Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (24 page)

When she went into the audition room I overheard how Henry guffawed with laughter, applauding as she went more and more over the top, going from stereotype to caricature. It was so gruff, so entirely macho that I sat agape, listening outside the door. She exited the room, a slight, wavy-haired goddess again, smirking with the confidence of someone who knows they’ve gotten the role.

At once, I realized that was how the part had been written, and why it had never occurred to me to read it that way. It was too obvious. I didn’t need to stick out my stomach or toughen up my girlishness. I already fit the bill all too well. I looked exactly like the character described in the Xeroxed summaries handed out to us with audition material: “butch, no-nonsense, hot-tempered, and can take a punch.” But I had been at Walnut Hill for a year and had yet to be cast in a show. I was not a bad actress, but maybe,
maybe
, I was hesitant. So, if I could get a part by playing the fat girl like a fat girl should act, then I couldn’t be afraid to try.

In my audition, I stood with legs splayed wide and fists on hips, long hair hidden in a bun behind my head. I barked through the monologue and paused as Henry laughed maniacally, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes as I threw in a spontaneous armpit sniff. It was a comedy after all. And fat people were supposed to be smelly. Of course I got the part.

But three weeks later, he’d stopped laughing.

“Chest voice, please!” he called to me as we rehearsed on stage. The three other cast members stood quietly as he gave me the same note I got every day. I cleared my throat, husky from yelling, and delivered my line again.

“Kelsey, go deeper,” he coached. “I know you’ve got that voice in there somewhere.”

I did it again. Henry jumped up from his seat and came up to the stage. I looked over at Kat, who’d been cast in another role, and rolled my eyes. We weren’t friends, but we’d become friendly enough to roll our eyes at each other whenever Henry gave an annoying note during rehearsals. This time, however, she just folded her arms and looked away, as sick of this as I was.

“What’s going on, huh?” Henry asked. I could tell that he was trying to walk the line between frustrated director and empathetic teacher.

“I don’t know. I’m trying to project.”

“You’ve got to practice and train your voice. Have you been doing those exercises?”

“Yes, every day.” Well, every other day–ish.

“I can’t stress enough how important this is for you. You’ve
got
to develop your lower register.”

“I know.”

“You can’t be all the way up here,” he squeaked in a mock-girly voice. “That lower register is going to be your best friend. If you want to do this for a living”—he gestured around the stage—“then you’ve got to understand that.”

“I do understand.”

“No, listen. You’re never going to be Juliet, honey.”

At this I felt the rest of the cast turn, pretending not to look. I was suddenly, horribly visible. Henry kept going.

“Never.
Maybe
you could do Lady Macbeth someday, but I don’t know. Come on, you know you’re not the ingenue. These are the roles you need to get good at.” He pointed at my boxy police-uniform costume. “This is who you are.”

You’re never going to be Juliet, honey.
That’s the phrase I really lean on when I tell this story. When I dreamt of it, I mostly dreamt of that sentence and the silence that came after. But when I woke up that morning back in my apartment, I finally had a comeback: Fuck. That.

Fuck that attitude. Fuck shitty teachers who dare to tell sixteen-year-olds who they are. Fuck anyone who looks at your stomach or your arms or your perfectly human body and says you better quit trying to look like a girly girl and act like the fat, sexless, supporting role you were born to be. Fuck people who’d rather you look like what they want to see or else not be seen at all.
Yes, please, oh please, just don’t make us look at you.
Fuck that nonsense because it’s too late. I exist. Sorry, sucks for you.

I lay in bed thinking in “fucks” for a while when I finally thought:
Fuck flip-flops!
Margaux had told me that if I wanted to be a senior editor then I had to stop “wearing flip-flops and sitting slumped over your desk all day.” And for weeks I’d been playing dress-up, all the while thinking,
But I don’t wear flip-flops! I may wear Target dresses, but I’m not such an urchin that I’d wear shower shoes to work!
That anger had felt good—righteous. I was beleaguered and oppressed, a victim of workplace fashion harassment. In my attempt at a makeover, I’d applied more lipstick over gritted teeth and tottered around in heels, all the while knowing the promotion was lost and it was all just because I wasn’t pretty enough.

