Fat Chance

“‘Money doesn’t mean that much to me. It doesn’t buy spiritual fulfillment. It’s something that you barter with. It has no intrinsic worth.’” He laughs out loud. “I’m going to use that on my landlord when he asks for the rent,” he says, deadpan. “‘It has no intrinsic worth.’”

For some reason my skin is starting to prickle. “Exactly who are you talking about?”

“The guy from that TV show…that hustler astronaut from The High Life.”

I slow my pace. “What?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Gelled hair, what’s his name?”

“Mike Taylor?”

“Yeah.”

I’ve fallen out of step with him now, dragging my feet. “Would you mind if I took a rain check on dessert?”

“You okay? You’re lookin’ a little pale.”

“I’m fine…it’s just been a really long day, and suddenly it’s all hitting me.”

Later on, I sit back and go over my phone messages. Shortly after I started the column, my phone started ringing with offers to do TV. Initially, I ducked them. How would it feel to be in front of the TV camera? I had this frightening scenario in my head: I was in an electronics store and everywhere I looked I saw my full face on all the screens of the demo models. Twenty different Maggies, starting with a ten-inch screen, graduating up to one the size of the eight-story Sony Imax screen, all in different gradations of harsh, artificial color. A too-red me, a pink-and-fuchsia me, a yellow-green me, a harsh black-and-white version, all color leached out. A flat-screened Maggie, a fat-screened Maggie. A United Nations of Maggie O’Learys. A fun-house house of horror come to life. Halloween. The vision makes me cringe.

Then there’s the business of speaking my mind without the safety net of print. Would I start to stutter and stammer? Could happen. There was no delete key on a live TV show, and I wasn’t used to expressing myself in sound bites. It was safe to work behind a computer screen. But ultimately, what it came down to was that I was never one to retreat in the face of a challenge…so…

First stop on the AM with Susie show is makeup. They redden my cheeks, add more lipstick to return the color that the lights wash out, then dust me with a giant powder brush to cut the shine. I’m ushered into the studio, and seated in front of the audience. The camera rolls up, the eyes of America are on me, and I feel as though the spotlight will imbue my words with greater meaning. I envision viewers alone in their kitchens or bedrooms, sipping coffee and eating coffee cake. They stop in the middle of paying bills or maybe cleaning the sink, hoping to come away with some moral or inspiration that will elevate them from the state of feeling disembodied, alienated, in perpetual despair about their weight and their lot in life. The effect I can have on TV dwarfs anything I can offer in print.

Susie cross-examines me. In a nice way.

“As America’s antidieting guru, Maggie, tell us a little about your own struggle. Was being overweight an issue for you all your life?”

“Well, I got my workouts in the family bakery in Prospect Park, instead of the playground, as a child,” I say, evoking sympathetic smiles from the audience. “I blame my weight problems as a kid on after-school snacks of hot cross buns, crullers and scones instead of carrot sticks and celery. And then, rather than climbing monkey bars and getting real exercise, I rolled dough in my parents’ bakery. Arts and crafts was decorating cookies with colored frosting and rainbow sprinkles, then gobbling up my jewels.”

“Didn’t your parents see what was happening?”

“In those days, feeding your kids was a way of showing you could love and provide.”

“So they were blind to what food had become to you?”

I weigh that for a moment. “Let’s say their gift was disproportionate. When you take a vitamin in the recommended dose, it keeps you healthy. Overdose, and it can be lethal.”

The discussion opens up to the audience, with no time to describe how I continued to overeat as I grew up. In my teens, I got my just desserts—Saturday nights in my room staring at rock-star posters on the walls, and listening to a blaring boom box while entwined in marathon confessional conversations on my pink princess telephone with desperate girlfriends. The secondhand stationary bike that my parents bought me soon became invisible, slipcovered with rejected clothes. If only abandoned exercise equipment could speak.

I was incarcerated in my room under self-imposed house arrest. Everyone else was out on the weekends, at movies, parties or concerts, and I was a prisoner of both my body and the four walls. One night, after going to a dance with my best friend Rhoda, wearing too much makeup and high platform shoes, we ended up in a back booth of Tony’s Pizza parlor at eleven o’clock. There sat Rhoda, black eyeliner melting, sipping Diet Coke and reaching for a third slice of pepperoni pizza. She smirked.

“At least it doesn’t walk away from you.”

It didn’t. Food was the gift that kept on giving.

To make things worse, my parents lightly brushed aside my preoccupation with my weight like crumbs on the counter, seemingly unaware of the pain and disappointment of growing up invisible to boys.

“Just use a little willpower,” my mother would say. “Learn to control yourself.”

Not my sister Kelly’s problem. Like our father, she could eat anything she wanted, and never gain. But I took after my mother. Our bodies followed some Manifest Destiny theory, expanding beyond appropriate borders and nothing could be done about it. Once the fat cells developed during early childhood, the number stayed constant for life. All that diet could do was shrink them down.

“Have you always been at war with your body?” Susie asks after a commercial.

