Hungry Read online

  Burdened by beatific Norman Rockwell visions of the family meal, we have developed a negativity about eating at home that is shared even by organizations that know better, the ones pushing healthy food habits. Weight Watchers (“Stop Dieting. Start Living.”) acknowledges the difficulty of cooking for a family night after night, particularly for the person on a diet, because home is where we know we should comply with whatever diet we’ve adopted at the time. Restaurants are where we go for a little fun, to treat ourselves, not to control our consumption.

  Let’s do the math: Food adds so much to our lives that we can lose track of the grand total. We love the feelings food arouses—the sensuality, the comfort of old favorites, the thrill of discovering new treats, the entertainment value of food—just not those pesky calories. We don’t want to bother with meal planning and preparation, but we care more than ever about what we eat and how we look. This doesn’t compute, except perhaps for those mythical gods with such a “fast metabolism” that they can eat anything and never gain an ounce. They are like students who always ace the exam and claim to “never study.” For lesser mortals, passing tests and eating healthfully both take effort. We exist on a continuum of difficulty. Who doesn’t have some kind of food addiction? It may be fleeting, like the woman who downs a box of Wheat Thins while sitting in freeway traffic the day before Thanksgiving (me). It may be deadly serious, like the teenager who obsessively counts every calorie as an enemy (Lisa).

  Eating disorders fester in an individual’s biological and psychological makeup, but we all live in a society that prizes thinness for women above all other qualities. Meanwhile, food gets in your face all the time, the elephant in the room. Project Runway and Top Chef battle it out for your desires. Want to look like a supermodel (or date one), or do you want to cook and eat like a great chef?

  The national panic about obesity provides more grist for obsession. Maybe you didn’t feel fat, just a touch overweight, before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised the height/ weight tables, and now your weight is considered morbidly obese. Are you going to exercise more and eat less, or just fuss more about food and appearance? Obsession is what food addiction is all about, and the accompanying compulsion to eat or starve yourself in order to soothe emotional pain, avoid scary feelings, or perhaps narrow your thighs or reach your “ideal body weight.” Eating disorders are diagnosable food addictions.

  If you’re not hungry now, you will be soon, and then you’ll have decisions to make. For serious food addicts these decisions take up most of the day. If your addiction is to drugs and alcohol, it is difficult but possible to learn to live without them. But you can’t abstain from food. For people with eating disorders, the object of their addiction is in their faces every day, next to media images of impossibly skinny celebrities.

  A few stars are finally admitting to eating disorders, but girls still want to look like them—thin hangers for designer dresses. Some centers of the fashion industry have been scared into setting standards. After the deaths of two anorexic models, the fashion shows in Madrid and Milan agreed to ban models whose body mass index falls below what the World Health Organization considers healthy. In the United States, the Council of Fashion Designers of America recognized the problem and formed a committee, which recommended “awareness and education, not policing.” Meanwhile, tabloid magazines and websites run galleries of shame, with big yellow arrows noting problem areas in legs and butts, and photo contests like “Guess the Celebrity Cellulite! Can you tell the star by her dimples?”

  Models, actors, and athletes set the pace, but at least one in every one hundred female adolescents in the United States is starving herself. Two-thirds of women students could be diagnosed with eating disorders at some point during college. College dormitories have their vomitoriums, where, everyone knows, a resident or two regularly throws up.

  ED patients jump all over the demographic landscape, from children as young as six to women in their eighties, to men and boys. Ten million women and one million men have eating disorders, and twenty-five million people struggle with binge eating, the latest wrinkle in the obesity epidemic.

  In times of famine, only the rich were fat. Now that anyone can look like Henry VIII—and too many people do—he’s gone out of fashion. The most self-accepting among us still despair of our own spare tires.

