Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--and My Own Part 2

The news looks even worse for our children. The American Heart a.s.sociation says one in three kids is obese or overweight, triple the rate in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy defined physical fitness for youth as one of the goals of his administration.7 Fifty years and nine presidents after JFK, we are being warned that this generation of Americans may be the first that will not live as long as their parents did.

Dr. Nancy Snyderman has seen the change in her own practice. Nancy is now a cancer surgeon, senior medical editor at NBC News, and author of Diet Myths That Keep Us Fat, but she began her career as a pediatrician. When obese children came into her office in the early 1980s, she says, "We sent them to the endocrinologist because we were worried that they had a hormone problem, or that they had a pituitary tumor. We never had parents who were overfeeding. If anything, the reason children came to the pediatrician with weight issues is because they were failing to thrive, and couldn't keep weight on."

Snyderman says childhood obesity has "caught us unaware, and frankly, unprepared for the onslaught of problems." Conditions that were previously rare in children-like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes (which was called adult-onset diabetes until we began seeing so much of it in a younger population)-are becoming common.

And the impact on young people doesn't end there. Partly as a reaction to bullying and teasing, obese children are more p.r.o.ne to low self-esteem and depression, which makes it a lot harder to do well in school. "There have been a number of studies in the past ten years showing that obese students are performing worse on generalized tests at school," says Rebecca Puhl. "In the studies that we have done, kids who report they're getting teased about their weight are much more likely to skip cla.s.ses and are reporting that their grades are harmed by this."

Bullying can start as early as preschool and continue for years. At first, researchers a.s.sumed that obese students were performing worse because they had some sort of learning challenges, but it turned out to be a response to the cruelty of their peers. "If we look at the teasing and bullying relations.h.i.+p, no wonder these kids aren't performing well," Puhl explains. "They have no support, they're facing relentless teasing, and they can't function at school."

In one survey Puhl asked fifteen hundred Connecticut high school students why kids are teased or bullied at school.8 Out of ten options, body weight ranked number one. "It was ahead of s.e.xual orientation, it was ahead of race, it was ahead of everything else," she reports. "The consequences for these kids are devastating. Kids who are teased about their weight are two to three times more likely to engage in suicidal thoughts and behaviors, compared to their overweight peers who are not teased."

As fat children grow into fat young men and women, we also face a national security challenge unlike any we have seen before. Mission: Readiness, an organization of retired senior military officers committed to supporting smart investments in America's children, calculates that 9 million young people ages seventeen to twenty-seven are "too fat to fight"; that is, too heavy to be accepted into the military. That's more than one-quarter of that age group. According to Sam Ka.s.s, the senior policy advisor for healthy food initiatives in the Obama White House, delivering a keynote address at a CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) conference, "Obesity may be our nation's greatest national security threat."9 It's the number one disqualification for military service.

That's especially troubling because the military has already become more selective in its recruiting than it used to be. "It's not the old paradigm of anybody can be in the military," according to Rear Admiral Jamie Barnett (retired). The military has gone high tech, and it "increasingly needs people who can handle complex systems: sensors, weapons, aircraft, submarines. Now we have to have really smart people, and here's a whole category of people who are smart and who want to serve who can't get in because of the weight barrier."

Ultimately, Barnett says, the nation could face a situation where it simply doesn't have the people it needs, particularly in specialty areas of the military. "We have to address this," he emphasized. Otherwise, the military will lose out on much-needed talent, the nation will lose out on the protection it needs, and whole groups of young people will lose opportunities for well-paying, secure jobs.

"There's significant research that the rise of the middle cla.s.s after World War II was in large part due to GI benefits: education, housing, things like that. Now we have a huge number of young people who won't even get a shot at that," warns Barnett. "It may take a while to understand what that means for America."

I'm completely on board with what all of these findings suggest-that there is real value in being thin. But hitting that target is not going to be easy, not for us as a nation, and not for any of us individually. I get angry when I see weight-loss commercials with women holding jeans that are ten sizes too large for them and saying, "This used to be me." They throw the jeans off to the side and show a newly slim body to the camera. Everything is now just perfect. In all our media we are bombarded by messages that seem to say, "This is how easy it is. Follow this diet and you'll be happy." Take it from me: maintaining a healthy weight is a lot of work, and it is forever. Constant. It's difficult.

