Am I My Body?: Part Two

1972 - 1982

In the fall of 1972, I started freshman year at Northwestern University. I’d survived long enough to make it to college!!! I got good grades, made new friends, and enjoyed myself immensely. No more lack of attention from boys – they were beating a path to my dorm room. Some weekends I actually had 4 dates! I think I weighed about 101 during these days, so I obviously had gotten back to a healthier weight. I was gorgeous. Just ask my husband – I met him my first week there. I didn’t gain an ounce in college. No “Freshman Fifteen.” Which astonishes me now, looking back, because it seems to me that we ordered pizza almost every night.

I don’t remember much about the food I ate those years. I wasn’t used to thinking about food very much. I grew up in a tiny little town in Indiana where we almost didn’t have restaurants. There was no McDonalds anywhere until my junior year in high school, and that was 20 miles away. Ethnic restaurants? What were those? My mother cooked dinner for me and my stepfather every single night, except occasionally when they would go out with friends. I could never get away from the table fast enough, since my stepfather took every opportunity to insult me, berate me, and call me names until he fell asleep in his chair shortly afterwards. He would often forbid me to leave the table until I apologized for my behavior but would then fall asleep, at which time Mom would tell me “Quick. Get out.” We ate dinner long after most of my friends, so I couldn’t get out soon enough.

I digress. We were talking about college. I think I weighed about 105 when I finished. I remember one outfit where I tucked a pretty blue and white striped sweater into a size-5 denim skirt. I have a tendency to tie a lot of important memories to clothes! I like clothes! But it’s been a VERY long time since I tucked something into a waistband.

After college I moved in with my boyfriend Ernie and we were married a year later. Things began to change. Now I had to learn to COOK. We ate almost all our meals together. Ernie was 6’1” and about 185 pounds. He never gained an ounce. If only I could have said the same.

By the time we were married I was a size 9 or 11. I still looked good…but I was bigger. I couldn’t understand why. Things only got worse when we moved to Boston soon afterwards. I struggled terribly trying to cook meals for my husband. I had no idea that all those wedding present cookbooks were filled with recipes no one had time to make! Sometime during Ernie’s second year at business school he told me to stop cooking so much. I was making myself miserable, and he didn’t really care that much what he ate. There was no deep dish pizza in Boston at the time, so I must have found plenty of other things to gain weight from instead.

We moved back to Chicago in 1979, and I knew I had to make some changes. It was the beginning of the Jane Fonda workout craze. I bought some leotards and leg warmers, and her book, recorded some music on cassette tapes (anyone remember those?) and began my workouts at home. Eventually I joined a health club and went to aerobic classes three times a week. I cut out beer and bacon, and probably pizza too, and dropped almost 50 pounds in less than a year. By the time I was 30 I was down to about 115. We went to Paris on a business trip around that time, and I had all my weight off. I strolled around Paris feeling pretty pleased with myself.

I remember a cousin’s wedding in Minnesota. My mother was so delighted with my weight loss she couldn’t stop talking about it. She bragged to every relative there about my weight loss. Have I mentioned that the only times my mother seemed happy with me were when I’d done something that reflected on her? Like getting almost straight A’s in one trimester in college, or dropping 50 pounds? Remember that flirtation with anorexia 13 years previously? Good thing I didn’t live with her any more.

At about this time I added weight training to my fitness routine. I LOVED it. There was a group of 6-8 women that formed around a beautiful, tall, charismatic Afro-American woman named Synovia Jones at my health club. She was a competitive body builder and we all began lifting like crazy. She helped us design our workouts and we all kept notebooks. Many folks at our gym, male and female both, thought we were crazy. Some of the more obnoxious guys would leave the biggest 45-pound plates on the bars and machines and tell us if we wanted to lift like men we would just have to cope. Of course, we always put back our own plates, but not them!

What about weight lifting appealed to me so much that I’m still doing it, 40 years later? I love feeling strong. At the time, I loved the measurable results. We all made gains and made them fast. We had power lift competitions at the gym and I was second in the bench press. My body changed a little, as I started widening at the back and shoulders. I gained a few pounds but told myself it was all muscle. And most of it was. I was wearing a size 7 dress now, mostly to accommodate my shoulders. And my waist. Even at my smallest I never had a waist. I have a short, straight torso and there just isn’t room to curve in and back out again. I’m built more like a man, with a straight torso and hips. Ernie disagrees, but he’s biased.

So at this point in my life, if I’m keeping score, it’s about 60 pounds up and about 50 back down. Pretty even score, right? But all that was about to change.