Daughters of Weight Watchers

the maternal heirlooms of skinny

Content warning: this piece will discuss disordered eating and diet culture.

I’m sick of many things like my stomach and my arms and the way clothing clings to where it once hung but I’m not yet sick of echoing my mother in my response of ‘where?’ when my friends remark, ‘but you’re so skinny!’. I’m 17 again but not really, because at 17 I was thin without trying. Bony and weak and insecure about it in the best way, as in, with the learned satisfaction that skinny was good even when it was bad. My brother would hold a wrist between his pinkie and thumb and jokingly, darkly, say I was so meat-less I’d shatter in a car crash. It scared me but not that much. I was gangly and feeble and perfect. I knew of girls that died in their pursuit of skinny and I wasn’t one of them. I ate little but always to fullness. I bought the smallest size of everything and it always fit. With no brain fog or eroding teeth or bruised ribs to know the protrusion of my hip bones and not the hunger, I felt chosen, a belief that was reaffirmed by the world, of course, but firstly by my mother.

For all my conscious life my mother has operated between two poles of perceived inadequacies: firstly, her fluency in English, and secondly, her body’s fluency in skinny. The first can be excused by many things (like, we moved to Australia when she was in her 40s, and she knows enough to get by), but the second is a failing that requires constant, endless correction. It is a marker of regression, a sentencing back to her younger self, which she has only ever portrayed in pairs of negative descriptors.  I was fat and dumb, she says. Fat and aloof. Fat and silly. Fat and sitting alone at a family engagement when a male relative made it known that her fatness was not a private, passive experience. It was visible to all and in that moment mostly to him, prompting him to ask, ‘why are you so fat, little girl?’. And what could she reply with other than the sound of her heart breaking, which came out as it often does in little girls, as a polite laugh. If there were ever a moment I could travel back to it would be this one, the maternal urge reversed in wanting nothing more than to cover the ears of my mother-child and prevent her from hearing her whole life change. But how long could I stave off those sentiments? What lesson, unsaid in that instance, wouldn’t be forcibly taught again and again by outside voices?

Then somehow my mother is older and more beautiful with a university degree and a challenging job. Strangers ask her where she got her nose done and are unbelieving when she replies that it’s natural. She has never been more elegant, more brilliant, more self-assured. There is seemingly no bridge that connects these two versions of her except controlled starvation, the practice of a lesson learned.

And then it is gone. It lasts as long as its recited memory because by the time I am five we are in a country that is not hers speaking a language that is not hers and she is in a body that is not hers. So of course, one of my earliest recollections of this new home country is standing in the Opti-Slim aisle of a pharmacy, its purple boxes being stacked beneath the kitchen sink. Welcome to Australia! Bare midriffs in place of chadors. Slender legs jogging in the afternoon sun. Arms crossed over the eyes of a bikini-donning tanner. The body is everywhere and thinness is everywhere and its messages are inescapable.

The presence of my mother’s dieting throughout my childhood becomes so constant it is difficult to discern in hindsight where one meal plan ended and another meal replacement started. There are rice cakes and steamed vegetables and jugs of lemon water. There are main meals eaten on small plates for the illusion of more food without the reality. There are ads on the TV for miracle slimming teas and the phone dialling, and there is me on the periphery believed to be immune to its influence because look, she is already so skinny. There is no male relative demanding I explain the space I take up in my quietness. There is only my mother, and her inadequacies, and the little girl inside her with the breaking heart.

The dieting peaks when I am about to enter high school, where on the several international flights back from a holiday my mum consumes only tomato juice. This continues for the next week at home. When the tomato juice is finished new bottles appear: giant 4L tanks of some faux-lemon weight loss drink that she drains throughout the day, paired with appetite suppressant pills in the morning. I don’t remember what my mum looked like during this time. But I remember the pills in the top kitchen drawer, the scales in the bathroom, and her comment when 11-year-old me would step on them, ‘lucky you’. It was not said with malice or even envy but genuine tenderness, a relief in believing that I at least would not have to endure this particular burden.

The liquid diets only fully disappeared once I saw a report about them causing kidney failure, and I, the mother-child, begged her to stop.

