The Apple
This is the story of a fat little girl, God, and an apple.
I didn’t know I was fat until my mother told me so, when I was six. It was 1978. She was holding a mimeograph of a typed diet plan she’d gotten from my doctor. “This will help you lose weight.”
I didn’t fully understand why she thought I needed to lose weight, or why anybody would. I looked at thin paper that still bore the faint, sweet-sharp smell of the smudgy blue-purple ink with curiosity.
DAY 1
BREAKFAST: 1 slice of toast with 1 tsp of dietetic jam, 1 half grapefruit, black coffee
LUNCH: Salad (canned salmon, leafy greens, and vinegar and lemon dressing), plus fruit, as well as black coffee, tea, or diet soda
DINNER: Roast chicken (no skin), spinach, half of a bell pepper, string beans, and black coffee, tea, or diet soda
Other days followed in a similar vein, mentioning things I’d never heard of before, like Melba toast (dry, two pieces).
After reading it over, six-year-old me had just one question: “Do I have to drink the coffee?”
“Oh no, that’s just for grownups who follow this diet.”
This was an enormous relief. “Good. I like grapefruit though.”
My relief didn’t last long. I was miserable. Hunger was my constant companion, but I couldn’t eat unless it was on that sheet of paper. I sat in the school lunch room eating my half-sandwich and baggie of celery sticks while my fellow 1st graders had whole sandwiches and chips and cookies. I had to do it, because I had to lose weight even if I didn’t understand why.
Over the next few years, I learned what it meant to be fat. Being fat meant being made fun of at school. It meant my mother’s look of disappointment every time she bought me a pretty dress and it didn’t fit. It meant being torn between taking the second helping my grandma offered and the lecture I’d get on the way home.
My mother was not a terrible person. She loved me deeply. She had been fat as a child and a young adult and was desperate that I not suffer the way she did. She lost weight in her mid-twenties with the help of diet pills (which were basically amphetamines back then), and maintained her weight with cigarettes and throwing up dinner every night. She didn’t try to hide it. If asked, she just said her stomach hurt after dinner. I thought that was normal. I thought everybody’s moms threw up after dinner. I was in my 30s before I realized she was bulimic.
In fourth grade, the bullying at school got bad enough that I talked about it at home. The solution to being bullied for being fat was an obvious one: stop being fat. That was when I started Weight Watchers the first time, and here’s where the apple comes in.
Weight Watchers met in a church basement that always smelled musty. It was the only time in my childhood I was ever in a church building that wasn’t our own brand of conservative fundamentalism. I remember being slightly shocked that we were in a bad church. It didn’t look bad. It looked a lot like our church basement, lit by bright flickering fluorescent lights, walls covered in cheerfully colored posters extolling the Fruits of the Spirit and pictures of Jesus with children. The only difference I could see was that there was a piano in the auditorium. That meant everyone who went to church there was going to hell. Still, we went to that church basement every Tuesday night, as religiously as we went to our own church three times a week.
After all, there were no fat children in the pictures with Jesus.
How to describe Weight Watchers in the late 1970s? This was long before Weight Watchers came up with “points” or rebranded itself as WW the “lifestyle company”. If you were there, you were probably a middle to upper-middle class white woman, and you were there because you wanted to lose weight. You counted “exchanges,” (servings) of everything and were allowed a certain number of exchanges of each food type a day. An ounce of lean meat was one protein exchange, an apple was a fruit exchange, and so on. Once you had checked off all your exchanges for the day, you were done eating.
It was the same ritual each week. I signed in at the folding tables and picked up a new food diary to fill out the next week. My mom paid the weekly dues and my little card that kept track of my “weight loss journey” was stamped with the date. Then came the moment of truth. There were two balance beam scales, each manned—or womaned, more accurately—by a Weight Watchers staffer. I would hand my card to them and get on the scale. I’d watch the weights on the scale move and pray that this time would be lower than the last.
Some weeks: “Down a whole pound, Lisa!”
I’d sigh with relief while the lady wrote down my weight and look at my mom smile.
But not this particular Tuesday. “Uh-oh, you’re up a quarter of a pound.”
It was hell. I scoured my 8-year-old brain to remember if I had Broken My Diet at all that week. Breaking My Diet had become as much of a sin to me as swearing or playing the piano during church. During church one Sunday night, one of the men had patted his big belly and said that he and other fat people were guilty of one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony. I tried to remember, had I been a glutton that week?
