Obsessed: America's Food Addiction

by Mika Brzezinski

  “You’re on my watch now, and you’re having the drugs,” I told her and ordered the epidural.

  After hours and hours of chatting about everything except how to deliver a baby, Mika decided it was time. I was afraid to tell her the doctor had just gone out for lunch, but luckily the nurse had been delivering babies for years. She told me to “get ready to catch,” and three pushes later there was Carlie, absolutely the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on.

  As Carlie started to cry, Mika asked me to phone her dad, the astonishingly imposing Zbigniew Brzezinski. I blubbered a bit to him, then handed Mika the phone. In the most composed voice, she said, “Dad, you have another granddaughter.”

  Mika showed me a lot about her character during the hours she was in labor, and vice versa. She came to see me as a big sister, the “adult” in our relationship. I recognized her strength. In the years to come, no matter what happened in her work or her personal life, she could count on me to have her back.

  Now, fourteen years later, Mika and I have had a role reversal. It began with that punch-in-the face moment on my boat. The words still echo in my mind. Mika said, “Diane, you’re not just overweight, you’re fat. You’re obese.” I couldn’t believe the word she had used to describe me: obese. Who says that to a friend? Who says that to anyone? I was angry and defensive.

  My first thoughts were, Oh, Mika, come on. I know I’m huge. My metabolism is shot. I try to diet but nothing works anymore. How could you know what it’s like? You and your tiny body in size 2 dresses. Please! You have been picture-perfect ever since I have known you, and when something is just a little off, like your imaginary double chin, you run to a plastic surgeon to fix it. You don’t get it. You naturally skinny women think women like me are a bunch of slobs sitting around eating bonbons all day. That is such garbage.

  But then Mika told me something that changed everything.

  “Naturally skinny? No way,” she shot back at me. “I do get it, I get it a lot more than you think. I’m not kidding, Diane—food takes up way too much of my time and my psychic space. Here’s my truth: I am an addict. I think about food all day long. I am always wondering if I can sneak away and grab some fast food or something sweet. But I don’t. I don’t because my career depends on winning my fight to stay rail-thin. But I know it’s unhealthy, and I hate every second of it!”

  As she launched into the tale of her fight with food, my anger dissolved. I couldn’t believe it, but she began to tell a story that was just like mine; a story of rarely feeling in control around food. Of going to parties and eyeing the buffet first, then trying to hurry through a conversation with her mouth watering. Of wondering what people would say, or think, if they saw her go back for more.

  You naturally skinny women think women like me are a bunch of slobs sitting around eating bonbons all day. That is such garbage.—Diane

  It was a story I could barely believe as I looked at her slender body, but I knew it was true when I looked into her eyes. “I am a junk food addict,” Mika said. She talked about stuffing herself with chips and ice cream in prep school, gorging on pizza in college, and scarfing down entire boxes of kids’ cereal at a sitting. That habit caused her husband, Jim, to nickname her “Jethro,” after the Beverly Hillbillies character with the enormous appetite. I really could not imagine her acting that way. I’d never seen it.

  Mika’s honesty about herself helped me hear what else she was trying to say.

  “You’re fat,” Mika blurted. “If you don’t lose the weight now, you’re going to die. Plain and simple: your weight will kill you.” That was either the rudest thing anyone had ever said to me, or the kindest. That’s Mika. She’s no diplomat. She puts all her cards on the table, and she was characteristically blunt. “I love you Diane, and you are fat,” she said.

  Friends, family, and colleagues had been dancing around my dramatic weight gain over the last ten years, so it was shocking to hear it stated so bluntly. Mika softened it a little when she said, “I want you to be around for my girls. They need another woman in their lives, especially when I am driving them nuts.” That last part made me laugh, because it’s true!

