Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (10 page)

“It’s a criminal act to be fat or ‘in the food’ or ‘struggling with the food,’” Katie blogged on her own site, Mrs. Beasley Says So. She was frozen out of the group. To admit to an outright binge risks losing one’s sponsor and being shunned by other members. They’re more frightened of the same thing happening to them than they are sympathetic to relapse. Speaking as a serial relapser myself, one becomes wary of consistently burdening a group with the announcement of three days or twenty-seven days of adherence to a food plan, or the redundant plaint of being unable to get abstinent. That self-consciousness itself can drive those most in trouble away.

Relapse along with weight gain was the worst crime Katie could commit. “My friends in that program, and myself included, have had to hate fat,” she added. How could “recovery” from compulsive eating occur when, through group-think, you turned your back on what you have been most of your life? It encouraged self-hatred, and Katie always lived on that edge. Three years of bingeing, crying, therapy, and raging later, Katie warned others, “Don’t hate yourself into weight loss. It won’t work, it won’t last, and please love yourself into acceptance. Don’t be afraid of Fat Acceptance. Embrace it and don’t deny who you are.”

I must interject that not all recovery programs, or all FA groups, encourage such fat phobia among its members. The Stepfords have always taught me and others to thank God for our fat, which was very possibly a life-saving, albeit inadequate, reaction to situations we couldn’t otherwise have borne.

At the same time, how many relapses come from losing a lot of weight—enough to shop in misses’ departments and be asked out on streams of dates—but not enough or, in some cases, an uncomfortable amount of weight?

In her first weight loss, when Katie reached 160 pounds, she was thin enough for economy class, designer clothes, and boyfriends, but when she got to 160 pounds, a size 10, a decade later, a group of women who had never been weighed on a loading dock scale deemed her still fat.

The more Katie lost, the more bewildered she was by the choices, possibilities, abilities, and changed dynamics with her colleagues, family, and friends. Black boatneck sweater or ivory muslin blouse? Should I change jobs or go after a promotion? What do I do with all this energy? The gauntlet of classic exchanges that are both flattering and insulting become wearying. “I remember standing to meet an old friend I’d been out of touch with for years” Katie said of her FA weight loss. Her friend’s eyes widened and Katie said, “This is what I really look like.” Her friend leaned in to kiss her and said, “I always thought you were beautiful.”

“What
bullshit
!” I spat. “I mean, you
are
beautiful, but if she’d always thought so, why wasn’t she setting you up on dates or asking you out with a male friend as your partner? Why wasn’t she asking you to go to Mexico with her or clothes shopping?”

“Yup,” she said. “Beautiful and fat and left out.”

The more she fit in with the anonymous crowds waiting for BART in the morning, the more exposed and, ultimately, fraudulent Katie felt among people she knew.

The dream that Katie bought into is that losing weight will make us beautiful, reverse the clock, get us the marvelous life we have watched other people having. But we are unprepared for living naturally in our now-thin bodies, which, as Katie experienced in her second weight loss through Food Addicts Anonymous, are not always good enough.

Fed up (pun intended) with the rigors and philosophies Katie couldn’t meet or embrace, she found it easy to skip a meeting, drift away from her sponsor, go into a bakery and get a dozen of anything. One of the few joys, in fact, of relapse is not, for twenty pounds or so, getting dirty looks for buying a pint of ice cream and eating it on the street.

Crawling, three or more hundred pounds crushing her knees, into the Rooms, and getting abstinent on a strict and highly exclusionary food plan is a setup for bingeing. All it takes is one slipup. In the Rooms, people warn themselves of how powerful cravings and dependency become once they’ve been indulged by saying, “My disease isn’t asleep. It’s doing push-ups.”

Years of watching everyone else enjoy birthday cake and Thanksgiving stuffing, years of Saturday nights without popcorn or pizza, weddings and showers attended without a drop of champagne and having to ask the cater-waiters what’s in the salad dressing: abstinence makes us outsiders as much, in ways, as our obesity did.

