To my disbelief, Weight Watchers hired me! It had all come full circle. I went through a rigorous training period and soon began my gig as the receptionist, weighing in nervous, jittery women who, if the scale didn’t display what they’d hoped for, seemed to feel they had lost everything that mattered (except the weight).
I could relate to having everything to lose. Despite my position with Weight Watchers, I was still not at my goal weight—and not on what they call “maintenance.” My own group’s leader, Cadence, who had been the biggest proponent of my working for Weight Watchers, told me under her breath that I was close enough to my goal to take the job. When I responded that I was still, in fact, losing weight, she said that upon glancing at me, I appeared to be at my goal weight, and since this opportunity was presenting itself now, I should record my weight on my application as slightly lower than it was. “You’ll get there soon enough,” she said with a wink—it was our secret.
My real weight at the time was in the 150s, which for my five-foot-four frame, was higher than it should have been by Weight Watchers standards. Plus, I was twenty-four, and thus still in the “under 25” category, which meant that I was supposed to weigh even less than I would have been “allowed” had I been just a few months older. In fact, according to the chart, even with my little white lie, I would only have fit into the “normal” range for someone my height if I were a senior citizen.
Even if I hadn’t been, essentially, a fraud, being on the other side of the Weight Watchers table would have been an odd experience. I put on the biggest smile I could muster, welcomed the people who walked through the doors, and—after they removed all outerwear, shoes, jewelry, glasses, and anything else they wanted to remove—I gently asked them to get on the scale.
In this moment when they were weighing in, their lives were suddenly in my hands—or so it seemed. Most people held their stomachs in and didn’t breathe, trying very hard to defy simple physics and magically will their weight away by holding it in. Maybe the scale wouldn’t notice! Of course, I could completely relate to that mind-set, as well as to the mind-set that said that prior to being weighed in, you had to visit the bathroom and force out pee that wasn’t yet ready to emerge—even just one tiny extra drop. I would overhear women telling each other how hungry they were because—like me—they didn’t eat very much on their weigh-in days.
My double life as binger and role model obviously could not continue. Because Weight Watchers wanted its staff to be an example of the program’s success, it required that all employees maintain a certain weight. So in order to keep my job, I was supposed to regularly get weighed in myself, and my weight was supposed to be recorded on a brightly colored card that said Staff. I was already slightly above the absolute highest end of that weight, since I hadn’t been entirely honest on my application form—a fact that terrified me. Starving myself again, as I had done at camp, didn’t seem feasible for me, mostly because I didn’t feel as in control of my setting as I had been there—there were too many variables now. Besides, I didn’t feel I had the mental energy to reenter starvation mode.
So I decided to deal with this weigh-in pickle by not dealing with it—in other words, I never showed up for my monthly staff weigh-ins. I knew that my deception would eventually catch up with me, but I was buying time in order to figure out what to do. Plus, even though I stopped weighing myself, I knew from the way my clothes were fitting that I was slowly inching up again. Perhaps, it dawned on me, my free time escapades were catching up with me. Other than the free time binges, I mostly followed the Weight Watchers program, though, admittedly, I was becoming lazy about counting points—oftentimes simply guessing at how many points this or that would be, and only recording it in my book every now and again. In other words, I had stopped following the program.
Eventually, as I always knew would be the case, my boss (who was also Cadence’s boss) found out that I wasn’t up-to-date on my weigh-ins and questioned me about why my weight card had not been filled out in so long. I lied and said that I kept forgetting, and that I’d do it that day. That day came and went, and what I imagined was my imminent demise hung like a rotten (two-point) apple over my head. I needed to deal with it, and I needed to deal with it quickly.
Something had to happen, and fast. Figuring I could put off my staff weigh-in for another week before being questioned again, I stooped to an all-time low, asking myself the dreaded question: What would my TM do? The answer? She would join Jenny Craig.
And so I did.
Confiding my somewhat embarrassing issue to my mother, who clearly had a sympathetic ear when it came to losing weight, without hesitation she offered to absorb the cost of Jenny Craig (surprise, surprise), and I eagerly accepted her offer (surprise, surprise). As I had hoped, Jenny Craig took the guesswork out of it, sending my premade meals to my apartment in a series of boxes that soon took over all the cabinet space in my tiny Manhattan kitchen. I followed the regimented program for a week and was quickly down several pounds. A week after that, I was down more. My weight was still a few pounds higher than what I had written on my initial employee card, but it was respectable enough that I would not cause any red flags to go up. Nobody questioned me when I went in for my weigh-in, and my Jenny Craig success allowed me to keep my job with Weight Watchers.
Of course, by providing its members with prepackaged meals, the Jenny Craig program lacked a fundamental tenet of weight loss, and of health. I needed a quick fix—a way to put out the fire—and I got that with the Jenny Craig program. But I was still consuming highly processed foods. Besides, in the long run, joining a program where all my meals were sent to me was simply unrealistic, as it never addressed the root causes of weight gain—nor did it teach me how to eat in a way that I could sustain myself without gaining it all back. Fundamentally, here I was at twenty-four, and I didn’t know how to feed myself.
