DECEMBER 2019
WHILE ED RESTS IN his hospital bed, recovering from the effects of a treatment, I am having a conversation with his assistant, Leon. Leon is a sharp, sophisticated young man whom Ed met in Germany during one of his trips there for cancer treatment. After starting as Ed’s chef, Leon has become more like a twenty-four-hour nurse-slash-caregiver, driving him to appointments when Wolfie is busy, making sure he stays on top of his medications, preparing his meals, and ensuring that Ed has what he wants. They get along great, and I understand why.
It’s my first one-on-one, in-depth conversation with Leon. He speaks four languages and has traveled extensively. He tells me about the meals he likes preparing for Ed. I share my stories about cooking for Ed when we were married and how I learned to make his favorite dishes from Mrs. Van Halen.
After gushing about my trip to Italy where I fell in love with food all over again and hearing about Leon’s gustatory excursions there, I tell him about my Nonnie and Aunt Adeline’s cappelletti, because I can’t talk about Italy or my love of cooking without referencing them, and soon Leon and I are discussing recipes, ingredients, and techniques with such passion that I almost forget we are in a hospital room with Ed.
“Edward told me that you have a cooking show on television,” Leon says.
“Yes, I have a lot of fun on it,” I say.
“It’s so great that you love food,” he says.
I chuckle. “Well, look at me.”
Leon stares at me, confused. He doesn’t get it. My attempt to use a self-deprecating quip to infer that I am fat does not register with him. He does not see me the way I see myself, which is heavy, struggling, not my best self, and not who I want to be. I wish it were different. I want to look at me the way Leon looks at me. He doesn’t see the fat. He just sees my knowledge and enthusiasm. Why can’t I do that?
Seriously. Why can’t I?
I get in my car and drive home fixated on this question. Since my teens, I have struggled with body image. The person I see in the mirror is fat, flawed, and in need of fixing. No one else has seen me that way. Ed adored me at any size (and once, during our heaviest days of partying, he actually told me that I was too thin). And Tom asked me out on our first date when my weight was at an all-time high. I have always been the dissenter. Even after running the Boston Marathon a few days before my fiftieth birthday and finishing in five hours and fifteen minutes, I stared at a picture of myself crossing the finish line, exhausted and elated, and thought, Oh my God, my thighs look so big.
Now, a decade later, I have lost both of my parents and my son’s father is fighting cancer and the last thing I need is to hate myself because of some number on the scale.
As I keep telling myself—and the whole world—Enough already.
Morning comes and I have a come-to-Jesus moment with myself. Instead of stepping on the scale as I always do, I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, and say, “Can I just at least not hate myself today? Can I at least do that? Can I not chastise myself because my jeans are a little tight? Can I get out of bed and look at the beautiful sunrise, appreciate the beauty surrounding me, enjoy hearing my cats purr, watching Luna’s tail wag, and feel gratitude for the life that I’ve been given? Can I just love myself today?”
I do not know if this is a surrender or a declaration of war.
It feels like both.
A few days later, I have a similar, less strident conversation with myself. Maybe I don’t have to struggle so much. Maybe I can just love myself today and see what happens.
I like that idea.
What exactly is it that I am trying to fix? What’s broken?
At my age, I should no longer be holding my body to the same standard I did when I was eighteen, thirty, or even forty; though at this point, I am not even sure what that standard is or whether there should be a standard other than healthy and loved. All I have ever told myself is that I need to change. It started in elementary school when a teacher pointed to my stomach, and said, “You better watch that.” At thirteen, I got it in my head that I had big hips, what I referred to as child-bearing hips, and I began to see myself as too curvy.
Two years later, I was on the set of One Day at a Time and comparing myself to my costar Mackenzie Phillips, who was tall and thin and beautiful. I thought she had the perfect figure, like the sixties supermodel Twiggy. She was everything I wasn’t. During an interview at the time, I actually told a reporter that I had a “very serious weight problem” and looked “like a tub of lard” when I stood next to Mackenzie.
I was fifteen or sixteen years old then. I thought I had an hourglass shape and I was embarrassed by it. I always wanted to be something other than what I was: taller, blonder, thinner. Every morning I got on the scale, and the rest of the day was an effort to make up for the number I saw. I never thought about enjoying meals. I told myself to be good. At the end of the day, I was either bad or I cheated or I slipped.
On the set, I hated going into wardrobe for fittings. I wanted to die whenever they said that they had to get a bigger size for me. I didn’t realize that they were bringing in small sizes because they thought of me as tiny and that the next sizes they got for me were still smalls. I thought the smaller the number on the scale, the more beautiful I was and the more jobs I would get. But it didn’t work that way. I went up for the movie Footloose, and when the part went to Lori Singer, I assumed that it was because I wasn’t as skinny or as beautiful as she was.
The same thing happened with the movie Cocoon, and I was devastated. I assumed that the people doing the casting thought I was ugly and fat or that something else was wrong with me. It never occurred to me that I might not have been a good enough actor or that I didn’t match what they had in mind. I just didn’t get it.
