Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (29 page)

When I arrived at the apartment, Jon was a dopey, slowed-down version of himself. I hugged his parents and sister, who’d flown in the day before the surgery to help him through the recovery. Soon, a gang of friends descended and we all clustered around him on the couch for the weirdest dinner party any of us had ever been to.

“Dude, you’re totally high. I think your parents can tell.”

Jon smiled through a codeine haze. “Shhhh, be cool.”

“You need anything?”

“Ugh, yeah. I need to call Ben.”

“Whoa, no you don’t. What?”

“Not today, but I gotta call him. I have to forgive him, or something.”

“Yeah, or something. I thought we were going to give him bedbugs.”

He looked at me, squinting, trying to find the thought. Finally, he gestured at the ice pack in his lap.

“It’s too much. I can’t deal with being mad anymore. I’ve got to make some peace, even if he doesn’t deserve it. I mean,
I
deserve it, right?”

“Okay. Right.”

God, he was high.

The air was still thick with muddy heat when I left just after sunset. Still, I decided to walk the forty minutes home, because I hadn’t been to the gym all week. Twice I’d canceled training sessions with Stephanie, needing to squeeze in an extra hour at the office, or sit through a bad night with Jon. Walking home was good enough, I told myself. Life gets messy, and there are far worse messes than having your
workout schedule
interrupted. Besides, I would be half asleep at the gym. Most nights I patched together just a few hours’ sleep, lying awake and worrying about all the things I couldn’t control. Next, I worried about the things I could control, but wasn’t: the week-old dishes in the sink, the unread e-mails stacking up no matter how many times I flagged them, and the laundry pile slumped over in the corner of my room like a body that I just didn’t have time to bury. One morning, while yanking my hair into an unwashed ponytail, I noticed my armpit fuzz had grown to making-a-statement lengths, simply because I’d forgotten to shave for a month. I looked down at my legs, covered in light blonde down, and decided maybe I was making a statement after all:
I am busy.

Nearing home, I wandered into the bodega down the block from my apartment to buy cat litter, congratulating myself for remembering at least one thing. Then, I remembered another thing: ice cream. Like all the twenty-four-hour delis in my neighborhood, this one kept two things well-stocked: loose cigarettes and a freezer drawer jammed with rock-solid pints of ice cream, absolutely none of which were low-fat frozen yogurt.

This time, I paused. An ice cream craving was fine, of course. But this was no isolated incident. First, there was the Ben & Jerry’s that night at Harry’s. Then, earlier this week I’d gone to the deli downstairs at work to buy a turkey sandwich for lunch, and noticed the gelato stand in the corner. The whole sandwich idea seemed idiotic all of a sudden—too dry, too salty. It wouldn’t be remotely satisfying, and true satisfaction was the most important thing, right? I ended up having two scoops of strawberry gelato for lunch, chasing it with a handful of almonds to make it more arguably a meal, should I be called upon to defend it in a court of law.

I’d popped downstairs for gelato most days for the last two weeks, usually just having one scoop as an afternoon snack. I’d always thought it ludicrous that a half cup was the recommended portion on the back of every pint. But I had to admit that when I ate the real-deal, cream-based stuff with mindful attention, it didn’t take much more than that to fulfill the craving.

Then there were the days when I wasn’t so mindful. Sometimes I ate my afternoon ice cream while browsing through Sephora.com’s latest facial serums that might be worth incurring a little credit card debt. Sometimes I scraped the tiny plastic spoon around for one last bite while watching
Saturday Night Live
clips on YouTube, promising myself that I’d watch just one more, just until I reeeeeaaallly finished the ice cream. Then I’d get back to writing this tricky paragraph, return my dad’s phone call, and shave my armpits.

Now, here I was, walking home from my best friend’s cancer party. And fuck it. It was hot. It was July, when you’re supposed to want ice cream. If I was craving fresh baked brownies, then sure, we could call that an instance of emotional eating. But what could be more instinctive than following a light summer-vegetable meal with a scoop of mint chocolate chip? Also, it had protein!

