Hungry (17 page)

My fixation on achieving the ideal body overpowered my ability to remain an active member of my family.

 

sheila:
In high school, Lisa started swearing off certain foods, then most of the restaurants I needed to review. She never was fat, but she felt that way, so it made no difference. Even if they had something for vegetarians, and a lot of my readers were vegetarians so I looked for those items, Lisa didn’t want to come with us anyway. She was revolted by the smell of steak, frying oil, whatever else was off her list on any given day. The tightening self-control was squeezing out any sense of natural balance, that you could just experience food, not as an enemy or ally but just as plain food. We didn’t expect a sixteen-year-old to make dining with us her top choice of activities. Still, when an all-vegan café opened in Palo Alto, I insisted that she had no excuse. The Bay Leaf Café was only three miles away and had a menu full of items she could eat.

As was often happening in Silicon Valley, techies with money had opened the Bay Leaf Café—bay for Bay Area, leaf for green environment. Two software engineers had stocked their little restaurant’s cheerful blond wood shelves with books like
Eating to Save the Earth
and
The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen
, and the menu was coded with full circles, half-circles, and three-quarter circles to indicate one hundred, fifty, or seventy-five percent organic for each item. I ordered a grilled portobello mushroom sandwich and an entrée involving brown rice, braised tofu, mushrooms, spinach, red onions, spring onions, and tomatoes in a sesame wine sauce. We missed the Mighty Carrot Roll, which turned out to be one of Bay Leaf’s most popular items, but tasted the creamy carrot soup and the unfortunate soy cheesecake, frosted with strawberry jam.

Lisa took a few sullen bites of each dish and was ready to leave. I wasn’t. I needed to get a better feel for this restaurant. She snapped at me for trying to make her eat too much, then got up and left me sitting there, like a jilted lover.

Later we learned that teenagers hide eating disorders behind a vegetarian diet. They may initially become vegetarians out of concerns about global warming and cruelty to animals, or disgust with what their parents eat and keep in the house. Maybe the family doesn’t eat fried food or red meat; teenagers will find something else to repudiate. They need to find their wings, and the kitchen is a convenient place to practice fluttering. Rejecting Mom and Dad’s food puts the growing space between you on the table every day. Plenty of young vegetarians stay on the healthy side, but for teens, there are important, self-defining side benefits of exercising discipline and losing weight, feeling good about the former and getting praised for the latter. What’s not to like about shunning meat, a win-win in terms of asserting yourself and saving the planet? Except for some unsettling odds: Vegetarian teens are twice as likely as their peers to diet frequently, four times as likely to diet intensively, and eight times as likely to abuse laxatives. These are all symptoms of eating disorders.

When Lisa started showing anorexic symptoms, Ned and I refused to believe it was more than another ripple of teenage turbulence. A storm we hadn’t anticipated, a disease we had barely known even existed; we were certain it would fade away, its place taken by some other problem, and then another, the way they usually do. In my head I was hoping to hear a doctor say, “This is in the range of normal. Lots of kids act and feel this way.”

Lisa was overexercising, skipping meals, restricting foods, hating her body overall, and obsessing over how certain body parts (thighs, legs, stomach) looked. We were clueless about the sexual activity, that Lisa’s hunger for love and affection made her so vulnerable and exposed to harm. When I read the section she wrote above, I feel sick.

Ned and I finally acknowledged that Lisa’s symptoms and behavior were problematic, and that she wasn’t going to grow out of them, like a pair of shoes. We went into full librarian and journalist mode. Frantic for a book to help explain Lisa’s eating problems, I kept coming back to Carolyn Costin’s
Your Dieting Daughter: Is She Starving for Attention?
It still sends one of the few clear signals in a cacophony of advice books. Costin spotlights what she calls “The Real Issues” that draw people to binge, purge, and restrict. They are what everyone wants:

All that made sense, but was new to us and we had to figure out how these hungers applied in our family. We continued our research. It turns out that people with a family history of eating disorders are twelve times likelier to develop an eating disorder than the general population, but we had no such history.

