Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (30 page)

Two hours later, Jon and I sat watching
Pretty Woman
and passing pints of ice cream back and forth across my cat-hair-covered sofa. This scene wouldn’t even have made it into the movie. My life now looked like something
cut out
of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
.

Lying in bed that night, awake again, I thought about the radical eating coach I’d interviewed earlier that summer on the subject of “
emotional eating
.” That’s how she put it—“
emotional eating
,” in highly italicized air quotes.

“I don’t really buy into the idea of it,” she told me, going on to say that every person eats “
emotionally
.”

“But, obviously, a person should feel their feelings rather than eat over them constantly,” I replied.

She shook her head. “You can still feel your feelings and eat. Dieters call it ‘
emotional eating
,’ but regular people just call it ‘
wanting a cookie
.’ I don’t think ‘
emotional eating
’ really exists.”

A “
radical
” concept indeed, but she had a point about the cookie. Even in childhood, no Nutter Butter ever fully prevented me from feeling the shit I didn’t want to feel. But that never stopped me from throwing more cookies at the problem. Cookies, or ice cream.

It took approximately two more nights of ice cream and romcoms before I gave in and went full-blown Jones, street-crying and all. Harry and I were walking to a birthday party on the Lower East Side when our casual conversation took a turn. All he did was ask how the book was coming along, and my eyes filled with hot, ridiculous tears.

“Let’s go find a place to talk,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me out of the Friday night foot traffic heading down Orchard Street.

“No, we have to go to the party. Let’s just go!” I wiped at my eyes, so embarrassed.

“We can be late. What’s going on?”

Here’s where I needed the monologue. This was my chance to unleash a summer’s worth of cathartic sobs. (Only then could I begin my redemptive late-night-walking-around-the-city-thinking-about-where-shit-went-wrong montage. With original scoring by Aimee Mann.) If I’d been able to speak, I’d have started with how scary it had been to see my friend laid low, and how the tiny, vanishingly small chance of his death made life feel at once precious and pointless. I’d talk about how stressful writing this book was and how monstrous I felt to be stressed over something like that when cancer stress should be the
only
stress. I’d throw in something about my mom and how I’d stared at her number in my phone four times that day, unsure if I should dial or delete it for good. I’d finish by saying that I was a fraud. I walked such a good walk, telling readers how well and joyous I was now that I’d gotten free of all my food issues. But TomatoPlant and the deli guy knew the real me: a sad, frightened, dependent thing with a freezer full of “
emotions
.”

I couldn’t say any of that, though, because I was crying too hard to talk. Harry stood silent, rubbing my back lightly, while the Lower East Side went on about its Friday night. I sobbed into his shoulder, completely unable to care who saw. Once you start street-weeping, you just need to keep going until the fadeout.

It took a month. I spent the rest of the summer crying all over the city, making up for lost tears. I listened to what could only be described as a fuck-ton of Aimee Mann. Harry got good at talking me through sleepless nights, and I got
slightly
better at talking about the things keeping me awake. I bought ice cream and I ate it, sometimes because I wanted it and other times because I really, really wanted it. All the air quotes in the world couldn’t make this any less real.

I knew ice cream wouldn’t make things less stressful, keep my friend’s cancer from returning, or un-feel my fear about it. I went back to
Intuitive Eating
and reread the chapter on emotional eating. One of the goals of the program is to learn how to cope without food, but the book stressed how important it was to recognize the “perks” of emotional eating. It wasn’t a symptom of failure, but simply “a sign that stressors in your life at that moment surpass the coping mechanisms that you have developed,” the chapter explained. “Overeating becomes a red flag to let you know that something isn’t right in your life.”
No shit
, I thought.
Thanks for the heads-up, Häagen-Dazs.

This was a habit I didn’t want to have. But maybe eating some emotional ice cream wasn’t a deal breaker. Maybe it would take more than ten months to get over a lifelong toxic relationship with food. And maybe it would take even longer to get over my mom.

Here was the really scary thought:
What if I
never
got over it?

We met at Grand Central. I spotted her first, standing in front of the clock in the middle of the bustling great hall. I raised my hand in a little wave as I approached.

“Can I give you a hug?” she asked.

I nodded and stepped into her familiar arms, both of us hesitant, but trying.

“Hi, Mom.”

We walked to the nearest exit, swarmed by Saturday tourists, and I aimed for Bryant Park.

“I don’t really know what to say,” she said, as we sat down at a spindly green table by the lawn.

I couldn’t think where to begin.
Do you still think I made up that whole molestation thing to ruin your life? Hey, I’m writing a memoir, and you’re gonna be in it!
There was nothing we could resolve in an hour in the park. Even if there was, I hadn’t come for resolution, only peace. It didn’t really matter what we sat there and talked about, or even that we talked. The most important thing was that we sat there, together, for a while.

