Authors: Kate Rockland
“… to calm you down after a fall on the sidewalk, that’s secondhand obesity. If dinner at your house consists of macaroni and cheese and chocolate pudding and cornbread and stuffing, then you’ll give the same dangerous foods to your own children when you become a parent. It’s a terrible cycle, and with my blog,
Skinny Chick,
and that’s a trademarked name, people, I’m trying to help Americans make healthy eating choices.”
Silence in the studio. The mechanical sounds of cameras lifting into the air, turning on their axes.
“I have to admit, I really love macaroni and cheese,” Shoshana began. “Oh, my god, on a cold winter night, your roommates are out, you climb onto the couch and put on a chick flick, preferably one with Matthew McConaughey shirtless, pour a glass of wine, and dig into a bowl of creamy mac ’n’ cheese … That’s my version of heaven, and I can’t imagine denying myself a pleasure like that.”
Oprah laughed along with her audience. “Girl, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that, too,” she said. She turned to Alexis. “Is that really so bad, to enjoy macaroni and cheese? My trainer says everything is fine in moderation.”
“I do admit to eating it in college like the next girl, but the average box of macaroni and cheese is chock-full of preservatives, dehydrated cheese powder, and dyes. Look, my blog is not just about looking great in a bikini, although I certainly give you a ton of advice from trainers and chefs for that! Accepting yourself mentally as obese might help your self-esteem, but I can assure you it will not help your chance of living into a ripe old age. I know my message isn’t as soft or cuddly as
Fat and Fabulous,
but I am very concerned with the things I heard Shoshana say today, and I’d like to show a slideshow I videotaped while walking down Sixth Avenue in Manhattan yesterday afternoon.”
“Sure, queue the videotape, Bryan,” Oprah said to a stagehand just to Shoshana’s left.
A hush fell over the audience and stage as the same screen that had been previously displaying pictures of Kirstie’s weight changes over the years now lit up behind Oprah. Images flashed on the screen of heavy people walking around Manhattan, shot from the neck down, their flabby arms waving down cabs, underwear lines showing through their sausage-tight stretch pants, holding the hands of their chubby youngsters. Shoshana felt her heart constrict. Any of these women in the video could have been her, going about her daily routine. She hated these Fattie videos constantly shown on the news to depict the American fat problem as an epidemic comparable to the plague. Come on! Anyone looks like crap when they’re headless.
She also felt angry that these people had been violated, but from the expressions on everyone’s faces in the audience it was clear they felt quite the opposite. Americans are drastically overweight as a whole, and there was a lot of truth in what Alexis was saying. Action had to be taken. As the images continued to light up the stage, the audience grew rapt. Probably the millions watching on their couches at home, too. Shoshana imagined a stay-at-home mother in Kansas City reaching inside a Fritos bag, her hand suddenly freezing before the chip made its way to her guilty mouth. She looked over at Oprah, who was watching the video carefully, her face the epitome of openness, not showing where her opinion lay but everything about the firm set of her mouth proclaiming:
I am presenting both sides! I am avidly listening to both of my guests and letting my audience figure out how they feel for themselves.
Shoshana was suddenly struck by how good Oprah was at her job, not being judgmental in the slightest. She felt the odd sensation of jealousy course through her. Sometimes it was exhausting being the face of a cause. The truth, the real, down-and-dirty truth, was that Alexis, horrid witch that she was,
did
present some good ideas and arguments. Shoshana really was an easygoing person at heart, and unable to be militant for her cause. Sure, she’d devoted her life and career to helping big girls like herself feel better about the way they looked in a size-fourteen halter top, but she didn’t always feel up to the task of being
the
leader of Fat Nation, when really there were so many different types of fat that sometimes it was really unfair that she had to include all of them under her belt, almost like a president being ashamed of Florida, or parents not
really
loving all their children equally.
