I’ve continued to struggle with my weight. It’s one thing to have body issues when you’re single, but being with someone, even someone who has never once mentioned your body size except to make “hubba-hubba” noises about it, exacerbates the problem.
About a year into our relationship, my weight started creeping up again. I found myself ten pounds heavier than I’d been when I’d met him and felt a lot less sexy. For three years I’d been using this app called Lose It to track my food intake, exercise, and weight. The app included an interactive chart that showed your weight over time, so you could scroll back and forth on your timeline and see your weight magically appear on every date you weighed yourself for as long as you’d had the app. I’d had it since 2013, so with just a finger flick, I could witness years of weight obsession, successes, frustrations, diet failures, and rationalizations fly by, date by date.
Some people might look back nostalgically on times in their lives when they were more functional, more hopeful, or just happier. I look back on past weights. I remember when I was twenty and got down to a hundred and thirty-five pounds and a size 10 after paying for a service wherein a “nurse” supervised my three-hundred-calorie-a-day diet for four months. I remember when I was twenty-eight and went from two hundred and twenty-five pounds to one hundred and ninety by walking on a treadmill in my mom’s laundry room after my father died. I remember when I was thirty-three and lost seventy pounds because I had finally gained enough self-esteem to believe I deserved to be with someone but not quite enough to believe I could do so while fat.
I have snapshots in my mind from each of these times: Trying on size 10 skirts in the Esprit store and not recognizing myself. Standing in front of a huge crowd in a gorgeous old movie house for Live Wire! and feeling sexy and confident for the first time in my life at thirty-four. Then standing on that same stage at forty-six and thinking it was miraculous that all I felt was nervous about my performance instead of worried that people were leaning over to their dates and saying, “She sounds a lot thinner on the radio.”
I’d had those affirming, confident moments in the past, so why wasn’t I having them now? Here I was, almost as thin as I hoped I sounded on the radio, and in a relationship with a guy who loved me and my body. Why couldn’t I love it too?
I’m five foot five, and when we first started dating, I weighed just under two hundred pounds, so I wasn’t harboring any illusions that I was rail-thin, but I felt that I had a lot to offer. I was curious and empathetic and took less than five minutes to put my makeup on. Because I’d been forced to read hundreds of books for my job, I knew enough about a wide range of subjects to be a sparkling conversationalist when I wanted to be. I had funny, interesting friends. I had one of the coolest jobs in Portland. I’d taken a fellatio class.
I brought a lot to the table. But I also brought my ass to the table, and in my mind, it was so huge that it shattered the table into tiny shards and then nobody had anything on the table because there was no table.
Weight is a powerful thing.
I remember watching The Truth About Cats and Dogs back in the ’90s and seeing size 10 Janeane Garofolo playing “the fat one” and thinking, I will never be thin enough to be the fat girl in a movie.2
And I will never be thin enough to be attractive to men.
Ruminating on dangerously, pathologically wrongheaded thoughts like these led me to be a thirty-four-year-old virgin and to avoid relationships for a decade after my first breakup.
I knew that something was broken. Something is still broken.
I’ve always known it, but I hadn’t had the courage or temerity to do anything about it until my OFW year. More precisely, until I started dating Scott and realized that no matter how great my romantic life got, as long as I felt like my ass crushed all my other awesome table offerings, I would forever believe that someone who wasn’t as fat as me was doing me a favor by dating me. It was time to do something.
I’d been so impressed with how Samantha Hess (the professional cuddler) had educated herself out of her body issues that I decided to research ways to do the same. I went to search for healing your relationship with your body and Google autocompleted my sentence to healing your relationship with your mother. I bookmarked some of those results and moved on.
