In a recent issue of Allure magazine, writer Simon Doonan addressed the whole dress-your-age business. “There is nothing more annoying than the idea of age-appropriate rules and regulations,” Doonan insisted. “As far as I am concerned you can wear whatever you want and at any age. All you need is conviction.” And more than likely, a drawer full of Spanx.
CHAPTER 7
Damn You, Middle-Age Spread
Here’s a fun experiment: Stop any random middle-aged woman on the street and ask her how she feels about her weight. (You might want to duck after you do this because there’s a decent chance you’ll get clocked in the face just for asking.) Odds are she is not happy about it one little bit. She might blame menopause or hormones or her scale or the fact that she has “no time to exercise,”* but regardless of the perceived culprit, you can bet your ever-widening ass she’s fighting that woefully termed reality known as middle-age spread.
I know this because I am an expert on all things related to weight. Not that I have any formal training on the subject, but if you could earn advanced degrees through painful, humiliating experience—which I totally think you should—I would have a PhD in dieting. I’ve alternately existed for weeks at a stretch on nothing but sausage, cabbage soup, cottage cheese, macadamia nuts, Slimfast, and pasta marinara. (Remember the carbs-are-your-friend-but-fat-makes-you-fat era? Damn, that was my favorite.) I’ve popped questionable pills that made my heart race, pedaled to Japan and back on a stationary bike, and stocked my cupboards with fat-free, sugar-free, chemical-laden, cardboard-like “substitutes” for everything edible. After all of this, I have come to the very scientific conclusion that dieting sucks.
Ironically, I was a scrawny slip of a kid. In fact, my nickname growing up was “No Body.” Get it? Because I had no body. Hahahaha except hello, moronic adults in my life, did you ever stop to think that to my ears you were calling me NOBODY? Fortunately, in my teens, I read a book about animal cruelty and became a “vegetarian.” This was an odd and surprising choice by all accounts, seeing as there wasn’t a single vegetable I would actually eat, if you didn’t count the nearly nutritionally devoid iceberg lettuce, and only then if it was smothered in a gallon of French dressing. Being a vegetarian was great because I got to eat pasta every single day! And pizza. And bagels. And French fries. (I convinced my mom potatoes were a vegetable using the airtight “they grow in the ground” argument, and because we were from New York City and didn’t know much about farming and also because there was no Internet to use for fact-checking purposes, she was sort of forced to believe me.) Now that I could never, ever have a delectable bite of corned beef or crispy strip of bacon again, I consoled myself with a bottomless bowl of buttered noodles.
The funniest thing happened when I became a vegetarian: I got fat. At least nobody called me No Body anymore.
College didn’t help. There I was with my new extra padding and no parental supervision when I met my two new best friends: Binge Drinking and her pal late-night Drunken Gorging. I shudder to calculate my daily collegiate consumption of booze from a caloric standpoint, and don’t even get me started on the nightly macaroni-pizza-nacho orgies that followed the partying. I was aware of the fact that I was fat (my dad made a helpful point of mentioning it whenever I came home, in case I hadn’t noticed), and I did not like it one bit. But I also really liked eating and drinking. What was a girl supposed to do?
One of my party buddies at the time was a girl named Melanie. Like me, Mel had been diligently working to pack on the requisite Freshman Fifteen, and also like me, she was an overachiever. Then Mel went home for three weeks for the holiday break and came back twenty pounds lighter. How in the hell had she lost what amounted to a pound a day, the rest of us demanded to know. Apparently, her mom had taken her to some famous Miami Beach fat-fighting guru, who had explained that if she merely jabbed herself in the gut with his magical solution a few times a day, she could continue to drink and eat like a competitive wrestler and any extra weight would just magically fall right off. (Our roommate insisted she didn’t know what was in those syringes, but the rumor was they were filled with a disgusting concoction involving amphetamines and liquefied human placenta.) And it worked. Mel continued to eat (jab!) and drink (stab!) and party (prick!) along with the rest of us (poke!) and I’ll be damned if she didn’t keep losing weight (thrust!). That impossibly skinny bitch paraded around campus in tiny shorts and went out in skintight Robert Palmer–backup-singer dresses (this was the ’80s), and it was really hard not to hate her.
