I was sitting cross-legged on my floor, playing Super Mario Bros. on my brand-new Nintendo. “Yes, obviously,” I responded, looking up at Mom from the TV screen. I could never get past level three anyway.
“Great. Come with me to my Weight Watchers meeting and we’ll pop over to Luigi’s on the way home.”
Ah, that was her ploy. And it was a brilliant one at that, because there was little I wouldn’t do for the opportunity to stuff my face with a thin-crust, crunchy, cheesy pie flecked with spicy oregano and robust garlic.
Let me be clear—the pizza was not in her plans just to woo me. There was also the fact that the time in between one’s weigh-in and the beginning of the following day was known widely among Weight Watchers aficionados and other regular weight loss program attendees like my mother as “free time.” Free time, which was most definitely not part of the official program, was, nevertheless, the only part of losing weight that actually appealed to me, and it would, in fact, follow me into adulthood. It was that magical period of blissful denial when you told yourself you were “allowed” to eat an unrestricted amount of whatever crap you wanted, and, in your deluded head, it did not result in weight gain. You didn’t have to count calories or quantities, nor did you have to record your food choices in any kind of journal. Somehow, according to this mythology, any future weight gain had absolutely nothing to do with this period of free time, when even the richest chocolate cake was miraculously free of calories or accountability.
It was simply your time to do as you pleased—a shining and anticipated evening of reward to commemorate a week of feeling deprived and overly managed by the harsh confines of a diet. Not only did free time reward you with the sheer physical pleasure of the foods you had craved all week, but it had the double impact of giving your brain a rest, too. During free time, you didn’t need to think about what you were and were not “allowed” to eat. Your life was not being dictated by anything other than instinct—or so it seemed.
There was also the joy of anticipating the upcoming free time. If your weigh-in was Tuesday evening, then on Sunday and Monday you would think, “On Tuesday night, I can eat whatever the hell I want,” and you would start planning your escapade. It was a beautiful, liberating feeling. It almost made the rest worth it—almost . . .
—
Mom’s Weight Watchers meetings were just an eight-minute drive away, held in a room inside a small community center. At that first meeting, I trailed behind Mom by a few feet, feeling awkward and on display.
“Good evening!” the receptionist (also the person who weighs you in) chirped to Mom, grinning ear to ear, looking like she might crack if she smiled any harder. (Weight Watchers employees are always all smiles and sunshine.)
Then she noticed me, the chubby kid hiding behind her thin mom, with thick hair, and—I’m sure she was well aware—more than ample padding (the very padding that Weight Watchers banked on). At the sight of me, the receptionist’s already high-pitched, New Jersey–infused voice became even higher and more singsongy. “Well, hell-ohhhh!” she said, clearly unsure how to talk to a twelve-year-old, using the same cadence you’d give a sticky toddler.
“Hi,” I responded, monotone—fingering the VHS-sized Game Boy inside my bag, wondering if I could play Tetris here without Mom getting annoyed.
Mom was busy removing her earrings, her boots, her blazer, her neck scarf—anything that could possibly weigh anything and wasn’t inappropriate to remove. She had already visited the bathroom twice to try to rid herself of any extra pee before the big weigh-in.
I felt the receptionist staring at me. We were both just standing there, doing nothing, waiting for Mom to be sufficiently undressed to step onto the scale. So I looked up at her—a woman in her forties with frosted hair and large, red Sally Jessy–esque glasses that were sitting too low on her nose. A second passed as we took each other in—she kept her smile the entire time, though it was clear to me that she was wondering how such a thin, pretty person had such a chubby, odd child.
“And what’s your name?” she sang.
My voice remained flat and one-tone—trying to compensate for hers. “Jasmin,” I responded, uninterested—trying to remember that after this sideshow was over, I would get to eat several pieces of pizza at Luigi’s.
“Oh, what a pretty name!” proclaimed the receptionist, whose name tag, I realized then, said, Hi, My Name Is Donna! (It even had the exclamation point.)
