Love Not Lipo ... Live a Little, Love a Lot

The rain fell steadily outside this Sunday afternoon while I sat staring at my blinking cursor thinking about her. My Love walked by and asked me “what are you writing about today honey?”

“I’m writing about my friend Camilla, from graduate school,” I said. “You don’t know her, and I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Oh!” he remarked, “what’s making you write about her?”
“I’m not sure,” I murmured. “She’s just been on my mind lately.”

At a juncture in my life where my professional goals require my doing an immense amount reflecting on the past, it is really no coincidence that I’ve had thoughts of Camilla. My past was fraught with envy and emptiness, and my present exists as it does, as a result of redefining envy, and figuring out what truly fills me.

The first time I actually spoke to Camilla was two weeks into my first year of graduate school. She approached me in the bathroom on September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks in New York. Our guest professor decided to process yesterday’s events in an open floor format in lieu of her planned lesson. Class had just wrapped up, and Camilla and I found ourselves standing next to each other at the sink, washing our hands. “I really liked what you were saying in there today, you really got me thinking about some things in a different way,” she said, shaking off her hands. What I said in class that day I don’t remember, but I do remember that up to that moment in the bathroom I was envious of Camilla, and frankly a little scared of her.

Camilla was a natural beauty. She was tall with thick dirty blond hair, green slanted eyes, and a light sprinkle of freckles across her golden skin. She carried her books around in a warm brown Coach tote, “toast,” I heard her call it one day, and she frequently moisturized her hands during class with orange scented lotion. She wore beautiful scarves. Although I didn’t truly know her, our tiny graduate program, by design, promoted self-disclosure, so I had a rough outline of her life. She grew up in a wealthy suburb outside Boston, was Ivy League educated, had a tight knit circle of girl friends from childhood and a summer house in Nantucket. Her dad was a doctor, and her boyfriend, whom she met freshman year in college, was named Alexander.

I don’t remember how exactly she and I first started socializing. Knowing my insecure mental state of affairs at that point in my life, my guess is it was thanks to Camilla. I don’t believe I would have made that first move. I have a number of prominent memories of our friendship over the last 10 years chronicling careers, kids, breakups, cross country moves (two of them) and recovery. One heart to heart talk of many occurred early on, in a subway car bouncing along the Green Line, one autumn afternoon. She explained to me how at one point in her life, her proclivity for Jennifer Aniston and Victoria’s secret catalogues planted a seed of self doubt that slowly began to negatively manifest in her eating habits and self image. She believed that her therapist nipped the potential for full blown pathology in the bud, with one simple statement. “You’ve got enough on your plate with your dysfunctional family Camilla. Do you really want to go there and add Anorexia to the mix? We can do it, but honestly, do we really want to??” Camilla claims her eating and body image issues resolved themselves from that point forward.

I learned a lot of personal things about Camilla on those subway rides back and forth to school, and while my baseline was perversely dubious about such things, I slowly began to accept that life had been far from perfect for Camilla, and her down to earth, seemingly stable place in the world was on the heels of many years of suffering and self exploration. Because Camilla is a person who was brave enough to show vulnerability when her veneer was so convincing that she really didn’t need to do so, I was able to be real for the first time in my life with someone who intimidated me. I let Camilla in to the dark, shadowy corners that were my life at that time. I told her about my eating disorders, I told her about my drug addicted boyfriend. I told her about my tortured entanglement with alcohol, and my early established belief that intoxication = warmth and intimacy. I told her that I had fears that I was a person who would end up alone, who would never have the gifts in life that she had. I did not go so far as to tell her that secretly, I didn’t think I deserved them.

There are moments in life when something happens. Someone says something that forever alters your trajectory. It’s one of those statements that make you catch your breath with its newness, and all of sudden becomes an intrinsic part of who you are from that point forward. Camilla and I walked in tandem, our feet pressing fresh fallen snow into boot-prints along the Boston sidewalks. Our chatty breaths melted the fluffy snowflakes floating down around us. She pointed her long delicate, perfectly manicured finger my way, her semi-new engagement ring glittering in the luminous winter twilight. “You know what I envy about you Claire? You are a person who never ever stops working on yourself,” she said. And I never have since.

