Are you sure you want to eat that
On Wednesday night, I cried for the first time about my weight since I can remember. Maybe ever. It’s been awhile. The only thing that comes close was when I was still living in LA, I couldn’t figure out the right thing to get for dinner. I’d been working, and I didn’t want to cook. But everything seemed like the wrong choice. Not Atkins enough. I was on a budget and didn’t want to go to the organic market. Nothing was right. Nothing was easy. I remember driving down Sepulveda Blvd. in Culver City past an El Pollo Loco having a full blown panic attack. That was 14 years ago.
It wasn’t choosing what to eat that set me off Wednesday night. I cleaned out my closet and for the first time ever, I didn’t feel relieved and unburdened of all the clutter I wasn’t wearing. I tried on a dress I’d had for awhile, a skirt that had been in regular rotation just a few years ago. They didn’t fit. The zipper wouldn’t climb any more north. I’ve been 90% perfect (as perfect is currently defined for me right now) since January. Mostly Whole30 with a few days off. I had a couple meals off. A burrito. One. A fancy dinner in Calistoga. It’s the end of April. I haven’t had any sweets at work since the end of last year. Not one bite. Save for being sick or out of town, I work out 3–4x a week. An hour-long dance class where my hair comes out soaked. A yoga class I go to thinking “is this going to be that much of a workout,” until 40 mins in I’m shaking in my asana. An hour-and-a-half hike up one of the steepest inclines in the city. Weight training with my husband, where I make fun of him for shaking in his planks. I don’t take it easy. Yet here I am.
I’m at my heaviest I think I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve been steadily climbing for 40 years. I’ve also gotten more disciplined about what goes in my mouth. I’ve figured out the exercise I love to do, I look forward to doing. By all accounts the number should be going down. But it doesn’t. And if it does, it doesn’t stay there for long.
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“Are you sure you want to eat that?”
This is what my mom would say to me when I was about to make a “bad” choice. And here in this moment, it was probably my birthday, and I could assure you that fuck yeah, I wanted to eat that.
And I’m sure I did. But I’m not sure I enjoyed it.
Shame, guilt, confusion.
Especially as what was and wasn’t “good for me” has been a moving target for as long as I can remember.
“Empty calories”
“If it tastes good, spit it out.”
“Let me read the label.”
None of it was about health. None of it. It was about how fat you were. Get a stomach virus and someone will be quick to mention the “silver lining.” Same with drug abuse. Same with cancer.
I was smoking as a teenager, because it was the ’90s and we didn’t know better, even though we did. Watch Reality Bites and tell me it didn’t look cool. My mom’s attitude toward my weight was legendary and known in the family, and I wanted to see how fucked up it really was.
“Would you rather I quit smoking or lose weight,” I asked her.
The answer was written all over her face as it was looking me up and down.
“You’ve lost weight” is the most effusive way you can greet someone in our family. The highest level of praise. More than “I’m proud of you” or “I love you.”
Weight in my family is inextricably linked with goodness, with the kind of person you are. “He doesn’t take care of himself, look how he eats.” There is only one way to live. The way that works for one is the way that should work for all. “Mediterranean diet.” “Low fat.”
The only thing handed out in extra portions is shame, and it starts early. My mother may have had a number of nicknames for me, but there’s only one I remember, “chubs.” I was probably 7. My mother is a psychologist.
It wasn’t limited to my mother, though of course, she’s going to bear a good amount of the blame here. She and my step-mother didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but they both agreed that my body as a child was a problem. My step-mother introduced me to what a girdle was, told me “a lady always holds in her stomach,” and in all likelihood is responsible for the picture below. I found it when I was cleaning out my dad’s things, and it looks like it’s from a Renaissance Faire we went to. Glad they had fun.
Fun and food were inextricably linked. The good memories were made with good food. Thanksgiving was the tastiest of holidays. One of the best trips my mom, brother and I went on was to Big Bear. Legendary because she let us eat whatever we wanted for one meal that we all cooked together. I made celery with cream cheese and celery with peanut butter for appetizers. So indulgent. So bad. She let us buy Oreos for dessert. Double-stuffed.
Around the same time I did a report for third grade about Anorexia and Bulimia. I can only guess it was my mother’s idea. I remember it feeling aspirational. I wanted the downy hair on my arms and the enamel stripped from my teeth. I’d wear these symptoms with pride.
I have no corporeal awareness. Those are big words. What I’m trying to say is I have no idea what I look like. If I present as the morbidly obese person my BMI says I am. I will size up people as I walk past them. I’ll see someone who maybe has the same proportions as I do, and I’ll ask my husband, “am I that size?” and he will look at me like I’m crazy. “You are not that big,” he’ll say. “Not even close. You’re a mid-size moose.” His term of endearment is strange and not-at-all-reassuring.
