Obsessed: America's Food Addiction

by Mika Brzezinski

  I suffered the judgments of stay-at-home moms in my neighborhood who shook their heads and tightened their lips at the plight of my poor babies. That didn’t matter to me. The equation was simple. This would be a tough time for my household, my children, and my husband, but there would be a better mother and wife at the other end. It was going to take a while—I wasn’t sure if it would be six months, a year, or even two—but I was going to change.

  It was a tall order for a woman who felt empty at the core, but I was determined to take control of my life. It began with making significant changes in my eating behavior. I did just what that network executive said. I drank a lot of water—all the time. Water, water, and water. I also started to eat healthy salads, with garbanzo beans and other low-fat protein. I cut out sweet cereals and replaced them with shredded wheat, granola, and Bran Chex. All of that paid off physically, and soon enough I began to look and feel healthier.

  The mental and emotional correction took much longer, because true health doesn’t come from the mathematics of eating (counting calories, calculating fat grams, measuring minutes of exercise) but from crafting a complete lifestyle that leads to an overall sense of well-being. My compulsion to overeat was still there. I could still eat an entire box of cereal at one sitting if I allowed myself to. Occasionally, I gave in to that temptation (and I still do).

  But I was making progress. I cut out foods that I knew were bad for me and slept as much as I could manage. Even though I was still tired a lot, I made sure to enjoy my family, because they put that sparkle back in my eye.

  At times, all of this was very hard to do. I sometimes felt as if I was just going through the motions. I should have put more emphasis on being healthy instead of worrying so much about losing weight, but I didn’t know the way I do now what “healthy” really means. It was a struggle to meet all those demands that come with scrambling to be a wife and a mother holding down a high-pressure job, and I wasn’t looking for the balance I strive for today. I was expected to be Superwoman—at least, I expected it of myself—and now, on top of that, I had taken on the added commitment of trying to reform bad habits and get healthy.

  As imperfect as my efforts were, they were huge steps in the right direction. The pounds fell off. I looked less tired, a little more alive, a little happier. I wasn’t a beauty queen, but I felt there was that something special about me again, something that I remembered as a little girl, before my body began to change and my eating got out of control.

  As imperfect as my efforts were, they were huge steps in the right direction. The pounds fell off. I looked less tired, a little more alive, a little happier.

  —Mika

  Eight months after beginning my self-improvement program, I sent that vice president at NBC a picture of myself looking fit and confident. It was just for fun, my way of saying thanks for giving me the kick in the pants I needed to start changing my life. I was still so busy being a working mom that I had to grab my daughter’s crayon to address the envelope. I slapped a Post-it on the photo—no time for a real letter—and scrawled “Is this better?”

  Not long afterward, the phone rang. It was the vice president on the line. I had a job on Home Page, a new show being created for MSNBC. I was finally off the night shift!

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE VALUE OF A HEALTHY THIN

  MY STORY, WITH JOE SCARBOROUGH, BRIAN STELTER,

  VIRGINIA CHA, REBECCA PUHL, DONNY DEUTSCH,

  SUSIE ESSMAN, GOVERNOR CHRIS CHRISTIE,

  DR. NANCY SNYDERMAN, SAM KASS,

  REAR ADMIRAL JAMIE BARNETT (RETIRED)

  That experience, and others since then, have taught me that weight and looks affect value. For me, it was literally the difference between “no thanks” and getting a job offer. When I was a little bit overweight and didn’t look quite as good, I struggled, and I could see that people with power just didn’t have much interest in me. But when I looked svelte and fit and put together, those same people pursued me.

  Diane fears that her weight has held her back from fulfilling her full professional potential and being adequately recognized for her value. “As a teen in the 1970s I was influenced by the feminist movement, and I believed that women would be judged on their talents and their smarts, not on how they looked,” she admitted to me. “It hasn’t turned out that way entirely, though, has it?”

  Diane is a blonde, I’m a blonde. She’s bright, I’m bright. And we’re both skilled journalists. Did her weight tank her dreams of working for a network news program? Is it the reason I succeeded and she lagged behind?

  It has been more than fifteen years since I started down the path toward a healthier weight. In the last decade, I have mostly managed to end the binge-and-starve cycle that held me captive for so long. I don’t do that anymore. I can’t. I have kids, and I have a career, and I have too many things on the line to act so foolishly. I feel good now. I try to take care of myself, and I look like I have my act together. My efforts have paid off in an exhilarating career. Today, when cake is served I usually don’t eat it. I have trained myself not to touch it, not to get anywhere near it.

  Still, I am far from conquering my problem with food. The attraction remains powerful. I continue to send a lot of contradictory messages to myself. I try to listen to the one that says, Stay away. This will make me fat. Don’t eat this. But occasionally I am swayed by the one that says, God, I want to eat all of that. That voice is still there, too, and I still have relapses.

  I have a tightly regulated way of eating because I simply don’t trust myself to eat reasonable portions of certain foods. Some nutritionists think my diet needs more repair, and I’ll be honest—I am frequently on the edge of hunger. I still exercise to a degree that some people might term compulsive. Achieving a healthy thin is a continuing struggle for me, and I expect it always will be. I envy people who are much more comfortable than I am in their attitudes toward food and body image. I wish I could relax my approach toward food a bit. That’s Diane’s challenge to me, and I’m trying.

