Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (4 page)

Soon we began talking about how I had won success in part because I had caved in to the pressures society places on women and manipulated my looks for the TV camera. We talked about the mixed messages imposed on women about their bodies, and how those messages are inflated to a nauseating level in the world of TV news and pop culture.

That was the start of a very real conversation that continues to this day.

Eventually, I made Diane an offer: she would work at changing her approach to food and exercise and lose seventy-five pounds, and I would help her do it. I decided to put my money where my mouth was, and to pay for her to lose weight. She could do whatever it took—buy a gym membership, hire a personal trainer, seek guidance from a dietitian, even seek out bariatric surgery. Whatever! I would be paying my girlfriend to start taking care of herself and to change her life.

At the same time, I would work at overcoming my own obsession with food, gain 10 pounds, and accept the new me. My goal was a healthy 135-pound woman who ate a reasonable meal when she was hungry, instead of someone who freaked out when the scale tipped 120 pounds, fought against the urge to eat at every turn, and often felt drained by all that effort.

Both of us would have the courage to ask for help. I would talk to professionals who would help me understand what was happening in my head and guide me on how to clear it up. Diane would finally find the support she needed to get rid of the fat. We would both talk to people who had lost weight and kept it off, and to people who felt comfortable in their own bodies, whatever their weight, and find out what insights they had to share. Together, we would reach out to people who understood that this issue goes beyond the individual and that we have to start making some changes together, as members of one society.

We decided to make a project out of it, which is how the idea of this book developed. We researched and wrote it together.

Our conversation on the boat started us on a journey that we hope will make us both better. Diane will weigh less, I’ll weigh more, and both of us will be a lot happier. We’re both still working on those goals, but we’re ready to tell all—to finally “go
there” without holding anything back. I hope this will inspire you to examine your own lifestyle, body image, and eating habits, whether you share Diane’s food issues or mine. Our friendship is stronger than ever, and we are inspired by the courage we have seen in each other. It is our deepest hope that these pages will inspire you as well.

Our conversation on the boat started us on a journey that we hope will make us both better. Diane will weigh less, I’ll weigh more, and both of us will be a lot happier.—
Mika

I
f you struggle with weight, I know what you’re thinking.

Really? You, Mika? What can you possibly know about my problems?

That’s what Diane thought, and it’s what Senator Claire McCaskill thought, too. The Democrat from Missouri said that right to my face; blurted it out in front of a thousand people on stage at the Annual Congressional Dinner of the Washington Press Foundation. “Mika, you look so beautiful sitting there in your size two dress. We have all noticed . . . your strong and consistent message of better eating and more exercise.
And
I
would like to say, on behalf of all the middle-aged overweight women in America, JUST . . . SHUT . . . UP!
”

The crowd went wild.

My outspoken stance on obesity and the way I describe my own diet haven’t just incited my close friends. They’ve also made
me the target of online attacks and anonymous bloggers. Trust me, I hear all of you. When
New York
magazine published my food journal, it was welcomed with online comments like this:

[MIKA] IS OBSESSED WITH FOOD AND RUNNING.
THAT IS ALL SHE TALKS ABOUT TO ANYONE WHO WILL LISTEN. SHE HAS THIS SAD OBSESSION WITH FOOD. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WITH AN EATING DISORDER.

That reader hit a nerve. He was right on when he pointed out my eating disorder, and I’m telling you, it’s not just
one
eating disorder, but many. I’ve dealt with them for years, and I am still working on my issues today.

I don’t know what alcoholism feels like, but I can only imagine that the first drink of the day must be something like my first bite of a Big Mac, especially when I have a second Big Mac already sitting in front of me, and a large order of fries right alongside it. Binges like that were my happiest moments in high school. For someone who preaches about healthy eating, that’s a pretty tough thing to admit. But I crave junk food, and for years, through my teens and twenties and into my thirties, all I could think about was how to get more of it.

That’s not how I was brought up. In my family, my father, mother, and two brothers ate breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the occasional snack. They ate for pleasure and for sustenance. I ate for pleasure, too, but it was really about emotional fulfillment.
I ate to be happy. I loved junk food and I felt it was the one thing that loved me back. (This was mostly teenage angst. My parents, grandmother Emilie Benes, and in their own ways, my brothers, Mark and Ian, could not have loved me more.)

No one in my family craved food except me. Everybody else ate because it was mealtime. My mother, Emilie, who is of Czech origin, would cook Eastern European–style meals, often serving the wild game that my brothers and my dad loved to hunt. There was plenty of tasty food in the house all the time, but my mother seemed to have her own eating under control. She loved delicious things, but she knew when to stop. She tried to teach me the same kind of discipline, but to no avail.

