Fat Woman Walking

The Author at Her 4th Birthday Party at Madge's Day/Night Nursery _____________________________ I’m not quite sure when The Beast was unleashed. None of my early memories revolved around food or the yearning for it. When I was four, my weight was normal – I was terribly little and cute, as most tots tend to be: a beguiling curly-haired blonde with mischievous blue eyes and a sparkling personality. Life hadn’t yet bruised me, although, unbeknownst to me, the world was crumbling around me: my mother in crisis, her drinking, joblessness, and love life reeling out of control. Living in California, I was parked at a day/night nursery, a boarding house for kids of all ages, placed there by Mo, my grandmother, when it became clear my mother would be unable to care for me going forward. Mo’s friend owned the boarding house, so she likely assumed I’d be happy there, and I was mostly safe, if not content – but some of my worst fears and nightmares occurred there. Madge, the pro...

The Author with Auntie, Summer 1968 _____________________________ “D IET.” Can you tell me how that word makes you feel? Oh, Lord. Don’t tell me you’re a Gestalt... No, Ms. Lee. Eclectic. Dabs of Freud, Jung, Horney, Skinner, Rogers, Ellis, and ‒ yes ‒ some Perls. I’d hate to think I’ve traveled all the way into my inner depths just to find a Cuckoo in a hot tub.... I like to think that I take the best of what psychiatry has to offer and give to my clients what they need. Now, then, where were we? “Diet.” Ah, yes. You were going to define that word for me. Well, maybe to ordinary people, “diet” is just another word in the English language, having one or two meanings, the primary denotative being, “to cause to take food” as a verb, and “food or drink regularly provided or consumed” as a noun. Then there is that lesser denotative meaning, a dieter’s term, which has to do with eating by prescribed rules established by doctors, nutritionists, families, peers, frie...

The author, Freshman year (age 14) Beatle haircut ___________________ 36-24-36. When I was just coming of age – about age 12 – The Aspirant Perfect Figure consisted of hourglass dimensions, the Jayne Mansfield (40-21-35) and the Marilyn Monroe (36-24-34) configurations. 36-24-36 was considered the gold standard, The Perfect Figure – never mind that few women ever reach those exact numbers. As I was bursting into bloom, it seemed that my body could be well on its way to achieving near perfection. I was slightly bigger than perfection, more like 38-27-40, but with some dieting – by now I was a veteran of the dieting wars – I could do it! My grandmother Mo pooh poohed my 36-24-36 goal: “You’re a big-boned girl! You’ll never be a Marilyn Monroe.” Actually, I wasn’t big-boned at all back then, and I’m not now; even when my weight is up, I enjoy skinny wrists and ankles. When you can find it, a small skeletal frame. In my fat days, whenever someone commented on my ski...

The author, age 15, and her grandmother Mo _______________________ After my grandmother Mo died, I inherited her diaries, sporadic histories of her life, varying from when she was a teenager to her golden years. What I discovered surprised me: even in her late 70’s and early 80’s, Mo was obsessed with her weight. She weighed herself daily and recorded the number, typically around 140, perhaps slightly chunky for her 5-foot height. If she lost weight or remained the same, she had a good day, but if she gained, her day was shot – and she was miserable and complained bitterly in her diary and planned starvation strategies for that day to shed it. Sound familiar? At first, I was surprised because I never thought of Mo as being fat or even fat-obsessive – it seemed to me that her weight never varied. Sure, when she was younger, she was slimmer than when I knew her, but wasn’t that the natural order of the world? After all, she bore and raised four children and was raising...

The author, age 16 ______________________ “Jeffer the Heifer.” – An early childhood nickname bestowed upon me by a mean boy, who happened to be my cousin. On some level, being dubbed as a heifer made a strange sort of sense, for I had endured a years-long adversarial relationship with this junior lunkhead. I expected to be bullied by him; the adults in the room thought the boy was kind of cute and clever, insisting that I was just a thin-skinned whiner who wouldn’t stand up for herself. I was never going to have the support of my family, so for most of my childhood I just sucked it up and avoided this person whenever possible. Never mind that the term “heifer” was wildly imprecise because I wasn’t terribly overweight, perhaps a bit chunky. Big deal. But even if I had been morbidly obese, it would have been cruel to allow this boy to bully me. I now understand that the adults around me were wrong to allow and even encourage this boy to make my life miserable, tha...