MY STORY, WITH JOE SCARBOROUGH, DR. MARGO MAINE,
DR. DAVID KATZ, CHRIS LICHT, GINA BARRECA,
KATHLEEN TURNER, GAYLE KING, KATE WHITE,
JENNIFER HUDSON, SUSIE ESSMAN
To the outside world, Diane and I look as if we think entirely differently about food. I’m the one with the reputation as a thin, fit woman, the one always going on and on about the obesity epidemic; Diane’s struggles are a lot more obvious than mine. But as our stories have revealed, we are in many ways the same. When Diane talks about visiting a twenty-four-hour supermarket after finishing the late-night shift at the news desk and buying cookies, M&Ms, chips, and ice cream to eat later that night, I’m nodding. I’ve done that, too.
I am still trying to find the discipline my mother valued so much. My body is healthier, but my head? Well, I am still working on that. At times I remain trapped in my thoughts of eating, and Diane does, too. Until we can spring that trap for good, there are going to be setbacks in our attempts to develop a wholesome relationship with food. That’s why it is so important not just to follow the stringent rules of a diet, but to make more fundamental changes in how you live—to change how you think, to overhaul what you eat and how you eat it, and to become physically active. We’ll talk about all that in the next few chapters.
I am in awe of successful women who manage to be free of the tyranny of food. The ones who connect with everyone in a room, while I’m busy thinking about how I can connect with another platter of food. I go to parties and see successful women like Arianna Huffington or Sheryl Sandberg or the late Nora Ephron, and they look so comfortable with themselves, so in command of the room. Meanwhile, I’m wondering how I can get another appetizer brought over to me.
There I am, in conversation with Walter Isaacson or Colin Powell, but my mind is so focused on those appetizers that I barely hear what they’re saying. Instead I find myself wondering, Where is that waiter with the mini hot dogs? My eyes are on Powell and I am nodding with fervent interest, but with my peripheral vision I’m looking for the waiter, and with my brain I’m wondering when he might show up. I keep on discussing the conflict in Syria as best I can, but by now I’m thinking that I might just walk back into the kitchen and get those damn mini hot dogs myself! Then my frustration turns to sadness, because I catch Arianna across the room. She also appears to be having a fascinating conversation, but I bet she is right there with her companion, not privately plotting a trip into the kitchen.
Whether it is the sensory pull of those mini hot dogs or full-blown addiction, my thoughts can be totally distracting. That’s less likely to happen when I have had at least a modicum of sleep and am working a fairly predictable schedule. The pull is not as strong then, and I don’t overeat. If I get enough rest, I usually have enough stamina to keep my eating under control. Believe me, it takes a lot of mental effort.
“Mika’s told the story about how she was fired from CBS on her thirty-ninth birthday. She thought that was the end of her career,” says Joe Scarborough. “She scratched and clawed her way back into the game, and then she decided she was going to take her health and her fitness and her body image to a whole new level. It was extraordinary watching her day in and day out sacrificing and suffering.”
I’m not as able to maintain that sacrifice when exhaustion sets in, and that happens a lot in a day that begins with a 3:30 a.m. wakeup call. My demons come back to bite me, and I’m more likely to compensate for my rigid low-calorie diet by suddenly and swiftly scarfing down huge portions of food. Margo Maine says part of my problem is that when I’m exhausted I may actually need to eat more. My body is demanding more calories, she says, because “that’s what our bodies need at those times. Our bodies go into these kind of emergency states, and we need to let that happen.”
As I learn to accept that, it becomes easier for me to ease up a bit and eat a little bit more fat, a few more carbs, a little more of the fuel I need to keep myself going. In the past, my approach has been to resist and resist that call, and then to suddenly break down and grab every morsel in sight.
I am trying to think about the world more like Margo does. “I believe that our bodies are gifts we have to take good care of,” she says. “That means feeding them, not just restricting and being careful, but feeding and allowing them to enjoy life. Part of enjoying life is enjoying food to some extent.”
More than a year after our infamous conversation on Long Island Sound, Diane and I are more convinced than ever that sharing our stories and providing support to one another are huge steps toward changing the way we think about weight and food. They have certainly brought us closer to each other. “We need to be able to have that dialogue, but the first thing we need to do is lay down the burden of blame and shame,” said obesity expert Dr. David Katz. “Until we do that, we as a nation are stuck at this impasse on obesity.”
