Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  Like a great many women in America, I can look at any food—an apple, a hard-boiled egg, a scoop of ice cream—and tell you how many calories it has, how many of them are from carbs, how many are from fat, and probably how many Weight Watchers points it is worth. I tell people that I’m bad with numbers and hopeless at science, but I can talk for hours about engineered foods and the evils of white carbs and high-fructose corn syrup and can instantly calculate how many miles on the treadmill correspond to any given dessert.

  None of that knowledge helped. None of my diets worked—at least, not in the long term. I’d lose fifteen or twenty pounds, keep it off for a little while, and then those pounds would come back, and sometimes they’d bring their friends. And, of course, with weight comes shame. In spite of my professional accomplishments, in spite of how full and rich and interesting my life was, I felt like a failure. Why can’t I get this under control? I would think . . . and, inevitably, if I could just lose ten, twenty, thirty, forty pounds, then I’d have everything I wanted. Then I’d be happy. Then I’d deserve to be happy. The size I am now, I don’t deserve to be happy, I don’t deserve to be loved, I don’t deserve good things . . . but when I’m thin, then I will.

  I can’t blame myself for feeling that way. The books I’d grown up on, the shows and movies I’d absorbed as if through osmosis, the advertisements and images that wallpapered my life, all told me the same thing: fat women deserve nothing. Fat women are hideous, punch lines, grotesqueries, jokes, and they qualify for nothing good that the world has to offer.

  Of course, that isn’t true. There is no magic weight, no magic size, no magic number on the scale where, as soon as you hit it, confetti rains down and a band starts to play and hidden doors slide open and Daniel Craig walks through them to lift you in his arms (because, thin as you are, he totally can) and carry you into the life of uninterrupted bliss that you just know could be yours, if you only wore a size two dress.

  Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, the saying goes. For too many women, I think that life is what happens when you’re planning on, or trying to, lose weight. As soon as I lose ten/twenty/forty/eighty pounds, then I’ll buy that dress/take that trip/wear a bathing suit/go dancing. But not until. I don’t deserve fun, or pretty, nice things. I don’t belong in the world at my size.

  So you don’t buy the pretty dress to fit your current body—because why spend money on something that won’t fit your new, theoretical thin self? You choke down chalky SnackWell’s cookies (remember those?) or frozen Atkins meals or green juice or cabbage soup, and deny yourself the foods you really want to eat. You don’t swim or wear shorts or sleeveless shirts because you don’t want people looking at the body you’ve been taught to think of as an offense, an affront. You get used to never seeing anyone who resembles you, anywhere—not on Broadway, in the movies, in the magazines, on TV, not unless she’s a punch line, or a sidekick, or maybe the “before” on one of those radical weight-loss shows. You make love with the lights off, which has, if you’re like me, probably resulted in more than one elbow-to-eye-socket injury and maybe even the words no woman ever wants to say—“um, you need to move that up a few inches.” When you read the celebrity tabloids, you skip over the shots of starlets in their evening gowns, but linger over reports of what they eat in a day and wonder if you, too, committed to a regimen of hot lemon juice and vinegar and dinners of sashimi and spiraled zucchini then you could look that good. You deprive yourself until you’re weak, faint, embarrassing yourself by drooling every time an Applebee’s commercial comes on. Then you cram whatever’s handy down your throat, and you don’t even taste it, and you eat more of it than you’d intended, and you hate yourself even more. Rinse, repeat. Forever. No matter how old you get, no matter how successful you are, how much you earn, or what kind of good you do in the world, you’re not allowed to stop. If you’re fat, you’ve lost the game. If you’re thin, you win—only thin is a moving target, always receding into the distance, growing ever smaller, and you are never allowed to stop trying to hit it.

  Except—as it turns out—you can make peace with a larger body. I did. And I am here to tell you that life on the other side is pretty solid.

  For me, it was a gradual change.

