Romance:From Fat To Fatale(9)

and I think we have to thank God for that - you can't even see how bad things really are. You are seriously messed up and you don't even know how messed up you are.

She slipped a pen and a clean sheet of paper across the desk and asked me to write down what I expected from the consultation. That was something I hadn't expected. I was expecting the lady nutritionist to lead the session so the blank sheet of paper and pen came as a surprise. What did I expect? Yeah. Good question. I put the top of the pen on my lower lip and frowned. What did I think this lady could do for me? Well, I wanted to lose weight that was for certain. I wanted to get my blood pressure back to a more normal level too. I wanted to look less like an escapee from a freak show.

I wanted the description on my medical report to say something more positive than 'serious health risk'. I wanted the local gym to welcome me back with open arms and a fresh cup of de-caff frappé as a pin-up paragon of feminine fitness.

Maybe I should just settle for losing weight. I lowered the pen and wrote that I wanted to lose weight, expecting the lady to ask me how much. But she smiled again and asked me why I'd chosen weight loss as my single objective. What was this? Some kind of psycho-interrogation?

I pursed my lips and replied a little impatiently that that was the most obvious thing about my condition - I needed to lose weight.

She nodded and said I must've been in this condition for a long time so what was suddenly so special about today that I'd woken up and decided to do something about the problem? Tricky, eh? Very tricky. She said she understood my reaction but she needed to know how I was feeling.

She needed to know about my motivation, what was driving me, whether I was really ready to follow her advice and take control of my life. Suddenly the conversation was getting more serious than I'd expected from a, well, from a nutritionist. The motivation was everything, she said. The motivation for getting so fat in the first place. The way being fat made me feel. What was the payoff for being so big? I told her that the medical had scared me into taking action and she smiled that really annoying smile of hers, the one that telegraphed the message that she could see right through to the code in my DNA, and she said no, that just wasn't true. What?

This was getting weird. How could she pretend to know precisely what I meant? I was getting uncomfortable now. I asked if she ever moonlighted as a telephone psychic, sharing her amazing gifts for telepathy with the great charge-carded anonymous public.No, she said, but I've heard every bullshit excuse for unhappiness ever invented so you're not bringing me something I haven't seen a million times before, Honey. I'd had enough. I was about to get up and leave. She just bored right into me with those blue eyes, saying she knew I was hesitating about getting up and leaving but she wasn't going to quit on me before we even got started. She wanted - no, she demanded - total honesty. No fairy stories. Just a straight admission of how I really felt. A starting point for a tough journey. A solid foundation for fixing my life.

And God help me but I started crying. Dammit! I didn't mean to but I couldn't help it. She must've been expecting this moment of emotional crisis because she had a box of Kleenex right on hand at the side of her desk. She moved it a little closer to me and nodded that I should take one. I grabbed a handful and cleared my eyes and then blew my nose, which sounded pretty much like an ocean liner announcing its arrival in the fog at Staten Island. OK now? She asked. Feeling a little better? I nodded, still feeling the weight in my chest and throat like a slab of lead cast in concrete, wrapped in ashes and anchored to my heart. I've got to ask you, my fellow traveller - have you ever been in a position like this? This was new territory for me. This was right off the edge of the world. There were dragons lurking on the contours of my rapidly dissolving horizon.

Yeah. It was scary in a totally non-fun way. I was most definitely not enjoying this wacko introduction to the wonderful world of nutrition. She was smiling and I could see the warmth in her eyes. I'm on your side, she said. I'm going to be with you all the way. You're fat mostly because you're unhappy. Sure you've made some unbelievably poor dietary choices but it's the unhappiness that supports the bad behaviour. She had to share this nugget of truth or the programme wouldn't work. She wasn't going to offer some superficial, ineffective approach to weight control that would fail at the first hurdle. We had to get to the real causes of my eating choices and then the nutritional advice would be so much easier to follow.

Hey, my dear friend, are you getting any of this? This is serious stuff. I sit down for a quick fix at some local nutritionist's voodoo parlour and within five minutes I'm on my fifth Kleenex, nose and eyes streaming, sobs escaping uncontrollably, ready to sign the pledge and give my life to Jesus for the chance to forsake the sin of my weight forever. Hallelujah! If this lady had been on the Church's payroll, Mavenka would've been a certified nun before her fourteenth birthday. No question. She was that good. I hadn't planned it but I think I'd just become a true believer.

We started very simply. She explained that my body was starved - I'm serious -

starved of nutrients and that was one of the reasons I was always eating. No wonder I was always hungry. She said that most fat people were starving. Our nutrition was so poor, full of those deliciously empty calories, that all we did was store fat -

apparently a natural human response to food shortages. I instantly got this image of those bone-thin kids in some blighted, drought-blasted, African wasteland, dying of starvation and lack of food and then I thought of my massive size - and just couldn't connect the dots.