Phillip laughed until he cried at her stories of the proctologists with whom she visited to talk up her line sulfasalazine and 5-ASA drugs, then came on like gangbusters with invitations for drinks and movies and, finally, the suggestion they go to New York. She went along with it because…well, he seemed to like her and she’d never had a real boyfriend and her mother had harped on her throughout her adolescence that she’d never get a husband if she were fat. With Phillip, she didn’t have to do anything. He took care of where they went on their dates, where they ate, drank, and made out. The phone calls and invitations were exciting, as was dressing up for dates and planning what to take and what to do in New York. It was easy to go with the flow.
In that Christmas week, the four-hundred-year-old image of a sad woman and Phillip’s making her look at every picture he took of the topiary at Tavern on the Green brought on a fit of melancholy that demanded some kind of big action. Clearly, Phillip was a loser. So she dumped him without so much as leaving a note in their hotel room.
And anyway, the sex was…odd. Or she was odd while having sex. She kept thinking of Annie Hall getting out of bed to sketch while she and Alvy made love. Part of her was sitting in that white chair, considering the painting, studying Zagat and New York Magazine for what would provide the best stories back home.
Katie loves Christmas, but it has never been kind to her.
Katie had read my Amazon blog about my relapse when she wrote me in May, volunteering to be interviewed for this book. I was intrigued by her history. At the age of twenty-six, she weighed 160 pounds after losing 177 pounds. She maintained that weight for a year. A decade later, she went from 400 pounds to 140 pounds for a year, then topped 400 pounds. I was impressed that she could gain 287 pounds in four years. Clearly, this was a woman of grit and determination.
We needed few preliminaries. The first thing we agreed upon was that the first ingredient of relapse is the cold-water shock of success. The second thing we understood about our relapses was that the Rooms where we got thin contributed to them.
Katie and I had had similar, but not identical, food plans. The general difference was that she had fewer whole carbohydrates than I, but we both, when we were in the Rooms, weighed and measured our food and we abstained from sugar and flour. Her first weight loss, at twenty-six, occurred under the aegis of Overeaters Anonymous, and her second, ten years later, happened while she was in FA, Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous. 21
FA is a very strict program in which everyone follows the same food plan and works the steps in closed groups with a checklist of behaviors one cannot engage in. They are the Jets in the gangland of eating disorder groups. Organized, insular, perhaps rightfully bragging about what they do, FAers tend to socialize among themselves. “They were the cool ones,” Katie, the perpetual wannabe insider, said. “I felt like I really belonged when I was in FA.”
She got really thin in FA. The pictures of her at 140 pounds showed a woman with many angles—collarbones and shoulder blades, high cheekbones and the thin woman’s smile that peels back the flesh around the mouth more than the fat woman’s smile. And her smile was brilliant.
For all that Katie felt like one of the Heathers in FA, she was never good enough for its rules. One of those rules was to reach the MetLife weight goal. Katie is five feet five inches tall and was expected to lose another fifteen pounds. “At 140, I was sickly and cold and miserable and hungry all the time. I asked for my food plan to be adjusted but it was another case of ‘You just want more food because you don’t have any willingness.’”
Willingness is one of the key words in twelve-step programs. Be willing to go to a meeting. Be willing to read Voices of Recovery or work on your fourth step. Be willing
In that Christmas week, the four-hundred-year-old image of a sad woman and Phillip’s making her look at every picture he took of the topiary at Tavern on the Green brought on a fit of melancholy that demanded some kind of big action. Clearly, Phillip was a loser. So she dumped him without so much as leaving a note in their hotel room.
And anyway, the sex was…odd. Or she was odd while having sex. She kept thinking of Annie Hall getting out of bed to sketch while she and Alvy made love. Part of her was sitting in that white chair, considering the painting, studying Zagat and New York Magazine for what would provide the best stories back home.
Katie loves Christmas, but it has never been kind to her.
Katie had read my Amazon blog about my relapse when she wrote me in May, volunteering to be interviewed for this book. I was intrigued by her history. At the age of twenty-six, she weighed 160 pounds after losing 177 pounds. She maintained that weight for a year. A decade later, she went from 400 pounds to 140 pounds for a year, then topped 400 pounds. I was impressed that she could gain 287 pounds in four years. Clearly, this was a woman of grit and determination.
We needed few preliminaries. The first thing we agreed upon was that the first ingredient of relapse is the cold-water shock of success. The second thing we understood about our relapses was that the Rooms where we got thin contributed to them.
Katie and I had had similar, but not identical, food plans. The general difference was that she had fewer whole carbohydrates than I, but we both, when we were in the Rooms, weighed and measured our food and we abstained from sugar and flour. Her first weight loss, at twenty-six, occurred under the aegis of Overeaters Anonymous, and her second, ten years later, happened while she was in FA, Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous. 21
FA is a very strict program in which everyone follows the same food plan and works the steps in closed groups with a checklist of behaviors one cannot engage in. They are the Jets in the gangland of eating disorder groups. Organized, insular, perhaps rightfully bragging about what they do, FAers tend to socialize among themselves. “They were the cool ones,” Katie, the perpetual wannabe insider, said. “I felt like I really belonged when I was in FA.”
She got really thin in FA. The pictures of her at 140 pounds showed a woman with many angles—collarbones and shoulder blades, high cheekbones and the thin woman’s smile that peels back the flesh around the mouth more than the fat woman’s smile. And her smile was brilliant.
For all that Katie felt like one of the Heathers in FA, she was never good enough for its rules. One of those rules was to reach the MetLife weight goal. Katie is five feet five inches tall and was expected to lose another fifteen pounds. “At 140, I was sickly and cold and miserable and hungry all the time. I asked for my food plan to be adjusted but it was another case of ‘You just want more food because you don’t have any willingness.’”
Willingness is one of the key words in twelve-step programs. Be willing to go to a meeting. Be willing to read Voices of Recovery or work on your fourth step. Be willing
Similar Books