  Up until then I had always thought about my weight as an issue of vanity. When I was heavy I didn’t look the way I wanted to look, or how TV viewers expected me to look. I never really considered my weight to be a health issue, although I should have. My dad was a skinny kid and a slender young adult, but he has been overweight since then, and heart disease very nearly killed him. It’s a medical miracle and a testament to his constitution that he’s still around. My grandmother was overweight and later in life developed diabetes, which she called her “sugar problem.” At the time, I didn’t recognize the link between diabetes and obesity, but I sure do now.

  I was moving along the same path. A path that was almost guaranteed to result in one or more chronic diseases.

  Shortly after our infamous encounter on Long Island Sound, I suggested to Mika that she write a book about her struggles with food. Readers have told her how much they have learned from her earlier books, about finding life and work balance, and about learning to stand up for yourself in the workplace, and knowing your true value. I thought if Mika told her own story, it would help other women.

  Mika took me up on the idea of writing this book, but I had no idea she was planning to aim her message squarely at me. And then my cell phone rang as I was driving to a speaking engagement in the far west corner of Connecticut, about ninety minutes from where I live. Mika was on the line. It was nearly dusk and I was heading down a lonely country road, not feeling great about giving the speech.

  I’m a former radio talk show host and I love talking to people, but for several years the fun of greeting a live audience and spending a couple of hours with them had disappeared. Instead of looking forward to it I’d been feeling a kind of dread, because I knew the audience wouldn’t see the person they expected, that stylish, slender anchorwoman of years ago. Instead, they would face a fat, fiftyish female who felt frumpy in a size 18 jacket and stretchy pants. You can hide some of that on TV with good camera work, but standing at the microphone at the front of the room, they were going to see all of me.

  On top of that my feet hurt, my knees ached, and I dreaded having to stand at a podium during my talk. It was going to take all the charm I could muster to make them forget who and what they were looking at, and concentrate instead on what I was saying. I wanted to get them wrapped up in my stories: stories about the people and places that make the state of Connecticut special, and give it character and heart. Those are the stories I had reported on TV and radio, and had written books about for years. Sharing them was my passion.

  But that sharing was getting harder and harder to do because of my weight. I hated the way I looked in person and on the screen. I won an Emmy for a documentary I produced and hosted a couple of years ago, but I couldn’t even watch myself on TV because I couldn’t stand how fat I looked.

  I couldn’t seem to do much about it. I had dieted on and off all my life, and nothing seemed to work. During my TV news career I was a size 10 at my thinnest, and more often a lot bigger than that. I was always the largest woman in the television newsroom, always worried about how I would look on camera when I had to step out from behind the desk. My first reaction when I got invited to a big event was always, What the hell am I going to wear? How much weight can I lose before then so I will fit into something nice? And then the diet cycle would start all over again.

  I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t worried about how I looked and what people were thinking. I knew I was smarter and more talented than many of my peers, but I just couldn’t conquer my weight. No one had ever said it, but I could imagine what people were thinking: Why doesn’t she get it together and lose the weight?

  As soon as I answered Mika’s call, she launched into her proposal. She asked me to write a book with her, but the offer came with a catch. I had to set a goal of losing seventy-five pounds as we w
orked on the book project. She promised to pay for whatever treatments would help, and to be my cheerleader every step of the way, but I had to make the commitment.

  As Mika outlined her idea, I started to cry. “Diane,” she told me, “this is it: no more excuses. You have got to lose the weight. I know you don’t want to hear it, but you must. Let’s make a deal. I’ll pay you to write this book with me. We will talk about everything, and when we are finished, we will both be better off. You’ll be thin and healthy, and I will be in a better place in my mind. But you have to lose A TON of weight . . . Come on, let’s do it.”

  I choked up as she plowed ahead with her characteristic insistence. Mika can be hard to turn down, but it was daunting to consider how tough it would be. My eyes were red and my mascara a little runny when I finally pulled into the place where I was giving my speech, but I had made up my mind. I was going to take Mika up on the offer. I knew it could be my last serious shot at getting my life back, and regaining what fat had taken away from me.

