We arrived in Los Angeles on the day of the San Francisco earthquake, and checked into the Hollywood Econo Lodge (‘Spend a Night, Not a Fortune!’). It seemed like the sort of place where exciting things might happen. We didn’t know about Quentin Tarantino then, but if we had, we might have hoped for a drug bust gone wrong or at the very least some kind of kung fu.
As it was, we ate the stale donuts in reception and decided to call our families back home, to tell them we were in California but not near the earthquake, and in good health. Actually, we were pretty excited about the donuts even though they were stale. It had been a month since we’d been in touch with our folks because, in the days before the internet or cellphones, doing that was all a bit of a bother. We couldn’t even dial New Zealand from our room — the receptionist had to ring the number and connect us.
It turned out our families weren’t worried about us at all, because they had other things to worry about. My beloved Uncle Laurie had died while we’d been traipsing across the States, my mother told me. Oh dear! And Dave needed to call home straight away because his father had advanced lung disease. What the? Oh, and my own father, not to be left out, had more of the same in his liver. Are you kidding me?
This put something of a dampener on our plans to find fame and fortune in Hollywood, let me tell you. Dave needed to go home straight away, so we had to sort that out somehow, but first we needed beer and cigarettes and Pringles because, like donuts, stale or otherwise, they were still a novelty back then.
I was charged with going to the grocery store down the street, so I set off, my head still reeling with the shock of all that bad news. I filled my arms with Miller Lite, Marlboro Lights, and Lo-Fat Calorie-Free Practically-Good-For-You Pringles (if only) and joined the queue at one of the check-outs.
When I got close enough to the register I dropped my wares on the conveyor belt, at which point the entire store fell into a frozen silence as the head of the woman behind the cash register snapped back like Nessie from the Loch, as she roared: ‘DO NOT PLACE YOUR ITEMS ON THE COUNTER UNTIL THE PERSON IN FRONT OF YOU HAS COMPLETED THEIR PURCHASE!’
Her name-badge said ‘Dolores’, and her face said that if I did not remove my items quick-smart she would rip my head off, pull out my innards, tie them in knots, chop them into tiny bite-sized chunks, fry them, chew them up, spit them out, then feed them to the pack of ravenous red-eyed wolves she kept under her chair.
I removed my items quick-smart. I didn’t know about that particular check-out rule, and anyway my father was sick, but Dolores did not look like the understanding type so I didn’t mention that; I just blushed and felt stupid and wished I was invisible or had gone to a different store.
Then a wiry little man with fuzzy hair came up behind me and — horror of horrors — dumped his shopping on the conveyor belt.
This time I froze in terror along with everyone else, and, sure enough, Dolores’s head swivelled several times, taking her three chins with it as her Darth Vader-like roar shook the very light-fittings: ‘DO NOT PLACE YOUR ITEMS ON THE COUNTER UNTIL THE PERSON IN FRONT OF YOU HAS COMPLETED THEIR PURCHASE!’
There was a moment’s silence. The wiry little man with fuzzy hair looked at his shopping, looked at her name-badge, looked at her face, and said: ‘Screw you, Dolores.’
Then he turned and walked away.
What can I tell you?
I LOVE that wiry little man.
Some rules honestly attempt to maintain public health or safety or good taste, and they’re worth sticking to, but some are just really f**king stupid, and Dolores’s was one of them. Plus, there’s just no need to be so scary.
In 1989 I did not have the gumption to even consider telling Dolores to screw herself.
In 1997 I did not have the courage of my own convictions when it came to Dolores getting screwed on the cover of my first book.
Now? Well, I think what you’re holding in your hands speaks for itself — and, no, smarty-pants, I know it’s not actually a talking book, it’s a book that simply suggests a certain approach to happiness which I call wicked, because then I don’t have to justify making stuff up and never reading Deepak Chopra, whose approach is probably not, say, wicked, although of course I wouldn’t know, and when I say ‘say’ what I really mean is … Hello, and welcome to my world.
