by Shauna Reid
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
DEDICATION
For Ma, Rhi, and Dr. G
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
DAY ZERO
THE BACKGROUND
YEAR ONE
YEAR TWO
YEAR THREE
YEAR FOUR
YEAR FIVE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
I’ve got the biggest knickers in Australia.
I stood beneath the clothesline on New Year’s Day, looking up at the washing I’d just pegged out. My sister’s undies were lacy and impossibly tiny. Mine were made of sensible cotton and three times the width. They billowed in the sticky summer breeze, curved and enormous like the sails of the Sydney Opera House.
Just when did my smalls become so impossibly large?
They were Bonds Cottontails Full Briefs, size 24. I’d purchased them in a value pack of pastel shades—traditional white, baby blue, and nasty beige. Now they were so stretched and faded they were almost transparent.
My mother and grandmother used to wear Cottontails, and as a child I’d snigger at their gigantic frumpiness. But now not only have I embraced the family tradition, I’m in danger of outgrowing it.
For years I’ve been waiting for the perfect moment. The sign. The grand epiphany. Just something to finally get through to me. I was hoping to hear a voice from above, commanding me to put down the family-size bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and take back my life.
“Now is the time, Shauna,” the voice would say. “Now is the time to go forth and lose your lard.”
But in the end it’s just me under the clothesline, shocked and humiliated by the sight of my monster underpants. And I know I’ve really got to do something this time, because Cottontails Full Briefs don’t come any bigger than a size 24.
DAY ZERO
January 15
Half the population of Canberra was in the queue at Weight Watchers, spilling out through the door and down the footpath. We were a motley crew of plump-cheeked grannies, haggard mothers, and besuited public servants, united in our determination and/or desperation to make 2001 the Year of Fighting the Flab.
I noted that I was the largest in the line. That’s the first rule of Fat Club—when entering a room, you have to see if there’s someone bigger than yourself, because that could make you feel slightly better. But no such luck for me tonight, just as it always seems to be these days.
I craned my neck to get a look at the scale. It was one of those old-fashioned mechanical ones, metallic and clunky. It appeared to have a 308-pound maximum capacity. I tallied up all those bowls of Christmas pudding and leftover roast potatoes and had a sickly feeling I was heavier.
Too fat for the scale. I hadn’t considered that possibility when I’d boldly declared I was finally going to Do Something About My Weight. I was going to be one of those sad cases you see on the news, so gigantic that they have to be taken down to a heavy vehicle weighing station to line up with cattle trucks and school buses.
I turned around and headed toward the door. But my sister Rhiannon, who had volunteered to tag along, grabbed my arm and thwarted my escape.
“Let’s wait until after the meeting and get weighed when everyone else has gone.”
We sat in the back row as the meeting leader began her talk. Her name was Donna and she seemed lovely. She had to be lovely. I desperately wanted her to have all the answers.
They were still weighing the New Year’s Resolutionists long after the meeting finished, giving me plenty of time to panic. Finally the room was completely empty, save for Donna and her two assistants manning the scale. Even as Rhiannon stepped on, I still contemplated running away. Or waddling away, if you must be technical. But I knew if I ran I’d just wake up tomorrow feeling even worse than I do today.
Rhiannon was informed she had a measly fourteen pounds to lose. She squeezed my hand and smiled. “Your turn.”
“Hop on, darling!” said the weigh lady.
“I can’t.” I could feel tears gathering. “I think I’m too big.”
“Too big?” She looked confused. “For the scale, you mean? It has quite a generous capacity!”
“I know.” I stared at my feet. “But I think I’m bigger than that.”
She called Donna over and they whispered discreetly. They rummaged around in a cupboard and found an extra weight to hang on the scale, increasing its capacity to 270 pounds. It took them ten minutes to find it, because they’d never needed it before. It was buried under a musty pile of discontinued cookbooks.
My face burned with shame as I climbed on. The scale rattled and groaned as Donna fiddled with the weights and tried to make it balance.
“You look like you’re about to crack up!” She patted my arm. “Don’t worry. We’re here to help you!”
The scale finally settled as I fought back sobs.
“I’m not going to tell you what the scale read,” said Donna as I stepped back down. “I’ll write it on your card but let’s not worry about numbers or targets or anything like that for now. You made the first big step coming tonight. Let’s just take it slowly from here.”
They were all looking at me with encouraging, sympathetic smiles. Why were they being so kind? I didn’t deserve kindness. Anyone who needed the Special Scale didn’t deserve kindness. I was so huge she didn’t even want to tell me how much I weighed! I fled into a corner and hid among the pedometers and point free sweeties.
Donna came over and hugged me. The warmth of her gesture unraveled me, and I finally felt the enormity of what I had done to my body.
“You’re going to be OK,” she said as I bawled uncontrollably. “You’re not alone.”
I couldn’t speak, except to mumble “Sorry” over and over.
I cried in the car the whole way home.
“Donna is right,” Rhiannon said kindly. “Tonight was the toughest step. It can only get better from here, I promise.”
