The skinny on skinny

If you find yourself paddling back and forth between tabloids every week, you will see that trash culture is trying to tell you two different things about one thing. A picture of Nicole Richie with an alligator Spy Bag that could actually have her for lunch floats on the cover with a glaring caption: "Scary Thin: How Hollywood is having a breakdown!" The following week, a cover with a variety of starlets, Miss Richie included, that resemble asexual eunuchs with really nice wigs is captioned in taxi-yellow with: "How they do it: How Hollywood stays in shape!"

Well, I guess a straight line is a shape. Before Karen Carpenter, wanting to be skinny was not a disease, it was a form of survival. Maria Callas swallowed tapeworm tablets that ate everything she ate to keep Ari Onassis from leaving her for the sylph-like Jackie, and Marilyn Monroe had weekly colonic sessions and a peachy cocktail of barbiturates and laxatives to keep her figure. (She was a size 10, the sample size of post-WWII). When the beloved singer fell prey to a heart attack, Karen’s beautiful voice was more remembered than the skeletal frame she clung to before she died. And the band plays on as more and more young adults and now even children find themselves being sucked into the weight wars.

A good part of my life was defined by how I ate. As a child, I was so skinny that my parents had me checked by doctors to see if I had some sort of bone disease. It turned out my genes had me destined for long, lanky limbs and a rigidly straight torso that would serve as a very visible bread basket later on. As a child, I would eat inhuman amounts of food just to fill myself out. My parents started to look negligent to the general public toting such a fragile and wan child swimming in her Sunday dresses despite their best efforts at nourishing me. It came to a point I was put under a strict nanny who had a medical degree of some sort and turned out to be Nanny McPhee. She blended my rice, meat and dessert together and made me eat it while she would watch TV and sometimes make out with her boyfriend. Like any child, I had a love/hate relationship with her, one that revolved around food. She was kind and lenient when I ate fast. I ate cooperatively if I was currying for a favor, such as an extra hour of watching TV. When I felt rebellious, I spat out everything she fed me, and she in turn would force the ruined meat down my throat. It was such a small world then; my world was dictated by how much I ate. Even as a little girl, I had issues with it; it had the power to prescribe joy or sorrow in my little life back then. My mother found out about this abuse a few months later after seeing me throwing up in the toilet and crying because I ate so much that it made me sick. She never allowed anyone to touch my plate again; they developed a system of democratic chowing from then on. For 10 years, I was a lanky kid, very awkward with bow legs. The day my arm started to resemble an arm, I wore tank tops nonstop. I stopped feeling like an alien and happily ate and eased myself in my freshman year in high school.

Going into college though was an entirely different story. I guess I just took it for granted that all my life I was this stick that needed to be fed and fed; then one day someone spread a rumor that I was pregnant. I mean, I thought I looked fine, not supermodel material, but I knew where that rumor found its home. My belly was big, filled with years of eating mami and egg with tuyo and tocino. I was the Pinoy version of Supersize Me. Once invincible to the insipid charms of fat and carbohydrates, the gastronomic Simon and Garfunkel, I suddenly had to watch it.

It started out innocently enough. I stopped eating candy, then anything that had fat in it (this was still the time when carbs were in), and worked off everything I ate on the treadmill. Then I started skinning my meat, removing any kind of flavor from my food, and walked around with a mini weighing scale so I could weigh everything I ate. I would whip it out on dates, not caring about how crazy I looked scaling my chicken breast: I was obsessed. I did crunches over two episodes of Seinfeld every day, and ran to everything unnecessarily. I lost the weight, but I also lost my life. So one day, I snapped, and like Greta Garbo who decided that she would do no more social interactions, I vowed never to ever get on a treadmill or weighing scale again.

