Diane saw my daughter Carlie before I did.
My husband, Jim, was out of town when Carlie decided it was time to be born. Jim and Diane had been colleagues when he was a news anchor and reporter at WTNH-TV in Connecticut. I was in a panic when I called Diane in the middle of the night to say I was in labor and needed help.
Diane met me at the hospital. After sixteen hours of labor, the doctor said, “It’s still going to be awhile,” and left the hospital to pick up a pizza. Moments later, I told Diane, “I think it’s time for me to push.” Her answer: “Close your legs and hang on while I get a nurse.” It didn’t work out that way. Five minutes later, my friend had a view of me only a medical professional should ever have as she caught my baby.
What can tie two women together more than that? We had forged a bond through the pain, emotion, and exhilaration that comes with bringing a beautiful new life into the world. And since then we have been the closest of confidantes. Nothing has been off the table about our marriages, our families, and the ups and downs of our careers. The only topic we ever skirted was weight and food, despite the huge role it played in both of our lives.
When we first met, Diane was probably about a size 12. She wasn’t skinny, but she was a tall, blonde beauty. Over the next few years I watched her weight steadily climb, as Diane gradually went from statuesque to obese. Every time she lost a few pounds she seemed to put them right back on, plus a little more. Whenever we got together, I couldn’t help but notice the change. It seemed as though Diane was sabotaging her TV career. I remember thinking to myself, Why is she letting this go on?
I remember thinking to myself, Why is she letting this go on?—Mika
Diane is smart, driven, and competent. I mean, this is one talented woman: she’s earned several Emmy awards, has been recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for lifetime achievement, and has been honored by the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame. A TV news anchor, reporter, radio talk show host, documentary producer, and author of six previous books, she has been on the air in Connecticut for more than twenty-five years. But I doubted other people were seeing all that when they looked at her. Given what I have learned about the value of being thin, I’d guess her weight was making them think instead, This woman doesn’t have it together. She doesn’t even have the discipline to lose weight and get in shape.
And that’s basically what I said on that beautiful afternoon on Long Island Sound when I came clean about how I felt. At first, it looked like it was going to turn into a very turbulent day for a treasured friendship. I wasn’t sure she would ever speak to me again.
I told Diane, “I don’t really think that you are sitting around eating all day, but I do think you need to break your cycle of depending on fattening foods and start believing in yourself again. You’re not really hiding anything with all those black pantsuits. Everyone knows you have a weight issue.”
Telling Diane the truth about her weight, and using that toxic word obese to describe her, was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I certainly didn’t do it to be a bitch, even if some people might have thought so. I did it because I want her in my life, and I was worried about her health. I also thought it was only fair for Diane to hear it from a friend. It’s what other people were thinking when she was on TV or when she got up on stage to give a speech.
If you are wondering, Why tell her the truth?, maybe that isn’t the right question. Considering how long it took me to raise the topic of weight, and what it was doing to her personally and professionally, it might be more helpful to ask, Why didn’t you say this ten years ago, when her weight was just becoming a problem? Why did you avoid it?
I wish now that I had talked to Diane much sooner. It would have been a lot easier for both of us.
When Diane took me up on the challenge to lose seventy-five pounds and we decided to write this book together, at first she was reluctant to tell her own story. But eventually we both decided that baring our souls was the way to set an example for others. No one is better off with silence. As Diane put it, “If we can start a dialogue between the two of us, maybe we can instigate a wider discussion. A national discussion. So I’m all in.”
Here is more about how Diane has experienced the struggle against food and overweight, in her own words.
Although Mika and I got to know each other a little while working as news anchors and reporters at rival stations in Connecticut, we really bonded when she was in labor with Carlie. That was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I don’t have kids, and my sisters live far away, so it was truly a once-in-a lifetime event; something I have never shared with anyone else.
No wonder Mika has remained special to me all these years later. But I have to be honest. She’s a little nuts. When she wanted to know if I would step in for her husband, Jim, if she went into labor while he was out of town, did she call me and ask for my help? Did she drop by the house? No, she ran into my husband, Tom, at a coffee bar one Sunday morning and asked him to run it by me.
She was still a couple of weeks away from her due date when I said yes. What I was really figuring was, What are the chances the baby will come while Jim is out of town? Yeah, right. I didn’t give the possibility of coaching her through labor much thought after that. The only thing I did think about was how Mika looked during her pregnancy, and that was sure frustrating to me. Even at nine months’ pregnant, she was thinner than I was. In those days, I was always thinking, What the hell can I wear that won’t make me look so fat?
