Getting Waisted (28 page)

Many of our Canadian friends packed up and went back home, as did pals from as far as Great Britain and France. But we decided there were random acts of nature almost everywhere and this was our home. We weren’t going anywhere.

Remy might have been a big baby, but he was a skinny little boy. Around his ninth birthday, as a not very good present, he got fat! Nothing had changed—not in his mostly vegetarian diet or active life—except the timer on his gene pool had kicked in and begun filling with the overflow of my Austro-Hungarian hormones. I felt awful. I wanted to protect him and put him in the Hansel and Gretel witch’s cage and starve him. Gilles, the saner voice, thought perhaps we shouldn’t draw any attention to his changing body, that it would sort itself out.
Sure, it’s possible. He’ll be that one happy fat kid.
He wasn’t. He hated his new, large body and no matter how often I kept telling him he was the same handsome boy I had always loved, he didn’t believe me. I knew Gilles was right; our son’s unhappiness was not my fault but somewhere I knew my endless struggle with my weight would have to affect his and for this I was sad.

So, in my twisted body-logic I decided there shouldn’t be two overweight people in the same house. It would minimize the taunting and teasing from the bullies who would soon enough begin to circle. Kids can sometimes be cruel but our son was not someone who could toss things off lightly. He was deeply sensitive and incredibly hard on himself: and having a fat mother didn’t help.

I was determined to shed my body mass yet again. I found what I was sure was the magic bullet: The Cookie Diet! I loved the name and the promises, “forty pounds in forty minutes.” Okay, perhaps that was a bit of an exaggeration, but they did promise the weight would just fly off. Why wouldn’t it? The diet consisted of six small, and by that they meant six
tiny
protein cookies a day! Plus all the salad and nonfat dressing one could inhale. It was all very state-of-the-art. White lab coats for all the staff; scheduled visits with weigh-in’s, and all kinds of highly recommended, but very pricey diet supplements on display along with their branded line of very pricey nonfat salad dressings. The cookies came in three flavors: sand, dirt, and gravel. A hamster could not have survived on this diet. But I dropped pounds by the truckload and plenty of my hair.
Why was my hair falling out?
My hairdresser explained to me I was suffering from a protein deficiency.
But I lost forty pounds in two months! I went down almost three dress sizes and I had a waist. I figured I could always get a wig. Let there be dancing. Gilles threw me a party and everyone brought cake.

25

The Revolving Door

Diet #30
Urine shots—What?

Cost
$2,500

Weight lost
80 pounds

Weight gained
How much does insanity weigh?

As Remy came through the hell of puberty,
his weight fell off in the same way it had come on—fast—but mine came and went and came again and again like a badass pimp checking on his cash cow. At this point I thought it might be faster and cheaper to buy a body-babe and go in and have my head transplanted on to her body. By my last count, I had spent one million, eleven dollars, and eighty-seven cents on weight loss.
The loss part was on a sliding scale, mostly sliding upward.
Add to that the medical bills for seeking just one doctor who would tell me I had a sticky thyroid but, nope, they all concurred that my thyroid was working just fine.
I’m sure when talking amongst themselves they said it was me who wasn’t working hard enough.
And I did finally go on a therapist hunt, but I really didn’t want to spend fifteen years on anyone else’s couch but my own—especially not to talk about my mummy and daddy issues. They were my parents and without them, where would I be?
Exactly . . . so a thank you is always in order.

On my way home one day I noticed a giant billboard touting a special on something called Lap Band something. I was whipping by pretty quickly, so it took a moment; I thought it was a travel site promoting a trip to Lapland, maybe to visit Santa. But then I got it. It was a quick fix surgery so one could look less like Santa. I didn’t want a lap band, it just sounded like some very unattractive belt. What I was really looking for was someone with a magic wand.

I grazed on Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and colanders full of leafy greens in order that I might feel full, eat less, and drop a few pounds. What I hadn’t counted on was the by-product of this misguided plan; that I wasn’t hungry, just smelly. I wandered the aisles of the cookbook section in my local bookstore. I started with breakfast recipes, moved on to snacks, followed by lunch. By the time I got to the dinner recipes, I pulled up a chair to one of the lovely fake-aged tables and gorged myself with notions of chestnut-stuffed pork loin roasts with parsnips and baby potatoes, I devoured the rosemary and olive oil coated chicken breasts stuffed with Asiago cheese, accompanied by pappardelle noodles with a wild mushroom sauce. For dessert, I visually consumed all of Julia’s pudding recipes, The Silver Palate’s Morrocan chicken, and Joy of Cooking’s chocolate mousse. I was almost sated, but I had one more stop to make, I had to bring Gilles the perfect apple pie. It was his favorite dessert, but when I walked through the door with a whole pie just for him, he pointed to his barely there, not for-real paunch and told me, my being on any food reduction plan was bad for his health, because I couldn’t start feeding him instead of me.
So now the choux was on the other foot.
Day in day out, I sat in front of Oprah’s Church of Divine Intervention believing her newest diet revolution would be the one. I had been on every diet she had ever been on, and they worked, just like they did for her—for a while. I fell for all the promises made by every entrant trying to get rich in the diet sweepstakes.
Sure I’ll eat like bears do—all blueberries, all the time.
The lure of twenty pounds lost overnight won me over again and again. What I hadn’t put together was, for every fast weight loss came a faster weight gain.

“The body is a very sophisticated machine that has evolved over thousands of years to deal with times of famine and drought. When you starve yourself, your body doesn’t know you are trying to get skinny. It thinks there is a shortage of food and so it goes into survival mode which is a dieter’s worst nightmare. Just when you think that you can trick your fat cells into shrinking more and more (to make you lose more and more weight) your body believes that there’s a shortage of food . . . And if this is what your body thinks is happening, it will not let any more fat cells get smaller—in fact it will do everything it can to preserve the status quo. It does this by slowing down your metabolism
.”

