by Lena Dunham
Ben taught me the term “self-actualized,” and it became not just a favorite phrase but a goal.
Devon made me a pencil case with a built-in sharpener, lent me his watch, showed me how to keep all my wires from getting tangled, and changed my iPhone alarm from marimba to timba so that I wake up happier, more soothed.
And now I come to him, whole and ready to be known differently. Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.
AS A CHILD I developed a terrible fear of being anorexic. This was brought on by an article I had read in a teen magazine, which was accompanied by some upsetting images of emaciated girls with hollow eyes and folded hands. Anorexia sounded horrible: you were hungry and sad and bony, and yet every time you looked in the mirror at your eighty-pound frame, you saw a fat girl looking back at you. If you took it too far, you had to go to a hospital, away from your parents. The article described anorexia as an epidemic spreading across the nation, like the flu or the E. coli you could get from eating a Jack in the Box hamburger. So I sat at the kitchen counter, eating my dinner and hoping I wasn’t next. Over and over, my mother tried to explain that you didn’t just become anorexic overnight.
Did I feel that instinct, to stop eating? she wondered.
No. I really liked eating.
And why wouldn’t I? My diet, up to that point, consisted entirely of organic hamburger patties, spinach-and-cheese ravioli (which I called grass ravioli), and pancakes my dad made in the shape of mice or guns. I was told that eating, really eating, was the only way to become big and strong and smart.
Because I was little. So little. Even though my favorite foods were: Doritos. Steak. Sara Lee pound cake (preferably still half frozen). Stouffer’s French bread pepperoni pizzas, my Irish nanny’s shepherd’s pie, and huge hunks of goose-liver pâté, eaten with my bare hands as a snack. My mother denies having let me eat raw hamburger meat and drink a cup of vinegar, but I know that both happened. I wanted to taste it all.
When I was born I was very fat for a baby—eleven pounds (which sounds thin to me now). I had three chins and a stomach that drooped to one side of my stroller. I never crawled, just rolled, an early sign that I was going to be resistant to most exercise and any sexual position that didn’t allow me to relax my back. But by my third birthday something began to change. My black hair fell out and grew in blond. My chins melted away. I walked into kindergarten as a tiny, tan little dreamboat. I can remember spending what must have been hours, as a kid, looking in the mirror, marveling at the beauty of my own features, the sharp line of my hip, the downy hairs on my legs, my soft golden ponytail. I still envy my own eight-year-old self, standing confidently on a Mexico beach in a French bikini, then breaking for nachos and Coke.
Then the summer after eighth grade I got my period. My dad and I were taking a walk in the country when I felt something ticklish on my inner thigh. I looked down to see a thin trail of blood making its way toward my ankle sock.
“Papa?” I murmured.
His eyes welled up. “Well,” he said, “in Pygmy cultures you’d have to start having children right about now.”
He called my mother, who rushed home from her errands with a box of tampons and a meatball sub.
I soon gained thirty pounds. Starting high school is hard enough without all your favorite nightgowns becoming belly shirts. But here I was, a slip of a thing suddenly shaped like a gummy bear. I wasn’t obese, but a senior did tell me I looked “like a bowling ball with a hat on.” According to my mother, some of it was hormonal. Some of it was the result of the medication that was keeping my obsessive-compulsive disorder in check. All of it was alien—and alienating.
This was the same year that I became a vegan. This was inspired by a love of puppies and also a cow who winked at me on a family vacation to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Rationally, I knew the cow was probably attempting to remove a fly on its lid without the aid of arms. But the wink, that seemingly irrefutable sign of sentience, stirred something in me—a fear of causing another creature pain, of not acknowledging their suffering.
I maintained the position for nearly ten years, occasionally lapsing into vegetarianism and beating myself up about it. When I was seventeen years old I even had a vegan dinner party that was chronicled in the style section of The New York Times—headline: “A Crunchy Menu for a Youthful Crowd!”—and catered by a now-defunct establishment called the Veg-City Diner. I wore my grandmother’s Dior, insisted on shoelessness (leather was a no-no), and explained to the reporter that, while I didn’t care much about the Iraq War, I was very concerned by our nation’s casual attitude toward bovine murder.
