Book Briefing: Beautiful Bodies: A memoir

By: Reham Essam

Beautiful Bodies by Kimberly Rae Miller

I’d been on a diet for over twenty years; two-thirds of my life had been spent thinking about food and how to avoid it, and I was tired of analyzing every sandwich I met. But I didn’t know how to eat without a diet. I didn’t know what my body was supposed to look like or how to see it as anything more than a “before” photo.

If I was grappling with something I didn’t understand—hormones, homework, boys, or bullies— I would find a book by someone who did understand, and the world seemed a lot more manageable. I didn’t know how much I should eat, but I knew less was better, and each day I had a competition with myself to eat less than the day before. In the Irony of all ironies, my lifelong struggle between dieting constantly and finding peace with my body had led to a career I loved.

Patience And Fortitude

Being a writer was a complete accident, but it was always in the making: I’m addicted to dieting. I’ve never met a diet I didn’t want to try. I have eaten nothing but meat, nothing but raw vegetables, nothing but fruit, nothing but juice. I have counted points, calories, and scarfed down all my meals in a six-hour feeding window. All of it in the name of weight loss. Dieting is my real hobby.

I have come to rely on the structure and hope diets provide as a way of anchoring myself in the world. When there are no rules or promises to life, a diet provides them. When things are at their most stressful, calorie counting is a refuge of control. I am aware that this is very much in line with disordered eating behavior. If we stopped being ashamed of our bodies, the whole diet industry would collapse. I like being employed as a writer, so I have mixed feelings about that, but I could probably find another job, and I would be curious to see a society that doesn’t revolve round people constantly trying to hate themselves into perfection.

The Inuit Diet

Inuit culture a chance to study the effect s of a high–fat, high–protein, low–carbohydrate diet on health and dental hygiene. In this thirty-year-old memory, I watch as the Sesame street crew follows an Inuit girl living Arctic Alaska as she goes about her daily life. She spends a little time with her grandfather in a hut he’d made from snow that he’d use while fishing and helps her mother prepare food in their perfectly status quo. From what I could tell, life evolved mostly around not freezing to death. Her key to survival: eating fat. Following her theory, I had a taste for fat, its creamy, savory essence that evolved into a chewy, salty gum of sorts; I knew that the Inuit were onto something. Fat is delicious. And it would keep me warm. Food had a purpose. I realized that what I ate could have an effect on my life, on my overall happiness. I’d never given much thought to my body—but now it was something I could control with food.

You Should Be Ashamed Of Yourself

We can trace our body-shaming ways back to the Bible. Right there, in the beginning, Adam and Eve just hung out in the Garden of Eden, being naked and loving it: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Their shameless naked unemployment lasts for only a few paragraphs. Once they eat something that they aren’t supposed to, everything changes: their bodies become totems of ignominy, and they are left scrambling to sew a few fig leaves together to cover themselves, to hide their bodies. The Bible was inspiration for America’s first diet-reform movement, led by none other than cracker was invented in 1829, not as a vehicle for chocolate and marshmallows but as away to ward off unholy sexual urges through good old-fashion wheat germ. 

Graham, a Presbyterian minister, become America’s first diet guru in the early 1830s when he toured the country, preaching his nutritive gospel. He warned that diet, health, and morality were inseparable, and in order to maintain balance between the three, spices, tea, coffee, refined grains, milk, meat, alcohol, and tobacco should be avoided entirely. In fact, the only way to ensure foods did not excite the spirit and lead to depravity was to follow a simple diet of vegetables, unrefined flour, and clean water. In other words, boringness is next to godliness. The teachings mirrored those of Graham’s when it came to the relationship between food and morality. 

I remember the exact moment I started to see myself as nothing but a failed body. I was in second grade and I weighed 125 pounds. I didn’t actually. I just thought I did. My mother weighted 125 pounds. She had mentioned her weight in passing and I, not being great with pronouns or active listening, decided she was talking about me. I didn’t know how much I was supposed to weigh at seven, but I knew that 125 pounds was too much. My body was no longer an extension of my thoughts or feelings, but something else entirely: a betrayer. I allowed these new feelings of sadness and failure to consume me, for hours, maybe a day, before I finally broke under the weight of my despair and started to cry in the middle of quiet study at school.