“And what’s your favorite food, Jasmin?”
(Wasn’t this a question you’d ask a three-year-old?)
I decided to go for honesty, and so I responded “Cheez-Its,” smirking just a little on the left side, for I knew that my answer would make her uncomfortable, just as my preteen chubbiness did.
After I said it, I could almost hear Donna’s inner dialogue. Ah, makes sense . . . was what I imagined she was thinking, as she took in my bulging belly and fleshy cheeks.
“Yum!” she proclaimed then, shaking her head left to right, her eyes extra wide and her mouth slightly open—because, apparently, what I said was revelatory. I wondered if Weight Watchers trained their employees in overacting.
Donna leaned in, got serious. “Speaking of cheese, have you ever tried our cheesy baked potato, Jasmin?” she asked me.
—
Mom had lost a half pound, so it was a good day. On days she gained—even a few ounces—there would be a darkness in the air that evening, a desperation and a floundering that was most palpable during the “free time,” when what was supposed to be a joyous, celebratory feast became filled with self-flagellation in reaction to the weight gain. But on days like today when she lost even a smidgen of weight, everything felt lighter and happier.
And so we sat in Luigi’s and shared a large pizza and garlic knots, each of us forgetting for a few blissful hours that our bodies were even a concern at all. In that moment, we were not fat or thin. We were not being bullied by others nor by ourselves. We were not writing down what we ate into our journal, nor scheming how to sneak our next illicit snack out of the refrigerator.
We were simply mother and daughter—sharing pizza, sharing a moment, sharing a life. It was free time—it didn’t count. And yet, it counted more than anything else.
—
I myself first joined Weight Watchers the following year, when I was thirteen and had had enough—or, more accurately, when my TM had. I had spent a great deal of time crying and yelling about being fat, then trying on everything in my closet several times—sure that there must be a flattering sweater or skirt in there that would take off thirty or forty pounds if I squinted my eyes enough. I also had masochistically attempted to try on some of Mom’s clothes. “We’re not the same size,” she’d say to me when I would come into her room, tearful, begging to please borrow something—wanting desperately to look as good as she did, knowing that her clothes were clearly the answer. She had enough clothing to open a small department store and, upon my request, would look and see if perhaps she had an open vest or a one-size-fits-most blazer (unlikely) so that I could continue to grasp on to the foolish notion that Mom and I could share clothes like we shared free time pizza.
Unable to ignore my frustration with my body—and probably aware of her own discomfort with my size (which was beginning to conflict with her undying conviction that I was, nevertheless, beautiful)—Mom asked if I might want to go with her next time to her meeting, but this time actually join—as in, as a member, not just a Tetris player. By then I was frequently joining her anyway, solely to bask in the free time afterward (lately we’d celebrate Mom’s weigh-ins with a bucket of crispy fried dead bird parts from Chicken Holiday). And so signing up myself suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I wanted to lose weight more than I wanted anything else in the entire world (other than how much I wanted to eat whatever happened to be in front of me at the moment, which somehow seemed to erase, momentarily, my longing to
be thin).
And adding to the pressure to look like the other kids, to fit in, and to please my mother, always in the back of my head, there was Broadway. I needed to be on Broadway as soon as humanly possible, and I believed I certainly couldn’t be if I was fat.
Thus began a twenty-plus-year on-again, off-again relationship with Weight Watchers—counting pretzels, then points; carefully scouring labels, menus, and moods. I lost some weight by following the program, though I never lost anything substantial—certainly not enough to bump me out of “chubster” territory. But when I joined that first time, I started to look at food not only as something to overconsume, but as something to deprive myself of—or at least to strive toward that. The idea of food as nourishment never even entered my mind.
—
A few years later, at sixteen, I was bigger than I’d ever been, and completely ashamed to walk into the doors at Weight Watchers again, wearing my failure for all to see. And so Mom took me to one of her other go-to places to shed pounds and swallow pride—Nutrisystem.
