Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (32 page)

Nor did they have comrades to talk with about how the habit of reaching for food as comfort didn’t leave. “The physical procedure was easiest,” Betsy said. “I never ate for hunger anyway. It was ‘I’m bored, I’m happy, I’m depressed, there goes a yellow VW.’ The day you say, ‘Oh, screw it, I’ll eat a box of Ding-Dongs,’ you can only have three because you don’t have a stomach. Unfortunately, they don’t put a band on your head.”

“I’m scared of that point where I’m not losing weight anymore,” Cynthia confessed of the fifteen to twenty pounds her doctor feels she can, if she wants, still lose. “Do I ever get to live a normal life where I don’t worry about what I get to eat or how much I exercise? My brother had vertical gastric in June and is down to 190, which is a healthy weight for him, and we were joking that I had ninety percent of my stomach removed and now I need part of my head removed. My brain still says, ‘you’re fat, you’re angry.’ What do I do with that?”

I’ve always said I’d consider weight-loss surgery if it came with a lobotomy.

Such a bargain is not so far off the mark. When a woman decides to have gastric surgery, she must, in order to be successful, change her relationship with the how and the why of her eating. There are really only three relationships one can have with the staff of life: the lucky few who eat for fuel, the extremely unlucky who eat for the sake of eating, and the mixed blessing of eating for the luxurious sake of the food itself.

A woman who has gotten to the size that she needs surgery to reverse it probably eats as a way of living. The food she ate in the past was important mainly for satisfying either an emotional need or a need beyond need, an imperative to chew, fill up, medicate. The hardcore eater, like Cynthia, doesn’t take small bites and chew carefully: she
feeds
. After surgery, the patient has to learn to eat, mindfully, for nutrition. If she wants a sensuous relationship with food, it will be in bits and drabs, and in the surprises of new foods she is allowed to eat.

The Angry Fat Girls and other relapsers must take these classifications as seriously as the surgical patient. Answering this question is a purely individual but fraught product of a lot of reflection—and it’s essential. Do we eat to eat, or do we have a different kind of relationship with food?

Mimi, for one, wanted eat her cake and savor it, too. She loved food. She loved the sensation of gelato in her mouth, was a student of pad thai, swooned over her Rachel Ray fruitcake. She had an educated palate and noticed things like the taste of wax in See’s chocolates or the use of powdered garlic instead of fresh. She even made a point of not eating everything on her plate…only to trip up soon after. “I made the mistake of eating a gingersnap after breakfast,” she berated herself on her personal blog. “The taste was addictive to the point that I brought the rest of the bag with me and ate in the car as I drove.”

I think the Skinny Cow chocolate peanut butter ice cream sandwich is a trick to make us think we can have it both ways. “Of course you can have it all,” its website proclaims under the banner of “Livin’ Large by Livin’ Skinny.” Tossing phrases and words like “rich and creamy deliciousness,” “creamy, dreamy, guilt-free,” and “give in to temptation” around like confetti, the peppy cow doesn’t really make a case for moderation or, better yet, learning to control cravings. “Some open their minds. Others open their hearts. Me, I open my freezer,” says the website’s cow with “sass.” We’re suckered in because the unspoken promise in Right Bites is that all we have to do is lose weight and then we can have more.

So, no, Wendy’s fat-free refried beans do not count as a vegetable and aren’t a substitute for broccoli. Such self-delusions don’t pay off. They don’t realign our use of food, the how and the why. Nor does a 140-calorie ice cream bar fill the void that the big bag of potato chips did.

Successful dieting is forever. If we maintain our weight loss, we never leave the diet, so the bargain we have to strike is between starving because our weekly points are used up or using those weekly points to put true, physical hunger to rest. For many women, I suspect, food is a lot like marriage and may even be the secret lover in many actual marriages. In our union with pizza, we have a choice between constant arguing and pretending the relationship is healthy, or our wedlock falls somewhere on the continuum between marriage counseling and divorce. Gastric bypass is a divorce. The torturous daily assessment of food as “good” or “bad” is having a misogamist for a shrink. The rigid food plan that Karen now follows is a legal separation with the intent to divorce sometime before she dies. “OA has been difficult,” she wrote me, “but [it] has also given me a freedom I have not experienced in a long time.”