Once, when I was around 22, my dad and I flew back east to attend my cousin’s wedding. The airline had lost my luggage, and I had no clothes to wear. I was in the car with my aunt, who was on the phone to her friend to see if they had something I could borrow to wear to the wedding,
“What size are you, dear?” My aunt asked me
“12,” I answered.
“12,” she said into the phone.
“Oh, a big girl,” I heard her friend say through the line.
Am I? Am I a big girl?
I don’t know. I didn’t know when I was 12 years old and sent to Weight Watcher’s camp. These were big kids. Really big. I was 5’3 and 117 pounds.
“What are you doing here,” they asked.
I didn’t have an answer. For once, though, I was the most popular girl around.
I wasn’t athletic growing up. At least I didn’t think I was. I was put into sports I was terrible at, like baseball, which didn’t give me the confidence for sports I might have actually been good at, like swimming. Doing sports wasn’t about teamwork or fresh air or making friends. Sports was about exercise, about losing weight. I avoided it as much as I could. I was ashamed for being bad at the sport, and I was ashamed for the reason I was there to play.
In college, I started swimming on my own. I’d get up early, get in the pool, and come home and feel great. It was the first time I understood working out as a means to a different end. I did it because I wanted to, not because I should. Still, I was not a small girl, I didn’t think. I felt like a monster. I felt like I looked like a monster.
“You’re not a monster,” I remember my best friend, Jenny, telling me.
She and I shared the same upbringing, the same, skinny mom who didn’t understand her curvy daughter. Both moms were named Nancy. We had more in common than we did different, and the differences were funny and charming and fucked up. When we’d treat ourselves to ice cream at the Baskin Robbins near our house, Jenny would be almost down to the last of the cone while I still had a good amount of the scoop to work on.
“I eat fast because I think someone’s going to take it away from me,” she said.
“I take my time because I don’t know when someone’s going to let me have this again,” I explained.
My weight has creeped up, consistently and steadily, my entire life. I have not stopped growing. I have slowed the progress, found an eddy in the tide, but it’s been hard-fought and fleeting. When I was still in college, I got in the habit of quitting things. First, I quit smoking. Then, I quit overt sugars and fats. I tried to quit coffee, but after three days I ended up at the doctor, convinced I had mono.
“You’re young, you’re healthy. Enjoy your coffee.”
But since I was in the habit of quitting habits, of finally exerting dominance over my body’s inclinations, I went as far as I could. I worked out for 90 minutes a day, most days. I compulsively tracked calories in the margins of my notebooks. 1100 was ideal. 900 was better. I got down to 147lbs. I was starving.
I went back home to visit for spring break.
“You’re a shadow of your former self,” she said. She meant it as a compliment.
I saw a nutritionist, because I knew it wasn’t sustainable, what I was doing. It wasn’t the first, or even the second time I’d seen one. In high school, there was a clinical one who showed me with her plastic models the difference between a pound of fat (big) and a pound of muscle (compact). There were charts and fake foods to show serving sizes. 3 oz of protein is a deck of cards. Your thumb is a tablespoon. There was another nutritionist I saw in LA. Two skinny, popular girls at school went to her also. One of them had a slight orange hue which could have been from tanning or could have been from baby carrots. The nutritionist lived high up in one of those big apartment buildings in Westwood, right on Wilshire. I am trying for the life of me to remember her name, to look her up. I feel like she had articles about herself perma-plaqued on the wall. I could look up those two girls on Facebook and ask them, but it’s the last thing I want to do.
Her apartment was stale and brown and smelled of wheat germ and steamed vegetables. She had asked me to keep a food diary, and I remember trying to be absolutely perfect in the week leading up. The Mediterranean diet. Whole wheat pasta. Non-fat cheese. The staples in my house growing up.
She looked over my paper slowly, shaking her head. Making notes. Judging with the very same look my step-father would judge the label of the breakfast cereal you were trying to enjoy.
“Hmm, no.” she said. “We need to fix this.” She looked at me over her glasses. “We need to get rid of this,” and as she said the word “this,” she gestured under her neck with a finger from left to right that almost looked like she was slitting her own throat, but here indicated my offensive double chin.
She told me to scoop my bagels, so I’d only eat the outside part. Scooping the insides of bagels was not the silver bullet that worked.
The nutritionist I saw in Portland offered the same advice I’d always gotten. Keep a food journal. Your plate should look like this. Get your salad dressing on the side, and dip your fork into it so you get a teeny taste with each bite of lettuce. I lied in my food journal. I didn’t understand why nothing worked. I felt ashamed and stopped going.
Seeing pictures of me are another trauma, most of the time. Especially candids where I haven’t angled myself the right way, one foot in front, stomach pulled in (but not up, so you don’t look like you’re holding your breath), chin slightly forward to avoid a thick neck. Or behind other people, or doubled over entirely. The few pics that look good, where the angle was just right, those will be profile pics for life.