The first thing we need to do is lay down the burden of blame and shame.—David Katz
Katz knows it is not easy to be candid, but he insists it is crucial. “It’s a good friend who will have that painful conversation with you, it really is. We need other people’s support and their skill sets in helping us.” That’s why I’ve made such a point of talking about obesity during Morning Joe, although our executive producer Chris Licht was horrified when I first started doing it. “I was afraid it was going to turn people off because no one wants to get lectured about their weight by someone who’s in such great shape,” admits Chris. “But Mika has earned that right. She works hard to be in shape and wants people to be healthier.”
Those of us who can reach an audience, whether on television, in the classroom, or simply at the dinner table, have an obligation to talk straight to people who will listen to us. We shouldn’t be hiding from our own struggles, or denying the struggles of the people around us. Raising the issue of weight and insisting we deal with it together is an important contribution to changing our approach. That’s why Gina Barreca, a professor of feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, starts her speeches by announcing her age and weight. “This way, the listeners don’t have to sit there and try to do the math. Because we all know that women will look at a speaker wondering, ‘Is she older or younger than I am?’ and ‘What’s her dress size?’ Until they can figure these things out to their satisfaction, they aren’t entirely paying attention.
“I tell them I was born in 1957, that I weigh a hundred and fifty-three pounds. I explain that in an Armani I’m a size twelve, while at Dot’s Dress Barn I’m a size twenty-two because, as women already know, the more you pay for your clothes, the smaller the size you’ll be.”
It makes sense to me. Women are always eyeing one another, so let’s share what we’re thinking about our own bodies and the bodies of people around us. That’s what Diane and I are doing, and it’s working.
Some women seem able to take a much more relaxed attitude toward food than me, even if they have some weight they would like to lose. I especially like the way the amazing actress Kathleen Turner thinks. She knows as well as anyone about the demands on women to be thin, especially if they are in the public eye, yet she seems comfortable with a little extra weight on her frame. That can’t be easy for someone who started her film career thirty years ago playing a siren in Body Heat. Some fans still expect her to look the same way. Her response: “Yeah, I know, I looked like that. I don’t anymore. Okay? Get over it.”
At the age of forty-eight, Kathleen played Mrs. Robinson on stage in The Graduate, and in one scene wore nothing but high heels. “For a whole twenty-two seconds,” she added. “I think one critic said I looked like a football player. I’m like, ‘I’m sorry? I mean, eight shows a week is not for sissies, guys.’”
After The Graduate had a successful run in London, Kathleen resisted taking the show to Broadway because she knew the nude scene would get a kind of attention she was not sure she wanted. As she was considering film options, she read a script that described the main character as “thirty-seven, but still attractive.” She was so angered by that kind of narrow view of aging and women’s bodies that she called the producers of The Graduate and said, “We’re going to Broadway. I was forty-eight and it was, essentially, a real ‘fuck you’—and I was very happy I did it.”
Kathleen acknowledged that she is probably about thirty pounds overweight right now. Her gradual weight gain coincided with a diagnosis nearly twenty years ago of severe rheumatoid arthritis. “Before that, I was an extraordinary athlete. I did all my own stunts and absolutely loved it. The arthritis at one point put me in a wheelchair and the doctors told me I would never be out of it, at which point I told them that they were fired.”
Numerous surgeries later, Kathleen has regained an incredible range of motion, and her younger co-stars on stage admire the physicality and energy she brings to every role. She thinks that at least some of the extra weight on her body has actually enhanced her career. “In some ways it’s good for my work in the sense that I am, and always have been, a character actress. I’m fifty-eight and doing these wonderful, very strong, very eccentric women who don’t need to please men anymore, right? In a way, the weight and the solidness of me enhances that.”
When she’s working, Kathleen is just not worrying about her body image. “On stage or on camera I don’t think about how I look, because that could interfere, even block, my acting. I am fortunate in my work. I know that the pressure of weight and appearance is different to many women in their chosen work.
