Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
So I didn't start trying to lose weight until I was in eighth grade,
which basically means that I didn't start going crazy
until I was 13.
By today's standards, I think that's like
"Hey, why didn't you start sooner?"
You see, I was always big
and like big big.
To call me chubby would have been kind, sure -
I probably would have thanked you and thought you were complimenting me -
but it would have been untrue.
I was the biggest kid in the classroom -
the one that was teased,
the one wearing a women's size-12 dress to her first communion.
But something happened when I was 20.
That year, I was a sophomore in college.
I'd just fallen in love.
I had this amazing group of girlfriends,
the kind that you nap with in a twin bed,
the kind that believe in all the same things you do:
in politics,
in religion,
in the fact that Felicity was crazy for having chosen Ben.
In a lot of ways, things were going really, really well for me.
I mean everything except for one thing:
I was uncomfortable almost all the time.
I had just bought these jeans at Old Navy,
and they were size 22,
and they started getting really tight.
I couldn't go out without wearing a cardigan,
because I was really scared
of people noticing that top roll of fat that hung over my belly button.
I developed this really weird paranoia of people watching me walk away,
of them noticing that all the pants I wore rode up when my thighs chafed
and created this, like, mega-wedgie.
If I was ever late to class, I mean even by five minutes,
I would skip it altogether,
knowing that I couldn't bring myself
to squeeze through that one row of students
to that lone middle seat.
I couldn't walk anywhere;
I couldn't walk up the big hill on campus.
I couldn't do many things without sweating.
And, of course, the problem with sweating is that your hair is going to frizz
and then you can't have that straight, sleek look
that makes your face look slimmer.
I saw pictures of myself, and I was like, "Who is that?"
So what did I do with all of this?
It was a Tuesday, and I'd just gotten home for summer break,
and my best friend and I decided to join the YMCA.
We were going to shape up,
which is so petite and cute for the life intervention I really needed.
(Laughter)
I walk into the locker room, and I put my things down,
and I walk over to the scale.
The interesting part about this
is that even knowing all I knew about myself -
that I was really, really big,
that my doctor had told me since I was a baby
that I needed to lose weight,
that I could eat
a medium steak-and-cheese sub with extra cheese and mayonnaise
on the car ride home from a shift at the local pizzeria
and then eat a full dinner at home -
like, even knowing all of these things,
I still felt this wild place
where I was unprepared for the number I saw.
268.
It was ...
sobering -
like at least 10 times worse
than when you spend a bunch of money and have to confront your bank statements.
Something about being that close to 300,
it scared the hell out of me.
And even though that number was alarmingly high,
it wasn't nearly as scary as, like,
what would happen if I didn't stop that gaining?
I thought about how hard it would be to turn back now -
how much weight does that mean I have to lose?
And even though that number was high,
I wasn't scared of existing at 268, because, like, "Hey, I'm here!"
It was, like, what comes after 268?
And for the math people in the room,
it's 300,
it's 400.
I did the only thing I could do - I worked out that day.
And this is not the part where I'm like,
"Exercise is all these endorphins, and you feel so good."
No, I hated every single minute of it.
But it was this fear that I had that said,
"I have to be on my way; I have to do it this time."
I did the only thing you can do when you want to overhaul your life:
I cried, I called my mother, told her it was all her fault.
She cried, we cried together, we reconciled, we fell deeper in love.
And then I watched a ton of Oprah.
(Laughter)
And then I made a plan.
And at first, the plan was just my own creation.
I cut down on the size of the meals I ate.
I chose to snack on fruits and nuts
when all I wanted to do was dip pretzels in Nutella.
I exercised consistently.
I joined Weight Watchers.
I counted points, and then I counted calories.
And it was working -
like, I was seeing results in every way.
I was doing what I set out to do.
But that's not to say that I didn't waver.
I wanted my gym to burn down.
I didn't want to do it myself because what a headache,
but I did want somebody else to do it.
I had all of these panic attacks where I was like,
"How much longer am I going to have to do this?"
or "Am I ever just going to be able to have a buffalo chicken pizza again
and, like, not just a slice?"
I was so sick of people telling me about slivers of things -
like, "Give me 10 slivers and we'll call it a day."
(Laughter)
I'd read this article about this woman.
She'd been morbidly obese for years,
and she decides to join Overeaters Anonymous.
And so she's struggling.
It's been a few weeks;
she calls her sponsor.
She tells the sponsor
"I'm not doing okay.
It's like this wanting to eat in me, it's not even in my control anymore.
I think I'm going to binge."
The sponsor tells her to breathe, and she's like,
"Yup, breathing's going to help right now, thank you."