Of course, the bulbous midsection again made itself known after a few weeks of coating my hard-earned abs muscles with all of its greasy glory. Everyone who has had a weight issue in their life is more often than not fixated on one part of their body. It doesn’t matter if you look normal on the surface; when you start scrutinizing yourself you’ll invent all kinds of mistakes. Mine was my gut that needed to be gutted out. Weary of the Jane Fonda lifestyle, I just started obsessing over finding the perfect diet: the slacker’s way to size zero. I mean, there were more aggressive dieters, such as the throat fisters (bulimics) or diet pill junkies, which I was too scared to do. However, that’s all kindergarten stuff compared to what some models do to stay thin. My friend, who has been a successful model for many years while having a healthy- looking body, said that some girls resort to burning their tongues with chemicals to kill their taste buds. It’s like how pedophiles resort to chemical castration so that they may not rape again or how African tribes slice off the clitoris of virgins to prevent them from straying from their future husbands. I vowed to find a way to lose weight and keep my tongue char-free.

I tried the Zone, which was too naggy; Sugar Busters, which was too fundamentalist; and finally the Atkins diet. A few years back, I wrote and exalted the cholesterol-crowned diet that promised to kick pounds off your body in weeks. I was hooked; I could eat steak and eggs all day. Sure, in the first few weeks I felt like Whitney Houston, but I acclimated to it quite well, again spiraling down to an alternate universe of odd dining behavior. At the beach, I would scrape pizza toppings from their crusts and leave a pile of crusts I called the leaning tower of pizza. I ate eggs like candy and anything that had sugar was thrown away. The diet was supposed to be good for two weeks; I did it for three years.

My friends would have mixed reactions. My fashion friends loved my emaciated frame, while my other friends expressed concern. I didn’t care that my gut was as flat as a cutting board and I didn’t care about everything else. It came to the point that I was just so tiny I had to buy kid’s clothes. Eating again became an obsession. How I tried to find loopholes in the diet and "cheat" while staying thin by using carb and fat blockers (which are huge tablets and which I have almost choked on on more than one occasion). Some of my friends were also into it, so we were like this group of people trying to see who could lose more weight in the least amount of time with the most innovative techniques: eating tofu pasta, downing chalky protein shakes and sugarless meringues. It was a sad life; eating out was more of a social thing than dining. We guessed the nutritional value of every course, leaving my non-dieting friends extremely bored. My friends kidded me about my liquid dinners because I would have nothing but gin and carbless tonic while they feasted on roast chicken. It seemed so normal back then, skinning my ebi tempura of its flour coating, eating consommé all day long, and downing diet sodas as if they were fruit juice. I was still eating, I told myself, even if I knew I had already created my little shop of horrors.

One day I saw myself: I had no gut, but everything just hung on me loosely, even my swimsuits. A vein was popping out of my forehead. This was so not-fabulous anymore. My boyfriend Marcel started making sure that I distracted myself enough with work and not with food. He brought me to carb temples, and you could say he wined and dined me to win my heart. Every time I earned another fold in my tummy, he pinched it affectionately and said it looked beautiful.

I have since gained 15 pounds. I’ve stopped wearing outrageous clothes to compensate for my boy-like frame. I don’t have that fashionista bod anymore, and I’m glad. I look at Nicole Richie and see how she is getting more famous by the minute as she disappears into thin air. We are such an image-driven society, where status symbols are everywhere, not only with our clothes, but in every inch of our skin: how tanned one is, how skinny one is, and etc. In a sick way, society rewards those who punish themselves to distort their bodies so they can fit into clothes that distort reality. I was fitting into a dress made for me by my dear friend Rhett Eala and the measurements were from my Atkins days (or rather, daze), the darling little thing would not push past my knees. I almost cried because I guess part of me still wanted to be outrageously skinny. It’s hard since I’ve wanted to be that for almost half my life. But Rhett made me feel better by saying, "I can finally make real clothes for you. Beauty-queen clothes!" We had a good laugh after that.

I’ve even made friends with the gym again. Of course, now I limit my visits to just an hour three times a week. I received one of the best compliments ever while having dinner with one of my harshest critics, Ricky. He said, "Lopez, you look like you’re going to live." At that point, I swallowed a big forkful of pasta and knew that I indeed was going to, with risotto and Spy Bags that won’t eat me alive.