Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (4 page)

My initial thought was that it would be a complete and total waste of time and
good-bye
. But I sat on my ego for five more minutes, promising it a trip to Sephora later, and tried to really imagine Theresa’s scenario. If I had all that—freedom from food obsession, no need to diet, a natural instinct toward healthy, satisfying eating—could I
hypothetically
be okay at this current weight?

“Maybe.”

“Okay,” said Theresa. “That’s fair.”

And she smiled. And she didn’t kick me out. It was a little miracle, to suddenly feel good enough.

I wanted my answer to be yes, but it wasn’t. This was my new chapter, and I didn’t want to fill it with my filthy old habits. I’d been a liar of convenience all my life, relying on the kind of falsehoods that grease the wheels and open escape hatches, letting me slip out of any uncomfortable truth. “I’m not interested in a serious relationship, either,” “Oh no! I didn’t get your e-mail,” “The leftover birthday cake is gone? The cleaning guys must have tossed it. That sucks!” I was the kind of liar who was begging to be caught.

“Yes,” I wanted to tell Theresa. “All I want is health and happiness. That other nonsense is behind me.” That’s what the confident plus-size woman would say right before she went hiking. That was who I wanted to be, but I just wasn’t yet. I left Theresa’s office hand in hand with the weepy, little fat girl, knowing we weren’t done. She was the lifelong liar in me, and she didn’t know any better. I’d have to tell the truth for both of us.

I
was eight years old the first time I got caught, and the crime was a handful of chocolate chips. I was on the phone with my dad, a nightly ritual.

“Adam’s on the phone,” my mother would call, and I’d take the receiver with its endless spiral cord and step inside the pantry, turn on the light, and close the door.

“Can’t she say, ‘Your father’s on the phone’?” he’d ask, and I’d lean against the shelves, assessing the goods. Our house was small, my siblings young and loud, and the pantry was the only place a person could close a door that wouldn’t immediately be opened.

“How did the quiz go?”

“Fine.”

“Did you have a sense of how well you did?”

“Fine.”

“Do you know how much I love you?”

“Yeah.”

This conversation was our well-practiced routine. I knew other kids of divorce who treated their long-distance fathers more like relatives than parents. But, though he lived far away, my dad called often enough that I had the luxury of getting bored with him.

I spent most of these calls preoccupied with the shelves. My mother had a small catering business, and the closet was perennially jammed with large-batch boxes of baking ingredients and other dry goods. With the door shut, I shook stale sprinkles into my mouth and sucked on cinnamon buttons intended to be noses of gingerbread men.

“Is there something in your mouth?” Dad asked. “What’s that sound?”

“Raisins.”

Raisins were my cover, every time. Though I knew grapes were off-limits (“pure sugar,” my mom said), raisins were smaller, harder, and I didn’t like them as much. Their mild grossness made them Good.

But on the back shelf of the pantry, tucked among dusty plastic bottles of cake decoration and boxes of Grape-Nuts that nobody ate, was a plastic tub, the size of a fish tank, of Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chips. This container was the first thing you saw when you opened the door: its giant red top, big yellow label, and enough chocolate chips to bake a batch of five thousand cookies.

We rarely had sweets in the house, and if we did, they were my mom’s pints of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, which were not easy to sneak without making a visible dent. Sometimes I’d find bags of Fun Size candies on top of the fridge, which my stepfather had impulse-bought on a supermarket run. Our nanny, Karen, kept a bucket of leftover Halloween candy next to her bed for months after the holiday. But again, these indulgences were hard to pull off without being detected. Someone might walk into the kitchen before I could get the step stool back in place, or Karen would note the disappearance of all her Reese’s cups. I was good, just not good enough for those illicit treats. James Bond wasn’t good enough.