* * *
At forty-seven years old, I signed up to be a spokesperson for Jenny Craig. I was public about my reasons. I announced to the world that I was fat—my weight was at an all-time high—and the goal I set for myself was to get thin. Finally. That was so me. I set up an all-or-nothing situation where the stakes were not only disappointment but also public shame and humiliation if I didn’t reach my goal, to say nothing of the devastation that this would cause privately.
The plan was reflective of my mindset at the time—broken, skewed, and unrealistic. I wasn’t trying to get healthy or deal with the reasons I had gained weight over the years—the currents of unhappiness, sadness, and discontent that flowed beneath my public cheer. I wanted to get thin. The two are not the same.
But it also showed my determination to survive. I had split from Ed in May of 2002 and I refused to take money from him. As a single working mom, I needed to make money. I wasn’t getting work as an actress. Jenny Craig was a good job, and it was going to make me thin. It was the best of the two worlds that mattered to me, and I put everything I had into making sure I succeeded.
The deal called for me to lose thirty pounds in eight months. I did it in three. My manager, Marc Schwartz, negotiated a new deal for ten more pounds. After I lost those next ten pounds faster than expected, they asked if I would consider fifty pounds and pose in a bikini for the cover of People magazine. I agreed under two conditions: First, that we avoid mention of the fifty pounds because I already knew it was impossible to maintain that weight loss; and second, that I wasn’t going to try to get into said bikini until ten days before the scheduled photo shoot.
That whole time I followed Jenny Craig’s program as if I were a nun who had taken a vow of celibacy, which was the way it felt at times. I ate preprepared meals, worked out, talked with my sponsor, and stepped on the scale for my weekly weigh-ins. The numbers kept going down. I was exhausted. I told myself that I was in training. I was going to get skinny. I was finally going to have the body I always wanted.
The bikini photo shoot was scheduled for the end of March 2009. Ten days before, my manager called me in the morning.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
For the next week and a half, I barely ate. I wanted to get in that bikini and see abs and definition, and I did. The photo shoot was done in total secrecy. No one on the crew was allowed to bring their phone onto the set. A week later, I was on the cover of People magazine wearing a tiny green bikini (which, by the way, was a large—even at my smallest, one hundred and twenty-two pounds, I still wore a large, evidence of how screwed-up the fashion industry is with sizing). A Jenny Craig commercial also ran nonstop.
“Now nothing’s stopping me from diving into summer,” I said, as I did a back dive into a swimming pool.
My smile was real. The splash was real. I was ecstatic. I proved that I could do something really hard if I put my mind to it—and I was thin.
I was happy that day although I almost fainted on the set. That night, I drank champagne. I enjoyed putting on my jeans without lying on the bed to pull up the zipper and slipping into a dress without having to pull two or three roomier alternatives out of my closet. But that feeling didn’t last much longer than those champagne bubbles. Neither did the weight loss. I started gaining as soon as the photo shoot ended. That was just one of many realities. Whether I was a size two, an eight, or a fourteen, I was still me.
That was never more apparent than when I started working with Wendie Malick and Jane Leeves on Hot in Cleveland. Both women were tall, skinny, beautiful, and gorgeous, and I thought, Here I am again, the one with the hourglass figure, short and round. All my insecurities came out as if Jenny Craig had never happened.
I remember one day at the end of the second season when we were preparing for a scene where Wendie, Jane, and I had to wear the same little black dress for Elka’s wedding. After getting dressed, I stood in the wardrobe room trying not to cry. I had seen the two other women looking tall and skinny and stunning, and there I was, short, fat, and round.
“Do I have to wear the same dress as them?” I asked our costume designer, Lori Eskowitz-Carter. “Couldn’t I wear one that’s not so tight?”
She was pained by my pain.
“Valerie, you are beautiful,” she said. “Why do you do this to yourself?”
“Thank you, but stop it,” I said, unable to handle the compliment and eager to get out from in front of the mirror.
“Why don’t you believe that you are beautiful?”
* * *
It’s the stories we tell ourselves. In the early 2000s, I heard about a study conducted by a Japanese researcher who studied water samples exposed to positive and negative messages. The water that was praised and thanked and loved looked clean and clear under a microscope. The water that was criticized and told that it was hated lost its purity and developed an unpleasant toxicity when studied under a microscope.
Whether these studies stand up to scientific scrutiny is debatable, but in a practical way, they make perfect sense to me. If you start every day by getting on a scale and telling yourself that you failed, you will feel like a failure. If you begin every meal by telling yourself not to eat because the food is bad for you and will screw up the number on the scale, you will approach every meal as if it’s something to fear rather than enjoy. Food is not the enemy.
I have always believed my poor body image began in elementary school when my teacher made that damaging comment about my tummy. I don’t know if I was even aware of my body before he said that. But that was only the most obvious source of confusion and insecurity. I think the root causes may have started earlier. While my mother was pregnant with me, my older brother, Mark, died after wandering unwatched into a friend’s barn and drinking poison out of a soda bottle. He was seventeen months old.
I was born only a few months later. I was literally born into grief. My young parents were still trying to get through that horrendous experience. I believe that I absorbed their sense of loss and sadness like the water did in that experiment. My parents never hid this tragedy from me or my brothers, but they didn’t talk about it, either. It was too painful for them. I didn’t learn about it until I was in my early teens. Only after my Nonnie died and I went back to Delaware for the funeral did I finally see Mark’s grave. The two were buried near each other.