The King And I (Go To Fat Camp)

King William’s alcohol-only diet didn’t seem to have changed his girth that much, as evidenced by fact that king did not fit in his coffin. As the church attendant tasked with preparing his body for burial smashed and smooshed his unembalmed, bacteria-riddled belly into his coffin, it become evident that William was too rotund to close the casket, and so he had an unplanned open-casket funeral.

 I was obsessed with fat camp. I could spend hours inspecting the various flavors the camps came in some promised the college experiences: spending the summer in a university’s dorms, using the fitness center, and eating in the cafeteria. Others promised a woodsy affair, offering a traditional sleep away camp with nature-based activities. Some boasted hotel accommodations and daily maid service. All of them promised I would make friendships that would last a lifetime and, more importantly. Return to my real life a more beautiful and confident me than I’d ever been before. My parents refused to drive me to camp— I’d gone against their wishes and was relegated to taking the bus to some town.

By the time my two-week fat-camp adventure was over, I was actually psyched to hit the scale. I’d spent a cumulative fifty-six hours exercising and had survived on ice pops and salad, the only mess-hall items I could stomach. I was sure that I was at least ten pounds lighter, and so on my last day of camp I met with nutrition staff to review my “life plan” and find out what my effort had earned me, but the counselor told me “It’s all muscle.”

Butts and Bellies

The good news is that I’m good in bed. I’ve always wondered about that. The bad news is that I fell in love with someone who wasn’t sure whether my problem areas were his deal breakers. I don’t know why I started reading Roy’s e-mail talking to his friend about my big butt and belly. Actually, I do know why I started reading his e-mail. I didn’t trust him, since it was by e-mail that I had found out that Paul had cheated on me. Paul and I had been together for almost four years. He was the first man I slept with, my first boyfriend, the first man I loved.

 At twenty-one I just wanted to lose my virginity before it become an embarrassing accessory; love I was a little more reticent about. The girl with Paul sent me an e-mail discussing their sex life. My first reaction is always rational, practical. A Calm before my emotional storm, I thought of reasons he’d depressed about in life, about us, but in the four years we’d been together we’d never even had a fight. Our life, our relationship, was so completely status quo. We read the NewYork Times together in bed on Sunday mornings, talked politics at local bars, sang karaoke in Koreatown, and went in vacation with couple friends. We spent holidays with his family and talked about our future, about hypothetical kids and hypothetical apartments we’d live in—together—one day. You don’t cheat on people you don’t cheat on people you’re planning a future with.

In the three years after Paul and I broke up, I’d dated a lot of really great guys and a few not-so-great guys. Each time I reminded myself that they weren’t him. They had never knowingly hurt me, but that didn’t seem to matter to the part of my brain that allowed me to feel comfortable letting my guard down around men who might want to see me naked one day. So in Roy’s Computer there was an access to his social media and email accounts, I started searching for anything he had confessed to friends about me. It didn’t take long for the e-mail to come up. He Had written to a friend about me, and his friend response was that he needed to get out immediately, because if I was chunky now, and he’d end up miserable with a fatty and ultimately screw up for life. 

The Birth and Death of Body Acceptance

The therapist I saw after our house had burned down had recommended the journal as a therapeutic tool so that I could reflect on my family’s loss privately, but I never wrote about the fire or mourning my pets, about leaving my friends, or less-than-stellar adjustment I was making at my new school. I didn’t write about how our new house had started to fill up with the same clutter we’d escaped in our old house or my parents fighting. Writing things down made them permanent, and I didn’t want history to reflect any of it. Therefore, I tried to skip this part from my life.

There isn’t a single chapter of my life where I wasn’t following some type of diet—expect for two outlying periods when I allowed myself to exist in the world without a diet to organize my days around. The first time was when I was eighteen and studying abroad in the Netherlands, I lost weight although I ate everything. When I went to meet my parents at the airport on the way home, my mother walked right past me. After Paul left I ate all the things, my second period of untracked consumption, rebellion against all the years of carefully planned meal and deprivation that was supposed to shield me from failure and disappointment. Quickly. Uncomfortably. I hated myself, but that was nothing new. I hid myself from the world, avoid social events and backing out of auditions. I didn’t want anyone to see me the way I really was. However, I wanted to be a star, I spent my weekends going on tours of law schools. I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to be a lawyer, but I wanted to go to school, to do something normal, grounded people did. I wanted to get away from the city and industry I shared with Paul. I liked the idea of spending my days behind a desk in an air-conditioned office. I didn’t have to be an actor, someone who was constantly struggling to be funny enough, flirty enough, pretty enough, someone whose weight was a commodity to be hired and fired by; I could just be a normal person who was allowed to be imperfect.

