The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I don’t think she is too worried about what I think. She has other things on her mind.

  “Chris really irritates me though,” she blurts out. “Because sometimes I eat a thing and he asks me how I can eat it when it’s got so many calories?”

  “Oh,” I say, when I should just have said, “hmmm.” “Oh, I would find that hugely irritating too. I don’t care what other people eat as long as they leave me alone to eat whatever I want, whenever I want.”

  “I agree,” she says. “And you know Chris often says things like that to me, about calories. I am just not one of those people who counts their every calorie. I just can’t be bothered; I mean, what a waste of time. Imagine sitting there and adding up this and that and then seeing what you can and can’t eat. How totally pathetic.”

  “Absolutely,” I nod in agreement, feeling like such a total hypocrite because I even count the calories I might have inhaled by mistake. For example, if I pass a bakery redolent of flour and butter, I add fifty calories to my count, just in case. I also count every tiny gram of fat that passes my lips.

  How can I ever tell her that? Especially in a room full of people standing quietly in line waiting to photocopy. What else can I do but agree with her?

  I start feeling very nervous at the turn the discussion is taking and tell myself to shut up and just listen to whatever it is that she is intent on sharing with me but I can’t do that, no, I have to do it the hard way.

  “I would find your roommate very irritating,” I say to her again. I don’t know if I am trying to reassure her or encourage her to tell me more.

  I have to admit I am curious because Brit seems so at peace with her eating, so unconcerned by it all that I feel the need to probe deeper, to see if she really is the way she appears to be: a carefree, Miss I-Eat-Anything-I-Like person.

  “The thing that pisses me off the most,” she says, “is that he eats things that are low calorie but they aren’t healthy. So it’s not like he’s concerned with his health, just his weight, which is totally wrong. And I want to ask him whose weight fluctuates up and down, his or mine? It isn’t mine, that’s for sure. But never mind that, he keeps telling me that all the things I eat are fattening and then he eats whatever he thinks is slimming at that moment, and then in the middle of the night, he gets up to make peanut butter sandwiches.”

  I can’t help myself. “I know exactly what you mean,” I say, and I think this is where I begin to lose control.

  “My sister’s like that,” I tell her. “She eats stuff like popcorn for breakfast, lunch, and supper, thinking it’s diet food. I keep telling her that popcorn has a lot of calories and a huge amount of fat but she just won’t listen. What these people don’t realize,” I continue, “is they are, in actual fact, eating way more calories than they think. You know,” I add, like I have it all together, “the saddest thing is that people who are slaves to food and diet have no freedom at all really. For instance, you and I work above a mall. Well, my sister would spend all day wondering whether she should just let go and binge for a day because, for her, all these foods are forbidden. She’s forever in a binge or starve situation and so her entire life is spent at the mercy of these foods and her preoccupations have got nothing to do with hunger or health. It’s that entire diet mentality.” I come to a close, disconcerted at having said so much, sure Brit will think I am odd.

  “Exactly,” Brit agrees and doesn’t seem to find anything odd about the discussion. “You’re quite right. I am much happier being on an even keel all the time. I admit I am not fat or thin but I am happy at my weight and I don’t want to be one of those people who’s always bingeing, like Chris. I used to be one of those people you know. In fact I have to tell you, I’ve got stretch marks from all the weight I have put on and lost through the years.”

  I don’t know what to say when she tells me about her stretch marks because I haven’t got any. I am surprised by her admission of having lost and gained that much weight, but I have to find something to say to show her I empathize with her.

  So I mumble something about her being thin or not at all overweight or something like that. She goes on to say she has a lot of friends, not just Chris, who are really messed up about food and that she used to be, too. She used to be one of those people who counted every single calorie but then she discovered Fit for Life and that was when everything changed.

  I tell her I’ve also done Fit for Life and it changed everything for me too because I abandoned calories and decided to eat as much as I wanted to of the food I liked, as long as I stuck to the Fit for Life categories.