Some people weren’t just fat, they were obese, and when Shoshana received their e-mails full of self-hatred and lines about wanting to hang themselves with a rope or throw up their lunches, she had to meet extreme
head-on
with extreme, so she assured them they were beautiful. With 91 percent of all college-aged women admitting to dieting, and anorexia causing more deaths per year than any other mental illness,
something
had to be done. She’d picked up the expression “God doesn’t make junk” from a priest who lived next door to her mother, and she quoted Father O’Reilly from time to time to her readers. She felt the expression covered everyone, and gave great comfort.
And yet sometimes … sometimes when the door to her bedroom was closed or she was in the shower, alone, she could relax enough to be honest with herself. The fact was that she exercised daily. And, although she ate a lot, and didn’t deprive herself of some of her favorite desserts and junk food, she also tried very hard to have a balanced diet, with servings of wheat, fruits, proteins, and vegetables. She power-walked every week with her sassy friend Nancy. She swam every Sunday, twenty laps, at Stevens University. She drank lots of water throughout the day. Why should she have to include people who stuffed their faces night and day with McDonald’s and Breyers, and then expected her to cover their butts in her general argument of loving one’s self?
The answer was that if she didn’t stick up for the heaviest women, clinically obese women, if she didn’t tell them they were not pieces of shit, people like Alexis Allbright would make not only the five-hundred-pound people want to slit their wrists, but the two-hundred-pound people feel they had no place in society, either. It was all or nothing and she was most certainly all in, but sometimes being the leader of a movement was not all fun and games. Sometimes she wanted to lie down and throw up her feet and read a junky novel, skip writing her daily blog, and buy a frickin’ Lean Cuisine for dinner once a week at Shop Rite without worrying that she might run into someone she knew who would snatch it out of her hands, hold it over their head as evidence, and shout,
You see? Shoshana Weiner is a fake! She’s a phony! She’s watching what she eats. She’s just like them!
But then she would sit down to watch mindless television, and be dumbstruck by shows like
Bridalplasty,
where brides-to-be, who should be reveling in being themselves (after all, why did the guys propose to them in the first place if not because they liked their looks?), instead are so filled with self-hate that they’re getting lipo at twenty-five and having their noses broken and stitched back together to win a free wedding.
Shoshana blinked. She realized she was in Chicago. Onstage. With Oprah.
“We’ve seen Alexis’s video. I’d like to open up the floor to my audience to find out what they think,” Oprah said, turning her body. She had on a beautiful blue and green glass bead necklace that shone under the bright lights whenever she moved.
A young black woman with a buzzed head, dark blue pencil skirt, pretty ruffled white blouse, and squarish jaw stood at a microphone in the aisle. “I am a surgeon and have three young children. I am also a single parent and have a hard enough time being home for my kids. If I want to give them a Twinkie for dessert sometimes, is that really so wrong?”
The audience clapped in encouragement.
“What’s your name?” Alexis asked.
“It’s Liza,” the woman responded, looking slightly surprised she’d been asked.
“Would you give your child a cigarette, Liza?” Alexis asked calmly.
Someone gasped. Shoshana looked around, only to realize it had been her.
But Alexis wasn’t finished.
“How about heroin? Of course you wouldn’t. But you’d give them a Twinkie. I find it sad that Americans give their children candy as a reward. What about a fresh, sweet carton of raspberries? How about a quarter, to put in their piggy bank?”
“Isn’t that philosophy a little strict?” Oprah asked, raising her perfectly plucked eyebrows.
But Alexis was on a roll. There was a gleam in her eyes. “Obesity is killing us, and the prime suspect is junk food. Now, if you’re asking me to set a killer loose in your home, fine. But I’m not going to stop until our taxes cease going to fund obese patient care, and people stop dying from premature diabetes and heart disease. I will not relent, even a little bit. I feel it is my duty to keep people healthy, and therefore, allowing secondhand obesity for kids is a no-no on my blog.”
“I don’t know about you, but this conversation is really making me want to go eat a Twinkie,” Shoshana said dryly.
Rainfalls of laughter from every row.
She continued. Funny was her strong point. It always had been. In school, Shoshana was friends with every single group, from the jocks to the skaters to the cheerleaders. If she could make a person laugh, that person wouldn’t judge her for her size. Wouldn’t call her mean names behind her back. Would see her as a person, a funny person.