Wasn’t that a seductive little story? And how long had I been telling it to myself?

Henry was right; I am no Juliet, nor am I ever going to be. Juliet is a suicidal teenager who married the first guy she kissed and then faked her own death when her parents kind of freaked out about it. The only thing we have in common is that we’re both total drama queens. But that doesn’t mean I can’t wear lacy dresses and delicate bracelets and long, wavy haircuts. It doesn’t mean that I’m not worthy of playing the lead. What the hell kind of life am I living if I cast myself as the sidekick?

I wasn’t an editor, either. As the weeks went on and I awaited word on my new position, I finally heard what Margaux had said in that first meeting:
You’re a writer.
Yeah, I had plenty of other skills, but this was the one I’d hitched my wagon to. It was the job I wanted. So why was I running from the career I’d worked so damn hard for? Because
editor
sounded more prestigious? Because it would make me feel equal to my stylish, skinny-girl colleagues? Was I trying to Juliet this thing?

Here’s another thing I’m not: in high school anymore. At sixteen, a teacher’s flippant remark could crush me. But I was twenty-nine and still desperate to play the victim. No one should be picked on for the bread they eat or the shoes they wear, but what was stopping me from saying, “Thanks, I got this!” and walking away? Why did I persistently see things through a lens of meanness, filtering out any praise or respect? How come I chose to believe only the bad things people said about me?

I didn’t have the answer, but I suspected it had something to do with that scared little kid in the pantry. I’d known from that first meeting with Theresa that she wasn’t quite done with me yet. If I was ever going to shake her, I had to quit listening so hard to other people and their rules. I’d learned to turn inward and listen to my body, but my mind was still a sieve of rejection and criticisms, and everyone who ever told me I wasn’t Juliet, but a big, fat slob in flip-flops, slouching on the sidelines. There was such a pitiful ease in believing them, too. As long as I was officially unworthy, I could stay safe and invisible, dreaming of my bright, thin future while never actually trying because, y’know, they’d never let me play anyway. But in the last few months, I’d stepped into that future, regardless of my size, and now my life was bigger and better than I’d ever expected it to be.

I was, as Margaux had urged, projecting an image. But it was
my
image, and maybe not her ideal. Maybe it wasn’t yet my ideal, either, because when I look back at
Good Morning America
, I see a girl who wanted nothing more than recognition—except to go hide under the bed all day. Faking confidence had taken me a long way toward actual confidence, but I had to take the last step myself. That was the step out of someone else’s opinion of me, and into my own, true skin. Maybe a baby doll dress, too.

There’s a popular self-helpy quote that says you teach people how to treat you. I think that’s true, but you also teach them how to look at you. Margaux taught me that, when I finally learned the right way to hear her. She, as much as anyone, nudged me out of my shell and into the world:
Here I am, like it or not.
She also soon promoted me into the senior writing position where I belonged.

It wasn’t just criticisms but also compliments that I had to learn how to hear. All those you-look-great (read: you-look-skinnier) comments had sent me right back into diet mode. The second people started noticing the subtle changes in my body, I’d wanted to accelerate the process, keep going forward, better, right to the top of the heap and the low end of the scale. That’s what got me panicking over omelets and gobbling down my dinner. I’d been overthinking and eating with anxiety again, looking up for those approving faces rather than in at my own hunger. I lost touch with my body for a moment there, and now my jeans were snug again. I’d forgotten the primary step in intuitive eating. Once again, I gave myself permission to eat, to stop eating, to buy potato bread, and to wear the clothes that made me feel good. Only then did my mind quit racing at mealtimes, allowing me to start eating like a person again.

It is easy to say that people are good or bad, because villains and heroes make for great stories. But that’s rarely true. Villains are almost always phantoms of our own making, and real heroism happens when you stop repeating that same old story and start telling the truth.

In reality, I wasn’t an ingenue or a teenager or a fan of high heels. Once, I’d been a kid in a pantry, but I wasn’t her anymore, either. As long as I clung to those identities, I would never find my own. I had to quit trying so hard to become something else—I just had to quit trying so hard, period. If I wanted to move forward, I had to get good and comfortable with who I really was: a writer, a woman, and kind of a drama queen.

