I fell in love with Cathy comics one afternoon at my grandmother’s house, flipping through the Hartford Courant. They weren’t printed in The New York Times, our household’s newspaper of choice. So every week after that my grandmother carefully snipped them out of her newspaper and mailed them to me, no note. I would savor them after school over half a box of cookies, laboring to understand each joke. Cathy liked food and cats. She couldn’t resist a sale or a carbohydrate. No men seemed to care for her. I could relate. By the time I reached high school, I no longer read Cathy, but I did act like her. I am thinking particularly of a shower I took where the lower half of my body was under the running water and the upper half was laid out on the bath mat, eating a loaf of bread.1
College was an orgy of soy ice cream, overstuffed burritos, and bad midwestern pizza inhaled at 3:00 A.M. I didn’t think very much about my weight or how food made me feel or the fact that what I ate might even be having an impact on how I looked. My friends and I seemed to be running a codependent overeaters’ network.
“You NEED and DESERVE that brownie.”
“Hey, are you going to finish that risotto?”
When a friend of my mom’s who I didn’t know very well died, I ate a massive panini, using grief management as my excuse.
I didn’t get on a scale until a year after I graduated. I maintained the childlike perspective that weighing yourself was something you only did at the doctor’s office—and if you were being offered a lollipop as compensation.
Occasionally I would walk into the kitchen in my underwear, stand sideways to display what I considered abs, and remark to my mother, “I think I’m losing weight.” She would nod politely and return to organizing the Sondheim section of her iTunes library.
At my annual gynecological exam, they stuck me on the scale. “I think I’m around one hundred forty,” I told the nurse, who nodded and smiled as she inched the numbers upward. It clunked, and thunked, until finally it settled at a hair below one hundred sixty.
“We’ll say one hundred fifty-nine,” she offered charitably.
One hundred fifty-nine? One hundred fifty-nine!? This couldn’t be right. This wasn’t me. This wasn’t my body. This was a mistake.
“I think your scale is broken,” I told her. “It wasn’t like this at home.”
On my way out I called my friend Isabel, hot and tearful. “I think I might have a thyroid problem,” I cried. “Come over?”
Isabel sat in my kitchen eating turkey from the package, listening patiently while I lay down on the marble countertop and moaned. “I am so fat. I am just growing and growing. I am going to be too big to fit through the door of any clubs.”
“We don’t go to any clubs,” she said.
“But if we did, you would have to carry me on a domed silver tray, like a piece of pork.” I grew defensive against my own judgment. “And anyway, one hundred sixty pounds is not that big. It’s like thirty pounds bigger than most tall models.”
So here I was, in the waiting room of my mother’s nutritionist, Vinnie. After all these years, she had won.
A note about my parents: they have a variety of holistic professionals on call. One of my earliest memories is being clutched tightly by my mother’s psychic Dmitri, who smelled of essential oils and walked around our house investigating “energies.” He told me I was going to live well into my nineties while I was just trying to watch TGIF.
Vinnie was unintimidating—he spoke lovingly of the Staten Island home he shared with his mother—but he didn’t spare me the rod when explaining that this weight gain wasn’t, in fact, the result of a wayward thyroid.
No, it was a result of too much sugar. I had, I told him, been eating eleven tangerines a day. Not enough healthy fat. Mild anemia. General overeating. He gave me some great basic principles (eat protein, avoid sugar, have breakfast), and he made it clear that every time I ate a cookie or a hunk of baguette I was filling my body with unusable calories, unnecessary inflammation jamming my gears.