When my acceptance letter started to roll in, I wasn’t excited, but I was resolved to trying out a completely different life.  I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be the poster girl for a movement I’d never heard of; therefore I have worked in modeling for a while. Then one day, I found Self magazine ran an annual diet series, and it was the perfect opportunity to brown nose the mothership. I followed the twelve-week magazine diet as best I could and blogged about it in what was supposed to be a short-lived blog called The Kim Challenge—I just wanted the producers might notice me as a writer, and they asked me to write for their blog network.

I kept writing my personal blog in addition to my daily column on Elastic Waist. And I bought it, hook, line, and sinker. I was a believer; we’re all in this together. Every time I sat down at my computer to work on my post for the day, I opened a new vein of insecurity, and the strangers on the other side of my words wrote back that they understood. Being on a diet meant that I was trying, but I’d never actually admitted how much my weight consumed me, how it had dictated every decision I made. People I didn’t know wrote to me regularly to tell me they felt the exact same way. I wouldn’t ever be thin enough to be thin enough and I didn’t weigh enough to have an acceptable place in the size-acceptance movement. So, I decided right then and there that I had found the secret; the key to being thin was being busy and happy. That was it, I thought. I just had to be busy and happy all the time and I would stay thin.

Canadian Pill Pushers

It wasn’t your fault; life handed you an unfair hand; now take these pills and everything will be better. Every story was mine at some point or another. There was always a reason to be fat, blame to be placed genetics, boyfriends, jobs, and traumas. None of us had gained weight because we wanted to. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and every one of us feels alone in it. I started popping pills from the giant unmarked jug as soon as I got home from my info session. But first I’d Googled all the ingredients. For the most part they were made up of caffeine and herbs with laxative qualities. They wouldn’t kill me. They probably wouldn’t make me thinner either, but they would at least keep me awake and help me poop.

Fight or Flight

I’d been dieting since I was a child, and even when I was thin for me I never seemed to be thin enough for anyone else—not my boyfriends, not my agents, not the trolls on the internet, not for diet-pill companies. My weight was the one thing in my life I couldn’t overcome; my butt was going to undermine my relationship with Roy as his friend told him on the e-mail.

I didn’t confess to being a big-butt-and-bellied snoop when Roy came home. I pretended it was just any other night of new-couple bliss, but I was in fight-or-flight mode. I could break things off with him now and leave him to the models and dancers he preferred, or I could diet harder. I didn’t want to break up with Roy. I liked him, more than I liked anyone in a long time. But I wanted him to like me as I was—that’s how romance is supposed to work, right? His email encapsulated everything I’d ever believed about myself: I was almost good enough, if it weren’t for my body. And my body was my fault. I couldn’t lose weight because I loved me now, but maybe I could lose weight because I wanted to love Roy. I caught a glance at my body one day while Roy and I were having sex, and for the first time ever, I thought that I looked sexy. It was the only moment in my life, other than the moment in the hotel room before my first and only pageant that I looked at my body with approval, the outline of my ribs evident through my skin. That was also the night Roy told me he loved me for the first time.

Fifty Pounds To Galilee

I didn’t believe him. I knew he was lying. If I was too fat for him when we met, I must have been monstrous to him now. I did believe that he loved me: it was just that he did so despite my body. Two years passed between when we met and when I submitted my book, and in that time he hadn’t missed a day of sending me a text to tell me he was thinking of me; he called regularly before we moved in together; and he never let two days pass without planning a night for us. He kept being wonderful, and I was just getting fatter and sadder and fatter. After Roy’s proposal, I was in starry-eyed bliss for about five minutes before I started tallying the calories, I needed to go on a wedding diet.

Broken Bodies

I had dieted successfully on a slightly screwed-up thyroid most of my life. Now nothing was working. I was supposed to be my most beautiful self on my wedding day, but I had reached a point where I refused to even look in a mirror or go out in public. I declined the engagement party my parents wanted to throw us, not wanting there to be any photographic evidence of my existence, and I started to feign feeling tried or sick whenever Roy planned a date night that involved other people.