A few days after I agreed to be her backup labor coach, Mika dropped a couple of books in my mailbox, including What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The books were still in the mailbox when she called our house Friday night. Jim was on a plane to New Orleans, and Tom and I had just polished off a pizza and a bottle of wine. “I think my water broke,” she whispered into the phone.
YOU THINK? WHAT? YOU’VE HAD A BABY BEFORE, NOT ME! WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU THINK???
I ran out to the mailbox to get the books so I could skim through the chapters on labor and delivery while I stayed on the phone with her.
“Yep, it’s starting,” she said. “You two should get some sleep and I’ll call you later.”
SLEEP? ARE YOU KIDDING?
Tom and I lay on our bed, suddenly and completely sober, fully dressed and ready to go. When the phone rang again, we phoned the doctor and headed for the hospital. Mika’s mom stayed behind to watch her daughter, little Emilie.
We couldn’t reach Jim, so all that night and the next day it was Mika and me in the shadowy labor room. The nurse came in a few times to check on her and told us to get some rest, but like kids at a sleepover, we kept right on talking.
There were a few times I had to step up, like when the anesthesiologist asked Mika whether she wanted an epidural. “Did you have one last time?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “But maybe that was a mistake.”
“You’re on my watch now, and you’re having the drugs,” I told her and ordered the epidural.
After hours and hours of chatting about everything except how to deliver a baby, Mika decided it was time. I was afraid to tell her the doctor had just gone out for lunch, but luckily the nurse had been delivering babies for years. She told me to “get ready to catch,” and three pushes later there was Carlie, absolutely the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on.
As Carlie started to cry, Mika asked me to phone her dad, the astonishingly imposing Zbigniew Brzezinski. I blubbered a bit to him, then handed Mika the phone. In the most composed voice, she said, “Dad, you have another granddaughter.”
Mika showed me a lot about her character during the hours she was in labor, and vice versa. She came to see me as a big sister, the “adult” in our relationship. I recognized her strength. In the years to come, no matter what happened in her work or her personal life, she could count on me to have her back.
Now, fourteen years later, Mika and I have had a role reversal. It began with that punch-in-the face moment on my boat. The words still echo in my mind. Mika said, “Diane, you’re not just overweight, you’re fat. You’re obese.” I couldn’t believe the word she had used to describe me: obese. Who says that to a friend? Who says that to anyone? I was angry and defensive.
My first thoughts were, Oh, Mika, come on. I know I’m huge. My metabolism is shot. I try to diet but nothing works anymore. How could you know what it’s like? You and your tiny body in size 2 dresses. Please! You have been picture-perfect ever since I have known you, and when something is just a little off, like your imaginary double chin, you run to a plastic surgeon to fix it. You don’t get it. You naturally skinny women think women like me are a bunch of slobs sitting around eating bonbons all day. That is such garbage.
But then Mika told me something that changed everything.
“Naturally skinny? No way,” she shot back at me. “I do get it, I get it a lot more than you think. I’m not kidding, Diane—food takes up way too much of my time and my psychic space. Here’s my truth: I am an addict. I think about food all day long. I am always wondering if I can sneak away and grab some fast food or something sweet. But I don’t. I don’t because my career depends on winning my fight to stay rail-thin. But I know it’s unhealthy, and I hate every second of it!”
As she launched into the tale of her fight with food, my anger dissolved. I couldn’t believe it, but she began to tell a story that was just like mine; a story of rarely feeling in control around food. Of going to parties and eyeing the buffet first, then trying to hurry through a conversation with her mouth watering. Of wondering what people would say, or think, if they saw her go back for more.
You naturally skinny women think women like me are a bunch of slobs sitting around eating bonbons all day. That is such garbage.—Diane
It was a story I could barely believe as I looked at her slender body, but I knew it was true when I looked into her eyes. “I am a junk food addict,” Mika said. She talked about stuffing herself with chips and ice cream in prep school, gorging on pizza in college, and scarfing down entire boxes of kids’ cereal at a sitting. That habit caused her husband, Jim, to nickname her “Jethro,” after the Beverly Hillbillies character with the enormous appetite. I really could not imagine her acting that way. I’d never seen it.
Mika’s honesty about herself helped me hear what else she was trying to say.
“You’re fat,” Mika blurted. “If you don’t lose the weight now, you’re going to die. Plain and simple: your weight will kill you.” That was either the rudest thing anyone had ever said to me, or the kindest. That’s Mika. She’s no diplomat. She puts all her cards on the table, and she was characteristically blunt. “I love you Diane, and you are fat,” she said.
Friends, family, and colleagues had been dancing around my dramatic weight gain over the last ten years, so it was shocking to hear it stated so bluntly. Mika softened it a little when she said, “I want you to be around for my girls. They need another woman in their lives, especially when I am driving them nuts.” That last part made me laugh, because it’s true!