  Maybe it started when I went to see Margaret Cho. She was doing her stand-up act at Rutgers—talking about her mother, talking about her childhood, talking about her failed ABC sitcom where executives told her she was too fat to play the part of herself. “You know what?” she asked. “Being thin is like trying to hold a basketball underwater.” You can do it, she implied, but at what cost? And what else could you be doing with all that strength, all that time, all that effort, that you were focusing on the ultimately pointless task of keeping the basketball submerged?

  By the 1990s, there was an increasing body of research that showed, conclusively, what Cho suggested and what almost anyone who’s been on the Weight Watchers merry-go-round can tell you: diets don’t work. Losing weight, it turns out, is the easy part. It’s just like every online commentator is ever so happy to explain—you take in fewer calories than you burn. But keeping it off is harder—is, in fact, almost impossible—because when you lose weight your body decides you’re living through something cataclysmic, like a famine or a war, and that it needs to hang on to every calorie you can give it. So your metabolic rate drops, which means you’ve got to eat less—in some cases, a lot less—to maintain your loss than a person who’d spent her whole life at that weight. In the stories I read, people who’d dieted off significant amounts of weight and kept it off described that feat as a full-time job. They logged every mouthful in a journal, they measured their portions precisely, they exercised, up to two hours every day, and they could never relax their vigilance, not even for a weekend.

  Did I want to live like that? Did I want “thin” to be my job? Wasn’t there more important work that I could do? By my late twenties, I had spent a solid ten years obsessing about my weight. I worked out regularly, because I liked being strong and fit and flexible, and because a session at the gym always left me feeling better than I’d felt when I walked in . . . but I decided that I was done with diets. If that meant I’d narrowed my fashion options or the size of the pool of men who’d want to date me, so be it. I didn’t need every man in the world to love me . . . I needed only one.

  I dated as a larger woman, fell in love, got engaged, and loosened my grip on the reins a little bit. I’d found a good man who loved me, just as I was . . . so maybe it wasn’t unthinkable that he’d love me even if there were a few pounds more to love? We both enjoyed good food, and we had the money to spend on great restaurants, or on cooking great meals . . . and both of those things, it turned out, were much more fun than those Weight Watchers meetings, where members tried to convince each other that a sliced apple was an acceptable, even delicious, substitute for cake.

  I got married in a plus-size wedding gown (note to bridal-gown designers—if ever there was a garment for which “vanity sizing” would be appropriate, yours would be it). I went on book tours and felt fine—after all, I was famous, or at least book-famous, for creating plus-size heroines who got happy endings in spite of their bodies. It wouldn’t do for me to show up skinny, right?

  Then, when I was thirty-three, I got pregnant. This was the moment I’d been waiting for ever since I’d learned where babies came from, because A) I wanted a baby, and B) I’d finally have an explanation for my appetite and a permission slip to eat, at last, to my heart’s content. For the first time in my adult life, I could just focus on what my body was doing, not on how it looked.

  Big mistake. Huge.

  And so, at last, here were brownies, deliciously dense; crisp-skinned roast chickens and meltingly tender sugar-roasted pork; voluptuous sea-salt caramels and dark-chocolate-covered pretzels. There were hoagies and banh mi and baked brie; there was cornbread and fritters and fried dough.

  I gained a lot of weight when I was pregnant—to this day, I d
on’t know how much, because I refused to look at the scale when they weighed me at my checkups. Then, after I had Lucy, I gained even more.

  I’d always been bigger (and, more to the point, hungrier) than most of the women I knew. I’d grown up watching people leave plates half full, declining snacks, even skipping meals, and I’d never been able to understand it. How can you just leave that there? Aren’t you going to finish it? Aren’t you still hungry? I was always hungry. It was like I’d been born without an “off” switch. I’d never known what it was to feel that I’d eaten enough. I’d been unable to follow that long-ago nutritionist’s advice about just getting used to being “a little bit hungry all the time.” I hated being hungry. Nor could I imagine a circumstance that couldn’t be improved by the addition of something delicious.