“I find it actually quite frightening to see some of the actresses on television now, because I don’t know if they have any intestines. In order to look like that you have to spend every waking moment of every day thinking about your weight. That’s a tyranny I don’t want to accept. I really don’t.
“Yes, I would be happy to lose ten pounds, and when I get off the road and back home, I will work on that. But I resent this demand that you have to look so incredibly, incredibly thin. It makes me angry. Who decides this?”
That’s a tyranny I don’t want to accept. . . . I resent this demand that you have to look so incredibly, incredibly thin. It makes me angry.
—Kathleen Turner
Gayle King is another woman who is able to accept herself and her body. She works hard to stay a size 10, and to keep her weight at 162 pounds. At five foot ten, she is the first to admit, “I’m no Skinny Minnie,” but she doesn’t get upset about it. She’ll diet when she has to, and she’ll exercise even though she doesn’t like it, but she is just not fixated on weight.
Gayle radiates confidence when she walks onto the set of CBS This Morning, and her philosophy on food couldn’t be more different from mine. “I’ve now gotten to the stage in my life that I deny myself nothing,” she insists. “I’m not going to not eat bread, or not eat cake, or not eat sweets. I’m not going to live like that. So I eat exactly what I want, and if I fall off the wagon I know how to get myself back on the program, whatever that is.”
That’s amazing for someone like me to hear, especially when Gayle admits how much she enjoys food. She recalls some time ago being at a hotel and ordering a room service breakfast: scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon (extra crispy), and an order of pancakes. The menu indicated the breakfast came with toast, and when room service asked if she wanted potatoes, she said yes to that, too.
“I was giving the woman the order and she goes, ‘For how many?’ I was so thrown by the question because I’m thinking this is not a lot of food, that I said, ‘Uh, two!’
“So the room service guy comes and brings it, and before he got there I had turned on the water in the shower and I said to the waiter, ‘He’s taking a shower, you can set it right here.’ Then I called out, ‘Honey, the food’s here!’”
Gayle told this as a funny story, but to me it would just have been humiliating. She also told me about walking into the office of her news director when she was working at WFSB-TV in Hartford. “On the list of things to talk to me about I could see he had written ‘Gayle’s butt.’
“I remember thinking, damn, Gayle’s butt? He says to me, ‘On those wide shots if you could just push in, because your butt hangs over the chair.’ I didn’t even have the wherewithal to be offended. I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll watch that.’ Now—and this comes with age—I know I could say, ‘Wait a second. Wait a second.’”
In my own life, I truly love to run, but let’s just say working out is not at the top of Gayle’s list of favorite things to do. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. “I hate exercise, I hate it, hate it, hate it, but I also know that it’s necessary. People say, ‘Don’t you feel so much better after you work out?’ Well, actually, no. I just feel that, okay, I did it. I did it, I did it.”
I loved Gayle’s stories because they told me so much about her. Yes, she does have to be aware of how much she eats, and she needs to push herself to exercise more, even if she doesn’t want to. And, yes, there have been times in her life when her weight became a professional issue. She knows she can’t ignore it, and she weighs herself once a week, using Jenny Craig, juice cleanses, or her latest discovery, Fresh Diet, a service that she says delivers really fresh, really delicious food to her home every day to shed a few pounds when she needs to.
But she’s also okay with who she is, and how she looks. “I think my relationship with food is pretty healthy,” she said. “It’s a loving relationship, because I really think that eating food, sharing food, cooking food is one of the greatest examples of love.”
I really think that eating food, sharing food, cooking food is one of the greatest examples of love.
—Gayle King
Because she is comfortable in her own skin, Gayle is also able to let go of the envy that sometimes accompanies insecurity. “There is always going to be somebody who’s skinnier, who’s richer, who’s prettier. I discovered that years ago. Now I can see somebody who’s gorgeous and I’m not envious. I’m like, ‘Wow, I really admire what you do and who you are.’”
In the end, Kathleen Turner, Gayle King, and others remind me that what really matters is having a healthy mind and body. I’m all for a healthy thin, and I think women have to recognize that we are going to be judged, at least in part, on how we look, whether we like it or not. But some women are content to live with a few extra pounds instead of obsessing about what they eat all the time, and I admire them for it.
