Things you only know if… you’ve been on a diet since age four

After her parents deemed her fat, Marisa Meltzer grew up counting calories until a shift in mindset finally stopped her obsession with weight

my lockdown kitchen has been a source of both comfort and dread. There’s the childish food I’m drawn to to mollify my anxiety – baked potatoes, pancakes, cheese sandwiches – and then the aspirational healthy things I buy – tons of baby spinach, quinoa, lentils – in an attempt to fit into my jeans (whenever the time comes that I go back to wearing anything with a zip). I eat a handful of milk chocolate for breakfast, feel guilty, and swear I’m going to eat nothing but vegetable soup for the next few days. It never lasts.

I have been on a diet for, essentially, my entire life. I wish that were an exaggeration, but it’s true. My parents put me on my first diet when I was four, young enough that I have no memories of food that don’t involve the restriction of it. This was the 1980s, when the whole world was watching their weight. And I, as a kid growing up in California to a mother who did Jane Fonda workouts, was no exception. When I see photos of myself at that age I had baby fat, and I imagine a well-meaning paediatrician told my parents I was in a high weight percentile for my age and height. But I don’t look like someone people would point at in the street.

I’m an only child and my parents were far from amicably separated, but they could easily focus on and communicate about my weight. And so trips to Mcdonald’s were eliminated; friends’ parents were told I was not allowed to eat cake at a birthday party; I was never allowed to order off a children’s menu at restaurants because there was too much fried food; dessert was verboten. It all ended up feeling like a punishment for something I didn’t understand I had done.

And so eating the food I wanted became my form of rebellion. You know the scene in The Wizard Of Oz where the movie goes from black and white to Technicolor? That’s how I felt when I spent time at friends’ houses. The most mundane foods, like cereal or lasagna, were indulgences that would never cross the threshold where I lived. I learned to savour them in secret.

My first round of Weight Watchers followed a few years later. My mother and I joined together – parent-and-child dieting was more acceptable in the mid-1980s – getting weighed once a week. The night before the diet started, I went to the fridge for some lemonade and my mother told me, ‘That’s your last glass. You don’t want to drink your calories.’ Now, over 30 years later, the idea of not wasting calories on beverages still haunts me every time I drink grapefruit juice or order a margarita.

At the age of 10, I endured two weeks of fat camp. My bag was searched for contraband chocolate and I did four hours of exercise classes a day. I lost 8lbs – and on the last day we were taken to the shops to buy new outfits with money our parents had set aside for a ‘weight-loss makeover’.

It was only when I hit puberty that I started to want to lose weight not just because my parents wanted me to, but because I wanted to look good in slip dresses and have boys like me. Losing weight could make me popular, I thought, and desirable.

Perhaps because I had a goal, I was able to actually properly lose weight. I started off on a diet of my own devising when I was 14 that consisted of a freshly squeezed orange juice, two plain bagels with nothing on them, and nothing else but water for the rest of the day. I lost 20lbs that summer. I felt triumphant, like I had finally overcome a fat childhood. But I wasn’t confident, I didn’t attend dances or have any male suitors to juggle. And, of course, I was hungry all the time.

What followed is every diet you can imagine, from the 30% fat, 30% protein ratio that kept Jennifer Aniston so slim to a stint as a vegan that I stopped once I began to gain weight, as I ate mostly bread, peanut butter and dark chocolate. I even saw a New York doctor loved by A-listers for his nutrition programmes. The client in after me was Jake Gyllenhaal who, if you’ve seen his handstand challenge online (or just stared at his biceps while mindlessly eating Greek yogurt, as I have), is clearly putting a lot of thought into what he consumes. This doctor told me I should be on the paleo ‘caveman’ diet, but a life without grain or sugar wasn’t worth the promise of a thinner body.

The ideal me – someone who can wear a UK size 12, who has sculpted abs and just one chin – is a distant, shimmering spot on the horizon I’ll never reach. Every diet is a promise that if you change your weight, you’ll change your life.

A week after my 40th birthday, I joined Weight Watchers for the first time since I was nine. But this time I wanted it to be different. No goal weights, for one. Rather than fixating on numbers on a scale and eliminating every last cosmetically unappealing ounce, I was instead interested in coming to terms with myself. I knew there was room to learn and change, and to find some peace. To a certain extent, this has worked.

Now, nearly three years on, I go to meetings every so often. I have a slightly more rational relationship with food (at least when we’re not in the midst of a pandemic) and I exercise more. But if you were to look at the numbers on the scale, I lost some weight. Not so much that I’d be on the cover of a magazine with a pair of comically large ‘before’ trousers to show off the change in my body. But the real change is in my attitude. I’ll count that as results. Marisa’s book ‘This Is Big: How The Founder of Weight Watchers Changed The World (And Me)’ is out now (Chatto & Windus)

The ideal me – someone with sculpted abs and just one chin – is a spot on the horizon I’ll never reach