While my veganism began as a deeply felt moral position, it soon morphed into a not-very-effective eating disorder. I never thought of it as a diet, but it was a way to limit the vast world of food that I had once loved so dearly—I had the feeling I could go mad if not given any boundaries. I’d be like that guy who drank the ocean and still wasn’t satisfied.
I fell in love with Cathy comics one afternoon at my grandmother’s house, flipping through the Hartford Courant. They weren’t printed in The New York Times, our household’s newspaper of choice. So every week after that my grandmother carefully snipped them out of her newspaper and mailed them to me, no note. I would savor them after school over half a box of cookies, laboring to understand each joke. Cathy liked food and cats. She couldn’t resist a sale or a carbohydrate. No men seemed to care for her. I could relate. By the time I reached high school, I no longer read Cathy, but I did act like her. I am thinking particularly of a shower I took where the lower half of my body was under the running water and the upper half was laid out on the bath mat, eating a loaf of bread.1
College was an orgy of soy ice cream, overstuffed burritos, and bad midwestern pizza inhaled at 3:00 A.M. I didn’t think very much about my weight or how food made me feel or the fact that what I ate might even be having an impact on how I looked. My friends and I seemed to be running a codependent overeaters’ network.
“You NEED and DESERVE that brownie.”
“Hey, are you going to finish that risotto?”
When a friend of my mom’s who I didn’t know very well died, I ate a massive panini, using grief management as my excuse.
I didn’t get on a scale until a year after I graduated. I maintained the childlike perspective that weighing yourself was something you only did at the doctor’s office—and if you were being offered a lollipop as compensation.
Occasionally I would walk into the kitchen in my underwear, stand sideways to display what I considered abs, and remark to my mother, “I think I’m losing weight.” She would nod politely and return to organizing the Sondheim section of her iTunes library.
At my annual gynecological exam, they stuck me on the scale. “I think I’m around one hundred forty,” I told the nurse, who nodded and smiled as she inched the numbers upward. It clunked, and thunked, until finally it settled at a hair below one hundred sixty.
“We’ll say one hundred fifty-nine,” she offered charitably.
One hundred fifty-nine? One hundred fifty-nine!? This couldn’t be right. This wasn’t me. This wasn’t my body. This was a mistake.
“I think your scale is broken,” I told her. “It wasn’t like this at home.”
On my way out I called my friend Isabel, hot and tearful. “I think I might have a thyroid problem,” I cried. “Come over?”
Isabel sat in my kitchen eating turkey from the package, listening patiently while I lay down on the marble countertop and moaned. “I am so fat. I am just growing
and growing. I am going to be too big to fit through the door of any clubs.”
“We don’t go to any clubs,” she said.
“But if we did, you would have to carry me on a domed silver tray, like a piece of pork.” I grew defensive against my own judgment. “And anyway, one hundred sixty pounds is not that big. It’s like thirty pounds bigger than most tall models.”
So here I was, in the waiting room of my mother’s nutritionist, Vinnie. After all these years, she had won.
A note about my parents: they have a variety of holistic professionals on call. One of my earliest memories is being clutched tightly by my mother’s psychic Dmitri, who smelled of essential oils and walked around our house investigating “energies.” He told me I was going to live well into my nineties while I was just trying to watch TGIF.
Vinnie was unintimidating—he spoke lovingly of the Staten Island home he shared with his mother—but he didn’t spare me the rod when explaining that this weight gain wasn’t, in fact, the result of a wayward thyroid.
No, it was a result of too much sugar. I had, I told him, been eating eleven tangerines a day. Not enough healthy fat. Mild anemia. General overeating. He gave me some great basic principles (eat protein, avoid sugar, have breakfast), and he made it clear that every time I ate a cookie or a hunk of baguette I was filling my body with unusable calories, unnecessary inflammation jamming my gears.