Up until then I had always thought about my weight as an issue of vanity. When I was heavy I didn’t look the way I wanted to look, or how TV viewers expected me to look. I never really considered my weight to be a health issue, although I should have. My dad was a skinny kid and a slender young adult, but he has been overweight since then, and heart disease very nearly killed him. It’s a medical miracle and a testament to his constitution that he’s still around. My grandmother was overweight and later in life developed diabetes, which she called her “sugar problem.” At the time, I didn’t recognize the link between diabetes and obesity, but I sure do now.
I was moving along the same path. A path that was almost guaranteed to result in one or more chronic diseases.
Shortly after our infamous encounter on Long Island Sound, I suggested to Mika that she write a book about her struggles with food. Readers have told her how much they have learned from her earlier books, about finding life and work balance, and about learning to stand up for yourself in the workplace, and knowing your true value. I thought if Mika told her own story, it would help other women.
Mika took me up on the idea of writing this book, but I had no idea she was planning to aim her message squarely at me. And then my cell phone rang as I was driving to a speaking engagement in the far west corner of Connecticut, about ninety minutes from where I live. Mika was on the line. It was nearly dusk and I was heading down a lonely country road, not feeling great about giving the speech.
I’m a former radio talk show host and I love talking to people, but for several years the fun of greeting a live audience and spending a couple of hours with them had disappeared. Instead of looking forward to it I’d been feeling a kind of dread, because I knew the audience wouldn’t see the person they expected, that stylish, slender anchorwoman of years ago. Instead, they would face a fat, fiftyish female who felt frumpy in a size 18 jacket and stretchy pants. You can hide some of that on TV with good camera work, but standing at the microphone at the front of the room, they were going to see all of me.
On top of that my feet hurt, my knees ached, and I dreaded having to stand at a podium during my talk. It was going to take all the charm I could muster to make them forget who and what they were looking at, and concentrate instead on what I was saying. I wanted to get them wrapped up in my stories: stories about the people and places that make the state of Connecticut special, and give it character and heart. Those are the stories I had reported on TV and radio, and had written books about for years. Sharing them was my passion.
But that sharing was getting harder and harder to do because of my weight. I hated the way I looked in person and on the screen. I won an Emmy for a documentary I produced and hosted a couple of years ago, but I couldn’t even watch myself on TV because I couldn’t stand how fat I looked.
I couldn’t seem to do much about it. I had dieted on and off all my life, and nothing seemed to work. During my TV news career I was a size 10 at my thinnest, and more often a lot bigger than that. I was always the largest woman in the television newsroom, always worried about how I would look on camera when I had to step out from behind the desk. My first reaction when I got invited to a big event was always, What the hell am I going to wear? How much weight can I lose before then so I will fit into something nice? And then the diet cycle would start all over again.
I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t worried about how I looked and what people were thinking. I knew I was smarter and more talented than many of my peers, but I just couldn’t conquer my weight. No one had ever said it, but I could imagine what people were thinking: Why doesn’t she get it together and lose the weight?
As soon as I answered Mika’s call, she launched into her proposal. She asked me to write a book with her, but the offer came with a catch. I had to set a goal of losing seventy-five pounds as we worked on the book project. She promised to pay for whatever treatments would help, and to be my cheerleader every step of the way, but I had to make the commitment.
As Mika outlined her idea, I started to cry. “Diane,” she told me, “this is it: no more excuses. You have got to lose the weight. I know you don’t want to hear it, but you must. Let’s make a deal. I’ll pay you to write this book with me. We will talk about everything, and when we are finished, we will both be better off. You’ll be thin and healthy, and I will be in a better place in my mind. But you have to lose A TON of weight . . . Come on, let’s do it.”
I choked up as she plowed ahead with her characteristic insistence. Mika can be hard to turn down, but it was daunting to consider how tough it would be. My eyes were red and my mascara a little runny when I finally pulled into the place where I was giving my speech, but I had made up my mind. I was going to take Mika up on the offer. I knew it could be my last serious shot at getting my life back, and regaining what fat had taken away from me.
Have you ever watched those weight-loss commercials with celebrities like Valerie Bertinelli and Jennifer Hudson and said to yourself, Yeah I bet I could lose weight if someone paid me to do it. I know I have. Now someone was making me that offer. I really couldn’t say no. How would I face my sisters if they found out I had turned Mika down? Especially Suzanne, who had cheered her friend Valerie Bertinelli through her own weight-loss battle. But I had SO much weight to lose, and at my age (the mid-fifties), could I really do it? All I knew was that I had to try. As cutting as Mika’s words had been when we first went down this path together, I knew they were driven by love. She was right; it had gotten that bad. I was having trouble getting onto our small boat, trouble getting into the bathtub. I had given up shopping because nothing ever fit, and plus-size clothes are just not that attractive on me. I now dressed for what fit and covered the most sins, not for what looked good. I was losing my self-confidence. The media business is tough enough for women without the added obstacle of being fat.
