Glancing over my doctor’s shoulder one day some years ago, I was horrified to see that she had written the word “obesity” on my chart. Obese? Me? Admittedly, I weighed two or three dozen pounds more than any doctor would countenance. I was buying my clothes from George Richards Big and Tall Menswear, a chain where the staff appears to have been chosen by gross poundage, to avoid any embarrassment a customer might feel when faced with a thinner salesman. But until that moment in the doctor’s office, my self-image had taken shelter under the relatively friendly term “heavy,” which implies normality, even inevitability. And in some corner of my mind, weight was a problem I sincerely intended to fix — eventually.
The sight of the word “obesity” awakened me. This needed serious attention. Something had to change! Going home from the doctor’s office, I felt the peculiar adrenalin that accompanies a fresh sense of virtue.
The years that followed brought a grim consultation with a dietitian, a period when I weighed in at the doctor’s office once a week, a brief era of Metrecal cookies (nutrition to compensate for the ordinary food I was, theoretically, avoiding), and two short-lived memberships in Weight Watchers. There were also many, many private resolutions, each combining the elimination of fattening foods with daily use of the treadmill.
All of these were successful, in the special meaning of a friend who summed up her lifetime of weight loss frustration in four words: “Every diet works once.” Like her, I took off weight every time I tried. And, like her, I soon grew back to my pre-diet self, invariably adding a few more pounds. With each setback, I became less optimistic about losing weight. Still, I pretended to the world that I saw nothing wrong. In the ’80s, I complained to the director of my TV show that on a certain occasion her way of shooting me made me look fat. She paused, looked at me evenly, and said, “There is a solution, you know.” I changed the subject.
At the end of 2007, I weighed 250 pounds, fifty more than someone just under six feet tall should carry. By then, like everyone else, I knew that being fat made me part of an international problem in public policy, a threat to the health care system as well as to myself. Bad news about “the obesity epidemic” was now regularly appearing across North America and Europe. The average weight of people in industrialized countries sharply increased in the ’80s and, despite much public alarm, continues to rise. I took no comfort in the knowledge that my careless gluttony was so widely shared. The sober commentaries from specialists reminded me of my own persistent failures and left me with a nagging question: Why had I allowed this to persist so long when any damn fool, including me, knew the remedy? Was I missing something?
During an unusually remorseful period, I happened to hear Shelagh Rogers on CBC Radio interviewing Harvey Brooker, a Toronto weight loss professional. He sounded wonderfully confident as he described the program he was running, yet he clearly understood that the task of becoming thin is hard for many of us, the task of staying thin monumental. A lifetime of failure had left me highly skeptical about anyone claiming to have solutions, but Brooker’s manner revived my dormant desire to change. Was I up for one more try? I signed on and began attending meetings at Harvey Brooker Weight Loss for Men. Over the next seven months, I lost fifty pounds, one-fifth of me, a fraction that felt like a miracle. Given my history and the common experience of others, it’s far more miraculous that today, after another eighteen months, my weight remains the same and shows no signs of increasing. But the largest surprise is that in this process I changed certain long-held ideas about the kind of help I needed.
Harvey Brooker meets his clients every Sunday morning on the second floor of a Dufferin Street strip mall, just south of Finch Avenue in Toronto. Its only neighbour at that hour is a cheerful kindergarten down the hall that serves the children of Russian immigrants living nearby. In the reception area, where a display of before and after photographs provides encouragement, members check in with the volunteers who staff the desk and with Harvey’s wife, Helen, before facing the moment of truth: the weigh-in. “How are you?” the man who reads the scales will sometimes ask. And I answer, “You’ll be the judge of that.”
About 150 men gather before the meeting to sip coffee and munch on apples provided for the occasion. I remember thinking during my first Sunday that it might be hard to find anywhere else such a rich variety of human shapes. Someone weighing at least 400 pounds chats with someone weighing about 175; the first man may be there because of dire warnings from his doctor, the second because he’s been unable to lose a stubborn paunch. A democratic spirit that springs up every week makes us take both of them seriously. We are all equal in the Fellowship of the Fat. We all have a secret we’ve tried to keep from our friends and family: that our bodies make us uncomfortable and we’re anxious to change them.
Just attending the program is an admission of sorts, but we also openly discuss our shared secret. The meeting begins with a personal statement that often has a confessional air. One recent speaker said he had been so depressed by various events in his life that he had grown to 300 pounds. At one point, he realized that chronic weight gain was a socially acceptable form of suicide: “I was trying to kill myself a pound at a time.”
Brooker, who’s been standing at the back listening, can sympathize with almost anything he hears. He, too, was fat. In his twenties, at five feet six, he weighed 215 pounds; a shirtless photo of him from those days, apparently chosen to emphasize his obesity, hangs in the auditorium and appears in a booklet about the program. During a period of self-examination, he determined to take off the extra weight (“It made me unhappy with myself”) and managed to do so. Today, at age sixty-six, he weighs within a pound or two of 155, about the same as in his thirties.
