Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (9 page)

And that’s basically what I said on that beautiful afternoon on Long Island Sound when I came clean about how I felt. At first, it looked like it was going to turn into a very turbulent day for a treasured friendship. I wasn’t sure she would ever speak to me again.

I told Diane, “I don’t really think that you are sitting around eating all day, but I do think you need to break your cycle of depending on fattening foods and start believing in yourself again. You’re not really hiding anything with all those black pantsuits. Everyone knows you have a weight issue.”

Telling Diane the truth about her weight, and using that toxic word
obese
to describe her, was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I certainly didn’t do it to be a bitch, even if some people might have thought so. I did it because I want her in my life, and I was worried about her health. I also thought it was only fair for Diane to hear it from a friend. It’s what other people were thinking when she was on TV or when she got up on stage to give a speech.

If you are wondering,
Why tell her the truth?
, maybe that isn’t the right question. Considering how long it took me to raise the topic of weight, and what it was doing to her personally and professionally, it might be more helpful to ask,
Why didn’t you say this ten years ago, when her weight was just becoming a problem? Why did you avoid it?

I wish now that I had talked to Diane much sooner. It would have been a lot easier for both of us.

When Diane took me up on the challenge to lose seventy-five pounds and we decided to write this book together, at first
she was reluctant to tell her own story. But eventually we both decided that baring our souls was the way to set an example for others. No one is better off with silence. As Diane put it, “If we can start a dialogue between the two of us, maybe we can instigate a wider discussion. A national discussion. So I’m all in.”

Here is more about how Diane has experienced the struggle against food and overweight, in her own words.

Although Mika and I got to know each other a little while working as news anchors and reporters at rival stations in Connecticut, we really bonded when she was in labor with Carlie. That was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I don’t have kids, and my sisters live far away, so it was truly a once-in-a lifetime event; something I have never shared with anyone else
.

No wonder Mika has remained special to me all these years later. But I have to be honest. She’s a little nuts. When she wanted to know if I would step in for her husband, Jim, if she went into labor while he was out of town, did she call me and ask for my help? Did she drop by the house? No, she ran into my husband, Tom, at a coffee bar one Sunday morning and asked him to run it by me
.

She was still a couple of weeks away from her due date when I said yes. What I was really figuring was
, What are the chances the baby will come while Jim is out of town?
Yeah, right. I didn’t give the possibility of coaching her through labor much thought after that. The only thing I did think about was how Mika looked during her pregnancy, and that was sure frustrating to me. Even at nine months’ pregnant, she was thinner than I was. In those days, I was always thinking
, What the hell can I wear that won’t make me look so fat?

A few days after I agreed to be her backup labor coach, Mika dropped a couple of books in my mailbox, including
What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
The books were still in the mailbox when she called our house Friday night. Jim was on a plane to New Orleans, and Tom and I had just polished off a pizza and a bottle of wine. “I think my water broke,” she whispered into the phone
.

YOU THINK? WHAT? YOU’VE HAD A BABY BEFORE, NOT ME! WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU THINK???

I ran out to the mailbox to get the books so I could skim through the chapters on labor and delivery while I stayed on the phone with her
.

“Yep, it’s starting,” she said. “You two should get some sleep and I’ll call you later.”

SLEEP? ARE YOU KIDDING?

Tom and I lay on our bed, suddenly and completely sober, fully dressed and ready to go. When the phone rang again, we phoned the doctor and headed for the hospital. Mika’s mom stayed behind to watch her daughter, little Emilie
.

We couldn’t reach Jim, so all that night and the next day it was Mika and me in the shadowy labor room. The nurse came in a few times to check on her and told us to get some rest, but like kids at a sleepover, we kept right on talking
.

There were a few times I had to step up, like when the anesthesiologist asked Mika whether she wanted an epidural. “Did you have one last time?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “But maybe that was a mistake.”

“You’re on my watch now, and you’re having the drugs,” I told her and ordered the epidural
.

After hours and hours of chatting about everything except how
to deliver a baby, Mika decided it was time. I was afraid to tell her the doctor had just gone out for lunch, but luckily the nurse had been delivering babies for years. She told me to “get ready to catch,” and three pushes later there was Carlie, absolutely the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on
.

As Carlie started to cry, Mika asked me to phone her dad, the astonishingly imposing Zbigniew Brzezinski. I blubbered a bit to him, then handed Mika the phone. In the most composed voice, she said, “Dad, you have another granddaughter.”

Mika showed me a lot about her character during the hours she was in labor, and vice versa. She came to see me as a big sister, the “adult” in our relationship. I recognized her strength. In the years to come, no matter what happened in her work or her personal life, she could count on me to have her back
.

