“Alan?”
“El-len.”
She looked horrified.
“Oh, Porshe. You’re not one of those!”
I turned to my mother, panicked. “I thought you showed her pictures and explained everything to her!” My mother swiveled on the sofa to face Gran and yelled, “Gran! I told you Portia was living with Ellen.”
“Yes,” she yelled back. “As roommates!” She looked perplexed and shook her head. “And all this time I was worried that that lesbian was hitting on my granddaughter!”
Gran closed her eyes for about twenty seconds. There was complete silence. I was holding my breath. It was the longest, quietest twenty seconds of my life.
“Well,” she said opening her eyes and holding her arms out for a hug, “I love you just the same.” We never talked about my sexuality again, only about how happy my life was with Ellen. From changing the channel in disgust to being Ellen’s biggest fan and watching her talk show every day, Gran showed me that people can change, including me, as I was certain that a woman born in 1907 in a small town in rural Australia would never be able to accept me. I had judged her and assumed that she would feel as though I had shamed the family. But I was wrong. In the nursing home where she spent her final few months before passing away at the age of 102, she kept a framed photo of our wedding for all the staff to see on the nightstand next to her bed. She was proud to call Ellen her granddaughter.
By the time I entered into my relationship with Ellen, I had recovered from my eating disorder. Living with Francesca forced me to deal with issues surrounding acceptance of my sexuality, and it also forced me to deal with my relationship to food. I shared a kitchen—and a bathroom. I couldn’t binge and purge without a lengthy and embarrassing discussion. I slowly stopped purging and just binged in my car or at work while she wasn’t there to see it. The rest of the time I would eat salads with no dressing. I was still fighting a heavier weight over the next two years, but what really became obvious to me was that I was doing something very wrong. I began to understand that every time I restricted my calorie intake, I would binge immediately after. Sometimes I could diet for a week or two without the bingeing and I would lose a few pounds, but then the binge would inevitably follow and I would gain all the weight back, and sometimes a couple of pounds more. I was always on a diet. I was either being “good” or being “bad,” but I was always on a diet—even when I was bingeing. I lived my life from day to day by weighing myself and measuring my success or failure solely on weight lost or gained—just as I had done from the time I was twelve. I’d measured my accomplishments and my self-worth on that scale for my entire life, with the same intensity and emotion, from 82 pounds all the way to 168. While I had begun to examine my behavior in treatment, I was forced to continue the self-examination when I was living with Francesca, because simply having to explain my actions to another person made me question them. I finally understood that by being on a perpetual diet, I had practiced a “disordered” form of eating my whole life. I restricted when I was hungry and in need of nutrition and binged when I was so grotesquely full I couldn’t be comfortable in any position but lying down. Diets that tell people what to eat or when to eat are the practices in between. And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating. “Ordered” eating is the practice of eating when you are hungry and ceasing to eat when your brain sends the signal that your stomach is full. “Ordered” eating is about eating for enjoyment, for health, and to sustain life. “Ordered” eating is not restricting certain kinds of foods because they are “bad.” Obsessing about what and when to eat is not normal, natural, and orderly. Thinking about food to the point of obsession and ignoring your body’s signals is a disorder.
Although I had learned about this from Carolyn, my understanding of how it worked was suspended due to my resistance to treatment. At the time of leaving Monte Nido, living without dieting sounded like a utopian philosophical ideal. That is, until I witnessed it at work with Francesca. A naturally thin woman who ate whatever she wanted and never gained or lost a pound was the most fascinating case study for this woman who had spent her life gaining and losing weight. I watched her eat pasta, candy, ice cream, and cheese. I watched her dip her bread in olive oil and wash it down with Coke—real Coke, not diet—while I ate dry salads with no dressing and sipped iced tea. I was dumbfounded that I was eating boring, dry, diet food and maintaining or gaining weight during the course of any given month when she never even thought about what she ate or how her body looked. I was equally amazed as I watched her order food at restaurants and only eat a small portion of her order because she was too full to finish it or skip breakfast or lunch because she got a little too busy and simply forgot to eat. After initially dismissing her eating habits as a result of her just being one of those lucky people who can eat whatever they want and stay thin, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe people who stay thin are the people who eat whatever they want.
I put this theory into practice after an incident between Francesca and me that was fraught with emotion and very revealing. I was sitting in the closet in our master suite crying because I couldn’t fit into a pair of pants that I had bought only a month before. They were size 6. I was in despair and when Francesca came to comfort me, I almost accused her of causing my weight gain, saying that she’d let me get fat again and that she didn’t care how I felt about myself or that my career depended on my ability to control my weight. After patiently hearing my wailing, she said something that I’ll never forget. She said:
“Fine. I’ll help you diet. But you’ll only gain it back.”
It was a simple statement, but the truth of it overwhelmed me. All I had done throughout my life was diet and gain the weight back. Therefore, the only conclusion I could make was that diets don’t work. Sitting on the floor of the closet with tears running down my face, I decided that my way wasn’t working, that it was time to try something else. From that day on, I decided that I would never diet again.
After that day, instead of watching her eat, I joined in. I ate whatever she ate. We cooked meals together and loaded pasta onto our plates. We ate ice cream. Because I knew I could eat pasta and ice cream again the very next day if I wanted to, I stopped wanting it in excess. If it were going to be available to me anytime, why eat like it was the last time I’d ever taste it? The fact that I stopped restricting food made it less appealing. The fact that I stopped labeling food as “good” and “bad” made me just see it all as food. Like Carolyn had told me, there was no bad food. There were just bad eating practices. I began eating every single thing I wanted when I wanted it, without guilt, without remorse, without feeling anything other than happy about the taste of the food I had chosen to eat. Initially, I gained a little weight. But over time, I found that I didn’t want to eat ice cream every day. Not because of fear of gaining weight, but because it was too cold, or too sweet for my taste buds after a salty pasta. I began tasting food and listening to my internal nutritionist as it told me that I truly wanted to eat a crispy, fresh salad rather than fries. When it told me that fries were what I was craving, it said, “Eat as many as you want knowing that you can always have them again tomorrow.” So I’d eat just a few until I was full, or I’d eat the whole damn serving until I couldn’t eat anything else on my plate. I stopped overeating. I stopped thinking about food. I ate exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it, without any feelings of guilt or being “good” or “bad.”