  This scourge hits our children at their most vulnerable. When I was a miserable teenager, my main focus of personal failure was having curly brown hair in a blond surfer-girl culture. But I could look forward to college, where a single standard of beauty wouldn’t snuff out all the rest, brains would matter, and the population would be more diverse. We had Barbie, but compared with what came before and after, we lucked out in the sixties and seventies, when there were lots of really bad ways to look. My mother’s generation and Lisa’s generation have a tougher time with the One-Look-Fits-All dictators.

  The Eating Disorder Referral and Information website gets over 3,200 visits a day—and that’s only one of dozens of such websites. Anorexia and bulimia are so virulent that even with professional care, forty percent of patients never recover.

  Then there are the rest of us, who occasionally diet but are always aware of our weight, and it’s always too high. Psychology Today found that eighty-nine percent of women want to lose weight. But this statistic is even more stunning: Twenty-four percent of women would sacrifice three years of life to lose weight. Refusing food is a time-honored form of protest, whether you’re a child objecting to broccoli or Mahatma Gandhi fighting British colonial rule of India. What’s new is the relentless beat that skinny is best (ever more so with big breasts, like the classic Barbie figure) and the common acceptance of that inhuman ideal. We worship deprivation and disdain gluttony as sinful and repellant. Better by far to be hungry. Girls earn bragging rights based on how little they eat, as do women who are old enough to know better. They share tips for reaching the promised land of Size Zero and even better, Size Double Zero.

  Pro-anorexia websites are waiting to share ever-more effective techniques of starvation with teenage girls, who love to hang out in digital space. (A recent posting: “I am aiming for 500 cals a day, and I am not exceeding 800. Under any circumstances. FRESH START!”)

  When Lisa was trawling for “thinspiration,” as the pro-anorexia websites call it, I was out reviewing restaurants. People often ask, “How did you keep working?” The real question is, “How could you keep working? Your child might be dying!” I asked myself that question many times a day. But being by Lisa’s side didn’t seem to help, either. She just kept getting worse. Lisa often called my cell phone when I was driving to a restaurant, and sometimes she would say, “I can’t do this anymore.” By “this” she meant life.

  Meanwhile I had the job of my dreams. Besides reviewing restaurants and answering readers’ questions, I wrote news and feature stories. It made national news when I found that a prominent local Italian restaurant was substituting pork for veal, a fraud that caused Muslims and Jews to eat forbidden foods. The more I focused on the details of food safety and marketing, the more passionately readers responded. Everybody eats. My predecessor had to quit this job for his health, but lucky me, I have the metabolism for it. I tacked this quote from the great food writer M.F.K. Fisher to my cubicle wall: “First, let’s eat,” and I followed that commandment.

  Also, I had to keep working because we needed my salary. Health insurance covered little of Lisa’s care. We finally found a psychologist Lisa connected with, and she’s made tremendous progress. Again we have hope, but her treatment has cost $30,000 a year. It comes out of money we had saved for Lisa’s education and future.

  Faced with a disease of uncertain origin and wildly conflicting experts, I flew into information-gathering like a frantic bird, collecting sticks and leaves to patch the nest. Quick, let’s try this treatment or that doctor. When your child is sick, that’s all that matters. You feel paralyzed at times, you can’t face another day, but you
keep going. My job just made the going a little trickier.

  People who meet me as a food writer invariably say, “But you’re skinny!” It may be my greatest accomplishment (“She ate a ton and never got fat”). But even at my thinnest postcollege depressive self, a knife blade in skinny jeans, I never lost track of the two or three pounds that would have flattened an imaginary bulge in my stomach.

  As a food writer and middle-aged woman, I have rounded up a bit. (When I started reviewing restaurants, it was: “But you’re so skinny!” Mostly I don’t hear “so” anymore.) I exercise a lot, and I kick myself for all the mental energy I put into my weight and body parts I’d like to trade in, when I could be caring about something important. How did my body issues and my job as a food writer contribute to my daughter’s anorexia? Lisa and I retreat to our own corners on this one. She sees a lot to blame on me, my job, our family’s food obsession. And you know, so do I. But I wonder how much can be attributed to my career choice, my personality, or just being Mom. Hungry is not about piling on the blame. There’s a lot more at work. Like mothers and daughters everywhere, when Lisa and I build up muscles of self-righteous anger and hurt, it’s hard to break through. Our book is about the hungers that put us back in the ring.

