When I was nine my mother initiated me into her eating disorder. She had been bulimic in college and managed to stop throwing up “one day at a time” with the help of my father after she told him about it. Her obsession with skinniness remained and she became a perpetual dieter. So one day after school I went to her studio to check in and instead of the usual conversation about how school had been that day she told me that I had gained some weight and needed to go on a diet. She said that she also needed to loose some weight so we could go on the diet together – wouldn’t that be fun. She explained that it was important for girls to learn how to diet because when you get older, if you are fat you will never find a boyfriend. I don’t remember the rules of the diet other than that at the end if we were both successful we would get to have steak for dinner as a reward.
After that I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what about me was fat. There are no pictures of me over weight as a child so I assume that I actually wasn’t. Before this I had never really looked at my body. I now spent time each day looking in the mirror, assessing each detail of my body and comparing it to other girls at school. After a while I decided that the thing that made me fat was my stomach because it wasn’t flat. I then started assessing my mother because I had never thought of her as fat. I realized that her hips and thighs were a bit bigger than some other women and decided that her hips were what made her fat. In a matter of days both of our bodies ballooned in my mind until I looked in the mirror and looked at my mother and saw fat and ugly.
I don’t remember the much about the first diet. I don’t think we ever had that steak. I know that after that, taking second helpings got me a disapproving look. The next diet was to be rewarded with a giant banana split at an ice cream parlor in the next town over. Over the years we did share a couple of these monstrosities but they were as rewards for good grades and not for diet success.
By the time I started High school I knew all about counting calories (I got 300 for breakfast and lunch and 450 for dinner), food combining, weight watchers, over eaters anonymous (she went and brought the wisdom home), grapefruit, ten days of vegetable soup, and the evils of fats in any form. I also knew that I was fat and a failure at diets because I kept gaining weight, (and getting taller). I was sure that I was utterly unattractive.
My mother started pointing out examples of people who were roll models of how to be thin. My aunt and uncle were on the Pritikin diet (which they interpreted as no fat) and they were held up as the shining example self-discipline and correct eating. I was disturbed by their unhealthy appearances and reports of dry skin and hair. The mother of one of my sister’s friends was stick thin. Looking back now I suspect that she was anorexic. She told my mother that she enjoyed the feeling of being hungry. My mother said that we should learn to enjoy hunger. I still do in a way.
In junior high I began to rebel against my mother with sugar. We didn’t have desserts very often so we were always looking for opportunities to eat it. There was sugar in the house so I would make sugary foods when no one else was home and eat them. I learned to make a “single serving” of chocolate frosting in a few minutes and made it regularly. I also took to eating sugar out of the sugar bowl by the teaspoon.
Some time around the end of Junior high one of my friends told me that what my mother was doing wasn’t right. She said that I wasn’t fat and that my mother didn’t have any right to tell me that I was. I realized that she was right, at least about what my mother was doing not being right. I asked my mother to stop. She agreed and stopped for a few days. I kept telling her to stop in more and more uncertain terms until one day when I was 16 and feeling pretty OK about my self she came up to me and said that I had gained some weight and that she could see it, just a little bit under my chin. I told her that my weight was none of her business and that if she mentioned it again that would be the last time we spoke. I weighed my self later that day and found that I had gained 3 lbs.
Shortly after that she started in on my sister. As soon as I found out I told her that if she did to my sister what she did to me she would never see me again. As far as I know she stopped.
At some point during my teens I swore off dieting because I didn’t want to be like her. I thought I could really mess with her by becoming vegetarian. Being vegetarian had several benefits as I saw it. It forced my mother to do extra work. It gave me a sort of moral high ground- I think to her it looked about as good as Pritikin. And it kept her form trying to share her diets with me. She was delighted and cooked separate meals for me until I moved away from home. By the time I moved out I was only vegetarian when I was home or around people who knew her (I had uncontrollable cravings for meat) but I kept it up at home just for her.
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