Eating Ice Cream With My Dog

“Then there’s only one thing to be done,” he said. “We shall have to wait for you to get thin again.”

“How long does getting thin take?” asked Pooh anxiously.

“About a week, I should think.”

“A week!” said Pooh gloomily. “
What about meals?”

“I’m afraid no meals,” said Christopher Robin, “because of getting thin quicker. But we
will
read to you.”

A. A. Milne,
Winnie-the-Pooh

Most, most loving thanks to my parents, Marie and Leonard Kuffel, for their faith in me, their generosity, their sense of humor, childhood summers at Flathead Lake, and school years full of nuns.

Transcendent thanks to Fredrica Friedman for your faith in me and in this book, and to Denise Silvestro for your passion and your brilliant editing. Andie Avila has been a voice of reason in the editing of a sometimes controversial book and I feel lucky indeed to have had the luxury of two editors.

I’m in debt to Pam Peeke for her brutally tough questions, and to Lybi Ma at
Psychology Today
and Judith Moore at the
San Diego Reader
for encouraging me to delve into this subject before the book was an idea. I wish we’d gotten the chance to be friends, Judith.

Tasha Paley continually kept me in a sense of “we,” and Gerry Dempsey and Ann Marie Carley fed me dinner and kept me from reverting to an early hominid when I’d been alone with the dogs and the computer for too long. David Seiter wrenched my heart after I’d given up on men and he keeps reminding me of how lucky I am. Jonathan Elliott’s rueful remarks when we meet on the street reminded me I have a brain as well as a useful eating disorder.

My daily peeps—Barley, Boomer, Chance, Henry, Hero, Malachi, and Roger—have owners who have been my cheering section and source of excitement about writing. Thanks not only for the [mostly] Lab Love, but thanks also to Susan and David Clapp, Ann Allen-Ryan and Leonard Ryan, Susan Sidel, Rene Dittrich and Jo Foster, Grace Yoon and Steve Kilroy, Renette Zimmerly and Tim McLaughlin, and Regina and Steve Rubin for everything you’ve done for me over the years and for being my most frequent human contact. And if I’m thankful for Lab Love, I have to acknowledge mine, Daisy. She makes me get up and think about something other than myself every day.

I’ve made forty-two thousand cyberfriends since the beginning of my blogging days. Most of us haven’t spoken but you’ve become a part of my contentment in life.

And finally, but not least, my special love to my brothers, Jim Kuffel and Tom Graves.

E
ating Ice Cream with My Dog
is the story of finding myself a hundred pounds heavier than when I last committed the crime of memoir. It is also a story of five women, self-named the Angry Fat Girls. This book is based on the spirit of their lives but heavily fictionalized in order to protect anonymity within their families, social circles, and workplaces.

I have created these fictions with their knowledge, active participation, and approval of the book you are about to read. In many ways, they wish they could openly join me in welcoming you to our circle of friendship, but this invitation has been left to me to articulate for them—or me and Daisy, my dog and boon companion, who is asleep with a yogurt mustache on her snout after helping herself to my lunch.

I. After “The End”

In the winter of 2004, I published
Passing for Thin,
an account of my midlife weight loss of 188 pounds and about being part of the world of normal-sized people for the first time. While the critics’ response to the book was laudatory, individual reader’s opinions ran the gamut from finding me self-involved and heartless to believing me to be a voice speaking about their own body experiences.

I tried and failed to respond to all of the emails. They were painful to read. Many were desperate; some described experiences similar to mine. In the year before the book was published, I began to regain my weight, so I often felt like a liar for giving advice I couldn’t follow or sympathy I couldn’t give myself. Congratulating the successful either made me twinge with envy or worry that my correspondent would feel my fallibility was theirs.

In the years of regaining half of my weight back, I did not give up on the hopes of permanently resuming abstinence
¹
and my 12-step program. I had intermittent periods of abstinence and weight loss. It was during these spells that I was more energetic and buoyant, and I tended to attack my backlog of emails during them.

There have been a number of iconic Poster Girls for Thin in the last several years. Sarah, the Duchess of York, Kirstie Alley, Valerie Bertinelli, Ricki Lake, Marie Osmond, Phylicia Rashad, and Oprah Winfrey have all discussed their weight gains and advocated particular methods for losing. I don’t compare my modest fame to theirs, but when it came to my inbox, I, too, found that I’d become a Poster Girl for Thin. But I was a poseur even as the advance publicity for the book began.

II. Frances in Blogland

The genesis of Angry Fat Girls started with the author blog I began on Amazon in the winter of 2006. Initially, I wrote about friendships, dogs, the writing process, having to ask clients for overdue money, what I was making for dinner, why I couldn’t fall in love with a man I was seeing. I resolved some loose ends from
Passing for Thin
. I was open about my weight gain and depression, and I came to wonder if I was becoming the Anne Sexton of Amazon.