Here’s a frustrating thing I’ve run into over and over again: There are clinics and groups for anorexics and bulimics and there are hospitals that offer surgery to those who are beyond morbidly obese, but for those of us who are “just” compulsive overeaters and obese, there really aren’t any programs, or if there are, those programs aren’t paid for by insurance unless it gets to the point where you need a gastric bypass. It’s like going to a doctor with stage two colon cancer and having her say, “We’re sorry, but we can’t offer you any treatment until you get to stage four.”3
After a lot of searching, I finally found a combination class/therapy group taught by a woman named Jacci Jones, whose name sounds like a badass lady cop with something to prove, but she’s actually a soft-spoken, sweet marriage and family therapist with something to prove…about disordered eating. The group focused on food addiction and healing one’s relationship with food, and of course my insurance didn’t pay for it, but thankfully I was making enough freelancing to afford to pay out of pocket. Insurance companies need to stop being stupid about weight. And mental illness. And pretty much everything else.
I told myself that I was going to either lose weight in the group or come to a place of peace with whatever my body looked like and not continue to torture myself by trying to get smaller instead of healthier.
My only concern about the group was the term food addiction. I’d never thought of myself as an addict, but once I started going to the group, I realized that of course I was.
I remember at one point talking about how much power a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup had over me and later thinking about how insane that sentence had been. I thought about the peanut butter cup on the counter in its orange plastic wrapper. It was just sitting there, being inanimate. Did I believe peanut butter cups had brains? Souls? Diabolical plans to get inside my belly?
The first thing I learned in group was that no food is inherently good or bad. It just is what it is and it has whatever caloric and nutritional content it has. And what you choose to do with food, on its own or in combination with other foods, can have an immediate positive or negative effect on your health and mood.
Pretty simple stuff, but once you truly connect to that idea, it’s quite powerful.
The group also helped me learn to fight with my brain more effectively. For the majority of my adult life, I’d spent my free time thinking about all the things I’d done wrong so far and all the things that would go wrong in the future. What I was learning now was that thinking something didn’t make it true. Another very simple idea, but for someone for whom being right was a constant imperative, this was a profound and liberating thought.
It feels counterintuitive, but in order to begin to heal from a lifetime of envisioning worst-case scenarios, I had to learn not to trust myself sometimes. Because an anxious brain is the ultimate unreliable narrator.
In the past, when I’d been under stress or feeling regret for a binge, my inner voice came at me with laser efficiency.
Look what you did to yourself. You’re disgusting.
Why are you so weak? You’re like a child.
You’re gonna die alone, and that’s what you deserve.
This is why I filled my time alone with a constant stream of social media, sudoku, naps, or videos of cats falling off things. Because no one wants to hang out with that asshole.
The group taught me to do the opposite of what one would normally do to a person with that voice—it taught me to empathize with it. To ask what had turned her into such a raging bitch. To ask what she might be afraid of.
Turns out, she’s afraid I’m going to have a massive heart attack. She’s afraid I’m going to be uncomfortably heavy and miserable for the rest of my life.
She’s afraid I’ll die alone.
She—that voice—is like the shitty, cruel, misguided mother I never had.4 She believes that even though the insults have never worked—not one single time—she needs to continue haranguing me every day so that I won’t make the same mistakes over and over again. Sure, she’s wildly ineffective, but she’s scrappy.
The voice didn’t totally stop once I understood where she was coming from, but I was periodically able to reason with her.
VOICE: Look at your thighs. You make me sick.
ME: Hey, Dick. [I call her Dick.] Listen, I understand why you’re concerned about them, but they’re doing their job really well. See how they’re holding me up and stuff?
DICK: They’re so jiggly and gross.
ME: Well, your exoskeleton is made of bile and cat poop, and live bees fly out of your mouth every time you speak, but you seem to get around okay.
DICK: That’s a low blow.
ME: I’m just saying we have stuff in common.
Over just a few months, the group had slipped me little pieces of information that, along with my sitting in a room for two hours and talking about food issues once a week, began to gain a foothold in my previously embattled brain.