  Fit for Life says eat only fruit until lunch, never mix acid and alkaline fruit, then never mix proteins and carbs, and go easy on all acid foods always. It is very much like the What Would Jesus Eat? diet and what Gandhi really ate.

  Of course I do no such thing as abandon calories. What a joke! Eat as much as I like? That’s hilarious too.

  So, why do I say it? Because I know that’s what she is going to say and I want her to think I am like her – normal. I don’t want her to suspect the truth about me and I think that’s when I begin to lose sight of myself in the conversation.

  I have been cautious up to this point, vague and nonspecific, but I start to feel terribly anxious and then, to my horror, I find myself blurting out way too much information. “You know though, my parents are very caught up in the whole diet mentality. I was brought up, and trained, to binge and diet. I was rewarded for it, like a poor unsuspecting little Pavlov’s dog. A starved then overfed Pavlov’s dog. I can remember my father offering me jewelry if I lost five pounds in one week. How totally impossible is that? And yet, that same weekend he told me we were all going out for waffles and ice cream and I could start my diet on Monday.”

  In for a penny, in for a good few pounds, I can’t seem to stop talking.

  “The odd thing,” I say, “is that my parents are good people and yet they’re so concerned with appearance. They so badly want my sister and me to be tall and thin and they keep trying to get us to be that way.”

  “But you are thin,” Brit objects, which is probably the most alarming thing she can say. Nothing makes me want to run faster and hide than a comment like that.

  I mumble something, denial probably, then I get back to the point.

  “I mean, every time I see them they ask me how much weight I’ve lost and I tell them I’m exactly the same as I was and they say no, I have lost a lot of weight and they want to know what I have been doing. And I tell them I haven’t been doing anything, I’m exactly the same. I wonder what their mental image of me is. It must be quite big really, for them to be so constantly surprised by my reality.”

  “But you are really so thin.” Brit insists again, alarming me even further.

  At this point we are interrupted by a very young, very gay, very tall graphic designer who rushes up to talk to Brit. I watch him schmooze madly and I think this is a good time for me to just shut up.

  Why have I said so much? All I wanted to do was tell her not to be pressured by her friend Chris, thereby assuring myself that I wasn’t pressured by this conversation with her either, or something like that. I don’t know. Does there always have to be a reason why? In my world, yes.

  I start to feel enormously fat and then I remember that she and I weren’t actually eating. All we were doing was talking about food and eating disorders in the most general terms. But I begin to worry that the conversation will set off a binge and, since I have not had one in the last week, I am not in any hurry to go off the rails.

  After the tall designer makes a flourishing exit, his black-almost-blue side-parted hair covering half of his face, I wonder if Brit will continue our conversation or if I should say something.

  “My mother is very health conscious,” she picks up the thread as though we hadn’t been interrupted. “And my father’s quite oblivious to food, so I have to admit we don’t have any of that at all. Except that my sister’s really skinny and she does have an
anorexic personality. She never eats a thing, not a single thing. We go and see a movie, she and I, and she’ll say ‘oh, let’s have a chocolate, I really feel like a chocolate,’ and she gets all excited, but then by the time we get into the store, she’ll say ‘oh, you know, I don’t really feel like it any more, I’ve lost my appetite.’ And she will have talked her way out of it.”

  “She was probably still dying for it,” I say. I can totally relate to her sister.

  “Probably,” Brit agrees. “But screw that. If I want to have the chocolate I will. I’ll eat an entire box of chocolate-covered almonds all by myself at the movies.”

  “Me too,” I say. But the last time I’d even been close to a chocolate-covered almond, I’d carefully eaten the chocolate off it, and had immediately discarded the almond, since everybody knows they are the most calorie-laden food in the universe. Except, of course, for avocados.

  “But,” Brit leans in closer and whispers, “you know who I think really has an anorexic personality?”

  “Meg,” I say.

  “Exactly. She is one of those people who doesn’t eat a single thing. But you must remember that she and Jon get shitfaced drunk every single night and so she saves her calories for that which is why she lives on coffee and diet Coke during the day. That’s another thing that pisses me off about Chris. He insists on telling me about my calories and then he sit and drinks an entire bottle of red wine all to himself and I think what about all those calories right there?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, and tell her what I know about wine metabolizing like pure butter. “But you are right about Meg, she doesn’t eat so she can drink at night with Jon.”