H
ow are things different now that you’ve given up dieting?”

The question sounded garbled through the conference-room speakerphone, but I didn’t need her to repeat it. The nineteen-year-old interviewing me for her student newspaper was not the first to ask me this. Almost every day the topic came up. I sometimes imagined this must be what it felt like to be Jennifer Aniston, constantly having to tell reporters that she was fine, just fine, thanks, and she promised to have a baby ASAP. (Except, I wasn’t Jennifer Aniston and this wasn’t
Vanity Fair
. It was a bimonthly insert in a free campus newspaper; more copies would be barfed on than actually read.) Still, I let myself have the self-important daydream as I answered the same old queries: Had I lost weight? Was I in better shape? Those answers I’d gotten down pat. Then came that last question and I choked, every time.

“It’s nice to be able to eat pizza without freaking out,” I replied. Groundbreaking, I know.

I wrapped up the interview and headed back to my desk, grabbing my lunch out of the office refrigerator on the way. I was on a purple cabbage kick, so I filled a plate with the crunchy salad and leftover chicken thighs I’d baked with apples and onions the night before. The office seemed more occupied than usual, as everyone had skipped their Starbucks runs and off-site lunches to huddle inside against the endless winter, now bleeding into spring. Rather than find a free corner for a distraction-free lunch, I decided to eat at my desk, utilizing the original site blocker: a scarf over the computer screen. But first, I Instagrammed it.

It’s virtually impossible to succinctly summarize the transformative joy that begins when you jail-break out of the cage that’s kept you anxious and miserable and self-defeating for your entire conscious life. So when pressed for a straightforward answer about how quitting dieting had changed my life, all I came up with was the pizza quote.

I don’t know when or why I picked that food as my personal emblem. It was my first instinct, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I said “pizza” because I was fairly certain that no one wanted to hear the real answer: mindfulness. That’s what I talk about when I talk about pizza. If it sounds boring, it’s because it is—atomically boring. It was that extreme boredom that turned my whole life upside down.

People often conflate “mindful eating” with intuitive eating, but that’s just because they both sound kind of Zen and tedious. Intuitive eating is a multilayered approach that helps maniacs like me learn to eat like normal people. Mindful eating plays a role in that process, but it is simply the practice of eating mindfully. And, when I say simple, I mean the hardest fucking thing I had ever had to learn.

In my early days of intuitive eating, it was simple. It meant turning off the television, taking out my headphones, or stepping away from the computer for at least one meal a day. The difference there was instantly apparent: I tasted more, I needed less, and I actually felt the experience of satisfying hunger and fueling my body. On the one hand, it was incredible! What a novel experience, being so singularly focused and aware. On the other hand, it was awful. And, soon, that hand balled into a fist and banged onto the table, making a racket throughout every damn dinner. I was antsy and irritated, every single time. I forced myself to slow down and chew with consciousness, but it took all my effort not to shovel down the food and get back to
anything
else. How about picking up that essay I’d started writing two years ago? Or I could change the litter box! My kingdom for a credit-card charge to dispute. But I’d strong-armed myself into this promise to eat just
one
meal per day with only myself for company.

Anyone who’s ever meditated understands the importance of riding out that itchy restlessness. But I’d never lasted for more than one meditation class, and I’d never met an itch I hadn’t scratched.

I did my best. For months, I sat there with my plate and breathed through the irritation. Wasn’t it worth it for all the benefits? Without mindfulness, I’d never have been able to neutralize French fries in the great Battle of Brunch. But by now, it had become routine and boring. My lunch break had become less break and more just lunch. Looking back on the one hand—the rational one—I knew that was the whole point of this undertaking. But on the balled-up-fist hand, that didn’t mean I had to like it. That didn’t mean I couldn’t sit down with my steak salad, furious with it for being nothing but meat and spinach—a lunch I desired but still nothing more than lunch. And after each of those quiet, conscious meals, I got a glimpse of something unfamiliar and inevitable: Mindfulness was sneaking off of the plate and into the rest of my life.