And screw all the Doloreses.
1. You don’t have to worry about turning 50. You did it already.
2. You don’t have to explain yourself if you can only think of two reasons.
It’s not quite in the JEANS
A lot of rosé has passed under the bridge since I wrote Stuff It: A Wicked Approach to Dieting, back in 1997.
At that point in my life I was fresh out of my job as editor of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, and working as a breakfast host on a middle-of-the-road Auckland radio station. I was riding high on the joy of being in my mid-thirties, full of bravado. Being on a diet was for sissies, I believed. Be happy being you, I insisted.
In 1997, email had barely been invented — we mostly sent smoke signals and aerograms — so after the book came out, women used to stop me in the street and tell me in person that they loved what I had written and that it was helping them feel better about themselves.
I’m not saying there were hordes of them. Or even a single horde. But there was definitely more than one. Possibly even a small handful, although never at the same time, so I suppose it’s more like a lot of separate fingers.
Even now I still get the odd correspondence from someone on one of my many modern electronic devices, even though Stuff It itself is out of print, so they must be re-reading an old dog-eared copy like the one I have that has faded in the sun so much that on the cover I look chronically jaundiced.
I still believe that most diets are a waste of time, although I have less traction on the subject these days because I am no longer always overweight. But the point I made in Stuff It about being happy being you remains the same: it’s not the amount of space you take up in the world that counts, it’s the amount of space inside you and what you do with it. If you fill it with fizzy drinks and KFC but then cry because nothing fits, that’s not good. But if you fill it with fizzy drinks and KFC and still fit your clothes and have good skin and a clean bill of health, well, actually I want to meet you to find out what your secret is.
We all know someone whose money has not bought them happiness. Well, thin thighs don’t buy you happiness either. Some of the most miserable people I know are a size 6. Obviously I don’t know them that well, as I do have standards; I prefer my friends to be around a size 10, or 12 if I want to share their clothes.
For me personally it was something of an eye-opener to realise that the disco globe of happiness does not descend because you fit your skinny jeans. And while we are on the subject, just because you fit skinny jeans does not mean you should wear them. Sure, buy a pair, and feel elated — you owe that to yourself — but then fold them up and put them at the back of the closet and admit, deep down, what you’ve known all along: that they really only suit ironing boards and seven-year-old Biafrans. (Hang on, do Biafrans still exist? We used to put money in the mission box to save them at school. Maybe they were saved? Or maybe Biafra is called something else now?)
Anyway, even Biafrans, if they still exist — or particularly Biafrans, if they still exist — know that the bits of them and you that are lovable and interesting and important are still in you no matter what your size or shape, and, while it’s nice to fit clothes when you try them on in a shop, you can screw up your bank manager’s happiness pretty darn quickly by buying everything that looks good then having trouble paying the bills.
How the hell I ended up writing about Biafrans and diets and shopping sprees, I don’t know. It seems a case of extremely tasteless juxtaposition, and I feel bad for the Biafrans. I also feel bad that sometimes we used to put peppermints in the mission box because our teacher had disgusting breath.
Anyway, let’s forget about the
starving Biafrans. Grrr! I forgot they were starving. Let’s not forget about them. Let’s make a donation to the United Nations World Food Programme (www.wfp.org). There, that’s better.
So, moving right along, for the most part when people stop me in the street it’s not because they want to tell me how much they love my books or columns, or how they think I could be a top international supermodel. It’s because they want to know how I lost weight.
The terrible truth is that I just woke up one day and it was gone. I didn’t have to do a single thing! The Portable Liposuction Device salesman had not only finally arrived, he’d also snuck into my house and removed my flubber while I was sleeping. How lucky am I?
Not falling for that?
OK. The truth is actually a tiny bit opposite.
It was September 2001. We were living in Queenstown while the Ginger was working on a film about a … um, er … oh, rhubarb rhubarb (I never do listen).