  one

  A Very Bad Day

  My daughter stands under five foot three and weighs ninety-three pounds. I can barely see the top of her head in the back of the patrol car as it sweeps by me, standing at the emergency room entrance on this otherwise gorgeous, blue-sky Saturday afternoon in August 2007. An armed policewoman gets out of the car and I can’t watch anymore. I retreat into the Soviet-style hospital compound to wait for Lisa, hoping the handcuffs will be off when I get to see her.

  Lisa and I had walked out of Stanford Hospital’s double-wheelchair-wide doors less than forty-eight hours earlier, after six nightmarish weeks in treatment for anorexia and depression. We hadn’t known it was even possible to stay six weeks in a hospital. It was way too long and while she wasn’t getting better, she was deemed stable enough. On Thursday we packed Lisa’s stuff into paper grocery bags. She hugged the cherubic resident doctor and a couple of the nicer nurses, and got one mile of fresh air as we drove to the new center of our hopes, a cozy, community-based halfway house where she would live for at least the next six weeks. They would have to be better weeks.

  Eventually, yes, they would be, but that morning Lisa called 911. She told the dispatcher she had eaten liquid soap and said she felt dead. Two Palo Alto Police Department cruisers, a fire truck, and an ambulance raced to the group home, a place I’ll call La Casa, a Tudor-style thirties-era house on a quiet residential street, and took my stunned daughter away in handcuffs. Metal handcuffs. This is police procedure for anyone who’s “a danger to him- or herself.”

  When the officers had appeared at the door, Lisa was stunned. She told them she didn’t really mean it. They were calm but stern. Once a suicidal-sounding call is made, there is no going back.

  The director of the halfway house called me. He was on his way to the hospital to fill out the necessary forms, and he would talk to me there. He, too, sounded calm. This wasn’t all new to him. When he got the call about Lisa’s 911, he was buying vegetables at the farmers’ market, where normal people went on Saturdays. Ned was out of town or he would have been at the farmers’ market, too.

  I put down the phone, wishing I hadn’t picked it up, that the call had been a prank or I’d dreamed it. Two days free of the hospital, and that was that. What next? But this was no time to explore my feelings. I threw some fruit, bread, and cheese into a sack. All I could think was, We’ll have to eat at some point. I wouldn’t leave Lisa even for a few minutes to get a sandwich.

  lisa: “I need you to just breathe,” the policewoman called back to me. But I did not want to breathe, I did not want to see, I did not want to believe I was sitting in the back of a police car, handcuffed and heading back to the Stanford Hospital emergency room.

  I had spent two nights at La Casa. I trembled uncontrollably and couldn’t think, but mostly it had gone okay. When I checked in, everyone was just getting back from the offsite day program. We had dinner, watched TV, and went to bed. But the second night, a Friday, most people got to go out after dinner. Being a new resident, I had to stay home to be monitored.

  Another resident, Jeff, was in the house as well. The two of us stayed downstairs, he in the dining room while I sat semipetrified on the couch in the living room. The real world scared me and presented itself full of activity, color, lights, and people after being isolated in a lock-down ward for six weeks. I was now in a new place, around new people, and I was still very sick and feared rejection from my new peers. Ron, on duty as the night staff, read a book in the office and waited for residents to come home and take their nighttime medications.

  I watched as Jeff got some ice cream and then came into the living room and asked me if I wanted some. It was very sweet ice cream: vanilla with birthday cake flavoring. I ate it at the dining room table, and pretty quickly freaked out about how much I’d eaten, so I went up to the bathroom and tried to calm myself down by washing my face but I couldn’t hold back. I stuck two fingers down my throat and made myself throw up, as I had done so many times before. I was used to the taste of vomit, but I also had a soapy taste in my mouth. I realized I must have swallowed some facewash that had remained on my fingers. This freaked me out and I hardly slept at all that night.