We are not "done" after we lose the pounds. It's not as though we can finish the dieting process and then just start eating again. It doesn't work that way. Obesity experts will tell you that losing weight is difficult; keeping it off is nearly impossible for many people. That's why we need to be much more strategic about how we address this difficulty. And we need to do it together.

It begins with sharing our stories, both the ones that show the value of being thin and the ones that reveal just how hard that is. As a country, a community, and a family, we have to be open about all of this. We should be able to talk about obesity just as we talk about smoking or diabetes or heart disease or cancer. When we see someone who has cancer, we don't think, Oh, they're undisciplined, they did something wrong. We feel sympathy, and we want to help.

We need to bring the same compa.s.sion to obesity. We can't spend so much time judging people; it's not fair, and it doesn't get us anywhere. And it doesn't help to keep blaming and shaming ourselves either.

Instead, we have to have real conversations, just as I did with my friend Diane.

CHAPTER THREE.

DIANE'S STORY Diane saw my daughter Carlie before I did.

My husband, Jim, was out of town when Carlie decided it was time to be born. Jim and Diane had been colleagues when he was a news anchor and reporter at WTNH-TV in Connecticut. I was in a panic when I called Diane in the middle of the night to say I was in labor and needed help.

Diane met me at the hospital. After sixteen hours of labor, the doctor said, "It's still going to be awhile," and left the hospital to pick up a pizza. Moments later, I told Diane, "I think it's time for me to push." Her answer: "Close your legs and hang on while I get a nurse." It didn't work out that way. Five minutes later, my friend had a view of me only a medical professional should ever have as she caught my baby.

What can tie two women together more than that? We had forged a bond through the pain, emotion, and exhilaration that comes with bringing a beautiful new life into the world. And since then we have been the closest of confidantes. Nothing has been off the table about our marriages, our families, and the ups and downs of our careers. The only topic we ever skirted was weight and food, despite the huge role it played in both of our lives.

When we first met, Diane was probably about a size 12. She wasn't skinny, but she was a tall, blonde beauty. Over the next few years I watched her weight steadily climb, as Diane gradually went from statuesque to obese. Every time she lost a few pounds she seemed to put them right back on, plus a little more. Whenever we got together, I couldn't help but notice the change. It seemed as though Diane was sabotaging her TV career. I remember thinking to myself, Why is she letting this go on?

I remember thinking to myself, Why is she letting this go on?-Mika Diane is smart, driven, and competent. I mean, this is one talented woman: she's earned several Emmy awards, has been recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for lifetime achievement, and has been honored by the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame. A TV news anchor, reporter, radio talk show host, doc.u.mentary producer, and author of six previous books, she has been on the air in Connecticut for more than twenty-five years. But I doubted other people were seeing all that when they looked at her. Given what I have learned about the value of being thin, I'd guess her weight was making them think instead, This woman doesn't have it together. She doesn't even have the discipline to lose weight and get in shape.

And that's basically what I said on that beautiful afternoon on Long Island Sound when I came clean about how I felt. At first, it looked like it was going to turn into a very turbulent day for a treasured friends.h.i.+p. I wasn't sure she would ever speak to me again.

I told Diane, "I don't really think that you are sitting around eating all day, but I do think you need to break your cycle of depending on fattening foods and start believing in yourself again. You're not really hiding anything with all those black pantsuits. Everyone knows you have a weight issue."

Telling Diane the truth about her weight, and using that toxic word obese to describe her, was one of the hardest things I'd ever done. I certainly didn't do it to be a b.i.t.c.h, even if some people might have thought so. I did it because I want her in my life, and I was worried about her health. I also thought it was only fair for Diane to hear it from a friend. It's what other people were thinking when she was on TV or when she got up on stage to give a speech.

If you are wondering, Why tell her the truth?, maybe that isn't the right question. Considering how long it took me to raise the topic of weight, and what it was doing to her personally and professionally, it might be more helpful to ask, Why didn't you say this ten years ago, when her weight was just becoming a problem? Why did you avoid it?

I wish now that I had talked to Diane much sooner. It would have been a lot easier for both of us.

When Diane took me up on the challenge to lose seventy-five pounds and we decided to write this book together, at first she was reluctant to tell her own story. But eventually we both decided that baring our souls was the way to set an example for others. No one is better off with silence. As Diane put it, "If we can start a dialogue between the two of us, maybe we can instigate a wider discussion. A national discussion. So I'm all in."