Extreme measures leave us in a lifelong moment of truth about what food means to us, what its absence means to us, and how we must craft a sense of self apart from all its charms and consequences. Surviving food’s absence and exploring ourselves is part of what happened when Wendy asked if we could start a joint blog. Blogging for Angry Fat Girlz meant a certain amount of meditation and research, and it required the focus that a package of Vienna Fingers once got. The responses were a wedge in our loneliness. For an hour or so every other day, either on Angry Fat Girlz or our own blogs, we were free of eating and in the thrall of our own talents and intelligence.

We were ourselves.

“You Are My Candy Girl”

T
he deliverymen watched Katie lie down on her new bed. She refused to imagine what they were thinking, this refrigerator of a woman whomping down on the plastic-covered mattress and box springs that sang a couple of bars of a nursery rhyme until her four hundred pounds settled. The box springs toottled again—was it “Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater”?—as she pushed hard with her left forearm to roll over onto her right side. She raised her right arm and rested her head on it.

“No,” she said, with her back to the two guys. They were kind of dishy, absolutely the sort of men she feared most, the ones who’d write “No fat girls need apply” in a personal ad, or might, on a horny Friday night, go on Craigslist hunting for big game they could do the nasty with and then disappear into tall tales at their favorite sports bar. “It’s not right. It’s not the one I tried at the store.”

“It’s the same model numbers,” one of them said, and rattled off some gibberish that ended in “extra firm.”

“I don’t care. It’s not right. I want the one from the showroom.”

“We delivered the same units, ma’am, but we didn’t pick up no showroom mattresses.”

“Then call and tell them you’re returning these and pick up the showroom mattress and box springs that I tried out.”

“We can take these back,” the other one said, “but you’ll have to call about the showroom model and make new arrangements for delivery.”

Katie rolled off to the edge of the bed, swung her feet to the floor, and leveraged herself over so that she could stand by pushing up from the mattress with her hands. She faced them and said, “No. Call right now and tell them you’re making the switch.”

“We told you, ma’am, we just pick up from the warehouse. We don’t work for the showroom.”

“Well, you do now,” she snapped. “Take these out and bring back the showroom models.”

“‘Ma’am’ got a little snippy today,” Katie told me on the phone that night. She was snuggled in her new showroom-floor double bed, leaning up against a reading bolster, her old yellow quilt pulled up to her chin. Orange was settled at her feet, and Apple was curled just under the bolster. “I made them take the mattresses back and deliver what I wanted in the same afternoon. I ended up calling the manager and told him I was too sleepy not to get what I paid for on the day it was promised.”

“I’m impressed.” And I was. We obese women overtip, get pressured into buying more expensive cell phones and laptops, all the while that we are fawningly thanking clerks and telling stores it’s not a problem that it will take another week for delivery. We do this as an act of begging pardon for taking up so much space, for stepping out of the invisibility of being fat by asking for things.

“Me, too. But, Frances—I’m in bed!”

Her old bed, thrown out in the move, had been intolerable for the last couple of years, and she’d been sleeping in the La-Z-Boy recliner she had to replace at least once a year. The feel of sheets on her bare legs was heaven.

“You know what else?” she asked. Katie is the most excitable of us, not only prone to despair but also to the thrill of treats. She has never waited to open a Christmas or birthday present in her life. “I haven’t done much grocery shopping yet. The only stuff in my kitchen is Diet Coke, skim milk, lettuce, tomatoes, and a cooked chicken breast. And apples. And olive oil and vinegar that made the move.”

“Are you going to get some vegetables and breakfast stuff today?”

“Mmm,” she said noncommittally. “The thing is, this is the first abstinent kitchen I’ve ever had. So far. It’s been a week and I’ve binged, but not at home.”

“Wow.” I know what it’s like to throw out flour and sugar, honey and bread, working my way down to alcohol-based extracts and, eventually, the rolling pin and cake pans. “Are you planning to stay in bed in order to keep it that way?”

“No. I’m planning on going to a meeting in Oakland tonight. There’s a huge one at a hospital at seven. Much as I hate the thought of going to another damn hospital.”

The meeting was held in a small auditorium. Katie wasn’t sure which was worse, the twenty or so people already there or the auditorium chairs. She was grateful, and a little furious, when someone noticed her hesitation and got up and set out a couple of folding chairs in the front row.