We had a nutritionist come in who told us that sugar was linked to brain fog, and I went off sugary treats for the first time in my adult life, which balanced out my moods, and while it didn’t lift the fog, it definitely thinned it out a little.
We watched a video from a doctor who informed us that walking for thirty minutes a day reduced the risk of heart attack by 31 percent—31 percent!
This information, which I imagine had been out there in the world for quite a while but which I’d been ignoring because Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were actively sabotaging me, felt revolutionary. In order to become healthy, I’d always pictured myself in one of those “getting strong now” film montages, where I started off chubby and had someone yelling at me in the rain to do pull-ups and sit-ups and bench-press a large log and pull a tractor tire with a huge chain while I cried nonstop and screamed, “I’ve got nowhere else to go!” But this idea that I could stroll my way to health? That I could meander my way out of a heart attack? That made health appear attainable. Because I have a low threshold for misery.
Two months later, my brother and I started a bet with two other friends that involved us going to the gym three days a week. I had to post real-time pictures of myself entering the gym and then leaving it at least twenty-five minutes later. I would owe the other three participants thirty-three dollars each for every week I failed.
We were all so clearly annoyed in the photos of the first few weeks that my roommate Shelly, who was in on the bet, texted, If someone came upon these texts and didn’t read English, they’d think we were a group of friends who had bonded over a shared hatred of mall architecture.
The bet was a success. I started walking three days a week without fail and have done so for a year now.
We’re still engaged in the bet and I’m still working on trying to be healthy rather than thin. It’s a struggle, but for the first time, I have hope that I won’t wake up every day for the rest of my life thinking about how I fucked up with food yesterday and wondering how I’m going to fuck up with it today. Food doesn’t feel like my enemy or my savior anymore, and if I gain a few pounds, it’s not the worst tragedy in the history of the universe. It’s just a thing that happens.
I’ve forgiven myself for all my food-related sins, but even more than that, I’ve realized that there’s no such thing as a food-related sin; there’s just eating that will make me feel good and eating that will make me feel bad. And neither choice has a damned thing to do with my character.
I’m flawed, but I’m trying, and I can finally see the beauty and humanity in both of those things.
Where work is concerned, I still haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up. I’m currently teaching writing and storytelling to adults and high-school kids, writing columns for which I don’t do a damn thing that scares me, and doing some freelance advertising work. Now that I’m out of the weekly dread-terror-relief cycle that Live Wire! used to cause, I’m not in a huge hurry to figure it all out.
I still perform, but now I know very clearly which experiences will bring me joy (reading essays, telling stories) and which will not (situations in which I am paired with a genius and must ask questions that may expose me as a nongenius).
I’ve defined for myself which relationships I should spend time thinking about (the kind with the people I love) and which I shouldn’t (the kind with four hundred strangers).
I also discovered that I should seek work in a field in which neuroticism is a plus (I would make a great Chihuahua, for instance).
When I look back on my year of living (relatively) dangerously, I’m half shocked that it was me who did those things and half shocked that I’d been so scared to do them.
Things I did that I’ll never do again: get a Brazilian, allow a stranger to put her vagina on my freshly washed clothing, have public sex, get stoned, and rate human beings like they’re shitty brunch spots on Yelp.
Things I did that I hope I’ll never do again: pee on the floor of someone I’m trying to impress.
Things I did that I might do again: leave a job when it causes a constant stream of cortisol to flow through my veins, go to a cuddler (if my boyfriend weirdly stops touching me), and attend a water aerobics class when I need encouragement from the elderly.
As for how my year-and-a-half-long adventure affected me, it didn’t magically change my entire life. I’m not a whole new me. I’m not fearless.
But I did learn that when it comes to increasing one’s general level of pluck, you don’t have to bungee-jump off a bridge—or even jump off the high dive, for that matter.
It turns out, grand gestures aren’t necessary. Because every time you dip your toe outside your comfort zone, you nudge its border just a little. And a little is enough to change things a lot.