But I’d seen the number written on that card: 351 pounds.
Three hundred fifty-one pounds! And I’m five feet eight inches tall, so I need to lose half my body weight just to be considered remotely healthy.
How could one woman weigh so much? Three hundred fifty-one pounds is not just the equivalent of two people stapled together … it’s practically the equivalent of two fat people stapled together!
Now it’s almost midnight. The tears have dried and I’m cradling a cup of diet hot chocolate as I write this; the first entry in my brand new, top secret weblog. I am carrying so much shame and disgust that I’ve got to let it all out somehow.
I am going to call it “The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl.” I like the idea of being an obese superhero, trussed up in Lycra and hiding behind a mask. There’s a distinct shortage of fat superheroes out there, far slower than speeding bullets and unable to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
I also know it will take some sort of miraculous superhero effort if I’m going to banish over 180 pounds. If there’s one thing I have taken from today, it’s that you have to be your own superhero. I don’t want to feel as bad as I did tonight ever again. The only one who can rescue me from this big fat mess is me.
THE BACKGROUND
You may be wondering, how is it possible to weigh over 300 pounds and wear size 24 knickers at the ripe old age of twenty-three?
I’ve been asking myself the same question, so I probably should explain how I managed to
acquire such a depressing set of statistics.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel fat. I don’t know how or why it started, but the thoughts were always hovering below the surface.
The first moment of awareness came when I was five years old and starting a new school. My mother held my hand as we walked up the front path. Bees were droning in the bottlebrush shrubs in rhythm with my pounding heart, and all I could think was, They’re going to hate me because I’m fat.
I grew up on a farm near a town called Cowra in the heart of rural New South Wales, with Mum, Rhiannon, and my stepfather, and we always ate healthy home-cooked meals. There were fresh vegetables from our garden, fruit from our trees, and tasty sheep and cows that had made the noble journey from our front paddock to the freezer. It was the sort of wholesome country lifestyle people get all misty-eyed about these days, but it never felt that good. Food was never just food in our household.
I was always a painfully insecure and nervous kid. My parents divorced when I was very young and their relationship was strained. Things were volatile between my mother and stepfather too, so I was always trapped in the middle of one conflict or another.
I spent my childhood with fear and dread constantly gnawing at my insides. It was like living at the foot of a volcano. There’d be long cold months where Rhiannon and I crept around the house, desperately trying not to disturb the ominous calm. Our bodies were always tense and alert to signs of trouble, any tiny changes in the atmosphere or the slightest tremble of the earth. I thought if I could just be a good child, quiet and obedient and perfect, then I’d be able to prevent the next eruption.
But something always set them off again. I’d be despondent for making a mistake, wanting to tear my hair out for being so foolish. It could be as simple as a sideways glance at the television during dinner instead of keeping our eyes on our plates, or not doing the dishes the very instant after our meal, or not sweeping the crumbs on the kitchen floor in the right way. These incidents would escalate and explode beyond all reason for days on end.
My mother was a Weight Watchers leader. You’d think with that sort of pedigree I’d have grown up to be a glowing picture of health—fighting fat is in my blood! But it mustn’t have been a very dominant gene.
Every Monday night Rhiannon and I tagged along to Mum’s Weight Watchers meeting. We were supposed to sit quietly in a corner and read our books, but this elaborate ritual intrigued me. Why did these women queue up like robots week after week? Why did they give money to the lady just to stand on a scale? And what mysterious power did that machine have to switch their moods to elation or despair with one shrill beep?
After the weigh-in, they’d assemble in a circle of clunky metal chairs. Some would crow about losing a pound, some would tell how they’d fashioned a lasagna out of cottage cheese and tinned soup. Some tearfully confessed to scoffing their children’s leftovers or the broken biscuits in the bottom of the tin. I began to understand that what you ate and what you weighed was a very big deal.
Sometimes after class Rhiannon and I pretended we were Weight Watching too. We’d take turns on the scale while Mum and her assistant Carol stacked the chairs.
“You’ve had a great week, pet!” I mimicked as Rhiannon jumped on.
“I switched to Weight Watchers margarine!”
Then we swapped places. I weighed in at seventy-seven pounds.
“Looks like a small gain, dearie.”
“Maybe it’s That Time of the Month?” I said. And I had no idea what that meant.
Suddenly Carol appeared behind me and frowned at the scale. “My God! She’s big!” She spoke to my mother in outraged tones like I wasn’t even there. “She nearly weighs as much as I do!”
I was never a skinny child but I wasn’t exactly fat either. Until that moment I’d hoped my greatest liability was my ginger hair. I did have round, rosy cheeks and rather chubby legs; but it was nothing that I wouldn’t have grown out of when I hit puberty. And at nine years old I already towered over Carol, who was a dainty dame of just four-foot-ten.
But I couldn’t apply that logic at the time. I finally had confirmation of my darkest fears. I had been labeled. From that moment on her words clanged in my ears and began to take over my life. “She’s big! She’s big!”
