[rainbow_tears]

Taken from psychologytodayonline

I had been summoned to The Show, the Holy Grail for authors and the fulfillment of all my mother's dreams. In a harried day of phone calls from Chicago, at the tail end of a snowstorm, the producers of Oprah decided, with 90 minutes to catch the last shuttle out of LaGuardia, that they might want me.

You'd think, on the eve of what could catapult my book to national attention, that I would be too nervous to eat.
I am never too nervous to eat.
As I grazed the basket of goodies in my expensed suite, I had two questions. First: Would Harpo Productions' bean counters go over my hotel tab and ask, "Isn't that the woman who lost all that weight? What are these charges for chocolate-covered almonds and honey peanuts doing here?"
Second: Why am I eating all this stuff? I might be on TV tomorrow!
What with Oprah replaying 24/7, everyone in America could count the bread crumbs on my velvet dress.
So much for the can-do kid who, after 42 years of obesity and missed opportunities, had lost 188 pounds and written a book about it. Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self is an account of how I used my radical change in weight to turn a small, private world of eating and surviving into one as big as my former size 32 dresses. I climbed mountains! I swaddled myself in cashmere and had lovers; I went to Italy. I floated out of the gym after lifting weights, I sat in restaurant booths, wore bracelets, and crossed my legs and took the middle seat in airplanes. Then I used my weight loss to do the next impossible thing: I became an author. Being thin opened the doors to experience and intimacy.

National exposure, however, was an intrusion I hadn't considered. I am not a pundit or role model. You're going to be pilloried, Frances, I thought with the vehemence of a Sicilian curse.
And yet, there I was gobbling Oprah's $12 cookies.
I put on my pajamas and pulled back the comforter on the king-size bed. It was littered with wrappers. My cheeks were burning with shame and calories. Tomorrow, I promised myself solemnly.
And when tomorrow came, I smiled and joked, and I was gracious when I wasn't, after all, needed for the show. I ached not from disappointment but with the hangover of sugar in my muscles, the sour gas in my gut and the heartbreak of being a liar.
After a failed romance and a change of jobs, I drifted into relapse in March 2003, a year before Oprah. I had time on my hands—and time, in my case, is the enemy. I filled it by studying where and how I went wrong, at the office, in the bedroom. Intellectually, I knew that the boyfriend was emotionally frozen and that my former employer was abusive and infantilizing, but I couldn't shake my ingrained conviction that I was responsible for everything that went wrong.
I stopped going to the gym; I started eating peanuts or rice cakes between meals. A little of this, a little of that, and one morning I announced to a friend that I saw no reason why I couldn't eat blackberry pie and ice cream, get the craving out of my system and return to my abstinence by noon.
I wasn't talking about a slice of pie à la mode. I was talking about a whole pie and a pint of ice cream.
A whole pie?
That summer I was reminded at every turn that I needed to be thin to promote my book. "You don't want those cookies, honey," my mom said as I carried off a stack I'd grabbed from the cooling rack. "Remember: You're going to be in Oprah's magazine."
She was wrong. I did want the cookies, and I didn't need reminding about Oprah. I sighed and took two more.
When I asked myself what I needed, I was met with an unconsoling barrage of hungers. I needed to know I was not disposable. I needed a resting place. I needed to know I had enough stuff to carry off the rest of my life—enough talent, discipline and intelligence—and enough sufficiency to protect me from more heartbreak. I needed enough hope to find the friends and man I mourned the lack of.
From August 1999 to August 2003, I'd gambled that losing weight would get me closer to all that, and I was told what to eat in those years. Now, after three years of maintaining my weight loss, I need to be told what to feel when everyone but me has an opinion of who I am.
I knew I—not just my body but my very self—was in trouble when I brushed aside a fleeting thought about how fat I looked with the answer, "Never mind. You'll like yourself when you're thin."
How does one live with self-acceptance as a future and an always-conditional state of mind? More pragmatically, in lieu of my size 8 clothes, my career depended on self-assurance. When asked, I admitted that I'd gained weight, adding that I had never presented myself as the poster girl of thin. I said this with poise, which is not to be confused with confidence. Poise is teachable; confidence is one of the elements missing from the periodic table, three parts self-respect to two parts experience.
To get to confidence, I was going to have to listen to my self-accusations and sit with the rejections. Maybe shame had something to teach me. My next recovery period from food addiction would be based on therapy, heretofore more a matter of coaching than peeling back the layers of self. My psychiatrist's and therapist's offices became the places I could air my feelings about myself in the hopes I could change my self-perception. "There's no point in getting depressed just because I'm depressed," I told my psychiatrist, who increased my morning meds anyway.
That October, on a blue-and-gold afternoon, I had Indian food with Lanie, a friend visiting from my hometown, Missoula, Montana. I described how depressed I was by my weight gain until she preempted me. "You've been very fat, Frances, and you've been very thin. Welcome to where the rest of us live."
I twiddled my fork in my plate of saag panir. I think of Lanie as being very tall and very thin, but a few months earlier I'd helped her pick out a dress. Her dress size was similar to what I was wearing that day. The event we shopped for had been a gathering of Montana writers, many of them old friends, all middle-aged. One had a rounder face than I remembered; another wore layers of a truly terrible print in the style that catalogs and store clerks describe as "flattering." Someone else was still very thin but looked drawn and brittle as age caught up with her bone structure.
These were women I'd long envied for their pretty thinness, and yet I'd been less like them when I was a size 8 than I was now.

At size 8, I had to admit, I was so self-conscious (and secretly, overweeningly proud of it) that often that was all I was. I could have programmed my answering machine to announce, "Hi, you've reached a size 8. Please leave a message and either the size 8 or Frances will get back to you."
None of the women at that party, or Lanie savoring her lamb kurma across from me, claimed their identities from their weights that night. They wanted to gossip, compare stories of their kids and discuss what they were writing, tell old jokes more cleverly than they had at the last party, and sample the desserts weighing down the potluck buffet.
I was not unlike them. Smaller by a size than Lanie, larger by a size than Laura, a little fresher looking than Diane. Of the Americans who lose weight, 95 percent gain it back within five years. I had gained a third of it back. Not all of it. To some extent, I had beaten the odds. I was stronger than the echoes of the boyfriend and boss allowed me to hear.
I was determined not to repeat the mistake of being, rather than having, a thin body. I'd lived through my size all of my life, so acutely aware and ashamed of my obesity that the likable things about me—my sense of humor, my intelligence, talent, friendliness, kindness—were as illusory to me as a magician's stacked card deck. As long as I defined myself by my body size, I would not experience those qualities for myself.
As fall turned to a snowy winter, I picked through the spiral of relationships that had unglued me the year before. I didn't blame the boyfriend or my boss for my relapse. I had been half of the problem healthier self-esteem would not have collapsed under their judgments of me. In obesity, I had clamped my arms to my sides to keep them from swinging as I walked. I craned my body over armrests in theaters and airplanes stood in the back of group photos to minimize the space I took up. I got thin and I continued to hide. Whatever reasons the boyfriend had come up with for not seeing me I met with amicability and sympathy Had I reacted honestly, even to myself I might have ended the relationshipInstead I'd gambled all my sweetness only to find out I was disposable Likewise I had not pressed my boss for an agenda of responsibilities from the start, nor had I clarified with her that her work and recreation styles frustrated and frightened me.
Slowly, I began to find toeholds in the avalanche of food and doubt. I worried about how fat I looked to potential readers and what I could possibly wear to flatter or disguise the 40 pounds I'd gained.