The Toll House chips were for large-batch baking projects Mom often did as a caterer. They were an ingredient, not a treat, and therefore kept right out in the open. It was like a chocolate loophole. I could lean into the pantry, pretend to grab a can of tuna, and come out with a heaping gob of chocolate in my mouth before anyone would notice. During my nightly dad-calls, I didn’t even need an excuse to be in there. And so I’d take the opportunity to slowly siphon off the contraband from that tub, my desire and terror multiplying as I watched the level go down. I was careful, telling myself I’d take just one handful, and then suck each chip into sweet nothingness on my tongue. But when my palm was empty, warm and chocolate swiped, I knew I’d have to have another. I would hang on, putting it off for five minutes, “fine”-ing my dad on the other end of the phone. And then, my pulse leaping to attention, I’d reach back, silently unscrew the top, plunge my hand into the tub, and pull out another round. It was a moment of extreme daring, a compulsive instinct I had to obey, not only for the pleasure that followed, but the fear of knowing any moment my mother could open the door.

This was the peak of our Food Police phase. Later, that’s how Mom and I would both refer to the years leading up to my first real diet. This was the era of tense, well-supervised meals: her hard gaze on my plate at the dinner table, the raised eyebrow as I reached for another helping of mashed potatoes. Mom wanted to help set me straight and I sorely needed it, budding criminal that I was.

I don’t remember exactly when or how it began, but I know there was a time when I could eat or ask for food without considering the consequences. In one of my grandfather’s photo albums there’s a shot of me somewhere around age four, glancing casually at the camera, tuna sandwich in hand like it was no big deal. Each time I see it, I’m stunned by the moxie on that kid, eating tuna on white bread, and probably with full-fat mayo.

But as long as I’d been conscious of having a body, I had known there was something wrong with it. There was just too much of me, and no one found this more offensive than my mother. It was as if my body was a drunk, vulgar guest I’d brought to the party and couldn’t keep under control.

Her own body fell into the general category of thin. It seemed to me that there were really only two ways to be: thin, pretty, and long hair, or fat, ugly, and who cares what the hair looks like? Mom had swingy blonde hair and long legs made lean with yoga. She always had a pint of coffee ice cream in the freezer, and ate it right out in the open. Even after giving birth to my two siblings, just eighteen months apart, she never crossed over into the realm of fat and loathsome. Baby weight or not, she always had the carriage of a thin woman.

A kid wants her mother to like her, and I was failing. True, I was smart, well-behaved, and sweet, but none of that trumped my round little tummy. All that just made me a fat goody-goody. But when Mom declared a Food Police state, I knew it was my chance to get in with the popular crowd. I just had to impress the leader.

“What’s up?” my mom had asked one day as we drove back from school.

At eight years old, I was just beginning the journey into chubby pubescence. Normally, I loved the times when she picked me up instead of Karen. Conversations that would have been brief or edgy at home were made breezy when she drove, the activity uncorking her. But that day I sat curled up quietly, arms crossed and fingertips poking into the doughy flesh of my sides.

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded, leaned my head against the window. I could smell my own hair.

“Well, if you don’t want to talk about it, then maybe you should try and snap out of it.”

My eyes spilled over and soon I was sobbing. It was the stupidest thing. I’d gone on a weekend trip with my best friend Amy and her mom to Rocking Horse Ranch, a Catskills resort where kids rode horseback through trails so flat and unscenic that only a horse-crazed third grader could possibly have any fun. I came back to school with the hilarious anecdote about the horse I’d ridden all weekend.

“His name was Double-Dutch Bubble Butt!”

Approximately four seconds later, it had become my nickname for life.

I wept the story out to my mother as we drove through the pebbled driveways and carefully unmown meadows of Bedford Hills, heading home to Croton and our little house by the river.

“Oh, baby.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. That really stinks.”

“It sucks!” I moaned, further testing the waters with an almost-curse-word.

“It does suck,” she nodded. “Those kids…Honey, I’m just sorry.”

“I hate it, I hate this!” I said, grabbing at my belly. She was in, this time. I had her on my side. Letting the tears out was always risky, since waterworks could just as easily be met with an eye roll. But the gamble had paid off this afternoon, and good thing, too. Crying was inevitable, but had I caught her in an eye-rolling mood the forty-minute drive would only serve to irritate her further with every silent tear.

“I just want to be someone else!” I was in full-blown melodrama mode now, swooning against the headrest.