—From a conversation with my GP as he tried to make me understand why I was wasting my time. And I felt it fall on my deaf ears.

Late one night, we pulled into our garage, to the half that was back to being used for car storage, and as we got out of the car, Gilles noticed a padlock on one of the storage cabinets above the car. He asked both Remy and I if either of us had locked anything inside the cupboard. We hadn’t. Gilles picked up a baseball bat and knocked the lock off. When he opened the door, we were stunned to see a neatly rolled sleeping bag, a blanket, some toiletries, and food supplies. Someone was living in our garage, in a cabinet! No matter how neat and clean this person was, we really couldn’t have a vagrant make his home in the garage. There were no toilets—enough said.

Gilles was removing everything when a man appeared in the driveway. He looked defeated, and even worse, familiar. We knew him. He and his wife had lived just a couple of doors down but they had gone through a messy divorce and she had the better lawyer, who had taken
him
to the cleaners. He had been a radiologist, but when his life had spiraled out of control he’d had a breakdown and lost his job. Gilles and I didn’t know what to do. “Hey Harry, how you doing?” didn’t feel right. We told him he could stay through the weekend. The next morning, we brought him some breakfast but he was gone.

He was the first ex-husband I had seen fall so far, so fast. I was very familiar with what happened to many of the displaced wives and mistresses, if they were unlucky enough to be tossed to the curb without enough of a cushion to get back on their feet. I also knew many great rock-solid couples in Beverly Hills, but for those other pairs on the precipice, still together but hanging by a thread, it was a very different story. None of those women, especially if they came from nothing, wanted any newly renovated, hot single ladies within 500 feet of their men. They brought fear to the neighborhood; they were threats in stilettos that had all the wives holding just a little bit tighter onto their husbands . . . and sons, if they were over fifteen. The art of shunning was alive and thriving. I asked Gilles what he would do if I ever dumped him.
As if
. He told me to go for it, but he’d be right behind me. “You can leave me, but I’m going with you.” With any other human being, that might have spun me into a bout of claustrophobia, but from Gilles, it made me laugh and feel loved.

I was at the grocery store checkout, feeling up all the avocados for the guacamole I was going to make, while the other hand flipped through the latest heartaches of every celebrity called Jennifer, and I caught an ad for hCG therapy. What I really saw was: “FAT FALLS OFF OVERNIGHT!” My desperation had finally reached its apex and I fell down another rabbit hole to where the purveyors of magical thinking lived. I asked around and got tons of testimonials from less than reliable sources who were not really sure what hCG was but had heard it worked. When someone I knew whispered in my ear that there was a doctor who’d had great success with this weight-loss system, I was in, even after she told me, “hCG is comprised of daily shots from the urine of pregnant women or possibly cows.” She wasn’t sure which. What? But of course I made an appointment.

A very real doctor in a white coat sat behind his large and reassuring desk and looked me over and immediately agreed I was an excellent candidate. I was happy to be excellent. He asked me how much weight I wanted to lose. I told him, “All of it.”

He assured me that with just one shot every day straight into my hip, the weight would fall off. The miracle was in the pregnancy hormone that was flushed by the urine, now put to better use than having it swirl down a drain. I nodded as if any of this sounded sane. I nervously inquired how much this miracle would cost. He felt it was a bargain at $2,500 given that it was for a six-month supply, and generously added I could pay it off in installments. I took out my checkbook.

He forgot to mention that the diet that went with the shots was a mere 500 calories.
That was like two sticks of gum.
How much water-packed tuna could one be expected to eat? How much leafy green compost crap could a person mulch?

But for almost ten months, I was holed up like a prisoner unable to socialize as gathering with others seemed to always take place around a table and I needed to avoid all temptation. It was stark, monotonous, and isolating. Every day was the same: Breakfast, one piece of woody, fibery toast with a vapor trail of peanut butter; lunch was one scoop of water-packed tuna on a pile of leaves; dinner, a boneless, skinless, tasteless chicken breast with a pile of different leaves; and then, as a reward, I got a tiny bowl of sugar-free, zero-calorie, zero-taste, chemicals-in-a-cup-Jell-O-like-thingy. For the second time in my adult life I lost more than eighty pounds. Eighty pounds: that was like ten bags of fertilizer, or a twelve-year-old child. I was a mere shadow of my former self and I could officially walk on water. I wore my superiority like a bullfighter’s cape, flourishing it at every opportunity. I was so much better than everyone else.

Given my current food resistance, I was in an anorexic’s frame of mind when my friend Joan sent me a book she thought I might enjoy. It was called
Hunger Point
and it was a great read, about a pair of sisters with different eating disorders that wreaked havoc on their lives. The story centered on the obsessive, often destructive, relationship women have with food and dieting; it was both heartbreaking and funny and I loved it. I thought the author, Jillian Medoff, had struck a very relatable chord and I sent the book to yet another good friend of mine, Trevor Walton, who ran the television movie department at Lifetime Television. He bought it. I had sold stories to the networks before and had dipped my toe into the producing world as an associate producer—which is a euphemism for not having to do much actual work—but I had been lucky and had been schooled by a terrific woman who had allowed me to shadow her on the movies that I had brought to her. For this one, Trevor put me together with a wonderful and experienced producer he liked working with, Ellyn Williams, and we were off to the races. I was now able to add executive producer to my career path. The movie starred Barbara Hershey and the now very famous Christina Hendricks of
Mad Men.