It's Not the Hunger. It's the Venom

I’ve thought of myself as many things over the years. I’ve been a daughter, wife, sister, mother, student, Baptist, atheist, Southerner, therapist, analyst, analysand, friend, enemy, writer, and too many other things to count.  And I have, for the most part, been fat. Not only have I been overweight to varying degrees since puberty, I have also discovered, through my own responses to the issue of weight and the struggle to lose it, the dwelling place of some of the darkest parts of my psyche.

 

I’m on another diet. I imagine, and I think realistically, that the sum total of all the weight loss on all the regimens I have been on in my life is now in the hundreds. This does, of course, include day long swearings-off of all food, a program that my fat repulsed brain actually believes I can continue until I break down somewhere around the cocktail hour and rationalize that vodka and olives covers two of the four food groups. It also includes weeks-long meat-based plans in which that selfsame brain enters such a stupor that the only thing I can do is drag myself through my busy day obsessed with the feeling that I smell very, very strange. Then, deciding meat is the culprit, and backed by my vision of the stringy, blissful vegetarian that I could be, I have given up meat for more than a year. I gained weight.

In fact, like many dieters, I have lived most of my life with the absurd yet inescapable conviction that my problem stems from eating various kinds of foods, and that eliminating them will be the equivalent of waving a magic wand over my zaftig body and rendering it eternally “height/weight proportional.” I have given up carbohydrates, alcohol, everything vaguely associated with oil or butter, most of the delicacies dear to my Southern upbringing, and, in a fit of ritualism, every food that begins with the letter “p” (Potatoes, pasta, pepperoni, pizza…it wasn’t the worst idea I’ve ever had). I grill or bake everything. I haven’t been through the window of a fast food restaurant in years, with the exception of a few months where, taking the advice of a weight loss expert who assured me I would overload and never want them again, the only thing I did eat were French fries. I have eaten enough fish to start checking when I shower for gills. I gave up when I remembered that Orca eat fish, and no Orca ever walked down the aisle in a tiara with “Miss Mississippi” emblazoned on a sash across her ample but height/weight proportional chest.

I am stunningly well educated where diets are concerned, and a less useful degree I can’t imagine. I collect eating tips like junk jewelry, amassing great, useless, embarrassing heaps of them that I try on until I can no longer think my own thoughts at all. I know about portion control. I have carried a half-cup measure to restaurants, trying to look casual as I stuffed a quarter of the gargantuan portions into the cup and set the rest as far away from me as possible. I have eaten exclusively off the appetizer menu, fighting off the admittedly goofy worry that the waiters would think I couldn’t afford a full meal and feeling compelled to leave ridiculously large tips. I know a serving of meat is the size of a deck of cards and not the deck of a small sailing vessel. I know both that the size of a baked potato referred to in diet literature is that of a tennis ball, and that the prospect of finding a potato that size in the supermarket is roughly equivalent to finding the cheap earring that my puppy once ate. It’s not impossible but I’d rather not go through the crap for so little reward. Therefore, I have gotten used to eating halves, half a banana, half a cup of oatmeal, saving the other half specifically so that it can stare accusingly at me from the refrigerator shelf as I stand there looking for something to keep me from feeling faint, but that has the kind of calorie count only available from the ice dispenser. I have eaten according to the old food pyramid, the new food pyramid, and the tenets of combination diets recommended by books that only make sense to the truly desperate and the authors’ accountants.

 

I have lain on more than one analyst’s couch and wished fervently that I would be told that my lifelong struggle with fat has to do with my chronically angry father, my beauty-obsessed and prematurely dead mother, the restaurant owned by my grandparents and in which I was pretty much raised, and the peculiarities of my culture. I want to blame the Gulf Coast where I grew up. Its hundred-degree heat and ninety percent humidity, the ubiquitous fire ants, water moccasins, poison oak and men who think nothing of hollering “Whoeeeee, shake that thang!” out their car windows at any woman engaging in overt body movement, keep all but the most masochistic women from doing a lot outdoors. Exercise in my family consisted of looking for the remote control for my father. I’d like to believe that growing up with such conflicted relationships with men made being svelte an ambiguous proposition and that being free of the conflict would make me free of the need for padding. But the fact is, there are still parts of the world where the only requirement for being fodder for inappropriate male attention is having a temperature above the ambient. It was the South that gave birth to the phrase, “More to hold on to.”