He told Isabel, who also wanted a tune-up, that the most digestible alcohol was champagne and that there’s nothing wrong with eating a lot of olive oil. To my mind Isabel didn’t need his help, considering she once lost twenty pounds eating an entire angel food cake per day and nothing else, but I was glad to have a comrade-in-arms. At Vinnie’s urging, I began to keep track of what I consumed (down to the almond) in an iPhone app and lost nearly twenty pounds in a few months. I sat at my temp job, my snacks for the day lined up on the desk in front of me, waiting for the moment I could add them to my log. I both dreaded and cherished the last bite of the day (usually another almond). I couldn’t see the difference in my body, but my scale, and my mother, assured me I was shrinking.
Every pound lost made me giddy, but at the same time a voice inside me screamed, Who is this lady you’ve become? You are a potbellied riot girl! Why are you plugging your caloric intake into your smartphone!?
What followed was a year of yo-yo dieting. Hence, this journal entry from the end of 2009: I started to consider dieting and weight for the first time, going from 152 pounds to 145 pounds to 160 pounds to 142 pounds. Now, as I write this, I’m about 148 pounds and my goal is to reach 139 by February (but more on that later).
Throughout much of that year, I was the world’s least successful occasional bulimic. I understood the binging part of the equation fairly well, but after stuffing my face with all the readily available cookies and soy cheese I would drift into a stupor and forget to try and vomit. When I finally came to, all I could summon were dry heaves and a string of the celery I ate nine or ten hours ago, during a more hopeful time. My face puffy, my stomach aching, I’d fall asleep like a flu-y baby and awake the next morning with a vague awareness that something terrible had gone down between the hours of eleven thirty and one. Once my father noticed a constellation of broken capillaries around my eyes and asked me gently, “What the fuck did you do to your face?”
“I cried,” I told him. “A lot.”
Another time I announced my intention to puke up a box of pralines to my sister, who then banged on the locked bathroom door crying and screaming while I labored over the toilet. “It didn’t even work,” I told her, stalking back into my room.
A friend once told me that when you’ve been in AA, drinking is never fun again. And that’s how I feel about having seen a nutritionist—I will never again approach food in an unbridled, guilt-free way. And that’s okay, but I think of those college years as the time before I was expelled from Eden.
What follows are entries from a 2010 journal chronicling my attempts to lose weight. This has been, up until now, the most secret and humiliating document on my computer, kept more hidden than my list of passwords or my index of those I have encountered sexually.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 21, 2010
Breakfast, 11am:
two pieces of gluten free toast (100 calories each)
w/ flax oil (120 calories)
¼ greek yogurt (35 calories)
peach (80 calories)
lunch/snack, 1:30 p.m.:
1 oz. salami (110 calories)
celery sticks (??)
Afternoon snack, 3:30 p.m.:
Mesa sunrise cereal (110 calories)
Rice dream (110 calories)
½ greek yogurt (25 calories)
w/ 8 pecans (104 calories)
8 dried cherries (30 calories)
Dinner, 8:30 pm:
Steamed zucchini (no calories?)
Approx 6 ounces steak (not sure of calories)
Tomatoes (60 calories?)
Arugula (3 calories?)
Newman’s Own Dressing (45 calories)
Dessert:
Small bite dark chocolate (30 calories)
Swiss Miss Fat-Free Hot Cocoa (50 calories)
4 am:
1 bite of peach (10 calories)
spoonful chunky almond butter (110 calories)
celery (0 calories I think)
total caloric intake: approx: 1,560
Notes: could have had more veggies. I also recognize I look better than ever and that I’m radiating a kind of good health I haven’t before. Also, working with my psychology/food guilt—the need to be perfect is what obsesses and then derails me, when the real goal is to enjoy food and listen to my body. That never steers me wrong. This journal is going to help a lot. I will try and stick to 1500 calories a day or less and not weigh myself next until September 22nd.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010
Breakfast: 12:00 pm
Mesa Sunrise cereal (120 calories)
Rice Dream (110 calories)
2 pecans (26 calories)
2 dried cherries (20 calories?)