I now dressed for what fit and covered the most sins, not for what looked good. I was losing my self-confidence.—Diane
Still, the idea of sharing my feelings about my struggles with weight made me a little sick to my stomach. It was hard enough to talk to Mika about it, much less to everyone who would read the book. Did she have any idea how difficult it was going to be for me? How embarrassing? Is this bargain we’re making brilliant or just plain crazy? Is it even possible?
As a TV personality and a radio talk show host, I’ve always emphasized the bright, the light, and the positive. Every inch of me resists admitting how bad I feel about my weight. But Mika is adamant that we begin the conversation, and she insists that I not hold back. No one knows more than I do how hard that’s going to be, but here goes.
Dieting is the most active sport I have ever engaged in. If practice made perfect, I’d be thin as a ghost. Honestly, I have been dieting almost all my life.
“I can’t remember a time when you weren’t either on a diet, or worried about your weight,” says my sister Suzanne. “Mom always looked trim to me, but I remember her being on Weight Watchers. I thought dieting was just what women did.”
It was certainly something I needed to do. My sister Debb says I was born “a good eater.” When she was a toddler, she bit the leg off a tiny glass deer at our granny’s house. The pediatrician advised my mother to make a big bowl of mashed potatoes and to get Debb to eat as much as she could, presumably to cushion the glass piece as it went through her system. She ate about two tablespoons, and I finished the rest.
When other kids were eating peanut butter and jelly or bologna sandwiches in the elementary school cafeteria, I was trying to hide the string-bean salad my mom had brown-bagged for me, her chunky firstborn. I have three sisters and a brother, and I was the only one who was a chubby kid. Back then my eating and weight were a family issue, although today I might have blended in better with all the other overweight kids in the United States. In my preteen years my mother searched for clothes to “slenderize” me, while Debb wore a rubber band for a belt.
Mika told me her family home was junk food free. The same was true of the suburban New York house where I grew up. My sister Melissa recalls, “We were always on a diet in our house. We never had the same snacks as other kids. We never had soda, except on holidays. To this day, my childhood friends remember our house as the one with the empty fridge.”
Mom doled out portions of cookies and snack food as treats. She would hide the snacks so none of us could be tempted to sit down and eat a whole bag. I’d go to set the table and discover, tucked in the bottom of the salad bowl, a package of cookies stowed safely out of sight. We didn’t have chips unless we were having a party, and we certainly did not eat in front of the TV.
“Good foods and bad foods were clearly defined,” says Melissa. “The constant fear of getting fat was drilled into us. Fat was bad, thin was good.”
Somehow I didn’t get the message, and I managed to keep packing on pounds. There was talk of sending me to “fat camp” for the summer, though that never happened. I was self-conscious about my size, and being the tallest kid in the class didn’t help. I was the only twelve-year-old I knew who was on Weight Watchers. My mom cooked and counted calories for my dad and me, and for a while that made a difference.
By high school I had slimmed down, but staying that way through college involved a constant roller coaster of diets. You name it, I tried it. “I never really questioned what you were doing,” said Debb about my teen and young adult diet cycles. “It seemed that trying different diets in search of ‘the one’ was the norm. No one in our circle ever thought to eat less and move more. That was too boring. We just assumed there must be a magic bullet.”
I hunted for it, that’s for sure.
Remember the Candy Diet from the 1970s? Ayds (pronounced “aids”) looked and tasted like chocolates or caramels, but as I found out later, they were appetite suppressants. In the early eighties as the AIDS epidemic broke out, you can imagine what happened to the candy with the similar name. Just as well: the active ingredient was phenylpropanolamine (PPA), which has now been linked to strokes in women.
Still, that one was more fun than the Grapefruit Diet, also known as the Hollywood Diet. It dates back to the 1920s, but became popular again when I was a teen. Lunch and dinner consisted of grapefruit, lean meat, vegetables, and black coffee. The diet came back into vogue yet again in 2004, when a study showed that the enzymes in grapefruit help reduce insulin levels and encourage weight loss (perhaps not coincidentally, the study was sponsored by the Florida Department of Citrus). At 800 calories a day the diet was hard to stick with, and to this day I can’t stand to look at grapefruit.
