Deborah Blumenthal - Fat Chance

Reggie, the mail carrier, empties a canvas sack of letters on my desk. “You really read all this crap?”

“It’s my bread and butter.”

From the day I started the column, the mail was my window on the world. Hard to imagine that it’s been only four years since giving birth both to the column and the realization that in losing—again—the war against fat I’ve fought all my life, nature has the upper hand. The size-sixteen rack was my destiny, and the only real choice I had was whether or not to accept it. But instead of looking at fat in terms of defeat, my publisher and I used it as a springboard to offer America a fresh take on obesity. As I made that quantum leap to fat acceptance, I’ve been crusading to carry overweight America with me. What I never imagined was that I would become not only a columnist but also a “Dear Abby” to the weight challenged.

Dear Maggie:

I’m twenty-five years old and fat. I’ve been trying to lose weight since I was six. I diet and diet, lose a few pounds, and then gain it all back. Everyone makes fun of me. My parents nag me all the time about controlling my eating, and it drives me insane. They say they’d stop if I just lost the weight, but I can’t. What should I do?

Women of all sizes, shapes, ages and temperaments now seek me out as a sounding board, shrink and diet counselor. But so do some censorious health experts who insist that I’m in perpetual denial, advising me to get my “fat head” out of the sand. Either way, the calls and letters never stop. Yes, I’m popular—at least with readers.

Popularity, of course, is a rare commodity for the overweight, and sympathy is, well, slim. We’re blamed for lacking willpower, and self-control. Few can fathom the intractability of the problem. Ironically, the overweight resent each other. One reader said:

Even though I’m heavy, I still feel that I can control myself and can lose weight if I want to. But other overweight people disgust me. I think that they’re just indulging themselves, and not showing any self-control.

There is no shortage of themes. Overweight infiltrates every part of one’s life, from bedroom to boardroom to the altar. But who said life was fair? Remember what the jury did to Jean Harris? No, she wasn’t fat, she was just mad. Okay, okay, so she killed a man, but you know, not so terrible—after all, he was a diet doctor. In some circles, women thought she deserved sainthood. Personally, I’m not against killing certain men. I doubt that there is any woman over thirty who hasn’t already come across at least one guy who deserves a toxic martini.

My phone rings nonstop, and even though I’m no longer on deadline, I try to avoid answering it. But where is my so-called secretary?

“Tamara? T A M A R A?” It’s futile.

“Maggie, my name is Robert Clancy. I’m an executive producer with Horizons Entertainment in Los Angeles.”

Ugh. “What can I do you for?”

“We’re starting production on a new blockbuster movie called Dangerous Lies. We’re all very excited about it. It’s going to be a very, very big film about a diet doctor in a weight-loss clinic who has to care for women obsessed with becoming thin…”

“Sorry, I can’t take the lead. I’ve already committed to playing Scarlett in the remake of Gone With the Wind….”

“Cute…but…the movie’s cast, Maggie. What we’d love to do is hire you as a consultant.”

“Pourquoi?”

“To coach our lead actor about the milieu of the overweight world and bring him up to speed on the mind-set of weight-obsessed women…”

What? No overweight women in Los Angeles? He had to call me? But to be fair, maybe there were some before they were all forced out of the city limits under the cover of darkness by a death squad of diet police.

“Look, Bob, I’m pretty tied up here with the column and—”

“Of course, I understand, but this wouldn’t take that much of your time, maybe just a couple of weeks.”

“Weeks?” I start opening the mail.

“We pay pretty well…would you just consider it?”

“Mmmm…I doubt it, but leave me your number.” I grab a Chinese menu and jot it down along the border next to the two-red-chili-peppers rating of the Orange Beef. “I’ll get back at ya.” Tamara walks in, as if on cue.

“HOLLYWOOD!”

“Run that past me again,” she says.

“They want me to fly out to Hollywood. Do you love it?”

“I hope you told them that I’m free to go as well. How much moola?”

“Not enough to get me on a plane.”

Celebrating the Gift of Ampleness

Like an overprotective parent who lends you the family car with spare tires in the trunk, nature is looking out on your behalf. Natural selection provides a surplus, and the reason is obvious. Just listen to former Yale surgeon Sherwin Nuland.

“An injured creature is more likely to survive and reproduce if it has a surplus to fall back on.” The human body is made with an abundance of cells, tissues, even organs. “We really do not need two kidneys or such a huge liver, or more than twenty feet of small intestine.”

While Voltaire might not have been thinking about the fleshy woman when he said, “Le superflu, chose très nécessaire”—the superfluous, that most necessary stuff—his words make biological sense too. The generous female body is the fertile one. Anorexics don’t menstruate, well-fed women do, a fact that tells us that we need sustenance to nourish our children and continue the species; reserves to carry us through periods of disease; and ample stores to sustain us in case of starvation. So bless your flesh. Look at your generous, sensuous, nubile body as a miracle of scientific engineering, a delicate, responsive, harmonious creation designed to perpetuate life and keep the human spirit burning.

At the very least, your lush human fat cells now come with a newer, higher price. Stem cells, harvested from fat, represent the new frontier for scientists in search of high-tech treatments for disease.

Why? Because they have the magical ability to turn into a variety of other types of cells. In other words, sometime in the near future, stem cells taken from your glorious globules may be used to replace injured or worn-out cells.

“It’s not a static spare tire around our waist. It’s really a dynamic tissue, and there are a lot of things in it that could help us fix people with diseases,” said Dr. Marc H. Hedrick, a University of Pittsburgh researcher.

So next time you look down at the scale, smile, don’t frown.

To know Tex Ramsey is to love him. I’m perched on the corner of the Metro desk—he’s the big honcho, Metro editor—with my legs crossed coquettishly, chewing a wad of purple bubble gum to get myself noticed, reading People magazine and waiting. You always have to wait for Tex, especially when it’s dinnertime. It’s not that he doesn’t have an appetite. Just the opposite. It’s just that dinnertime is synonymous with deadline, and the phone next to him rings constantly. He glares at it momentarily and then looks back at the computer screen.

“Don’t we have a secretary around here?”

“Out sick, Tex.”

“Sick of what, this joint? Anyone think to call a temp?”

“Don’t think.”

Business as usual.

“T E X, you cut half the story,” the police reporter’s whine fills the room. “I spent three hours with the commissioner and you give me four hundred words?”

“No space. We’ll do a follow.”

“Follow? He won’t spit at me after this abortion.”

“Bring me a hankie.”

A general assignment reporter shows up next, a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism graduate, with no obvious pathology, who in two short years at the paper has developed a tic. He’s smacking a copy of the newspaper against his hand in fury and grousing about a typo in his story about a hero cop. He closes his eyes, dropping his head in despair.