“Tell me exactly how you did it,” she says.
I covertly look to the right and to the left—as if a Star Trekesque escape pod will suddenly appear and I will be rescued from this conversation. No luck. I can’t just walk away. I see this woman at the gym three days a week. I have to say something…and something polite, too.
“Well, you know that whole thing they say about diet and exercise,” I say. “It actually works.”
“No, no. Tell me,” she says. “How much weight is it now?”
“125 pounds.”
“That is a whole person. Tell me exactly what you are eating.” She scoots over her sweatshirt so I can sit next to her on the bench. We’re in the aerobics studio at the gym and she expects me to settle in with her for a nice, long, cozy chat.
The Midwest nice in me is too strong. Not only must I stay—I must answer her questions as truthfully as I can. This has been genetically encoded inside me—like my reflex to watch the Detroit Tigers, consider it my God-given right to eat a wide variety of casseroles made with Campbell’s soup, and to call all types of trainers and athletic shoes “tennis shoes.” I also have an inability to walk away if someone says he or she needs help—even if that someone is standing by a van with no windows, wearing a ski mask and offering me a whiff of a free perfume sample on a white piece of gauze that looks just large enough to cover my mouth and nose.
“I generally have oatmeal for breakfast,” I say. “For lunch, I usually eat a salad, or one of those South Beach Diet entrée things? Sometimes leftovers of whatever we had the night before. After I get the kids at school, around 3:30? I usually eat a yogurt and a quarter-cup of almonds. Sometimes an apple or a couple of clementines? We eat normal stuff for dinner—whatever the kids like—chicken, tacos, spaghetti. I work out here, five, six days a week.” I motion to the gym.
She nods. “You’re doing it all wrong,” she says.
I am startled by this information. “I’ve lost 125 pounds the wrong way?”
“Yes. Are you taking any supplements?”
“Well, no. I like milk. I have a glass of milk with dinner. And like I said, I eat salad a lot and we normally have a vegetable for dinner. I eat fruit for snack and I’m not anemic or anything. I really do enjoy red meat and…”
“You need to take supplements. For one thing, fish oil.”
“I can’t take fish oil.”
“Why can’t you take fish oil?”
Because I have bipolar disorder and it makes me hypomanic, I want to say. But then I run up against what the average person thinks about people with bipolar disorder.
“It disagrees with me,” I say.
“Oh you bring it back up? They have no-fishy-repeat capsules now. You should try those.”
It is hopeless. “Okay.”
“And you need a multivitamin.”
“I do?”
“Yes. I am sure you are missing important vitamins and minerals.”
“I am?”
“You need to eat six meals a day. For instance, you really should have a mid-morning snack. And you should have another snack after dinner.”
“I’m not hungry at all mid-morning. I really hate eating in the mid-morning. And if I start snacking after dinner, I can’t stop.”
“It doesn’t matter. That’s what you are supposed to do. You shouldn’t have so many calories at dinner. They say that’s awful—to have the bulk of your calories at dinner.”
“That’s the only time of day I cook and all four of us are together. I really need to go take my shower and…” I move a little sideways on the bench, making some more personal space, indicating my readiness to leave.
“So what other kinds of exercising are you doing besides kickboxing?”
“I run.”
“How far?”
“Between two and four miles a day four, five days a week.”
“That’s too much.”
“I enjoy running. I think it helps with my…”
“Are you doing any strength training?”
“Yes.”
“What sorts of things are you doing?”
“Mostly arms because since I run I figure…”
“You need to be strength-training ALL over. A different set of muscles. Every other day. Are you taking a day off inbetween?”
“Sometimes. It just depends.”
“Always take a day off.”
I nod. I happen to look at her thighs and then I take a glance at my own. With a weird kind of disconnect, I notice my thighs are smaller than hers. It is still hard for me to believe I am smaller than another woman. Any other woman.
She grins at me and for the first time, I notice the smile isn’t in her eyes.
“I need to go,” I say.
“Okay,” she says. “You look great. Keep up the good work.”
You don’t mean that, I think.
“Thank you,” I say.
* * * *
I stand in the shower. I have showered at the gym for years. Even when I weighed 300 pounds, I liked to swim with my kids and walk on the track during the winter months.
A woman with dark hair in her late 50s turns on the shower next to me.
“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she says.
“Yes, I have. Thank you,” I say.
“You’d look very slender if you just got your tummy tucked,” she says.