Here is more about how Diane has experienced the struggle against food and overweight, in her own words.

Although Mika and I got to know each other a little while working as news anchors and reporters at rival stations in Connecticut, we really bonded when she was in labor with Carlie. That was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I don't have kids, and my sisters live far away, so it was truly a once-in-a lifetime event; something I have never shared with anyone else.

No wonder Mika has remained special to me all these years later. But I have to be honest. She's a little nuts. When she wanted to know if I would step in for her husband, Jim, if she went into labor while he was out of town, did she call me and ask for my help? Did she drop by the house? No, she ran into my husband, Tom, at a coffee bar one Sunday morning and asked him to run it by me.

She was still a couple of weeks away from her due date when I said yes. What I was really figuring was, What are the chances the baby will come while Jim is out of town? Yeah, right. I didn't give the possibility of coaching her through labor much thought after that. The only thing I did think about was how Mika looked during her pregnancy, and that was sure frustrating to me. Even at nine months' pregnant, she was thinner than I was. In those days, I was always thinking, What the h.e.l.l can I wear that won't make me look so fat?

A few days after I agreed to be her backup labor coach, Mika dropped a couple of books in my mailbox, including What to Expect When You're Expecting. The books were still in the mailbox when she called our house Friday night. Jim was on a plane to New Orleans, and Tom and I had just polished off a pizza and a bottle of wine. "I think my water broke," she whispered into the phone.

YOU THINK? WHAT? YOU'VE HAD A BABY BEFORE, NOT ME! WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU THINK???

I ran out to the mailbox to get the books so I could skim through the chapters on labor and delivery while I stayed on the phone with her.

"Yep, it's starting," she said. "You two should get some sleep and I'll call you later."

SLEEP? ARE YOU KIDDING?.

Tom and I lay on our bed, suddenly and completely sober, fully dressed and ready to go. When the phone rang again, we phoned the doctor and headed for the hospital. Mika's mom stayed behind to watch her daughter, little Emilie.

We couldn't reach Jim, so all that night and the next day it was Mika and me in the shadowy labor room. The nurse came in a few times to check on her and told us to get some rest, but like kids at a sleepover, we kept right on talking.

There were a few times I had to step up, like when the anesthesiologist asked Mika whether she wanted an epidural. "Did you have one last time?" I asked her. "No," she said. "But maybe that was a mistake."

"You're on my watch now, and you're having the drugs," I told her and ordered the epidural.

After hours and hours of chatting about everything except how to deliver a baby, Mika decided it was time. I was afraid to tell her the doctor had just gone out for lunch, but luckily the nurse had been delivering babies for years. She told me to "get ready to catch," and three pushes later there was Carlie, absolutely the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on.

As Carlie started to cry, Mika asked me to phone her dad, the astonis.h.i.+ngly imposing Zbigniew Brzezinski. I blubbered a bit to him, then handed Mika the phone. In the most composed voice, she said, "Dad, you have another granddaughter."

Mika showed me a lot about her character during the hours she was in labor, and vice versa. She came to see me as a big sister, the "adult" in our relations.h.i.+p. I recognized her strength. In the years to come, no matter what happened in her work or her personal life, she could count on me to have her back.

Now, fourteen years later, Mika and I have had a role reversal. It began with that punch-in-the face moment on my boat. The words still echo in my mind. Mika said, "Diane, you're not just overweight, you're fat. You're obese." I couldn't believe the word she had used to describe me: obese. Who says that to a friend? Who says that to anyone? I was angry and defensive.

My first thoughts were, Oh, Mika, come on. I know I'm huge. My metabolism is shot. I try to diet but nothing works anymore. How could you know what it's like? You and your tiny body in size 2 dresses. Please! You have been picture-perfect ever since I have known you, and when something is just a little off, like your imaginary double chin, you run to a plastic surgeon to fix it. You don't get it. You naturally skinny women think women like me are a bunch of slobs sitting around eating bonbons all day. That is such garbage.

But then Mika told me something that changed everything.

"Naturally skinny? No way," she shot back at me. "I do get it, I get it a lot more than you think. I'm not kidding, Diane-food takes up way too much of my time and my psychic s.p.a.ce. Here's my truth: I am an addict. I think about food all day long. I am always wondering if I can sneak away and grab some fast food or something sweet. But I don't. I don't because my career depends on winning my fight to stay rail-thin. But I know it's unhealthy, and I hate every second of it!"

