Read Eating Ice Cream With My Dog for Free Online

Katie and Bridget, had moved away from New York, so when I saw the numbers on the scale, I called one of the last old-timers from the meetings, known by twelve-step members as the “Rooms,” I habituated. Twenty years earlier, Patty had stopped fifteen years of vicious bulimia with the help of the Stepfords. She had the longest recovery of anyone left in the meetings I attended, although her largest size had been a mere eighteen.
    Early in April, as I was beginning to interview women for this book, I dug up my Stepford phone list and called her. “You have to sponsor me.”
    “I don’t really have time for more sponsees,” 5 she said. “I can take your food until you find a sponsor, though.” 6
    “You don’t understand. You are my sponsor now. You don’t have a choice. You’re the only person I know with the recovery and”—here my voice broke—“the kindness I need.” I had gained weight by eating sugar and flour. I was, therefore, bad—immoral, in a state of mortal sin, as corrupt as the last four presidents combined—and I needed not only forgiveness but benevolence in order to mend my evil ways.
    “Okay,” she said, her voice softening, “can you call me at five fifteen tomorrow morning?”
    In three minutes I was back in Program. 7
    Twelve-step thinking tends to be black-and-white—you’re clean 8 or you’re not, and “clean” doesn’t have much credibility until you have ninety days. The home meeting 9 I attended had changed. My posse had largely disbanded, and there wasn’t much talk of weight loss. I’d been taught to keep my mouth shut for the first ninety days of abstinence, to listen rather than speak in meetings, where foods are never specified 10 and the emphasis is on “hope, strength, and experience.” I had plenty of the latter but very little hope or strength.
    A week into working with Patty, she told me to write a history of my relapse. I did so on my Amazon blog. It was a rambling thing but people responded, and those readers gave me the company and support that I’d been missing in my current life of windchills, dogs, sugar, and wobbling abstinence. Blogging also made me more real to myself.
     
     
    Katie was deliberating on the practical matter of her suicide.
    She had already chosen the date—May 29, six weeks away, both sensible and sensitive: her brothers and mother wouldn’t have to remember separate dates for her fortieth birthday and her death.
    That was easy , she thought as she slipped her fingers along the edges of a box of carrot cake. The top lifted at a forty-five-degree angle. She took a forkful of frosting from the edge of the cardboard platter and allowed her attention to wander to the subject of packaging. Was it possible that Entenmann’s intended these fragile lids to dent like this so that consumers had no choice but to finish off the box in one go? “I wouldn’t put it past them,” she said to the living room wall, and kicked back in her La-Z-Boy. She stabbed into the cake and returned to the business of her death. Where she would do it was dictated by how, and how continued to dizzy her with possibilities.
    She’d tried pills, and she certainly didn’t want a repetition of the scenes with her family, the hospital, and shrinks that method had caused three years earlier. A gun would pretty much wipe out the good intentions of May 29, as would razor blades. In any case, neither had ever been serious options.
    There was nothing cleaner than pulling a James Mason/Spalding Gray—should she take a drive over to Half Moon Bay? But such a dignified death was reserved for those who would sink . Katie would bob in with the tide and find it as hard to get off the shoreline as the proverbial beached whale. Hanging was also the province of the thin—she had visions of bringing down rafters and scaffolding. Throwing herself off some rooftop would flatten anyone or thing she fell on. She didn’t have a garage, so carbon monoxide was a non-option.
    The San