There is a lot of catching up to do.

In relapse, we still continue to have the hope of finding peace with food in the Rooms, so why not eat the grand slam? We know our fat asses will be back in uncomfortable folding chairs as we cross our arms protectively across our chests and keep our heads down in the shame of having fucked up.

What was recently our best friend—the community of fellow overeaters—fades and we return to what helped us survive for so long. “Ice cream is my lover,” one blog reader wrote me, and another, watching the nubile students from NYU walking through the long dusks of June, sighed, “I went to OA for a while, but picked up more craziness and self-absorption there than I had before.”

“It really is a miracle that I went back to regular OA,” Katie said of her latest reentry, that June of 2006. “In FA, I lost faith in anything Higher Power–like.”

I disagree with her notion that there was a miracle involved. Katie had tried Weight Watchers and every diet on Amazon and the magazine racks: How could she not go back to the only thing that had worked for her? She wanted gastric bypass, but having surgery was contingent upon losing some weight and its success would depend on her sticking to a strict food plan. The Rooms were her only alternative, whether she took God in with her or not, and she needed a sponsor who didn’t try to become a Higher Power by smacking her hands with a ruler for calling at 5:04 a.m.

The first thing you have to understand about Katie is that she had what could be called emotional fibromyalgia. A car backfiring could make her furious (
Why doesn’t that idiot take his car into the shop—people are trying to work here!
), jealous (
Lucky guy—he has the money to get it fixed.
), despairing (
My car is going to die anytime.
), or go off on a wild tangent that could consume days of research and fantasizing (
I’m moving to Venice, where there are no cars and no rules against smoking.
).

An annoyance someone else would laugh off in the course of a day could send her spinning for a week. The cause of the annoyance was often of her own making, which she acknowledged and then heaped more blame on herself for. There was that company meeting she had attended, in which she categorically laid out what their training program was lacking. She wasn’t lambasting the person in charge of training new salespeople, but she was clear about what wasn’t working. I might have couched such criticism by softening it with “my experience and the latest research suggests” or “other companies are finding success by,” but Katie jumped in with salient, imperative points. Her boss was pleased: a successful salesperson with a degree in organizational behavior brings a lot to these bimonthly summit councils. The training manager got into a major snit that, of course, got back to Katie.

“I’m gonna quit my job,” she snarled. “Bunch of assholes. She called me a queen bee. I’m not a queen bee. Am I a queen bee? I wasn’t exactly
mean
. I want to see this company expand, and she’s not doing her job. Does that make me a queen bee?”

That fluidity her therapist speaks of was in full play. The day after she told me the story, she changed her Gmail icon to a scowling little girl with the words “
I’m
the queen bee around here.” Five days after the meeting, she changed the picture to a hive with the caption “There can only be one queen bee.”

Katie didn’t let go easily.

She was a Gordian knot of sadness, despair, self-loathing, sarcasm, bluntness, anger, gratitude, appreciation, contempt, honesty, and game-playing, each in equal proportion
all the time
. Her therapist had a lot of experience working with borderline personalities and Katie was glad about that because she saw herself in many of the DSMIV-TR—the revised fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—criteria for the disorder.
²³

The good news about having borderline personality disorder is that the condition usually stabilizes after ten years or so.

The bad news about having borderline personality disorder is that, for Katie, it had gone on for more than forty years.

Above all, Katie was full of longing—the way a stray dog longs for scraps or an orphan for a parent—for friends, for her family’s acceptance, to be in less pain, to belong, to fit in. One of the reasons that we became friends was because the opportunities she (often unknowingly) gave me to fulfill some of those longings were so blatantly obvious. Wanting love, after all, is coequal to wanting to give it. Katie granted me that supreme pleasure.