Mimi—one of the four other women who share the story of
Eating Ice Cream with My Dog
, and the first of the four to comment on my blog—wrote, “I’m glad you are being personal. After reading
Passing for Thin
, I felt as though I’d made a friend who was able to be honest about herself.”

I was surprised at how accepting readers were that I hadn’t maintained my weight loss. They identified with my seesawing and bingeing. They, too, were between rocky road and a hard place.

“Is there anything else that can make you feel so completely useless and terrible and weak and awful?” B. responded. “It’s nice to know I’m not alone in these feelings.”

“…Those of us who feel like freaks for not being able to control a food addiction don’t feel like we’re the only ones out here…” wrote H.

As readers confessed their own stories, ranging from childhood abuse to their diet plans, a string of thanks kept showing up.
Thank you for talking about your weight gain. Thank you for talking about how hard it is to lose a best friend. Thank you for talking about standing up for yourself. Thank you for talking about being depressed.

By April, my blog became a virtual watercooler in the politics of being female in the new millennium, a place where readers could discuss with each other what they felt other people in their lives didn’t understand. “This has become sort of my online diary,” M. wrote, and Mimi, one of the Angry Fat Girls you’ll get to know, described what was happening most poignantly: “We’re all trying to walk new paths without using food as the fix to get there. Working out the kinks, a.k.a. anger, hurt, fear, without feeding them is a process…It is like learning how to speak another language. You have to practice it every day.”

For women who are afraid to ask for help, the blog functioned as a public red flag in statements rather than pleas. “I’m afraid of airport food, and I came here to get a dose of reality and community,” Mimi wrote of being trapped in a late spring Chicago snowstorm.

“I got a lovely lavender dress, and tried it on today after much trepidation, and guess what???? I couldn’t get any part of the dress over my HUMONGO upper body!” L. posted.

“I’m sending you a big hug from the west coast,” someone wrote back within an hour. “I was a bridesmaid at a size 28 and hated everything about it.”

They cheered each other on in successes. “I am impressed that instead of eating, you took the time to stop, take a breath, and write down how you were feeling. It’s hard to know what I’m feeling at times.”

They consoled each other when they lapsed. “I need to get on here and vent that I gained two pounds at my WW weigh in…I *know* that I have not eaten 7,000 extra calories this week,” was a familiar lament.

“Hang in there,” someone wrote back. “Your attitude is an inspiration that hopefully I can take to heart.”

We amassed some hilarious terms for our bodies and food. “I’m stuck with tavern arms,” one writer described herself. “I’ll save you the gory details of the food porn,” a woman said of a late-night brownie session. Wendy, one of the subjects of this book, calls her local deli man the Cheese Pimp. The hang of fat over jeans’ tops became known as muffin tops.

Perhaps the greatest compliment to what was happening on my Amazon blog was said not to me, but to one reader from another. “We posted today about the same time (two minutes apart). Our posts are very similar—sugar/chocolate cravings stopped by willpower and reading Frances’ blog and [each other’s] comments.”

Intimacies took place between gardening tips, reading recommendations, parenting ideas, and stories about knee arthroscopy, antidepressants, jewelry, movies, favorite television shows, and housekeeping. Readers became friends among themselves, forming kinships and enmities that I still don’t know about. I watched them evolve into a circle of which I was only the Master of Ceremonies.

“I guess I wish I knew what happened after your book, but before these posts. The time in-between. Do you feel like sharing any of this?” D. asked just as my sponsor
²
asked me to write an account of what was then my three-year relapse. I asked my readers if they wanted me to do it in the blog. Their answer was a resounding yes, and for nine days I wrote about what tripped me up and what held me down.

“As I keep stumbling along…I keep looking for stories out there of people who battle, perhaps even fall once in a while, but keep pulling themselves up to try again,” A. said.

“Please keep telling the story. Been there. This helps,” Y. said in confirmation.

The responses turned into discussions of triggers: difficult job experiences, parents, codependency, sugar detox, old habits of smothering our feelings, sugarless candy, lack of time, lack of privacy. Relapse, I learned, was so
easy
, preying on vulnerabilities we ourselves may not know the dangers of. “What precipitated my descent into regaining weight was a despicable act of betrayal by a family member. I was angry at this person, and angry at myself for not making it clear how devastated I was,” K. said.

A. confessed, “My birthday fell on a Sunday and I didn’t hear from a single friend. Nothing. I spent the day alone. Did some shopping, had dinner out—alone. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it was the worst day of my life. And I’ve been on a steady gaining trend ever since.”

I’m going to skip to the end of this book, in March 2007, when the four of us—Lindsay, Mimi, Wendy, and I—who shared the blog Angry Fat Girlz met up in Brooklyn, New York. Lindsay wrote a short post about the experience and among other comments, Belle said, “I would be interested to hear how y’all came to be writing this thing together. I get so much inspiration and thought-provoking insight from your posts and those who comment.”