Upstairs, I grabbed a spoon, took off all my clothes, and sat on my unmade bed, reaching for the remote. I thought about Jon, likely nodding off into twelve hours of painkiller sleep. I remembered how, earlier that evening, he smiled when I walked through the door, then winced, hard. But still, he leaned up from the sofa to hug me with the arm that wasn’t holding down the ice pack.

“Hey, MG,” he said.

“MG” was our shared nickname, created the first year we met at Walnut Hill. It began one Friday night, when we rented a video of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and got permission for Jon to stay late in my dorm’s common room to watch it.

Neither of us had seen the film before, and both thought we were in for some gentle, old-timey comedy. But when Mickey Rooney appeared on screen as Holly Golightly’s “Japanese” neighbor, we were struck dumb. When the movie came out in 1961, reviews described this character as “broadly exotic.” Today, we might call him “so fucking racist.” We’re talking buckteeth, taped eyelids, and an inability to pronounce the letter
L
.

On screen, Rooney started screeching “Missa Go-right-reee!” and Jon and I turned to each other, agape. Then, we exploded with teenaged outrage. What should we do? Call the police? Write a manifesto? How did this film become so universally adored? The movie-watching night was over. We were too busy exclaiming “Missa Gorightry?!” at an ever-more loud and flabbergasted volume. One of my dorm-mates emerged in the doorway, pissed off and half asleep, clearly having been awoken by our spontaneous antiracism demonstration (which probably looked more like two white kids screaming racial slurs at each other). We stopped yelling and burst into unstoppable laughter.

We never saw the end of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. But that night, the “Missa Gorightry” screaming match became the inside joke that Jon and I never got over. We’d called each other “MG” ever since. When new acquaintances asked where the nickname came from, it was virtually impossible to explain without making us sound like racially insensitive idiots. That’s why you keep old friends around. In a crowd of strangers, they’re the ones who know your true heart. And that you’re not a racist.

A car alarm bleated beneath my window and I fell out of the memory. All of a sudden, I was back in my apartment, tired and hot. Jon was sleeping somewhere, full of stitches and medicine. When I looked down at the pint of ice cream, half of it was gone.

L
et’s talk about this for a minute. Do you have time?”

Stephanie looked up from my chart, having just recorded all my measurements.

“Sure.”

It was an early Friday morning in August, and this meeting would be our last. The gym had been incredibly generous in letting me temporarily train with her for free, but Stephanie no longer had room in her schedule, and I just didn’t have the cash flow that would allow me to pay for a new personal trainer. Besides, it was never my intention to have one forever. I’d learned my way around the gym and gotten used to being a regularly active person. Before my gym schedule got thrown out of whack in the last couple months, I’d even come to like jogging. I kind of hated myself for admitting it, but I suppose begrudging progress is progress nonetheless.

“Your blood pressure’s a little higher than last time.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Any idea why that might be?”

“I have a little too much on my plate right now, I guess. And I’m not sleeping much.”

“Okay. Well, keep an eye on that. The other thing is your body fat.”

“What about it?”

“There’s been some change.” Stephanie pointed to the graph where she’d recorded all my numbers after pinching my upper arms, lower belly, and other fatty spots with measuring calipers.

“See, your abdomen is down, but your arms are actually up a little.”

“Ah.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Maybe
sorry
?

“Same thing here. Your calf measurement is down, but your thighs haven’t changed at all. And your subscapular is up a bit as well.”

“Is that unusual? To fluctuate?”

“No, it’s not uncommon. But I mention it because you’ve been a little inconsistent this summer.”

Right. All those mornings I’d canceled. All those weeks I’d worked out three days instead of five, either occupied with Jon, catching up on work, or too exhausted from my cool new insomnia habit.

“I have had a lot going on.” I heard defensiveness creeping into my voice.

“I just hope you’re not quitting this thing.”

“I’m not. Of course I’m not.”

“Good. Because you’ve come a long way.”

“I know that. And I’m not done.”

She looked down at the numbers and shook her head. “I wish we weren’t finishing on this note.”

I looked down at the page. I saw the months of Stephanie’s diligent recording, noting my resting heart rate, my stamina on the treadmill, but mostly all those little pudgy spots she pinched with calipers to track my body fat. On paper, that was all that mattered. On a deeper level, I knew there was a more important story the calipers couldn’t tell. But, sitting there with Stephanie’s mild disappointment, it was hard to hear.

