Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (10 page)

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
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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
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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
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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 worked 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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.”