As she launched into the tale of her fight with food, my anger dissolved. I couldn't believe it, but she began to tell a story that was just like mine; a story of rarely feeling in control around food. Of going to parties and eyeing the buffet first, then trying to hurry through a conversation with her mouth watering. Of wondering what people would say, or think, if they saw her go back for more.

You naturally skinny women think women like me are a bunch of slobs sitting around eating bonbons all day. That is such garbage.-Diane It was a story I could barely believe as I looked at her slender body, but I knew it was true when I looked into her eyes. "I am a junk food addict," Mika said. She talked about stuffing herself with chips and ice cream in prep school, gorging on pizza in college, and scarfing down entire boxes of kids' cereal at a sitting. That habit caused her husband, Jim, to nickname her "Jethro," after the Beverly Hillbillies character with the enormous appet.i.te. I really could not imagine her acting that way. I'd never seen it.

Mika's honesty about herself helped me hear what else she was trying to say.

"You're fat," Mika blurted. "If you don't lose the weight now, you're going to die. Plain and simple: your weight will kill you." That was either the rudest thing anyone had ever said to me, or the kindest. That's Mika. She's no diplomat. She puts all her cards on the table, and she was characteristically blunt. "I love you Diane, and you are fat," she said.

Friends, family, and colleagues had been dancing around my dramatic weight gain over the last ten years, so it was shocking to hear it stated so bluntly. Mika softened it a little when she said, "I want you to be around for my girls. They need another woman in their lives, especially when I am driving them nuts." That last part made me laugh, because it's true!

Up until then I had always thought about my weight as an issue of vanity. When I was heavy I didn't look the way I wanted to look, or how TV viewers expected me to look. I never really considered my weight to be a health issue, although I should have. My dad was a skinny kid and a slender young adult, but he has been overweight since then, and heart disease very nearly killed him. It's a medical miracle and a testament to his const.i.tution that he's still around. My grandmother was overweight and later in life developed diabetes, which she called her "sugar problem." At the time, I didn't recognize the link between diabetes and obesity, but I sure do now.

I was moving along the same path. A path that was almost guaranteed to result in one or more chronic diseases.

Shortly after our infamous encounter on Long Island Sound, I suggested to Mika that she write a book about her struggles with food. Readers have told her how much they have learned from her earlier books, about finding life and work balance, and about learning to stand up for yourself in the workplace, and knowing your true value. I thought if Mika told her own story, it would help other women.

Mika took me up on the idea of writing this book, but I had no idea she was planning to aim her message squarely at me. And then my cell phone rang as I was driving to a speaking engagement in the far west corner of Connecticut, about ninety minutes from where I live. Mika was on the line. It was nearly dusk and I was heading down a lonely country road, not feeling great about giving the speech.

I'm a former radio talk show host and I love talking to people, but for several years the fun of greeting a live audience and spending a couple of hours with them had disappeared. Instead of looking forward to it I'd been feeling a kind of dread, because I knew the audience wouldn't see the person they expected, that stylish, slender anchorwoman of years ago. Instead, they would face a fat, fiftyish female who felt frumpy in a size 18 jacket and stretchy pants. You can hide some of that on TV with good camera work, but standing at the microphone at the front of the room, they were going to see all of me.

On top of that my feet hurt, my knees ached, and I dreaded having to stand at a podium during my talk. It was going to take all the charm I could muster to make them forget who and what they were looking at, and concentrate instead on what I was saying. I wanted to get them wrapped up in my stories: stories about the people and places that make the state of Connecticut special, and give it character and heart. Those are the stories I had reported on TV and radio, and had written books about for years. Sharing them was my pa.s.sion.

But that sharing was getting harder and harder to do because of my weight. I hated the way I looked in person and on the screen. I won an Emmy for a doc.u.mentary I produced and hosted a couple of years ago, but I couldn't even watch myself on TV because I couldn't stand how fat I looked.

I couldn't seem to do much about it. I had dieted on and off all my life, and nothing seemed to work. During my TV news career I was a size 10 at my thinnest, and more often a lot bigger than that. I was always the largest woman in the television newsroom, always worried about how I would look on camera when I had to step out from behind the desk. My first reaction when I got invited to a big event was always, What the h.e.l.l am I going to wear? How much weight can I lose before then so I will fit into something nice? And then the diet cycle would start all over again.

