Entries tagged with weight

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Vigilance

A Wednesday in June 1983

6:00 a.m.

I bolt out of bed ravenous. I hop on the scale. 139 (I am five foot six inches tall). It is now almost 8 years since my last drink and 12 months since my last cigarette. I am 33 years old. Despite religiously following a “meal plan” that I found in the back of one of Jane Brody’s cookbooks, I weigh 14 pounds more than I did when I smoked, although still 16 pounds less than I did in high school. If nothing else, I should be happy that even at this weight, I am now thinner than at least half of my peers (because they got a lot fatter not because I got a lot thinner), many of whom have had children, many of whom never battled weight as a child and are now mystified by how the pounds have piled on, many of whom like being larger and feeling like a “force to be reckoned with” (fat is a feminist issue?) But things feel out of control. I yearn for that lung-deep, dark sucking in of nicotine and tar, that hunger-killer. Since I quit smoking, even after a year, I am ravenous every minute.

Tearing my way to the kitchen (which is also the living/dining room in my East Village flat) I find a box of cold cereal, pour it into a measuring cup (can’t have more than a half cup), then into a bowl, add low fat milk, grab a spoon, and scarf the mixture down in 30 seconds. I welcome the warm grounded feeling of having something in my stomach. This will keep me sane, focused, and on task (whatever that task is) for a few hours at least. Then I boil water for tea. No coffee, because I can’t drink it black. No fruit; I have to save that for my mid-morning snack.

The night before I had promised myself that I would wake up and take a jog, but one needs to do that on an empty stomach and there is no way I could have done even so much as wash my face let alone dress in such a state of hunger, not to mention that I would most likely have been unable to turn my key the right way in the lock on the way out, because hunger often causes me to lose muscle memory. (When I’ve been that hungry I’ve lost ATM cards, broken typewriter ribbons, become disoriented and confused in familiar spaces, screamed for help because I thought I was locked out of my apartment. Once, thinking I could do an errand at noon before eating, I lost a package I was supposed to take to FedEx.) And I hate running. As a child I was teased because I couldn’t run. It made my chest burn and the backs of my knees ache. Later, maybe when I was in my 40s, I learned that this was because I had both scoliosis and asthma. I can walk faster than I can run. So I will walk to work (distance being about a mile and a half). Payday is not until Friday and I only have $5 left anyhow.

After breakfast I pull on jeans and a T shirt and take my beagle Paulie out for a walk. When I come back I put food for him in a dish on the floor and food for my Siamese cat Blito in a dish on the dining table (too high for Paulie to reach). I don’t worry that I have tormented Paulie with the wait; he won’t be that desperate because, since I live in dangerous “Alphabet City”, and never am outside past 9 pm unless I am brought home from somewhere in a taxi who waits until my key is in the lock, he has done his night-time “business” on some old newspapers.

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11:00 a.m.

I am at my desk in the Flatiron Building, at my job as a Production Editor. I have been hungry since 10. I had a half a banana, but that has done nothing. I know now that no work will get done until I can have lunch, the earliest “allowable” time being noon. Trying to proof an article, I see that I have read the same sentence over and over. My mind spins toward memories of all the miseries of having been fat – well, not really fat, just too fat to pass muster as an upper middle class child in the 1950s. All the dresses that “spanned” on me, the jiggly bits on my thighs five years before anyone else had them, children making ugly jokes. Mind chatter kills hunger but doesn’t expedite the work on my desk. Well, when I pick it up at 1 pm I will do it fast.

AA and OA say “pick up the phone before you pick up the…” Great! So I will call my sponsor, or one of my friends who works at home, or one of my friends who is as bored in her office as I am in mine. We can commiserate about how hard life is without booze, cigarettes, enough food to make us feel full. I will stare at the proofs in case anyone comes by. I always finish my work on time. I have never had to be reprimanded.

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12:30 p.m.