Right where the worst fatties could be inspected and pitied. Poor things: I hope the Higher Power doesn’t let that happen to me…

To her relief, other people drifted in and hauled over more folding chairs. By the time the leader stepped up to the podium and invited the crowd to stand and join the Serenity Prayer, there were a dozen women sitting in the row with Katie.

The meeting started with a reading of the twelve steps and a new arrival took the seat that would be least disruptive of the proceedings. That chair was next to Katie. She shifted her bulk to the left as much as she could without entering her other neighbor’s space and concentrated on what was being read.

“Number Three,” a man’s voice from the back announced. “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives to the care of God as we understood him.”

“Number Four,” another man’s voice picked up. “Made a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves.”

Katie groaned inwardly. She’s been in the Rooms for fifteen years and had worked the steps. They had not prevented her from getting to 427 pounds. Other people seemed to be able to practice all those twelve-steppy niblets of advice—keep your eyes on your own plate; one day at a time; let go, let God—but they seemed to have some extra epidermis or a curtain they could pull to keep the world in its place. Katie felt like a burn victim, missing her skin, or like she lived behind a scrim where her reactions and desires were on freak show display.

The leader introduced a speaker named Kenneth. Katie slumped. Men’s and women’s experiences with eating, food, weight, body image, the program, life were so different that it could void the story’s validity for the opposite sex.

He talked about growing up in chaos, a rageful alcoholic father, a meek mother who didn’t defend herself or her six kids. Early on, he discovered he felt safe when he was stuffed. Sometimes he ate plain flour to achieve what he had come to understand was the indifference of numbness. He weighed three hundred pounds when he barely managed to graduate from high school. Getting a job at Wal-Mart got him out of his parents’ house, and it got him easy access to candy bars, bags of cookies, stale bakery goods on sale.

He ballooned to four hundred pounds in a year and got fired for shoplifting a fistful of Snickers bars. He spent his unemployment in his room, watching television and eating. When his unemployment ran out, he got a night job as a janitor in a hospital where he mostly hung out in waiting rooms. That’s where he heard about Optifast and dropped 220 pounds in a year. He enrolled in night school and studied computer science. He got buff. He got his first boyfriend. They started eating out, and he learned he was a talented cook. They had regular Sunday brunches. His weight shot up. His boyfriend dumped him.

By then he was working in information technology for the hospital and heard about something else, a twelve-step program for compulsive eating. He gave it a shot.

“I can’t tell you that my life is easy,” he said. “My father died of ammonia on the brain last year, and my mother had a nervous breakdown. As the only sibling who doesn’t have kids, I was the one who had to check her into a hospital and look after her when she came home. It meant moving back to the place where my disease took away my life. But I did it abstinently. I didn’t eat sugar or flour, I measured my meals, I continued to pray and meditate. Sometimes I stood at the kitchen cupboards looking at what was in them. But my sponsor reminded me that God loves me as I am, but He loves me too much to keep where I am. I knew it was only temporary and mostly I did what they say in OA—don’t eat, read the Big Book, go to meetings. Because I’d made my amends to my parents and let go of a lot of my bitterness toward them, I was able to finally see that serenity is not freedom from the storm but peace amid the storm.”

The timekeeper was holding her hands up in a T to signify that his time was up. He nodded and smiled—at Katie, especially?—and said, “I’ll just close by saying, keep coming back!”

The applause was thunderous. Everybody loves a huge weight-loss success. Katie clapped, too. That thing about God loving a person too much to keep them where they are hit close to her new home. She’d been kicked out of her San Bruno apartment because of the kittens she loved. Her dream of gastric bypass was busted. She was in that storm that Kenneth talked about, a storm of rejection, but she had no serenity. It was another aphorism that works for people who can pull down heavy drapes and secede from other people’s bad weather. When Katie tried to shut out bullshit like Kaiser’s evaluation team and her mother’s assumption that she’d take the cats to the ASPCA and apologize to her old landlord, her scrim was too flimsy to hold out against a rain-lashed wind.

Katie felt a hand on her knee. It was the woman at her right, the one who came in during the steps. Diane! Diane, her first sponsor from seventeen years ago!

“Oh, my God!” Katie squealed. A couple of disapproving looks shot their way, and she lowered her voice. “How are you?”

“I’m good, Katie. How are you?” Diane’s whisper was tentative. She could see perfectly well how Katie was. Stevie Wonder could see how Katie was doing.