I also admire Kate White, who banned diet stories, normally a staple of women’s magazines, while she was editor in chief of Cosmopolitan. “I just felt that girls have enough to worry about. Diets don’t work. If someone promises you can lose ten pounds in four weeks you’re going to lose it, but you’re going to gain it back. I felt that it was unfair to women to keep fostering the notion of these quick diets, when really what you need to do is to overhaul your approach to food on more of a long-term basis. I decided if we gave any information about health and food, it would be just smart nutritional information.”
Diets don’t work. If someone promises you can lose ten pounds in four weeks you’re going to lose it, but you’re going to gain it back.—Kate White
The magazine does provide guidelines for eating smart, and under Kate’s watch, Cosmo launched a new feature titled “Body Love,” which is aimed at helping women feel good about their bodies. “That’s a lot about celebrating your body and feeling good about it and feeling confident about it,” she says.
Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Hudson is another woman who has been able to resist the cultural pressures most of us face. At any weight, she has always managed to maintain a healthy body image. “I remember the first time I was told that I was plus-size, at least in Hollywood terms. I was on the red carpet and the media were asking, ‘How do you feel being a plus-size girl?’ I looked over my shoulder like, ‘Who are you talking to?’ because I never saw myself that way.”
Coming from Chicago, Jennifer thought of herself as just an average-sized woman. The norms of Los Angeles took her by surprise, but she didn’t get thrown by them. “I was maybe a size twelve at the time, and that’s pretty good. Where I come from, size is welcome. So I thought, hold on. I have the height of a supermodel, I have lips that people pay for, so why should I feel insecure? I didn’t have those insecurities at all.”
When she did decide to lose weight with the help of Weight Watchers, she was genuinely surprised by the attention it attracted. “I’ve had people coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh, my God, you’re my inspiration,’ and I’ve thought, people were watching? I didn’t realize that until after the fact.” Curiously, Jennifer actually felt more pressure after she lost weight because her body began to get so much more attention.
Body image is also a nonissue for comedian Susie Essman. In my next life, I want to be just like her. Why? Because she tells it like it is, whether she’s swearing a blue streak on Curb Your Enthusiasm or performing stand-up comedy. She’s a woman who really knows her own strength. “As a female comedian, there’s this tremendous balance of power and femininity that’s very difficult to maintain,” Susie explains. “It’s a very masculine art form, it’s a very aggressive art form, and it’s very powerful being up there by yourself onstage. Stand-up is so hard, and I have to be so focused when I’m on stage that I don’t have room in my head to think about what I look like while I’m performing.” I can’t imagine what it would be like to be able to worry only about what comes out of your mouth, not what your body looks like. It just doesn’t work that way for most women on television or in show business. I take it for granted that I am always going to be judged partly on what I weigh and how I look.
“It would be a whole different thing if I was just an actress out there in the marketplace,” Susie acknowledged. “But I’m a comedian. So it’s different. I write everything that I say. I have my own sense of my own power because I’m onstage all the time doing that.” Susie understood what it takes for me to get my job done, and I really appreciated that. “Let me tell you something, Mika. You sit up there with Joe and Donny and Barnicle, and you hold your own with them. You should feel pretty damn good about that. Because that’s a boy’s club over there, and it’s not easy.”
She also reminded me that it takes a lot more to succeed than a good-looking body, helpful though that is. “It’s been said that a pretty face is a passport,” she said, “but it’s not. It’s a visa, and it runs out fast. Yes, your life is easier when you’re attractive; I absolutely believe that. I think things come more easily, whether it’s standing in line at the deli or whatever. However, you’d better develop yourself, because there’s always going to be somebody prettier, younger, and thinner. Always!”
You’d better develop yourself, because there’s always going to be somebody prettier, younger, and thinner. Always!—Susie Essman
I know that, of course, but it’s not always at the top of my mind when I am wondering how I look to the millions of viewers who are watching me every day. It’s a way of thinking that needs to be part of our larger conversation, whether it is taking place in schools, libraries, or community centers, on television, or in political and public health circles. If we are going to get healthier as a nation, we need to think differently about body image, weight, and eating disorders. They are all so closely tied together.