Fat Chance

What’s more neurotic than a Celine? It’s a Celine wired on Xenadrine! Yup that’s right, add me to Diet Pill Poppers Anonymous. As a child I was a walking stick. All bones no lovable flesh to bite or cuddle. As a child, I was a very uncute waif. Gaining weight became the objective of my life. I ate with wanton abandon, until I realized sometime back in college people started whispering behind my back. They were saying that I was pregnant. As far as I was concerned the only thing growing in my stomach was a fetus made of fat sired by Haagen-Dazs and Tapa King sperm cells. From that time on I jumped on the image-conscious bandwagon of the 21st century and started obsessing about my weight.

I started to try to lose weight like all sane human beings. I started to go to the gym to be able to shave off those icebergs of blubber from my gut. I did an hour of cardio, an hour of weights and an hour of chitchat with all the gym attendants. I had fun buying gym outfits and checking out if there were any cuties at the gym. And then before I knew it, just as the belly started disappearing, so did my sanity. I stopped hanging out with my friends and just about broke up with my college boyfriend, just so I could have more time getting physical.

This is where the deranged Karen Carpenter part comes in. I started carrying around a mini weighing scale, calorie counter book, and a chart on proper food servings thus freaking out friends and waiters alike. I read every nutrition and diet manual I could get my hands on. I recited the calorie, carbohydrate and fat content of almost any dish (skinned/not skinned/fried/baked/steamed/boiled/raw) like some teen wonder. I would buy clothes a size smaller just to remind myself not to eat. While people would be surfing the porn sites late at night, I would surf food sites such as Epicurious and recipes.com to fill my gastronomic fantasies. I was a wreck, but at least I was skinny wreck.

I really don’t know what the straw that broke the camel’s back was, but one day I decided to resign as gym bunny and borderline anorexic and instead became a GNC fanatic. Maybe it was because I could no longer stand the sight of those sweat-coated machines or maybe it was because I had a mental overload thinking of ways to fool myself that fat-free chocolate cookies were just as good as Mrs. Fields cookies. It was there that I met my first popper friend, Hydroxycut. We were actually introduced during the autumn of my gym bunny career. However, I found that its effects remained increasingly consistent with or without physical exercise. Forget that I stayed up late at night thinking that everyone hated me and had a continuing mental workout of climbing the walls. Forget the fact the fact that my heart was beating as fast as Lydia de Vega could run. I stopped having my wet dreams of strawberry Haagen Dazs and bulalo. I was a wreck (mentally), but I was as svelte as a lizard. It was the closest that I could get to becoming a celebrity. I possessed all the characteristics of being a skinny fuck-up with no friends, except that I lacked fame and talent.

And so with racing heart and sweaty palms I ventured on to diet pill wonderland. I started smoking too, because I heard that it staves off appetite and black coffee stimulates the mind enough to kill your hunger pangs. This is of course according to my other deranged idol Barbara Hutton (I also picked up a few habits from her—one of them is having a taste for dangerously sexy but emotionally unavailable men, but that’s another article altogether). But I realized that I was turning into Zelda Fitzgerald and true enough I realized that if I kept this on I wouldn’t make it to the last waltz. So I decided to ditch the brain zonkers and change my lifestyle. I moved on to fat absorbers.

These excellent gems of fat-absorbing fiber were both the bane and boon of my life. I could eat a steak or a quarter pounder without guilt. It was heaven—no more neurotic/psychotic episodes. The only effort required was remembering to pop it 30 minutes before a meal. From three hours at the gym I regressed to a minute of swallowing crayfish fiber tablets. I have become the laziest person with an eating disorder.

Recently, my gambit for achieving physical beauty has become the assassin of my health. I started having ulcers, mood swings and other physiological side effects from having such an unhealthy lifestyle. I call it nutrition deficiency psychosis; others just choose to call it an attitude. So, I did something that I never thought I would ever do, not even as a child. I started eating healthy. Oh, what an arborous task of quitting smoking (except in times of stress such as meeting deadlines and having nothing to wear), laying off the booze (alcohol sugar apparently turns into fat right away, I heard) and yuk, eating veggies. Until recently I have never in my carnivorous existence imagined shoving cow food in my mouth. But a little (I mean very little) salt makes these green wonders palatable at the very least. I mean I still have to progress into finishing a full green salad. Right now I’m just at the steamed veggies level.

If I trace the roots of my obsession about having the perfect body I would like to blame it on my painful childhood which was cloaked with the beauty myths fed to me by glossies such as Vogue and Mod and TV nymphets like Heather Locklear, and musical goddesses like Madonna and Olivia Newton-John. The allure of the slim woman is undeniable; she is attached to the promises of wealth, power, fame and attractive men. She is victorious—always, well according to Aaron Spelling at least. They all had the best lines in any movie or show. They always had the last laugh. And they always wore Halston and Calvin. I wanted to be just like them.

Being thin also meant securing one’s future for some women. Long before I was born, Maria Callas popped tape worm pills in order to keep her weight to a minimum and keep darling Ari. Of course despite her worm harvesting, she still lost Ari to bony Jackie. These thin women—they always win. However, in real life the over-zealous quest to be skeletal has made losers out of all of us.

So, as I try to make a historical review of my life as a nutritional rebel, I can’t help but notice the scars that I have gathered from my insurgency with getting fat. With a less than balanced state of mind, dry mouth, scratched stomach and trembling heart—I wish to dispense some words of wisdom. Drink lots of water and when ordering meat, choose the one with the word loin attached to it. Then you have a fat chance of getting your life back.

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Email me at celinerlopez@hotmail.com