I can barely remember a time when I wasn't worried about how I looked and what people were thinking. I knew I was smarter and more talented than many of my peers, but I just couldn't conquer my weight. No one had ever said it, but I could imagine what people were thinking: Why doesn't she get it together and lose the weight?

As soon as I answered Mika's call, she launched into her proposal. She asked me to write a book with her, but the offer came with a catch. I had to set a goal of losing seventy-five pounds as we worked on the book project. She promised to pay for whatever treatments would help, and to be my cheerleader every step of the way, but I had to make the commitment.

As Mika outlined her idea, I started to cry. "Diane," she told me, "this is it: no more excuses. You have got to lose the weight. I know you don't want to hear it, but you must. Let's make a deal. I'll pay you to write this book with me. We will talk about everything, and when we are finished, we will both be better off. You'll be thin and healthy, and I will be in a better place in my mind. But you have to lose A TON of weight . . . Come on, let's do it."

I choked up as she plowed ahead with her characteristic insistence. Mika can be hard to turn down, but it was daunting to consider how tough it would be. My eyes were red and my mascara a little runny when I finally pulled into the place where I was giving my speech, but I had made up my mind. I was going to take Mika up on the offer. I knew it could be my last serious shot at getting my life back, and regaining what fat had taken away from me.

Have you ever watched those weight-loss commercials with celebrities like Valerie Bertinelli and Jennifer Hudson and said to yourself, Yeah I bet I could lose weight if someone paid me to do it. I know I have. Now someone was making me that offer. I really couldn't say no. How would I face my sisters if they found out I had turned Mika down? Especially Suzanne, who had cheered her friend Valerie Bertinelli through her own weight-loss battle. But I had SO much weight to lose, and at my age (the mid-fifties), could I really do it? All I knew was that I had to try. As cutting as Mika's words had been when we first went down this path together, I knew they were driven by love. She was right; it had gotten that bad. I was having trouble getting onto our small boat, trouble getting into the bathtub. I had given up shopping because nothing ever fit, and plus-size clothes are just not that attractive on me. I now dressed for what fit and covered the most sins, not for what looked good. I was losing my self-confidence. The media business is tough enough for women without the added obstacle of being fat.

I now dressed for what fit and covered the most sins, not for what looked good. I was losing my self-confidence.-Diane Still, the idea of sharing my feelings about my struggles with weight made me a little sick to my stomach. It was hard enough to talk to Mika about it, much less to everyone who would read the book. Did she have any idea how difficult it was going to be for me? How embarra.s.sing? Is this bargain we're making brilliant or just plain crazy? Is it even possible?

As a TV personality and a radio talk show host, I've always emphasized the bright, the light, and the positive. Every inch of me resists admitting how bad I feel about my weight. But Mika is adamant that we begin the conversation, and she insists that I not hold back. No one knows more than I do how hard that's going to be, but here goes.

Dieting is the most active sport I have ever engaged in. If practice made perfect, I'd be thin as a ghost. Honestly, I have been dieting almost all my life.

"I can't remember a time when you weren't either on a diet, or worried about your weight," says my sister Suzanne. "Mom always looked trim to me, but I remember her being on Weight Watchers. I thought dieting was just what women did."

It was certainly something I needed to do. My sister Debb says I was born "a good eater." When she was a toddler, she bit the leg off a tiny gla.s.s deer at our granny's house. The pediatrician advised my mother to make a big bowl of mashed potatoes and to get Debb to eat as much as she could, presumably to cus.h.i.+on the gla.s.s piece as it went through her system. She ate about two tablespoons, and I finished the rest.

When other kids were eating peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly or bologna sandwiches in the elementary school cafeteria, I was trying to hide the string-bean salad my mom had brown-bagged for me, her chunky firstborn. I have three sisters and a brother, and I was the only one who was a chubby kid. Back then my eating and weight were a family issue, although today I might have blended in better with all the other overweight kids in the United States. In my preteen years my mother searched for clothes to "slenderize" me, while Debb wore a rubber band for a belt.

Mika told me her family home was junk food free. The same was true of the suburban New York house where I grew up. My sister Melissa recalls, "We were always on a diet in our house. We never had the same snacks as other kids. We never had soda, except on holidays. To this day, my childhood friends remember our house as the one with the empty fridge."