People say that food is the good girl’s drug. Certainly, I’ll own up to my decades of addictive, disordered behavior around food. But now I realize it was just one particularly cheap and sticky strain of my real drug of choice: distraction.

It was easy to see how it slipped by me for so long. When I was a little kid, it just meant I was daydreamy, or imaginative, running around performing whole musicals and movie scenes for the cat. When I grew up into a voracious reader, then great! Who would discourage a twelve-year-old from rereading
The Catcher in the Rye
? In high school, I was a devoted theater student, and in college I was serious about film study.

All that was true. Then there’s the truer version.

I wasn’t just rereading
The Catcher in the Rye
. I was rereading everything, constantly: in the car on the way to school, at recess, waiting for Karen to come pick me up, and then all the way home. When I got home, I shoved a book on tape into my boom box and listened to another story until I fell asleep. Once, I discovered there was no audio version of
Just As Long As We’re Together
(the Judy Blume novel I just couldn’t grow out of), so I spent a weekend making one by reading the book aloud into a tape recorder. Then I just sat down and listened to it, playing Free Cell on the computer, for an entire summer.

Those teenaged nights I spent alone in my dorm at Walnut Hill singing along to CDs weren’t just about musical appreciation. They were about not being there, not being me. I was long gone, deep in my head, buried in the drama of “Someone Else’s Story” (from the original Broadway cast recording of
Chess
).

Then I’d gone off to spend college in one long movie binge under the auspices of “studying.” True, I did honestly love the medium, but part of what I loved about it was sitting in the dark watching other people live their lives. (And it’s not as if my taste was strictly highbrow; for every Andrzej Wajda film in my repertoire, there was a
Garden State
.) No matter what the quality, any film was better than my own life. I much preferred staying in to watch
Reality Bites
rather than going out and experiencing just how much reality actually bit. But that was just the mildest symptom of my distraction habit.

Driving back from BU sophomore year, I got pulled over by a state police officer going ninety-four miles an hour while listening to a particularly tense and thrilling chapter of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
. Later that summer I totaled my mother’s minivan in my first and only car accident. I wish I could tell you I was drunk, but the truth is I was singing at the top of my lungs along with
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
, completely shitfaced on Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Not once did it occur to me that this might be a problem. How could it? I’d built a wall of sound around myself so loud that nothing could get in. And I damn sure didn’t want to get out. It wasn’t until I started sitting through those quiet, mindful meals that the truth began to dawn on me.

As an unhappy kid, I’d let distraction swallow me whole, and that was fair. Children have no control over their own lives, caught in the wake of grown-up reality. But even as I grew into a teenager and adult, the fantasy was all I needed, and all I could handle. I’d handle real life later. When I chose a story to escape into, it was always about someone a little bit older than me—nothing too relatable. In high school I watched
Love Story
, imagining how much better life would be when I got to college. In college, I watched
The Last Days of Disco
, thinking how sophisticated and social I would be once I got that first job and cramped but well-decorated apartment. My dorm room was a sty, but the second I got my degree I’d transform into the kind of person who vacuumed.

Then, there I was, an alleged adult with the cramped apartment and cat hair all over the floor. The more real my life became around me, the harder I read, sang, watched, and of course, ate.

When I was being good, I’d spend weekends chopping up heaps of greens for those virtuous pots of healthy soup, listening to David Sedaris read essays on a CD player, then an iPod, then an iPhone. When I was in between diets, I’d pull sheet after sheet of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven, then eat a stinging hot plateful in front of
When Harry Met Sally
. Fine, my twenties weren’t going as planned, but I would make lemons into lemon bars and remember that everything would become better, brighter, and funnier when I hit my thirties. Thirty was the new twenty, the part where everything got good. So said every women’s magazine:
By thirty, you know what you want, you’re making more money, and you’re finally comfortable in your own skin.
Really? Great! After spending a decade in my aimless, broke, uncomfortable twenties, thirty sounded like a blast. Until then, I’d just watch a movie and wait to grow up.

I was twenty-nine when I sat down for that first distraction-free meal. I didn’t know then, but each time I came to the table I took another step out of the daydream and into reality.

“How are things different now that you’ve given up dieting?” they asked, and I’d give them the pizza quote. It was true. Then there was the truer version.