Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (2 page)

The fourth Angry Fat Girl I came to love and share my life with was Katie. Katie can be an over-the-top online contributor or, for reasons that include fear and a doomed sense of distance from the world, a lurker. She did not participate as a commenter on either Amazon or Angry Fat Girlz but she volunteered to give me her weight history. Our connection was instantaneous.

What did I want this book about regaining weight to say? I thought about Andrew Solomon’s
The Noonday Demon
, and I thought about its subtitle:
An Atlas of Depression
. I wanted to map relapse and how, more ashamed than ever, we fight back.

I recently received an email from a reader who wants to be an opera singer and is losing weight toward that goal. Our reasons for that first big weight loss have different specific motivations, but in essence they are all about being able to do things we can’t do, or think we can’t do, when we’re fat. Being newly thin after a long/permanent sojourn in obesity is also experientially similar. Compliments, acceptance, no shame at the doctor’s office! Clothes! Dating! Climbing, dancing, cycling, the revolved half-moon yoga pose! Maui! Graduate school, career change! While all these exclamation points are deserved, the rewards of being thin have less to do with becoming a superwoman than they do with having the same choices everybody else has.

The illusions have worn off when we are coming out of relapse. Those glamorous mysteries are no longer there. Perhaps the ambition of losing that big weight again is vital to our definitions of ourselves and our bodies because we are forced to assess reality. Mimi, for instance, is no longer interested in weighing 140 pounds, the upper end of her medically ordained ideal weight. She would like to settle at 180 for the sake of her knees and sleep apnea, comfort on planes and finding clothes. On the other hand, I want to get back to 150 for a smattering of venial reasons. I found power in being a size 6, although it was incomplete and I didn’t know how to use it. For the first time in my life, for whole minutes at a stretch, I felt unassailable.

Regaining weight is natural and, statistically, nearly inevitable. Being prone to obesity is a physical condition like epilepsy or asthma—at best controllable but never curable.

And yet the participants in my blog kept trying to lose and/or maintain weight, just as forty-five million other Americans try each year, dreaming of one or more of the promises of being thin—professional success, romance, clothes, looking normal, approval from loved ones, improved health and mobility.
³
However, it is especially painful for me and others like me who took years to lose more than one normal body weight and went through the initiation into normalcy only to lose our way and relapse with significant weight gain. I had maintained a weight of 150 pounds for a year. Why did I and so many other women react to life events by savaging ourselves?

I wanted to answer this question, and I wanted to find my way back to being thin. Could I lose my regained weight and invite readers to come along for the ride, either as witnesses or as participants? And if I couldn’t lose the hundred pounds I’d put on, perhaps I could document why it’s so hard as an offering of reassurance that, no, my readers are not the only ones to regain and get stuck.

Two comments have stuck with me every day since 2006.

The first was an enraged troublemaker, those responders that are called “trolls” in cyberspeak. “If y’all are so over your anger or working through it and well on the way to being ‘forgiving’ people (whatever that means), then how come y’all are still stuffing your faces with food guaranteed to wreck your bodies? Where, exactly, does that impulse to self-destruction come from, hmm?”

E. responded directly to what was behind that snottiness. “Sharing is HARD. You bare your soul and hope that someone connects. And here, usually they do.”

But, despite support and therapy, drugs and journaling, self-help books and exercise, why
were
we all stuffing our faces?

The second comment was harder to absorb, partly because I cried so hard when I read it. “I wouldn’t be alive today if Frances Kuffel hadn’t gained weight back.”

That might be the moment I had to reconsider my weight gain as a positive crisis.
Passing for Thin
included an apt description of life in a fat body, but as I lost weight in the book, it may have become an arrow to the heart of those who couldn’t cross the line into a normal size. Poster Girls can be motivators, but they can also be accusers.

In
Passing for Thin
, I tried to tell readers that if I could lose weight, anyone could. However, my blog took on a new mission of putting words to the feelings of failure and shame of regaining weight or being unable to lose it, and of getting on with life as I carried that knowledge. The responses showed how much women needed to speak out about their day-to-day struggles with food and their bodies in the context of their lives, and that they needed each other to understand and share their struggles. I have that in my twelve-step program, but it’s a luxury only those desperate enough to dedicate themselves to such an endeavor get. While many of the commercial diets include counseling sessions along with weigh-ins, online bulletin boards, and discussion threads, what I saw in my blog was different. Such venues don’t parse the minutia of negotiating life—a toddler’s meltdown, panic over a dissertation proposal, or an episode concerning sizism on
Boston Legal
—as
part
of negotiating our relationships with our food and our bodies.

I’ve never advocated that a twelve-step program is the only way to lose weight, leaving my recommendations to “whatever works for you.” But I’ve discovered that this Weight Thing is clearly easier to bear within a system of sisters. That I, the most meager of icons, had fat feet of clay provided permission for other women to stand up with the safety of anonymity and say, “Me, too,” and then go on to say a whole lot more.