In truth, I found all my weight loss efforts to be unrealistic and unsustainable—Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig alike, not to mention self-imposed starvation. Even looking at my TM’s patterns with both Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig of joining, losing, quitting, gaining; joining, losing, quitting, gaining—how was that a testament to these programs actually working?
—
The reasons I ate remained exactly the same as they had been before, and nothing I had done in my life thus far had effectively approached these issues from a systemic level. The impetuses behind my maniacal, obsessive food intake were, by and large, twofold.
First of all, I was addicted (and, no, “addicted” is not too strong a word) to processed junk foods—which, ironically, included many of the decadent Weight Watchers snacks foisted on me at my meetings. The box bore a bright sticker that bragged 2 points! but Weight Watchers left the lengthy and difficult-to-pronounce ingredient list out of its marketing scheme. The very ingredients that were regularly found in Weight Watchers foods—the milk chocolate, the sugar, the oil, not to mention the preservatives and endless lists of additives and dyes—differed from the ingredients in the Doritos, Cheez-Its, and Twix bars that I used to consume (and still consumed during “free time”) only in that they were formulated to be lower in calories by limiting quantity. They were as far away from health-promoting, whole foods as one could get—with the exception, of course, of Jenny Craig’s insta-meals. Of course, if you ate only a small amount of these foods, as you were supposed to, you could lose weight and maintain that weight loss. But, as I said before, I was addicted. “Small amount” is not a concept that addicts understand. Once foods like that crossed my lips, there was no such thing as enough. Ultimately, by their emphasis on allowing a small amount of these foods, but limiting the quantity, rather than focusing exclusively on the quality of the food, these weight loss programs smacked, for me, of deprivation. As I discovered years later when I lost one hundred pounds and kept it off, true health comes from finding abundance, both on your plate and in your life.
The secon
d component I was missing in my quest to shed pounds was a bit more amorphous, but nonetheless became the main ingredient I needed in order to give rise to an honest and healthy life. The truth is, even though my whole life up until that point had been focused around becoming thin, I never once took a step back to look at the bigger picture—what food actually was, and what that meant for me. I was, I would soon learn, completely unconscious about my eating. Not only regarding the unbalanced, toxic, addictive relationship I had to what I consumed, but regarding the glaringly obvious fact that eating is the most personal political act there is. There were much bigger ramifications to it than just my pants size.
These two facts—my food addiction and my lack of consciousness around what I consumed—actually wound up going hand in hand. But until I was jostled out of lifelong patterns—patterns that were, it seemed, hereditary—I would remain stuck in this unhealthy loop-de-loop that governed my days and my consumption habits. Facing the reasons behind my food choices would, naturally, prove to be painful. But it was nothing next to what it would be like to bear witness to the ramifications of those food choices.
That, I was about to learn, was a whole other animal.
II
what i gained
TEN
someone else’s flesh
Back when I was a young college student in Philadelphia, the definition of “eccentric” as I had known it thus far grew significantly in its scope. It was the late 1990s—perhaps the first era not to have a fashion trend all its own—and South Street, where I frequently hung my hat at night, was bustling with oddballs of all stripes. Some were stuck in the punk scene—with pink, stiff hair and spiky black boots that weighed more than they did. And some were still very much living it up in the grunge era, not noticing that it, too, was over—comfortably sporting large flannel plaid shirts with Chuck Taylors on their feet.
Broad Street, home to my school and my dwindling innocence, was fast paced and busy with a mix of tight-bunned ballerinas and cardboard-coffee-cup-carrying businesspeople clad in smart suits and simple sneakers (which they’d change out of once they got to the office). Everyone, it seemed, had an identity. Even those not overtly wishing to make a statement were making one with their perhaps contrived blasé attitudes.
Being a floundering kid-adult only perpetuated my fascination with how others chose to define themselves—or how the world defined them without their say in the matter. On Twelfth Street, a buff white guy walked hand in hand with a tall and dapper black man. On Pine, a pregnant woman pulled her long hair back into a knot, then ducked into an overpriced baby boutique with organic this and that. In Rittenhouse Square, a grandfather with his pants pulled high watched and beamed as his tiny, pigtailed granddaughter hopped in a circle on one foot. And I watched, too.
As I soaked in everybody’s identities, I craved one all for myself—something unique that would separate me from the rest of the herd. Something that did not begin with f and end with at. I wanted to dig deeper. So I went from watching to experimenting.
—
My friend Hazel and I were barely eighteen when we found ourselves in a living room belonging to four fifty-something gay men, all sitting around smoking pipes stuffed with tobacco. We were there picking up our friend Rick on our way to a fellow classmate’s party on South Street. Rick, also eighteen, had recently found himself rooming with these quirky men—one of whom was a family friend—in a beautiful big house on Locust Street.
Hazel and I awkwardly stood there in our gaudy sequined ensembles—neither of us had been offered a seat—and the four men proceeded to have a knowing conversation about us with their eyes, darting looks, and condescending half smiles at one another. They all sat with their legs crossed in their matching leather armchairs, puffing on their pipes and clouding up the room with their smoke and arrogance. Hazel and I had our very own inner conversation going on—we knew that if we made eye contact with any one of them (or with one another), we would have started cracking up, so we each did everything we could to avoid it, as we waited for Rick to join us.
