Kara Richardson Whitely - The Weight of Being: How I Satisfied My Hunger for Happiness

T he doctors hand moved across a thick red line on a graph. She pressed firmly down and made a dot.

My daughter, then five years old, had just slid over the line into the overweight swath of the growth chart. I wanted to curl up into my flesh, all three hundred pounds of it.

You dont want to be there, the doctor said gently to Anna. Its just a little over, but you might want to try little things to cut back and move a little more.

Im sorry. Im so sorry, I thought while stroking my little girls blonde hair, a nod to the Scandinavian roots on my side of the family. She had my gray-blue eyes. She had my skin, which was set to sunburn at the slightest sunscreen slip. She had my piano-perfect fingers, and now, it seemed, she was about to inherit my weight problem. I couldnt let that happen.

But shes not fat, I thought. Shes not like me. I cant let her be like me. My weight was all consuming; it was the thing I most wanted to lose, yet it had stuck with me the most tenaciously for the past three decades, regardless of how many times I signed up for diet programs, bought new exercise equipment (my latest, a rowing machine, was currently collecting dust in my office), or wrote down resolutionsgive up sugar and exercise every dayor goalslose 100 pounds this year and fit into a size 12 by the weddingin my weight loss journal.

I could mostly rationalize away all those failed efforts. After all, a raft of studies proved how tough it was to lose weight and keep it off. And I was relatively healthy (I didnt have diabetes, heart disease, or any other syndrome associated with fat people) and somewhat fit, so I could brush aside the fact that I was powerless to change my weight.

But now, my fat was encroaching on my daughters life. I wanted to defend her against the scourge that made everything from sleeping to moving difficult. I couldnt control my eating. How would I control hers?

But I made Annas food choices for her. I was the mother, the person saying yes when she asked for another helping of Goldfish crackers. I was the one caving in to her nightly requests for ice cream. I loved ice cream. We all did. But what my family didnt know was that I was dipping into the half-gallon container while they were out during the day, and then secretly replacing the empty container and starting all over again the next day.

My relationships with food and my body were twisted, torturous affairs. The kind that filled me with angst and immobility. And now I was passing this on to my daughter.

Well do better, I told the doctor. But as I said it, I worried the intention fell flat, like any of my weight loss pursuits, announcements, and campaigns that started with me buying a whole lot of thingsfrom fat-free this and that to a series of exercise videos and weight loss hypnosis CDsand would go nowhere.

I gathered my purse and walked Anna out the door. We stopped at the reception desk only to collect a sticker for her bravery. I tried to smile but felt sick inside, knowing that Annas problem started with me.

Mommy, can we get a treat here? she asked, as we walked past a neighboring pharmacy.

Not today, sweetie, I said, as we reached the elevator.

But Moooooooooom, she cried, drawing disapproving stares from passersby.

I knew all about those stares. I had been bullied about my weight since I was nine years old. People made fun of my protruding belly, my expanding rear. It made me a big target, the butt of jokes.

I put those thoughts out of my mind. Anna wasnt me. I smiled at my daughter, who was still looking at me beseechingly. Okay, but something healthy, I conceded. I grabbed a Rice Krispies bar from my bag, hoping it said fat-free somewhere on the label.

Later that evening at dinner with my fit, marathoner husband, we talked about how we wanted to stay healthy as a family.

Oh, boy, Chris said, almost in a joking manner, the same way he did if he discovered all the cookies were missing. It was a comment he made as if hed heard it before.

Anna looked down at her rice and chicken. I didnt want her to be self-conscious. We never sat down at the table to discuss my weight, so why would we be doing that for her?

I tried to quickly diffuse the conversation. Well, how about we start saving sweets for the weekends? How about we sign Anna up for swim classes?

Okay, Anna said.

We left it at that.

A few nights later, I helped Anna on with her pajamas. Im fat, she declared.

Honey, youre not fat. Im fat, I blurted without thinking.

I knew that. I just didnt want to hurt your feelings, Anna said, looking away as if she was afraid she was going to get in trouble for speaking the truth.

At school, she and her fellow kindergarteners had been trying on the word fat for size, seeing how their classmates reacted to the epithet. A few kids, even one heavier than Anna, already dubbed Anna fat, she had confessed. I was enraged, told the teacher, and had the girl apologize to my daughter. I worried they were calling her that because of how I looked.

Its about being healthy, I said, gulping away a tear. I had been an overweight kid, a too-big-to-miss target for bullies since the age of nine, when my parents divorced and I hid in the pantry, binging to drown out their screaming. When I was twelve, I put on forty pounds over the summer after my brothers almost-adult friend sexually assaulted me. Fat was my protection but also my curse. The more life hurt, the more I ate and, of course, the more I gained. The more I gained, the worse I felt.

I had to keep Anna from ever feeling the way I did. I needed to do something this very moment to show my daughter a healthy way of living. She should not have to experience the weight of simply being. My weight of being. It buried me.

If she was going to feel good about herself, change had to start with me.