That night, I recounted the Mom meeting to Jon over bowls of cold, late-summer pasta at my little dining table. In the last few weeks, I’d watched as he went through a posttrauma montage of his own. (His was more of an early-morning, take-on-the-day montage, with Janet Jackson in the background.) He’d rented a gorgeous high-rise apartment with a two-bridge view. He’d forgiven Ben and bounced back from both the surgery and the breakup in record time, suddenly taking up jogging and dating a new guy we called “Harvard Penis.” Having hit my own bottom less than a year before, it was stunning to see my friend rebound from his own, and a lot more quickly than I had.

“And, that’s the magic of cancer!” he tilted his head and smiled a real-fake smile.

“Here’s lookin’ at you, cancer.” I extended my tumbler of Prosecco toward him, and we toasted to cancer like two old friends at the end of a long, lesson-learning movie. Ah, sure, there’d been some hits, but the important thing was everyone was alive, happy and better for the journey. And, it was over.

Except no, of course it wasn’t. Five minutes later, Jon was in hysterics, enraged at his ex and terrified that every flicker of pain in his body was the cancer coming back. In that moment, none of it felt
over
. The cold pasta sat between us getting colder, and the only sound to score his sadness was the light fizzing of a cheap sparkling wine. By now, even I’d run out of platitudes. This time, I’d have to improvise.

“You know what I heard on a podcast this morning?” I asked, the way all good speeches begin.

“What?” He looked up from under a single, trembling hand.

“So, I was listening to
WTF
at the gym this morning. You don’t listen to that, right?”

“No, I don’t listen to any podcasts. I know, I know.”

“Right, no, that’s not the point. Anyway, Rosanne Cash was on.”

It would have been a nicer moment had these words of wisdom come from my own well-earned experience. Even if I’d pulled them from a favorite old book, that might have given them more gravitas. But I’d take an epiphany wherever I could get it, and this one came courtesy of a celebrity interview I’d heard on the treadmill one morning.

“She said this thing about how ‘closure’ doesn’t really exist.”

“Okay.” Jon raised his eyebrows, unimpressed.

“Think about it, though! It’s amazing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, we all talk about ‘closure’ as if it’s mandatory.”

“Right, so you can move on.”

“Exactly! But when has that ever happened? When it counts, I mean.”

He sniffed and shrugged.

“What if closure is bullshit?”

“It’s all bullshit.”

“I’m serious. What if we never waited around for this mythical feeling, and just moved on without it?”

He shrugged again, then nodded in the way that means:
I love you and I get it and you can stop talking now.

The best part of going on a diet is knowing it will end. I don’t mean the part where the whole thing falls apart and you find yourself whispering on the phone with the Chinese place, calling in dumplings like a mob hit. I mean the “after” shot. We think we’re running toward a goal weight, but really, we’re not running toward anything so much as running away from that “before.”

“Before,” I was fat. I was fearful and embarrassed by myself. I was too damaged by everything that came “before”: the pantry full of chocolate chips, the late nights lurched in front of the toilet, the looking and touching I could never hide from as a kid, and all the other looks and touches I’d missed out on, hiding as an adult. The failure, most of all, is what defined “before.” Not since that first diet at age eleven, when I’d lost thirty pounds in two weeks by subsisting on green beans and mania, had I ever hit a goal weight. I lost so much, but never enough. If I went from a size 16 to an 8, then that was halfway to a 4. And when I hit 160 after losing fifty pounds, I was that much closer to 120, when I would finally leave my room, buy all new clothes, and start my life, for real. Until then: reruns and crunches on a floor that I should probably vacuum. That was before.

The day I quit dieting was the day I gave up on “after,” and what a great relief it was. But it took almost a year for me to realize that there’s no escaping my “before.” All that history is in me. The people who hurt me and the ways I’ve hurt myself—they are part of the messy, awkward truth of who I was and who I am now.

I am better, but I am not done. I no longer have a clear picture of what being done looks like, and I think, more than anything, that’s the change that’s made me better. When I stopped trying so desperately to starve and burn “before” away, I finally got to participate in right now. That baggage wasn’t going anywhere. So, I’d just have to bring it with me.

Here’s the uninspiring truth that I learned one uneventful morning while climbing up the treadmill: Endings are baloney. You can look at any day of your life and call it an ending, a beginning, or a Tuesday. That doesn’t mean that every day will be the same, only that there’s no point in standing around screaming at the sun to set. There is no such thing as real closure the way we typically define it. It’s not a gift someone else can give to you. The apology will never erase the argument. The good-bye kiss won’t make you miss them any less. The diet may help you drop the baby weight, but you still had a baby. You’ll never un-have it, no matter how much dressing you order on the side.