Sarah Shotland
Full
I was put on my first diet at five years old. By my mother. My mother—whose five sisters call her Peaches—is by everyone’s admission, the pretty one. The other eight look like me: pink and freckled, dishwater eyes and soft bodies that tip over, top-heavy, flat and shapeless on the bottom. Our chins recede into our necks, our shoulders slump into our arms. But my mother could stop a pick up truck flying down a dirt road. She’s got legs all day long, eight-shaped, with emerald eyes and lashes long enough to trap a tear. Before she got pregnant with me, she was a dancer, all fringe and sequins, but my mother was never fragile.
My mother worked for that body.
When I was young, she owned an Aerobicize studio. She taught other women to sweat. On family vacations, she brought her step bench. Don’t talk to Peaches before she’s had her morning workout. Today, my mother uses a weighted stationary bike—an hour and a half, twice a day, every day, no exceptions. She gained only 17 pounds in her last of six pregnancies—an accomplishment she never forgets to mention when a friend of mine shares the news she will have a baby. She weight trains and runs marathons and she never forgets that one day off could wreck it all.
My mother has made a career of her body, and she could only teach her daughters the things she knew: deprivation, denial, discipline. So when she saw me, at five, with chubby cheeks and a pouty tummy, she panicked, and called a nutritionist who promptly put me on a diet of vegetable soup, grapefruit and green beans.
I have been on a diet for 25 years. For 25 years, I have counted calories and points, ordered salads with the dressing on the side, peeled the skin off fried chicken, but never forgotten to suck the grease off my fingers. I have measured my value by my skirt size, and measured everyone else that way, too. I like to eat alone, standing up, spooning sauce straight from the pan, tearing the bread chunk by chunk, preferring never to see the total sum of accumulation. Bite. Bite. One more. No one bite enough to feel guilt over.
For 25 years, I have felt most loved when I am most hungry. The flat stomach proof I deserve one more gulp, one more chunk, one more kiss. My mother taught me the satisfaction of deprivation and the corresponding joy of more. She taught me longing—to look at the soft, pink middle of a filet and lust after it. We always want the forbidden.