This Is Big

Jean Nidetch is dead.

I have the slightly morbid habit of reading the New York Times obituary section every morning, usually while sitting at the wooden kitchen table in my Brooklyn apartment, drinking coffee while my bulldog, Joan, snores at my feet, exhausted from her twenty minutes of walking. An obituary takes someone’s life and compresses it into a neat arc of beginnings, highlights, lowlights, and endings, which is why I enjoy reading them before I go off and make my way through my own work as a writer as well as my life, in both of which I often feel like I’m traveling from one slippery point to an unknown other, lacking coherence or a plan. In obituaries, I have a subconscious wish to see in one illuminating flash how another person figured out her story so I can gain some insight into mine. It was mostly a soothing habit, until the morning I read about Jean.

In late April 2015 the obit headline read, “Jean Nidetch, a Founder of Weight Watchers, Dies at 91.” I must have looked confused—it had not ever occurred to me that an actual person had thought up Weight Watchers. To me, at thirty-eight years old, the ubiquitous weight-loss company had no origin story; it had always just existed.

Existed, I thought, to torment me. Tortured would be a polite way to label my relationship to dieting, which I had pursued my whole life. I can’t even recall how old I was when my parents put me on my first diet. Four? Five? I think I was nine when they signed me up for Weight Watchers. That was what passed for smart parenting in the 1980s. Weight Watchers didn’t last more than a few weeks. And it didn’t work. None of the diets ever did. They still don’t. I am a chronic, classic yo-yo dieter whose weight has risen and fallen so many times that, if charted, it would resemble a city skyline.

But there was Jean Nidetch smiling at me from the home page of the New York Times, with big owl-like glasses and a blond bouffant, holding a piece of cake she clearly had no intention of eating. My first thought was that finally I had a face to put to my misery. Was this the she-devil who’d started it all, the one who made weight loss seem like a fait accompli if only you cared enough about it? I read Jean’s obituary, eager to give myself a target to blame for my own Sisyphean attempts at dieting and all the attendant obsession and frustration. I thought I knew just what the story of her life would be, some variation of a thin woman becomes rich and famous butting into overweight people’s lives, never giving them a moment’s respite from calorie-counting or branded no-fat frozen treats.

But as I read, I didn’t see a villain in Jean Nidetch; I saw myself. Here was a woman who also had spent a lifetime thinking about her weight. Jean had been a chubby kid who turned into a fat adult, a woman who wrestled with a raging sweet tooth and whose preferred method of consumption was not enjoying a slice of fancy cake with friends but rather inhaling an entire package of her favorite supermarket cookies in the privacy of her own bathroom. Jean and I were both five foot seven, Jewish, blond (hers by bottle, mine by birth), and residents of Brooklyn (hers by birth, mine by adoption). When I look at old photos of her before she lost the weight, the physical resemblance between us is so strong, she could easily be my aunt or cousin; she could almost be me somehow transported back in time to New York City in 1961.

I realized that I was the same age as Jean was when she’d begun to lose the weight and transform her life beyond her own—and anyone else’s—wildest expectations. Her rock-bottom moment was when someone mistakenly assumed she was pregnant. Dozens of people have mistakenly assumed I was pregnant—at the airport, on the subway, at restaurants as I sat next to my own thin mother. One woman at the department store Barneys wouldn’t even take no for an answer. “You must be at least postpartum,” she said and stared at my abdomen. I blushed, shook my head, and tried to look busy browsing scarves. I made a mental note never to wear the gray hoodie I had on again.

Jean also sounded so human, a woman who’d struggled with love and age and work and family and her place in the world. So instead of delighting in the demise of a newfound nemesis, by the time I finished reading the abbreviated version of Jean Nidetch’s life, I felt a moment of connection between us.

My job as a journalist who writes a lot about the world of beauty and wellness and fitness entails sampling treatments and sometimes spending time with famous people. It’s a life that I’ve worked hard for and I love being part of the glittery landscape of New York. I also feel like I live in a world of thin people. I know their habits but I’m also aware that I am not one of them. The irony that I professionally subject my body to the advice of others is not lost on me. I know that part of what makes me good at writing about these procedures is the fact that I am not a swanlike woman with an absence of cellulite and the gift of natural athletic ability. What I don’t get to share publicly is my occasional ambivalence, that sometimes I feel low talking to gurus who promise that their rainbow-based diet will solve my weight problems or trainers who tell me they’re just dying to get me on a cardio program.

I have never had a healthy relationship with food. Given the tender age at which I started dieting, I probably never had the chance to form one.

Once, I went to a photo shoot to meet the actress Emily Blunt for a British Vogue cover story I was writing. She was getting her hair and makeup done, so I was killing time before we were introduced, wandering around the location, a massive nineteenth-century industrial building in Long Island City that had been turned into a lush venue teeming with ivy on its brick walls that you could rent for weddings and the like. I set my bag on a green velvet sofa and eventually made my way to a table strewn with the remnants of a catered lunch: quinoa salad, grilled chicken, iced tea, and a plate of dairy-free, flourless brownies sitting next to a bouquet of flowers. I sat down and ate one brownie after another, the way I always eat things—the way Jean probably once ate things—without savoring them, as if the act of eating needed to be gotten over with as quickly as possible. With no dairy or flour, the brownies were almost healthy, I figured. A bearded photography assistant wandered inside to get a cable while I was stuffing my face. I turned my back to him, as if that would hide my crime of appetite.