  But my life is so much better than it once was. My strict approach largely works for me, at least for now. I look at my weight goals this way: I run a business that I know as “Mika, Inc.,” and it runs on the fuel of being thin and healthy and energetic. That’s the juice that inspires me and keeps me going.

  In Knowing Your Value, I urge women to send a clear and commanding message about who they are and what they are worth. You can’t do that if the message is a lie. For the bulk of my career I thought the only thing that mattered was being thin. I thought that thin equals success. It took me a long time to realize that it’s not enough just to look good. That image won’t last unless you are healthy on every level, and honest and transparent about what it took to get you to that place. That honesty will give you a sense of peace and clarity, along with the confidence you need to do the job before you, and to be recognized for your accomplishments.

  For me, it has been a matter of getting the message I send others in sync with the message I send myself. My outward appearance and my internal sense of self are finally coming together. I feel a lot more sure of my value, not only in terms of dollars and cents, but in terms of my own self-worth. What you see now on Morning Joe is a woman who isn’t hiding anymore. I know who I am, and I think I look better now than I ever did, because I am more able to be myself.

  Virginia Cha, that journalist–beauty queen who took the news anchor job I thought should have been mine, taught me a lesson that has stuck with me to this day: you have to look at what you have to offer and feel good about it, instead of being consumed by what other people do or have. It took me a long time to figure that out.

  Friends of mine in many walks of life agree that when you walk into a room looking good, you are sending a message about yourself that says “I have my act together.” There is research to suggest that carrying extra weight sends an opposite message. Overweight women are generally viewed by their employers as less disciplined, less emotionally stable,
and less desirable employees. A study published in the Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender showed that 60 percent of overweight women report being discriminated against in the workplace.1

  The impact on the pocketbook is stark, too. People who are obese have a harder time finding jobs and are less likely to be promoted than their thinner counterparts. And whatever work they find pays less. “Women who are obese earn about six percent less than thinner women for exactly the same work performed. Obese men earn about three percent less than thinner men,” concludes Rebecca Puhl, PhD, of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University.

  Actually, these numbers might even be more dramatic than Puhl estimates. I have also seen a study that concludes heavier women may face a penalty of as much as 11 percent of their salary.2 Based on the 2010 average US wage of $669 a week, this would be like paying a tax of $76 a week for being fat, according to health economist John Cawley of Cornell University—and that’s provided you get the job in the first place.

  Admittedly, weight is less important for men. Joe Scarborough has put thirty pounds on his six-foot-four frame over the past five years and it hasn’t hurt his earning potential at all. This doesn’t mean that men are immune to the pressures of professional judgment and public scorn, as Brian Stelter, the media reporter for the New York Times, understood. Brian began to gain weight at around the age of sixteen, about the same time he got his driver’s license. Having a car for the first time gave him not only the freedom to get around, but also the freedom to eat badly. “I trace it back to being able to go through the drive-thru, because until you have a car, your parents can control your eating more effectively,” he said ruefully.

  By the age of twenty-four, Brian weighed 280 pounds.

  “I looked like a slob, and in the back of my head I sensed that my bosses would judge me as a result,” Brian says. “I just felt in my gut that I wouldn’t succeed as much in my professional or my personal life if I didn’t lose the weight. I write about television, sometimes I’m on television, and I didn’t like the way I looked on television. And I thought to myself, I’m probably not going to be booked on the shows I want to be booked on if I hold on to this weight.”

  There was also that woman who turned him down for a date, and unintentionally helped to motivate his weight loss.

  Brian started a Twitter feed, posting every time he put something into his mouth. That helped him lose nearly a hundred pounds, and to gain a lot more confidence in himself and his career.

  Donny Deutsch is another successful man who knows that his physical condition has enhanced his value and doesn’t mind admitting it. Donny is a well-known advertising exec in New York City and a regular on Morning Joe. In his book Often Wrong, Never in Doubt, he has a chapter called “The Charles Atlas School of Management.”

  “I always wanted to feel if shit went down at a meeting I could kick the crap out of the other guy,” Donny says. “Now, that’s obviously a metaphor, but I think staying in shape and looking good just helps your overall persona. I always say that when you look better, you feel better, and it shows self-discipline.”

  Donny, like so many of us, admits that his weight goes up and down. “I was forty pounds heavier at one point. I find the times that I am on a physical regimen and eating right and looking the way I want to look, it is tremendously impacting on every area of my life.” Adds Donny, “I’m a guy that’s been made fun of a lot, because as a CEO I wore a tight-fitting T-shirt.” Go ahead and laugh, he says, but he thinks that sends a message about who he is.

  “So many successful men are kind of schlumpy. I thought it was quite a feat to be somebody who was successful in business and at the same time focused on my physical well-being, because we all know the time and sacrifice it takes to be fit. I think people look at me and say, ‘Wow, this guy’s really got it going on! You know, he can really juggle a lot of balls!’”

