Sarai Walker - Dietland

I called Gladys. “What’s wrong with me?” I whispered into the phone, too weak to even speak.

“It’s sugar withdrawal. You’re an addict, honey. That poison is leaving your system.”

“But I’m so hungry.”

“I know, sweetie,” said Gladys. Sugar. Honey. Sweetie. Gladys wasn’t helping.

I kept waiting for the horrible feeling to go away, but it didn’t. At night I dreamed about éclairs. Hunger pangs woke me, traveling through my body like the reverberations of a bell. I held my hands over my ears and rolled back and forth in bed, hoping the sensations would go away.

Between meals, I dealt with my hunger by dipping lettuce leaves into mustard (a tip from Gladys), which was practically a zero-calorie snack, about as effective as eating air. Still, it gave me something to chew and swallow. Gladys’s other tips for fighting hunger included doing jumping jacks, even in public places, drinking liters of water, and writing in my food journal:

1. After eating, I feel: Very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, hungry, or starving: starving

2. My mood right now is: Positive, neutral, discouraged, or irritable: positive

3. Today I am thinking about food: Only at mealtimes, occasionally, or constantly: constantly

On the Baptist Plan, I nearly passed out from hunger. Once in the kitchen, I was slicing a bell pepper, but then there were two on my cutting board, then three. They were multiplying. I set down my knife and stumbled backwards, bumping the handle of a skillet on the stove, sending hot oil and scallops crashing to the floor. Elsa insisted I go home, but I went back to my peppers, trying to chop while my hands shook. [7] Memorandum: From senior vice president [name redacted] to [name redacted] cc: Eulayla Baptist (February 3, 1982): “Pay attention, [name redacted], we’re not going to get sued! (That lady in Tucson notwithstanding.) 850 calories a day is adequate for human survival. Ignore those World Health Organization stats. There’s a big difference between a starving African and a fat American. Besides, our literature says it’s a 1,200 calorie-a-day regimen, which is perfectly safe.” ( Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 333.)

I wanted to stuff myself with the food that surrounded me in the restaurant, but in my mind I pleaded with my hungry self to be sensible. Nicolette’s mother, a Waist Watchers obsessive and borderline anorexic, had a bumper sticker on her car that read NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS. I didn’t know how it felt to be skinny, but if I ate the pink trays of food and the packaged snacks and nothing more, I would find out in only nine months. The fact that my misery had an end date, a parole date, kept me going. Once or twice I thought about jumping off the roof of the restaurant, but I kept these fantasies to myself.

When I returned to the house on Harper Lane after work, I ate my dinner quickly and crawled into bed, since being awake was torturous. In the morning I would try to soothe myself with a hot shower, but I grew increasingly worried as the drain filled with clumps of my hair.

At the Baptist clinic, Gladys would say, “You must have been good this week!” [8] Memorandum: From senior vice president [name redacted] to Eulayla Baptist (November 12, 1985): “I cannot emphasize enough the importance of using moral terms when talking about dieting to our clients and the media. The Baptist name makes this even more effective. When Baptists lose weight, they’re ‘good’; when they stray from the plan, they’re ‘bad,’ as in: ‘Were you good or bad this week, Rosemary?’ Every clinic must implement this language immediately.” ( Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 337. N.B. See also D. Montrose, “American Dieting Culture and Its Roots in the Christian Narrative,” Journal of Weight Loss Studies 1, no. 2 [1999]: 124–46.) She and the other women were interested in my progress, pulling up my shirt to get a better look at my hips and tummy. The weigh-in was the highlight of my week. I was good for a whole month and lost twenty-nine pounds.

When July came, my father sent my yearly airline ticket, Los Angeles to Boise, but I told him I couldn’t visit. There was no way for me to transport my Baptist frozen meals, and I couldn’t eat normal food. “You’re not coming to visit me because of a diet? ”

“I can’t, Daddy. You’ll be proud of me when this is finished, I promise.” I was his only child. He had married again, but his new wife couldn’t have children, so I was his only hope for grandkids. If I was fat, no one would want to marry me. I wanted to tell him this, to explain that this wasn’t just a diet, that everything in my future and his depended on it, but I couldn’t say the words.

With my summer cleared of all obligations except for my job at the restaurant, I spent most of my time alone at home. When I went out, I didn’t have the energy to care if people took photographs of me. Nicolette invited me to the mall and to movies, but I couldn’t be surrounded by such fattening food. Every evening at the restaurant I was exposed to non-Baptist food, and those were the worst two hours of my day.

In our weekly meetings, Gladys expressed her worries about my job. “You need to separate yourself from temptation, Miss Kettle.”

“If I don’t work at the restaurant I can’t afford to be a Baptist.”

“Well, we don’t want that, ” Gladys said. There was a newspaper on her desk and she began to look through the classifieds to help me find a job that didn’t involve food. “Here’s an ad for a dog walker.”

“I don’t have the energy to walk.”

“Babysitting?”

I imagined being passed out from hunger on the kitchen floor and a toddler with a phone, trying to dial 911.

“No, I’m better off at the restaurant. I can handle it.”

Except that I couldn’t. One evening I had to stir a massive pot of macaroni and cheese, then serve it up on plates for thirty-four children celebrating a birthday. There must have been thousands of pasta tubes in the pot, glistening in the gluey cheese. The intoxicating smell filled my nose and my mouth, even penetrating my brain and wrapping its orange tentacles around every conscious thought. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, that’s what I told myself. I wondered how many calories were in the pot. A hundred thousand? A million? The thought was repulsive.

When the plates came back to the kitchen, a few of them were scraped clean, but there were many with lumps of macaroni and cheese stuck to them. A few of the plates looked as if they hadn’t been touched. The dishes were lined on the counter, waiting for Luis to clean them, but he had gone out back for a smoke.

I paced in front of the plates, looking around to see if anyone was watching me. With my fingers I scooped up some of the pasta tubes and placed them on my tongue. It was the first real food I’d had in more than a month. The texture was different, like cashmere instead of a scratchy polyester.

After the initial moments of bliss, the gravity of what I was doing began to spread over me in a feverish heat. I ran to the bathroom and spit the glob of food into the toilet, my eyes filling with tears. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Gladys had given me pamphlets on every eventuality: Dieting After the Death of a Loved One and The Dangers of Carnivals, Circuses, and Fairs. I had piles of these pamphlets, but they hadn’t been powerful enough to restrain me against the siren song of pasta and melted cheese. In the face of that, I decided I’d done well. I hadn’t even swallowed.

I started wanting to call in sick to work. I was sick, or at least I felt that way practically every moment of the day, but I couldn’t admit it. That would have given my mother a sense of satisfaction. If I told her how I felt she would try to ban me from Baptist Weight Loss. I began to worry about what would happen when school started and whether my grades would suffer, but I decided that I wouldn’t think that far ahead.