Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest to Discover if Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer by Jen Lancaster Page B

you’d think my fear would propel me into the car and on to the gym, but it doesn’t. There’s an O. Henry level of irony here that I can finally afford the occasional pedicure again, yet being borderline diabetic, I might eventually lose my feet. 43 I’m scared enough to consider these factors . . . but not quite enough to be spurred into really doing something. I’m wrapped up in angst, not action. Sure, everything Dr. Awesome said was real and frightening when I was in her office . . . but now that it’s a few weeks in the past, her dictates feel slightly less relevant.
    Too bad I’m fighting with my mom at the moment, because parental involvement has always provided me with motivation to lose weight. After my freshman summer, I was in great shape for a long time. However, my weight started to inch up again during my third junior year. 44 This time the bloat was beer related, since I’d turned twenty-one. Because I was finally a legal adult, no one was making me stand on a scale against my will. And yet Mom’s will was just as strong. So she—ever the crafty one—employed a different approach.
    One day she and I were looking at my sorority composite photos. I began to bitch that my collarbones were almost the only ones you couldn’t see in the off-the-shoulder black drape and pearls my sisters and I wore for the shot. Naturally, I thought I was cuter than everyone else, 45 but with my insanely competitive nature, I didn’t like them being thinner than me. Sensing an opening, my mom leapt on the opportunity like Maisy on a Milk-Bone. She offered to “help me” before our photos were retaken in the fall. Oh, yes, she promised, my collar bones would be defined. Help consisted of her paying for membership at a fly-by-night diet center.
    Without a doubt, the Nutri-Bolic center provided the worst diet food ever. My meals were mostly packets of dried powders claiming to be “soup” and “oatmeal,” although none resembled any soups or oatmeals I’d ever tasted. Had I been in a coma, perhaps I’d have appreciated the thick, starchy liquid texture of my meals. Too bad I was conscious, because I found myself telling random strangers, “I just want to chew something, damn it!”
    Interestingly, this “food” gave me a brand-new appreciation for all the staples of my mom’s repertoire. I craved every atrocity to ever originate from our badly wallpapered, low-ceilinged, harvest-gold-appliance-having kitchen. Hot dogs shriveled in the microwave to cocktail-frank size, paired with stale buns? Yum! The three-bean salad that looked exactly like the organic matter we pulled from our pool’s filter? Deelicious! Unseasoned rubber chicken served on a bed of still-crunchy brown rice? Bring. It. On! Even those grotesque onion-and-Worcestershire creations my dad, Dr. Ronald McMengele, grilled just long enough to make the blood run down our arms when we picked them up were suddenly appealing. 46
    Consuming a thousand calories a day with very little protein, I felt lightheaded and weak every second for three whole months. I wasn’t just hungry. I was famished. Starving. Ravenous. Not only did I want to consume my parents’ cooking in vast quantities; I was in such a state that I’d look at the love of my life, a 140-pound Great Pyrenees mountain dog named George, and I’d fantasize about his tender, meaty flanks, charbroiled over a hickory-wood fire and served with a side of home fries.
    I didn’t lose weight that summer because I was eating sensibly—I lost it because I was starving. I dropped more than thirty pounds, but at the cost of a portion of my sanity.
    The clothing store where I worked was right across from a drugstore in the Glenbrook Square mall. At the end of the day, I’d sail past the displays of Generra and Guess T-shirts in our front window to buy a Little Debbie brownie. When I got to my car, I’d open the package and spend five minutes smelling it and marveling at the smooth icing and dense, rich,