Finally, one of them spoke—each of his words drawn out like he had time to kill. “What are you chiiiildren doing with your liiiives?” he asked.
“We’re theater majors,” I replied nervously and quickly, trying to compensate for his slowness by picking up my own vocal pace.
“What yeeeear are you in school, chiiiildren?” said the same man, which inexplicably caused one of his comrades to guffaw.
Hazel answered, barely audibly. “We’re freshmen.”
This time, it was a different man who spoke. “They’re eighteen, Larry,” he remarked. “Can you imagine? They’re. Just. Eighteen.”
Larry—the first guy—took another puff of his pipe. “Theater students,” he said to his peers. “Probably bisexual. Probably don’t know it yet.”
And, with that, the men all chuckled, as Hazel and I turned the exact same shade of maroon as their living room furniture.
I was definitely not ready for “bisexual.” In fact, I found the scene I had been assigned in Acting Studio, in which I had to kiss my classmate Mandy on the mouth, to be unbearably difficult (each time I went in for the kiss I would break into a nervous and loud laugh), and bisexual—let alone out-and-out gay—was not something I had previously considered. The very thought seemed absurd and embarrassing.
But clearly I needed an identity, and fast—and anything that started with the letters LGBT or Q was firmly off the table. Soon enough—following in the footsteps of another classmate, Emily (a lesbian, ironically)—I decided to find my identity in food choices rather than sexuality and made what I felt was the bold decision to ditch meat. Seeing as how I already wore all black and smoked clove cigarettes (though never inhaled, since I was doing it solely for show), I reckoned that slapping the label “vegetarian” on there was the natural next step in honing my image.
—
Given my lifelong obsession with food in general and cheeseburgers in particular, and my newer one with Philadelphia cheesesteaks, becoming a vegetarian was a pretty bold step for me. Throughout my entire childhood, my birthday parties had been catered by Burger King—each little attendee getting a cheeseburger all to herself, with two or three for me. I found no greater satisfaction than the one I derived from biting into a smoky brown patty and a melty, perfect square of orange cheese between two buttery white halves of a bun dotted with delicate sesame seeds. As I became a teenager, my go-to became the slightly more substantial cheeseburger you could find at any diner you’d pass on Route 18—the bun a bit harder and crunchier than the ones at Burger King, the patty blacker and thicker. A grown-up burger.
Within weeks of moving to Philadelphia to start college, I had already quickly become a regular at the cheesesteak food cart on my corner—trading in my fascination with cheeseburgers for their kitschier first cousin. The white buns, long ovals this time, filled with stringy brown meat intertwined with a gooey white cheese, made me feel comforted and sated. It got to the point where the guy at the cheesesteak cart I passed each morning—located on the corner of Broad and Walnut, just steps from my asbestos-laden theater class—would see me coming, give a little wave that I would return, and promptly start making my “regular.”
Jumping from that kind of meat consumption to vegetarianism was a huge leap, and had I thought about it for more than the three seconds I devoted to this decision, I probably would have convinced myself not to do it. I’m sure I would have eventually landed on the side of plants anyway, but I’m grateful that I trusted my instincts when I did.
—
I went vegetarian for two main reasons.
First, there was Emily—my adorable, short-haired, baby butch friend, who had a painting on her wall of a naked woman (which always embarrassed me). Emily’s vegetarianism seemed so sophisticated to me, her nonchalant attitude about it even more fascinating. Despite her decision to not eat meat, she sti
ll joined the rest of our group when we’d jaunt over to Johnny Rockets on South Street—and her hippie burger didn’t look that different from ours. It was still blackened and crunchy, still encased in a thick white bun, still doused in ketchup and mustard, still served alongside salty fries. So, Johnny Rockets: check. I was in awe of Emily’s ability to so seamlessly weave her vegetarianism into her life. It was simply a part of her, as fixed as her lesbianism or her light brown hair. It was woven into her identity. She had an identity. I was envious.
It was not as though I was after Emily’s identity per se, but I was indeed after an identity. And the best part about Emily’s was that it was a nonissue. Her vegetarianism (and her lesbianism, for that matter) was simply part of who she was, but not anything she felt the need to flaunt, or something she felt required validation. For me, even waking up in the morning required someone to reassure me that it was an appropriate thing to do, then someone else to congratulate me for doing so. Emily oozed confidence in a way that most middle-aged people haven’t wrapped their heads around, let alone floundering nineteen-year-olds, and that captivated me. She was comfortable in her own skin, and I wondered if one day I might be, too. Specifically regarding her vegetarianism, it was not something she ever hit anybody over the head with, or even discussed very much. She felt it wasn’t right to eat meat, so she didn’t. End of story. I was impressed, and I was impressionable.
The second reason I became vegetarian was the fact that for the first time in my life, a food I loved actually managed to wear out its welcome . . .
Always Too Much and Never Enough Page 13