Getting Waisted (29 page)

Producing a movie is hard work with high stress and long hours, often sixteen-hour plus days, along with the responsibility for the huge team chosen and hired by us and answerable to us, while we were answerable to the network paying the bills. But along with the hard work, there is also the kind of camaraderie formed out of intensity and shared goals. There is also a lot of downtime waiting for shots to be set up, with platters of food on offer to keep everyone’s energy from flagging. It took every ounce of superhuman willpower to snack on the crudités and low fat choices while staring lustfully at the mountain of peanut butter cups, donuts, croissants, and every imaginable type of juicy finger foods. Old habits do die hard, especially when there are trays and trays of yummy, fat-producing treats shoved under my nose. I have never been a nail biter but the array of butt-enhancing deliciousness constantly on offer broke me. My old friends, cheese and chocolate, were soon screaming my name and I answered by inhaling every piece I got my hands on. The famine was over!

I fell back down that hole where my missing self was waiting to come on home. Remember fatoms? They will find you.

26

The Last Dance

Diets
1-100

Cost
$1,000,011.87

Weight lost
1,000 pounds

Weight gained
Not the point

I had no will power left.
I was eating old after-dinner mints scraped from the bottom of my purse as I sat in my snobby Beverly Hills gynecologist’s office for the annual spelunking expedition to make sure all systems were a go. I stared at the aquarium filled with most of the tropical fish from the part of the ocean surrounding Maui and I caught my reflection; the yo-yo cycle had run me over and killed me dead. If I hadn’t quite gained back all eighty pounds, I was well on my way. I was deep into a cycle of self-loathing and fury at my weakness. I glanced at a brochure extolling the brilliance of liposuction. I picked it up then put it back down, then picked it up again. The photo of the newly lipo’d model morphed into a newly thin me, but the nurse arrived and broke the moment.

I was lying down with feet hooked into the must-be-male-designed cold-steel vagina splaying apparatus. My doctor, wearing his miner’s cap, was rooting around in the dark depths of hell so, of course, I made idle conversation, inquiring about his standard poodle’s well-being and about the lovely new herringbone couches in the waiting room. I believe I even commented on his tanned complexion, which led to a conversation about the joys of winter skiing—as if I had a clue—but I played along just as though we were at a cocktail party. Finally, during the removal of the icy cold speculum I said to my longtime gynecologist and advertised lipo-sucker extraordinaire, as if it were perfectly normal, “So how would we go about this lipo thing?” Faster than a speeding bullet, my feet were back on the ground and the backless paper gown was on the floor and I was stark naked. I was sure I heard him chuckling. I took a quick look at my body and thought this was hopeless but he was only too eager to demonstrate. He whipped out his special Sharpie and began to draw a never-ending series of large circles: on my hips, my buttocks, my stomach—
all of them—
on my thighs, my knees, my upper arms, my back, and on my wattle. I was standing in front of a mirror while this humiliation was taking place. My eyes were squeezed tightly shut. I’d rather have had his entire arm up my
hoohah
. He was humming.
Other images began swirling: a tube attached to me, funneling fat and grease directly into a biofuel container. Cars could run for years to come. What if he charged by the circle? I’d be thin but too broke to buy any new clothes.
He stopped humming.

My gyno/cosmetic surgeon pointed to each circle and explained how much fat would be sucked out and then, in a slightly silky used car salesman’s voice, he continued explaining that the procedure was a tad expensive but then asked how many times had I starved myself for months on end, worked out till my muscles were screaming and still I was not happy with how I looked . . .
Oh excuse me, show me a woman who’s happy with how she looks, even when she has a great body. The whole freakin’ world is a fun house mirror.
I snapped back to consciousness to hear him say I should trust him because this was the easy road to a better, thinner new me and I didn’t have to do a thing—just leave the driving to him.

The procedure would only take a couple of hours; however, I would be wrapped, head-to-toe, in a mummy-esque, Ace bandage/Spanx combo thing for a few days—a kind of vapor lock to keep the fat from trying to get back in. Doctor Lipo, however, would be back at the office, armed with his silver speculum before any of his gyno-patients had a chance to miss him. How desperate did he think fat people were?
Don’t go there.
I allowed my gyno, now lipo-sucker, to seduce me with the vapor of possibility. Oh how I wanted his magic wand to work. I took out my checkbook. I was soon back in the nurse’s office having blood drawn and a variety of other pre-op tests.
Alakazam!
A cancellation appeared out of thin air and I was booked for surgery two days later at seven in the morning.

I was digesting all of this while waiting for an elevator, when one of the other gynecologists, possibly a jealous one, came out of the office. He had seen me getting the blood work done and he sidled up to me as we rode down in the elevator. In no uncertain terms he told me there was a lot o’ money to be made in lipo-land and he didn’t approve but he felt I needed to know that this procedure was no walk in the park. “Have you ever been whacked hard with a baseball bat? This is similar; think extreme mugging!”

I was home feeling excited about my new body-to-be and terrified at the body blows I would have to endure to get it. But I gave birth to an eleven-pound boy; nothing could hurt more than that,
could it?
That baby, now fifteen, hurled himself with his giant-sized stinky shoes onto the bed where I was sitting and praying, and asked why I was doing this. The answer rolled out of me, surprising us both. I was tired of shopping in fat-girl stores, I was sick of dieting. I didn’t want to be different; I wanted to blend in. Remy pointed out that I had made a whole life out of being different and he didn’t believe me. I was no longer sure what I believed. I just knew I was tired of the dance. I wanted to be like Sleeping Beauty and go to bed fat and wake up thin. He looked at me, “Mom, what if you don’t?”
What if I don’t?