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t wending my way through cycles of gorging, deprivation, self-punishment, anger, resentment and rebellion, all of it siphoning off feelings of self-worth.”

Susie turns to the audience for reactions, and a teenage girl in tight jeans with short wavy hair stands.

“I was chubby, as my mom put it, in elementary school and my body made me feel like I was a living sin.” She pauses, taking a breath, then stares into the camera.

“I’m four-nine and I weigh 142 pounds. I feel suffocated, trapped in a dark hole, hopeless.” She looks out beyond the audience. “At first I isolated myself from everybody and all I did was eat, then at the age of thirteen, everything changed.”

“What happened?” Susie asks.

“I became anorexic. I was so paranoid about my unhappiness, I went on for two years being like that. It got to the point where if I had more than thirty calories a day, I would literally hurt myself.” She pushes up the sleeve of a baggy gray sweatshirt to reveal an arm disfigured by the rubbery red scars. “I am a cutter.”

There is stunned silence in the audience. Susie says nothing, as though participating in a moment of respectful observance.

“I know that wasn’t easy,” she says finally. “Thank you.” Thunderous applause rings out, then she turns back to me. “At what point did your thinking change?”

“Staring down at the scale one day. The numbers hadn’t changed and I was ready to smash it to see if that would make it budge. Maybe it was broken. I wanted to pick it up and see, the way you check the phone to see if it’s working when the boy you’re in love with doesn’t call. But then it struck me that there was another option. I could triumph over that meaningless rectangle of steel that I had inveighed with so much of my self-worth by ignoring it and taking back charge of my life. Instead of wallowing in embarrassment and self-hatred, I would take my liability and flaunt it. It was time to fight back against the western world’s prejudice toward a condition that most people couldn’t change. From then on, I refused to dress like a mourner in black to look thinner. I opted for hot pink, chartreuse. I didn’t care if it had horizontal stripes and made my waistline as wide as the equator. I’d go over the top. ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,’ as Mae West said. Diets were a sham, biology was destiny, so I ran with it.”

“What did you do?”

“Aside from shopping sprees in plus-size stores where things actually fit, I turned my attention to my soul. It was time to get in touch with who I really was because everything inside of me that was real and vulnerable had been buried. I started going to Overeaters Anonymous where they began each session by holding hands and saying a prayer: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference.’”

“The same prayer that AA uses,” Susie says.

“Yes. And that environment made me realize how much I needed spirituality in my life because I had become so closed off to love and meaning outside of myself. I was turning to a higher power for the love, strength and generosity that I couldn’t find in myself anymore. Until then, I was locked in a one-dimensional life that was consumed with what I weighed and ate, not who I was or could become.”

There are murmurs of agreement from the audience.

“I had lost my place in the universe. Everything in my life was out of proportion.” In the eye of the camera, it all comes back to me. The hot TV lights shine down on me like heavenly beacons there to illuminate the truth, and I’m sweating as if I’m arriving at some religious epiphany. The studio is silent.

“Night after night, I sat in a windowless basement of an East Side church where compulsive eaters shared their stories. One night a withdrawn teenager told of being afraid to fall asleep at night, staying up listening for the sound of her abusive father’s footsteps approaching her room. Strawberry ice-cream sundaes in the kitchen after school were the only thing that made her feel good, and forget his touch, at least for a while.

“A bearded man, very overweight, spoke of atrocities in Vietnam. He had nightmares of seeing the bullet that ripped through his buddy’s chest, and getting there too late to save him. Eating was his escape from the guilt he had over his own survival. Others described stultifying days filled with nursing aging, bedridden parents; facing job loss; empty existence after retirement; the death of a spouse, all tales offering pinholes of light into their intimate worlds of grief and despair. So many people felt orphaned, split off from a world where everyone else seemed to be living purposeful, fulfilling lives.

“Eating filled them all with comfort and satisfaction, but like a euphoric drug, once the high wore off, it left them more despondent than when they started. Watching these people reveal themselves helped me. So did the idea of living life one day at a time, and drawing strength from this community.”

A Clairol commercial prevents me from talking about how science writing connected me to the outside world in a more concrete, expansive way, and how the column and my like-minded thinking with Wharton later propelled me, Maggie O’Leary from Brooklyn, New York, to cult celebrity. Back in the eye of the camera I end by telling viewers:

“Eat to appetite instead of eating to extreme. I’m not saying don’t lose weight if you want to, but I think you should do it without making your life miserable and impossible and unfortunately that’s what very restrictive regimens do. And if you choose to remain at a weight that America deems ‘fat,’ well, that’s okay too if you’re okay with it because in the long run it just might be better than cycling over and over.

“What I hate to see are people subsisting on diet foods that they hate. Food is a source of pleasure, and we should enjoy it. I’m not saying that many of us don’t have terribly serious food issues—it would be disrespectful to be glib about it. There are suicide eaters out there, and they need therapy, not chocolate Kisses.”

“And, Maggie, let’s talk about your column,” Susie says. “Isn’t ‘Fat Chance’ really a rallying cry for women all over America? Isn’t it really about a lot more than the issue of fat?” As I nod, she goes on.