The history of the blog was passed around like a recitation of Homer around a campfire of Athenian soldiers bound for the Peloponnesian battle zones.

L. responded, “Many of Us (capitalized because we thought of ourselves as a club) became regular commentators on [Frances’s] blogs, and many of Us came to rely on each other and Frances’s insights and inspiration (and her dog stories) for support. Then one day, THUNK! The rug was yanked out from under us and Amazon’s blog [mal]function did the yanking. There was no Frances, no Girlz, no support. We finally found each other over on Frances’s website, and someone suggested we start a blog. Voilà! Here we are.”

“Almost right,” Lindsay wrote back. “Wendy started AFG for Frances after the incident she mentioned, and then I came on to help with some of the techie stuff and started posting here and there, and Wendy invited Mimi to join us a little later. We had all been commenting on the Amazon blog regularly. So it’s sort of an evolving thing. Wendy is still the official owner of this blog.”

Still not quite right, so I corrected: “I don’t know that Wendy started it
for
me as much as to provide another platform besides Amazon. I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ because I’m a blithe soul in cyberspace, but I have to confess I didn’t pay much attention to it beyond contributing the name and some of the manifesto. We should ask Wendy why she wanted to start this blog.”

As the fire sank into embers, the tale came full around to Wendy. “Why? It just seemed like something to do; some random decision on my part. Sometimes my ideas work, and sometimes they don’t. This one seems to be one of the more successful ones.”

We decided early on to make this blog more general and issue-oriented rather than a chronicle of our days. We chose to make Angry Fat Girlz a place to discuss popular diet and self-help books, coping with holidays, makeup counters, bra fitting, negotiating visits home, and nights out with friends, Weight Watchers meetings, victimhood, self-sabotage, thin-envy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and cupcakes.

The blog gave women a voice with which to talk about the Great American Pastime that is also the Great American Secret: what we eat, how/when/where we eat, why we eat, how much we weigh, how much we have gained or lost, what size we are, how much we like or hate exercise, the daily aggravations, and the occasional revelation. About twenty readers eventually became bloggers in their own right. Some of those blogs won awards, and some of the writers became new voices for the weight blogging phenomenon.

Of Angry Fat Girlz, P. wrote, “I learned about diet and exercise and Spanx and writing and cooking and shoes and boyfriends and jobs and, along the way, I also learned about personal power.”

Wendy, Lindsay, and Mimi had been emailing and hooking up on Instant Messenger while my Amazon blog was most active, forming friendships I had unwittingly instigated but didn’t consider myself a part of, although they included me in jokes and articles they emailed each other. One summer night I accidentally turned on Instant Messenger. Mimi found me and invited Lindsay into the conversation. Within minutes, Wendy had appeared online, and I watched them tear apart whatever television show they were all watching. I left my IM open most nights and looked forward to our online conversations-slash-bitch fests. They were hilarious and gave me insights into pop culture that, because I hate TV, I was ignorant of. In June, they had each volunteered to be interviewed for the book on relapse that I was formulating, so I had their addresses from their questionnaires. I sent birthday cards to the summer birthday girls, which meant they then had my address. If I still identified myself with my Amazon blog (and later my blog on Car on the Hill), rather than the Angry Fat Girlz blog, I was enjoying getting to know the women who did the bulk of the work under the initial imprimatur of “a blog for fans of Frances Kuffel.” It instantly outgrew me, and Mimi overcame all our laziness at some point and took the tagline off, which was a huge relief.

Out of Angry Fat Girlz, I made three of the closest friends I’ve ever had.

III. How a Blog Is Not a Book

In March, in the middle of my relapse history, the book proposal I’d worked on for a year was turned down by my editor, and my agent asked what I was writing now. The novel I’d halfheartedly scratched at, I confessed, had taken a backseat to my blog.

“Why are you wasting these lovely, honest entries on a bunch of us reading them here? These would make a great book,” J. asked around the time my agent brought up the need for a new book idea. My immediate answer to J. was that, having paid money for
Passing for Thin
, I owed readers my continued candor. By summer, I owed them my gratitude for another book.

The sympathy and stories of my readers’ own relapses, I told my agent, assured me that relapse was a topic that was common and little talked about.

I didn’t want to write a book based on the blog. Certainly, there would be wonderful information there to use as diving boards for deeper reflection and I’d use bits of it for color, but a blog-book could only be organized in two ways: chronologically or thematically. There was nothing chronological about the blog except the dates of the entries, and nothing thematic except for snippets of back-and-forth over yoga or peonies or fat caste systems. These online dialogues usually petered out in a day or two.

But maybe, I said to my agent, the subject of relapse could be a book, based on more voices and experiences than my own in exploring the special shames of relapse.

I asked if readers would be interested in telling me their stories and my inbox overflowed. Their generosity was partly in support of my enterprise and partly therapy for them as they aired secrets to someone they knew understood and would not be dismayed. The interviews were long and draining on both sides.