One of my oldest, dearest friends called me up and asked me to comment on Releana personally and professionally. She handles marketing for a progressive medical practice in an urban community in the Northeast. Releana?? What’s that? I asked her. She roughly explained the premise to me as a physician prescribed, medically supervised weight loss program involving a hormone. My further research into the product taught me that Releana is a brand name product featuring a property called HCG, Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, a naturally produced hormone found in pregnant women’s placentas and excreted through the urine. HCG allegedly enables your body to break down fat cells not normally reachable by diet and exercise alone. The claim is, you take the hormone, you combine it with the prescribed diet, and you lose weight….massive amounts of weight, like up to a pound a day. Additionally, the research cited on the Releana website claims that subjects taking HCG “coped more efficiently with daily irritating situations, were in a better mood, and handled home conflicts without stepping up family discussions.” Sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it?

I will attempt harness the intense emotional response I am currently having, and calmly clarify a couple points. FYI, the prescribed Releana diet is called “VLCD.” That stands for Very Low Calorie Diet…500 calories a day. To put that into common context, that would be like 10 points on Weight Watchers. That would be like ½ a pint of ice cream. That would be like a yogurt, an apple, and two pieces of bread. For the day. And with regard to mood, most people losing weight rapidly are in a good mood.

Why does losing weight rapidly put people in a good mood? It’s not because of a hormone. It’s because people who are struggling with their weight are tortured. They’re tortured by society’s message that they’re lazy slobs. They’re tortured by the 40 billion dollar diet industry that whispers to them seductively “this will be the last time I will ask you to shell out a couple hundred bucks…this time you’re gonna be happy.” They’re tortured by the fact that Fatism is the last acceptable prejudice in our society. In order to subsist, the diet industry counts on this consumer misery, and subsequent weight loss failures. If you read the fine print of almost any diet out there, pills, hormones, shakes, points, even Gastric Bypass Surgery, you are being asked to follow that company’s interpretation of some type of modification to what you consume. Any time your caloric intake is less than the calories you expend, you will eventually lose weight. Therefore, most of those diets encompassed beneath this 40 billion dollar umbrella do work if utilized properly and “as prescribed,” Releana included. This is why so many of these companies can afford to offer money back guarantees. They count on the fact that the consumer will not be able to follow it properly. Then obviously you can’t blame the product.

My heart was broken perusing the posts of individuals taking Releana. The abundant internet chatter left nothing to my imagination of what these consumers are experiencing. The commentary spans like a wild pendulum back and forth between euphoric I’ve-found-the-meaning of-life reverie, to the crushing defeat captured in I-can’t-believe-I’ve-gone-and-done-this-again lamentations. As compulsive eaters, like all addicts, we are people of extremes. When we are high-as-kites, on top of our game, (“I was so GOOD this week!!!”) we are actually setting the stage for our rapid descent back into depths of despair, empty inside, and envious of others (“I’ve been so BAD lately.”) The internet reactions to Releana are predictably consistent with this mindset, and leave me feeling discouraged and troubled by my peer group’s fear and hopelessness.

In short, I want to emphasize that I do not blame the diet industry for our failures at weight loss. Nor do I blame America’s obesity problem on McDonalds serving Supersize Fries. I may gain weight from eating Supersize Fries, but I appreciate my God given right to choose to do so if I wish. I may choose to take Releana, and just not worry right now about what will happen to my weight when I come off the hormone, what it would be like to maintain that weight consuming 500 calories a day for the rest of my life, and how 500 calories a day is contributing to my dwindling muscle mass, stressed organs, dull skin and thinning hair.

For today, even though they’re yummy, McDonalds fries actually make me feel like $#%&, and so I choose not to eat them. For today, I choose to eat the amount of calories that fill me up (which I predict is going to be more than 500), and I will do it with foods that seem to me, to fuel my body. I choose to trust myself that I am able to determine these things. I choose to believe that if for some reason I go off course, I will find my way back again if I commit to treating my body with the respect and love it deserves. I choose to recognize and accept that I will not lose a pound a day functioning like this. I choose to continue to wrap my brain around the fact that this journey I’m on has no real end point, and that’s ok. As a result of my choices, I feel rational, even, not fearful, not euphoric, and not empty. Oh and P.S., it didn’t cost me a dime.