I couldn’t think of anything. I took my own food to Grandma’s Sunday dinner that week instead of eating her fried chicken. I’d written down my food and checked off the box for each exchange I ate. My dismay must have showed, because the weighing lady smiled and said, “It’s okay, it happens. Your clothes might be heavier than last week’s or you might have hit a plateau.”
Then there was the meeting. It differed from a church service only in that we didn’t sing (with or without a piano), nobody read the Bible, and women were free to speak. And speak they did. They shared their trials and tribulations of the week, or asked for pointers on how to deal with eating out or going to a party without Breaking Their Diet. Some announced that they’d reached their goal weight to thunderous applause.
And little me, desperate for approval, would share my stories too. “I didn’t eat one of the cupcakes my friend brought in to class for her birthday on Thursday.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“You’re so lucky to be doing this so early. It just gets harder the older you get.” I would hear this a lot through the years as a child dieter.
After I got home, though, I was angry. I didn’t eat the cupcake! It had pretty pink frosting and I’d wanted one so badly. My teacher, Miss Snyder, gave me a puzzled look when I said I didn’t want one. I told her I was on a diet and she nodded and moved on to the next kid. Why would God let me gain a quarter of a pound when I did what I was supposed to? It never occurred to me that the diet might be at fault, or that people’s weights just fluctuate regularly.
If I’d known I was just going to gain weight anyway, I thought rebelliously, I would have eaten the cupcake.
Still, I went home, determined to do better.
The period between dinner and bedtime was always the hardest for me. My parents went to bed around nine, and I’d usually stay up until ten watching television or reading a book. Around 8 PM I’d start to get hungry, and I’d have to look over my food diary for the day to see if there was anything left I could eat. Sometimes I would remember to save something, other times I’d be looking at the list of unlimited vegetables (eat as much as you want, as long as there’s no added fat!) and considering heating up a can of mushrooms for a snack. (Which I did, more than once.)
This particular night, though, what I wanted more than anything was an apple. It must have been autumn, because the apples were brilliantly red and crisp and juicy. I’d had one with lunch and wanted another. The Weight Watchers plan for youth only allowed three fruit exchanges a day. I had already eaten all mine, including the aforementioned apple. If I ate another one, I would be Breaking My Diet. I would be committing the sin of gluttony.
My parents were asleep. They wouldn’t know if I ate an extra one. The people at Weight Watchers would never know either. But God would know. And the scale, the other all-seeing, all-knowing figure of my childhood, would probably know too.
I was caught in the first emotional and spiritual dilemma of my life. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, I was tempted by the literal forbidden fruit. (I wasn’t allowed to call it an apple because the Bible doesn’t specifically say it was an apple.) Instead of a wily serpent urging me on, I had the growl in my belly. I had the memory of the lost cupcake.
My weekly food diary seemed to be mocking me. There were all my carefully penciled Xs, and my scrawling handwriting detailing each meal. Corn flakes, ¾ cup, 1 cup of skim milk. No coffee, but a cup of orange juice, which counted as two fruit exchanges. Had I really finished the whole 8 ounces? Maybe I hadn’t. They always said at the meetings to write down everything you ate, even if it wasn’t on the diet. Maybe I could just write down the extra apple and atone for it at the meeting, the same way people would sometimes go up to the front pew after the sermon at church and beg forgiveness for something or another.
I don’t know how long I struggled with the temptation of the apple. My memory tells me it was hours, but I know that’s impossible. However long it was, I was as anguished as Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying for help. Over an apple.
If this were the story I wish I could tell, 4th grade me would have thrown caution (and that ridiculous exchange list) to the wind and eaten the damn apple. Alas, the drive for approval and fear of God won out. I went to bed hungry that night.
Eventually Weight Watchers went the way of the first diet (which I now know was a version of the infamous fad Scarsdale Diet). There would be others over my childhood years—crash diets, fad diets, fasts, medically supervised diets, pills—all with the same result. I stayed fat, and my mother stayed disappointed.
My last diet was when I was 22. Perhaps not coincidentally, I left my childhood church at about the same time. It would be over a decade before I was able to accept that my mother, however well-meaning, was wrong. That my first doctor was wrong to give a six-year-old a crash diet. That anyone who told me I “just needed willpower” was wrong—because what is a bigger sign of willpower than a 4th grader saying no to a cupcake?
I’ve thought a lot about that little girl over the years, especially as I’ve worked to rebuild my relationship with my body and with food. I’ve wondered what could have been different. And if I ever had a chance to time travel? I’d go back and give her an apple.
And a goddamned pink cupcake.