  I say that like I know about Meg’s drinking, but in reality I am stupefied. I had no idea she drank or that they drank together. I thought she was a binge eater like me who throws up her dinners and that’s why her face is always swollen.

  But, now that I think about it, I have seen her drunk and falling about on more than one occasion. But I have always thought her disorder was eating, not alcohol. I am very taken aback by this news and want more time to think about it.

  “I think Jon encourages Meg not to eat,” I say. “And Brit, please don’t think me a bitch but I am convinced Meg throws up. Have you noticed how every time we go out for lunch and she eats something, she trots off to the washroom right after? I mean, I could be wrong, but I doubt it. What do you think?”

  “Of course, I agree with you,” Brit says. “Why do you think I asked that dippy mystic Indira to read aloud about it? I wanted to see Meg’s reaction. And then, when Kenneth, oops, Kenny asked about anorexics, I just about fell over but Meg didn’t even seem to notice. But maybe we should have looked up alcoholism.”

  I suddenly realize the other people in the photocopying room are listening intently. I lean closer to Brit and we discuss, in a whisper, how Jon wants Meg to be thin, and we say that we can’t understand why Meg, a bright, intelligent woman, allows herself to be manipulated by everybody around her, including Jon.

  “You know,” I say, lying to the last, “what really made me stop counting calories was that I thought to myself, so here I am, a successful woman who achieves so much in life, and what do I want inscribed on my gravestone? That I counted every last calorie to the end?”

  Brit doubles up in laughter. “Exactly,” she nods vigorously.

  All right, so I haven’t stopped counting calories. I mean, I couldn’t stop even if I tried to. But I do try to eat so few that if I don’t count them, it doesn’t matter much. And I do tell myself that gravestone thing, to try to keep it all in perspective, even though I fail there too.

  We finally get our copies done and collated and Brit says she wants to visit the caf and will I come with her, so I do, and she gets a huge bag of fries and offers me some but I say I don’t like them, thanks anyway.

  We discuss men and their desire for thin women and then we talk about how good food tastes when you eat it instead of numbers.

  And that really is the truth.

  Look at the other night, at a function of Mathew’s, when I had a doughnut for dessert, with chocolate glazed icing. It was the nicest thing I have eaten in a very long time. I savoured every tiny bite, every lick. It wouldn’t have tasted nearly that good if I ate them regularly and besides I had more than enough calories and fat grams saved up to make it a legal eat and I was so proud of myself that I could eat a doughnut like that.

  I could see Mathew was very surprised too. In all our years together, he has never seen me eat a doughnut. I was a bit worried I might be sparking off a monumental binge that would see me ending up at nine hundred pounds but I managed to keep my panic in check and I only ate raw fruit and steamed vegetables the next day to atone.

  What am I thinking about? Where am I? I’ve lost my train of thought.

  Oh right. Brit and I are talking about how good real food tastes when you are not eating numbers.

  And then, she starts telling me about the time she lost over forty pounds and her hair started to go grey and fall out and her friends cried when they saw her.

  But she doesn’t seem to want to discuss that in any further detail so I don’t press her.

  At least I don’t end up telling her that much about me. I don’t tell her my obsessions and fears, or about the running total of calories in tiny writing on the palm of my hand.

  I don’t tell her how I double up on my starving if I have to go out for a lunch or how I quietly, secretly, weigh myself so Mathew doesn’t hear me. I don’t tell her anything like that at all.

  Well, okay, I told her about my family and the gold jewelry offer, which is more than I usually reveal, but it is also not the end of the world.

  I don’t tell her I have tried every single diet under the sun, and that no matter what, I always feel as big as a house, a lumbering lump with gargantuan thunder-thighs, and I don’t tell her that I’ve seen a nutritional coach twice who tried to help me understand the difference between hunger and appetite, and my psychological needs versus my physical needs, and I don’t tell her how I deny myself all the time.