And the sponsor says,
"Do you think you can do it today?"
And the woman's like,
"Do what today?"
And the sponsor says,
"Do you think you can make it to the end of today without bingeing?
Just today - not tomorrow, not the next day, not next week.
Can you just focus on making it through today, staying strong?"
And the woman just has this moment
where she's like a little confused
and a little relieved at the thought, like,
just today.
"Yeah, I can do that."
And she hangs up the phone.
She did that.
She stayed strong that day and somehow lost the weight.
And now, here I was,
this struggling woman thinking about that story I'd read years ago,
like understanding the full power of "just today."
"Just today."
That's how I made it through.
A little over a year after I started that day at the Y,
I went back,
and I weighed myself on that same scale.
That's the scale I should have burned down -
not the whole gym, because there's people -
but that was the scale.
(Laughter)
And I'd lost over 130 pounds.
And at first, it was, like, exhilarating.
I had this body that I'd only seen other people have.
I could cross my legs fully for the first time.
I could wear a T-shirt and a tank top
that I bought at stores that everybody went to.
I could run for five miles without stopping -
something I never even wanted to do.
I could walk and not be nervous that anyone would tease me
or that a frat guy would call me a fatty again
in front of my friends.
I had this confidence suddenly,
and more people made eye contact with me as I walked by.
Because the thing is,
I wasn't just thin,
I was ...
I was accepted.
I was seen.
I felt this sense of worthiness that I hadn't before.
And there's something really bittersweet
about noticing that your own value has risen so exponentially, so quickly,
and all for what you've changed about your appearance.
When I'd overhear my boyfriend's friends say,
"You know, she was cute before, man, but you really lucked out,"
or when a friend of the family told me,
"It's good that you stayed a little bit thicker
because that suits you,"
or when one of my friends
got tired of hearing other people praise how good I looked now,
and I could sense this shift in our relationship,
I started to recognize
that all of this attention came with its own baggage.
When that newness and that fun started to fade,
I felt this pressure from the outside, from the inside:
a pressure to maintain,
a pressure to be normal.
Like, what is that? Number one.
And the pressure was on all of these levels.
One was on an eating level.
My family, my friends -
they really believe in this motto of "Eating big means living big."
They'd be like, "Cut the crap with dieting.
Eat half a calzone - that's moderation.
What are you talking about?"
And I didn't even know how to introduce calzones into my life again.
It was just so new.
And on another level, a personal one,
I thought that a lot of the problems that existed in my life -
my anxiety, my depression, my crippling self-doubt -
I thought that they were because of my fatness
and that they'd have gone away now,
that they would have seeped out of my skin
in all these millions of beads of sweat I'd shed,
but they didn't.
Because I was still the same person.
And I just wanted to go back to the same optimistic feeling that I had
when I thought that thinness was the answer.
Soon, I just wanted to eat again.
When it became too much to bear,
when I started to say to myself,
"Maybe I should eat again because wasn't it easier then?"
I started therapy.
And as I'm sitting there telling this woman about my life,
telling her about my history with food and where it all began ...
I told her about this night in November
when I was sitting on Mom's bed and the phone rang.
And I couldn't remember the exact words that Mom used,
but I remember that she told me
Dad was dead.
That all those months that we didn't know where he was,
when he told us he was going away to get better,
to stop drinking for once and for all,
that he was in Arizona, 3,000 miles away.
And that the coroner hadn't been able to identify his body at first,
because he'd been homeless,
with no ID, no wallet, only two pennies in his pocket.
And I thought of that conversation that I had, the last one that I had,
where he asked me to tell Mom
to send him money to come home on the train,
and I, knowing that Mom had $25 a week to buy groceries
and that she'd already said, "No,"
and I, hearing that vodka made his voice wobbly, said,
"No, Dad, I can't.
I won't."
And that night I found out that he died at that train station.
I remember those things like they're this old movie,
like one you watch in high school, the ones you hate,
with the plot that you can't quite pay attention to.
It's like once Dad died,
food wasn't something that I could just control,
something to bide time,
something to cry with, celebrate, get mad at.
It was like food was the only thing,
and I ate.
And when I was done eating, I found a snack.
And now thin, without it, I started to grieve.
And there's no easy way to tell anybody that.
There's no way to tell someone
"Look, I know I just lost half my body weight
and I should be so happy,
but I'm not,"
or "I'm not just trying to eat healthier and move more.
I'm trying to reconcile the fact that I miss food like I miss Dad,"
that I have replaced feeling anything
with eating.
One of the parts of therapy
that stayed with me the longest and probably helped me the most
was this writing I'd started to do -
I journaled.
