Size and Sensibility

Losing half her body weight was no picnic. But living thin, and expanding her sense of self, nearly made Frances Kuffel's world blow up.

By Frances Kuffel, published on January 01, 2005 - last reviewed on September 26, 2007

I had been summoned to The Show, the Holy Grail for authors and the fulfillment of all my mother's dreams. In a harried day of phone calls from Chicago, at the tail end of a snowstorm, the producers of Oprah decided, with 90 minutes to catch the last shuttle out of LaGuardia, that they might want me.

You'd think, on the eve of what could catapult my book to national attention, that I would be too nervous to eat.

I am never too nervous to eat.

As I grazed the basket of goodies in my expensed suite, I had two questions. First: Would Harpo Productions' bean counters go over my hotel tab and ask, "Isn't that the woman who lost all that weight? What are these charges for chocolate-covered almonds and honey peanuts doing here?"

Second: Why am I eating all this stuff? I might be on TV tomorrow!

What with Oprah replaying 24/7, everyone in America could count the bread crumbs on my velvet dress.

So much for the can-do kid who, after 42 years of obesity and missed opportunities, had lost 188 pounds and written a book about it. Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self is an account of how I used my radical change in weight to turn a small, private world of eating and surviving into one as big as my former size 32 dresses. I climbed mountains! I swaddled myself in cashmere and had lovers; I went to Italy. I floated out of the gym after lifting weights, I sat in restaurant booths, wore bracelets, and crossed my legs and took the middle seat in airplanes. Then I used my weight loss to do the next impossible thing: I became an author. Being thin opened the doors to experience and intimacy.

National exposure, however, was an intrusion I hadn't considered. I am not a pundit or role model. You're going to be pilloried, Frances, I thought with the vehemence of a Sicilian curse.

And yet, there I was gobbling Oprah's $12 cookies.

I put on my pajamas and pulled back the comforter on the king-size bed. It was littered with wrappers. My cheeks were burning with shame and calories. Tomorrow, I promised myself solemnly.

And when tomorrow came, I smiled and joked, and I was gracious when I wasn't, after all, needed for the show. I ached not from disappointment but with the hangover of sugar in my muscles, the sour gas in my gut and the heartbreak of being a liar.

After a failed romance and a change of jobs, I drifted into relapse in March 2003, a year before Oprah. I had time on my hands—and time, in my case, is the enemy. I filled it by studying where and how I went wrong, at the office, in the bedroom. Intellectually, I knew that the boyfriend was emotionally frozen and that my former employer was abusive and infantilizing, but I couldn't shake my ingrained conviction that I was responsible for everything that went wrong.

I stopped going to the gym; I started eating peanuts or rice cakes between meals. A little of this, a little of that, and one morning I announced to a friend that I saw no reason why I couldn't eat blackberry pie and ice cream, get the craving out of my system and return to my abstinence by noon.

I wasn't talking about a slice of pie à la mode. I was talking about a whole pie and a pint of ice cream.

A whole pie?

That summer I was reminded at every turn that I needed to be thin to promote my book. "You don't want those cookies, honey," my mom said as I carried off a stack I'd grabbed from the cooling rack. "Remember: You're going to be in Oprah's magazine."

She was wrong. I did want the cookies, and I didn't need reminding about Oprah. I sighed and took two more.

When I asked myself what I needed, I was met with an unconsoling barrage of hungers. I needed to know I was not disposable. I needed a resting place. I needed to know I had enough stuff to carry off the rest of my life—enough talent, discipline and intelligence—and enough sufficiency to protect me from more heartbreak. I needed enough hope to find the friends and man I mourned the lack of.

From August 1999 to August 2003, I'd gambled that losing weight would get me closer to all that, and I was told what to eat in those years. Now, after three years of maintaining my weight loss, I need to be told what to feel when everyone but me has an opinion of who I am.

I knew I—not just my body but my very self—was in trouble when I brushed aside a fleeting thought about how fat I looked with the answer, "Never mind. You'll like yourself when you're thin."

How does one live with self-acceptance as a future and an always-conditional state of mind? More pragmatically, in lieu of my size 8 clothes, my career depended on self-assurance. When asked, I admitted that I'd gained weight, adding that I had never presented myself as the poster girl of thin. I said this with poise, which is not to be confused with confidence. Poise is teachable; confidence is one of the elements missing from the periodic table, three parts self-respect to two parts experience.

To get to confidence, I was going to have to listen to my self-accusations and sit with the rejections. Maybe shame had something to teach me. My next recovery period from food addiction would be based on therapy, heretofore more a matter of coaching than peeling back the layers of self. My psychiatrist's and therapist's offices became the places I could air my feelings about myself in the hopes I could change my self-perception. "There's no point in getting depressed just because I'm depressed," I told my psychiatrist, who increased my morning meds anyway.