  Yes, I tell her I get a bit tense and stressed out whenever I see my parents and I stop eating for weeks before an anticipated visit but Brit just seems to think that I lose my appetite naturally due to stress, not that I plan restrictive lists.

  No, she doesn’t know that, but I know she has at one time lost over forty pounds and that her hair started to fall out.

  We go back to work and I feel awful, fragmented, and horribly exposed.

  Brit sits at her desk across from me and we carry on chatting, and she says that she has been watching Meg since she started and soon became aware of her issues and problems and she also says that she has watched me, too, oh dear God, but that I eat normally – a bit too healthily – but normally.

  “Oh, do I?” I laugh. I am laughing out of relief that I have fooled her. I am that happy to remain undetected.

  “Poor Meg,” she says. “Remember the last time we all went out for lunch and all she had was a salad? At least you and I ate properly.”

  “Absolutely,” I say, having starved myself for a week in order to appear normal at the dreaded lunch. “After all, why go out to lunch if you are only going to eat lettuce?”

  She and I laugh again. But I have the last laugh because as usual I had planned and prepared and ordered wisely, and while Meg had only ordered a salad, it arrived smothered in thick blocks of feta cheese, deep-fried croutons and whole olives, with an oil dressing and about three million grams of fat. I realize that Brit can’t be as diet savvy as she thinks she is, because she thinks that Meg’s salad is the dieter’s dish at our lunch, meanwhile, that salad outweighed all of our food combined. She’s probably like my sister, Madison, who vaguely approximates calories and who’s usually off by a good thousand in her daily calculations.

  I am glad Brit thinks I am a normal, if over-healthy eater, because that’s exactly what I want her to think. But, by the same token, she must th
ink I’m a normal weight, and a normal weight by my standards is gross, obese, disgusting.

  And, while Brit might be watching me and Meg, I’ve been watching Brit and the truth is she’s the one that is out of control.

  She had two muffins and an egg salad sandwich for breakfast this morning. Then she had those fries and a huge lunch. So I think she wanted to bring all that up, so to speak, because she’s feeling fat and awful and she needs to talk, and none of it is about me.

  But before I start being too impressed with myself for having fooled her, I must vow to never let this kind of conversation happen again. If Brit ever talks about any of this again, which she will, I must just sit there and let her say whatever she wants, and offer encouragement and support, without letting her into my world at all. It’s much too dangerous because sooner or later I will make a slip. She’ll talk about it again, I know she will, she has to, she’s losing control and I can sense it.

  A rolling stone is a fat, round thing

  I HAVE THE WORST FAT DAY at the Rolling Stones concert. It was depressing, not only because fat days are depressing, but because all I could think about during the Rolling Stones concert was food. Is there nothing on the planet that can distract me from food? Not even a concert given by legendary rock superstars? Perhaps the finger of blame for my failure could be pointed at the fully catered box suite we were in. One of Mathew’s perks. If we had been in the crowd, I would have eaten before leaving home, and we wouldn’t have been flanked by food-laden buffet tables the entire night. I guess I still would have been tempted by the fast food vendors, but I can usually resist them pretty easily.

  So, there I am, sitting in five-star luxury, supposedly enjoying a night on the town when all I am really doing is calculating my fat grams and calories.

  While I am adding and subtracting, I am trying to tell myself that I could be doing a lot worse, that I am keeping it under control as best I can. For example, when we arrive at the agency there are snacks laid out and I only have one nut and one chip and a glass of mineral water. This translates to10 cals/half a gram of fat + 10 cals/1 gram of fat + zero/zero all of which equals not doing too badly. Then we are given a ride to the stadium and taken up to the suite, primo treatment. I am relieved to see a small bowl of fresh veggies and I attack them. That counts as “free food” but I add another 50 cals/2 grams of fat just because you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many “safety-net” calories in the bag. And yes, there is fat in a cherry tomato. It might only be 0.3 grams but you have to watch those fat grams, they pile up pretty quickly.