I had been so busy not being on a diet that I had taken my eye off the scales for a tad too long, a fact which became only too clear in the sweaty changing room of the Queenstown Just Jeans shop.
Trust me, there was nothing Just about the jeans I tried on that day. They strayed more towards the Not Quite. And Then Some.
Happily, the Ginger — similarly prone to a spot of corpulence — was having the same horrifying experience in the adjoining cubicle. We both emerged, looking somewhat ashen, left the store empty-handed and empty-bottomed, jeans-wise, and repaired home to have a leafy salad and no beers for the rest of our natural lives.
Well, that’s not true. We did repair home, and the Ginger went on a diet, as is his wont. Men are very annoying — in general, in case you hadn’t noticed — but never more so than when on a diet, because for some inexplicable reason they seem able to stick to them without over-thinking it.
The Ginger generally doesn’t give a toss about his dress size, but if he does, he loses weight simply by deciding to. One morning quite recently, he got up, weighed himself, declared the results unsatisfactory and announced he was on a diet. By lunchtime he had lost a kilo.
Another male friend of mine, who also often fights and wins the battle of the bulge, took to the so-called Caveman Diet like a duck to water, declaring it the easiest thing he’d ever done and losing a bundle. His mystified wife, on the other hand, simply developed a serious addiction to the cheese he was himself refusing to eat.
Back to September 2001 and Queenstown, though. When I got back from the Not Quite Jeans debacle, I had to seriously put my thinking cap on. (I love my thinking cap because, like most hats, it always fits.)
In nine months’ time I would turn 40, I figured out. I would probably have a party. If not two parties. I would need something to wear. If not two somethings.
And it occurred to me, once my thinking cap was set at the correct jaunty angle, that while I was happy being me and diets were for people who didn’t mind not losing weight but liked talking about it, I did not quite fit anything that I might want to wear to either of my imaginary fortieth birthday parties.
This could have been shameful, because I had thrown major sh*t-fits for the very same reason on the eve of my twenty-first and my thirtieth, and on many other eves in between. Plus I had written a whole entire book about how you really shouldn’t do that.
This time, however, there was a major difference.
There would be no need for a major sh*t-fit on the eve of my fortieth, because it was still nine months away and a person can actually do something about their weight in nine months.
It’s pretty astonishing that it took me 39 years to work out that it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. I saw the ads, for Fat Guy With The Beard From The Hangover Movies’ sake! I worked in magazines; I knew every word Rachel Hunter had ever uttered. I may have even made up some of them myself.
Still, better late than never, and I have always been a late-bloomer. I’m the little engine that couldn’t. To begin with. But then, a lot later, could. That very day I went out and got myself an exercycle, and it is this trusty steed that I thank, to this day, for losing that weight and keeping it off.
Also, I hacked into Weight Watchers. Well, it wasn’t online then, but if it had been, I would have been a hacker. As it was, a friend of mine gave me the Week One book for the then-new Weight Watchers points system, and I followed the diet without going to the meetings or having the public weigh-ins, which I find beyond appalling.
This could be considered dieting, although it didn’t feel that way, because for once I had left enough time for it to actually work.
Also, because I wasn’t paying for it, I felt as if it wasn’t official. Having belonged to Weight Watchers groups in all corners of the world over the preceding two or three decades at great expense but without much lasting success, I rightly felt that I had paid my dues.
Remarkably, the points system worked for me. Previously at Weight Watchers, I had found the regime too pernickety to follow and had given up; plus, as I say, while those get-togethers definitely work for some people, they made me want to remove body parts with a hacksaw rather than queue to weigh them. I’m very tall. Just my skeleton would weigh more than an entire short fat person. No fair!
What the points system did, though, was let me make up my own mind about what I would eat, so it didn’t feel that diet-y. I remember very clearly the day my hand was reaching out towards a chocolate brownie and I thought, ‘Ooooh, I could have two bits of chicken later on for the exact same price.’ The penny dropped. A cookie in the hand was worth two birds on a plate.
