Eating Ice Cream With My Dog by Frances Kuffel Read Free Book Online Page A

or a refusal to understand that the fat body was and continues to be as much a part of the person as her thinner body.
    The also turns weight into community property, the way a wife might ask her husband, “How did you lose the keys?” as they stand in the rain outside their locked car. “Lose” is problematic, too. To lose something is to hope to find it.
    Is there one big stockpile of fat that we all draw on? Is there a Fat Lost and Found at which we have to describe our weight (“It’s thigh fat, about thirty inches, with dimples?”) in order to reclaim it?
    If I lose property that is exclusively mine, the noun is preceded by a personal pronoun: “How did you lose your book report, Frances?”
    There is nothing more personally and exclusively mine than the weight I bear. It is a more conscious and public part of me than my joy or sexuality or great hair. My weight or my size crosses my mind every time I make a meal, make a date, bend over to tie my shoes, go outside, put on clothes, and countless other motions and imaginings.
    The word weight in that question is just as peculiar. The most successful anorectic has weight, a glimmer of a fetus has weight. Without a qualification (even a generic one such as “so much weight”) and taken literally, talking about losing weight reduces the successful dieter to nothing at all. Further, weight says nothing of what, really, weight is . Weight is muscle and bones and blood and organs and fat. We don’t burn weight, we burn fat, from which getting thinner is a by-product. Is fat so alien, so unmentionable, that it’s safer to talk about it in terms of sterility and separateness, an item made of not-us? Still, the question of how, unreflective as it is, persists. As it happens, the Angry Fat Girls put their money where their mouths are in two organizations. Katie and I have continued our alliance with twelve-step programs for eating disorders, and Wendy, Mimi, and Lindsay attend Weight Watchers. Our organizations do not dictate the how of dieting, there aren’t necessarily set perimeters. Our food varies from day to day, and each camp has its own vocabulary for operating within it.
    The lingo that twelve-step programs for eating disorders employ is as wide of the mark as any other. “I’ve given away fifty pounds,” you might hear a particularly enthusiastic member say. “To whom,” I want to snap, “a thirteen-year-old anorectic?” The newly thin would answer that she gave her pounds to God or HP, “Higher Power,” just as she turns over all of her life to Him or Her or It. I can’t bear people talking about HP. I inevitably wonder how Hewlett-Packard has provided a miracle.
    “I’ve released fifty pounds,” another twelve-stepper might say. This is somewhat more realistic except that it’s backwards, isn’t it? Wouldn’t fifty fewer pounds release the body?
    Ought we say, “I have been relieved of fifty pounds”?
    Or our inquisitors could frame the question of how someone loses weight the way they might ask how someone eased another physical ailment: “How did you get rid of your migraines?” or “How did you cure your flu?”
    At least these questions aren’t hinting that we will re-find our weight or that it, like Lassie, will re-find us, which is found in that announcement that, yes, we’ll have dessert, but “I just hope it doesn’t show up on the scale tomorrow,” as though the needle will bounce around until it settles on cheesecake.
    Members of twelve-step programs for eating disorders speak of their food as being “clean” and “tight” in addition to the broad generalization of “abstinent,” which means whatever the going definition of refraining from compulsive eating is. 12
    Members “work a strong Program” and participation is complicated. As a Stepford Wife, I can attest that Program requires a lot of time and something between obedience and surrender, as stated in the source for all of the 601 twelve-step programs,