Then there was the Cambridge Diet, which consisted of meal replacement drinks and claimed to provide all the nutrients needed to maintain good health while the dieter lost tremendous amounts of weight. A Cambridge University professor got the credit for that one, and the product sold briskly in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Cambridge Diet worked for a while, but my weight came back on when I started eating real food again. That didn’t stop me from trying another liquid diet, Slim-Fast, when I was thirty and hoping to drop a lot of weight before my wedding.
There was always another diet to try, so I kept hopscotching from one to the next. When I went off Slim-Fast I lived on Lean Cuisine. Then there was the Cabbage Soup Diet, with its gallons of cabbage broth, a little coffee, skim milk, and low-fat yogurt. Not surprisingly, the side effects included low energy, mood swings, and sugar cravings.
I can go on and on about my low-cal escapades. How could I forget my bout with the Scarsdale Diet, invented by Dr. Herman Tarnower, whose best-selling diet book was published in 1978? It got another huge sales boost when he was killed two years later by his lover, Jean Harris, headmistress of the Madeira School, Mika’s high school alma mater. (When she applied to the school for admission, Mika was interviewed by Harris herself. Not long after, Harris was convicted and sent to prison.)
The South Beach Diet and the Zone Diet had a less colorful backstory, but those were on my list of tried-and-failed diets, too. Starting to see a pattern here? The pounds came off, but not for long, which led to another round of dieting. Every diet seemed to work for a while, but I never changed my eating habits. I never tried to understand the underlying drivers of my ballooning weight. That wasn’t something many of the diet books or the TV talk shows emphasized.
“We come from a mindset that suggests diets are temporary tortures we must endure,” says Debb. And when we’re done, “then we have permission to backslide into old habits, as if we were entitled to a reward for our sacrifice.”
Eating for comfort was a well-established pattern for me by the time tragedy struck in my life, and I really needed that comfort. Shortly after graduating from college, the death of my longtime boyfriend following a fiery car crash sent me on a binge of eating and drinking that skyrocketed my weight from 140 pounds to nearly 190. I’ll never forget the moment Mom and Dad walked into my newsroom in upstate New York, a three-hour drive from their home. My heart stopped. They took me aside and told me that Mitch had been in a terrible car accident on his way up to see me over the weekend. I had been frantic with worry, not knowing where he was. Even his mother hadn’t been able to find him.
Finally the hospital called, and we learned Mitch was in critical condition in the burn unit at a New York City hospital. They had not been able to locate family or friends because most of his possessions in the car had been burned, too. We went to New York and the scene was as horrific as any I hope ever to see in my life. This young man, whom I had loved since he was a boy, was entirely wrapped in bandages. Only his toes were showing, and as I held on to that one part of his body that was unscathed, I prayed, for him and for me. He hung on for a little over a week, until one last brother from his big family was notified and flew home from across the globe. His brother said good-bye and Mitch was gone.
I had just started my TV career and I was living alone. Food was my comfort, and after Mitch’s death I kept getting heavier and heavier. It was some time before I was ready to emerge from the darkness of my grief and even think about losing weight.
This time, at my parents’ urging and with their encouragement, I turned to the Atkins Diet. Cardiologist Robert C. Atkins described his low-carbohydrate regimen in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution in 1972. His approach was controversial, but at one time one in eleven Americans was said to be following the Atkins diet.
It allowed steak, lobster, cheese, and eggs but severely limited carbohydrates. I inhaled food like ham and cheese omelets, burgers (no bun), and nuts. Dr. Atkins contended that his approach switched the body from metabolizing glucose as energy to converting body fat to energy, a process called ketosis that involves controlling the production of insulin in the body.
I remember my first visit with Dr. Atkins. He reviewed my meager breakfast, which typically consisted of toast, coffee, and orange juice, and declared, “That juice is the problem. You’ve ruined a whole day right there with all that sugar.” Mom and Dad picked up the tab for my weekly visits to Atkins’ swanky, art-filled Manhattan offices, and for the steaks I sometimes devoured, with the doctor’s blessing. I peeled off fifty pounds, and kept them off for a few years. My dad did well on the diet, too.
In the end, the Atkins approach was just one more temporary fix, but dieting in one form or another still remained a habit. I was not much for exercising, unlike Mika, who was fanatical about it. I grew up in the years before Title IX, the federal legislation that required schools to spend equally on sports for men and women. Sports were not built into my school life, and as a kid who was overweight and klutzy, I didn’t really learn to play any team sports very well, although I took tennis and swimming lessons.
Women going to a gym to work out? Back then that was virtually unheard of. But I did join an Elaine Powers Figure Salon, an exercise studio designed for women. We donned leotards and tights and danced our way through an early form of aerobics. In those days they still had machines with belts that you put around your hips; I guess we thought that would “jiggle the fat away.”