  In the morning, after breakfast, I felt like my body wasn’t mine. Maybe it was all the meds I was taking, but my surroundings became hard to detect. I went upstairs and grabbed my cell phone to call 911. This is what I remember:

  “I think I just killed myself.”

  “Where are you? What happened?”

  “I’m at La Casa. I swallowed facewash and OD’d on Prozac.” I didn’t have access to Prozac or any other medications, and the facewash had been the night before. I just wanted them to come and, as I envisioned, rescue me because I knew something was medically wrong or very off with me and I simply did not feel safe.

  Then they were there, and then there were handcuffs. I said, “No, I didn’t mean it. I’ll be okay. Just let me stay here.”

  We were supposed to go to the beach on Saturday.

  sheila: I was planning to take Lisa to the beach on Saturday. After six weeks of recycled ventilation in a concrete hospital built in 1959, she could use some ocean atmosphere. Psychiatry patients who were stable enough were allowed to sit outside on the deck or shuffle down to the patio for half an hour, but Lisa rarely earned that privilege. She hardly even looked out the window. Most of the time when we arrived, her room’s curtain was closed, and she hadn’t noticed or cared. She was very depressed, and shaky on an antipsychotic medication, but she was capable of sitting in the car for the one-hour drive to the coast. I calculated the possible restroom stops in case of beach traffic.

  We were supposed to have an entirely different spring, summer, and fall. This felt like the Lifetime movie version of somebody else’s life. Lisa needed two more classes to graduate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, but she was able to walk with her class in June 2007. By now she would have been enjoying the summer; working at O’Neill, an upscale surfer-style clothing shop; and starting to think seriously about her future. She’d still have a couple of classes to finish up in the fall to get her degree in American Studies. She’d considered careers in teaching and in counseling, but needed time away from school before applying to graduate programs. It was a miracle she was even close to graduating with her class. Considering how horrible her freshman year had been—at least one quarter lost to bulimia—Ned and I were thrilled. And we’d been primed not to expect a four-year bachelor’s degree at the University of California. Lisa’s brother, Jake, spent seven years in and out of UC Berkeley.

  I’m trying to make the case that Lisa wasn’t under the parental gun when she fell to pieces and lost more than three seasons of her life at age twenty-three. Public
school tuition helped us dither. I know parents who carried through on threats of “Four years and you’re out!” with regard to college. Was it our permissive parenting that put Lisa on the road to extremely serious eating disorders in the first place? Lisa could have used stricter expectations, for sure. Maybe she felt lost. But I don’t know that stricter parents have fewer anorexic kids. Was the attraction to anorexia that it was a way to set limits that we should have been setting? It was also a powerful way to get attention and to manipulate.

  During Lisa’s last year in college, she was working too many hours at the store, with a full academic load. But she kept saying that she liked to keep busy. She didn’t like to have time on her hands. What was that about?

  As a young child, Lisa liked to tell us, “I love you to pieces that will never break again!” Now we were even analyzing Lisa’s version of Humpty Dumpty. If there had been a fall and something had broken, how could we not have noticed?

  Our family had medical history, depression on my side and weight on Ned’s. Not just weight. Craziness about weight. Ned’s sister started taking diet pills when she was ten and has been on diets ever since. Ned got a little portly and then lost it, but his sister’s torture stayed with him. He feared for any child of his, especially a daughter.

  Genetics, then, gave Lisa two strikes, but something else must have happened. As with many diseases, the rule you often hear about eating disorders is “Genetics loads the gun, and experience/ cultural pressure/trauma pull the trigger.” Depression and weight/ body image issues are as common as colds in America, yet most of us don’t become anorexic. We all navigate relentless media and social pressures to squeeze our imperfect selves into a very narrow band of acceptable appearance and accomplishment. Everyone is exposed, but some are more vulnerable, especially teenagers and young adults struggling to figure out who they are. What comes through clearly, though: Be thin.