INSATIABLE
by Rachale Combe

Veronica Roselle is supersized. Her voice, low, a little husky - she smokes Parliament Lights seemingly by the carton - has got quality and quantity. Veronica projects, and she speaks in long, torrential paragraphs. She’s got a huge heart, and she wants to know your problems (she gives good advice, she says). If you start to cry, big, fat tears will well up in her eyes, too. Her aesthetic is grand. She drives a mammoth gold Lexus SUV. Her apartment in Long Branch, New Jersey, with its wraparound terrace and sweeping view of the Jersey shore, is magnificent: wall-to-wall marble, big gilt-framed mirrors, an army of figurines, a customized armoire so enormous, Veronica’s not sure she could get it out were she to move, a turquoise baby - grand piano, a chandelier over the splash-pool-size bathtub - Veronica really knows how to fill a room. You can’t avoid her, to be honest. Intense is the word that comes to mind. And obese - or severely clinically obese, if you want to be severely clinical about it - is the other word that would have come to mind a few years ago, before Veronica performed a rare act of reduction and lost 220 pounds. Now a lean, toned 139 pounds, at five feet seven, she’s thin - skinny, even. But Veronica, who’s thirty-seven, can’t bring herself to describe her body in such small-person terms. Instead, she’ll say she’s "more slender," or "slimmer," as though she doesn’t want to downplay, or perhaps forget, that her waist once measured more than five feet around and that her unquenchable appetite drove her to eat quarts of lo mein and gallons of ice cream and boxes of doughnuts until she passed out.

Veronica’s family looms equally large. In fact, it’s a wonder the Roselle house never exploded, given their collective expansive energy. Joe Roselle, Veronica’s father, six feet two, silver-haired, gravel-voiced, sits, walks, and talks like a man who’s done very well for himself (and he has, as the owner of several waste-management companies). He calls women he’s only just met "babe," and it seems entirely appropriate. In fact, you’d be disappointed if he didn’t call you babe. Veronica’s brother, Peter, younger by only eighteen months, has a similar BMOC confidence. Tall, dark, and handsome, Peter was president of the student body and his fraternity at New Jersey’s Monmouth College (which he and Veronica both attended), and so popular growing up, Veronica says, that their house was the place to be.

The Roselles were happy to be de facto chaperones, and this is probably because of Veronica’s mother, Anita, who loves a holiday, a birthday - any excuse to throw a party. When Anita isn’t out attending to one of her five charities, she’s entertaining family and friends at her home along the Navesink River in the posh hamlet of Fair Haven, New Jersey. She keeps a telephone on a stool next to her seat at the kitchen table so she can answer it - and it rings constantly - without leaving her guests. Anita, who has also struggled with obesity and overeating, recently followed her daughter’s lead and became "more slender." But before she lost those eighty pounds (and counting!), Anita’s gatherings featured insane, laughable (Anita herself chuckles about it) quantities of food: ten different appetizers, followed by six entrées (chicken, shrimp, and artichoke française, a family favorite called "steak Murphy," sausage and peppers, and perhaps an eggplant parm or some veal), plus side dishes, plus eight or more desserts, sometimes prepared by the Roselles’ caterer, who has also lately become "more slender," shedding ninety pounds in four months. If Anita’s sister, Marie Pellicone, came by, she would bring a few more salads and desserts, along with her husband, Tony, and two daughters, Dina and Denise. All four Pellicones, by the way, are also much "more slender" these days, having lost a combined 345 pounds.