My son had only ever known a mother who reacted to food as if it were either kryptonite or heroin. “Get that Alfredo sauce away from me. I’m getting bigger just by looking at it.” “Who has candy? I gotta have some sugar. Now!” My sweet, caring boy was scared for
me
and for him.

He took a lawyer’s stance and argued that it just wasn’t me. “It’s stupid and it’s dangerous.”

What did he mean by that? Crap, I knew what he meant; I was never going to be thin. They could have had those fat-sucking tubes pumping for twenty-four straight hours and I would have been thin-ner, but I’d still be me . . . potato me. I had lived most of my life on one diet after another as I tried to bet against the house, but the house always won. I sent flowers to my gynecologist, begging his forgiveness for cancelling, but really it was in the hope that he’d return my deposit.

I thought about Gilles and how much this man loved me, no matter what weight I was. He once asked me, “What if
I was the fat one? Would you have given me a chance?”
Uh oh.
I honestly couldn’t answer. Had the tables been reversed like that, I hoped I would have gone with my heart as he had, or I would have missed out on one of the most beautiful human beings on the planet. Gilles said that’s how he felt about me. He hoped that one day I would see me as he did, and as my friends and family did.
I, too, prayed I would get there.

In an odd but serendipitous way, a few days later it was our close friend Noreen’s birthday and I wanted to find something unique to surprise her with. I was excited when I found a restaurant that offered a “dining in the dark” experience, which was supposed to enhance our senses of taste, smell, touch, and hearing by abandoning the one that we often take for granted—our sight.

We met in the lounge area of the restaurant, our coats were hung up, and we were handed menus and instructed to pick our dinners from a specially prepared list. Noreen, her husband Kevin, Gilles, and I were then greeted warmly by our blind server who instructed us to hold on to her and each other’s shoulders as she led us led farther and farther into a pitch-black dining room. The deeper into the room we went, the more apprehensive and slightly giddy we became. We could hear conversations, punctuated by the clinking of glasses and silverware and the occasional burst of laughter, but it was completely disorienting not to know where we were going or what the room looked like. When we got to our table, our server took us one by one and had us touch the backs of our chairs in order to seat ourselves. She then told us she would be bringing the wine. “Wine!”

It was surreal and more than a little uncomfortable to be sitting in pitch black, where no matter how much you blinked, your eyes never adjusted, but our hearing became absolutely acute. There was a distinct feeling of apprehension that enveloped all of us, in spite of knowing we were in a safe place. It took a moment, but then came the joy of discovery as we groped around the table and found our utensils. I was giddy when I discovered a breadbasket filled with rolls. The scent was heady. Kevin found a little pot of butter and we collapsed in laughter when more than one of us began buttering our hands instead of the bread. Our waitress brought the wine and deftly poured it by holding the stemless glasses one at a time, then asking each of us to reach up and take it from her hands. She told us that she had not always been blind but had had meningitis as a child, which had caused her to lose her eyesight; yet she rode the buses and worked at a fast-food restaurant during the day at the takeout window. When our dinners came, we giggled, as we couldn’t resist feeling everything on our plates, exclaiming with joy at the recognition of a Brussels sprout or a cherry tomato. When hands accidently touched across the table in search of salt or pepper, we became sensory explorers as we touched each other trying to figure out who was who. We could hear squeals of delight from tables around us as they made discoveries of their own. (Some sounded more than a little risqué.) The food was delicious and we decided the chefs were definitely not blind. It was a magical evening in that everything was about revelations, sensual and sensory, with an appreciation for what we were lucky enough to have and an understanding of what we’d been missing. The best things in life are not always what you see.

I finally saw the light. Eating should bring pleasure not panic. What the hell was wrong with me that I almost handed myself over to a gynecologist with a weekend diploma in fat removal? There are no miracle cures, but there are always great salesmen who succeed in making us think there are and I had been shrunk and expanded over and over, like a polka-playing accordion. A bolt of lightning streaked across my brain: it can’t be what
you
think of me, it has to be what
I
think of me. The 101 humiliations it took for me to become me were gifts for which I would be eternally grateful; without them, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today. My long, frustrating journey from serial dieter and potion popper to hard won self-acceptance had been aided and abetted by the bill of goods we have all been sold: that we will never be good enough unless we look like cover girls. Cover girls don’t even look like cover girls without teams of handmaidens and air-brushers (today, Photoshoppers) at the ready. Female unhappiness is really big business. There are pushers dealing in everything from too-thin eyelashes to too-fat thighs, and we’re the addicts they have hooked. Everyone wants us to change but I want us to make the most of what we’ve got, because being fat in a society that worships thin is like being asked to walk the plank on a daily basis . . . but only if we listen. We need to be the best we can be until we change,
if
that’s what we want to have happen, but if it doesn’t, being bullied, being made to feel unworthy, and despising ourselves is far too big a price to pay. I don’t want to be fat but I will no longer starve or medicate myself to achieve the impossible. I simply would like to be healthy, eat clean, and move my ass to the beat of a life well lived.