Mom doled out portions of cookies and snack food as treats. She would hide the snacks so none of us could be tempted to sit down and eat a whole bag. I'd go to set the table and discover, tucked in the bottom of the salad bowl, a package of cookies stowed safely out of sight. We didn't have chips unless we were having a party, and we certainly did not eat in front of the TV.

"Good foods and bad foods were clearly defined," says Melissa. "The constant fear of getting fat was drilled into us. Fat was bad, thin was good."

Somehow I didn't get the message, and I managed to keep packing on pounds. There was talk of sending me to "fat camp" for the summer, though that never happened. I was self-conscious about my size, and being the tallest kid in the cla.s.s didn't help. I was the only twelve-year-old I knew who was on Weight Watchers. My mom cooked and counted calories for my dad and me, and for a while that made a difference.

By high school I had slimmed down, but staying that way through college involved a constant roller coaster of diets. You name it, I tried it. "I never really questioned what you were doing," said Debb about my teen and young adult diet cycles. "It seemed that trying different diets in search of 'the one' was the norm. No one in our circle ever thought to eat less and move more. That was too boring. We just a.s.sumed there must be a magic bullet."

I hunted for it, that's for sure.

Remember the Candy Diet from the 1970s? Ayds (p.r.o.nounced "aids") looked and tasted like chocolates or caramels, but as I found out later, they were appet.i.te suppressants. In the early eighties as the AIDS epidemic broke out, you can imagine what happened to the candy with the similar name. Just as well: the active ingredient was phenylpropanolamine (PPA), which has now been linked to strokes in women.

Still, that one was more fun than the Grapefruit Diet, also known as the Hollywood Diet. It dates back to the 1920s, but became popular again when I was a teen. Lunch and dinner consisted of grapefruit, lean meat, vegetables, and black coffee. The diet came back into vogue yet again in 2004, when a study showed that the enzymes in grapefruit help reduce insulin levels and encourage weight loss (perhaps not coincidentally, the study was sponsored by the Florida Department of Citrus). At 800 calories a day the diet was hard to stick with, and to this day I can't stand to look at grapefruit.

Then there was the Cambridge Diet, which consisted of meal replacement drinks and claimed to provide all the nutrients needed to maintain good health while the dieter lost tremendous amounts of weight. A Cambridge University professor got the credit for that one, and the product sold briskly in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Cambridge Diet worked for a while, but my weight came back on when I started eating real food again. That didn't stop me from trying another liquid diet, Slim-Fast, when I was thirty and hoping to drop a lot of weight before my wedding.

There was always another diet to try, so I kept hopscotching from one to the next. When I went off Slim-Fast I lived on Lean Cuisine. Then there was the Cabbage Soup Diet, with its gallons of cabbage broth, a little coffee, skim milk, and low-fat yogurt. Not surprisingly, the side effects included low energy, mood swings, and sugar cravings.

I can go on and on about my low-cal escapades. How could I forget my bout with the Scarsdale Diet, invented by Dr. Herman Tarnower, whose best-selling diet book was published in 1978? It got another huge sales boost when he was killed two years later by his lover, Jean Harris, headmistress of the Madeira School, Mika's high school alma mater. (When she applied to the school for admission, Mika was interviewed by Harris herself. Not long after, Harris was convicted and sent to prison.) The South Beach Diet and the Zone Diet had a less colorful backstory, but those were on my list of tried-and-failed diets, too. Starting to see a pattern here? The pounds came off, but not for long, which led to another round of dieting. Every diet seemed to work for a while, but I never changed my eating habits. I never tried to understand the underlying drivers of my ballooning weight. That wasn't something many of the diet books or the TV talk shows emphasized.

"We come from a mindset that suggests diets are temporary tortures we must endure," says Debb. And when we're done, "then we have permission to backslide into old habits, as if we were ent.i.tled to a reward for our sacrifice."

Eating for comfort was a well-established pattern for me by the time tragedy struck in my life, and I really needed that comfort. Shortly after graduating from college, the death of my longtime boyfriend following a fiery car crash sent me on a binge of eating and drinking that skyrocketed my weight from 140 pounds to nearly 190. I'll never forget the moment Mom and Dad walked into my newsroom in upstate New York, a three-hour drive from their home. My heart stopped. They took me aside and told me that Mitch had been in a terrible car accident on his way up to see me over the weekend. I had been frantic with worry, not knowing where he was. Even his mother hadn't been able to find him.