We didn’t have to hate her for long. One sad day for poor Mel, those shots just stopped working. The weight started to creep back on. No matter how many times she stabbed herself with her bottomless stash of needles, it wouldn’t stop. By the end of that year, Mel had gained back all of the weight she’d lost plus another few pounds for good measure.
So if injecting ourselves with fetomaternal organs on speed wasn’t the answer, how were all of these other gals in our dorm—many of whom ate and drank and partied heartily right alongside us—staying so skinny? Apparently, I was told, a lot of them just excused themselves to the bathroom after a meal or a bender, jammed a slender finger down their elegant throats, and ridded themselves of all of those pesky calories. I decided to give it a go once after a big night of porking out. It was horrific. I nearly choked to death and my eyes watered for about an hour afterward and my throat felt like I’d swallowed a gallon of battery acid. Still, I tried it a few more times, thinking maybe I just needed some practice. But bulimic I was not meant to be.
Sophomore year my friends and I went to the Florida Keys for spring break. I watched nubile-bodied girls my age running around in bikinis and felt stabs of jealousy and anger, feelings I numbed with epic quantities of food and booze. The trip turned out to be a blast, in the drunken-blur sense at least. And then I saw the pictures.
Wow, that’s a really bad picture! I thought, standing at the drugstore counter and sifting through the pile. I look really fat there. And there, too. Holy cow, I’m burning this one! This one, too. OMG, I’m burning ALL of these.
I’d known that I wasn’t exactly skinny, but was I really that fat?
I decided right then and there that I had had enough. I would go on a diet. I would eat nothing but big green salads with fat-free dressing and drink sparkling water until I lost the weight. I could do this. I would do this. I wanted it that badly. Nothing I ate could taste as good as being skinny would feel. (I actually saw that for the first time on a Saturday Night Live skit. Obviously, I knew they were mocking something, but I remember thinking that’s actually sort of brilliant! I should remember that.) Sure, it would be a sacrifice. But the payoff! Oh, the beautiful, enviable payoff! I was as committed as a girl could be.
I can’t remember if that one lasted five minutes or ten.
It turned out, this dieting business was a bitch. While I had never really given much thought to food or calories before, suddenly those two things consumed my every waking thought. I thought about what I was going to eat and what I wasn’t going to eat and what I should have eaten, and I beat myself up for every forbidden forkful. I bought fat-free cheese and crackers and cookies and chips by the trunkload and munched on them around the clock. They all tasted like crap, but I ate them anyway because they were fat-free and I wanted to be that! Never hungry but never satisfied, I’d eat and eat and eat, all the while mentally calculating calories and fat grams and promising to do better the next day.
Getting dressed was torture. “Does this make me look fat?” my roommates and I would ask each other as we tried on slouchy black outfit after outfit. None of us had the balls to reply with the truth: “No, honey. Your FAT makes you look fat.” I became a math whiz, able to calculate any dish’s dietary damage on sight. I hated every second of it. I am starting a new diet tomorrow! was my last waking thought on any given drunken evening. Then I’d wake up hungover, and everybody knows the saying: Starve a cold, f
eed a hangover. Preferably something fried.
I happened to live in the athletic dorm, which was another irony because I had never played a sport in my life. I had never watched a single football game or tennis match on TV either, and I couldn’t even toss a Frisbee. But I’d turned in my college registration paperwork late, and all of the campus dorms were full, so my parents were forced to fork over for the pricey private dorm, the one where all of the athletes lived. Gabby Reece—yes, the achingly gorgeous volleyball phenom/glamazon/supermodel—lived on my floor. I’d watch her stride through the cafeteria with her perfect, gazelle-like body day after day and marvel at the fact that we were even both the same species. I’d heard she was friendly and approachable, but I wasn’t about to find out for myself. Who wanted to get caught standing next to that? And then one day, admiring Gabby’s obnoxiously perfect abs while she frolicked in our dorm pool while my friends and I drank beer and refused to take off our cover-ups, it hit me: I should work out!
Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I would just work out and get skinny and toned like Gabby, and life would be great. I joined the local gym and became a recognized-by-name regular. Sometimes I’d do three aerobics classes back-to-back—trying in vain to undo the caloric damage I’d done the night before (or preempt the similar destruction I knew I’d inflict later that day). I’ll bet Gabby Reece doesn’t eat half a pizza at 2 a.m., I’d scold myself after a binge. Fuck you, myself would reply. I worked out today. Pass me another slice.
Working out did not help me lose weight.
The fact that I was constantly “on a diet” (that “never worked”) didn’t seem all that odd to me. It was just the way it was. My mom had been on the same diet for as long as I could remember. Her weight never, ever changed, but every day of my life I had heard a detailed account of her efforts to shed those last ten pounds. Apparently, they were stubborn little SOBs.
My junior year in college I signed up for a semester at la Sorbonne in Paris.* The very first thing I noticed when I got off of the plane was how impossibly, insanely thin French women are. Not just in general; I’m talking every single one of them. Finding a fat Frenchwoman is harder than finding an employee on the floor of Costco when you can’t figure out where the hell they decided to move the dried mango slices and cat food this week.
The French must be genetically superior, I thought. That was all there was too it. They had to be—because these women ate like linebackers! Croissants and crepes and everything a la crème. Day after day I’d sit in cafés and watch these spaghetti-thin genetic freaks dip their big, crusty chunks of baguette in bowls of olive oil and eat the fattiest meats on the planet—steak and duck and sausage swimming in buttery beurre blanc—without guilt or consequence. Meanwhile, I couldn’t find a single fat-free cracker in the entire country.
Finally I figured it out: It was the wine! See, I was eating exactly what they were eating—well, minus the butter and delicious sauces and in grotesque portions—but like an ignorant American, I was washing it down with beer. Silly me! I switched from Budweiser to Bordeaux and waited for the weight to fall off. You will be shocked to learn that it did not happen.
I came back to the States with special souvenirs of my time in France. I brought them with me everywhere I went. They’re called haunches.
After graduation, I got my first job. It was a really glamorous gig in advertising sales, and by “glamorous” I mean “whatever the diametric opposite of glamorous is.” I’d check into my tiny cubicle in the morning, map out my day’s route, and then hit the road, dashing from one client to the next in the hopes that one of those bastards would spring for a full-page, full-color ad so I could pay my rent and maybe buy myself some new boots. In case you’ve never worked in sales, I’ll let you in on a secret: Sales is really another word for “schmoozing,” and one typically schmoozes one’s clients over a meal.
Faced daily with restaurant lunch menus that didn’t feature SnackWell’s cookies or Baked Lays and dining partners I didn’t want to make uncomfortable with a litany of sauces-on-the-side requests, I was forced to consume real food. I ate soup with croutons in it, turkey sandwiches with cheese and mayonnaise, and salads with bacon bits and olive oil dressing. (I’d long since abandoned my pretend vegetarianism.) I ate bread with butter (not fake butter spread!) and slices of avocado and spicy, peanut buttery Pad Thai. Man, I’d forgotten how good food could taste. In the back of my mind, I was sure I was going to balloon up like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float, but I was too busy—and too satisfied—to care.
The most incredible thing ever happened when I stopped dieting: I lost weight. You can’t imagine how crazy it was to discover that for the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t consciously restricting or analyzing every morsel I put in my mouth—in fact, I was eating whatever the hell I wanted—and I had lost weight. I wondered if maybe I’d finally managed to get myself a tapeworm. I decided not to get it checked, because if I did have a tapeworm, the doctors would most certainly want to remove it, and then I’d gain the weight right back, just like poor Mel had.