“Well, Kels.” Mom rested her forearms on the wheel as she eased to a stop at a red light. Her tone shifted just so. Sympathy time was up. Now it was all about bootstraps. “You know, you don’t have to put butter on everything.”

I hiccupped, stared up at the passenger-side visor mirror, eye to red eye with myself.

“Right? It’s not like you can’t do something about this.” She pointed an elbow at my middle.

“I know.”

“I know you know. Listen, you can do this. You just need to stop snacking so much, right? You’ve got to stop with the junk. I know Amy can eat chocolate ice cream for breakfast and still look like a twig, but most girls can’t.”

I thought of Amy’s house. Her mom kept a candy drawer in the kitchen, no rules or anything. Both mother and daughter were tall and reed-thin and ate take-out every night in front of
Jeopardy!
I’d just about lost my mind when I first saw the inside of their freezer: There was half a goddamn Carvel cake in there that they’d
forgotten
to finish after Amy’s birthday.

“I don’t eat chocolate ice cream for breakfast.”

“I didn’t mean literally, come on.”

“I’m sorry!” The sobs began a second wind and Mom reached over, grabbing my hand with a little shake.

“Hey, enough. This is not the end of the world. You just need to shape up.”

I turned my hand around inside her palm, holding her hand back with a squeeze. The light changed and she let go, eyes back on the road.

“Y’know what I mean, jelly bean?”

That was when the head-shaking and lip-pursing at the dinner table began. Every time I extended a hand toward the bread basket or the gravy boat, Mom’s eyes would snag it like a fishhook. I’d look up at the “no” on her face and sit back before anyone else could see that I’d been reaching in the first place.

At restaurants, I’d order a side of fries and she’d raise an eyebrow.

“You sure about that?”

The waitress would look between us for a moment, unsure of her role in this stalemate.

“I meant salad.”

We went on for years like this, the fridge filling up with carrot sticks and the ice cream stashed behind the ice dispenser, out of sight but always on my mind. A fat kid always knows where the ice cream is.

Even if I was just a not-so-skinny kid, I knew that was as good as obese.
You are obese
, I reminded myself daily, standing naked before the small mirror in my room on the basement level of the house. I’d initially hung it on the wall to be part of a vanity table, hoping to get a cushy stool to place in front of it, so I could sit and brush my hair a hundred times before bed, probably something I saw in a movie about pretty girls with flat stomachs and zero armpit hair. But I never got the stool, and was now stuck with a mirror placed exactly high enough to see my midsection each time I walked by. Instead of brushing my hair each night, I jumped up and down in front of it, gaping with mesmerized horror at the jiggly roll below my navel and the floppy blobs that would be breasts on any other girl.

It was a mean little ritual, this routine assessment of my disgustingness. Some nights it overwhelmed me and I dropped to the ground, first doing crunches, then leg lifts, then push-ups, until my vision went fuzzy and I crashed to the floor, banging my knees. My room’s cement flooring was covered in white linoleum, with plenty of throw rugs for warmth. But as the exercises became part of my nightly routine, I sought out the hard, cold spots on the floor, positioning my legs over them so that I could bang my knees for the grand finale. The ritual grew in time and detail as I grew more hateful and afraid of what I saw in that mirror. I exercised and prayed and whacked my wristbones on the bedframe at just the right angle, three times; always, I concluded by banging my knees against the floor, one, two, three. It was the only thing that hurt enough so I could finally stop and go to sleep.

Despite these nights of painful discipline, each day I woke anew a criminal. Before I discovered the hopeful thrill of dieting, I was desperate for someone to keep me in line and grateful to my mother for taking on this thankless task. I needed those eyes on my grabby little hands or else the jiggly bit would take over the rest of me. I knew it, because every time I left the house my mind went on high alert. I didn’t just know where our ice cream hiding spot was; I knew where
all
the hiding spots were. I knew the vice principal kept a silver dish of Hershey Hugs on his coffee table, and that his door was left open even after he’d left for the day. I’d leave after-school play rehearsal or reading club and walk up and down the hallway, swinging my arms in a farce of nonchalance, then dart into his open door and snatch two-thirds of whatever was in the bowl.