I look down at my stomach. I’ve had two children, one by C-section. I’ve lost 125 pounds. Faint white stretch marks criss-cross my lower abdomen. But there is also a belly-piercing, my 100-pound weight loss present to myself, and a definite line of muscle bisecting the middle of my stomach. My lower rib cage is visible, as are the outlines of my hipbones. I do 200 sit-ups three times a week. I have skin hanging, yes, but to me it is more battle scar than nip-and-tuck opportunity.
I don’t say anything back to her. My Midwest nice says if you can’t say something nice, you don’t say anything at all.
“So are you going to?”
“Am I going to what?” I say, pretending to be obtuse.
“Get your tummy tucked?”
Why is this any of your business, bitch?
“No, I don’t think so,” I say. I turn my back on her and pretend to rinse my already-rinsed hair.
“It’s a shame,” she says. “You must have at least five or ten pounds of skin. Just hanging there.”
* * * *
“Women can be bitches,” David says.
He sits in his wheely chair. I sit on the loveseat. David is one of my weight loss secrets. He is my psychologist and I know he is part, a big part, of the reason I’ve been able to lose and maintain my weight.
I rub my hand across my forehead. “They were all so nice to me when I started losing weight.”
“And then you got smaller than they did,” David says.
“Are women really that petty? I don’t believe it.”
David looks incredulous. “How else do you explain someone telling you that you’ve lost 125 pounds wrong, when you’ve lost it naturally, without invasive surgery?”
“I don’t know. No one was like this when I weighed 300 pounds. Maybe they weren’t as obnoxious as I made them out to be when I told you the stories.”
“How do you misconstrue someone telling you that you have five or ten pounds of skin hanging?” David asks.
David has a good point.
“How are you feeling about your weight loss, in general?” David asks.
“Good, I think. I would like to lose 10 more pounds but I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”
“Give it time,” David says.
“I don’t ever want to gain it back. I love not thinking about food all the time. I spent so much energy before thinking about what I was going to eat and when I was going to eat, what I could do to prevent myself from eating and then beating myself up and feeling guilty about whatever it was I’d eaten.”
David nods.
“You have to think about what to say to these people, when they say these things,” David says. “Have some response ready.”
I shrug. “I don’t know, David,” I say. “My first instinct is always to be nice.”
* * * *
At my front door is a large square package and I look to see the return label. My boots are here. I carry the box upstairs and open the package with scissors. The boots—knee-high, brown, two-inch heels are as fun to open as a Christmas present. I tuck my jeans into them and they zip up on the first try. They feel nice—a little snug in the calves but they are supposed to be that way. I’ve always wanted a pair of boots like this, fashionable and a little slutty. I look critically at myself in the mirror. There is an actual space, which light can pass through, between my thighs.
I am still fat by many people’s standards. I’m a size 12. I search inside myself for the hatred of my body that has kept me close company for over 35 years. I don’t find it. There is insecurity, but no hatred. That lack, to me, is a ragged and hard-fought victory. And we all know that victories sometimes end in peace.
* * * *
“You look great,” my friend says. We live a few hours apart and we only see each other a few times a year. “How have you done it?”
I know what she wants to hear. What everyone wants to hear when they ask me this question. She wants to hear Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. She wants to hear South Beach Diet, Business Plan for the Body, L.A. Weight Loss, Medical Weight Loss Clinic or Bob Greene’s new book. She wants to hear that I cut all my carbs or that I had bariatric surgery. She wants to hear something that she can precisely replicate so that she too can lose weight as I have.
She is my friend, so I want to be honest but there is no way for me to explain the complexities of my eating disorder or my current relief. I’ve managed to short a circuit, or a build a new circuit, around a faulty one. A big part of that has been my relationship with David. David takes almost as much pride in my new body as I do. But I can’t even tell my friend “therapy” as a short response. I know a lot of people who have been to therapy and are still overweight. I know a lot of people in therapy who can’t really talk to their therapist. And there are a lot of shitty therapists. If I tell my friend “therapy” as a mechanism for weight loss, she could go to therapy and get some bored and hopeless wretch sitting in an office chair, secretly counting hairs on her arm, while pretending to listen and dreading the insurance paperwork waiting post-session.
“What’s your secret?” she asks.
“It’s complicated,” I say. “When I started, I kept track of my calories.” This is true.
“What else?”
“Exercise. The decision that I just can’t do that anymore. I just can’t eat like that anymore,” I say. And a deep affection for David, I add silently. I don’t want to disappoint David. I am learning to not want to disappoint myself—and not wanting to disappoint David is tiding me over until then.
“Not Weight Watchers?”
“I’ve been to Weight Watchers before. It’s a good program. I lost weight on Weight Watchers,” I say. And then I promptly gained it back.
