wearying. “I remember standing to meet an old friend I’d been out of touch with for years” Katie said of her FA weight loss. Her friend’s eyes widened and Katie said, “This is what I really look like.” Her friend leaned in to kiss her and said, “I always thought you were beautiful.”
“What bullshit !” I spat. “I mean, you are beautiful, but if she’d always thought so, why wasn’t she setting you up on dates or asking you out with a male friend as your partner? Why wasn’t she asking you to go to Mexico with her or clothes shopping?”
“Yup,” she said. “Beautiful and fat and left out.”
The more she fit in with the anonymous crowds waiting for BART in the morning, the more exposed and, ultimately, fraudulent Katie felt among people she knew.
The dream that Katie bought into is that losing weight will make us beautiful, reverse the clock, get us the marvelous life we have watched other people having. But we are unprepared for living naturally in our now-thin bodies, which, as Katie experienced in her second weight loss through Food Addicts Anonymous, are not always good enough.
Fed up (pun intended) with the rigors and philosophies Katie couldn’t meet or embrace, she found it easy to skip a meeting, drift away from her sponsor, go into a bakery and get a dozen of anything. One of the few joys, in fact, of relapse is not, for twenty pounds or so, getting dirty looks for buying a pint of ice cream and eating it on the street.
Crawling, three or more hundred pounds crushing her knees, into the Rooms, and getting abstinent on a strict and highly exclusionary food plan is a setup for bingeing. All it takes is one slipup. In the Rooms, people warn themselves of how powerful cravings and dependency become once they’ve been indulged by saying, “My disease isn’t asleep. It’s doing push-ups.”
Years of watching everyone else enjoy birthday cake and Thanksgiving stuffing, years of Saturday nights without popcorn or pizza, weddings and showers attended without a drop of champagne and having to ask the cater-waiters what’s in the salad dressing: abstinence makes us outsiders as much, in ways, as our obesity did.
There is a lot of catching up to do.
In relapse, we still continue to have the hope of finding peace with food in the Rooms, so why not eat the grand slam? We know our fat asses will be back in uncomfortable folding chairs as we cross our arms protectively across our chests and keep our heads down in the shame of having fucked up.
What was recently our best friend—the community of fellow overeaters—fades and we return to what helped us survive for so long. “Ice cream is my lover,” one blog reader wrote me, and another, watching the nubile students from NYU walking through the long dusks of June, sighed, “I went to OA for a while, but picked up more craziness and self-absorption there than I had before.”
“It really is a miracle that I went back to regular OA,” Katie said of her latest reentry, that June of 2006. “In FA, I lost faith in anything Higher Power–like.”
I disagree with her notion that there was a miracle involved. Katie had tried Weight Watchers and every diet on Amazon and the magazine racks: How could she not go back to the only thing that had worked for her? She wanted gastric bypass, but having surgery was contingent upon losing some weight and its success would depend on her sticking to a strict food plan. The Rooms were her only alternative, whether she took God in with her or not, and she needed a sponsor who didn’t try to become a Higher Power by smacking her hands with a ruler for calling at 5:04 a.m.
The first thing you have to understand about Katie is that she had what could be called emotional fibromyalgia. A car backfiring could make her furious ( Why doesn’t that idiot take his car into the shop—people are trying to work here! ), jealous ( Lucky guy—he has the money to get it fixed. ), despairing ( My car is going to die
“What bullshit !” I spat. “I mean, you are beautiful, but if she’d always thought so, why wasn’t she setting you up on dates or asking you out with a male friend as your partner? Why wasn’t she asking you to go to Mexico with her or clothes shopping?”
“Yup,” she said. “Beautiful and fat and left out.”
The more she fit in with the anonymous crowds waiting for BART in the morning, the more exposed and, ultimately, fraudulent Katie felt among people she knew.
The dream that Katie bought into is that losing weight will make us beautiful, reverse the clock, get us the marvelous life we have watched other people having. But we are unprepared for living naturally in our now-thin bodies, which, as Katie experienced in her second weight loss through Food Addicts Anonymous, are not always good enough.
Fed up (pun intended) with the rigors and philosophies Katie couldn’t meet or embrace, she found it easy to skip a meeting, drift away from her sponsor, go into a bakery and get a dozen of anything. One of the few joys, in fact, of relapse is not, for twenty pounds or so, getting dirty looks for buying a pint of ice cream and eating it on the street.
Crawling, three or more hundred pounds crushing her knees, into the Rooms, and getting abstinent on a strict and highly exclusionary food plan is a setup for bingeing. All it takes is one slipup. In the Rooms, people warn themselves of how powerful cravings and dependency become once they’ve been indulged by saying, “My disease isn’t asleep. It’s doing push-ups.”
Years of watching everyone else enjoy birthday cake and Thanksgiving stuffing, years of Saturday nights without popcorn or pizza, weddings and showers attended without a drop of champagne and having to ask the cater-waiters what’s in the salad dressing: abstinence makes us outsiders as much, in ways, as our obesity did.
There is a lot of catching up to do.
In relapse, we still continue to have the hope of finding peace with food in the Rooms, so why not eat the grand slam? We know our fat asses will be back in uncomfortable folding chairs as we cross our arms protectively across our chests and keep our heads down in the shame of having fucked up.
What was recently our best friend—the community of fellow overeaters—fades and we return to what helped us survive for so long. “Ice cream is my lover,” one blog reader wrote me, and another, watching the nubile students from NYU walking through the long dusks of June, sighed, “I went to OA for a while, but picked up more craziness and self-absorption there than I had before.”
“It really is a miracle that I went back to regular OA,” Katie said of her latest reentry, that June of 2006. “In FA, I lost faith in anything Higher Power–like.”
I disagree with her notion that there was a miracle involved. Katie had tried Weight Watchers and every diet on Amazon and the magazine racks: How could she not go back to the only thing that had worked for her? She wanted gastric bypass, but having surgery was contingent upon losing some weight and its success would depend on her sticking to a strict food plan. The Rooms were her only alternative, whether she took God in with her or not, and she needed a sponsor who didn’t try to become a Higher Power by smacking her hands with a ruler for calling at 5:04 a.m.
The first thing you have to understand about Katie is that she had what could be called emotional fibromyalgia. A car backfiring could make her furious ( Why doesn’t that idiot take his car into the shop—people are trying to work here! ), jealous ( Lucky guy—he has the money to get it fixed. ), despairing ( My car is going to die
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