Weight Watchers, 1984.

The summer I turned 18, I attended my first Weight Watchers meeting.

I walked into the small office, set in the center of a strip mall in Montclair, CA. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

Milling about the front room—signing in, eyes down, then moving toward the hallway—were women much older than me. They stayed silent during sign in, then shuffled to the meeting.

Their bigger bodies contrasted with the slender body of the woman I guessed immediately was the leader of the meeting. Bleached blonde hair, perfected makeup, a tan so dark she looked like the raw umber crayon I used often as a kid—this lady exuded Southern California perfection. Neon colors, short skirt, toenails painted in her summer sandals.

She was our goal.

I handed the cash to the woman at the desk and wrote down my parents’ address and phone number. And my name. The woman smiled at me, said “Welcome to Weight Watchers” with a perky tone, and gave me a card for the weigh in.

Oh god. I have to weigh myself in front of everyone here? Why?

I sensed immediately why the women before me were shuffling. No one wanted to do this.

Any time I had weighed myself before, I felt furtive. In our home, I slid the scale out from the bathroom cupboard, then locked the bathroom door. And then I stepped on, the needle wavering back and forth until it stopped on a number. 180. OH GOD. Too big. Too big! my internal voice roared at me. You should not have eaten those Clark bars. Bad. Bad.

And then I slid the scale back into the bathroom, vowing that no one would know.

And now I had to do it in front of other women? I started to hyperventilate a little bit.

I waited my turn to walk toward a giant scale, with numbers so large they could have been the giant E at the top of the eye chart. One after another, a woman stepped on, waited for that needle to stop wavering, and then looked at the number.

“You lost 2 pounds this week!” the neon-shirted leader shouted. “Hooray!”

All the women applauded.

When one woman gained a pound, the leader shouted, “You gained a pound. That’s okay, honey. You can do better this week!”

Every woman looked down at her feet.

None of us wanted to be her.

Thankfully, I was the last one in line. I stepped on the scale and noticed that it settled on 178. Of course, I had not eaten much for the couple of days before the meeting, so I could start lighter, officially, than I had weighed at home.

The leader patted me on the shoulder and said, “We all have to start somewhere. Good for you. You came. You’re ready to face the fact that you have to lose weight. I’m proud of you.”

I wasn’t proud. I was a loser.

But maybe, if I worked hard and did what they said, I would be a loser of weight.

And then I could show everyone—I can be normal, just like everyone else.

“A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.”

I hated every day of that summer.

I dreaded the weigh-in, that held-breath moment on the scale before I found out if I had been a success or a failure. When I did lose a pound or 2, then I would cheer, triumphant. Everyone clapped for me. I sat in that week’s meeting beaming. I did it! I can do this!

The triumph wore off when I left the meeting. My parents were in their neon-green Volkswagen Rabbit, waiting for me, my brother in the back seat. They drove me there and picked me up every week. My mother, not even waiting for me to close my car door, turned back to me and said, “Well?!”

“I lost 2 pounds.”

She pumped her fist and said she was proud of me.

When we returned home, I moved to the kitchen to make myself lunch. My stomach growled, since I had skipped breakfast to make sure that weigh-in went well. I wanted a grilled-cheese sandwich, a handful of potato chips, and some cherries. A glass of lemonade.

When I sat down at the kitchen table, my mother looked askance at my meal and said, “How many points is in that meal? Have you calculated it yet? Don’t put a bite of food in your mouth until you know. I think that’s too much.”

Any joy I felt at the smell of my lunch left me.

I added up the points from the little booklet I carried with me all summer.

I took ½ the grilled-cheese sandwich away from my plate and gave it to my little brother, along with the potato chips. I stood up to grab some cut carrots instead. And then I threw away the lemonade and poured myself a glass of iced tea, without sugar.

“There. That’s more like it,” my mother said, before opening the refrigerator and eating anything she wanted.

“If you can pinch more than an inch, try the Special K diet.”

My mother hated her body.

She had been slender until I was about 7, when chaos exploded in our home. She began eating for comfort.

I followed her example..

All that processed food that most people ate in the 1980s—it tasted good at the time, especially the potato chips, the Stouffers French bread pizza I popped in the microwave, and the candy that always seemed to be in the house.

After a loud screaming match between my parents, which I tried to help them solve, they went to separate rooms. And I went to the kitchen to eat my feelings.

Of course I did.

But unconsciously, I learned to feel that I was a bad person.

I watched my mother attack her own body with hateful words after she ate her feelings. I swallowed what she said about food and herself.

I absorbed that pernicious cycle of needing food to feel better, then hating the body that had eaten.

I digested it until I felt the same way about my body.

When my mother suggested that I try Weight Watchers—”we’ll pay for it”—she said it was because I was about to go into my senior year of high school.

“You’ll never get a boyfriend if you keep looking like this. Trust me.”

So, every week I gave myself some treats that day after the weigh-in. And then I counted every point, cut every bit of joy in food I had once felt, and beat my appetite into submission.

Losing weight was more important than my temporary happiness.

I learned that from Weight Watchers.

“Put it in the waste – not on your waist.”

September of 1984. I walked back onto my high-school campus 20 pounds lighter.

8 weeks. A lot of celery sticks. Loathing and hatred toward my body and willing it to be different. 20 pounds lost.