“So you’ve done it on your own?”
“I told you I’ve been going to therapy?”
“Yes.” She looks distracted. As if this part of the story doesn’t interest her. She’s waiting for me to get to the punch line and I didn’t realize I was telling a joke.
“That’s been helpful.”
Describing my hours with David talking about the roots of my eating disorder and the effects my weight loss has had on my life as helpful seems like it is oversimplifying, but when in Rome… you have to be skinny enough to wear a toga, I guess.
“What’s been helpful about it? Do you keep a food log and show her?”
“Him.”
“What?”
“Him. My therapist is a him. David.”
“Does he tell you to weigh and measure your food?”
“We don’t talk about all that. We talk about things that stress me out and that makes me less inclined to stuff my face, stuffing the stress down.”
“So that’s it? You talk about your stress?”
I feel frustrated and agitated and so very tired of having this conversation. I am reminded of the movie City Slickers with Billy Crystal—when Curly holds up a single finger in response to what is important.
“This,” he says, holding up his finger. I want to hold up my finger to my friend (actually I want to hold up my middle finger to her about right now) and just say, “This.” You have to figure it out for yourself, what will help you. Counting calories, a certain plan, supplements, that’s not the issue, is it? The issue is you’re eating when you’re not hungry, you’re using food for other things besides physical nourishment. And I can’t tell you how to stop that because I’m on new legs myself in this territory. I don’t have any answers, I’m just trying to keep doing what I’m doing.
“We talk about a lot of things. I don’t know exactly what helps, but it helps. David helps. And I exercise a lot.” That’s all I can tell her. That’s all I have to give that I know will be received.
“Oh,” she says. She looks vaguely disappointed in me.
* * * *
I run my hand lovingly along my collarbone. Feeling my collarbone is a daily pleasure. I am down another size on top and need to buy new bras. I head to the mall with a $10 off a bra and a “free pair of panties!” coupon. I shop at Victoria’s Secret for all my underwear and bras. I don’t care who they exploit in their manufacturing. The joy of hopping over the size-fence they use to keep the fat women out is too powerful.
I see heavy women lumber past the store, their eyes looking in at the tiny whorish mannequins and then away. I see their resignation at being herded toward Lane Bryant like second-class citizens. I know what they are thinking and feeling. After all, I was one of them a mere 18 months ago.
There are also women striding past who are large and gorgeous and proud. But these women do not weigh 300 pounds—something happens at that demarcation which even the most beautiful and confident self cannot overcome.
* * * *
I open up the package of graham crackers and smear canned frosting on one and take a bite. I feel guilty already. I “shouldn’t” be eating this. I eat four crackers like that—the sugar hitting my stomach and my bloodstream quickly. I feel nauseated but strangely fulfilled. What has caused this transgression? Why didn’t I text message David? It is the worst time of day for me. I skipped breakfast, ran two miles, did my kick-boxing class, ate a can of soup for lunch and had a sugary coffee drink at the coffee shop. I’m starving, restless, tired but also the emotions are there. I try to sort through them and label them. Not an easy task when you have bipolar disorder and your normal emotions are super-sized, beefed up on steroids like a lying baseball player testifying in front of Congress.
I feel desire—I want David like a security blanket, the comfort of his presence. There is stress—deadlines for school, my kids’ hectic schedule, the demands of my house, wanting to spend time with my family and friends and not quite sure when that will happen. I am also bored—there is a sameness to my days. I read. I write. I run errands. I take care of my children. I clean my kitchen. I check my email. I cook dinner. I go to bed and then I do it all over again. No one ever told me so much of being a responsible adult was mind-numbing monotony. There is a reason my husband and I can no longer watch the movie “Groundhog Day” and laugh.
The food distracts me, gives me a sensation and it allows me to beat up on myself. I will weigh myself tomorrow and if my weight has gone up, I will feel frustrated and blame the crackers and the frosting. If I stay the same or go down a bit, I will feel I have gotten away with something.
Everyone asks me how I have done it. Like I am finished, completed. Like I have graduated from my food addiction and into the class of people that never have to think about what they eat, how they eat or when they eat. That special class of people that automatically stop when they are full and have been the same size all of their adult lives.
I am just an ordinary sinner. And my redemption is a daily thing.
———-
About The Author:
Telaina Morse Eriksen is an MFA student in creative nonfiction at AULA. Her essays have been published in Heartlands Magazine, Two Hawks Quarterly and have won multiple local contests. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan with her husband, two children, kitten Max, and two very fat, lazy, and ancient goldfish.
