‘Moose’ details hardship of being an overweight kid

“You let yourself go, is what you did.” People who say this should get their eyes gouged out with a carrot. They’re the very same people who believe most overweight individuals are fat because they’re miserable. “You’re trying to suffocate your emotions, eating from stress and out of depression, because you cannot stand your life.” They believe when a person is trim it’s because they’re content. In my case, it was just the opposite.

The times in my life when I’ve been my thinnest, I’ve been a walking psycho wreck. Forget the fact that I was basically starving myself; skinny was usually due to some kind of loss. Death. Rejection. Divorce.

When I was married to a man whom I now refer to as The Wasband, I slipped into a cozy life. For the first year and a half of our marriage I remained quite slim at 123 pounds. But then I became more domestic, trying to please him with fresh baked goods and his food favorites. Miniature cheesecake brownie bites. We gained weight, sharing food and the guilt of overeating it, together. He baked me a carrot cake from scratch. I even checked the garbage for carrot shavings in disbelief. I was impressed and knew he loved me. I licked cream cheese frosting from his finger.

And then one day, when I was probably up twenty-­five pounds since being married, he said to me, “I’m not as attracted to you as I once was.”

You’re a real shit, I would have thought if I were . . . I don’t know, sane! But I’m sure I asked for it. Yeah, you read that right. I bet I wouldn’t let up until he admitted it. That’s the answer I was looking for, and I wasn’t going to stop until he gave it to me. You know how you suspect something, but until the person actually admits it, it isn’t completely true? I was secretly hoping he’d never admit it, preferring instead to believe that maybe I was just sensitive; maybe I wasn’t as fat as I thought. Or even if I was, somewhere inside I wished it wouldn’t make a difference, despite knowing men are visual. Because hopefully he wouldn’t see me as fat or thin; he’d see me as me. Stephanie. His wife, the woman with whom he chose to spend the rest of his life.

I went three days without articulating a word to him, a habit I’d perfected since my camp days with Adam. Despite his pleading e-mails, attempts to convince me what he’d said was taken out of context, that he’d love me no matter what I weighed, I didn’t believe him. I was wounded and felt it so deep in my chest that I clutched at it, reminding myself to breathe. And then my hurt turned toward anger. That’s when I went on a hate diet.

Ah, the Hate Diet.

I realized its effectiveness while filling out a personal progress journal, one of those fill-­in-­the-­blanks self-­help journals, Mad Libs for the manic. I purchased it the afternoon following his admission. Not as attracted, I kept repeating to myself. I hid away in the bookstore, sipping water in the upstairs café. I borrowed a pen and did some of the exercises within.

In a short paragraph, the journal instructed me to “identify one person in your everyday life who is taking positive steps to be healthy and control his or her weight.” Oprah was first on my list—not exactly in my everyday life, but certainly a person who’d broadcast her weight- loss successes. I paused, biting my inner lip in thought. Then I scrawled the name of a woman from work who was quite possibly anorexic. As far as I could tell, the only calories she consumed came from the milk in her coffee. And as fucked up as it is, there she was in blue ink on my role model list. I added a childhood friend I’d heard lost a lot of weight. Then Michelle, another coworker. And then the list changed.

I scribbled the name of an ex-­boyfriend who once said, “You’re bigger than the girls I usually date.” Another who when we returned from winter break in college had said, “Well, someone’s mother fed her well.” I added the name of ex-­friends, including the slurs I could remember. “Jordan,” I wrote, “and the case of the fat pants.” I added my motherf____r-­in-­law, and then my husband.

I’d get thin and stylish and look better than ever, and my motivation was never “so he’ll love me more.” It was “so the ass-­hat will regret ever uttering those words.” Healthy marriage, I know. That’s a different book.

It was just as it had been at camp all those years ago. I was still motivated by hate. Take that, judgmental windbag. I’m thin. I suppose it’s along the same lines as “the best revenge is being deliriously happy.” My best revenge was being thin. Because you can’t really see happy; people can fake that. You can’t fake thin.

So I would begin, as we all do, a diet. A crash and burn bitch of a diet. But how? What would work this time? Hadn’t anything I’d learned from Fran or fat camp prepared me for this? No, there had to be something easier.

I resolved to follow the advice in the journal and ask the thin people on my list how they did it. Oprah had personal trainers and private chefs and wasn’t, if you can believe it, returning my phone calls. I hadn’t actually seen the childhood friend on my list, so it would be quite awkward to phone her out of the blue. “Hey, it’s been forever, but I heard you’re no longer a tub. What’s your secret to staying motivated?” I decided to ask my waif coworker how she did it.

“Don’t do anything that makes you sweat,” she confided, quite eager to divulge her secrets. “It’ll make you too hungry. Do yoga if you have to, but not the hot kind. And don’t keep any food in the house. Just turkey. That’s it. And drink lots of coffee,” Waif Worker said, raising a fresh cup of it.

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