With warmth, wit, and not a trace of self-pity" (Entertainment Weekly), Betsy Lerner details her twenty-year struggle with depression and compulsive eating in Food and Loathing, a book that dares to expose the insidious nature of women's secret life with food.

"Alternating between hilarious and heartbreaking" (People), Food and Loathing gives voice to one of the last taboo subjects and greatest stigmas of our time: being overweight. Lerner's revelations on the cult of thinness — from the dreaded weigh-in at junior high gym class to the effects of inhaling Pepperidge Farm Goldfish at Olympic speeds — are universally resonant, as is her belief that this is one battle no one should fight alone.

Essential reading for anyone who has ever wielded a fork in despair or calculated her self-worth on the morning scale, "Lerner's lament is a triumph" (Publishers Weekly).

Chapter 1

It is 1972. I am twelve years old. It is the first day of sixth grade, and I am standing in the girls' gymnasium waiting to be weighed. My last name begins with L, so I am exactly in the middle of the line. The thinnest girl in class stands directly in front of me. At the front of the line, our gym teacher, Miss Match, with her butch haircut, slim boy hips, and two-pack-a-day gravelly voice, barks out our names. Looming beside her is that gray piece of metal: the scale. Miss Match weighs each girl and calls out the number for her assistant coach to record on her clipboard. Her assistant jots the numbers with her ballpoint pen: 100, 105, 88, 120. The line moves forward and I begin to sweat. The girl ahead of me has arms and legs like twigs. Her thighs swim inside her gym shorts. She is blond and has huge, soulful eyes. In seventh grade she will become my best friend, but for now she is this skinny thing and I hate her. Three girls behind is my current best friend, Anna Mankowicz, who has shot up over the last year to a sinewy five foot six. She towers over us and has bona fide breasts. I also know that she has hair down there. I love her, but I am also afraid of her, of her recent developments. Boys like her.

A few girls behind Anna is Wanda Mueller. She is not my friend or anyone else's. The reason is obvious: she's the fattest girl in the class. She's really, really big. Tall and fat. She usually wears skirts, and her legs look like telephone poles that dead-end at her sensible brown shoes. Her cheeks flush quickly and are often either firing up or fading out. For me, she is the safety net. She's the one everyone picks on, the one who gets ostracized. She protects me from the same fate.

Even at age twelve, I have developed an elaborate set of coping mechanisms to keep people from teasing me. They include being funny and being nice and behaving in such a fashion that everyone in the world will like me. Maintaining this facade takes a great deal of energy, since I am filled with self-loathing and a good dollop of misanthropy. Still, I am able to hide my outsized feelings because the desire to be liked and not ridiculed is stronger than all the hatred I can conjure. I have always been able to befriend my deepest enemy and thus keep him — or her — from hurting me. In the sixth grade, hurting people took the form of name-calling: fag, fairy, wimp, fat. When I read a purloined copy of The Godfather that was making the rounds through our sixth-grade class, mostly for the sex scenes, I found instead Vito Corleone's famous line, "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer." I kept his counsel, for I knew exactly what he meant. By the time I reached the sixth grade, I couldn't stand most of my closest friends.

* * *

The line moves up. I hate the way my gym shorts cling to my skin. It's a one-piece rayon suit, and its goal in life is to cling and ride up my ass. The line continues. I start to panic. I tell myself, I'm not Wanda Mueller. At least I'm not Wanda. Then I feel guilty. I think about lunch and how my mother always packs the same thing: an egg salad or tuna fish sandwich and a piece of fruit. Never a cookie or a sweet. No little bags of potato chips or Fritos. Too fattening. I hate Miss Match. She's been known to make remarks about weight, and though she's never directed one at me, I live in terror that she might. The skinny flower in front of me steps up to the scale. Match slides the balance to the left, lower and lower. Finally, she calls out, "seventy-eight." That's what I weighed in the third grade, for Chrissake.