  After listening to me try to both articulate and avoid articulating my struggles with being a large woman in a world that associates anything BUT “beautiful and intelligent” with being so, my analysts have, eventually, come around to using the same dread inducing word that makes me feel as if they have simply given up on me—genes.  Forget Freud, forget oral fixations and shaky object relations and a narcissistically wounded sense of self. I’m a product of my people in the most fundamental way, and we are ill suited to abundance. My survival skills have doomed me.

I’m hearing a lot about the genetic components of obesity these days, and, perhaps strangely, I don’t like what I’m hearing. Having come from mostly Irish and Welsh and a little Choctaw, races whose entire existence in the world today is based on their ability to survive starvation conditions, it makes sense that I have a body that would hang onto every calorie as thought it were its last. I must admit I can’t help being tickled at the idea that this is the physical equivalent of a psychological problem. I have a neurotic gene structure. What once was a perfectly good mechanism for survival in times when famine was upon the land and a few thousand miles of forced march was an acceptable way of showing people to their new home is now an albatross around my short, fat neck. My DNA can’t understand that, unlike the old days, plenty of nourishment is available and my metabolism doesn’t have to go on standby every time I refuse a piece of pie. I want to scream at my genes, “This is inappropriate! You’re living in the past!”

  

The sad part is, I do scream at myself a lot when I’m dieting, and that has gotten me to thinking about my dieting self. Not long ago I began to really look at how I talk to myself when I’m trying, yet again, to lose weight. My dieting self is engaged in a 24/7 war, and it isn’t against weight.

I’m one of those people who lives with one internal voice that thrives on punishing, and another against whom the punishment is aimed, and who can’t help but endlessly rebel against it. Never mind where they came from; psychoanalysis did clear that up for me. But knowing has not, so far, done much to help. Dieting, which involves facing up to issues for which denial is a fine mechanism for psychological survival, calls that punitive voice out like nothing else on earth. Let me just think about forming a plan and standing firm in the face of hunger, and the tongue lashing begins.

 

“Here we go again. If you hadn’t let things go so far you wouldn’t be in this condition. You screwed it up before; what makes you think you won’t screw it up again?”  I feel like a child taking blows from the most sadistic bully and, lacking the ability to either fight or flee, becoming surlier by the blow. These parts of me despise one another. That internal relationship becomes a sinkhole for energy, optimism, pleasure in accomplishment, anything but sheer pain. They just can’t seem to give it up. I feel like I’m living with an internal version of domestic abuse, and can’t move out of the house.

When I restrict my eating I become food phobic, driven toward total abstinence by the blanket application of “Thou shalt not” to any form of consumption whatsoever.  Any act of eating is an act of transgression, and the punisher in my head and the rebel that responds with fury make a simple meal an exhausting, draining experience. No wonder I can’t keep it up for long.

But I have. I have kept it up for periods of time measured in years, and I have been successful in going from what the actuarial charts call morbid obesity to what they call acceptable and I call attractive (To hell with healthy. Show me a woman without a doctor’s orders who is dieting purely for health reasons and I’ll show you a woman in denial.). I started gaining it back as soon as I stopped losing it. I once exercised and starved for a year and a half, buoyed by the actual, real Richard Simmons. I was so good I made infomercials with him. If he couldn’t actually destroy the punitive voices, he at least drowned them out with positive affirmations and sheer goofiness enough to keep me from going mad wondering whether that piece of bread contained a hundred or a hundred and fifty calories.  I regained it. I have had my hair fall out on the most reasonable of diet and exercise regimens. I have gone through periods of time when I stuck arduously to a program designed for healthy weight loss only to watch the scale go up a pound and down a pound and up a pound and down a pound without rhyme or reason to the change.  There is nothing like an incomprehensible weight gain to call that voice out from its lair.  “Oh HO—if you’d just get up off your lazy butt…” The idea of living with that voice for the rest of my life in order to believe other people think better of me makes me sad. It’s not the hunger. It’s the venom.

And yet, I can’t stop wanting to be attractively, acceptably slender. I’d say I’m pining for health, but except for a persistent and ironic tendency toward gastric upset and a few joints that have admittedly taken too much wear I’m one of the healthiest people I know. I’m just tired of feeling as though I’m being punished for the way I am, and so am willing to be punished as a result of trying to change instead. Between the two, there’s not a lot of rest.  

  

So here I am, one week into a Nutrisystem program, having lost about three pounds. I hate it. I’m back in old familiar territory, watching the scale with a level of obsession that borders on diagnosable, as my stomach growls and I try to decide whether as my “extra” I’ll have a cup of fat-free yogurt or an egg white for breakfast. Or nothing at all. Maybe if I eat nothing I’ll lose the pound I gained for some inexplicable reason yesterday.

 

I wonder if there are any olives in the fridge.