  These were different circumstances, though. This was a different hunger. I was eating not to feel, piling food on top of emotions I couldn’t handle, using ice cream and cookie dough to tamp down the misery of failing as a mother, and my fears about whether my husband would find another job, what it meant for our financial situation and our marriage if he couldn’t and if all of the financial and child-rearing responsibilities ended up being mine. Food was my answer to everything. Bad day? Have a cannoli. Irrational terror about going broke and ending up homeless? Have two. Sleepless night, cranky baby, not even thirty seconds of privacy in which to change my tampon? That’s why God made foie gras.

  By the time Lucy was two, the first number on the scale was a 3 . . . and I was scared. I couldn’t lose the weight that I’d gained, because I’d never been able to lose weight and keep it off, so why would this time be different? My blood pressure and cholesterol were both edging into the danger zone, and I was sure that diabetes, which runs on both sides of my family, was just around the corner . . . except, like many fat women, I was skipping checkups, too afraid of going to the doctor and getting the inevitable what-are-you-doing-about-your-weight talk to find out.

  I was stuck. On the one hand, I did not believe that my worth resided in my appearance; I knew that there had to be a way to live happily in the body that I had. But I didn’t feel good. I longed for the days when I’d been “just” a size sixteen. I didn’t want to be thin, I just wanted my old, Jen-size body back . . . only now there was a way to get it, a way that worked.

  I’d been initially repelled by the idea of weight-loss surgery; grossed out, specifically, by the former girl-band member who’d once been my size, then had her stomach stapled, and was suddenly showing up in Playboy, and on the cover of People, with her entire body slipped into the leg of her size-twenty-eight jeans, and talking about how, for the first time in her life, she felt pretty and sexy and desirable. I felt personally betrayed. Wasn’t she supposed to have felt pretty and sexy at her former size? Wasn’t she carrying the banner for the rest of us big girls? Who would carry our banner now?

  I was deeply conflicted . . . but, surreptitiously, I bought her book and began studying the surgery. I went online, browsing before-and-after pictures, reading stories about people who said that, for the first time in their lives, they knew what it was to feel full. And they were able to keep the weight off that they lost. It sounded like a dream come true.

  I researched for months and found the best surgeon in the state, who told me that I could expect to lose about a hundred pounds, a figure that would put me back in the neighborhood where I’d spent most of my twenties. I attended the practice’s here’s-how-you’ll-be-eating-now classes, memorized the binder they gave me, resigned myself to always having protein first, turning bread into a special treat, and knowing I’d get sick if I had too much sugar. I tried not to feel like a hypocrite, telling myself that I was doing this for my health—so I’d be able to get down on the floor comfortably when I was playing with Lucy, so I wouldn’t leave her motherless too soon.

  It’s true that some of my decision was motivated by health and comfort . . . but some of it was caving in to external pressure, to everything the world said about larger bodies. Maybe, if I’d been stronger or happier, I could have figured out how to be in the world at a size twenty-eight instead of a sixteen; how to deal with not fitting into airplane seats or not being able to buy clothes at even the plus-size shops at the mall; how to let it roll off my back when snarky local bloggers posted pictures of me at my heaviest to illustrate posts about what a wonderful guy my husband was and how could he stand being married to her?

  I could have tried harder . . . but I was so beaten down, so tired of fighting, so sick of my weight and my size being one of the preoccupying issues of my life. I didn’t want to be skinny, or pose in a men’s magazine, or worm my way into a cast-off plus-size pant leg. I wanted to have a normal appetite and my old body back. I wanted to take the issue of weight off the table. I wanted to know, for once in my life, how it felt to have enough, and for reasons science didn’t entirely understand, people who had weight-loss surgery had much better luck at reducing their risks of diabetes, and at keeping the pounds off, than the dieters. I wanted something that worked, instead of the screw-you yo-yo of losing weight and then gaining it back, and losing it and gaining it. Again.