My face is grim as I step up. I watch Miss Match's knuckly fingers work the balance toward the upper end of the scale in five-pound increments. It takes forever. This slow torture, I am certain, is deliberate. On that day of my twelfth year, I weighed 134. I was five feet tall. It was too much. What I would give to see that number again.

* * *

After school, and much cajoling, Anna Mankowicz's mother agrees to take us to Dunkin' Donuts as a back-to-school treat. We live in a suburb of New Haven and have to drive the fifteen or so minutes into town, down Whalley Avenue, a main thoroughfare that is home to most of my favorite fast-food chains. I sit in the back seat with Anna while her two younger brothers maul each other in the way-back of the station wagon. Anna's brothers are big guys, destined to play all manner of contact sports. Anna's mother is petite. She secures her frosted hair beneath a velvet navy blue hair band. She wears culottes and a polo shirt and always looks as if she is coming off the golf course triumphant after sinking a difficult putt. I am afraid of her, though I have no reason to be. I sense that she can be mean.

At the doughnut counter, Anna and I ask for our usual: glazed. The boys scarf down crullers. Mrs. Mankowicz sips at her black coffee. We are happily eating our doughnuts when the youngest, a strapping boy nearly six feet tall, announces he wants another. His brother chimes in that he does, too, and Anna follows suit. I keep silent, not because I don't want another — those glazed things are like air — but because I am afraid the request might appear rude. After all, I am not a member of the family. I know Mrs. Mankowicz is going to treat me, but I am anxious about presuming the lengths of her generosity. Too, my silence shelters a deeper fear: I am afraid of looking like a pig. I already feel self-conscious next to my svelte friend, my thighs sticking to the pink vinyl stool.

"Boys, you may choose another doughnut," Mrs. Mankowicz begins, "but Anna, I don't want you eating another. You've got a figure to watch."

I sit there frozen. I can't believe my ears. For all the hinting and prompting and gesturing and glancing my mother does to convey her disapproval of my eating too much, she has never once come out and said "You can't eat that." She has never denied me a bite. I know that she wishes I would lose weight, disapproves when I take seconds or order something fattening at a restaurant, but she never uses her authority as my mother to limit my food intake.

"Betsy, would you like another?" Mrs. Mankowicz smiles at me, her hot pink lipstick now faded, imprinted instead on the lip of the mug before her.

I know she is being polite. But her words cut through me. If I take the doughnut, then I am admitting defeat. After all, doesn't her offer imply that my figure is beyond watching? Already too chubby, I might as well pile it on. Or I could decline the doughnut and act as if I am full. (Full? There aren't enough doughnuts in the state of Connecticut!) Mrs. Mankowicz's dark eyes are on me, waiting for my response, seeming to know that I want to eat everything in sight. I look into her eyes, trying not to cry and trying to understand if she is being cruel or if I am being too sensitive, as I am usually charged.

I am also trying to maintain a shred of dignity in front of my best friend and her two brothers, who seem oblivious to my dilemma. Mrs. Mankowicz is waiting. It is a simple question: Do I or do I not want another doughnut? Reinterpreted, however, through the web of self-loathing known as my inner life, it sounds more like: Do you want to die by lethal injection or the electric chair?

By now the boys have nearly finished their seconds. I want to kill Anna's mother. I want to rip every pink thing from this shit-box of a doughnut shop and smear it with chocolate custard. I want to scream in her tight little face: You know I want another doughnut, you fucking bitch. But more than anything, I want to race home to my mother and lambaste her for letting me feed my face. I want her to control me the way Mrs. Mankowicz controls Anna, so I can be beautiful and slim. I want to throttle my mother for letting this happen to me. But then I pull myself together. I tell myself that I am happy I have my mother and not this controlling bitch. I am happy that my mother doesn't tell me what to eat. I am happy because I am my own person and I will deal with my weight in my own way. Who would want a mother like that, anyway?