She opened her hands.
Duh
. “Let’s talk after the meeting,” Diane said, and sat back with her legs crossed, holding Katie’s hand for the next forty minutes. The warmth of Diane’s hand and the steady pressure as she gently squeezed Katie’s knuckles allowed her to cry.

“I had a sponsor last spring who put me on the Kay Sheppard plan,” Katie told Diane over coffee. “I lost a little weight but it was slow and the plan is stupid.”

Diane is a small woman with bright blue eyes. She was a little plumper than the last time Katie saw her, some ten years ago or so, and she’d let her hair go gray. Her curls bobbed as she nodded her head.

“Stupid how?”

Katie ticked off the forbidden substances: “No caffeine. No diet soda. No aspartame, NutraSweet, or Splenda: only saccharine or stevia. Sugar-free toothpaste at seven bucks a tube. One teaspoon of spice or herbs a day. One ounce of vinegar or salsa or mustard or other condiment per day. I mean, what the fuck?”

“But you were losing weight?”

“Like, thirty pounds in two months. I know, I know. Lots of people would be thrilled to lose twenty pounds. Lots of people don’t weigh more than four hundred pounds and aren’t on disability and trying to qualify for weight-loss surgery. But my sponsor decided that at my weight, I should eat the men’s version of the food plan. Six ounces of protein and six ounces of dairy for breakfast, a starch at every meal. A protein and fruit ‘metabolic adjustment.’ I was always eating, and it was too much food.”

“Does this plan associate itself with Program?” Diane asked.

“Yeah. I was going to meetings and studying the Big Book with my sponsor. I didn’t like her, though. I mean, I liked her, but I hated going over to her house.”

Diane shook her head. She’d heard Katie’s screwball reasoning before. Thirteen years earlier, Katie raved in her morning phone calls about how much she loved her new boss at the Department of Justice; she was high on the mob case he was pursuing, her coworkers were hilarious…but the office was painted a bilious green that ground her nerves. Then there was the new best friend from the Rooms. They shopped for their new thin clothes together, went to the movies, went hiking in Muir Woods. But the young woman didn’t have an answering machine and that was, in a daily gathering of grievances, the end of that.

Diane knew these enthusiasms were surrogates for food. Katie didn’t fall out of love with people or interests or work as much as she hurtled through them, ravenously, until she came abruptly to some aspect of herself that she despised. It wasn’t the paint, it was the feeling that she was helping to put crooks away when what she really wanted to do was de-crook them. Her answering machineless friend was her lifeline, and Katie hated herself for needing a savior. The damage she did was through her inability to let a friendship wane or leave a job gracefully. She would quit without explanations or apologies, not because she hated who or what she was leaving but because she hated herself for her hunger.

Katie had quit Diane. A friend from the Rooms had migrated to a cousin program and Katie followed. Diane didn’t see her in meetings or hear from her for a couple of weeks. She called and left a message, and Katie responded by email that she’d started going to FA.

Looking at her now, Diane was impressed that Katie had returned to the Rooms. It spoke volumes about the power of the basic premises of community and repetition one finds there.

“It sounds like this—Kay Sheppard?—wasn’t the food plan for you,” Diane said cautiously. “What are you eating now?”

“Pretty much everything, but not at home. At home I eat abstinently. Mostly I don’t eat there.”

Diane laughed. “I’ve always thought car insurance should be higher for active food addicts. Eating a hero and driving Nimitz Freeway is a menace to society.”

“Dipping french fries in those little ketchup things during rush hour on Van Ness should be short-listed as an Olympic event. And I drive a stick shift.”

“The things we do for our disease.” Diane took a long sip of her coffee. “So I take it you don’t have a sponsor.”

“No. I just moved here. This is my first meeting in—phoo. Months.”

“You’ve moved to Oakland?”

“No. Alamo. Or Vanillaville, whichever. It’s the world’s most boring town.”

“Do you want to get abstinent?”

Katie’s eyes teared up at that. She looked quickly down at her coffee cup and stirred it diligently. “More than anything,” she said hoarsely.

“What kind of abstinence are you looking for? You’ve certainly sampled a bunch.”

“I want the basics. The way I did it with you. Three meals, low carbohydrate, no seven-dollar toothpaste or being forbidden to eat out for the first ninety days.”