  I asked Donny how he thought my looks and weight affect my value as a newswoman. As an advertising expert who has sold all kinds of products, he knows what gets people to buy something—and those of us in the television business are truly selling ourselves. “Looks matter,” he emphasized. “There’s a reason you’re in that chair versus woman X. The brains and the ability are a given, so I’m not demeaning you by saying this. But in a visual medium or in any medium that has to do with imagery, thinking that looks don’t matter and we shouldn’t judge—that’s just not reality!”

  Comedian Susie Essman, co-star of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, agrees that women on TV are especially likely to be judged based on what they look like. And Susie says it’s a no-win proposition: a woman who seems to care too much about her looks “gets described as self-loathing. If she lets her weight go, then she’s described as not caring about herself. It’s like you can’t win.”

  That’s reality, and research backs up this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” aspect of things. A 2012 survey conducted for Glamour magazine by Yale’s Rebecca Puhl seems to confirm Susie’s suspicion. Puhl asked nearly two thousand women, ages eighteen to forty, to envision a female stranger who was either “overweight” or “thin,” and then to choose two words to describe her. The most common words used to describe the overweight woman were slow, undisciplined, sloppy, and lazy. Thin women didn’t fare much better. They were called bitchy, mean, controlling, vain, and self-centered.3

  Surprisingly, Puhl found that the weight of the survey respondents didn’t affect their answers. Heavy women were just as likely to use words like sloppy to describe someone who was overweight. Likewise, slender women were just as likely to say that a thin woman was mean.

  “What that survey showed is that we judge people who are overweight in very negative ways, and then sometimes we judge people who are thin in negative ways as well. It’s a no-win situation,” says Puhl, who is an expert in weight stigma. Part of that results from stereotypes of overweight and obese individuals presented in both children’s and adult media. “We know that the more people are exposed to media, the worse attitudes they have, and the more prejudice they express toward people who are overweight and obese. That is something that has increased significantly during the past fifty years.”

  Puhl wants us to confront some of that negativity. “This highlights the need to educate ourselves about how the media and how our culture are shaping these values that promote bias and prejudice and judgment. And we need to find ways to challenge those.”

  Weight is almost the only place where people are willing to speak bluntly about their prejudices toward an entire group of people. At Yale’s Rudd Center, researchers use a tool known as the Fat Phobia Scale to ask people to rate characteristics of those who are fat. Puhl says she would not have been able to get candid answers if she had used a similar scale to study gender or racial bias. “It’s no longer socially acceptable or politically correct to say that someone feels negatively, or has prejudice, because of race or gender. With body weight, that’s not the case. People are willing to express very readily the stereotypes and negative attitudes that they have toward obese people.”

  People are willing to express very readily the stereotypes and negative attitudes that they have toward obese people.—Rebecca Puhl

  That willingness to stereotype reflects a prevailing idea that obesity results from lack of willpower and discipline. It totally ignores the reality of our contemporary food environment, which makes high-fat, high-sugar foods easy to access, and it shows ignorance about how such foods can get a grip on us that is hard to release. It shrugs off the mixed messages we get: one that tells us “being thin is worth just about any price” and one that says “this food is cheap, available 24/7, and designed to stimulate pathways in your brain that keep you coming back for more.”

  When we lay fault entirely at the feet of people who carry extra weight rather than see them in that larger context, it becomes easy to say unkind things about them. “Blaming individuals for their excess weight is at the root of a lot of stigma that we see,” s
ays Puhl.

  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie can attest to this. He is often in the spotlight, not only because of his leadership role, but also because of his size. Like any politician, he’s had to develop a thick skin, but he’s still deeply hurt by some of the hateful comments and tweets he gets. He read me these two: HEY GOVERNOR, WHAT DID YOU HAVE FOR BREAKFAST TODAY, ONE STICK OF BUTTER OR TWO? and THINK GOVERNOR CHRISTIE CAN BE VP? HE’S TOO . . . FAT, AND AMERICANS HATE FAT PEOPLE.

  People would never say such vicious things about someone with any other type of health challenge. “It is extraordinary how brutal people will be about my weight,” the governor said. He thinks people assume he is lazy or lacking discipline because of his weight, and wonders, “Do they think I got this far in life without discipline?” I’ve heard Oprah say the same thing, and Diane says it, too.

  “For somebody like me who’s had so much success in my life, and really been successful at everything I’ve tried, to not be able to be successful at this is incredibly discouraging,” revealed Christie. The attitude he encounters ignores the many complex factors involved in losing and regaining weight. Getting to a “healthy thin” certainly takes personal discipline and determination, but it also requires some changes in the world around us. It is not enough to say “eat less, do more.” Or to follow columnist Eugene Robinson’s simplistic advice for anyone with a weight problem: take a walk and eat a salad.

  “That is the height of ignorance about what this issue is really all about,” Christie avows. “I’m well beyond the taking a walk stage. I work out four days a week with a trainer. I’m riding the bike and lifting weights and doing floor exercises for an hour a day. For people who have never had issues with their weight, they can’t understand it.”