“Stephanie, thank you for everything.”

She smiled and reached out long, strong arms for a hug.

“You helped me change my life,” I told her.

It was true. She’d pushed me as far as I could go. Now, it was up to me to stay there. If I could do that by myself, I wouldn’t need a piece of paper for proof. I wasn’t quitting anything.

I headed upstairs to the treadmills and power-walked through a quick workout on my own. Disappointment was okay. I could have a little pout, right? I reached for my phone and the particular form of validation one can achieve only through social media. People talk about how social media keeps us isolated from one another and unable to fully process our feelings. But if I ever needed a reality check on my emotional stability, all I needed to do was open an app. The more needy I was, the more I Facebooked, Instagrammed, and tweeted.
Did you guys see the moon last night? So crazy!
(Please say yes, for I am so alone in this world and need the solace of knowing that someone else looked up at the moon and thought it was so crazy.)
Can you believe how huge my laundry pile is?!
(
Can
you believe it? Is it unhealthy? Am I a hoarder? What do you think?)

Stomping uphill at 3.1 mph, I tweeted something about watching
Law & Order
at the gym. Everyone watched
Law & Order
, and surely one of those fans would click the little Favorite button under my tweet, giving me the gold star I needed. No, not “needed.” Not anymore. Now, I just really, really wanted it, and that was different.

I forgot to eat lunch until almost four. Somewhere around midday, I’d had a few low-grade hunger twinges, but mostly, I just felt tired. The night before, I’d found myself thrashing around in Harry’s bed, hurling my face into the pillow and ordering myself to sleep. He’d recently bought an ultrathick foam mattress cover to try to alleviate one of the five thousand things that suddenly kept me up all night. Now I watched him sleep soundly through my insomnia tantrum, completely undisturbed. He was the wineglass and I was the lady jumping on the bed, or rather, kicking and moaning on the bed. Those commercials aren’t exaggerating. That space foam is good.

For most of the night, I just stared at the ceiling, reprioritizing my to-worry list; there was one item slowly creeping right to the top. Ever since Jon’s post-surgery party, I couldn’t get his words of codeine wisdom out of my head.
I can’t deal with being mad anymore
, he’d said about his brutal dumping.
I’ve got to make some peace, even if he doesn’t deserve it.

She didn’t deserve it, either. But maybe I did. If Jon could forgive the guy who’d broken his heart, maybe it was possible to forgive the woman who’d broken mine. I sat up in bed and grabbed my phone, looking through my contacts just to see if it was still there. It had been almost ten years since I’d lived in that house, but the number was still labeled “Home.”

The next day, coffee was my first priority. Numb with sleeplessness, I hurried through a decent breakfast, knowing that without protein and carbs in the morning, I’d be half asleep at my desk all afternoon. Next, I drank as much coffee as I could stand before noon (the caffeine cutoff time in my new Get Some Fucking Sleep plan). I’d never been a committed coffee person, but now that I was a zombie, I found it made me a slightly more productive zombie. The only issue was that coffee turned the volume on my appetite way down. Most days I reminded myself to listen for it anyway, but other times, screw it. That day was a “screw it” day. Eating well was a priority, but so were things like unfinished work, friends in crisis, and staying awake.

In lieu of lunch I took a bag of stale almonds out of my desk drawer, dumped a small heap next to my keyboard, and clicked to the comments of my latest Anti-Diet Project post.

Catybaby:
This is so stupid. You’re saying we should eat whatever we want? It’s okay to be fat and lazy? What if I “intuitively” want a pound of bacon every day? That’s how this country became a bunch of disgusting, diseased morons. If I accepted myself as a weak fat-ass I’d kill myself.

YES. Jerks and idiots. This was also a priority, and my favorite kind. I replied:

Kelsey Miller:
Wow, sorry to hear that! If you check out the rest of the column you’ll see fitness is a big part of it, and it’s not quite as simple as eating pounds of bacon. Intuitive eating encourages people to honor hunger and enjoy food with mindfulness and self-respect. Hope that helps clarify!

Catybaby never replied, but someone else did:

DaniellaB:
Show me the studies that says this works. Bet u have none.

