Weight Cycling

TW: Disordered eating, fatphobia

Mom is in the kitchen today. I’m slumped in the recliner, pretending to watch TV in the living room. I always feel compelled to watch her as she goes through her weekly ritual. It’s Wednesday so she did the grocery shopping and she’s laid out the food across every available surface. Her food and our food. She keeps them separate as if proximity to our full-calorie, full-fat, sugary, highly processed regular food will somehow contaminate her 100-calorie, non-fat, sugar-free, organic and natural diet food. I watch her anxious movements, the muttering under her breath, the lists she’s making while consulting the eating schedule on the fridge. And I wonder how despite the Herculean effort she makes week after week, month after month, year after year, she’s still so damn fat.

I’ve never known a thin or even normal-weight version of my mother, although I’ve seen photos of her before she had me and my brothers. Objectively speaking, my mom was hot when she was young. Hippie girl skinny, with long hair and high cheekbones, no hips or butt but a generous chest (something she neglected to pass on to me), and a big smile that lit up her whole face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile like that. Maybe when she’s gone down a few pounds and she celebrates finally “turning things around.” But even those smiles are tinged with fear, a tightness around the eyes that slowly calcified into crow’s feet. And the pounds always come back, along with new ones. 

One of my first memories is sitting at a Weight Watchers meeting with my mom as she shared about her struggles losing “the baby weight.” I was baby number four and I’ve heard her say throughout my life that it was after she had me that she “lost her figure.” The way she says it makes it sound as if I stole it from her but she doesn’t want to accuse me outright. My brother’s apparently played no role in my mother’s fate as a future fat woman.  

Weight Watchers eventually became Jenny Craig and a fridge full of packaged meals. Then there were the stringent meal plans of a particularly militant dietitian. After that, there was the Atkins, South Beach, and Grapefruit diets, the weekly groceries reflecting the particular diet du jour. (I scan the groceries on her side of the kitchen, I think this week she might be trying keto again.) There were also the nurseries at the various gyms I grew up in. Yet somehow the numbers on the scale always seemed to be on the rise.

Earlier this year, on the night before my thirteenth birthday, I woke up to pee and heard a sound coming from the kitchen. Every muscle in my body tensed. Maybe a burglar had broken in or a serial killer or a raccoon. I’d crossed the darkened house to see what was making the noise because clearly I’d learned nothing from horror movies. But what I found was even more horrifying.

My mom was sitting on the kitchen floor crying, the remnants of my birthday cake staining her face and hands and the kitchen tiles. She’d eaten all of it. I gasped and she looked up. Seeing her face streaked with frosting, crumbs, and tears, her eyes wide with shame and terror, my stomach turned.

“I think I’m addicted to food,” she croaked.

I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. The next day when I got back from school there was a new cake. After I blew out the candles I refused the piece my dad offered saying my stomach was upset. My mom gulped down her piece and mine.

A while later I found some Overeaters Anonymous pamphlets and I think she went to a few meetings, although she didn’t talk about that as much as she talked about her diets. But eventually, she abandoned those too and the diet foods returned. 

A few weeks ago, my dad was looking at the assortment of Paleo-friendly supplies on her side of the kitchen. He picked up a box of something called Caveman Cookies and scoffed. “You know, honey, I think you’re addicted to dieting.”

I was sitting in the living room and I nodded involuntarily at that. Neither of them noticed.

My mom took back the box with a huff. “I’m trying my best here. I wish you were more supportive.”

“Why can’t you just accept yourself as you are? You know I love you no matter what.”

I snorted. This time they noticed. I looked away from the TV and saw both my parents staring at me. Defiance rose up in my chest and I looked at my mom in the eyes.

“He’s right,” I said. “You’re always on a diet and if anything you’re getting fatter.” 

My mom glared at me and then at my dad. Without another word, she went back to putting away the groceries, tossing things into cabinets and slamming the fridge door. That was the last time either of us ever made a comment about my mom’s weight loss efforts. 

After the birthday cake incident and my ill-timed snort, I noticed my mom became self-conscious around me. She wouldn’t eat in front of me and if I walked into the kitchen when she was making herself something, she would throw it out or put it in the fridge.

“Lost my appetite,” she’d say and walk out of the kitchen.

So now I watch her in secret. Like a spy or a visitor at a zoo. 

Mom catches me watching her and gives me an embarrassed smile. That’s the smile I associate with my mom, spreading tentatively across her wide, squishy face. She starts to put the food away and I turn back to the TV. There’s a commercial for Applebee’s followed by another for Pizza Hut and another for Taco Bell. My stomach rumbles but I ignore it. I’ll be damned if I end up like my mom.