I had plumped up in high school. Every afternoon I came home from school and arranged a sandwich, chips, and a milkshake on the kitchen table while I read the newspaper. Two and a half hours later, I’d eat dinner. During a fling with candy-making, my sister and I had learned that simply melting butter, brown sugar, and corn syrup in a pan makes chewy butterscotch, swirled around a spoon before it hardens. I’d have that or some ice cream and with my afternoon snack. And what do you know, I gained weight, adding to the usual miseries. An intuitive English teacher had told me not to worry so much, that for many girls high school is torture and real life begins in college. He was right. In college I found a place in the world, like Lisa had at camp. The love handles just went away.

In matters of dress, the sixties were far less constricting than previous and later eras for self-conscious young women. Instead of worshipping one appearance goddess, we could aim for hippie or preppie, or make it up as we went along. Twiggy, the five-feet-seven-inch, ninety-two-pound British supermodel was a blip on the horizon, having only just begun to inspire anorexics like Karen Carpenter worldwide. Miniskirts certainly looked better on thin bodies, but at the same time the women’s movement was making inroads into attitudes about body acceptance and self-expression. Lots of women in Berkeley had stopped shaving their legs. Miniskirts were not hanging in their closets.

I had chosen UC Berkeley over UC Santa Cruz because of my hair. All through high school I straightened my hair and shellacked it with hairspray. I knew it would be even frizzier in coastal Santa Cruz, and I’d be miserable. I hadn’t counted on the fog in Berkeley, which would have been a disaster had I stuck with the curl-free look. But liberation was at hand, bringing in Afros, ringlets, and every kind of natural and manufactured hairdo. Most different from what kids face now, in my era there was room to experiment with your appearance, and a middle ground.

As when Lisa was born a good eater, I was happy that she wasn’t like me—an adolescent nerd. She had a much more active social life. She didn’t choose her college based on her hair.

 

 

 

Those are the personal and social roots of Lisa’s anorexia. There are historical roots as well.

Eating disorders, especially anorexia, are like what cancer was in my parents’ generation, and what tuberculosis was to the generation before that: the shameful, mysterious disease that scares everyone to death. Until somebody discovers the real physical causes, these diseases are invested with all kinds of treacherous powers to invade and destroy. In 1881, one year before bacillus was discovered as the primary cause of tuberculosis, a standard medical text listed these causes of TB: “hereditary disposition, unfavorable climate, sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation, deficiency of light, depressing emotions.” That is, getting tuberculosis was mostly your own fault. Patients absorbed the message that they must have done something to bring the disease on themselves. As do ED patients, and parents like me and Ned, today.

“Just have a cracker. A slice of apple. A carrot?” we have pleaded with Lisa. We don’t say, but she hears, “How hard is that? Do you want to be sick? Just take a bite. You can start getting better right now!” We are like the people who don’t get migraines and don’t understand the sufferer lying in bed, wanting to die. We express sympathy but inwardly suspect malingering. Joan Didion describes this brilliantly: “Why not take a couple of aspirin,” the unafflicted say from the doorway, or “I’d have a headache, too, spending a beautiful day like this inside with all the shades drawn.”

Cancer used to be that way. Even if the patient hadn’t done something to make her body turn against her, how could she have been so out of touch with her body not to know? But now, most cancers are not immediate death sentences and even smokers get sympathy when they become ill. The field opened for another disease to be the Next Big Fright. Enter eating disorders.

 

 

 

History has shown us a fair share of starvation as a form of protest, from Mahatma Gandhi to Irish nationalists in the modern era to suffragists and saints before that.