So, in a way, the worst had already passed by 14 when we came across the new Weight Watchers centre built off the sportswear section of our local Target and my mother told them her goal weight. It was only 5kg heavier than what I was at the time. The cubicle we were led to was tiny and the salesperson dressed in gym gear and the looping W’s of the logo playful and disarming. It was all so purposeful it should have felt sinister. If not to me then to someone, looking at a young girl dutifully translating a program of hyper self-surveillance to her mother and saying no. But in the repackaging of calorie counting as “daily points budgeting” (counting “up” in consumption rather than “down” in restriction), weight loss was just a simple game. A total sum of Fat – Food + Weight Watchers = Everything You’ve Ever Wanted, and who was I, who was anyone, to deny my mother the whole world?

There were Weight Watchers food products formulated specifically for weight-loss, but it wasn’t enough to simply consume them. They had to be eaten in controlled quantities, in the correct combinations, alongside specific types and intensities of exercise. Of course, the idea was to combine one Weight Watchers product with another; the pills were to be replaced by a Weight Watchers kitchen scale to weigh out exactly the amount of Weight Watchers cottage cheese my mother could spread across a single Weight Watchers wafer in the mornings, for example, which was to be recorded in a log and later presented at the week’s check-in. (It is this specific breakfast that is the clearest in my mind’s eye, as I remember it distinctly looking like eating nothing). Every food item needed to be accounted for, including liquids, stopping just short of noting the number of in-breaths and yawns and stifled laughs that were swallowed.  It is sad now to admit how mundane it felt to witness. How logical. Restrictive but only in the traditional meaning of the word “diet”, and boring, anyway, occurring on the outskirts of my own full life.

I had good friends and high grades and a crush on a boy. I took the bus to school and spent the weekends at shopping centres and the summer break tanning at the public pool. People pointed out my thinness, always as a compliment, and though I was awkward in responding I was quietly proud, another thing I was doing right. I was skinny and young. Skinny and smart. Skinny and normal. And then it was gone.

Somehow I am older and I cannot stop the panic attacks. I cannot sit in a classroom, I cannot step foot into the shopping centre I’d once lapped over and over without thought. The pills I’m prescribed don’t do anything to aid the torment and I would have thought them entirely ineffective if it wasn’t for the distinct feeling of numbness that arises, and the realisation that I had gained weight. At 20 there is nothing I am doing right. I don’t know this mind, I don’t know this body, and the mother-child is me and I am trying to cover my own ears to the voices but I am many years too late.

I hear it back distinctly: fat and dumb. I add my own: fat and pathetic. Fat and crazy. Fat and useless.

When my doctor suggests we up my dose, there is only one thought to verbalise to my mother on the drive home: I am going to get fatter. Though she says the right thing in response I cannot hear her. I cannot digest the words “all that matters is your health”, because, I think, how could that be true? I am not reminiscing on the Optislim and the pills and the scales but they are there somewhere in me, making me realise that my mother didn’t say “you’re not fat” instead.

So perhaps it was inescapable, or perhaps it was never going to be her words to say. More unrealistic than expecting I would respond to this prospect with anything but negative emotions is the possibility that it would be my mother to reverse them. A little girl, a woman, the voices she heard herself and must hear still, everyday, that when my own mind mimic leave me exasperated thinking: is this it? The singular task to pursue forever and ever?

I up my dose and I gain the weight and I go back down and the weight stays. I have bigger problems, I have other problems, but I don’t kid myself into pretending the daydreams of skinny don’t repeat in my head. There is no ‘but’, there is no ‘and yet’.

Now the summer days are hot and in the morning I’m looking at the fat content on the melting tub of butter. I spread some on my toast as my brother says ‘it’s the saturated fat you got to look at’. My mother is talking to us about picking up a hobby, taking up some classes. She is a few months into 60 and a few years into going to the gym 5 days a week. Weight Watchers is long gone but the no-fat, sugar-free, portion control habits remain. When I eat an ice cream she shares one, and it is my voice saying no when she describes it as a naughty treat. I call her skinny and she says ‘where?’. I call her beautiful, I call her loved. She is elegant and brilliant and self-assured, though to her I could never prove it.

‘What about an English class?’ I propose.

She replies, ‘maybe a class on how to get skinny.’

I eat my buttered toast and look up short-story writing classes for myself instead.