It has taken me less than 60 seconds to dispatch my made-at-home tofu and brown rice with steamed veggies, sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park. The weather is lovely. If I can’t eat enough to satisfy me for more than an hour or two after a meal, and my work is dull, I can fill myself up with other things. I watch the squirrels in the park. They make me smile. I think of my beautiful Paulie and wonder what he is doing. Then I walk over to Teddy Roosevelt’s Birthplace near Gramercy Park. It is a historic brownstone that looks like the homes that all the (mostly thin) old money girls I went to elementary school with lived in in Brooklyn Heights. The furniture and the old photographs recreate the era when the young Teddy was growing up. Children were kept apart from their parents. Not allowed in nice parts of the house. I see that Teddy was sickly as a child and grew to love the great outdoors. He took on physical challenges because he knew he could, even if they didn’t come naturally: an object lesson that I will remember.

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6:00 p.m.

I am sitting in my 12 step meeting, in a room with about 25 other women. Most have been sober for several years, at least half have stopped smoking, and about three quarters of the women who have stopped smoking have gained a minimum of 30 pounds. This puts things in perspective. Because I have always been vigilant, sacrificing several hours a day of productive work and sane thinking to hunger, I have only gained 14. In the sharings, alcohol is rarely mentioned. The primary topic seems to be food. Food slips, binges, eating “forbidden” food. The nightly pint of ice cream is a recurring character as is the whole pizza eaten alone. I can pride myself on not having done any of those things since I was 18, before I started taking diet pills and then drinking. For me, binge eating was a gateway into substance abuse. For a lot of these other women, it seems to be a gateway out. When I “cheat” (at least once a week if not twice) this entails only minor infractions: having creamy dressing on my salad or butter on my broccoli.

At the moment I am not hungry because before I left the office, I drank a packet of instant Miso soup dissolved in boiling water, my one allowed between-meal snack of any substance.

My self-pride teeters a bit when I see Bonnie (not her real name). She is a “type” that I have envied since childhood. She comes from a very wealthy family but has no contact with them. But her “breeding” tells. She has a “straight” body build (no saddle bags, no large breasts, no crooked knees) and perfect cheekbones. Like many of the other women, she is sporting a crew cut but she is the only one on whom it is flattering. Bonnie never talks about food. She rails against patriarchy, capitalism, men (whom she calls “non-women”), her father, his new wife, and her boss. She is a fierce warrior. She and I have often bonded around how little money we make doing low-level editorial work. She inherited good bones, but gets no money from her family. It is hard to tell if her family rejected her for being gay or if she rejected them for being bourgeois. In any event, she has the confidence that only freedom from being parented can bring a woman in early adulthood. But there is a tripwire here. She still smokes. She has not yet said goodbye forever to the seductive hunger-killer. Is dropping the fourteen pounds I gained worth dying for, I ask myself? No. I remember hearing about a woman my age who died of lung cancer from smoking. That is why I quit.

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10:00 p.m.

I snuggle under the covers in my East Village flat. No matter how fat I think I am, because I am considerably below my genetically preprogrammed “set point,” I am always cold (it is 62 degrees out but I am under two blankets) – although tonight I am not hungry. I ate some poached fish and greens at 8 pm. I wrap my arms around Paulie. Blito lies on my back. I do have a human loved one but we don’t live together. This is one of my nights on my own, which I enjoy. I fall asleep thinking of Jane Eyre living on starvation rations at Lowood School, yet nonetheless staying alert enough to learn and eventually become a teacher, and about the thin, rich girls I went to school with whose proto-Victorian parents often punished them by sending them to bed without supper. I have had a happy day but a hard one. Maybe tomorrow will be easier.