Same with exercise. If I could do 20 minutes on the bike, I earned an extra point and so could have a bit more at tea time. This kind of bargaining with myself, I could do! Like most former serial dieters, I am a champion bargainer.
The difference this time was that everything I was doing, right or wrong, was religiously being recorded in a diary and added up at the end of every day. And although I do spend a lot of time writing fiction, in this instance I tried to stick to the facts, which as usual were more boring than making stuff up, but quite useful for getting a clear picture of the situation.
Plus I was actually weighing myself instead of imagining what the scales might say. Serial dieters tend not to actually weigh themselves because they are afraid of bad news. This is not a great system, because if you are going by how tight your clothes are, and if your clothes tend for the most part to be baggy in the first place, you can get seriously out of whack. Rip the plaster off, I say, and let the scabbing commence.
Actually, I still don’t like weighing myself, because I can put on three kilos overnight. I am not kidding. That’s a baby. And I’ve certainly never eaten one of those that I know of, although I did have a very strange soup once in China.
Anyway, when you’re cutting down, the first thing you have to do is know what you are cutting down from, because that can be a very motivating factor to keep on cutting.
I stuck to that Weight Watchers’ Week One programme like glue for a month, and by then it was not even a diet anymore, it was just the way I did things. I’d always been very sceptical of the change in ‘lifestyle’ that diet experts talked about, because it sounded like too much of a commitment. But while I was writing down what I ate, exercising and weighing myself, a ‘lifestyle’ became a lifestyle.
When I turned 40, nine months later, I had lost almost 15 kilos. In the next year — well, more about that to come.
In the meantime, can we just return and give praise to that humble exercycle? I have the very same one to this day. It drives the Ginger bananas, because it has pride of place in the living room where I watch TV at high volume when I use it, which is still quite often.
Its handles have lost their mojo (they smell like cheese-and-onion crisps), and the batteries no longer work — it has to be plugged into the wall — plus you can only operate the necessary buttons on the key pad by repeatedly poking them with a wooden lemon-juicer, but I love that exercycle.
In September 2001 I could manage maybe 10 minutes on it. By October, maybe 12; by Christmas of that year, 20. At times since then I’ve pedalled furiously maybe for 40 minutes or an hour if I’ve been overdoing it at the smorgasbord; at other times I’ve used it to hang my beach towel on.
It sits there, day after day, reminding me that if I’m going to be sitting on my chuff yelling at Fashion Police on E!, I may as well plonk said chuff on the bike and burn off a few extra calories.
Why would I bother if I am no longer overweight, I hear you say? Or I should hear you say. It’s definitely what I used to think when I saw people who weren’t overweight at the gym. When I’m not overweight I’ll never go to the gym, I would scoff. I’ll just sit at home and eat pies.
Well, the thing is, once this lifestyle thing happens, you might find out you kind of like the gym. It’s good for your head, of all things. It makes you feel happy. And you know what? You’d probably go anyway, even if you didn’t still have an annoying muffin top — not that an annoying muffin top’s a big deal (Biafra, Biafra) because, for all we know, Mother Teresa had an annoying muffin top, and that didn’t stop her from being an otherwise good person, according to most.
‘If I can make one tiny little bit of difference in the world (apart from inventing no-risk slimming tablets that look, feel and taste like kettle-fry crisps*),’ I said at the conclusion of Stuff It, ‘I would like at least one nine-year-old, teenager, working girl, young mum, or old-age bowling champ to read this book, forget their fat day, hitch up their elastic waistband, look the world in the eye and say, “Stuff it!”’
That’s a petal on the daisy-chain of the key-ring to happiness right there.
The only difference is that obviously now I would like them to say, ‘Screw you, Dolores!’ instead. Or, in fact, words of their very own choosing, which is kind of the point: do it your way, just do it.