The dancing, combined with some Jane Fonda exercise tapes, kept my weight down for a while. Through my early TV career I managed to maintain a pretty good look. I was never skinny, but with the right camera shots I was attractive enough. In the 1980s, a size 10 was considered fine for a woman on TV. Today, an anchorwoman that large would be considered an elephant.
I moved from my first TV job in Binghamton, New York, where I’d gone to college and started my career, to the Hartford–New Haven TV market. It was a big jump and I loved it. It gave me the chance every day to share the news with our viewers, to tell them stories that would make a difference in their lives. Viewers took me into their homes and their hearts, even sending cards to me at the station when Tom and I got married. They felt like family, and we invited them to our wedding on TV. I am sure they noticed my struggle with weight over the years, but the audience had become my friend—and as Mika has pointed out, friends are sometimes too kind to say what they think.
In my thirties and forties I continued to exercise, joining gyms and even hiring personal trainers, but it wasn’t enough. Although I felt better, my weight continued to climb, slowly for a while, then with gathering speed. I would get “too busy” to exercise and fall off that wagon, too.
I kept searching for a permanent weight-loss secret. I had spurts of success with portion-controlled meals from Nutrisystem. Their freeze-dried or frozen foods helped me stay in a size 12 or 14 for a while, until it was time to eat “real food” again. The switch to reallife eating was always my downfall. Counting points, calories, and grams of fat, figuring food exchanges, and every other way of measuring and weighing food made me crazy. I tried Weight Watchers, though I dreaded going to meetings and having people whisper, “That’s the gal from the news.” I should have gotten past it and said, “Hell, yeah, it is . . . and I am just like you, I need help,” but I was too embarrassed.
I’d be vigilant for a while and lose some weight. Then I would hit a plateau and think, Why bother? Or I’d start sneaking snacks that “didn’t count,” like a spoonful of peanut butter right out of the jar, or anything that I could eat over the sink. A glass of wine on Saturday night became a cocktail and a glass of wine, and eventually I was having a glass or two every night of the week. I tried to be honest and count the calories allotted for the day or the week, but eventually the counting and the weighing and the vigilance would break down again.
Luckily for me, my husband was always supportive of my weight-loss efforts. I never suffered from the sabotage syndrome so many women complain about. He wasn’t ordering pepperoni pizzas while I was dieting, but when I was willing to indulge, he was, too, and that meant Friday night pizza or Chinese takeout and lots of eating out. I’d indulge, feeling like a normal person for a while. But I never compensated quickly for the extra calories, so I steadily gained weight. Then I’d be back on another strict regimen, trying to drop twenty-five or more pounds.
Over time I went from a size 10 to a 16. Talk about denial.
The only time in my life when I was not obsessed with food was in the mid-1990s, when my doctor prescribed the drug combination fenfluramine-phentermine, commonly known as fen-phen. Losing weight became effortless because I was never hungry. I stopped thinking about food all the time. For the first time in my life I could go to a party without heading to the buffet table. I no longer cleaned my plate at every meal and our dog discovered table scraps for the first time, because there actually were leftovers. I packed a lunch for work, and at the end of the week five of them would be sitting in the newsroom fridge. I had forgotten to eat, something that was once unheard of for me.
I got back to my ideal weight and actually wore a size 10 again. I was elated, and not only because of the serotonin release triggered by the drugs. But as my TV station’s consumer reporter used to say, “If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.” That was definitely the case with fen-phen. A thirty-eight-year-old client at the nail salon I frequented, who had been obese since childhood, started using fen-phen about the same time I did. She got very thin, and then suddenly died. There was no autopsy, but people whispered that fen-phen had killed her.
This made me nervous, but I kept on using it because it felt so good to be thin again. As a TV journalist I even reported on studies suggesting the dangers of fen-phen, but my desire to look good was so strong that I ignored the health risks. I was probably lucky when the matter was taken out of my hands. By the late 1990s, the drug combination had been linked to pulmonary hypertension and heart valve problems and pulled from the market. I decided not to join the class action lawsuits against the manufacturers, but I held my breath for years, fearing that cardiac damage would show up. Thank goodness it never did.
I kept the weight off for a while even without the drug, but as you have probably figured out by now, I gained it all back.
For me and just about everyone else who has weight issues, the real trouble is keeping off the pounds after you lose them. I’ve always felt a kinship with Mark Twain, who once observed, “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” The same could be said of me; just substitute the words lose weight for smoking. I can’t even begin to calculate how many pounds I have lost and gained over the years.