  Have you ever watched those weight-loss commercials with celebrities like Valerie Bertinelli and Jennifer Hudson and said to yourself, Yeah I bet I could lose weight if someone paid me to do it. I know I have. Now someone was making me that offer. I really couldn’t say no. How would I face my sisters if they found out I had turned Mika down? Especially Suzanne, who had cheered her friend Valerie Bertinelli through her own weight-loss battle. But I had SO much weight to lose, and at my age (the mid-fifties), could I really do it? All I knew was that I had to try. As cutting as Mika’s words had been when we first went down this path together, I knew they were driven by love. She was right; it had gotten that bad. I was having trouble getting onto our small boat, trouble getting into the bathtub. I had given up shopping because nothing ever fit, and plus-size clothes are just not that attractive on me. I now dressed for what fit and covered the most sins, not for what looked good. I was losing my self-confidence. The media business is tough enough for women without the added obstacle of being fat.

  I now dressed for what fit and covered the most sins, not for what looked good. I was losing my self-confidence.—Diane

  Still, the idea of sharing my feelings about my struggles with weight made me a little sick to my stomach. It was hard enough to talk to Mika about it, much less to everyone who would read the book. Did she have any idea how difficult it was going to be for me? How embarrassing? Is this bargain we’re making brilliant or just plain crazy? Is it even possible?

  As a TV personality and a radio talk show host, I’ve always emphasized the bright, the light, and the positive. Every inch of me resists admitting how bad I feel about my weight. But Mika is adamant that we begin the conversation, and she insists that I not hold back. No one knows more than I do how hard that’s going to be, but here goes.

  Dieting is the most active sport I have ever engaged in. If practice made perfect, I’d be thin as a ghost. Honestly, I have been dieting almost all my life.

  “I can’t remember a time when you weren’t either on a diet, or worried about your weight,” says my sister Suzanne. “Mom always looked trim to me, but I remember her being on Weight Watchers. I thought dieting was just what women did.”

  It was certainly something I needed to do. My sister Debb says I was born “a good eater.” When she was a toddler, she bit the leg off a tiny glass deer at our granny’s house. The pediatrician advised my mother to make a big bowl of mashed potatoes and to get Debb to eat as much as she could, presumably to cushion the glass piece as it went through her system. She ate about two tablespoons, and I finished the rest.

  When other kids were eating peanut butter and jelly or bologna sandwiches in the elementary school cafeteria, I was trying to hide the string-bean salad my mom had brown-bagged for me, her chunky firstborn. I have three sisters and a brother, and I was the only one who was a chubby kid. Back then my eating and weight were a family issue, although today I might have blended in better with all the other overweight kids in the United States. In my preteen years my mother searched for clothes to “slenderize” me, while Debb wore a rubber band for a belt.

  Mika told me her family home was junk food free. The same was true of the suburban New York house where I grew up. My sister Melissa recalls, “We were always on a diet in our house. We never had the same snacks as other kids. We never had soda, except on holidays. To this day, my childhood friends remember our house as the one with the empty fridge.”

  Mom doled out portions of cookies and snack food as treats. She would hide the snacks so none of us could be tempted to sit down and eat a whole bag. I’d go to set the table and discover, tucked in the bottom of the salad bowl, a package of cookies stowed safely out of sight. We didn’t have chips unless we were having a party, and we certainly did not eat in front of the TV.

  “Good foods and bad foods were clearly defined,” says Melissa. “The constant fear of getting fat was drilled into us. Fat was bad, thin was good.”

  Somehow I didn’t get the message, and I managed to keep packing on pounds. There was talk of sending me to “fat camp” for the summer, though that never happened. I was self-conscious about my size, and being the tallest kid in the class didn’t help. I was the only twelve-year-old I knew who was on Weight Watchers. My mom cooked and counted calories for my dad and me, and for a while that made a difference.

  By high school I had slimmed down, but staying that way through college involved a constant roller coaster of diets. You name it, I tried it. “I never really questioned what you were doing,” said Debb about my teen and young adult diet cycles. “It seemed that trying different diets in search of ‘the one’ was the norm. No one in our circle ever thought to eat less and move more. That was too boring. We just assumed there must be a magic bullet.”

