When I was in high school, I would walk to the Waldenbooks in the mall near my home and read novels while standing up. This was the 1970s, long before bookstores became places that encouraged people to sit, hang, browse. There were no armchairs in that narrow store on the second floor of Columbia Mall in Howard County, Maryland.
Reading while standing up felt like stealing, a pathetic thrill for this straight-A goody-goody. I had money — I babysat, I eventually worked at the Swiss Colony in the same mall. I could buy any volume I truly desired. But my stand-up reads were books too embarrassing to bring home. I remember only two.
One was The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a British novelist perhaps best known today for inspiring the name of Bruce Willis’s and Demi Moore’s oldest daughter. It now strikes me as a perfectly respectable book; I could have forked over $1.25 for it.
The other one was — I couldn’t begin to tell you the title. It was a slick psycho serial killer tale that began with a young couple parked on Lovers Lane, where they were attacked by a man with, if I recall correctly, a metal hook for one of his hands. He used his hook to slash the roof of the convertible, or maybe it was a knife, and as the metal blade (or the hook) pierced through the canvas, the beautiful, vain sorority girl — it was implicit that she deserved to die if only for her smugness — thought: “I should have had that slice of cheesecake at dinner.”It has taken me more than 40 years, but the singular achievement of my life may be that if I am attacked by a serial killer on a deserted Lovers Lane, I almost certainly will have had dessert. Not cheesecake, because I don’t like cheesecake. Possibly some dark chocolate, preferably with nuts or caramel, or a scoop of Taharka ice cream, an outstanding Baltimore brand, or one of my own homemade blondies, from the Smitten Kitchen recipe.
Maybe a shot of tequila, an excellent digestif. Maybe tequila and a blondie.
But only if I want those things. Many nights, I’m not in the mood for anything sweet after dinner. Every day, one day at a time, one meal at a time, one hunger pang at a time, I ask myself what I really want. I then eat whatever it is.
It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.
Every girl remembers her first diet. Usually, it’s her mother’s.
My mother was (and continues to be, at the age of 88) slender and fit. As a child, she was part of a group of underweight campers “ordered” to drink daily milk shakes. On her wedding day, she weighed 102 pounds. Why do I know these facts? I know only that I know them. Her wedding dress hung in the hall closet outside my bedroom, sealed in a plastic bag, but I was never going to wear it. When I was little, that dress — a lovely knee-length shift — was too plain to fit into my future wedding fantasies. And by the time I was 10 or 11, it was clear that I was never going to fit into a dress made for someone who weighed 102 pounds.
In her mid-30s, my mother gained some weight and decided to go on a diet. This seemed like an adult rite of passage to me, a journey that I would inevitably undertake one day, heading out on the bounding billows of Tab. My mother’s diet was a topic of much discussion in our family — and much teasing by my father. My father also was rail thin; at the age of 12, I managed to shimmy into his old Navy uniform for the 4th of July parade. My older sister was thin as well. Many, many, many years later, a good friend saw me with my family at my stepson’s bar mitzvah and asked: “Did you get all the nutrients?” This was the first time that anyone had ever suggested there was anything attractive about my size relative to my family’s.
In case it’s not clear, I was never thin. I am tall, big-boned, with a belly that tends toward protrusion. I was maybe 10 or 11, close to the age my own daughter is now, when my mother cupped her hand over my convex midsection and said, “Look at your little pot belly.” Because I was a weird kid who sneaked into the adult side of the library to read adult books — you may sense a theme emerging — I had read Max Shulman’s Barefoot Boy with Cheek. In that comic college novel, a girl goes to a party where guests are instructed to dress as song titles. She chooses “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and wears a gown with a bare midriff, a smudge pot “cunningly hinged” to her navel. This is how I saw my pot belly — a literal pot, a growth, a foreign object hinged, not so cunningly, to my navel.
By the time I was 14 — 14! — I was plotting furiously in my diary: How To Get a Man. Step 1, of course, was to get a flat stomach. At the age of 15, about the same time I was reading books standing up at the mall, I signed up for a dance class, God knows why. The dance teacher, the mother of a close friend, screamed at me: “LAURA LIPPMAN YOU HAVE A POT BELLY YOU ARE TOO YOUNG TO HAVE A POT BELLY I AM ALLOWED TO HAVE A POT BELLY BUT YOU ARE NOT!”
My first summer home from college I worked as a lifeguard at a small apartment complex where no one knew me, which gave me license to wear a two-piece bathing suit. An older man kept asking me out. After my third or fourth turndown, he guessed my weight almost to the decimal point, then assured me: “If you lost 20 pounds, you would be a knock-out.”
Then there was the man I loved so much and he loved me, too, until he fell in love with someone else. “It’s funny,” he mused. “You’re not really my type. I like petite women.” And off he went with a waif.
Every woman on the planet knows the rest of this story. Diet blah blah blah body dysmorphia yadda yadda yadda Atkins Scarsdale etc etc. We can all write list poems of the eating plans we have undertaken, the measurements on which we obsessed, the various low-carb sects to which we converted. I have nothing new to say about any of this.
What is new is that I have decided, at the age of 60, that I am a goddamn knockout. Like Dorothy at the end of the film version of The Wizard of Oz, I had the power I sought all along. I rub my thighs together — sorry, couldn’t resist — and tell myself over and over that I am beautiful and, what do you know, suddenly I am. Then I cup my hand over my 9-year-old daughter’s gorgeous, solid abdomen and tell her she is beautiful, too.
She’s not sure. She asks: “Is there a way to eat that makes a person lose weight?”
No, I tell her. Eat what you want when you want it and your body will figure out what it wants to be. Trust your body.
And then I leave the room and cry a little. I helped to do this. Although I never said the word “diet” in front of my daughter, never spoke about anyone’s weight, I did this to her. Kids don’t miss a trick and my daughter saw how I used to dress in the morning, how I turned to examine my profile, standing tall, sucking in my gut, smoothing the front of my pants or skirt. She noticed when I stopped eating bread the year she was 3. Yes, I tried Whole30 six years ago and yes it worked for a while, how could it not? You try not to lose weight while abstaining from alcohol, grains, dairy and legumes.
Now try deciding what you actually want and tell me which is harder.
Thanks to our modern world, I can pinpoint almost to the minute when I decided to give up dieting. As a former Weight Watchers customer — of course I am a former Weight Watchers customer — I received an email when the company announced it was rebranding itself as WW — “wellness that works.” Suddenly, the whole con was clear to me. On Sept. 24, 2018, at 11:42 a.m. I DM’ed a screenshot of the email to a friend and added: “fuck it NO MORE DIETING. EVER.”
I continued:
“I have been worried about my weight for 45 years, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this to my kid. I’m almost 60 years old and some part of me is still worried that not enough men find me fuckable. People talk about the White House distracting us, nothing has distracted me as much as this stupid battle with my weight and my looks, both which are fine, almost everybody’s weight and face is [sic] fine, and way too many benefit from getting us to think otherwise.What would happen to the global economy if all the women on the planet suddenly decided: I don’t care if you think I’m fuckable.”
by Laura Lippman, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Evgeny Buzov / Getty