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LJ Idol Week 13: Enjoy Every Sandwich

I remember the exact moment when I stopped enjoying food. I was 12, and had had the flu for two weeks. After two weeks with a raging fever—tossing, turning, sweating, and not eating—I woke up 15 pounds thinner. The five foot three, 125 pound girl who looked back in the mirror was someone I had never seen. (I had been in the 90^th weight percentile for my age since I was 5, and when I went to bed with the flu I weighed 140.) Now this was not the moment when I first noticed my weight. That had happened five years earlier when I was about 7. I was probably not as fat as I thought I was; I was simply not ectomorphic. Yes, I weighed 20 pounds more than most of my female classmates, but I was also quite a lot taller. The reason I knew I was fat was that people commented on it, not just as an aesthetic handicap, but as a moral failing. Like when our second grade teacher passed around a box of chocolates to a group of (maybe 15) of us, saying “take one”. There were several layers of chocolates in the box, probably 40 in all. So I took two. Who ever heard of anyone taking one chocolate the size of your thumbnail? Even tv commercials tell you that. (“Betcha can’t eat just one.”) Anyhow, I was roundly excoriated by the teacher for being greedy, and my size was mentioned in the process. Then there was the time I was eating a sandwich in the lunchroom next to a skinny athletic boy (we were about 9) and I said “I love mustard” only to be smarmily chastised by this boy who said “You’re not supposed to love food [insert critical parent type sneer]; you’re only supposed to love people.” I wanted to say that you could love both, that it really wasn’t the same kind of love, but could not get myself to speak up. Even then, I knew that children didn’t appreciate nuance. But despite all this, and despite my sometimes going for weeks at a time without eating dessert or any type of sugary snack (I was able to discipline myself to do this by telling myself that eating sweets was “childish”), I never got any thinner and I couldn’t stop enjoying food.

Until I saw what I looked like waking up from the flu. So the challenge became: if I could be that thin sick, could I be that thin well? I mean “thin” is relative. My idol, Beth the Ballerina, was the same height I was and weighed 90 pounds. Even if I was no longer overweight (no longer overweight for an adult if I had been one, anyhow), I still had chunky thighs, and was still bursting out of a bra size 34B. I did not look like a ballerina or like the sort of “classic” 12-year-old who might be the heroine of a children’s novel. So I set out not just to maintain the weight that I had become, but to achieve “Beth-hood”. My mother found me a private ballet teacher. I made her take me to a fancy brassiere shop to buy a minimizer bra. I let my hair grow. I tried to live on 500 calories a day. I grew another inch and lost another 10 pounds. I had a nervous breakdown and ended up sitting in a psychiatrist’s office.

About six months later I gained back all the weight but—thanks to the ballet lessons, the fact that I was now five foot six, and the redistribution of weight that happens when you grow up—I had permanently lost my chubby awkwardness. I now looked like Kim Novak. I dyed my hair blonde. I looked like Jayne Mansfield. I was popular with boys. But I still longed for sveltitude (it was the era of Twiggy and Mia Farrow). I was no longer reprimanded for being greedy, but was told that I looked trashy. Girls from my social class didn’t have big boobs when they were 13 or 14. So I made friends with blue collar girls instead. Once my father died I was no longer an upper middle class girl anyhow.

I lost and re-gained 25 pounds again. I started smoking to spoil my appetite. A music teacher friend of my mother’s told me that I had an exceptional singing voice (I had spent my young childhood imitating Julie Andrews) but it was more important to me to smoke and be thin(ner).

Whatever I weighed that week, during those years I certainly never enjoyed food. I often ate nothing all day so that I could eat one of the nightly four course dinners my mother was famous for. Or I made my own meals (meat and veggies, no starch or sugar) and sulked over dinner (I was not allowed to go to my room.) Then, after a few weeks, not being able to stand it anymore, I went to the local candy shop and bought a pound of fudge. Or I went to a coffee shop and treated myself to a club sandwich with bacon and turkey. Did I enjoy it? Not particularly.

When I was 19 I discovered diet pills, which I washed down with copious amounts of alcohol.

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At 25 I got sober. I was down to 125 pounds again. As was the case post-flu so many years earlier, I decided that if I could be that thin drunk, I could be that thin sober. This time I actually managed it for a few years. I was away from my mother and her cooking, I had rooms full of peers in recovery to emote to when I felt hunger pangs (I learned that drama was as successful an appetite suppressant as amphetamines), and I had just met Betty and we were madly in love.

