When it was my turn to meet with Gladys individually, she apologized multiple times for the “unfortunate incident.” “What we’re doing here at the clinic is radical and life affirming,” she said. “We’re taking care of our bodies. People like that woman find this very threatening. She’s like an alcoholic or drug addict, completely in denial. She’ll probably be dead soon.” Gladys seemed to savor the thought.
She gave me a tour of the exercise room, with pink dumbbells bearing the Baptist name scattered on the floor and a woman in a modest leotard leading a group in jumping jacks. In the privacy of her cubicle, Gladys snapped a Polaroid of me and told me to stick it in my binder and bring it to the clinic each week. This was my before picture. She then weighed me and, using a software program developed by Eulayla’s brother, a computer scientist, calculated that I needed to lose 104 pounds, which would take only nine months on the Baptist Plan. “In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy!” she said, her silver charm bracelet clanking on the keyboard. Gladys made it seem so easy that I wanted to hug her. I would be thin in nine months. Software doesn’t lie. I carried my first week of shakes and frozen dinners home in two shopping bags, puffed up with Gladys’s words of encouragement.
At home, my mother looked on coolly as I put my food away. The six-packs of shakes and the pale pink trays of frozen food filled most of the space in our fridge and freezer. I also had a packet of Baptist Supplements.
“Why do you need these?” My mother examined the pebble-colored tablets.
“Gladys said I have to take one each day.” She’d been emphatic.4
At breakfast and lunch, I drank a foamy peach shake from a can. At dinner, I microwaved my designated meal, then peeled back the silver plastic to reveal beef stew, its chunks of meat and peas floating in a lukewarm bath of brown gravy, or a turkey meatball, like a crusty planet surrounded by red rings of pasta. The meals were small, merely a scoop or two of food, and they seemed to lack a connection to actual foodstuffs; I thought it was possible the “food” was constructed of other elements, like paper and Styrofoam, but I didn’t care, as long as eating it led to thinness.5
My first week as a Baptist, I was filled with energy and motivation. I’d been instructed to avoid people who were eating, those unruly mobs with their knives and forks, but given my job at the restaurant this was impossible. It didn’t matter. I was experiencing transcendence from the grotesque world of mastication and grazing. The sight of people eating made me sick.
Before my shift at the restaurant, I would stop by the Baptist clinic to do aerobics. At work I moved faster than ever. One night I chopped twenty-five onions in record time, leaving Chef Elsa to marvel at my speed. Red peppers, celery, and garlic lay in colorful heaps on my chopping boards. I’d finish early and take on extra projects, such as reorganizing the grain cupboard and alphabetizing the spices.
When I returned home from work one night I was greeted by ten Italian pilgrims sitting in our yard, lighting candles and playing the guitar. I opened the curtains in my bedroom to listen to them sing. They waved and smiled, and I didn’t mind that they were looking at me. Nothing could dampen my mood. I was a jailed girl about to be released from a long sentence.
By the end of the week, I was twelve pounds lighter. Gladys and the other women clucked around me, admiring my shrinking figure.6
In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy!
Like most highs, mine was not to last; as I entered week two, I crashed. If school had been in session, I wouldn’t have made it. I skipped aerobics class and had to force myself to leave the house to go to the restaurant, which I had to do to pay for the Baptist Plan. In Chef Elsa’s kitchen, I became prone to staring off into space without blinking. “Are you sick?” she asked me. The week before I’d been a wind-up toy spinning around furiously; now I had fallen over, silent and still.
I called Gladys. “What’s wrong with me?” I whispered into the phone, too weak to even speak.
“It’s sugar withdrawal. You’re an addict, honey. That poison is leaving your system.”
“But I’m so hungry.”
“I know, sweetie,” said Gladys. Sugar. Honey. Sweetie. Gladys wasn’t helping.
I kept waiting for the horrible feeling to go away, but it didn’t. At night I dreamed about éclairs. Hunger pangs woke me, traveling through my body like the reverberations of a bell. I held my hands over my ears and rolled back and forth in bed, hoping the sensations would go away.
Between meals, I dealt with my hunger by dipping lettuce leaves into mustard (a tip from Gladys), which was practically a zero-calorie snack, about as effective as eating air. Still, it gave me something to chew and swallow. Gladys’s other tips for fighting hunger included doing jumping jacks, even in public places, drinking liters of water, and writing in my food journal:
1. After eating, I feel: Very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, hungry, or starving: starving
2. My mood right now is: Positive, neutral, discouraged, or irritable: positive
3. Today I am thinking about food: Only at mealtimes, occasionally, or constantly: constantly