Food is always a huge part of the holidays. Throughout these pages, you’ll find stories about hams and turkeys, cookies, and booze. It can be overwhelming for the average person, being faced with so many seasonal treats, and it’s downright impossible for those of us who have food issues. This chapter is the hardest for me to write because it’s the scariest. I feel especially vulnerable knowing it’s not filled with pratfalls or hijinks to make you laugh but instead exposes a secret I’ve kept most of my life. If I’m being honest, this is something I wrote for my last book but was too weak to share through those pages. When it came time to turn in that manuscript, I deleted it, hiding the words on a separate hard drive, in hopes that one day I would be strong enough to share. Not sure I’m strong enough, but I am going to include it here, hoping that maybe one or two of you reading will feel a little less alone when you go to a Friendsgiving or office holiday party and stress over the menu and the hors d’oeuvres.
I was eleven when I was first confronted about having an eating disorder. Not even a teen, and people were speculating about whether I was anorexic. Before that, peanut butter was my friend, and we used to get together with M&M’s on the couch quite a bit. When I was very young, the calories burned off me easily, but around age nine, they went to my hips and stomach and face and legs. Family would lovingly describe me as “chunky.” Or if you were the father of my friend Tim after he had his day beer, I was “Chunk-a-Dunk-Fatty-Danny-the-Manny” (it was a tongue twister, but he managed). By ten, my parents pushed me to play football in the hopes that I would slim down to my previous size.
Most people think you need to be thick to play football, like being hefty would be a positive thing for the sport, but it turns out there is such a thing as being too overweight to play in the youth league. The first practice consisted of everyone hopping onto the scale in front of the rest of the team for weigh-ins. Out of roughly fifteen young men, three of us were deemed unfit…that is, unless we lost the appropriate amount of weight before the first game. It wasn’t just a pound or two—I had to lose over ten pounds, which is a lot at that age. The humiliation of a youth organization labeling me overweight in front of all my peers was enough to push me right into diet mode for the first time in my life. There are plenty of things I don’t know, but I’ve always been the type of person who is good at teaching myself stuff when I put my mind to it, so I excelled at dieting. Mom would take me to the grocery store, and I would read the labels on every last thing, always focusing on calories. That meant I wound up eating lots of rice cakes, vegetables, and powdered butter I put on baked potatoes and broccoli. I didn’t care if what I was eating wasn’t exactly food as long as it was low cal. I was obsessed and counted every single calorie that went in my body.
I felt completely in control, which I loved. Those of you who are type A know what I’m talking about: eating becomes a math equation. You know how many calories you want for the day, and you only eat foods with exactly measured portions. Eat less than the amount you pre-prescribe, and you lose weight even quicker! Hooray! Right? Health and wellness are so important, but I don’t feel that a preteen should be as obsessed with calorie counting as I was at age ten. And while the other football players were concerned with tackles and throwing the perfect spiral, my every thought was consumed with ways to eat less. Pretty soon, I was dropping weight way too quickly. Over the course of just a few weeks, I lost more than fifteen pounds. And it kept going from there. Eventually, even the hand-me-down clothes from my older athletic brother finally fit me like they should instead of looking two sizes too small.
The more weight I lost, the better I felt. Girls in my class started paying more attention to me (which I thought I liked at the time, but…LOL, nope), and I didn’t feel like the odd man out at practice. I was no longer the “fat kid” I felt they labeled me as, and my self-esteem flourished. I was even doing well on the football field—that is, until I almost passed out one day during a warm-up. Coach asked us to run some laps with our pads on. What I hadn’t learned at that point was that food is also fuel, and you can’t be very athletic with no nutrients in your body. I stopped and hunched over a fence with stars in my eyes and weak legs. An adult came over and tossed me some Gatorade—which I promptly drank after a quick glance at the nutrition label—and I pulled myself together.
“You okay?” the adult asked.
“I’m fine,” I assured.
And that was the extent of anyone checking in on my health for quite a while.
When it came time for the next weigh-in, I’d lost more than the necessary amount to play the rest of the season. I should’ve stopped, but dieting was an obsession and hobby I wasn’t quite ready to give up. I begged my mom to continue buying those chips with the olestra. They lit my ass on fire like a seasonal three-wick pumpkin caramel latte candle from Bath and Body Works, but they were fat-free! At dinner, I would pass on the delicious homemade food and opt for a rice cake. Queen Linda Pellegrino can cook, so saying no to her meals was a challenge in itself. Traditional dessert was a bust, but I’d save up my money for those cookies that came in the green box and promised zero calories, completely bamboozled by the entire diet industry. Even at a young age, I noticed people started treating me differently once I got skinny. A family friend who used to call me husky (and the man who called me Chunk-a-Dunk-Fatty-Danny-the-Manny) no longer did, I wasn’t picked last in gym class, and puberty started to fill me out in the right ways.
Then something shifted as I noticed students start to whisper around me in school. The same kids who had called me fat were now critiquing me for being thin. I even overheard a couple of peers saying I had an eating disorder. I had never even heard the words before, and suddenly I was being diagnosed with it on the playground. My generation of young girls grew up with a deeper understanding of body image issues than I did (they were also presented with lots of fucked-up challenges because of the era and media; the women certainly had it harder when it came to weight/food stuff). One day toward the end of the school year, the phone rang. It was my principal asking to talk to my parents. Mom told me it was nothing, but I found out years later that they called to question my eating habits. The administration was concerned with my weight fluctuation.