  I hunted for it, that’s for sure.

  Remember the Candy Diet from the 1970s? Ayds (pronounced “aids”) looked and tasted like chocolates or caramels, but as I found out later, they were appetite suppressants. In the early eighties as the AIDS epidemic broke out, you can imagine what happened to the candy with the similar name. Just as well: the active ingredient was phenylpropanolamine (PPA), which has now been linked to strokes in women.

  Still, that one was more fun than the Grapefruit Diet, also known as the Hollywood Diet. It dates back to the 1920s, but became popular again when I was a teen. Lunch and dinner consisted of grapefruit, lean meat, vegetables, and black coffee. The diet came back into vogue yet again in 2004, when a study showed that the enzymes in grapefruit help reduce insulin levels and encourage weight loss (perhaps not coincidentally, the study was sponsored by the Florida Department of Citrus). At 800 calories a day the diet was hard to stick with, and to this day I can’t stand to look at grapefruit.

  Then there was the Cambridge Diet, which consisted of meal replacement drinks and claimed to provide all the nutrients needed to maintain good health while the dieter lost tremendous amounts of weight. A Cambridge University professor got the credit for that one, and the product sold briskly in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Cambridge Diet worked for a while, but my weight came back on when I started eating real food again. That didn’t stop me from trying another liquid diet, Slim-Fast, when I was thirty and hoping to drop a lot of weight before my wedding.

  There was always another diet to try, so I kept hopscotching from one to the next. When I went off Slim-Fast I lived on Lean Cuisine. Then there was the Cabbage Soup Diet, with its gallons of cabbage broth, a little coffee, skim milk, and low-fat yogurt. Not surprisingly, the side effects included low energy, mood swings, and sugar cravings.

  I can go on and on about my low-cal escapades. How could I forget my bout with the Scarsdale Diet, invented by Dr. Herman Tarnower, whose best-selling diet book was published in 1978? It got another huge sales boost when he was killed two years later by his lover, Jean Harris, headmistress of the Madeira School, Mika’s high school alma mater. (When she applied to the school for admission, Mika was interviewed by Harris herself
. Not long after, Harris was convicted and sent to prison.)

  The South Beach Diet and the Zone Diet had a less colorful backstory, but those were on my list of tried-and-failed diets, too. Starting to see a pattern here? The pounds came off, but not for long, which led to another round of dieting. Every diet seemed to work for a while, but I never changed my eating habits. I never tried to understand the underlying drivers of my ballooning weight. That wasn’t something many of the diet books or the TV talk shows emphasized.

  “We come from a mindset that suggests diets are temporary tortures we must endure,” says Debb. And when we’re done, “then we have permission to backslide into old habits, as if we were entitled to a reward for our sacrifice.”

  Eating for comfort was a well-established pattern for me by the time tragedy struck in my life, and I really needed that comfort. Shortly after graduating from college, the death of my longtime boyfriend following a fiery car crash sent me on a binge of eating and drinking that skyrocketed my weight from 140 pounds to nearly 190. I’ll never forget the moment Mom and Dad walked into my newsroom in upstate New York, a three-hour drive from their home. My heart stopped. They took me aside and told me that Mitch had been in a terrible car accident on his way up to see me over the weekend. I had been frantic with worry, not knowing where he was. Even his mother hadn’t been able to find him.

  Finally the hospital called, and we learned Mitch was in critical condition in the burn unit at a New York City hospital. They had not been able to locate family or friends because most of his possessions in the car had been burned, too. We went to New York and the scene was as horrific as any I hope ever to see in my life. This young man, whom I had loved since he was a boy, was entirely wrapped in bandages. Only his toes were showing, and as I held on to that one part of his body that was unscathed, I prayed, for him and for me. He hung on for a little over a week, until one last brother from his big family was notified and flew home from across the globe. His brother said good-bye and Mitch was gone.