Now, fourteen years later, Mika and I have had a role reversal. It began with that punch-in-the face moment on my boat. The words still echo in my mind. Mika said, “Diane, you’re not just overweight, you’re fat. You’re obese.” I couldn’t believe the word she had used to describe me: obese. Who says that to a friend? Who says that to anyone? I was angry and defensive
.

My first thoughts were
, Oh, Mika, come on. I know I’m huge. My metabolism is shot. I try to diet but nothing works anymore. How could you know what it’s like? You and your tiny body in size 2 dresses. Please! You have been picture-perfect ever since I have known you, and when something is just a little off, like your imaginary double chin, you run to a plastic surgeon to fix it. You don’t get it. You naturally skinny women think
women like me are a bunch of slobs sitting around eating bonbons all day. That is such garbage.

But then Mika told me something that changed everything
.

“Naturally skinny? No way,” she shot back at me. “I
do
get it, I get it a lot more than you think. I’m not kidding, Diane—food takes up way too much of my time and my psychic space. Here’s my truth: I am an addict. I think about food all day long. I am always wondering if I can sneak away and grab some fast food or something sweet. But I don’t. I don’t because my career depends on winning my fight to stay rail-thin. But I know it’s unhealthy, and I hate every second of it!”

As she launched into the tale of her fight with food, my anger dissolved. I couldn’t believe it, but she began to tell a story that was just like mine; a story of rarely feeling in control around food. Of going to parties and eyeing the buffet first, then trying to hurry through a conversation with her mouth watering. Of wondering what people would say, or think, if they saw her go back for more
.

You naturally skinny women think women like me are a bunch of slobs sitting around eating bonbons all day. That is such garbage
.—Diane

It was a story I could barely believe as I looked at her slender body, but I knew it was true when I looked into her eyes. “I am a junk food addict,” Mika said. She talked about stuffing herself with chips and ice cream in prep school, gorging on pizza in college, and scarfing down entire boxes of kids’ cereal at a sitting. That habit caused her husband, Jim, to nickname her “Jethro,” after the
Beverly Hillbillies
character with the enormous appetite. I really could not imagine her acting that way. I’d never seen it
.

Mika’s honesty about herself helped me hear what else she was trying to say
.

“You’re fat,” Mika blurted. “If you don’t lose the weight now, you’re going to die. Plain and simple: your weight will kill you.” That was either the rudest thing anyone had ever said to me, or the kindest. That’s Mika. She’s no diplomat. She puts all her cards on the table, and she was characteristically blunt. “I love you Diane, and you are fat,” she said
.

Friends, family, and colleagues had been dancing around my dramatic weight gain over the last ten years, so it was shocking to hear it stated so bluntly. Mika softened it a little when she said, “I want you to be around for my girls. They need another woman in their lives, especially when I am driving them nuts.” That last part made me laugh, because it’s true!

Up until then I had always thought about my weight as an issue of vanity. When I was heavy I didn’t look the way I wanted to look, or how TV viewers expected me to look. I never really considered my weight to be a health issue, although I should have. My dad was a skinny kid and a slender young adult, but he has been overweight since then, and heart disease very nearly killed him. It’s a medical miracle and a testament to his constitution that he’s still around. My grandmother was overweight and later in life developed diabetes, which she called her “sugar problem.” At the time, I didn’t recognize the link between diabetes and obesity, but I sure do now
.

I was moving along the same path. A path that was almost guaranteed to result in one or more chronic diseases
.

Shortly after our infamous encounter on Long Island Sound, I suggested to Mika that she write a book about her struggles with food. Readers have told her how much they have learned from her earlier books, about finding life and work balance, and about learning to stand up for yourself in the workplace, and knowing your true value. I thought if Mika told her own story, it would help other women
.

Mika took me up on the idea of writing this book, but I had no idea she was planning to aim her message squarely at me. And then my cell phone rang as I was driving to a speaking engagement in the far west corner of Connecticut, about ninety minutes from where I live. Mika was on the line. It was nearly dusk and I was heading down a lonely country road, not feeling great about giving the speech
.

I’m a former radio talk show host and I love talking to people, but for several years the fun of greeting a live audience and spending a couple of hours with them had disappeared. Instead of looking forward to it I’d been feeling a kind of dread, because I knew the audience wouldn’t see the person they expected, that stylish, slender anchorwoman of years ago. Instead, they would face a fat, fiftyish female who felt frumpy in a size 18 jacket and stretchy pants. You can hide some of that on TV with good camera work, but standing at the microphone at the front of the room, they were going to see all of me
.