When I was forty-nine I set a goal: 50 by 50, meaning I would lose fifty pounds by my fiftieth birthday. At that point I was out of TV news and commuting three hours a day, round trip, to my radio job. My alarm went off at 2:30 a.m. After I had done my radio show, most days I headed to the PBS station in Hartford where I produced and hosted a magazine show. I was tired, but I knew I had to start exercising again if I was going to reach my goal. I joined a gym and lost about twenty pounds. I was on my way to 50 by 50.
Then my health problems began. First came stress fractures in both feet, then a painful neuroma in one foot that led to plantar fasciitis and tendonitis. I spent the entire summer in physical therapy. Pain kept me out of the gym, and my weight inched back up. A year later I tripped over my dog (yes, really) and broke my foot and my elbow. Another reason not to go to the gym.
With few other options to consider, I began to think about bariatric surgery. It seemed like an easy answer. Just about everyone who undergoes the surgery loses weight—a lot of it and quickly, too. Bette, a gifted video editor and one of my close friends, had gone through the “lap band” procedure, and I watched how well it worked for her. In gastric banding, a surgeon actually wraps a device around the upper part of the stomach to form a ring. The ring is attached by a tube to an access port left under the skin. The doctor can then control how tight the ring is by inserting saline through the port. So your “new” stomach is smaller, you eat less, and feel full with what seemed to me like teeny amounts of food. Bette lost more than two hundred pounds. Even more importantly, other health problems, known by the scary term comorbidities, cleared up.
Prior to the surgery, Bette had been taking insulin and two oral medications for diabetes, two medications for high blood pressure, and one for her cholesterol. She suffered from swelling so severe that sometimes she could barely keep shoes on her feet. And because she had developed sleep apnea, a dangerous condition closely linked to overweight, she was tethered at night to a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine to help her breathe.
After surgery Bette needed none of that. She was off all her medications, worked out almost daily at a gym, started riding a motorcycle, and trained to be an emergency medical technician. She even posed nude for an art class. It was obvious the weight loss had transformed her life, and I suspect it may have even saved it.
But like most medical procedures, bariatric surgery has its down-sides, and I saw some of those up close with Bette. Vomiting, nausea, nighttime acid reflux, and other postoperative complications can be enduring problems. Bette also had a significant amount of loose skin, and considered extensive plastic surgery to get rid of it.
Still, bariatric surgery was tempting. There are a number of possible approaches, but as I did my research, I was not entirely surprised to learn that none of them are the perfect fix they appear to be. Never mind the TV stars you see showing off their sexy new bodies after bariatric surgery. It is definitely not that simple.
The procedure does change your life, but some of the long-term implications are daunting. I wasn’t sure I could live permanently on a diet that counts a half cup of food as a full meal, requires that you chew your food to the consistency of a fine paste, and advises you not to eat food and drink liquids at the same time.
I was also concerned about one common and often permanent side effect of “gastric bypass,” which is a type of bariatric surgery that involves disconnecting the stomach from the small intestine and connecting it to the large intestine instead. The side effect, called dumping syndrome, happens when the undigested contents of the stomach move too rapidly into the small bowel. When people who have had the surgery eat sweets, dairy, fats, or carbohydrates they sometimes get very ill with symptoms that can include weakness, feeling faint, nausea, sweating, cramping, and diarrhea.
I had watched two other friends struggle with the aftermath of bariatric surgery. One woman about my age had a procedure called vertical sleeve gastrectomy. Her surgeon removed 85 percent of her stomach. She chose that procedure because it avoids some of the side effects and weight regain that can accompany gastric bypass. Still, a full meal for her is about three ounces of food, and she must be constantly vigilant about what she eats. The other friend is much younger, barely out of her teenage years, and she spent weeks in a hospital and months in recovery after complications from her gastric bypass.
Despite all that, both women considered the procedure to be a life saver. But they were also substantially heavier than I am. With a BMI of 38, I was just below the level that officially qualified for the surgery, though I’m pretty sure I could have persuaded a doctor to take me on as a patient.
Another downside was the cost. The lap band procedure can cost between $8,000 and $30,000. My insurance company would have paid for it if I had a BMI of 40 or above, or a BMI of 35 coupled with a comorbidity, such as diabetes. Thankfully, I had no comorbid conditions.
All the medical literature says the surgery is to be used only as a last resort. It might have been worth paying for it out of pocket if it was truly my only option, but I couldn’t convince myself of that, despite my long and checkered career as a dieter. Wouldn’t it really be better to improve my eating habits and exercise more? Reluctantly, I ruled out surgery. There had to be another way.
At the time Mika hit me over the head about my weight, I was in deep denial about how dire my situation was. I was in my mid-fifties and weighed 250 pounds. There, I said it. 250 pounds. I can hardly breathe just writing down that number on the page. It is so shocking, even to me. I weighed more than some NFL players.