Lunch: 1:30 pm
2 scrambled eggs with salsa (150 calories)
Arugula (3–7 calories)
Snack: 3:45 pm
¼ green apple (45 calories)
1 spoonful chunky almond butter (110 calories)
5 dried cherries (30 calories?)
Snack: 6:40 pm
²⁄³ bag of peeled fruit snack—dried fruits, cashews, walnuts (200 calories)
Dinner: 9pm
2¼ corn chips with two scoops guacamole (100 calories?)
Chopped salad of beets, carrots, jicama, spinach, jalapeño dressing (150 calories?)
Fried fish taco w/ corn tortilla (300 calories?)
1 piece of fried plantain (50 calories?)
total caloric intake: approx 1,411
Notes: This journal is a place to record all the conflicting, intense emotions I have about food and to free myself of them. It’s about more than calories. I decided I will weigh myself every Sunday, so I know I’m on the right track. Today I weighed 149.5 on my mom’s scale (a heavier scale). I’m not going to obsess about weight, but a positive goal would be to be 139 pounds by the November 12th premiere of Tiny Furniture. I am going to make strides to make that happen (taking my supplements, listening to my body, avoiding gluten, refined sugar, booze, a lot of red meat and fats, going to Physique 57 class even though the women there are all engaged to be married and mean).
MONDAY, AUGUST 23RD, 2010
1 am
Smooth Move laxative tea
Late night snack: 4:45 am
Dried fruit (100 calories)
Breakfast: 10:15 am
1 Raweo raw chocolate cookie—these are like oreos but raw (100 calories)
2 fig/date/almond snowballs (180 calories)
1 tbsp Flax Oil (120 calories)
1 piece Tulu’s gluten-free oat bread (120 calories?)
2 pieces leftover Chinese chicken (100 c
alories?)
Lunch: 1:30 pm, Wild Ginger
½ bowl vegetarian hot and sour soup (100 calories?)
Salad w/silken tofu and carrot-ginger dressing (200 calories?)
Steamed Chinese Broccoli (25 calories?)
Green tea (0 calories)
Coffee: 3pm
Coffee with ½ cup soy milk and tiny bit of maple syrup (50 calories?)
Dinner: 6:30pm, Strip House
6-oz. filet mignon (348 calories)
½ serving creamed spinach (100 calories?) EDITOR’S NOTE: yeah right
two bites fried potato (50 calories?)
1 bite toast w/bone marrow (60 calories?)
one bite escargot, ¼ snail (43 calories?)
drinks:
2 seltzers
total caloric intake: approx 1,576
Notes: I had diarrhea today! Maybe it’s from the Smooth Move tea, which I am oddly addicted to. It tastes like chocolate!
TUESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2010
Breakfast: 10:30 a.m.
2 sugary cherries from a tart (20 calories?)
1 piece Tulu’s gluten free honey oat bread (120 calories)
w/ almond butter (100 calories)
seltzer
Lunch: 3 p.m.
Fruit salad w/ kiwi, orange, apple, grape, pineapple, strawberry (110 calories)
Cottage cheese (100 calories)
Tea
Dinner: 8:30 p.m.
Soy coconut pudding with berry sauce (300 calories?)
⅓ piece cornbread w. miso butter (100 calories?)
Late Night Snack: 12:30 a.m.
¼ piece cornbread with miso butter (150 calories?)
¼ cup ginger ale (93 calories?)
total caloric intake: approx 1,093
Notes: I have a bad fever (103) and general fluishness today. However, I do feel like I’ve hit a stride with my eating and I’m about 100% healthier mentally about it than I have been in a long time. Not swearing off of anything, or being extreme. Therefore, no desire to binge or go into a crazy food zone. It’s a totally new sensation!