Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (11 page)

Eating for comfort was a well-established pattern for me by the time tragedy struck in my life, and I really needed that comfort. Shortly after graduating from college, the death of my longtime boyfriend following a fiery car crash sent me on a binge of eating and drinking that skyrocketed my weight from 140 pounds to nearly 190. I’ll never forget the moment Mom and Dad walked into my newsroom in upstate New York, a three-hour drive from their home. My heart stopped. They took me aside and told me that Mitch had been in a terrible car accident on his way up to see me over the weekend. I had been frantic with worry, not knowing where he was. Even his mother hadn’t been able to find him
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Finally the hospital called, and we learned Mitch was in critical condition in the burn unit at a New York City hospital. They had not been able to locate family or friends because most of his possessions in the car had been burned, too. We went to New York and the scene was as horrific as any I hope ever to see in my life. This young man, whom I had loved since he was a boy, was entirely wrapped in bandages. Only his toes were showing, and as I held on to that one part
of his body that was unscathed, I prayed, for him and for me. He hung on for a little over a week, until one last brother from his big family was notified and flew home from across the globe. His brother said good-bye and Mitch was gone
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I had just started my TV career and I was living alone. Food was my comfort, and after Mitch’s death I kept getting heavier and heavier. It was some time before I was ready to emerge from the darkness of my grief and even think about losing weight
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This time, at my parents’ urging and with their encouragement, I turned to the Atkins Diet. Cardiologist Robert C. Atkins described his low-carbohydrate regimen in a series of books, starting with
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution
in 1972. His approach was controversial, but at one time one in eleven Americans was said to be following the Atkins diet
.

It allowed steak, lobster, cheese, and eggs but severely limited carbohydrates. I inhaled food like ham and cheese omelets, burgers (no bun), and nuts. Dr. Atkins contended that his approach switched the body from metabolizing glucose as energy to converting body fat to energy, a process called ketosis that involves controlling the production of insulin in the body
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I remember my first visit with Dr. Atkins. He reviewed my meager breakfast, which typically consisted of toast, coffee, and orange juice, and declared, “That juice is the problem. You’ve ruined a whole day right there with all that sugar.” Mom and Dad picked up the tab for my weekly visits to Atkins’ swanky, art-filled Manhattan offices, and for the steaks I sometimes devoured, with the doctor’s blessing. I peeled off fifty pounds, and kept them off for a few years. My dad did well on the diet, too
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In the end, the Atkins approach was just one more temporary fix, but dieting in one form or another still remained a habit. I was not much for exercising, unlike Mika, who was fanatical about it. I grew up in the years before Title IX, the federal legislation that required schools to spend equally on sports for men and women. Sports were not built into my school life, and as a kid who was overweight and klutzy, I didn’t really learn to play any team sports very well, although I took tennis and swimming lessons
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Women going to a gym to work out? Back then that was virtually unheard of. But I did join an Elaine Powers Figure Salon, an exercise studio designed for women. We donned leotards and tights and danced our way through an early form of aerobics. In those days they still had machines with belts that you put around your hips; I guess we thought that would “jiggle the fat away.”

The dancing, combined with some Jane Fonda exercise tapes, kept my weight down for a while. Through my early TV career I managed to maintain a pretty good look. I was never skinny, but with the right camera shots I was attractive enough. In the 1980s, a size 10 was considered fine for a woman on TV. Today, an anchorwoman that large would be considered an elephant
.

I moved from my first TV job in Binghamton, New York, where I’d gone to college and started my career, to the Hartford–New Haven TV market. It was a big jump and I loved it. It gave me the chance every day to share the news with our viewers, to tell them stories that would make a difference in their lives. Viewers took me into their homes and their hearts, even sending cards to me at the station when Tom and I got married. They felt like family, and we invited them to our wedding on TV. I am sure they noticed my struggle with weight over the years, but the audience had become my friend—and as Mika has pointed out, friends are sometimes too kind to say what they think
.

In my thirties and forties I continued to exercise, joining gyms and even hiring personal trainers, but it wasn’t enough. Although I felt better, my weight continued to climb, slowly for a while, then with gathering speed. I would get “too busy” to exercise and fall off that wagon, too
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I kept searching for a permanent weight-loss secret. I had spurts of success with portion-controlled meals from Nutrisystem. Their freeze-dried or frozen foods helped me stay in a size 12 or 14 for a while, until it was time to eat “real food” again. The switch to reallife eating was always my downfall. Counting points, calories, and grams of fat, figuring food exchanges, and every other way of measuring and weighing food made me crazy. I tried Weight Watchers, though I dreaded going to meetings and having people whisper, “That’s the gal from the news.” I should have gotten past it and said, “Hell, yeah, it is . . . and I am just like you, I need help,” but I was too embarrassed
.