My social awkwardness was the price he paid for falling in love with in introvert, but he was mad at me. I’d crossed a line when I’d started encouraging him to go out to events alone—a compromise, I thought— so he could still be social and I could still be invisible. He kept saying “Your body is tricky. That’s all. Maybe you should see nutritionist.”

I’d picked the latest possible appointment because my work schedule was always a little unpredictable. The nutritionist’s office was already dimmed; the secretaries had already gone home for the day and turned the decorative lamps placed around the waiting room off, leaving only the faint fluorescent ones in their place. Three of the four offices were empty and dark, but I could hear voices behind the one closed door.

Alison, the doctor, was twenty-six-year-old, she had an eagerness that made me nervous but was also sort of endearing—I remembered being fresh from school and wanting so desperately for people to take me seriously, and for the most part people had given me the benefit of the doubt. She was wearing a dress, while I wore cardigan. Cardigans are like the security blankets of clothes, hiding muffin tops and covering strain fabric seams. Or at least that’s what I told myself. She listened attentively and took notes, nodding when appropriate. After the BMR test, she said that I have a broken metabolism.

Eat less, move more was a mantra I had lived by, but I’d taken it to extremes for more than half my life, and I had broken my body, as my body had no idea what to do with food anymore after eating less amount of food. So Alison said we need to build my metabolism back up, through eating up to 1,800 calories besides eating slowly to allow my body to eventually adjust. I was shocked; it was double what I was currently burning efficiently.

Roy, the sexy Dr.Phil told me that metabolism isn’t an organ; I can’t break it. It’s the rate between building and destroying tissue, and an intricate combination of systems: hormonal, thermoregulatory, and biomechanical. There are no instances of people leaving periods of extreme caloric deprivation heavier.

After hesitation, I decided to confess to Roy about  the e-mail that I had read 3 years ago that he sent to his friend about my body, and apologize for invading his privacy and ask for clarification why he is about to marry me although he doesn’t like my body. I expected he will be mad at me, but instead he said really quickly that my weight became a non-issue for him, he looked ashamed. Not the reaction I was expecting and he added “My priorities were screwed up.” 

I kept up my reverse diet even after the wedding, but I stopped paying to see Alison. Roy and I wanted to buy an apartment and have kids, and I needed that money to go toward the things that really mattered. Maintaining my over weight status didn’t feel all that important. I had spent a lifetime dieting, and it had made me heavier. I didn’t have a specific weight or calorie goal to hit, but my whole life had been about achieving the unachievable.

Evolving Venuses

The truth is that for most of human history, our ancestors simply had less food available and had to work much harder for it. Whether they go fat or not and when they did have access to food had more to do with where they lived than instinct and self-control. Genetics was a perfect excuse for all my many imperfections and a valid reasoning point for why my friends could eat cookies without feeling bad about themselves and I couldn’t. 

Two people of similar weight, height, body shape, and lifestyle can eat the same foods but with vastly different results. Some people require fewer calories than others. Their bodies are models of metabolic efficiency: they seem to hardly need any food at all the function in the world, and if they were to eat the recommended amount of food suggested by governing guidelines, they would actually gain weight. Their body is a great betrayer, who can bump up the needle on the scale in one moderately indulgent weekend.

Whose Line is It Anyway?

Food.Sex.And. According to my wise best friend, Anna, all men are made up of a simple trifecta of priorities.  The “and” is what changes from man to man. For her boyfriend it’s cars. For my husband it’s superheroes— mostly in the form of comics, but superhero movies are still a matter of utmost importance in our home.

Once I agreed with Roy that we want a baby, I proceeded to dunk several more tests in my fresh cup of morning pee. All with the same result, a faint pink line, the pink line got darker over the next few days, and as it did our priorities changed. But first, I wanted to tell my parents. Roy thought we should wait until we were further along, but I assured him that was just for friends. Parents should be told right away. Plus I said” if something goes wrong, I’m going to need my mom.”

My mom had described to me, in detail, repeatedly, all the foods I could and could not have now that I was pregnant. I had changed my diet completely, happily, as soon as that line turned pink. I had no problem nixing anything with artificial colors or sweeteners, which we didn’t eat much of anyway. I added four hundred calories to my daily allowance, not because I was afraid my regular, diet-conscious eating habits were too minimal to make a new human. I’d deal with being fat later; the next nine months were about the baby, and I loved it.