Despite her best efforts, I was consumed from an early age with thoughts about what I could eat next.
When am I going to get to the 7-Eleven?
(which was conveniently located right around the corner from my house).
When will I be able to get a pint of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, or a pizza in a pocket, or a bag of chips?

My best friend growing up was Laura Eakin Erlacher. We met in elementary school in McLean, Virginia. “I always looked forward to having dinner at Mika’s house,” Laura remembers, “because it was what family dinners are supposed to be about. They always had the freshest food and lots of interesting conversation.”

The food may have been fresh, but it was also unfamiliar to her. I wondered what Laura thought when my mother served the duck my father or brothers had shot earlier that day. Or venison.
Really, serving up Bambi for dinner?

One night, my mom made “hamburgers” and Laura wolfed one down. I asked her, “Want another?” She said yes, and I
laughed as she took a bite of it. “So you do like
deer meat
after all,” I announced. “That burger was made from venison,” Laura recalled later. “It was not the kind of food we ate at my house, where a typical entrée was not venison but meatloaf.”

I remember feeling like my parents were different. Everything about us felt different, and at the time, I just wanted to be an American. I wanted to eat American food. My mother didn’t cook like other moms. I wonder if that somehow encouraged my feeling that I was missing out on something and promoted my cravings and binging.

I found what I craved at Laura’s house, and I loved eating there. Her parents had a cabinet I dubbed the “junk machine.” It was filled with the kinds of snack food we never had at home. Potato chips, cookies, all kinds of cereals including peanut butter Cap’n Crunch! My all-time favorite was the cake frosting. They always had two or three canisters of Duncan Hines vanilla and chocolate icing on the shelf. My mom made her own icing, but I thought these people really knew how to eat, enjoying rich and super-sugar-infused, ready-made icing. I ate it right out of the plastic canisters, as if it were yogurt.

Laura’s parents were always amused at how much icing I could eat. To this day, when I visit their home they greet me at the door with a quick hello and wait while I rummage through my favorite cabinet. “I grew up in a household where there were no restrictions on what foods we could have in our home,” Laura recalls. “My mother would buy snacks that children love, and Mika had this insatiable appetite for them.” Yes, I did!

Laura and I ended up going to different high schools, but we got together almost every day after class. On the way home, we would stop at the local 7-Eleven and buy mounds of candy
and ice cream to eat while we did our homework. Laura could eat a few bites of each one and be satisfied, but I didn’t stop until I had devoured the last bite, even scraping clean the family-size container of ice cream.

I don’t know why a serving or two wasn’t enough, but I always had to get to the bottom of the carton. It would kill me to put an unfinished pint of Häagen-Dazs back into the freezer. Back then I had no idea why I had that kind of insatiable urge. I only knew that if my eating was interrupted, I would fixate on going back for more.

I knew what I was doing was wrong, but it didn’t change my behavior. My mother noticed that I would sometimes steal away to eat junk food, and she would chastise me for it. “Mika, you’ve got to have more discipline,” she would say. “Mika, you are just compulsive!” I don’t think she knew how true that word was. I was a compulsive eater, and I was developing a dangerous pattern that would chart the course for a very dysfunctional relationship with food.

Here’s how it played out for me as a teenager. I was a poor student who had trouble focusing. Junk food and candy seemed to be about the only things I could keep my attention on. I always felt hungry, but it was a nagging, irrational hunger. It was the kind that can never really be satisfied, and it got in the way of my fulfilling my potential as a student and a person. I just didn’t have enough focus left to be able to listen in school or retain information.

I know now that I had some sort of a sensory disability, because I retain auditory information, but not what I read. My mother took me to visual therapy for several years, where I was supposed to train my eyes to focus, and I wore thick glasses. I
am absolutely certain my academic challenges played into what became an almost debilitating battle with food and diet.

While I have a successful career today, I really believe I could have done much more. More importantly, I could have enjoyed the journey, the joys and blessings in life, if only I had been able to turn off the messages urging me to eat. It was a self-destructive cycle. My teenage mind thought,
Okay, I can’t be the smartest girl in school, but I can get that food in me and that’ll feel good
. That feeling kept me isolated, even in my own home.

I come from a family of overachievers. My dad was the national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter and an architect of the Camp David accords; he is a gifted foreign policy expert/strategist/Harvard graduate/everything. My brother Mark is US ambassador to Sweden, brother Ian was a key player in the Pentagon during the Bush years, and my mother is an accomplished artist. In our family, intellect was a valued commodity, and I never felt mine measured up. I never really thought I brought much to the table, so junk food filled the emptiness I felt. I couldn’t bring
that
to the table, but I could stash it away and gobble it up later.