My life isn’t enormously different, but in addition to finally being okay with leaving Live Wire!, I found that one small, important thing did change for me. Just one word.
Interesting.
When someone suggests I try something new, something that sounds like it could lead to awkwardness or discomfort or risk, instead of That sounds terrifying, my brain now says, Well. That sounds interesting.
It doesn’t say, Let’s fucking do it! We are totally gonna turn this [mildly adventurous experience] into our bitch! But it does offer up a surprisingly judgment-neutral response, which is kind of a big deal.
I wanted to make myself more optimistic, and I feel like my one shiny new word absolutely counts. It’s tiny, but it counts. And I spent a whole year doing weird shit without having made that infinitesimal shift, so it turns out you don’t have to be optimistic to live an interesting life.
So if I came away from this whole thing with a lesson, I guess it’s this: Fuck optimism. I mean, I love optimism, and if you have it naturally, that’s wonderful. Go with that, always and forever. You’re lucky and I hate you a little.
If you don’t have it naturally yet you go ahead and do the thing that’s going to make your life—and, by extension, you—more interesting, well, you’re still doing it, aren’t you? You’re still doing it with your Okay Fine Whatever attitude, which is a lot more of an accomplishment, if you ask me.
So go forth, and do things hesitantly! Say, Hey, world! I don’t trust that you have my best interests at heart, but I’m willing to do this anyway! I just want to be clear that I’m not promising to like it! World? Are you still listening?
The thing is, the world probably isn’t listening. The world is just minding its own business, spinning at a thousand miles an hour and trying to hold it together, just like you are.
So this is going to be on you.
Do it.
Roll your eyes, throw a mini-tantrum, say it’s gonna suck balls, and do it.
And just know, somewhe
re, I’m saying it’s gonna suck balls and doing it too.
1 His name is Scott. Which is my brother’s name. I know it’s weird, but if we can deal with it, so can you.
2 If you haven’t seen it, it’s another modernized Cyrano story, but this was Hollywood and Cyrano was a woman, so instead of a giant nose, she was cursed with a hideously medium-size body.
3 To be clear, being overweight does not automatically mean you’re not healthy. Those people who shame fat people because they claim to be concerned about their health need to realize that it’s absolutely possible to retain your health as an obese person with exercise, the right foods, or just good genes. But for me, because I ate terrible foods and didn’t exercise, obesity meant gallstones, high blood pressure, pre-diabetes, a bad back, and the beginnings of fatty liver disease. Obesity and health didn’t go together for me.
4 As I was growing up, my mother was a casserole-making, terrible-school-play-attending, Christmas-elf-impersonating hundred-pound ball of energy and acceptance. She came from a long line of weight-obsessed women but never said anything to me about mine. Partially because our family was very adept at avoiding uncomfortable conversations. Remember that game “the ground is poison,” where you leap around on pillows and laundry and furniture to avoid touching the floor? We played “conflict is poison” during my entire childhood.
Acknowledgments
(Or: Sorry I Didn’t See You for Two Years; I Hope We Can Have a Drink Now and Catch Up. You Look Great!)
It is a goddamned miracle that you’re holding this book. Writing it was the strangest blend of joy and hideous torture and it would not exist without an army of supportive, forgiving, generous people who believed that I was capable of doing it even when I told them they were full of shit, which I’d like to apologize for here. And also thank them.
Thanks, first, to my agent Laurie Fox for seeing that my column was a book and for pestering me (charmingly) until I let go of the fear and wrote the fucking thing. To Reagan Arthur and the amazing team at Little, Brown and to Jean Garnett for having faith in my work, the keenest of editing eyes, and the patience not to kill me or the project. To Gregg Kulick for a beautiful cover and Tracy Roe for slogging through the grammatical nightmare that was this book. To Lauren Velasquez, Maggie Southard, and the entire marketing and publicity team. And to Christine McKinley, without whom this book wouldn’t exist. Thank you for nudging me.
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