I grabbed some bookmarked studies on the benefits of intuitive eating and diet-failure stats, pasting them into a reply. Then I launched into a chipper tirade about how “working” meant different things to different people, and mine didn’t mean getting skinny. Thnx!

I clicked deeper into the comments, thanking the supporters for their support but keeping my eyes peeled for what I really wanted (the critics!). Then, out of the clear blue Internet, came the name I hadn’t seen in months.

John2John:
Lol, fatso loves bacon nom nom nom. ur still ugly.

I could hardly believe the prickly glee that filled me from head to toe upon seeing this comment. It was perfect, pure dumb-assery, and mean as any insult I’d ever gotten. I mean, “fatso.” It took confidence to whip out an old-school “fatso.” My hat-tip to you, John2John. How I missed your ugly mug.

What trolls like John2John didn’t realize was that, as much as they wanted to make me feel bad, I got a gross and secret thrill from their nastiness. It satisfied the part of me that was used to being bullied—comfortable even. And I loved to see other readers come to my defense, like an army of usernames and avatars. The only downside was that I couldn’t really reply, the way I did to other criticisms. There was no valid argument I could negate, and to acknowledge him would just make it look as if I took the term “fatso” seriously. I’d just have to enjoy watching his comment get pushed to the bottom, buried by all the nice ones. But that was not what happened. Instead, someone backed him up.

TomatoPlant:
I don’t know that I’d call her ugly, but she’s definitely irresponsible. She just wants everyone to be fat like her because losing weight and getting healthy is too much work. It’s pathetic. She’s desperate. Sigh.

This, I could not abide. How could someone both agree with a troll like John2John and do it in correct grammatical format? TomatoPlant was obviously a real person who knew how to use commas when calling me a loser. I went into personal PR overdrive, replying with something like:

Kelsey Miller:
Hi there, TomatoPlant! I’m actually in the best shape of my life these days. And, in fact, it’s been even harder than dieting, but the difference is that this time I’m actually getting healthy and happy. Doesn’t feel so pathetic! Thanks for reading!!

TomatoPlant:
So, that’s why you’ve replied to every single negative comment on every single story? Okay, honey.

When I looked up from the screen next, half the office was gone. It was like one of those nights when falling asleep and waking up feels like merely blinking. I’d waded belly-deep into the comments on each and every one of my Anti-Diet Project posts, and then dozens of other stories I’d written in the last two months. Every four-hundred-word post, every personal essay—I combed them all for negative comments and saw that somewhere, someone who called herself “TomatoPlant” was exactly right about me, at least in one regard. I’d never once let a negative comment go unanswered. I’d defended myself against legitimate critics, juvenile jerks, and people who’d clearly not read past the first paragraph of the story.

Looking at Twitter, I saw that negative tweets about my work were met with aggressively positive replies. Almost every time, my response was longer than the critical comment itself. In the last year, I’d made my tiny mark as a writer who broadcast a message of confidence and self-acceptance. I could click on any interview I’d given or any piece I’d written and see myself as the poised, kick-ass woman I wanted to be. That was the real story. But scroll down to the comments or check my Twitter feed, and there I found it punctured with a million tiny holes.

You busy tonight?
Jon’s text buzzed my phone to life, interrupting the great TomatoPlant revelation.

Approaching the bodega on my way home that evening, I didn’t have to wait for a craving to arrive. It was a constant, low-grade ice cream fever now, and one that could only be cured with more ice cream. I didn’t even pretend to ask the guy behind the register how much. I just plunked down five bucks for a pint of AmeriCone Dream and told him I didn’t need a bag.

“Spoon?” he asked.

“What? No.”

I could have picked the same argument I’d had with Harry, demanding if the cashier thought I was the kind of wildebeest that ate Ben & Jerry’s by the pint, and what made him think that, and what right did he have to offer me a spoon in that tone? But I decided one cliché was enough for today. Right now only my jam-packed freezer knew what a Bridget Jonesian mess I was. I wasn’t even the flawed but charming book version of Bridget Jones or the flawed and slightly less charming movie version. I mean the movie
sequel
version where she cries in the street and exclaims things like, “Oh God, I’m
never
going to get married!”