The medieval Saint Catherine pioneered what came to be known as “holy anorexia.” She was the champion of the common people, that they should have a more intimate union with God. Fasting was a way open to everyone. For many years, the Divine Sacrament was Catherine’s only food, for the eighty days from Lent to the Feast of the Ascension. Born in 1347, Catherine became a saint in 1970, but her story of sainthood is full of earthly parallels for teenage girls today. She chose anorexia as an adolescent, rebelling against the patriarchal medieval Catholic Church and against her family. Her domineering mother sought social status, while her father sat on the sidelines. They fit the anorexic family stereotype.

From Saint Catherine on, anorexics basically hungered for hunger itself, deprivation as fulfillment. At eighteen, Mollie Fancher parlayed a streetcar accident into worldwide fame as the “Brooklyn Enigma.” From 1865 until her death fifty years later, she claimed to abstain from food. She did not leave her bedroom, but she did welcome visitors and sell her brand of wax flowers and embroidery, making a little profit on the ordeal. During the Victorian era, other “fasting girls” took to extremes the generally accepted notion that women should keep their appetites in severe lockdown. Living without food became a public spectacle, even inspiring circus side-show fasts of “hunger artists” who earned their living by starving.

All of this is horrifying to someone who earns her living by eating.

lisa:
When Mom first got the food critic job, I thought, “Great! I could be helpful!” As her name became more well-known in the food world, appearing numerous times a week in the paper and often in the news, I never thought, “Oh, my mom is a celebrity.” Now, I brag about her work. People are still impressed and envious, and I get to gloat a little.

But I have to wonder how I could
not
have an eating disorder with a food-critiquing mom. She and I grew up in totally different times with different idealized women. For me, a woman’s worth, as I learned too often in middle school, was equated to body type and image. Restricting food was a skill in itself, and many of my friends excelled. How could I be like them if food was so highly valued in my family? We were always eating out, trying one new restaurant after the other and always having to order a different meal so that Mom could try everything.

One afternoon during my senior year of high school I agreed to meet Mom for lunch, and it didn’t work out well. I had whittled my weight down to 105 pounds, and subsisted mainly on lean protein, veggies, and fruit, in between hours of cardio-aerobic activity. She picked Café Borone, an outdoor, contemporary California cuisine hotspot next to Kepler’s, a popular bookstore in Menlo Park. They had plenty of suitable menu items: fresh soups, large salads, and fancy sandwiches. But I freaked out. Nothing appealed to me—or rather nothing fit in the strictures of my rigid diet plan.

I know she just wanted to have a pleasant lunch with her daughter. But I stared at the menu board overhead, while she carefully made suggestions, and I said, “No! That will make me fat, Mom!” She read out one option after the other, and I rejected everything. I wanted to give up, and let my hunger wallow in my tiny stomach, but I could tell I was acting like a child. I settled on a grilled vegetable sandwich on wheat bread, which I broke apart around the edges. The sandwich was fine, but I left most of it on the plate. My love affair with food was over.

I had to break free and find my own image and value. As I got older I began to stray from family dinners and my formerly adventurous appetite. My weight dropped and I seemed to become more noticeable to those who before had never or rarely acknowledged my presence. Words like “fit” and “thin” joined in their compliments of my body. I knew my assistance with Mom’s job was done. No longer could I go along for the ride, because each restaurant visit would be a surefire sabotage. Of course I can’t deny that avoiding eating out presented me with much less exciting and overall fun meals, but receiving praise about my body was better than a fancy restaurant meal. Even when praise turned into worry as I lost more weight, I only heard “skinny” or “thin” or “she exercises a lot,” and I had to keep going.

For her first few years as a food critic, Mom celebrated in the company of an enthusiastic daughter, taking a relieved breath to not have one of those picky kids. But I gave her something far worse. I think that because of her job, shoving unnecessarily large meals in front of my curious young self, I never learned moderation. “Eat more. Try this,” is what I heard. Never, “Stop.”

While Lisa was restricting, refusing, and turning inward, I was enjoying my spin in the spotlight. Going from copy editor to restaurant critic was like joining a prominent restaurant as a dishwasher and working your way up to chef. At first you do essential work that nobody else wants to do, and then, poof, you’re the star. You even have fans.