Daily Excerpt: The Optimistic Food Addict (Fisanick) - Lovely in My Bones
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Excerpt from The Optimistic Food Addict by Dr. Christina Fisanick.
Lovely in My Bones (part 1)
I remember well wanting to be the
woman Theodore Roethke knew. She was “lovely in her bones.” I am not sure that
I knew what he meant when I first encountered those lines. In fact, I think
back then, around fifth grade, I misunderstood entirely. Trained to understand
beauty and worth by the media and American culture from the moment my eyes
could see, I figured Roethke meant that this woman was physically
stunning—slender, sleek, and, well, skeletal. I wanted to be just like her. I
wanted to BE her. But even more, I wanted someone to feel that way about me, to
wax poetically over my face and form, but I believed that my body—fat, frumpy,
and flabby—would never give rise to such melodic praise.
Whether Roethke’s focus remained
solely on this woman’s physical form is debatable, but he never utters her
name. We never learn what she does, if she is a mother, a writer, an aviator.
We know nothing of her voice, her demeanor. He tells us only of her eternally
enchanting loveliness. In a poem so much about the body, the woman about which
it is written is disembodied—ethereally corporeal—“cast[ing] a shadow white as
stone.” Of course, the sexual suggestions throughout each verse further treat
her as an object to be viewed, to be lusted after, and to be laid. And at 11,
when my favorite poet’s words washed over me like a love letter from an unknown
admirer, I thought that was what I should want. I longed for the male gaze. In
it, I believed, was my worth as a woman. What other value could I possibly
possess?
After more than a decade of feast
and famine, puberty prohibited me from losing weight even during the latter part
of the cycle. Instead, at age 11, my weight soared as I gained 70 pounds in the
nine months following my first period. The difference between my fifth and
sixth grade school pictures is a frank tell all of how far my obsession with
food had come. My long, chestnut, curls had fallen softly on my orange sweater
and framed my still-slender face like feathers in fifth grade. Just a year
later, my neck has doubled in size and my breasts had too, bulging obviously
from beneath the purple and white cotton of my Pac-Man t-shirt.
It is easy to blame my expanding
waistline on puberty. After all, most girls seemed to gain weight during that
time, but looking back, I realize that the rounder my shape became, the more I
hated myself. The more I hated myself, the more I muted my feelings with my
drug of choice—food. I barely coped with the hormonal rush of early
adolescence, which was then worsened by the onset of Polycystic Ovarian
Syndrome, a metabolic endocrine disorder that causes weight gain, cystic acne,
head hair loss, facial hair growth, fatigue, missed periods, infertility, and a
host of other ‘unfeminine’ manifestations.
But
it wasn’t so much my reflection in the mirror that pushed me into my first
forays of “watching what I ate.” No, it was the way boys my age looked—or
didn’t look—at me. I was unappealing to them. I remember a ginger-haired boy I
loved making moo noises behind my back on the way out of school one afternoon.
I remember being too embarrassed to put on a swimsuit for our annual class
field trip to the local pool. I was 11! Body hatred had already become firmly
rooted in my thoughts, but it wasn’t until one early summer afternoon that I
turned to dieting to solve my unlovable problem. I had just returned from my
yearly physical, where I had learned that my weight had climbed to 137.5
pounds. The shame of that number fell heavily on my mind, but I didn’t resolve
to fix myself until my little brother, who I am certain did not have any idea
of the harm he was about to cause, got on his bike and went singing throughout
our neighborhood, “My sister weighs 137 and a half pounds!” The next day, I
started fasting.
I
had watched my mother and her sisters diet for years. With Richard Simmons’
Deal-A-Meal, TOPS, Weight Watchers, and a seemingly endless stream of schemes
to lose unwanted flesh. Damning words about their bodies rippled through their
conversations as often and openly as talk about the weather and good sales on
ground beef. Therefore, it was natural for me to turn to deprivation as a
source for transforming my body into something more desirable…to men.
And yet,
it never worked. Rice cakes, cabbage soup, running from dawn until dusk, Slim
Fast, and still, I remained fat and became fatter. The self-coercion would last
a few days before, what I thought was my willpower, would crumble, and I would
find myself elbow deep in a bag of Herr’s barbecued potato chips and gulping
down bologna sandwiches with mayo and onion one after another until the pound
of meat and the loaf of cheap white bread were gone.
My mother, already an
unsuspecting player in the yo-yo diet game, would admonish me for spending days
in the summer reading romance novels and eating bowl after bowl of her homemade
potato salad with a gallon of sweet tea. Her voice, which would call out from
the kitchen sink where she was watching me space out with my drug of choice,
was shrill and nearly convincing:
“Why
do you need all that food? You just had a bowl of that.”
“Can’t
you save some for later? For after dinner?”
“You
are just going to gain more and more weight by the time school starts in the
fall.”
I
could call her criticism cruel, and I did for years, but what I have learned is
that my mother was just as caught up in diet culture as most women were during
the 1980s, when the aerobicized body was all the rage. Even though she made it
clear that her diet tools—weight loss cards and special foods—were for her
only, her body contempt reinforced her words: “Don’t get fatter. Fat isn’t
pretty.”
As
I struggled to resist Little Debbie’s and Pepsi that summer, I also struggled
with understanding what it meant to now be a “woman.” It is not uncommon for
eating disorders and other psychological problems to develop at this pivotal
time in a girl’s life. The hormone upheaval and identity challenges are
overwhelming, even for the most grounded of young women. And I found myself,
more than ever before, turning to food to ease my pain and confusion, both of which were enhanced by misinformation and the
disruption caused when I discovered my story of origin.
Two years before, I had learned
that my stepfather wasn’t my biological father, a fact everyone but my angry
teen cousin Dominick thought was in my best interest, or at least my stepdad’s
best interest, to keep secret. I could lie and say that on some level I always
knew the truth, but in all honesty, I never had reason to wonder. We were both
overweight, with brown hair and brown eyes. His paternity seemed legitimate.
Once my
mother discovered that Dominick had told me the biggest of all family secrets,
she decided to tell me more about it. In an awkward conversation at the kitchen
table, with my grandmother and aunt present, she told me, “Your real dad lives
somewhere in Ohio.”
Two
years later, when she learned that my period had started, I was given another
cryptic talk. Both messages were delivered by the same person at the same
caramel colored, pressed board table, in the same too-hot trailer kitchen with
my shorts-clad legs sticking painfully to the vinyl seat of my chair. This time,
the message was even more confusing: “Now that you got your period, you have to
watch how you act around boys.”
I was too overwhelmed and afraid to ask further questions—even the most basic question of all: why? Instead, I went along with it, pretending that I didn’t know my brother and I had had different fathers and that I understood why getting my period had somehow changed my relationship to men and boys.
Read more posts about Christina and her book HERE.
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