My mother was thrilled. “You look so good now!”

I walked through the hallways and into classes, shy as always.

Everywhere I walked, I noticed that the teenage boys who had never seen me before suddenly followed me with their eyes that day.

It didn’t feel good.

I felt like an object, a sexual construct, sprung from the forehead of Zeus, like Athena.

I didn’t feel like me. I felt too, too noticeable.

Girls I didn’t know looked me up and down, then said, “Oh hi. You look different.”

By the end of the week, I realized they weren’t complimenting me. Now that I had lost the weight, I was the competition.

I went home miserable.

I thought this work would make me feel normal. Accepted.

Instead, I was an outsider again, in a new form.

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

Skinny didn’t feel good on me.

I walked around exhausted. I hated the attention I received. It made me resent the fact that I had been invisible before.

20 pounds was the difference between the sad-sack girl and the new sexy conquest.

Neither one of those was me. That was my body.

My entire mind revolted against the idea of counting points or calories.

Receiving congratulations for restricting myself hard enough to be smaller on the scale? I hated that with the ferocity of 10,000 suns.

My life was deeply constricted already.

My mother’s fears—and the fact we were required to organize our lives around them—kept my life circumscribed in a tiny, high-walled circle.

I could not leave the house unless she and my dad drove me there and stayed in the parking lot.

I didn’t get to ride my bike around the block until I was 16. That took months of negotiations.

I didn’t step foot in anyone else’s house by myself until the winter after the Weight Watchers summer.

And in the house, I was on constant high alert from my parents’ fights and my mother’s panic attacks that turned into screaming meltdowns.

I didn’t know then. I didn’t know this was not healthy.

It was the only world I knew.

By the time I was 17, my spirit for being myself was broken. My first and most important priority was always, always making sure that I didn’t ask for anything that would make my mother uncomfortable. Or angry. Or scared. It was my job to keep my wishes restricted so I would not make her freak out.

But in that house, the only freedom I had was the books I read and the food I ate.

Take one of them away from me? My brain and body ROARED with disapproval.

And then I remembered—you’re bad, Shauna.

You need to lose weight.

Peacemaker. People pleaser. Fawner. I realize now those are trauma responses.

In the last decade, I have learned that cPTSD can make you one of the world’s quickest and most proficient threat detectors.

When everything feels like a threat, being hypervigilant about the number of points you are putting in your mouth only sets off a deeper stress response.

It took me until my 50s to realize that mechanism.

“Are you feeling bad or being bad?”

I wasn’t alone in this.

American culture in the second half of the 20th century engendered disordered eating.

Metracal shakes, which came onto the market in 1950s, were 225-calorie, vitamin-fortified meal replacements. Drink 4 of them a day to lose weight. 1000 calories a day and no solid food—that will help you achieve the almighty goal of losing weight.

Obetrol, a drug filled with methamphetamines to help curb your appetite. They were on the market as a “short-term” weight-loss help, but many women took them for years.

AYDS reducing candies, which came in a box like See’s—so many to choose!—were filled with benzocaine (the numbing agent that prevented women from being able to taste the food in their mouths, thus making them want less) and then phenylpropanolamine, which was a decongestant and thus reduced the appetite. First on the market in the 1940s, they were wildly popular for decades. I remember members of my extended family eating them before a meal, then I’d watch them pick at their food, which was suddenly tasteless.

Eventually, AYDS candies were taken off the shelf in the mid 1980s, because of the AIDS crisis. Since then, phenylpropanolamine has been taken off the market for humans, since it could cause strokes, high blood pressure, and seizures. It’s only used by veterinarians now to treat urinary incontinence for dogs.

How many women in America used these 3 products in the never-ending struggle to become skinnier?

I quit Weight Watchers the fall of my senior year. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

There were plenty of other programs in the 1980s that I could have chosen instead of Weight Watchers—Jenny Craig; Nutrisystem; SlimFast; Optifast; the cabbage diet; the Scarsdale diet; the Beverly Hills diet; the grapefruit diet; low fat/high carb; Fit for Life; the Atkins diet—but I didn’t want any of them. None of them.

What teenage girl wants to curb, contain, count calories, and control her appetite?

Control control control.

I wish that I could say that I came to these clear realizations after the Weight Watchers summer.

I disdained diet culture. I didn’t develop disordered eating. I learned to trust my body.

I wish that I could say I stopped thinking of myself as bad, over and over and over throughout the decades of my life.

But I can’t write that truthfully.

That feeling—you’re bad; stop eating so much; look at the size of your belly; no man will ever love you looking like this—dove in deep. Those feelings burrowed down in me, until they became insistent whispers in the darkness.

I can still hear them now, if I listen.

“What goes in early goes in deep.” —Ina Garten

These are 3 photographs of me at 17, the year before I started Weight Watchers.

That was the “fat” version of myself that I hated. HATED.

She was BAD.

And now, I sigh. She didn’t need to lose any weight.

She is glorious. Still imprisoned at that point, but one day she would rescue herself.

She’s still inside me now.

I wish I could give her a hug. I’d make her a grilled-cheese sandwich, a handful of potato chips, and some cherries. A glass of lemonade.

Taste every bite. Enjoy this moment.

There’s nothing wrong with you.

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