"No, thank you," I say. "I'm not hungry."

* * *

The following year, Anna went to private school and I attended public school in our suburb. We continued to see each other at our temple for the final year of Hebrew school classes, which would culminate in our being bas mitzvahed. Our circle hated Hebrew school and felt that the required two afternoons a week were a waste of time. In our religious ennui, we regularly gathered in the woods behind the school to play truth or dare and smoke cigarettes.

The game required players to either make good on a dare or answer any question truthfully. The questions we asked were aimed to humiliate and were usually about sex, attempting to determine how much experience each of us had had. Since we were all completely inexperienced, the game became one of bluffing. Once Reva, the skinny girl from gym class, was asked if she swallowed or spit it out. After searching our faces for a clue, she blurted: "Spit what out?" The boys broke up in guffaws. And when my friend looked at me, I made a superior, sorry face as if I knew the answer.

It all sounds innocent enough, but as we pushed each other further and further, waiting to see who would crack, it became an unrelenting game of chicken. Uptight about my body and convinced that my inexperience with boys was related, I found the game agonizing. But beyond the social politics of our little game, something else was becoming clear: all the boys were in love with Anna. And the alpha male of our group, Petey Marks, was clearly ready to claim her for his own.

I watched all this happen with the silent eye of the documentarian. Anna's marvelous neck tilting backward as she laughed too hard at his jokes. Petey lighting two cigarettes in his mouth and handing one off to her. How I longed for him to lift a cigarette from his mouth and hand it to me. Instead, when I asked him for a light, he'd whip his lighter in my direction with a dismissive flick. Light it yourself. I marveled at the sinew behind Anna's knees and the long, olive-colored thighs that disappeared into her cotton shorts. How easily she could pop up from sitting cross-legged, all in one motion, while I struggled to haul myself up. In class I coveted the way she double-crossed her legs beneath her desk, while I could barely cross one chubby thigh over the other.

In the woods, I watched Anna and Petey go from teasing to wrestling to making out. I watched how a girl would captivate a guy and he would circle his wagons around her. To me, she denied even liking him, afraid she would hurt me. But her protection was too close to condescension, or worse, pity. I swore from that time forward I would never let a girlfriend think I cared for a moment when she canceled plans with me and waltzed off with her new beau. As for Anna, deny it as she might, I knew her tongue and mouth had already found his, and I knew that it was only a matter of time till they went further.

Had it been only a year earlier when Anna played make-out with me? When she would pounce on me as we watched our favorite soap opera, General Hospital, pretending to be Luke and Laura, and kiss me wildly with her hand sealed over my mouth, her spacious hips grinding into mine. Though we were always fully dressed, I didn't play these make-out games with anyone else, and I felt an illicit thrill of collusion. But now, behind B'nai Jacob, I watched my best friend disappear deeper into the woods, and I knew I had lost her forever. By thirteen I considered myself something of an expert on human behavior, and I understood that in the poker game of life, boyfriend trumps best friend.

* * *

In junior high I encountered a new paradigm for thinking about myself, in the form of a laminated chart that our science teacher pulled out — a diagram outlining the three body types: ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph. Here it comes, I thought. We're going to have to identify ourselves by body type, and I am going to be standing alone with Wanda Mueller and the one fat boy in our class. I glanced at Wanda a few rows behind and was sickened to see her clotted cheeks.

Hitting the chart with her rubber-tipped pointer, the science teacher recited a little trick to remember the types: the ectomorph eats to live, the mesomorph eats and lives, and the endomorph lives to eat. This information hit me with a number of terrifying simultaneous thoughts: Did I live to eat? Was the act of stuffing my face my raison d'être? I had already developed some sneak-eating habits, and I was highly aware of how much everyone else was eating. By now the world of food had been precisely divided into two camps: the dietetic and the forbidden. Was it possible that the act of filling my mouth was the only thing that brought me real pleasure? What was I feeling when I watched Petey and Anna's lips seal? Of all those beautiful best friends, first Anna, then Reva, would I love any as well as my most reliable and trusted friend, food?