  I had the operation in January 2006, and woke up in the recovery room feeling like I’d done ten thousand sit-ups, then had my midsection run over by a bus. I was lucky that I didn’t have any complications and that I was still, in my heart, the A student who’d do what it took to get a gold star. I followed the rules, subsisting, first, on protein shakes, gradually reintroducing bites of soft-boiled eggs and lean protein into my diet. I walked laps around the hospital floor as soon as they let me out of bed, and went back to the gym as soon as I was home. There was trial and error, and so much throwing up those first few months after I ate the wrong foods, or even too much of the right ones, that it barely even bothered me when it happened. Eventually, I got to the point where I could eat almost everything, in moderate portions—a piece of bread here; a few forkfuls of dessert there. Best of all, for the first time ever, I had an off switch. I knew what it felt like to be full, to say, No thanks, I’ve had enough, and mean it, to leave food behind and not make plans to run back when nobody was looking and gobble it down.

  At the end of the first year, the period during which most weight-loss surgery patients lose the majority of their weight, I’d shed almost exactly the amount my surgeon told me I could expect. I was back to my pre-wedding, pre-baby body, back to being a size sixteen, sometimes able to fit into the so-called “straight” sizes, sometimes shopping in the plus section. I could eat normally for the most part. I wasn’t thin . . . but it didn’t matter. Taking things further would have involved preoccupation and effort—keeping the basketball down. Where I’d ended up, I decided, was fine, and probably where my body was meant to be all along . . . and in the decade since the operation, that’s where my weight has stayed.

  I committed to the new rules of eating. I exercised for an hour a day most days of the week. I ate my protein first. For the first time in years, I studied my body in the mirror, letting myself look at what the weight gain and loss and pregnancy and surgeries had left me with—my belly, jiggly and soft, cross-stitched with silvery stretch marks and scars, my thighs, muscular underneath a solid and seemingly immobile layer of cellulite, breasts and upper arms that both appeared to be subject to a more stringent gravity than the rest of me. It was nothing you’d pay to see in Playboy . . . but it was mine, and I knew that I’d have to make peace with it.

  I committed to turning off the voice in my head, or at least turning down its volume, when it told me that I was too fat to deserve happiness. I was a mother now, the mother of a daughter. I wasn’t just responsible for myself and my own body issues—I was at least partially responsible for the way Lucy would grow up seeing the world and her own place within it.

  I thought about how the symbolism and rhetoric of dieting did or did not fit into a feminist framework. If feminism’s goal is for women to be more present in the world, to step up and be c
ounted as equals and (politely and firmly but never ever shrilly or stridently) ask for what is ours, what kind of sense would it make for me to spend time and money trying, literally, to diminish myself, to take up less space, to make myself ever smaller? How would working out feel if I shifted the focus from I wish I were thinner to I want to be stronger? What would it be like to just set that burden down and never pick it up again and just live, as best I could, in the body that I had?

  I worked on it. I practiced following every negative, self-critical thought with a positive one. My legs look strong, I’d think, after noticing that I was, once again, the biggest person in barre class. Or I’m getting a lot more comfortable in these poses, I would say, after noticing that I was also the biggest person at Bikram yoga. I would try to reframe my body in terms of what it could do, not whether it was aesthetically pleasing to strangers I’d pass on the street, even in the face of skepticism and intractable societal norms (after I had completed a four-day, two-hundred-mile bike ride, the first thing one of my coworkers asked was “How much weight did you lose doing that?”). I would remind myself that it’s not my job to give erections to random men on the Internet, and that if strangers don’t like the way I look, they can exercise their option of not looking.

  Baby steps. I wore a sleeveless dress. On TV. People tweeted about what a pretty color it was, not about my upper arms looking like pans of dough on their first rising. At a friend’s urging, I trained for a sprint-distance triathlon, and not only lived to tell the tale but was one of the first women in my age group out of the water (best part—looking over at a fellow swimmer and thinking that she was topless, with extremely hairy nipples, before realizing that I’d swum all the way up to the men’s group). I made a point of looking at larger bodies on the Internet—models, athletes, fashion bloggers, other writers—until I’d shifted the needle of normal in my own head. (Science shows that this works. The more larger bodies, older bodies, real-people-in-the-real-world bodies you see, the more you move your own needle of what constitutes “normal.”)