The weight of the matter

Weight, just like age, is a touchy subject for women; I don’t know how it is with men but it is considered rude to ask a woman how old she is or how much she weighs. These are pieces of information a woman will never voluntarily offer so when confronted with a question about age, a woman will more often than not reply with an approximate like “I am in my 40s” or “I am 50-something”; never “I am 41” or “I am 59.” If it concerns weight, a woman will usually start with the words “about” or “around,” not “I am…” (Funny how women like to treat numbers as anything but an exact science.)

While weight is a major issue these days and rightly so because of the dangerous health concerns it raises, there are public personalities who thrive despite their above normal weight. They work in major businesses like fashion and entertainment and serve as inspirations at a time when people are in dire need of affirmation and hungry for positive role models. They wear their “challenge” like a badge of honor, proving that weight is a problem that has a solution and not a hindrance to success or an excuse to fade into anonymity. They lend their famous names to a common problem that normal folks like you and me face and they make it okay to struggle and to fail and to get back up and try again.

It is a tall order for them to remain true to themselves and succeed at what they do in the very public arena they belong to because of the prevalent and often distorted ideal to remain forever thin and young. They may be exceptions to the rule but they definitely are not pushovers or wallflowers; they are forces to be reckoned with in their fields.

Celebrity Confessions

I was flicking through the channels one evening when I saw Wynona Judd on the Oprah show; I stopped to watch and listen to her talk about her years of battling obesity. She described herself as an “emotional eater” and went on to reveal the psychological, emotional and physical trauma she felt in her attempt to overcome this condition. She said something that got in my mind, words that I have come to memorize and repeat over and over in my head. She said to Oprah, “I don’t like the word ‘diet’ because it has the word ‘die’ in it.” She goes on to explain without shame her ongoing fight to lose weight, to eat right and keep healthy for her family, friends and multitudes of fans while she continues to do what she loves doing best, singing country music. Wynona Judd is one of the pillars of American Country Music (AMC), a multi Grammy and AMC award winner as well as a mother and a wife, just like many of us.

“Wow,” Oprah exclaimed, profoundly affected by Ms. Judd’s public confession. Oprah, who herself has gone from being an overweight woman to a marathon runner then to a depressed “heavy” person trying to work her way back to fitness and great health all over again, admitted to being a “food addict” in the same episode and claimed she uses food to repress certain kinds of emotions. Her abnormal relationship with food, like many other people, has led her to ultimate highs in fitness and miserable depths in weight gain. She has shared her plight with the audience and has publicly recorded her fight to lose the fat, get fit and healthy on the Oprah show with the help of nutritionists, doctors, fitness trainers and other health experts. She has even rallied audiences from all across America who face the same weight struggles to join her and talk about their experiences on TV.

Fifty-nine-year-old Kirstie Alley, who was shown flashing her bootilicious body on Oprah in 2006 in a bikini after losing 75 pounds as a Jenny Craig spokesperson, is another entertainment personality who’s on the “hefty” side. Back to square one plus 10 pounds more after the Jenny Craig plan, she claims to have “just sort of gone wild” packing on the pounds one more time, tipping the scale at 228 pounds, her heaviest weight ever. Constantly surrounded by food growing up, Kirstie Alley became big despite being a competitive swimmer in high school due to her addiction to sugar. She has been very candid about her problem and remains upbeat about her chances of overcoming the battle of the bulge. In her latest attempt, she has agreed to appear in a TV reality show entitled Kirstie Alley’s Big Life on A&E Channel; for the first time she will open the doors to her house and let the audience into her daily personal life as she juggles her roles as a producer of feature films and a mother of two while sticking to a new weight-loss program and looking for love.

While Queen Latifah may be considered a “big girl,” she signed on as a Jenny Craig spokesperson to lose a mere 20 pounds. She gladly embraces her curves and never intended to get skinny. A very vocal advocate for healthy living among curvier women, Queen Latifah said in an interview: “I don’t really diet, I kind of keep everything in moderation, exercise and eat right. I eat a lot of vegetables and lean meats and I drink a whole lot of water.” She hits the gym at least five times a week and alternates between the treadmill and the elliptical machine for cardio exercise. She has since lost about 10 percent of her body weight and has managed to keep off the 20 pounds while continuing her lucrative career as a singer, actress and product endorser; in 2008 she became an exclusive model for Cover Girl with her very own Queen Collection makeup line.

