a hero, and I wasn’t trying to be. I just didn’t want to be such a loser.

Still, some part of all this illustrious ass-kissing must have sunk in, because it wasn’t just the Anti-Diet Project that was getting all the attention. In recent months, I’d begun to pitch bigger, more ambitious stories. I wrote more and more first-person opinion pieces, grabbing at any opportunity to take a stance on something. Writing the column, I’d realized it wasn’t just talking about weight and body image that made it successful, but the way I talked about it. I had a big mouth, and a lot of people seemed to like it. Even those who didn’t sure seemed to like disagreeing with it. I ventured out of my comfort zone, pitching in-depth stories on men’s rights activists, the college campus rape crisis, and other things that really pissed me off. I still enjoyed writing the Anti-Diet Project and the occasional watermelon-smoothie stories, because everyone loves a good smoothie. But it was thrilling to discover I could write about something other than food and my relationship to it. Why not? If the press, the readers, and my colleagues thought I was smart, maybe I was. Maybe I could speak up, have an opinion, and ask for things—and maybe I deserved them?