One of the questions writing this book has forced me to confront bluntly is where, exactly, does my responsibility for my weight lie? Am I exonerated because of biology, the pain of my history, and/or my dysthymic depression? Or will losing weight contribute to the remission of those conditions?

In the name of all the women I’ve spoken to or heard from, the broadest answer I can find is that the first steps in taking responsibility are to
name
the problem and then
own
it. The blog world was a chance to own and share our weight problems. Even if we stayed in the ownership stage too long, each of us was more conscious than ever before of what we as individuals needed to do next. I read as women went into therapy for the first time, signed up for their first marathon, left smothering marriages, went on hospital Medifasts, had gastric bypass, joined twelve-step programs, went on antidepressants, got pets, went back to school. Those choices were the next step in the maze of losing and sustaining weight loss.

Another subject this book has prompted me to examine closely is what authentic life is and how it relates to what we weigh and what we eat.
Authenticity
is popularly defined as living by one’s core values, which should produce a sense of being at ease with the world and one’s missions in life. Aspects of authenticity include:

 

• Being open to experience without censorship or distortion
  
 

 

• Living fully in the moment, so the self feels fluid rather than static
  
 

 

• Trusting inner experience to guide behavior
  
 

 

• Feeling free to respond rather than automatically react to life events
  
 

 

• Taking a creative approach to living, rather than relying on routine and habit.
  ⁴
  
 

Using fat and what I call wrong-eating as a barrier to the outside world impinges on these characteristics. And yet fat women and compulsive wrong-eaters have accomplished great things. The question of authenticity splits at this point. Is genius exempt? Did Gertrude Stein fail herself, or would she have been more if she had been less? Or did being fat and overindulging shape her ability to live without regard to social norms but in compliance with her own creative instincts?

The desire to be at peace with ourselves and the world is not unique to the women who fall into the category of Angry Fat Girlz, but it is a more agonizing search because there are more extremely difficult hurdles of different sorts to overcome. Do doughnuts prevent me from hearing the truths going on around me? Are these fifty pounds keeping me from trying a master swim class? Are these fifty pounds why I didn’t get the ER nursing job I interviewed for?

And, conversely, does the search for authenticity we hope dieting will further intervene in living fully? Will my commitment to weight loss continue to isolate me, now in new ways? Can I survive the family reunion with all those desserts around or should I cancel? Have I missed seeing a neighbor because I was looking at the reflection of my new figure in a car window? The what/how/why we eat and what we weigh can be broken into a million Freudian interpretations and causes, but they combine into two fuels that combust when they meet—denial and shame. Double the shame when the woman has relapsed and regained weight, and don’t try to quantify the anger. I lied through my wistful teeth when I defined the Angry Fat Girlz blog manifesto as being, “We’re not angry at a world that doesn’t like fat people, or angry at ourselves. We’re angry at our fat, our eating, our reasons for eating.” I wanted my weight-and-binge worrying comrades to forgive themselves, certainly. We are all working against biology in the endeavor to control our mouths and pounds, but my anger at what prompts me to eat and at allowing it to get the upper hand was a screed written across the 250 pounds I weighed in March 2006. And despite having a lover at the time and piles of Fat Lady catalogs with nice clothes and open credit lines, I was angry that pretty, feminine, sexual, wantable started somewhere under size 18. I was even angrier at not knowing if that social standard was an external or internal pressure, although I had evidence and a therapist that suggested I put those adjectives aside.

I leave it to my readers to decide these matters of responsibility, authenticity, anger, self-denial, rejection, and girliness for themselves. In
Eating Ice Cream with My Dog
I can only speak for myself and the four women I got to know so well that they share the story of a year of trying to dig out of relapse with me.

IV. The Truth about the Angry Fat Girls

Truths are complicated because truth is both an ideal and an idea, the latter of which has confounded humankind through 2,400 years of debate from Socrates to Pope Benedict XVI. The definition of truth includes conformity to fact and fidelity to a standard. The word derives from the Old English
tr
owth
,” which connotes loyalty, honesty, and good faith. But history has proven that truth is malleable, and it only takes a reexamination of an issue such as the Jim Crow laws to see how easily truth changes—and loses—meaning.

A
fact
is “information presented as objectively real,” and it derives from the Latin
factum
, meaning a deed or an act. A fact is a single thing. The standards against which it is held make up the fluid truth.

In my love for and sometimes frustration with my friends, I have written and interpreted with
tr
owth
but I also relied on
verisimilitude
, which is the appearance of truth. The characters Mimi, Wendy, Katie, and Lindsay are based on real people—my dear friends—but are an amalgam of facts and informed guesswork on my part and on theirs about each other’s thoughts and motivations. To protect their privacy, I have changed their names, the names of the people in their lives, and their specific locations. I also changed their professions and interests, instead creating fictions that are parallel to their real lives and reflect their truths. I have done this in close consultation with them, constantly asking, “Does this feel right?” One of the Girls has actually taken up the fictional corollary I created for her as a real-life undertaking.