I’d be vigilant for a while and lose some weight. Then I would hit a plateau and think
, Why bother?
Or I’d start sneaking snacks that “didn’t count,” like a spoonful of peanut butter right out of the jar, or anything that I could eat over the sink. A glass of wine on Saturday night became a cocktail and a glass of wine, and eventually I was having a glass or two every night of the week. I tried to be honest and count the calories allotted for the day or the week, but eventually the counting and the weighing and the vigilance would break down again
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Luckily for me, my husband was always supportive of my weight-loss efforts. I never suffered from the sabotage syndrome so
many women complain about. He wasn’t ordering pepperoni pizzas while I was dieting, but when I was willing to indulge, he was, too, and that meant Friday night pizza or Chinese takeout and lots of eating out. I’d indulge, feeling like a normal person for a while. But I never compensated quickly for the extra calories, so I steadily gained weight. Then I’d be back on another strict regimen, trying to drop twenty-five or more pounds
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Over time I went from a size 10 to a 16. Talk about denial
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The only time in my life when I was not obsessed with food was in the mid-1990s, when my doctor prescribed the drug combination fenfluramine-phentermine, commonly known as fen-phen. Losing weight became effortless because I was never hungry. I stopped thinking about food all the time. For the first time in my life I could go to a party without heading to the buffet table. I no longer cleaned my plate at every meal and our dog discovered table scraps for the first time, because there actually were leftovers. I packed a lunch for work, and at the end of the week five of them would be sitting in the newsroom fridge. I had
forgotten
to eat, something that was once unheard of for me
.

I got back to my ideal weight and actually wore a size 10 again. I was elated, and not only because of the serotonin release triggered by the drugs. But as my TV station’s consumer reporter used to say, “If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.” That was definitely the case with fen-phen. A thirty-eight-year-old client at the nail salon I frequented, who had been obese since childhood, started using fen-phen about the same time I did. She got very thin, and then suddenly died. There was no autopsy, but people whispered that fen-phen had killed her
.

This made me nervous, but I kept on using it because it felt so good to be thin again. As a TV journalist I even reported on studies
suggesting the dangers of fen-phen, but my desire to look good was so strong that I ignored the health risks. I was probably lucky when the matter was taken out of my hands. By the late 1990s, the drug combination had been linked to pulmonary hypertension and heart valve problems and pulled from the market. I decided not to join the class action lawsuits against the manufacturers, but I held my breath for years, fearing that cardiac damage would show up. Thank goodness it never did
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I kept the weight off for a while even without the drug, but as you have probably figured out by now, I gained it all back
.

For me and just about everyone else who has weight issues, the real trouble is keeping off the pounds after you lose them. I’ve always felt a kinship with Mark Twain, who once observed, “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” The same could be said of me; just substitute the words
lose weight
for
smoking.
I can’t even begin to calculate how many pounds I have lost and gained over the years
.

When I was forty-nine I set a goal: 50 by 50, meaning I would lose fifty pounds by my fiftieth birthday. At that point I was out of TV news and commuting three hours a day, round trip, to my radio job. My alarm went off at 2:30 a.m. After I had done my radio show, most days I headed to the PBS station in Hartford where I produced and hosted a magazine show. I was tired, but I knew I had to start exercising again if I was going to reach my goal. I joined a gym and lost about twenty pounds. I was on my way to 50 by 50
.

Then my health problems began. First came stress fractures in both feet, then a painful neuroma in one foot that led to plantar fasciitis
and tendonitis. I spent the entire summer in physical therapy. Pain kept me out of the gym, and my weight inched back up. A year later I tripped over my dog (yes, really) and broke my foot and my elbow. Another reason not to go to the gym
.

With few other options to consider, I began to think about bariatric surgery. It seemed like an easy answer. Just about everyone who undergoes the surgery loses weight—a lot of it and quickly, too. Bette, a gifted video editor and one of my close friends, had gone through the “lap band” procedure, and I watched how well it worked for her. In gastric banding, a surgeon actually wraps a device around the upper part of the stomach to form a ring. The ring is attached by a tube to an access port left under the skin. The doctor can then control how tight the ring is by inserting saline through the port. So your “new” stomach is smaller, you eat less, and feel full with what seemed to me like teeny amounts of food. Bette lost more than two hundred pounds. Even more importantly, other health problems, known by the scary term comorbidities, cleared up
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Prior to the surgery, Bette had been taking insulin and two oral medications for diabetes, two medications for high blood pressure, and one for her cholesterol. She suffered from swelling so severe that sometimes she could barely keep shoes on her feet. And because she had developed sleep apnea, a dangerous condition closely linked to overweight, she was tethered at night to a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine to help her breathe
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