Gradually my weight crept up. I stopped smoking (penalty: 15 pounds). So I was no longer at my thinnest, but not as heavy as I had been as a teenager. Also, the benchmarks had changed. As a 12-year-old I had been conspicuously heavy. As a 30-year-old (the age at which I had my last cigarette) I was about average. But I still didn’t enjoy food. Betty and I fought about what foods were “allowed” in the house. We fought about what time meals could be eaten. She had been extremely thin all her life. She didn’t get it.

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I don’t remember when I began to enjoy food again. I was probably in my mid-forties. I was now in a senior management position and could no longer afford to spend large swaths of the day too hungry to think clearly. I still ate mindfully and ate sweets sparingly, but I noticed that I felt better if I ate six times a day and not three. I gained about five more pounds but not more. Now that I was no longer hungry all the time I was no longer obsessed with food, and the fear that I would keep eating and not be able to stop gradually dissipated. I had been away from my mother’s enormous dinners for several decades. Betty and I usually ate dinner in bed in front of the tv. We served ourselves a modest amount (she often left half of hers) and didn’t go back for “seconds”.

I discovered that in social settings as an adult, it was ok to talk about enjoying food. People said things like “I love mustard”. No one called them greedy or piggy. People talked about restaurants they liked. I joined in the conversation.

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I am now almost 70 and Betty is 84. She is bedridden and has dementia. I believe that the progression of her medical conditions was hastened by her picky eating habits. The last time she was in the hospital one of her diagnoses was “severe malnutrition.” She weighs 90 pounds. She fights constantly with the home attendants (and me) about not wanting to eat this, that, or the other. I see that extreme thinness resulting from picky eating habits does not age well. My mother was four foot ten and weighed 180 pounds and she was fit and active until she was about 93. I still weigh 145 but am now only five foot two. So I am now overweight again. Tough tomatoes. I suppose I enjoy food, although I enjoy many other things more. I am still mindful of what I eat. I don’t eat sandwiches very often, certainly not at home because I don’t keep bread in the house. But there is a little French grocery store near where Betty lives that makes wonderful sandwiches on pumpernickel ciabattas. My favorite is Swiss cheese with lettuce and tomato – and mustard. And yes, when I have one I enjoy it very much!

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LJ Idol Write-off: Fatherless (Open Topic)

At 14, I suddenly became fatherless (my father died of a heart attack on the street). There was a large, secular funeral. We had very little family, but my parents had a large circle of friends, and as a tenured university professor, my father had a coterie of adoring adjuncts and students. Nonetheless, we had no prescribed rituals. One friend of my father’s, an atheistic secular Jew, said that “these times are hard for people like us”, meaning that no religious tradition told us what the next steps should be. In fact, on the morning we were told that my father had died, I was not even sure whether or not I was supposed to go to school.

My father’s death was traumatic, but it hardly left me feeling “orphan-like” or “Dickensian,” a prototype very much in my thoughts because by the time my father died I had read almost all of Dickens, fallen in love with his works, and been intrigued by the large number of orphans, or at least children without mothers, who seemed to have lives of freedom that I could only dream of. So our family was deprived of an upper-middle-class income and a stern patriarch, but, counterintuitively, “parenting” increased exponentially as my mother fearfully micromanaged everything I did, much more than she had previously, particularly as one of my father’s interventions had been “leave her alone!” not to mention that he wanted at least some of her attention on him, not me. And there were even more mountains of food than had been supplied by the lavish dinners my mother had served every night to welcome my father home, dinners which, from hors d’oeuvres to dessert, contained more than a day’s caloric requirement for a 14-year-old desperate to get her BMI below 25. Thanks to the endless hordes of friends and neighbors trying to be helpful and sympathetic, there was now a round-the-clock feast, and a house filled with round-the-clock guests. Fifty years later, I realized that by endlessly eating and socializing, my mother was dealing with grief, but certainly neither she nor I were “pining” which, as a euphemism for weight loss, was the prevailing stereotype of grieving.