Not long after that incident Mum put me on my first diet.
One day my sister was given a sandwich for lunch and I got a plate of cottage cheese and vegetable crudités instead.
My stomach ached with shame and hunger as I gagged down the lumpy cheese. I’d learned from the Weight Watchers ladies that food was divided into good and bad. In the “good” camp were vegetables, fruit, and rice cakes. Chocolate, cakes, and anything remotely sweet and pleasurable were “bad.” So to be presented with a plate of Good meant there was something Bad about me. You didn’t eat Good food because it was wholesome and healthy; you ate it because you didn’t want to be fat. So at that moment I knew I’d found yet another way to disappoint.
The more I was forced to eat the Good foods, the more the Bad stuff took on an irresistible, forbidden allure. Throughout primary school I’d covet other people’s lunchboxes. My best friend Katie was a rare creature whose mother packed her delicious sweet things for lunch, but she seldom wanted to eat them. How could she not be interested in a Wagon Wheel or a Milky Way? Didn’t her whole body ache to rip them open?
Eventually my hunger would triumph over my shame.
“Umm … are you going to eat that?”
“Nah, I don’t want it. Do you?”
“Well, only if you’re sure?”
One time Katie gave me some Nutella. It was one of those snack packs with a foil lid and a tiny plastic spoon. I peeled back the foil and the chocolate perfume punched me in the nose. The Nutella looked so smooth and calm in its little box, it seemed a shame to disturb it. But five minutes later it was gone, and I felt the tension in my body ease. I wedged my tongue into the little grooves in the bottom of the tray, making sure I didn’t miss anything.
I was always trying to find ways to escape. I spent hours writing plays and “novels” about faraway places. I read books by flashlight in the bottom of my wardrobe. I was a big fan of Enid Blyton and all her talk of treacle, chocolate cake, and midnight feasts at boarding schools.
I devoured Roald Dahl too. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was an obvious favorite, but I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox and his network of tunnels underneath the farmers’ store sheds. I dreamed of digging my own secret tunnel into a cake factory, and there’d be nothing Mum could do about it.
When I ran out of books, I’d read the fridge and freezer pages of appliance catalogues. I’d stare longingly at the carefully styled shelves, trying to pick my Dream Fridge based on its contents. I loved the rows of condiments and posh, bottled water, the celery lounging in the bottom drawer, the watermelon wedge smiling on a platter. And there were always elaborate sundaes in tall glasses. I wanted a family who had a fridge full of sundaes! And a freezer full of ice cream too. There was always ice cream! We had half a cow and a stack of sugar-free stewed fruit in our boring freezer.
I began to notice how food was a weapon in my parents’ never-ending war. My stepfather started complaining about Mum’s Weight Watchers meetings, saying that they took up far too much of her time. At first she protested that she needed the support and accountability to maintain her weight, but eventually she caved in and quit. And then she gave up being leader of our Brownie pack, until all she had left was her teaching job. But that still seemed too much for my stepfather’s liking, so he attacked in other ways. We would come home with the weekly grocery shopping and he’d tear through the bags, finding fault with every purchase. He criticized the way she dressed, the way she spent money, the “lazy” way she dared to spend five minutes drinking a cup of tea when she got home from work.
When my mother started to regain weight, the onslaught was even more relentless. He presided over the contents of her dinner plate, passing judgment on
every morsel. Of course, he was naturally skinny, so this was an easy way to assert his superiority. I watched my mother trying to steel herself; at first she was angry and defiant, but as the years passed she seemed to get worn down. She’d eat perfectly in front of him, so as not to give him any ammunition, but then I noticed that she’d do the opposite when he wasn’t around. One time I hid behind her bedroom door and watched her lift a pile of clothes out of her dresser and retrieve a bar of chocolate. She sat on the bed and put one square after another into her mouth, slowly and mechanically, as if in a dream.
The more my stepfather kept on at my mother about her weight, the more she began to do the same to me. Every summer started with a new diet. Maybe she was trying to stop me from turning out like her, or maybe she thought she could protect me from the same kind of suffering. But to me it just drummed in the message that I was deeply flawed, useless and out of control. I was afraid to eat so much as a lettuce leaf in front of my parents. I started to mimic Mum’s secretive behavior, stealing food and lugging it back to my wardrobe hideout. Stray cookies, hunks of bread, a plastic-wrapped slice of cheese—I’d cram them into my mouth and feel ashamed, comforted, and rebellious all at the same time.
The situation was awash with contradictions. Mum would give me salad one day then treat me to an ice cream cone the next. We’d cook a healthy Weight Watchers recipe for dinner, but then I’d see her dig out a bag of crisps from a secret stash. Then some days Mum would send Rhiannon and me to the take-away shop for fries, and we’d stuff them down as we drove home from school, winding down the windows to let out the greasy smell. We’d stop at a roadside bin to dispose of the wrappers so my stepfather wouldn’t find out. I was confused, but reveled in the feeling that the three of us were united in a wonderful conspiracy.
