Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (21 page)

“I tell them I was born in 1957, that I weigh a hundred and fifty-three pounds. I explain that in an Armani I’m a size twelve, while at Dot’s Dress Barn I’m a size twenty-two because, as women already know, the more you pay for your clothes, the smaller the size you’ll be.”

It makes sense to me. Women are always eyeing one another, so let’s share what we’re thinking about our own bodies and the bodies of people around us. That’s what Diane and I are doing, and it’s working.

Some women seem able to take a much more relaxed attitude toward food than me, even if they have some weight they would like to lose. I especially like the way the amazing actress Kathleen Turner thinks. She knows as well as anyone about the
demands on women to be thin, especially if they are in the public eye, yet she seems comfortable with a little extra weight on her frame. That can’t be easy for someone who started her film career thirty years ago playing a siren in
Body Heat
. Some fans still expect her to look the same way. Her response: “Yeah, I know, I looked like that. I don’t anymore. Okay? Get over it.”

At the age of forty-eight, Kathleen played Mrs. Robinson on stage in
The Graduate
, and in one scene wore nothing but high heels. “For a whole twenty-two seconds,” she added. “I think one critic said I looked like a football player. I’m like, ‘I’m sorry? I mean, eight shows a week is not for sissies, guys.’”

After
The Graduate
had a successful run in London, Kathleen resisted taking the show to Broadway because she knew the nude scene would get a kind of attention she was not sure she wanted. As she was considering film options, she read a script that described the main character as “thirty-seven, but still attractive.” She was so angered by that kind of narrow view of aging and women’s bodies that she called the producers of
The Graduate
and said, “We’re going to Broadway. I was forty-eight and it was, essentially, a real ‘fuck you’—and I was very happy I did it.”

Kathleen acknowledged that she is probably about thirty pounds overweight right now. Her gradual weight gain coincided with a diagnosis nearly twenty years ago of severe rheumatoid arthritis. “Before that, I was an extraordinary athlete. I did all my own stunts and absolutely loved it. The arthritis at one point put me in a wheelchair and the doctors told me I would never be out of it, at which point I told them that they were fired.”

Numerous surgeries later, Kathleen has regained an incredible range of motion, and her younger co-stars on stage admire
the physicality and energy she brings to every role. She thinks that at least some of the extra weight on her body has actually enhanced her career. “In some ways it’s good for my work in the sense that I am, and always have been, a character actress. I’m fifty-eight and doing these wonderful, very strong, very eccentric women who don’t need to please men anymore, right? In a way, the weight and the solidness of me enhances that.”

When she’s working, Kathleen is just not worrying about her body image. “On stage or on camera I don’t think about how I look, because that could interfere, even block, my acting. I am fortunate in my work. I know that the pressure of weight and appearance is different to many women in their chosen work.

“I find it actually quite frightening to see some of the actresses on television now, because I don’t know if they have any intestines. In order to look like that you have to spend every waking moment of every day thinking about your weight. That’s a tyranny I don’t want to accept. I really don’t.

“Yes, I would be happy to lose ten pounds, and when I get off the road and back home, I will work on that. But I resent this demand that you have to look so incredibly, incredibly thin. It makes me angry. Who decides this?”

That’s a tyranny I don’t want to accept. . . . I resent this demand that you have to look so incredibly, incredibly thin. It makes me angry.

—Kathleen Turner

Gayle King is another woman who is able to accept herself and her body. She works hard to stay a size 10, and to keep her weight at 162 pounds. At five foot ten, she is the first to admit, “I’m no Skinny Minnie,” but she doesn’t get upset about it. She’ll diet when she has to, and she’ll exercise even though she doesn’t like it, but she is just not fixated on weight.

Gayle radiates confidence when she walks onto the set of
CBS This Morning
, and her philosophy on food couldn’t be more different from mine. “I’ve now gotten to the stage in my life that I deny myself nothing,” she insists. “I’m not going to not eat bread, or not eat cake, or not eat sweets. I’m not going to live like that. So I eat exactly what I want, and if I fall off the wagon I know how to get myself back on the program, whatever that is.”

That’s amazing for someone like me to hear, especially when Gayle admits how much she enjoys food. She recalls some time ago being at a hotel and ordering a room service breakfast: scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon (extra crispy), and an order of pancakes. The menu indicated the breakfast came with toast, and when room service asked if she wanted potatoes, she said yes to that, too.

“I was giving the woman the order and she goes, ‘For how many?’ I was so thrown by the question because I’m thinking this is not a lot of food, that I said, ‘Uh, two!’