I remember reading Mark’s headstone while holding Wolfie in my arms. At the time, Wolfie was about the same age as Mark was when he died. I have always said that I couldn’t imagine the pain my parents went through after losing their child. However, I could imagine it. And I did. I remember tightening my grip on Wolfie as tears washed down my face. It was the first time that I grieved for my brother, and I began to understand my parents a little better.
I have returned to that feeling many times over the years in an effort to process and understand the impact Mark’s death had on all of us. I don’t know how my parents dealt with it or each other. My father had the ability to put on a stoic mask and soldier on. But I don’t think my mother ever allowed herself to really grieve. Once, when I was pregnant, she said, “If it’s a boy, you’re going to name him Mark, right?” Aside from that one time, we never talked about him or how my parents got through that terrible time.
No wonder, like me, she ended up on a lifelong diet because she ate her feelings instead of working to understand them. I know there was joy surrounding my arrival, but I wonder if more was expected from me.
I knew my parents’ love for me was without question and that my birth had nothing to do with the tragedy of losing Mark. Still, before I was even born, there was a message sent to me that my role was to please others and bring enough happiness to fill a gaping hole, a task that could never be completed and that also missed the real point—much like the ten pounds I would always be trying to lose. I assumed a role that was never mine to fill. I never put it together until I allowed myself to do what my parents didn’t know how to: take the space to grieve what wasn’t, what isn’t, and what can never be.
It took me until I was nearly sixty years old, but I finally understood that this feeling of trying to make up for my parents’ loss was as impossible as finding happiness in a number on the scale. I have to consciously remind myself that it doesn’t make sense, and in its place, I need to create a new, more rational, and healthier narrative.
* * *
How do you change the narrative?
By being present and aware.
My body is perfectly fine. Why am I so critical of it? Why do I treat it like an emotional trash can?
Enough already.
Bodies are bodies—each one different and unique, even with people who are the same size and weight. They are neither good nor bad.
They can be healthy or unhealthy.
But it’s what they contain that matters most—the head and the heart.
This body of mine functions properly and performs on command; and I suppose that if it could talk on its own it would ask, “Why do you hate me? I get you up in the morning. I make your coffee. I get you upstairs and downstairs. I take your dog for walks. I call your cats and answer the phone. I help you smell the roses. I know how to open a bottle of wine. I dance. I swim. I think. I laugh. I fight off germs. I inhale and exhale. I ran a marathon. I created a brand-new life. I taught that brand-new life how to drive (and freaked out only a few times). I’m here for you all the time.”
I finally hear it and know what to say in response: “I don’t hate you. I don’t mean to treat you badly. I am sorry for the past. Thank you for everything you have done for me and continue to do. I am trying to change. I want to treat you better. I hope we are together and continue this relationship for a very long time. I love you.”
When I begin to hear the old voices in my head now, I try to close my eyes and breathe through the moment. I calmly tell myself that I am kind, I am good, and I am beautiful just the way I am right now. At this age. In this body. Sometimes I choose other words. Sometimes the words don’t register with me. Sometimes I have to get up and move. The important thing is to do something to change the narrative in my head. Our bodies are 70 percent water, I remind myself. Talk nicely.
Like this afternoon. When I start to have one of those moments where the anxiety creeps up on me, I get up and go for a walk in the backyard. I pick a few grapefruits from one of the trees. I also see oranges and lemons that are ready to be brought inside. And kumquats. My kumquat tree is a marvel that almost seems to be speaking to me. The fruit begins to ripen at the bottom, then fills out in the middle, and finally changes color at the top. I fill a small bucket with the bite-size fruit and bring it into the kitchen, thinking I’ll make some kumquat liqueur. There’s more: peaches, guavas, pomegranates. I catch myself smiling at this blessing of abundance.
I am also feeling inspired. I want to create something delicious for dinner tonight. Maybe a lemon pasta with shrimp. Maybe a dessert. Maybe both.
This is how I change the narrative.
* * *
My mom used to make a pineapple upside-down cake that was always one of my favorites. With the fruit I have picked, I am going to make a variation of that, my upside-down citrus cake. It’s tangy, sweet, and refreshing. I melt butter and mix brown sugar and granulated white sugar. Once it turns into a buttery smooth caramel, I pour it into a pan. Then I layer in slices of my oranges and a grapefruit, and pour in some orange liqueur. I make cake batter, scoop it over the fruit and bake at 350 degrees for fifty to sixty minutes.
As it bakes, the cats and the dog find their way into the kitchen, and I know why. Something smells good and sweet and delicious. They give me a look that says, You’re driving us crazy again. Once upon a time, I would have spent all this time telling myself why this upside-down citrus cake was bad for me and denying myself even the smallest taste until—guess what—I would have eaten a couple of pieces and hated myself the rest of the day.
But today I am reveling in the process, from gathering the fresh ingredients from my trees to the bakery scent that fills my kitchen. I can’t wait to share it. Look at me: I love food. You can see why.