I didn’t want history to repeat itself. I was pregnant now, and that made me feel like the clock was ticking; I needed to find peace with my body. It was going to change, it was going to get fatter, and the amount of fat I have could not be my priority any longer. I was making a new person. There was a part of me that secretly wished that my baby wasn’t a she, because the world is so much harder on girls. The pressure to be everything, to be smart but also to be beautiful, ambitious but also supportive of everyone else, carefree but thoughtful, full of personality and gravitas but also in great shape— it’s a tightrope that I’ve fallen  from on many occasions. The feminist in me wants to say,”Fuck the tightrope,” but the truth is I don’t know who I would be without it; my whole life has been centered around my performance. I suppose there are different battles men fight, but I honestly don’t think they’re as hard to balance. The dilemma is how could I teach my baby to respect women’s bodies when I didn’t respect mine?

I started bleeding three days later…

What To Expect When You‘re Losing Your Baby

The ultrasound wand entered my body and my baby appeared bigger than the last time, but the flicker of his heart was gone. The doctor moved the wand around looking, but I knew she wouldn’t find it. He was only measuring six weeks and two days.  This baby was wanted. No one had acknowledged that yet, not me, not Roy. We had gotten pregnant easily, surprisingly easily, and it was sort of a high-five moment.  The doctor kept saying I’m sorry. It wasn’t his fault. It was mine. My body wasn’t good enough. My metabolism killed my baby. Then, the doctor added that we can re-try to have a new baby but after two months. I wondered what it would be like to have sex with the sole purpose of making a baby. I didn’t want that, but I could see myself becoming obsessed with tracking ovulation dates and cervical mucus. It seemed like a crappy way to make a baby. Not out of love but out of sense of failure.

I talked to my body while I waited for the ills to work their way through my system. We were going to have to go through my system. We were going to have to go through this together.

I’m sorry. This is going to be hard and it’s going to hurt. I’m sorry we have to go through this. But I will take care of you.

I hadn’t had any connection to my body since I was seven years old. I’d made it the villain of my life story—I blamed everything on it. If I didn’t get the part, I blamed my body. If I didn’t get the guy, I blamed my body. If I didn’t like who I was, I blamed my body. But I didn’t want to blame it anymore. I wanted a truce. I wasn’t ready to love it, but I didn’t want to hate it anymore.

Ending An Era

I’d never put much stock in the five-stages-of-grief idea. People in my life had died, and I’d been sad and missed them, but I always understood and accepted it. Miscarrying was something else. I couldn’t justify it. I knew that miscarriages were common. I knew that it didn’t mean I’d never have another baby. I knew it hadn’t had any thoughts or feelings— it wasn’t a person who had died tragically; I wasn’t mourning a baby that I’d held in my arms and cared for and loved. I didn’t miss him; I didn’t know him/her. I understood that I was mourning the idea that I was going to be a mother, the experience of being pregnant. I just needed to get over it and do it again. It wasn’t a happy ending; it wasn’t even a silver lining. I wished desperately that I’d never been pregnant at all. Even if I never lost another pound, I needed to reach peace with myself. The only pictures I had with my mother were from my wedding. I didn’t want to be the kind of mom who never took pictures with her family. Didn’t leave memories for her children to hold on to, I didn’t want to pass on my deep-seated insecurities to my kids. I needed to actually take some time to live in it the way it was instead of hiding from it. I will always love diets and the hope they give me, but I will love them for what they are, a fantasy, and I will not let them hurt me again. Chasing the ideal body is like chasing the horizon— it’s all a matter of perspective. I’ll never really get there, but I’ll appreciate the view as I try.

Epilogue

In the past twenty-two weeks I’ve gained seven pounds, but it looks like more. My face has thinned, but my breasts are huge, and the roundness of my belly has moved up and up. I have officially had to transition out of pants that button, and my maternity jeans have just started to reach the point where I don’t have to pull them up constantly. I look pregnant. There are some habits that die hard, and each month on my way to the doctor, I make sure whatever it is I’m wearing is on the light side. I ate whatever I wanted, it was the first time to drink milk, and eat burger. I know it won’t always be like this, but I hope it will. Not the hungry part, the being okay with being hungry part.