When the football season ended in the early spring, we all gathered for an award ceremony in the gymnasium. All the fall sports players from each grade were there, along with family and friends who wanted to celebrate. Coaches got onstage, grabbed the microphone, and handed out awards to their best players in front of what felt like everyone in town. My head coach announced to the crowded room that I, Danny Pellegrino, won the MVP award for the football season. Me, the most valuable player! I was shocked and proud, but I knew I wasn’t better than anyone else on the team. I joke about playing sports now, but I was legitimately a great baseball player, and my height gave me an advantage over the other kids when it came to basketball. Football, however, was not my game, but here I was receiving a prize for my work. What the fuck. Even as a young kid, I knew I wasn’t being rewarded for the sport; I was being celebrated for getting thin. One minute, adults were worrying about my size, and the next, I was being congratulated for losing so much weight. And I was eleven years old. It forever altered the way I viewed my body.
My eating habits slowly got back to normal once I reached seventh grade. Probably a combination of feeling confident and my parents pushing a healthier lifestyle on me. Then, in college, I got it in my head that I needed to be more fit than I was. My peers were spending time in the weight room, and my hormones were leading me to check out all the other guys around me. I noticed the biceps I didn’t have and the abs I so badly wanted. It all coincided with me coming to terms with my sexuality, and eating became something I could control when I couldn’t control all that other stuff going on in my head. I started doing the calorie counting again. I took up running. There was no puking (yet), but I was definitely unhealthy. In between freshman and sophomore year, I took my dieting too far, and when I returned for fall semester, I started to hear the whispers again. People were wondering if I had an eating disorder. Clothes that once fit tight suddenly looked baggy on me, but because I couldn’t see an eight-pack of abs, I continued to eat very little and run obsessively. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have an eight-pack of abs, just that my eyes weren’t seeing it. Once again, I got dizzy, and this time, I woke up in the campus hospital with my roommate looking after me. Lack of nutrients caused me to black out and faint.
This time around, I was a little bit older, so I knew when my diet was getting out of control. I saw the problem, and although it was hard to stop, I was able to curb my issues before they caused any permanent damage to my body. What I didn’t realize then that I know now is that my obsessive personality is not an issue when it comes to loving TV shows or movies, but it is when it comes to my eating.
Off and on for years, I would take my diets too far. Every time a new Whole30 or Atkins came around, I would hop on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, I was never happy with my body. What I see in the mirror is not what everyone else sees. During my fittest, the years in my twenties when I was doing CrossFit six days a week, I had the body I’d always dreamed of, but I couldn’t see it. I can never see it while I’m in it.
During the really extreme times in my adulthood, I threw up my food. Calories in, calories out. It seemed logical. I learned sick tricks, like what foods to eat that easily come back up. If I had to attend a big dinner, I would pray they would serve pasta because I knew that was easy to vomit. It was never a regular thing, but even one time is too many, and it was more than one time.
A few years ago, I got a job ghostwriting a diet book. I’m sure a lot of you are thinking that sounds like a nightmare to someone with food issues, but it turned out to be a great experience because it forced me to learn more about nutrition. I had to know exactly what a carbohydrate is so I could write about it, and I had to learn how proteins and sugars work in the body. Diet culture only taught me about calories, but nutrition taught me about the bigger picture.
That’s not to say I was all good after that. Before the aforementioned diet book came out, I was terrified. Most people would worry about the writing, hoping audiences would be satisfied with the work they did, but instead, I concerned myself with how my body looked. I didn’t want to be the chubby guy who (ghost)wrote a diet book. I wasn’t chubby, mind you, but that’s what my mind saw and told me over and over. Body dysmorphia is similar to depression in that it can convince you of anything—you see a different person than the one in the mirror. I obsessed again in the months leading up to the book release, working out twice a day and eating small portions. I could’ve followed the lessons in the book and done it the healthy way, but I fell back on the same routine I was used to.
My weight has fluctuated in the years since, always within about twenty to thirty pounds. Just when I think I have a handle on it, something happens to throw me off. In 2020, some unrelated health issues caused my weight to go up and down what felt like every other week. The subsequent global pandemic didn’t help my waistline either, but aside from those few previously mentioned periods of my life when I rapidly lost weight, I don’t think anyone would ever look at me and think I had a problem with my size. I’ve always been active, and the heaviest I’ve ever been in my adult life is still not considered obese. Not only that, but I also genuinely like the way I look otherwise. I think I have a nice face, I’m more than satisfied with my height, and although I don’t have the best fashion sense, I look handsome in a suit. It’s the body dysmorphia I can’t get over, the pounds my eyes see when it’s just me and a mirror.
I wish more than anything that I could end this chapter by telling you I’m healed, but I’m not. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. And more than anything else in this book, I’m horrified for people to read this chapter. I worry I’m not talking about it in the right way or that you’re going to think I’m forever unwell. This has always been my little secret, and now you’re all in on it. I keep imagining others treating me differently at dinner parties, watching what I eat or wondering if a trip to the bathroom is a relapse. And the holidays are the hardest time, when food greets us at every corner. We indulge and overstuff our faces with turkey and pie. In my head, I bargain with myself, trying to reason that I don’t have to reveal everything to you in these pages. Shouldn’t some things remain personal? The angel on my shoulder is telling me I need to write this so some of you out there find some solace in my admissions, but the absolute truth is that I need to send this out into the void to come clean, to release the memory of the young kids on the playground whispering about my well-being. I want to emancipate the echo that swirls inside my head telling me my body is too fat or too ugly or too big. I pray these pages will help me love the skin I’m in, even just a little bit more.