Like so many of us, Katie pinned her future on thinness. “I believed in the dream that when I lost weight everything in the world would be better.” The one part of her longing that was fulfilled by losing weight was that she fit. Airplane seats and clothes and all those scary moments that we feel so acutely excluded from became available, and Katie embraced them. She who had never traveled much went to Hawaii, the Caribbean, Mexico. “I was able to go anywhere and do anything. I didn’t have to think about my clothes or packing…everything looked good. I could be having a bad hair day, no makeup, and still feel good.” She took yoga, which she loved and missed, she left her clerical job in the district attorney’s office and went into sales and made a lot of money. She got a tummy tuck.

It looked to everyone to be the happy ending after years of sad stories, but her success became another aspect of herself that she mourned. “Deep inside I was so sad. I cried all the time. People would say to me, ‘What is wrong with you? You’re thin! You should be happy!’ I believed these comments, and I felt even worse for feeling so bad. Something was terribly wrong with me, and I couldn’t figure it out. I became even more self-loathing, and the only soother that has ever made me feel safe was to eat a lot of cake.”

We should mandate that all weight-loss compliments be accompanied by, “You have always deserved your thinness,” or quote Pam Peeke’s formula, “For every twenty-five pounds removed, it takes one year to mentally adjust. So be kind to yourself, okay?”

Peeke’s formula is breathtaking for women like Katie, Wendy, Mimi, and me, who come from very high weights. It means that when Katie was twenty-six, 160 pounds, and a brand-new size 10 after sixteen months of her restricted OA food plan and a loss of 197 pounds, mentally she weighed about 303 pounds. She had the same insecurities of the fat woman who sabotages herself in order to spin her failures, which may explain why she carried a snotty attitude into the workplace and was either fired or quit before she could be fired. A 303-pound woman doesn’t
deserve
to make good money, a 303-pound woman has to strike before the name-calling and judgmental looks flatten her, a 303-pound woman doesn’t have choices when it comes to men and so will go to New York in order to take an idiot’s picture with King Kong carved from privet in a sleet storm outside Tavern on the Green—even though she was a size 10.

Nor would she have collected the experience to understand what healthier, metaphorically broader people learn as they go along. The most important of these lessons is that
it’s not about you
—“it” being bad behavior or having emotionally frozen parents, the lack of a man’s follow-up after a date. When you’re fat, everything is about your fat and, by extension, everything is about you.

“It was almost like being in another world,” she said of her last and biggest weight loss. “I was never comfortable; I felt like an imposter.” One of her terrors was that new people in her life would find out she had weighed 330 pounds in her recent past. “I really tried to hide the fact that I had ever been fat. Then people who had known me before would say, ‘You look so good,’ and I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, but I should have never been fat in the first place, so it’s really not an accomplishment.’”

I wager that every woman who has lost an altering amount of weight has a silent comeback to those compliments. Mine was, “What was I before? Chopped liver?” Mimi had slightly more negative reactions, vacillating between, “What did I look like before?” and “No, I don’t. You’re just saying that to be nice.” Our unspoken responses are as undermining as our low expectations because we reaffirm for ourselves how unacceptable and loathsome our big bodies, and with those bodies, our selves are.

Using Pam Peeke’s formula of a year of adjustment for every twenty-five pounds lost, it can take a decade to separate social judgments from our obesity, our obesity and fates from something bad in us, and realize that, like everyone else, our faults and compulsions do not detract from our worthiness as human beings.

In June 2006, as Katie started a new food plan, she avoided meeting with her sponsor as much as possible. She had been on disability, because of her weight and depression, for two months, and she was filling her days with cruising the Internet and becoming absorbed into a reality television series I’d never heard of. For a small fee, she was able to access twenty-four-hour live feeds from the house in which
Big Brother
was being shot, and her sarcasm and incisiveness made her a star in the program chat rooms.

Then it unraveled.

“One of the ‘houseguests,’” she emailed me on another of what I had come to think of as our Loser Fat Girl Saturday Nights, “said ‘If anybody is on the Internet right now watching this, they are pathetic.’ That really affected me. I tried to chat about it with people in the room but they were assholes and just said, I shouldn’t let someone I don’t know affect how I feel. I started crying really hard.”