“You look cute in that picture,” my grandmother said. It was a straight-on pic of her, visiting me in college. “I do?” I said
“Well, you look fat,” she clarified, “But your smile is cute.”
“Oh.”
The advent of instant technology hasn’t made anything better. Take a picture and show me on your phone or fancy digital camera how it looks and I’ll purposely blur my eyes so I can’t see the pixels in front of me. I’m on video conference for most of my meetings throughout the day now, and while I should be looking at the presentation or people on-screen, instead I’m looking at how my belly seems to be pouring into my lap, or how much bigger I seem to be compared to other people in view. For my wedding pictures I learned that I tend to throw my chin down and back when I laugh. A normal person would see how much I was laughing that day, I just saw how thick my neck looked.
I didn’t think I’d ever find the guy who would marry me. Not the guy I wanted to marry, but the one who would choose me. Dating was always hard, and I always blamed my weight for being rejected, passed over, ignored. It was why I didn’t get hit on. It was why no one asked me out. It was why no one set me up. I couldn’t think of any other reason, and I had enough experience not to ask.
In Portland, I connected with a guy online. This was early, early online dating. Like, meeting someone on Craigslist early. We corresponded via email, maybe via AIM. I finally sent him a pic, and he then decided he didn’t want to meet me. I somehow persisted and met him for coffee at a Starbucks on E. Burnside.
It was awkward and later he would message me, “I just don’t usually go for big girls.”
The struggle is real. The struggle is perennial. I’ll decide it’s time to deal with things once and for all. I’m going to find the secret lever I haven’t been able to get purchase on, and that’s going to make all the difference. More cardio, more weights. Atkins, paleo. Whole 30. They work for a short time, but edges slip back in and the difference wasn’t that marked to begin with. My size 12 pants fit a little looser for a month or two. My husband will notice and say “You’re too skinny.” I know that’s impossible.
The non-scale numbers were fine for a long time. Until they weren’t. My cholesterol will be a little high, and I take it as a personal failing. Your bloodwork is a reflection of you, of your lifestyle. Your lipid ratio isn’t the only thing that’s off. You don’t take care of yourself. No discipline. One time my triglycerides were spiked out of hand, and my doctor started to sniff around metabolic syndrome, syndrome X, fatty liver. Metformin would be the new magic to melt away my problems and reveal the fit girl underneath. Nope, nothing. I’d quit the metformin. What was the point.
In January of this year, I picked up the challenge again. #whole30. Dance on Mondays and Wednesdays, Personal training on Saturday, a hike on Sunday. Yoga when it fits in the calendar. Get the numbers checked, go to the doctor.
“Your blood pressure is a little high,” she said. “Do you have a family history of high blood pressure?”
“Do we?” I asked my mother, later that night.
“Well,” she said, “Your grandmother did late in life, and your grandfather. But the one thing that can really make a difference is — ”
“ — genetics on your father’s side,” I thought she was going to say.
“ — your weight,” she said.
Not “weight,” but “your weight.” Mine.
“How would you suggest I lose weight?” I ask her. “Work out more than four times a week. Eat less than no sugar, drink fewer than zero drinks a week?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve lost ten pounds.”
I’ve done all the things I know how to do. I keep seeing these damn nutritionists, sure that one of them will come up with the magic element I’m missing. Maybe my blood results will come back with something new. My liver enzymes came back elevated and the sick back of my mind hopes it’s something catastrophic. Something with a stage.
Give me that sweet, sweet silver lining.
But the number keeps going up. It’s high. The last nutritionist had me step on a scale and I saw the number come back as 180. It’s objectively high, and I don’t know what to do. Look at me, and you’ll see where it sits. My thighs are massive, though it’s the mass of muscle underneath that’s giving them their girth. They were big but got bigger when I became a long-distance cyclist. I’ve been off the bike for years, but the tree trunks I have for legs haven’t winnowed. I have strong arms, and the same machine that told me my weight also told me my muscle composition. I have a very strong core, 75th percentile for women. There’s a six pack under there somewhere. Short of sickness or surgery, I don’t know how to find it.
The obsession, the preoccupation, it comes and goes. It’s in an aggressive swing right now, the most consuming it’s been since I can remember.
Dieting isn’t like quitting smoking. You don’t have to smoke to survive, but you have to eat. And when eating and the choices you make are inextricably linked to your goodness as a person, and that goalpost seems to shift with every study, every bite is fraught. It’s fucking exhausting.
Since Wednesday, I’m trying a new tack. Eat less. Try to be hungry more. It’s counter to what I’ve read and what I thought I believed. Deprivation will get you nowhere. I don’t know if it’s working, but I know I hate it. I’m hungry. I’m on edge. I’m irritable. I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want to see food in my instagram or Twitter feed. I don’t know what I want. I want to be healthy. I want to be comfortable. I have no idea how to get there, or if I ever will.
