Good Foods and Bad Foods

There is only one rule that decides if a food is good or bad, and that is if you're fat or not. If you're fat, the only good foods are tuna, and grapefruit, and vegetables. If you're not fat, anything you want to eat is good. For instance my sisters are not fat. Mama buys them delicious things like sugared cereals and whole milk. She makes them cookies, and when it's someone's birthday, they always get a slice of the cake. Grandpa Brown visits, and he takes us all out to Baskin Robbins for ice cream. Linda and Karen can have whatever they want, but Mama calls after me as we go out of the house, that I'd better watch my diet.

My Grandma Johnson is fat. I know this because she eats dry toast and grapefruit and coffee with saccharin tablets in it, every morning for breakfast. She makes us delicious cakes with coconut frosting on them. She fries fish, and chicken, and okra for us. She bakes us fresh biscuits, and serves us yummy cold ham and sweet pickles. But this is because we are not fat. Later on after I become fat, and have to go on a diet, I teach her how to make creamed tuna with powdered skim milk in it like Mama does, so we can both lose weight together.

My Daddy is fat too. I know this because Mama calls him fat. – We all call him fat, although the only way you'd notice it is because his belly makes his shirt bulge out a little. Daddy always eats whatever he wants anyway. He eats potato chips, and Planters roasted peanuts, and chocolate chip ice cream. He makes Mama keep a special dish with real butter for him, because he won't eat margarine, and if there's not a lot of whatever we're having for supper at night, he always gets mad (Mama says this is because he grew up in the Depression). The only bad thing that seems to happen to Daddy because of all his eating, is that Mama complains. That's bad, I mean I wouldn't want her complaining about me like that. It isn't as bad as you'd think ought to happen, though, considering all the bad foods he eats.

As for me, I go on my first diet in the Fourth Grade. Whenever I get something I'm not allowed to eat, such as a candy bar, or a bottle of Magic Shell chocolate syrup for making sundaes, I put it away safe for when I am skinny enough to eat it. By the time school lets out for the summer, I have lost all the weight I'm supposed to. There's this whole new set of rules I'm supposed to follow, called a Maintenance Diet. This involves adding in just a few non-diet foods, but not very many of them, and in very small amounts. For instance I am allowed to eat peanut butter again, for the first time since I started my diet. For the Maintenance Diet, I can mix peanut butter into the powdered skim milk I'm still supposed to have every day. That's pretty good, although it's kind of a lot of work to go for a snack for just one person, and anyway, I've still got all those sweet snacks that I saved when I was dieting.

I keep gaining and losing weight all through the rest of my childhood. Sometimes I get scared, because I read about how dangerous it is for your weight to go up and down. It's called “yo-yo dieting”, and it's way worse than just staying fat and being done with it. But I can't seem to help myself. I go on Diet Watchers, and suddenly there's all these foods I can't eat. I can't just give them up forever, can I? I mean who doesn't eat a slice of cake on their birthday? Who doesn't have a couple slices of pizza and a soda, when the family goes to the Pizza Parlor?

Then when I'm like 15, I discover this book that's called Fat Power, and it is the most incredible book in the world. It says that being fat isn't the same thing as being bad. Fat is just a way some people are shaped, and the ones with the problem are all the skinny people who give a lot of hate to them. I love that book. It makes me feel happy in a way no other book ever has in my entire life. After I read it, I decide I'm never going to go on another diet again. If the natural way for my body to be is fat, then let me be fat. It's up to other people to learn to accept me. I give up even trying at Diet Watchers, and when Mama finds new crash diets that she wants us to try together, I say “no thank you, I'm not going to diet any more.”

Only after I stop, I don't really know how I'm supposed to eat. I can't eat everything I love, can I? I mean isn't there a limit?  But if there is a limit, what is it?  How do I know when to stop, which foods to eat and which ones to leave alone?

For a long time after I stop dieting,  I eat a lot. I buy sacks of Autumn Mix after school in September, and finish them before I get home. I buy marshmallow-filled candy eggs and chew them one after another, all the way through Easter weekend. I make Christmas cookies with extra candy chips in them in the winter, and apple pies and pineapple upside-down cakes in the summer, and sometimes I don't even make them to share.   I still eat whatever Mama's made for supper as well, big servings of it, and seconds too, unless she starts looking at me funny.

What it ends up coming down to, is that I eat all the foods that I love, and as much of them as I want, until I discover that my body has no set-point.  I am not one of these people who is going to get to a certain weight and just stay there, or if I am, it's some huge weight way past 200 pounds that I've always been too scared to let myself get to.  I weigh 155 pounds when I finish High School.  I weigh 175 when I graduate from college 4 years later.  At that point I get scared and start dieting again, and that just brings its own problems.