“I mean, how many times did the girl say ‘Twinkie’?” Shoshana continued. “You’d think they were paying her for subliminal advertising or something.”
More laughter, filling the room, bouncing off the walls. Oprah was smiling and nodding, encouraging her.
“Look. When I see Blake Lively, Nicole Richie, and Paris Hilton in magazines in designer gowns with their rib bones literally sticking out the sides, it breaks my heart, because I know for every picture in a magazine there is a young, easily influenced girl looking at it and just reaching puberty, starting to have emotions, and feelings toward her developing body. And I know, just as you do, that seeing those so-called ‘glamorous’ images truly can alter a young girl’s perspective. Suddenly her curvy thighs and full breasts aren’t so beautiful and exciting anymore. She wants rid of them. She wants to look like the celebrities in the fancy dresses and the models selling sexy products like perfume and clothing and sunglasses the kids at school are wearing. It’s not a flaky concept. I assure you, it’s a split-second look at those pictures and then down at her own body, an instant that can alter her belief system. Now she hates the way she looks. She idolizes these girls, and will do anything to look like them. Including starvation and jeopardizing her health. How many of us have to die of anorexia before we say enough is enough?”
Strong clapping that filled the room.
Alexis waited until the noise dimmed down. “You are leaving out the medical details of what goes into making a person overweight. There are many studies that say how much fatter Americans are becoming every year.”
“And you are leaving out the fact that some people are born big-boned, and can’t help being big,” Shoshana shot back. “How do you think reading your blog makes those people feel? They can listen to your advice to work out ‘just thirty minutes a day’ or try one of your fad diets, and they’ll still be larger than you find appropriate. It’s not their fault, and yet you continue to place blame over their heads. What do you think reading
Skinny Chick
does to their self-esteem?”
Alexis said something, but it got lost in the clapping, and she waited again until it started to die down. Oprah smiled at her audience, pumping her arms slightly for people to reel it back in, to remember that she had another guest on the stage who should have the platform again, even if her message was the unpopular one.
“Shoshana is leaving out a very important detail,” Alexis said quietly yet deliberately, like a great director building tension for an explosive scene. “One that she purposefully keeps from the readers of
Fat and Fabulous
.”
Anticipation hung in the air like a spider’s web.
I do?
Shoshana thought.
I am?
Suddenly her stomach dropped. Oh, no. Surely she wasn’t going to go
there
. No one would be that cruel.
“Her father died of a heart attack,” Alexis said in a syrupy, faux-concerned voice. “Four years ago. He was only forty-nine. He was mowing his front yard and simply dropped dead right there. It was a preventable tragedy.”
The smell of freshly cut grass. Emily playing Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” in the living room. She’d just applied lotion on her hands, and when she raised them to her mouth the smell of vanilla was overwhelming.
A hush had come over the room.
“At the time of his death he was over three hundred fifty pounds,” Alexis finished quietly.
Her father lying in the sharp green grass, right hand still clutching the mower’s handle. Sweat stains on his gray Rutgers T-shirt. Cicadas humming all around her. His brown cigar, still lit, lying next to him. His wide face, the one she loved so much, seen hovering over her when she was in her crib, grimacing when she hit him on the thumb with a hammer when she was five, breaking into a smile from the stands at her high school basketball game, was now still and beet-red around his beard.
Shoshana finally looked up, into Alexis’s ice-blue eyes. How could someone with eyes that beautiful be so awful? So this was the face of evil, she thought. She was unable to speak. It felt like a hand, perhaps a very skinny and pale one like Alexis’s, was wrapped around her throat. If she opened her mouth to speak she’d burst into tears. Her vision blurred as she desperately fought off crying.
Alexis saw her opponent weakened and rattled off her final statistics to drive home her point. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of America’s children are overweight and seventeen percent of teenagers are clinically obese. That’s more than three times the rate of a generation ago. Did you know there is a link between cancer and obesity? The American Cancer Society claims one hundred thousand lives lost to obesity-related cancer a year.”