The petite blonde who worked at Nutrisystem did not acknowledge my presence any more than she absolutely had to. Instead, she addressed my TM, talking about me as if I were a nonentity—a heavy, nonfunctioning piece of machinery in the corner. “Your daughter is obese,” she told my mother, in the same tone she’d have used to announce that I got a B on my math test.
“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting this conversation happening around me and about me, “but that’s ridiculous. I am not obese.” (Plump, yes. But obese?)
The woman turned back to my mother to respond to my statement, once again only vaguely acknowledging my presence, as if I were just an idea of someone—not an actual girl.
She continued, “Given your daughter’s age and height, her weight indeed puts her into the category of ‘obese.’ But there are solutions.” With that, she looked at me and offered a smile, which was as far from genuine as the one I offered back.
The solution that she spoke of involved the herbal version of a weight loss drug called fen-phen (fenfluramine and phentermine), which was said to stop the formation of fats—as well as control hunger and reduce cravings. The original nonherbal version of fen-phen was an option at that time, too, but our new friend, Barbie, advised that I was “not yet at the point of needing that”; she said the herbal (which was a combination of ephedra and Saint-John’s-wort) would be just fine for me (or for “someone her size”).
My mother was uncomfortable about the whole thing and not so keen on putting her teenage daughter on a magic weight loss pill. But I, of course, was intrigued. In for a penny . . .
So we left our Nutrisystem outing with a bottle of herbal fen-phen, neither Mom nor I uttering a word the entire drive home. In the car, the bottle sat in a little plastic bag on the floor by my feet, a reminder of my “obesity,” and cold, hard proof that I needed a “solution”—which of course meant that I had a problem. (Or that I was the problem.)
It wasn’t as though I didn’t realize that my size was an issue—it was pretty much all I thought about—but I existed in this haze and daze between knowing that I was not like the other kids and feeling like I was absolutely the same, stature and all. So pointing out the elephant in the room—referring to my fatness as a “problem” that needed to be addressed with medication—resulted in my feeling both completely perplexed and thoroughly ashamed. I knew, but I didn’t know. I wanted to be different from how I was, but I wasn’t sure I understood, or was ready for, the repercussions of that.
Food was my salvation. And so the idea of changing my eating and living habits to accommodate the physical change I craved—to be thin—didn’t seem like a viable option. None of the “diet” programs I tried—not Weight Watchers, not Nutrisystem, nor Jenny Craig, nor the laxative teas I bought at the drugstore—addressed my “problem” from a systemic level. What these proposed “solutions” purported to offer was the ability to magically make me thinner if I would follow a prescribed meal plan for a limited time or—as in the case of the herbal fen-phen—if I would pop a pill.
Nothing I did addressed the reasons I overate in the first place. For one thing, there was the imbalance in my life that caused me to start using food as my drug of choice. But much more importantly, nothing I did addressed the overarching issue, that the foods I consumed were highly addictive and unhealthy—the opposite of wholesome. These were foods that were literally designed to make me continue to come back for more, and so I did. Some of these were foods that were, in essence, outright lying to me, by purporting to be “high fiber” or “low fat”—and pretending that meant something—yet secretly giving me the precise mix of soft, salty, and sweet that would make a person like me want to keep grabbing for it. What other thing in life was so inexpensive (or in my case free, since I was still a child supported by her folks), satisfying, and accessible?
I took my herbal fen-phen a total of two times and lost a total of zero pounds. Taking the pills made me feel like I was a sick person, like I was in the mental ward and being given my settle-down-now medicine in a tiny paper cup. I opted against returning to Nutrisystem, and I shook my head in disgust the following year when the original fen-phen was yanked from the market due to the fatal heart complications it caused. Herbal fen-phen was soon removed from Nutrisystem as well, since it, too, carried a stigma, as well as conflicting reports on its safety and reliability. It seemed that to lose weight, taking a magic pill was not the answer. (Breaking news.)