I got downright skinny. A college friend came to visit me and told me she was worried about me because she could see my spine. I tried to hide my pride. Other friends would ask me how I’d done it—which diet I had used—and nobody believed me when I told them my Big Secret was that I’d stopped dieting. And that when I had, I had completely stopped obsessing about food. And that when I’d stopped obsessing about food, I didn’t need to eat around the clock. That after I’d had a simple, satisfying meal, I could get on with my life—which turned out to be quite full when there was room for something in it besides thoughts of forbidden food.
I stayed skinny for twenty years, even after gaining fifty pregnancy pounds—twice—and popping out what I think we can all agree were unnaturally massive babies at nine pounds apiece.* I ate whatever I wanted, stopped when I was full, and pretty much assumed I’d won the war with food.
“Enjoy it while you can,” older friends warned me, “because your metabolism is going to screech to a halt the day you turn forty.”
Not my super-metabolism, I’d think smugly, popping another sweet potato fry into my mouth. I’ve got this thing figured out.
And then I turned forty. I kept right on doing what I’d been doing all along, namely eating burgers and fries and bread dipped in olive oil whenever the urge struck—in mostly modest, satisfying portions of course—and drinking my coffee with generous amounts of half-and-half. Out of nowhere, the strangest thing started happening: my clothes dryer, which had always worked perfectly up until this point, began shrinking my clothes. First it was my jeans, which I chalked up to the fact that I only wash them a handful of times a year, so they’d probably been ridiculously stretched out. But next it was a skirt, then a few skirts, then every pair of pants and the single pair of shorts I owned. What the hell?
I made a note to call the dryer repairman.
Not long after my fortieth birthday, I went for my annual ob-gyn check. I’d been avoiding my scale at home but I knew she was going to make me step on hers—the one humiliatingly positioned right in the hallway where everyone can see you stripping yourself of every last accessory and holding your breath before you step on—so I’d worn a featherlight sundress and my wispiest thong. I kicked off my sandals, took off my clunky watch and stepped onto the scale hesitatingly, terrified to see where the little pointer-thingy would land.
I couldn’t believe it. I was the same weight I’d been for as long as I could remember. Exactly. So what the hell was happening?
I brought this mystery up to my very-thin fiftysomething friend Rachel, who gently explained that even when women don’t gain weight, everything sort of . . . shifts after forty. “I have bulges and pooches all around my middle that I didn’t used to have,” she insisted.
“At the risk of sounding rude, you are a fucking liar,” I told her. “I’m looking at you.”
&
nbsp; “It’s not what you can see; it’s what you can’t see,” Rachel insisted.
Apparently, Rachel’s secret was something called a Muffin Top Stopper, which is a pretty cute name for a pants expander. It seemed you just slipped this thing between the existing button and buttonhole on your jeans, and it bought you two or three extra inches. Never mind that your flabby, fleshy tummy blubber would poke right through the new opening; we’re talking full-on muffin-top stopping.
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” I pleaded.
“I’m not kidding,” Rachel insisted. “I know you think I’m so skinny, but honestly, without this thing I’d have flaps of skin hanging over both sides of my jeans.”
“I think I’d rather have the flaps,” I told her.
I hate the flaps. I really do. And the fleshy skin that oozes out from beneath my bra straps in the back and the new thickness I have in my middle where I am almost positive I used to have a waist (one friend calls it her “meno-pot”). But what am I going to do? Forsake pizza forever? Succumb to the scalpel? Quit my job and never see my kids so I can work out eleven hours a day and then die penniless and estranged from my family but with an extremely toned corpse? What would be the point? Life is hard enough. And besides, bread tastes really, really good. And isn’t balance the key to everything?
I know, you probably don’t eat bread. Because you read Wheat Belly, and you’re convinced that carbs are the spawn of Satan. But life is supposed to be lived—not merely tolerated—and to me, never again enjoying a fresh-baked slice of focaccia or a bowl of French onion soup, which would mostly be broth without that delicious cheese-covered crouton thingy on top, or an occasional bacon cheeseburger with the bun and everything doesn’t seem worth it.
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 8
