Sarai Walker - Dietland

I wished she hadn’t sat down next to me, since we looked like two Humpty Dumptys seated together. During the part of the meeting where we were supposed to chat with our neighbor, Janine spoke as if the two of us were the same. She even invited me out for coffee after the meeting, but I said I was busy. I had never had a fat friend and I didn’t want one.

Throughout the meeting, Janine spoke up, saying things like, “My whole family is fat and they think dieting is a waste of time.” Gladys shuddered at Janine’s words and continuously corrected her. We learned to say overweight or obese, not fat. We were never to say diet, either, but instead use terms such as the plan, the program, or eating healthily.

Toward the end of the meeting, Gladys handed each of us a booklet with “When I’m Thin . . .™” printed on the cover. There was a photograph of two smiling women carrying shopping bags. Gladys said that we would write in our “When I’m Thin . . .™” journals each week. Inside, at the top of the first page, it said, “When I’m Thin . . .™” and then there were five blank lines underneath with suggested topics such as romance, careers, and fashion. Gladys directed us to close our eyes and imagine ourselves thin. She told us to write down five things that our thin selves would be able to do that our overweight selves couldn’t.

The other women and I began to write, but Janine looked stunned. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “I came here to lose a few pounds because of back pain. What kind of sick, self-loathing mindfuck is this?” She was flipping through the booklet, red in the face, breathless from rage.

“Watch your language,” Gladys said. “Baptists do not use vulgarity.”

Janine looked at Gladys, her eyes blazing behind her rhinestone-studded cat glasses. “Are you for real?” She flung her “When I’m Thin™” booklet at Gladys, who seemed terrified, holding up both hands to shield herself. Janine made a door-slamming exit. In her wake there was silence in the room, leaving us to contemplate the departure of the loud, angry woman, disagreeable and huge, what none of us wanted to be.

When it was my turn to meet with Gladys individually, she apologized multiple times for the “unfortunate incident.” “What we’re doing here at the clinic is radical and life affirming,” she said. “We’re taking care of our bodies. People like that woman find this very threatening. She’s like an alcoholic or drug addict, completely in denial. She’ll probably be dead soon.” Gladys seemed to savor the thought.

She gave me a tour of the exercise room, with pink dumbbells bearing the Baptist name scattered on the floor and a woman in a modest leotard leading a group in jumping jacks. In the privacy of her cubicle, Gladys snapped a Polaroid of me and told me to stick it in my binder and bring it to the clinic each week. This was my before picture. She then weighed me and, using a software program developed by Eulayla’s brother, a computer scientist, calculated that I needed to lose 104 pounds, which would take only nine months on the Baptist Plan. “In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy!” she said, her silver charm bracelet clanking on the keyboard. Gladys made it seem so easy that I wanted to hug her. I would be thin in nine months. Software doesn’t lie. I carried my first week of shakes and frozen dinners home in two shopping bags, puffed up with Gladys’s words of encouragement.

At home, my mother looked on coolly as I put my food away. The six-packs of shakes and the pale pink trays of frozen food filled most of the space in our fridge and freezer. I also had a packet of Baptist Supplements.

“Why do you need these?” My mother examined the pebble-colored tablets.

“Gladys said I have to take one each day.” She’d been emphatic. [4] Some Baptists claimed to have suffered kidney problems as a result of the diet, but this was never proven in a court of law. Mama threatened to sue her accusers for slander, but she never did. Under oath she couldn’t have denied that the diet gave some Baptists bad breath and constipation and made their hair fall out. ( Adventures in Dietland, Chapter 2: “The Baptist Plan: Not Everyone Is a Believer,” p. 138.)

At breakfast and lunch, I drank a foamy peach shake from a can. At dinner, I microwaved my designated meal, then peeled back the silver plastic to reveal beef stew, its chunks of meat and peas floating in a lukewarm bath of brown gravy, or a turkey meatball, like a crusty planet surrounded by red rings of pasta. The meals were small, merely a scoop or two of food, and they seemed to lack a connection to actual foodstuffs; I thought it was possible the “food” was constructed of other elements, like paper and Styrofoam, but I didn’t care, as long as eating it led to thinness. [5] Mama’s personal assistant, [name redacted], blackmailed her in the summer of 1990. She had recorded a phone conversation between Mama and her, in which Mama said that the Baptist meals “tasted like shit” and “you couldn’t pay me to eat them.” ( Adventures in Dietland, Chapter 2: “The Baptist Plan: Not Everyone Is a Believer,” p. 141.)

My first week as a Baptist, I was filled with energy and motivation. I’d been instructed to avoid people who were eating, those unruly mobs with their knives and forks, but given my job at the restaurant this was impossible. It didn’t matter. I was experiencing transcendence from the grotesque world of mastication and grazing. The sight of people eating made me sick.

Before my shift at the restaurant, I would stop by the Baptist clinic to do aerobics. At work I moved faster than ever. One night I chopped twenty-five onions in record time, leaving Chef Elsa to marvel at my speed. Red peppers, celery, and garlic lay in colorful heaps on my chopping boards. I’d finish early and take on extra projects, such as reorganizing the grain cupboard and alphabetizing the spices.

When I returned home from work one night I was greeted by ten Italian pilgrims sitting in our yard, lighting candles and playing the guitar. I opened the curtains in my bedroom to listen to them sing. They waved and smiled, and I didn’t mind that they were looking at me. Nothing could dampen my mood. I was a jailed girl about to be released from a long sentence.

By the end of the week, I was twelve pounds lighter. Gladys and the other women clucked around me, admiring my shrinking figure. [6] Memorandum: From senior vice president [name redacted] to Eulayla Baptist (August 1, 1980): “A diet that produces slow and steady weight loss will not hook new customers, Eulayla. How many times do I have to spell this out? People want immediate results, and an 850-calorie-a-day regimen will give them just that. Baptists will lose a significant amount of weight in the first few weaks [ sic ] and become addicted to the high of dropping pounds. When they fail to keep up this momentum, they’ll only blame themselves. Trust me on this. I worked at [name redacted] for five years, remember? That’s why you hired me!” ( Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 332.)

In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy!

Like most highs, mine was not to last; as I entered week two, I crashed. If school had been in session, I wouldn’t have made it. I skipped aerobics class and had to force myself to leave the house to go to the restaurant, which I had to do to pay for the Baptist Plan. In Chef Elsa’s kitchen, I became prone to staring off into space without blinking. “Are you sick?” she asked me. The week before I’d been a wind-up toy spinning around furiously; now I had fallen over, silent and still.