A Weighty Matter - Go Figure - Part 1

I can't remember a day since my mid-teens when I wasn't worried about the weight or size or shape of my body.  Prepubescent, I had that awkward pre-teen girl's body - a kind of lumpy roundness that almost looked fat.  My mother Penny was on a diet her entire adult life.  Always. On. A. Diet.  She gave birth to me when she was 21 and then in rapid succession had two more children so that by the time she was 24, she was a mother of three and diagnosed with diabetes.  She never got rid of the baby weight in between pregnancies and she "lost her figure", as the old saying goes.

When I was six, my dad sent Penny to her first "Fat Farm" (as my dad called it) at Duke University Medical Center.  She packed up and was gone for two or three months. A wonderful, elderly woman, Mrs. Freeland, came to live with us.  She took care of me and my sisters, my dad worked while my mom was in search of her health and her figure.  From what I remember and the stories I heard and pictures I saw, the fat farm seemed to be more a huge party than anything else.  The diet was better known as the Duke University Rice Diet.  You were fed a couple of cups of white rice each day with a few veggies and fruit thrown in for color and the doctors made you walk everywhere.

Once, my sisters and went to spend a weekend with my mom at the Fat Farm.  All the "patients" stayed in a motel near the medical center.  I remember a big kidney-shaped swimming pool, a whole bunch of poolside drinking with Johnny Mathis playing on the record player or radio incessantly - it all felt very glamorous - to this day, my sisters and I still have a fondness for Johnny Mathis.  Lorne Greene, of Bonanza fame, was at the fat farm too and he and my mom became friends.  I still have an autographed photo of Lorne with a lovely note to me and a 45 record of one of his hit singles - who knew Lorne had a singing career?  Make your own judgements, people!  Every day, the patients would walk to the "Rice House", eat their rice breakfast,  walk home, walk back, eat lunch rice, walk back to the motel, walk back to the Rice House, eat rice dinner, walk back and proceed to spend the rest of the night playing duplicate bridge and drinking.  I have deduced the only reason they lost any weight at all was all the walking and the starvation diet they were on.  I think my mom and the other "patients" stayed smashed for three months.

My mom made the front page of the Durham newspaper once.  She sent us a copy.  She was beautiful in the photo - she had lost a lot of weight and it must have been autumn - she was dressed in a long, dark purple leather trench coat that belted at the waist, she had on matching sunglasses with dark purple frame and lenses, her hair was done up with a "fall" and she was wearing uber-cool boots.  That outfit would be hip today and I'd give anything for that leather coat. Using her as the Rice Diet fat farm model of success, the article went into the details of her daily regimen - the walking, the food, the top notch medical care.  The article mentioned nothing about the copious amounts of vodka and grapefruits consumed by the pool.  Alcohol consumption be damned, she still came home three months later slim, gorgeous and rested.

But not happy.  Never really happy.  The closest representation of my mother I can come up with in pop culture is Betty Draper from Mad Men - in a bad marriage, seethingly unhappy, perpetually discontent, patently selfish and always looking for something more.  She was stuck in that time before women were allowed to have different choices or roles and she resented it.  In due course, the weight returned and she returned to the fat farm the following year.  It became our little dysfunctional family ritual for about three years.

We called it the "fat farm" because that's what my dad called it.  It was a colloquialism that wasn't considered offensive at the time, but I still felt some shame - I don't recall telling anyone that my mother was at the quote-unquote fat farm.  In fact, I don't remember ever telling anyone that she was gone.  We all just pretended that this was a normal thing that all families do.  I learned to keep secrets at a very young age.

My mother's battle with her weight never ended.  Her diets were insane.  It was usually something really horrible like 2 cooked hot dogs, no buns and sliced tomatoes or cottage cheese.  I don't know why she ate those particular foods, even today it's horrible to remember. But along with the hot dogs were the vodka grapefruits and they must have made her life the diet tolerable.  There I was, a mother in and out of the fat farm and a father who was sure to let you know if he thought you had gained even the tiniest amount of weight.  You can see where this is going, right?  I remember my first diet was my junior year of high school.  I don't know why I decided I was fat. I was  5'8" and 132 pounds.  I was athletic and fit but when I looked in the mirror I didn't see that.  I saw FAT.  I went down to 125 pretty quickly by basically starving myself and in retrospect, I think it was more about the discipline - that I could do it if I chose to and that there was at least one thing in my life I could control.

When I arrived at Southwest Texas State University, I tried out for the dance team - the Strutters.  One of the first things you had to do at tryouts was get on a scale and be weighed in front of all the other girls.  By then, I was almost 5'9".  In front of 100 girls, none of whom I knew (I was a Virginia transplant, remember) I stepped on the scale.  The scale read 142 - a not unreasonable weight for someone of my height and bone structure.  I'd bet dimes to dollars that my body far was pretty low back then. Ms. Tidwell, our director, announced my weight to all the world, as she had every other girl's, and commanded that I be down to 132 by the time two-a-days were done. (Yes, like the football teams, the Strutters had their own two-a-days.) Thus began my first truly bad dieting experience.  For the next two weeks, I ate one small meal each day and took 4-6 ExLax every night before bed. It was horrible and without going into detail - use your imagination - I was under 130 at the end of that two week period.  It was an almost impossible weight for me to maintain, and I lived in fear of that damn scale - we weighed in every Friday before game day and if we were over our directed weight, we couldn't dance.

The thought that I wasn't thin enough coupled with the "stranger in strange land" mentality, decimated my self-confidence.  Being from Northern Virginia, I stuck out like a sore thumb in Texas.  I didn't know how to do my makeup or hair - it seemed to me that the other girls were successful beauty contest contestants and knew all the secrets - and they weren't sharing. They each were perfectly groomed and coiffed and they seemed to know each other regardless of their age or class.  Unfortunately for me, I arrived on campus in a pink metallic Cadillac Seville that my dad gave me stuffed with a wardrobe from Neiman Marcus and Saks.  They probably thought I was a pretentious Yankee and I was so shy and uncertain in this new world that I isolated.  I didn't have one friend on the dance team except my "big sister" but for reasons not important here, she was gone from school most of the year - so I was basically alone. My dance mates shunned me and it was crushing. I didn't understand Texas and I understood this group of girls even less.  I was an 18 year old pariah.  My dancing career was doomed and the next year, I would not be a Strutter. But by then, I had made friends, wonderful friends - women who are still in my life today.

In my junior year, I went from my dancing weight of 130 to 155.  I felt terribly fat. My roommate Alisa and I joined a gym. We were going to Puerto Vallarta for spring break and wanted to be thin.  Alisa brought home a new, amazing diet book - The Beverly Hills Diet by Judy Mazel and that diet rocked our world.  For the first ten days we ate pineapple, mango and papaya - that's it, I think.  A potato thrown in here and there.  Corn on the cob once in a while. A banana before bed. It was all about food "grouping".  No laxatives needed on this diet, trust me!  Alisa and I went from skinny bitches to super skinny bitches.  I wore a green knit string bikini in Puerto Vallarta - Alisa and I still talk about that bikini - but the overwhelming feeling I had on that trip was one of being uncomfortable in my body and still feeling fat.  This is how I felt at the thinnest, fittest time of my life. It was the beginning of  yo-yo dieting for me.

I was twenty years old and doing my own version of Penny's "fat farm" without even realizing it.

To be continued......