Finally the hospital called, and we learned Mitch was in critical condition in the burn unit at a New York City hospital. They had not been able to locate family or friends because most of his possessions in the car had been burned, too. We went to New York and the scene was as horrific as any I hope ever to see in my life. This young man, whom I had loved since he was a boy, was entirely wrapped in bandages. Only his toes were showing, and as I held on to that one part of his body that was unscathed, I prayed, for him and for me. He hung on for a little over a week, until one last brother from his big family was notified and flew home from across the globe. His brother said good-bye and Mitch was gone.

I had just started my TV career and I was living alone. Food was my comfort, and after Mitch's death I kept getting heavier and heavier. It was some time before I was ready to emerge from the darkness of my grief and even think about losing weight.

This time, at my parents' urging and with their encouragement, I turned to the Atkins Diet. Cardiologist Robert C. Atkins described his low-carbohydrate regimen in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution in 1972. His approach was controversial, but at one time one in eleven Americans was said to be following the Atkins diet.

It allowed steak, lobster, cheese, and eggs but severely limited carbohydrates. I inhaled food like ham and cheese omelets, burgers (no bun), and nuts. Dr. Atkins contended that his approach switched the body from metabolizing glucose as energy to converting body fat to energy, a process called ketosis that involves controlling the production of insulin in the body.

I remember my first visit with Dr. Atkins. He reviewed my meager breakfast, which typically consisted of toast, coffee, and orange juice, and declared, "That juice is the problem. You've ruined a whole day right there with all that sugar." Mom and Dad picked up the tab for my weekly visits to Atkins' sw.a.n.ky, art-filled Manhattan offices, and for the steaks I sometimes devoured, with the doctor's blessing. I peeled off fifty pounds, and kept them off for a few years. My dad did well on the diet, too.

In the end, the Atkins approach was just one more temporary fix, but dieting in one form or another still remained a habit. I was not much for exercising, unlike Mika, who was fanatical about it. I grew up in the years before t.i.tle IX, the federal legislation that required schools to spend equally on sports for men and women. Sports were not built into my school life, and as a kid who was overweight and klutzy, I didn't really learn to play any team sports very well, although I took tennis and swimming lessons.

Women going to a gym to work out? Back then that was virtually unheard of. But I did join an Elaine Powers Figure Salon, an exercise studio designed for women. We donned leotards and tights and danced our way through an early form of aerobics. In those days they still had machines with belts that you put around your hips; I guess we thought that would "jiggle the fat away."

The dancing, combined with some Jane Fonda exercise tapes, kept my weight down for a while. Through my early TV career I managed to maintain a pretty good look. I was never skinny, but with the right camera shots I was attractive enough. In the 1980s, a size 10 was considered fine for a woman on TV. Today, an anchorwoman that large would be considered an elephant.

I moved from my first TV job in Binghamton, New York, where I'd gone to college and started my career, to the HartfordNew Haven TV market. It was a big jump and I loved it. It gave me the chance every day to share the news with our viewers, to tell them stories that would make a difference in their lives. Viewers took me into their homes and their hearts, even sending cards to me at the station when Tom and I got married. They felt like family, and we invited them to our wedding on TV. I am sure they noticed my struggle with weight over the years, but the audience had become my friend-and as Mika has pointed out, friends are sometimes too kind to say what they think.

In my thirties and forties I continued to exercise, joining gyms and even hiring personal trainers, but it wasn't enough. Although I felt better, my weight continued to climb, slowly for a while, then with gathering speed. I would get "too busy" to exercise and fall off that wagon, too.

I kept searching for a permanent weight-loss secret. I had spurts of success with portion-controlled meals from Nutrisystem. Their freeze-dried or frozen foods helped me stay in a size 12 or 14 for a while, until it was time to eat "real food" again. The switch to reallife eating was always my downfall. Counting points, calories, and grams of fat, figuring food exchanges, and every other way of measuring and weighing food made me crazy. I tried Weight Watchers, though I dreaded going to meetings and having people whisper, "That's the gal from the news." I should have gotten past it and said, "h.e.l.l, yeah, it is . . . and I am just like you, I need help," but I was too embarra.s.sed.