When puberty kicked in and the rest of the known world at Amity Junior High paired off, I protected myself by befriending all the boys who weren't interested in dating me. If I had a slight crush on a fellow, I'd immediately fix him up with a prettier, thinner girl, then privately bemoan my outcast state. I prided myself on being the only girl allowed in the boy's poker game in study hall. Being friends with the coolest guys offered some protection, some consolation, though I would much rather have held hands than dealt them.

To all outward appearances, I was a bright girl who got excellent grades. I made people laugh. I was good at lots of creative things, like making pottery, and I was starting to write poems. I had lots of friends. I was funny, I was generous, I was reliable. Though I didn't know it at the time, I was becoming your standard-issue fat friend.

I didn't really know how I looked. In part, I kept my body hidden even from myself, adopting the standard garb of adolescent angst: fatigues, flannel shirts, sneakers without socks. I'd wear batik or Indian-print wraparound skirts and clogs when I had to get dressed up. I kept my hair long, past my shoulders, and never pulled it back, as my mother would have liked. But I relied on more than loose clothes and hair to camouflage my weight. I used every fiber of my personality to keep a person from thinking I was fat. When I looked in the mirror I saw that my face was pudgy, no cheekbones in evidence. I had hazel eyes, a small nose from my father's side, and thick, wavy, brown hair. I wasn't happy with my reflection, yet I suspected that if I ever lost weight, boys might actually consider me pretty.

Only one thing was holding me back. As my mother would occasionally croon, "If you were thin, you'd be perfect." She meant it as a compliment; the sad truth is, I believed it. I really thought the only thing between me and perfection was thirty pounds.

* * *

My mother was neither heavy nor thin, and like most women, she constantly monitored her waistline. She dressed to hide problem areas rather than show off, preferring tailored clothes to frills, flannel pajamas to silky nightgowns, sensible, well-fitting pumps to anything strappy and sexy. My mom didn't have great gams or a fabulous bottom, and if she had she probably wouldn't have emphasized them, as many women do. It simply wasn't her style to call attention to herself.

I would scrutinize her as she performed her rituals of hair and makeup, the routine of creams and powders, liners and lipsticks. But my mother never seemed to take any pleasure in getting dressed up. She put on makeup as if following a recipe. She was always too rough, rubbing in foundation as if she wanted to erase her own cheek, nearly smacking herself with the powder puff. Her hair took the worst beating. She would whack the brush at the side of her head to shape her short, tight curls into a reasonable helmet.

My mother believed she was plain, but she considered herself an expert at "maximizing her looks." It was she who tutored me in the art of camouflage. She knew which styles were slenderizing and lengthening. She knew exactly how long a hem or sleeve should be, what should be tucked in, what tucked out. She knew about belts and bags and matching accessories. My mother insisted that certain types of clothes — turtlenecks, double-breasted jackets, pleats — were disastrous for me. She liked a short jacket on me; I preferred long. And she liked bright, strong colors, which became a sore point later, when I left home for college in New York City, a town that basically required only one thing of you: that you wear black.

My mother tried desperately to get me to wear "good" clothes, sporty combinations. I can still see the frightened faces of the saleswomen, whose initially hopeful and helpful demeanor shrank in the face of my obstinacy. My mother was always extremely solicitous of these women, whose pancake makeup came to an abrupt end in a masklike line at their jaw, whose pill-y cardigans smelled of mothballs, whose bifocals hung from a strand of shiny beads like a necklace, resting on their bosom shelves.

"Excuse me," she'd say to one of these women. "Can you show us the latest styles?"

Copyright © 2003 by Betsy Lerner

Tags: Eating Disorder, Diets and Weight Loss

About the Author

Betsy Lerner holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, and was selected as one of PEN's Emerging Writers in 1987. She is the author of The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.