After a few years,
I started to feel steadier,
saner,
more at home in my own skin.
And I started a blog.
I was like really courageous.
It's a food blog -
for everyone who's like, "Get her away from the food."
I'd begun cooking at that point, making all these healthy recipes.
I figured, "Why not just photograph it
and subject it to the criticism of a million people online?"
And so, at first, I'm just sharing these recipes.
And then I say,
"Okay, it's time.
I'm going to share my weight loss."
And I did.
And I wrote about weight loss and body image
in this honest, vulnerable, sometimes cringe-inducing way,
really not knowing how people would react
but, I guess, with one intention:
to just be a friend to anybody else who had ever struggled like I had,
to just make sure that anybody who felt weird or unsure or alone,
to let them know that "Hey, you're not. I'm weird too.
If you're thinking about having the second cupcake, I just had three."
Like, you know, it's just to be supportive.
I didn't want to be the girl that lost weight
and claimed she was a different person, a better person, a new person,
because no, like, I wasn't.
I was just handling new circumstances.
And I think that being fat and chubby
and morbidly obese and thin
and one time too thin
and never having felt just right,
it gave me a credibility in what I wrote,
and with that came this connection, a trust.
People emailed me.
I got thousands of emails.
People who wanted to know how to lose weight.
People who wanted to know if I had excess skin.
People who wanted to know if my relationships changed.
Or people who felt hopeless.
People who were kind.
People who were not so kind.
People who said
that I was "a self-absorbed, faux-poetic little princess
who no one wanted to read."
Someone who said that I looked better before.
Someone who called me a fraud when I'd gained weight.
But, mostly, people just needed to tell their stories,
and, really, I just needed to hear them,
because that's all I was doing, is telling my story.
I'd created this place to talk about food and recipes,
and I didn't talk about those.
I talked about body image.
I talked about breaking up with my longtime boyfriend.
I talked about gaining weight in 2012 -
2012 was like the worst year ever, did you feel that? -
(Laughter)
and what a terrible failure that made me feel like.
And all of these little struggles I still had every day.
And good or bad response aside, it was like people understood.
Turns out I was never the expert -
I think you know that.
I wasn't this healer;
I wasn't a guru.
I was the one still healing;
I was the one still figuring it all out.
And this writing that I did,
this back and forth with thousands of people,
it was this catharsis that I didn't know I needed
until I was experiencing it.
All of it was my way of turning this lifelong struggle I had
into something good, something meaningful.
I started to realize about blogging the same thing I was realizing about life,
which is it's never just about the food -
it's the way I'm using it to tell my story.
Food isn't the stand-in for a dad.
It didn't make my depression go away.
It doesn't make me feel like I'm good enough,
smart enough, pretty enough.
It doesn't make me stop questioning
whether the books I'm writing are worthwhile to anybody.
It took me a long time,
but I think I get it
that the answer to the question
of how do you lose weight and keep it off -
the answer is not in the places we look.
The answer is not in religious adherence to calorie counting or paleo
or green juice in the morning or a strict exercise routine
or anything like that.
The answer is in the same mantra
that I used to lose weight in the first place.
The answer is in doing it today.
It's waking up every day and asking yourself,
"Can I do it today?"
Not thinking about tomorrow or next week
or all the challenges to come
that will definitely make you want to quit at one time.
Just living in this moment, every moment.
It applies everywhere.
It's with work. It's with loving your partner.
It's eating right when your office has donuts.
It's going out for three glasses of wine
and trying to make a decision that doesn't involve a deep fryer.
It's treating your kids with patience
when your kids are sometimes the worst people you've ever met.
(Laughter)
You give it your all just for now.
And, look, maybe tomorrow you can do it again,
but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
When you do this,
when you don't turn to food to cope with grief, anxiety, sadness,
every lonely moment,
you end up having no alternative but to seek out other things
that bring you fullness, bring you joy, bring you pleasure.
You do more.
You go out when your inclination is to stay in your swaddly comfort zone
and order in.
You pursue the things that leave you feeling good after having done them
rather than ashamed.
Maybe you write,
maybe you cook,
maybe you watch YouTube videos of unlikely animal friendships, but -
(Laughter)
what you find
is what you've been looking for all along,
except you don't find it in your taste buds.
You find it in a collection of a million teeny, tiny moments -
you find fullness.
So do that.
Do that today.
Make it through this day, and give it everything.
Not for the people around you -
be present for yourself, for every feeling, for every opportunity.
It's not easy.
Sometimes it will hurt.
But if you do it, and if I do it,
we will be full.
Thank you.
(Applause)