The shoot was just a few weeks after Blunt had given birth to her second daughter—“my Bean,” she called her in her lilting accent—and I’m so nosy that I’d snuck first thing into the wardrobe area of the shoot to see what size jeans she currently wore: 26. Which is about a size 2.

Emily Blunt finally came down the stairs from hair and makeup, trailed by a baby nurse carrying a tiny infant. Blunt smiled graciously and gestured toward the brownies. “You really must try one,” she said to me and the nurse, adding that the brownies were just so good, so rich, that she was satisfied with just one small bite and in fact could not possibly eat more; that’s how rich they were. Was this how normal people’s brains reacted to food—one nibble and you were satisfied? I had eaten perhaps four brownies in the span of less than five minutes and stuffed another half a dozen in my bag to devour at home, alone. (I’d also taken a few sad-looking pieces of cold chicken for the dog.) When I’d heard Blunt coming down the stairs, there was just enough time to rearrange the remaining brownies on the plate so it didn’t look like a troop of ravenous Girl Scouts had been at them. I was privately embarrassed by my behavior and jealous of Blunt at the same time. Maybe that’s how you maintain a size 26, even postpartum, only eating one small bite of one brownie when confronted with a plate of them. I know now what Jean would say: “Not eating the hot fudge sundae has to be more important than eating the largest, richest hot fudge sundae in the world.”

For the past several years I have felt trapped between dieting my way to a slimmer body and simply giving up and trying to love myself as is, caught between change and acceptance. But no matter how unattainable perfection may be, working toward it—as opposed to working toward self-acceptance—is satisfying in its own way. There’s action involved in inching closer to a goal, even one you can’t attain—counting calories, working out, weighing in. At least you’re aiming for something tangible. I would like to feel better in my body. I would like to be able to climb subway stairs fast without feeling out of breath; I would like to be able to see a picture of myself and not have it ruin my day; I would like to have a much less emotional relationship with food. But at the same time, am I a fool for still, after all these yo-yo years, wanting to lose and keep off weight when I know that, statistically, it’s rare?

Jean Nidetch was a woman who succeeded where I—and millions—had failed. She lost seventy-plus pounds and kept them off, then she founded a company and became a mogul, and all of this was over fifty years ago, when help-wanted ads were still divided by gender. She basically earned the American dream. On that same spring day I read Jean’s obituary, I took out my journal—I’ve kept one since I was a teenager—and wrote down a list of questions I wished I could ask her, questions whose answers might help me with my own life. How had she succeeded while others struggled? What made her so different from other housewives? What did it really take to change—effort or luck or the support of people around her? Sheer determination? What did it feel like to transform?

In the days and weeks after I read that obituary, I couldn’t stop thinking about Jean. Jean wasn’t there to answer my questions, of course, and the internet yielded surprisingly little about a woman who had accomplished so much. I began to wonder if I could find the answers another way. I’m a journalist. So what if an assignment editor wasn’t pushing me to write about Jean? What if I assigned Jean to myself?

Jean’s life and mine were very different. I’m not a frustrated housewife with two young sons. Rather, I’m the kind of person who makes watercolors of sunsets in the summer while drinking cocktails on my roof, who reads a book a week and goes to French movies. My friends often cite my life as being an inspiration to them, and I have quite rigorously assembled something that looks really good from the outside. But that performance has always been a stark contrast to how I feel about myself. I had a gut feeling that Jean Nidetch knew all about that soul-killing mismatch.

I’ve never been afraid to go all in for my assignments. I’ve been to all-women camps where a group would chant “Man on land” just to let you know men had come to clean the outhouses; I’ve had a shaman tell me I was a lake in a former life (and then tell me a spirit told him I should lose weight); I’ve let near strangers lead me off-trail hiking through the redwoods. I am brave, and I am dedicated, and I decided I was going to join Weight Watchers for real. With a good attitude. I admit I had long dismissed Weight Watchers as the most retro, basic, lowest-common-denominator, least chic diet company in the world. But it worked for Jean, and if I wanted to find a way out of this constant struggle and understand a woman who conquered weight for herself and others, why not? I was constantly on a diet, so why not that diet? Plus I hadn’t ever been on one single diet for a whole year before. I didn’t think I would lose seventy pounds like Jean did, although I had before, and gained it all back and then some. If I lost a pound a week, I would be fifty pounds lighter in a year, but what else could happen? Every diet is a promise that if you change your weight, you’ll change your life. What did transformation mean to me after all these years of chasing one?

So maybe this time would be different. No goal weights, for one. I wanted the year ahead to be about strength and triumph, but I wasn’t naive and I knew I couldn’t predict how it would go. It was about losing some weight, not the impossible quest of eliminating every last cosmetically unappealing ounce. Rather than fixating on numbers on a scale, I was interested in coming to terms with myself and trying to break some of my worst lifelong habits. I knew there was room to learn, and to change, and to find some peace.