—
My teen years were full of attempts at losing weight—which were frequently fleetingly successful, until I would gain my pounds back shortly thereafter. Throughout high school and then college, I was always up and down, up and down—though those ups and downs generally bounced somewhere between chubby and fat.
By the time college was over, I was my heaviest yet (though not yet nearly the heaviest I’d become). Even though I was an actor with NiteStar, the AIDS-awareness company, it only paid minimum wage. And so whenever I wasn’t there, I was busy pounding the pavement trying to get (higher-paid) roles—and I like to believe I was talented and savvy. My monologues were well rehearsed and fresh, I was astute at cold reads, and I knew exactly how to navigate the business side of theater—I sent out a constant cycle of head shots and thank-you postcards, and kept an organized planner to map out my audition strategy for each week.
The feedback I got from casting directors, agents, and theater directors was always extremely positive. “Well, you’re definitely good,” they’d say, their pencil pressed up against their lips as they were lost in thought—knowing just as well as I that there was no role for me. The fat girl parts were few and far between—the best friend sidekick!—and you can bet your bagel every plump aspiring actress on the isle of Manhattan was gunning for them.
Getting a role in and of itself, weight issues aside, is hard enough—the odds are seriously stacked against you. I remember reading that for every one hundred auditions, you get two callbacks. Regardless of the specific statistic, the point remains the same: it takes a relentless and monomaniacal personality to truly do what it takes to get a job in theater. Being fat and trying to get a role takes an already teeny tiny window of opportunity and makes it that much more slight.
My body, it seemed, was getting in the way of my dreams.
—
Recently, a coworker asked me and a group of pals what our superpower was—in other words, what are we absolutely fantastic at doing, that we can pull out no matter what. One friend said her superpower is the ability to truly connect with people and have them open up to her. My own superpower is that I feel that if I want something enough, I can manifest it—I can make it happen, or at least make a version of it happen. Even when I was an insecure, bullied kid, I was extremely driven about the things I wanted—such as theater and writing.
That relentless drive stayed with me throughout my adulthood. If I have a goal, I wi
ll stop at nothing to make it real. It’s a type of monomaniacal behavior to which I attribute the successes I’ve had in my life. I am a taskmaster—a relentless, get-it-done type of woman. If there is an issue, I will troubleshoot and fix it. If you have a problem, I will find you a solution. If I want something, I will figure out a way to make it appear—or, at least, I will try everything in my power, my superpower. (The opposite side of that superpower—my “kryptonite,” my coworker calls it—is complete tunnel vision and obsession with people and ideas. It can become all encompassing, and that’s not always a positive thing.)
In my early twenties, becoming a working actress was my absolute top priority. My entire life up until that point had been about getting up onto the stage. From the time I was a little kid, that was what I studied for and prepared for. It meant absolutely everything to me—I would have put my life on the line for it. I had the talent, the business sense, the ambition, and the gumption to make it work. And yet the thing that got in my way—my body—was, I felt, completely outside of my control. When it seemingly mattered the most, my superpower failed me. I had no control over my body or what I put into it. It was a runaway train, carrying me along for the ride.
EIGHT
the hungry me
I was broke. Though I spent my days working for the AIDS-awareness educational theater company, the pay was pathetic, and even with the addition of my regular babysitting jobs, I did not have nearly the money I needed to live in Manhattan. When I saw a job opening for a theater director at a sleepaway camp in New Hampshire, to direct a bunch of privileged, hormonal kids in West Side Story, I applied—and promptly got hired. The pay was not too shabby, and I was in great need of a change of scenery.
The camp was nestled on a large lake in the midst of lush greenery. Many of the staff members were from Europe or Australia, and they had all known each other for years—their summers were regularly spent working at this camp. I arrived two weeks into the season, when everyone was already well into the rhythm of the summer. I shared a rustic cabin with the other specialists—the art teacher, the music teacher, the gymnastics teacher, and a random assortment of a half dozen other twenty-somethings all keen on teaching our precious young ones during the day and secretly drinking to excess at night.
Always Too Much and Never Enough Page 10