“So the room service guy comes and brings it, and before he got there I had turned on the water in the shower and I said to the waiter, ‘He’s taking a shower, you can set it right here.’ Then I called out, ‘Honey, the food’s here!’”

Gayle told this as a funny story, but to me it would just have been humiliating. She also told me about walking into the
office of her news director when she was working at WFSB-TV in Hartford. “On the list of things to talk to me about I could see he had written ‘Gayle’s butt.’

“I remember thinking, damn, Gayle’s butt? He says to me, ‘On those wide shots if you could just push in, because your butt hangs over the chair.’ I didn’t even have the wherewithal to be offended. I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll watch that.’ Now—and this comes with age—I know I could say, ‘Wait a second. Wait a second.’”

In my own life, I truly love to run, but let’s just say working out is not at the top of Gayle’s list of favorite things to do. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. “I hate exercise, I hate it, hate it, hate it, but I also know that it’s necessary. People say, ‘Don’t you feel so much better after you work out?’ Well, actually, no. I just feel that, okay, I did it. I did it, I did it.”

I loved Gayle’s stories because they told me so much about her. Yes, she does have to be aware of how much she eats, and she needs to push herself to exercise more, even if she doesn’t want to. And, yes, there have been times in her life when her weight became a professional issue. She knows she can’t ignore it, and she weighs herself once a week, using Jenny Craig, juice cleanses, or her latest discovery, Fresh Diet, a service that she says delivers really fresh, really delicious food to her home every day to shed a few pounds when she needs to.

But she’s also okay with who she is, and how she looks. “I think my relationship with food is pretty healthy,” she said. “It’s a loving relationship, because I really think that eating food, sharing food, cooking food is one of the greatest examples of love.”

I really think that eating food, sharing food, cooking food is one of the greatest examples of love.

—
Gayle King

Because she is comfortable in her own skin, Gayle is also able to let go of the envy that sometimes accompanies insecurity. “There is always going to be somebody who’s skinnier, who’s richer, who’s prettier. I discovered that years ago. Now I can see somebody who’s gorgeous and I’m not envious. I’m like, ‘Wow, I really admire what you do and who you are.’”

In the end, Kathleen Turner, Gayle King, and others remind me that what really matters is having a healthy mind and body. I’m all for a healthy thin, and I think women have to recognize that we are going to be judged, at least in part, on how we look, whether we like it or not. But some women are content to live with a few extra pounds instead of obsessing about what they eat all the time, and I admire them for it.

I also admire Kate White, who banned diet stories, normally a staple of women’s magazines, while she was editor in chief of
Cosmopolitan
. “I just felt that girls have enough to worry about. Diets don’t work. If someone promises you can lose ten pounds in four weeks you’re going to lose it, but you’re going to gain it back. I felt that it was unfair to women to keep fostering the notion of these quick diets, when really what you need to do is to overhaul your approach to food on more of a long-term basis. I decided if we gave any information
about health and food, it would be just smart nutritional information.”

Diets don’t work. If someone promises you can lose ten pounds in four weeks you’re going to lose it, but you’re going to gain it back.—
Kate White

The magazine does provide guidelines for eating smart, and under Kate’s watch,
Cosmo
launched a new feature titled “Body Love,” which is aimed at helping women feel good about their bodies. “That’s a lot about celebrating your body and feeling good about it and feeling confident about it,” she says.

Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Hudson is another woman who has been able to resist the cultural pressures most of us face. At any weight, she has always managed to maintain a healthy body image. “I remember the first time I was told that I was plus-size, at least in Hollywood terms. I was on the red carpet and the media were asking, ‘How do you feel being a plus-size girl?’ I looked over my shoulder like, ‘Who are you talking to?’ because I never saw myself that way.”

Coming from Chicago, Jennifer thought of herself as just an average-sized woman. The norms of Los Angeles took her by surprise, but she didn’t get thrown by them. “I was maybe a size twelve at the time, and that’s pretty good. Where I come from, size is welcome. So I thought, hold on. I have the height of a supermodel, I have lips that people pay for, so why should I feel insecure? I didn’t have those insecurities at all.”

When she did decide to lose weight with the help of Weight Watchers, she was genuinely surprised by the attention it attracted. “I’ve had people coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh, my God, you’re my inspiration,’ and I’ve thought, people were watching? I didn’t realize that until after the fact.” Curiously, Jennifer actually felt more pressure
after
she lost weight because her body began to get so much more attention.