Free Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life by Kelsey Miller Page A

soft and round versus tall and gangly. Losing that weight would have simply deflated me slightly. In my mind, of course, I was sincerely obese, a jiggling mass, unworthy of being anyone’s girlfriend, best friend, or daughter. I’d known it in my heart for years; Rainbow Management had made it official. Then they’d given me the solution.
    The diet was simple. I already had a well-honed sense of Good and Bad foods by this point, so I simply eliminated all but the Goodest of the Good. For two weeks I ate nothing but raw green beans, cucumber wedges, skinless chicken breasts, and low-fat lemon yogurt. Mom and I were in on it together, finally on the same team. Every day, I came home from school to find the fridge stocked with Tupperware containers of my fresh green snacks. I poured huge, pink glasses of Crystal Light and chomped away at whole pounds of raw green beans until my stomach bloated with a bubbly kind of fullness. At night, my chicken breasts were shoveled down in minutes. Dinner was now a perfunctory task just to get me to bed so I could get to tomorrow, which was another day closer to the next meeting with Rainbow.
    Despite now recognizing this as an undeniable crash diet (and such a ’90s one, with the yogurt and the cucumber) I was never hungry during this time. If I was, it was entirely muted by the New Diet Buzz. Others might describe this feeling as being in the zone. But “the zone” implies something you can get back into, and, in my experience, you get only one shot with a diet. During those early days of that first diet—and every diet after it—I was high on the easy initial weight loss and the newness of it all. My system shocked, I dropped five pounds almost overnight, and the morning weigh-in became a delight I daydreamed about in school. I was dead set on a goal that was both magical and within my grasp, and every day that I adhered to the meal plan I woke up closer to it: clothes looser, cheekbones sharper, belly sinking lower in the tub. It wasn’t an illusion, either. I was doing it. I was eleven years old and eating nothing —of course I was doing it.
    I suddenly had a laserlike focus unlike any I’d ever experienced. I willfully kept blinders on, knowing on some primal level that there was no room for distraction or temptation. Other people’s food didn’t interest me at all, but why risk it by being around other people? Amy and my other few close friends knew about the possible contract, a secret I’d been able to sit on for all of twenty minutes. But I didn’t tell them about the weight I’d been asked to lose, nor the diet that occupied my every waking thought. Why bother? I’d soon be thin, famous, and an entirely new person.
    Instead of ten pounds, I lost thirty. Such a dramatic loss can only be chalked up to the fact that I was a child, and the carrot on the end of my stick was stardom. My body was more pliable than it would ever be again, and my mind, I’d soon discover, was hardwired for obsession. But this is the assessment of the adult looking back on the kid, five billion therapy sessions later. Back then? Honest to God, there are no good enough words for the kind of joy I felt.
    Felt isn’t even the right word. I was composed from head to toe of sheer, maniacal success and happiness. I had done it, times three, A+++. I was sincerely skinny for the first time in conscious memory. In the bathtub, I gawked at my previously slender legs, which were now even thinner and gapped at the thigh. Lying in bed, I ran my hand back and forth in the new well between my hipbones and the even deeper one between my rib cage. I didn’t have to pray or bang my knees against the floor. Instead, I pressed my inner wrists against these thrilling bones until it hurt, a new nightly ritual that lasted for hours, the excitement too great for me to sleep.
    None of my clothes fit. Mom took me to the Jefferson Valley Mall for a few new outfits, plus a special one to wear to my next meeting with