I did not have a good relationship with my father during the last two years of his life. Only a few months before he died we had had a knock-down, screaming, physical fight over my anger that a classmate, Hannah (not her real name)—skinny, quasi-orphaned (her divorced mother had lost her job and had dispersed her four daughters to stay with various friends and relatives), bitchy, and oh, so Dickensian—had been living with us. My father told me to feel sorry for her. I called her a bitch (not to her face, but in a loud voice within her earshot, in a family argument) because not only had she taunted me for being fat, she had also cajoled and wheedled my mother into making a Laura Ashley type shift dress for her like the one she had made me, and then had preened around telling me how much better she looked in it than I did. In any event, my no-holds-barred rage at Hannah led my father to beat me (something he had only done once before, when, while on a crash diet, I had had a screaming tantrum—about nothing—fueled by low blood sugar) all the while telling me how fortunate I was compared with Hannah. In retrospect I realize that what hurt me more than the beating was the fact that he “just didn’t get it”. I did not feel more fortunate than Hannah. She was everything I wanted to be: thin (despite eating whatever she felt like), independent (even when she was living “at home” with her mother she mostly supported herself with babysitting money), self-confident, and skilled at squeezing sympathy and admiration out of other people. She might have elicited some sympathy from me if she had had any of the cultural markers of poverty that I had been taught to be aware of—poor speech, ignorance of books and of the arts, clothes of inferior make—but she did not. Really the only two things that set her apart from other girls our age whom I might have invited for a sleepover were her crooked teeth, and the fact that she did not own a pair of pajamas, but instead slept in frayed dungaree shorts and a t shirt.

It took me years to realize that the most critical sequela of my father’s death was not a reprieve from future beatings or my mother’s endless dinner parties mostly peopled by catty gay men and sexually exploratory girls in their twenties (not the best role models for a teenage daughter), but our permanent fall from the “professional middle class”. At first I did not notice it because the only things that ended were things I hated anyhow. I no longer went to a private school, and we stopped going away for extended periods during the summer. I was thrilled to be out of the private school where I was at the mercy of two girl cliques: the rich Jewish girls who showed off their clothes and social precocity, and the thin WASP-y girls who showed off their forever pre-pubescent thinness. And I couldn’t have cared less if we didn’t go away much. Who at 14 wants to take a vacation with her parents? Excursions out of town did still occur, but they were fewer and farther between. By that point, I hated them, even the summer weekends, because at the height of my obsession with my weight (whatever I weighed that particular month) I loathed and feared summer clothes and usually kept on a knee-length skirt and stayed away from the beach (and of course it was impossible to stick to any kind of diet if I was either someone’s guest or staying in a hotel). And even worse, my mother, with her misguided generosity, once or twice took Hannah on one of these trips, which for me was sheer Hell. My mother seemed to adore Hannah (this adoration took the form of a combination of pity and admiration), and the bitter irony of it all was that what my mother adored about Hannah was her feistiness, spunk, and independence, traits that my mother’s style of “helicopter parenting” made it impossible for me to develop.

Years later, a mentor of mine referred to women like Hannah as “killer waifs”, And reader, I ended up with one as a life partner, albeit one whose saving grace was that she adored me, thought I was gorgeous at any weight, made me feel like a princess, and was extremely generous with money when she had any.

Combining a casual elegance (she was of course very thin and ectomorphically built, and rarely ate anything substantial) with a chaotic lifestyle (her apartment was filled with junk and completely disorganized and she was always on the edge of financial disaster) she reminded me of the eccentric waifs all ages, genders, and persuasions who graced my mother’s dinner table after my father died. After she and I became an “item”, I felt that I was in a dream come true: in the midst of a whirlwind romance, living the sort of improvisational quasi-foodless lifestyle that I had longed for as a teenager immersed in Dickens.

Now almost 70, as a legally single woman in a studio apartment (I still have the same life partner but we do not live together) living on a very modest income, without any family, I suppose I am a kind of waif and orphan myself (when my partner dies I will have no one with whom to spend Thanksgiving, for example). But sadly, I am now much too old to be anyone’s Hannah.