At the time Mika hit me over the head about my weight, I was in deep denial about how dire my situation was. I was in my mid-fifties and weighed 250 pounds.—Diane
How did this happen? I look in the mirror and I cannot believe what I see. I was never skinny, but at size 10, I was once described by a TV critic as “comely.” Now I am pushing a size 20? My heart is pounding as I read and reread this line, but I’ll say it again: 250 pounds.
“You’re fat,” Mika said. I was.
I began to craft a program that I hope will bring long-term permanent change. I’m done with promises of a quick fix, and I know from experience that restricting what I eat is not enough. After years of yo-yo dieting, I know firsthand that people who don’t exercise lose muscle and fat while dieting, but when they rebound, they gain back the fat.
The first thing I needed to do was to get off the couch and into the gym. But with all my pains, aches, and general loss of fitness, I was nervous about getting injured. Those stress fractures in my feet, which developed after the ambitious weight-loss program I had started several years earlier, eventually led to a raft of related orthopedic problems. For several years I had been in and out of physical therapy. I couldn’t afford to go through all of that again.
I asked my doctor and my physical therapist how to transition from physical therapy into the gym without injury, but neither had a solid recommendation. I’d worked with trainers on and off with some success, but this time I needed someone who could also address the myriad medical issues I was developing. I looked at several hospital-sponsored programs, but most were targeted at cardiac patients.
The more I looked, the less I was convinced I could find a trainer and a gym that could really help me. I knew I couldn’t afford another injury, and besides, in my current condition I was less than enthusiastic about being surrounded by Skinny Minnies. Then two very caring friends came to me with a suggestion (you might even call it an intervention). They were getting great results with a trainer who had a radically new approach and a rare ability to motivate clients and inspire change.
My friend Anna is fit and athletic, but she’d had to undergo knee surgery. She said this trainer had helped her to heal, and to take her workouts to a new level. The other friend is a TV weatherman whose weight had climbed to over three hundred pounds. Joe was a longtime colleague, and I knew he had struggled with his weight for years. He was turning fifty, and had recently lost eighty pounds and maintained the loss. He said he was in better shape than he had been in his days playing college football. The trainer, he told me, counseled him on nutrition and “gets inside your head.”
At their urging, I looked into Akua Ba Fitness, a one-on-one training center in West Hartford operated by D’Mario Sowah. I needed someone special. My fear of being injured again, coupled with my embarrassment about my size, called for someone who could go above and beyond the usual requirements. It was a tough combination to deal with, but I was lucky enough to meet someone who could. D’Mario is a master trainer who is experienced and well versed in fitness and anatomy. The small size of his studio also meant I would have some privacy—definitely a plus.
In terms of life circumstances, D’Mario and I are polar opposites. He is a young African American born in Ghana, plucked from an orphanage and forced into slavery as a child soldier. As we worked out together, I slowly learned his extraordinary life story, including his escape that led him to America. The way he rebuilt his life is incredibly uplifting.
D’Mario’s regimen involves healthy eating and a training method that foregoes most exercise equipment, relying instead on using your own body weight as the resistance in your workout. At our first meeting he analyzed my fitness level (virtually nonexistent) and talked to me about my goals and my failure to lose weight over the last fifteen years. My tears flowed (again), and in spite of our differences I sensed the inner spirit of this man, his nurturing soul. About my weight and my awful physical condition, D’Mario simply said, “Lay down that burden; that burden is mine to carry now.”
About my weight and my awful physical condition, D’Mario simply said, “Lay down that burden; that burden is mine to carry now.”—Diane
No one had ever referred to my weight like that before; as a burden I had been carrying. And yet of course it was. I had felt so much shame because I had not been able to rid myself of it. I felt like a failure after all the false starts, all the dashed hopes of recent years.
Through my career I had been seen as a winner: popular, talented, and able to reinvent myself every time a curve ball was thrown my way. When I was downsized from my position as a news anchor, I became a morning talk show host at the biggest radio station in the state, and landed a contract to produce and host programs at the PBS network in Connecticut. I turned my TV work into six successful books.
But at the age of fifty, after I was downsized from the radio job and had my PBS work outsourced after ten successful years, I was shaken. And now I couldn’t even control my own body. I was fat and feeling miserable.
It wasn’t easy for me to let go of the sunny personality I showed the world, but D’Mario let me see that I could, at least in the privacy of our training sessions. “I want you to let go of the pain and just believe,” he said. “That’s hard, but I want to help you see that this is just a stage of your life, and there is a lot more ahead for you.”
So I started Mika’s challenge with new optimism. Little did I know that a major health crisis would derail my plan, and that I would spend months getting back on track. This journey was going to be a bumpy ride.