Emme, the 47-year-old size-12 Ford model, found a successful career as a plus-size model after having struggled with compulsive eating at an early age. She openly talked about being an “anomaly” and trying to constantly be accepted in the cutthroat “skinny only” modeling industry. She only completely accepted her body image and shape years into her career and when she got married and became a mother. She capitalized on her plus-size body as a TV reporter and host of E! Fashion Emergency and wrote four books, the latest of which is aimed at children exploring the physical and emotional aspects of hunger titled What Are You Hungry For? 

Andre Leon Talley, 61, the editor at large for Vogue, is a binge eater who weighs in at 300 pounds; one of the most influential style setters from the late 20th century to today, he attended the Ivy-League Brown University and honed his talents under the tutelage of Diana Vreeland, one of fashion’s most venerable personalities. His 30-year career included a successful stint at the helm of W magazine in Paris and ultimately led him back to America and Vogue.

The grandson of a sharecropper and the son of a taxi driver, Andre Leon Talley was raised by his grandmother who worked as a domestic servant along with his mother in North Carolina. Although he grew up poor, he lived in a home that was sparsely but tastefully furnished and went on to graduate from high school in the predominantly white North Carolina. As fate would have it, Talley was a devoted reader of Vogue from his teens and credits his sense of style to the magazine, her grandmother and her world, especially the church. He recollects “the big experience was on Sundays after church, I’d wash the dishes, walk to the white part of town, to the newsstand that was open on Sundays” to read Vogue. He went on to say, “You saw beautiful images of women, beautiful church hats and gloves. These were not people of great means and wealth, but they had the most wonderful style especially on Sundays.”

Talley came out on TV (of course, on Oprah!) detailing his out-of-control eating, spending evenings after long, intense and exhausting days downing two packs of cookies and other junk food in front of the TV to relax and unwind. His friends in the fashion industry arranged an “intervention” over worries about his general health and welfare. Anna Wintour, Vogue America’s editor in chief, a colleague and a dear friend, expressed concern in an interview: “I noticed how hard it became for him to sit in the front row at the fashion shows because he was simply too big and had a hard time breathing.” During one clandestine meeting that Talley thought had something to do with an award being bestowed upon him, several friends in the fashion industry — including Wintour, Oscar dela Renta and Marc Jacobs — sat Talley down and told him of their plan to send him to Duke University’s Diet and Fitness Center before it was too late.

Touched by the love of his friends, Talley has embarked on a diet and fitness program and describes it as a “lifestyle change, like reprogramming your mind about food.”

Karl Lagerfeld the iconic head designer and creative director for Chanel, did not seem to have unusual eating habits nor did he encounter many problems losing weight; he also had more banal reasons for shedding the pounds: “I suddenly wanted to dress differently, to wear clothes designed by Hedi Slimane,” he said in an interview. Lagerfeld, at age 73, lost 42 kilograms or about 92 pounds in a period of 13 months on a diet created especially for him by Dr. Jean-Claude Houdret called “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet.” Ironically, Lagerfeld, who was heavy for most of his life as a fashion designer, has been very open about and repeatedly criticized for refusing to use models over “size zero” for his fashion shows and ad campaigns.  

You Are What You Eat

Food plays a vital role in how much we weigh and by what means we lose it, as proven by these “big” personalities. Although there isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula to explain the relationship we all have with food, a few important facts will help us determine whether we are eating for the right reasons:

• Physical hunger comes gradually and can be postponed while emotional hunger feels immediate and urgent;

• Physical hunger is easily satisfied with any number of foods while emotional hunger comes as a very particular craving;

• Physical hunger allows a person to stop eating when full while emotional hunger keeps you eating beyond what you normally would;

• Physical hunger doesn’t cause feelings of guilt while emotional hunger automatically causes guilt right after.

Life does not have to begin and end with weight unless we choose to as these “larger-than-life” personalities have shown us. We need not be discouraged and defeated by the constant pressure to be thin; instead we must take action if we want to take control of our bodies. There are people who find enough courage and determination to make the change on their own; others require the help of friends and medical intervention while some people need public attention to get them going. Let us take our cue from these famous people of humble beginnings and middle-class upbringings who live their “big” lives in front of our eyes. Like them, we’ve got the same 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year to live, and like age, weight is just a number: we’ve got the power to bring it up or take it down.