That’s how it was: Veronica was a fat girl, in a fat family, living in a fat world. So how did Veronica, Anita, Marie, Dina, Denise, Tony, the caterer, and, for that matter, three other Roselle family friends all become "more slender" after years of losing and gaining back weight? They had gastric bypasses, a.k.a. stomach-stapling surgery. While the operation is still viewed by many as lazy or vaguely freakish - not incidentally the same kinds of adjectives often used to describe the obese - it is actually both extremely painful (compared to, say, the SlimFast plan) and increasingly common (it’s even got a celebrity endorsement by Carnie Wilson). Its growing popularity is probably due to the surgery’s phenomenal success rate: More than 80 percent of recipients lose and keep off an average of 60 percent of their excess weight for a decade, while almost no one who uses traditional methods does the same. Also, there’s been a marked increase in candidates: Nearly two-thirds of Americans are now overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and 27 percent of that group are obese. Perhaps the real question, then, is how did the Roselles, like so many other Americans, get so fat? In truth, it’s pretty shocking how little we know about the physiology of appetite, satiety, and metabolism. We’re discovering the basics: The brain makes us start or stop ingesting based on stomach receptors that tell the hypothalamus what we’ve eaten (fat or protein) and how much; glucose levels in the blood track the amount of energy we have available in the form of carbohydrates. The brain also sends and receives messages about our long-term energy reserves: Fat cells emit hormones called leptin and adiponectin (among others, scientists think) that indicate how much fat is stored. Depending on whether we weigh more or less than our genetic "set point" - more a range than one number - we will be encouraged, on a neurological level, to eat more or less. Metabolism may also be influenced by these signals - speeding up when we surpass our set point, slowing down when we fall short. And this explanation is cursory. Besides reproduction, food intake is the most basic requirement for the propagation of the human race, so the biological mechanisms that govern it are among the most evolved, with many redundancies and a preference for conserving energy. In other words, our evolutionary mandate is to err on the side of overweight rather than underweight.

Still, for the most part, the obese exceed even the upper reaches of their genetically determined weight range. They’re actually overriding nature’s design in some way, consciously or not: They may have a defect in the appetite-signaling process - something hardwired in the brain. Or they may have learned to use food to compensate for an abnormally low number of dopamine receptors, which regulate feelings of pleasure and satisfaction, in the same way addicts rely on drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. (Intriguingly, the antidepressant bupropion, which influences dopamine and has been approved by the FDA as an antismoking medication, was recently shown to help people lose weight.) Much is possible, scientists say, and very little is proven. The Roselles are a prime example of how difficult it is to tease out the causes of obesity, and of how likely it is that no one factor is in itself responsible: Was it their genes? In addition to the six family members already mentioned, another cousin of Veronica’s is one of those who survived bariatric surgery in its early, brutal form in the 1970s. Veronica can show you pictures of several generations’ worth of overweight relatives. (Her paternal grandmother was a "classic Italian grandmother, out of The Godfather - overweight, the cardigan sweater, the hair pinned back in the bun, the boobs that come down to here," Veronica laughs, cupping her hands somewhere around her navel.) Then again, perhaps the family was a victim of sociological forces. Ideas as well as DNA were passed down from generation to generation: Food is central to their Italian heritage, a way to show love, prosperity, and hospitality. Still, they’re not all obese. So perhaps the explanation is psychological: Many in the family say their eating was emotional and talk of abusing food. Of course, twin studies show that eating disorders have a strong hereditary component . . . which brings us back to genetics. But whatever each individual in the Roselle family thinks his or her main problem was, they all agree on one point: Veronica’s troubles were the most monumental.

Her story starts out typically enough: Veronica Roselle was a "big girl" from age five on, growing up in Neptune, New Jersey, not far from the apartment she lives in now. The tallest in her class. The wearer of specially made, extra-large Catholic-school uniforms. The oddball, she says. Excruciatingly self-conscious. "It was really painful to see all these cute little girls with pigtails, and even if they had glasses or whatever, they were just tiny and petite," Veronica says one day as we sit at her kitchen table, picking at tuna wraps and a fruit salad. "I was always isolated. I felt like I had no friends, no people I could
communicate with."

Veronica was also an anxious child. Her fears were such that her parents put her in therapy when she was ten. Her younger brother’s ease with other kids - and with his weight (he could eat whatever he wanted)-didn’t help matters. So, in a familiar story recounted on Oprah (and by Oprah) hundreds of times, Veronica turned to food-entertainment, opiate, and protection, all rolled into one chocolate-coated, cream-filled, artificially flavored snack cake. And the more she ate, the better she felt: "Cookies, candy, Suzy Qs, Yodels, Devil Dogs. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, Mom, I’m really dying for steak and potatoes.’"

Though her mother had been a slip of a girl when she got married - "She wore a double-A bra!" Veronica says-Anita began to put on weight after Peter was born. Peter’s girlfriend, Tiffany Weiner - a knockout brunette with a cartoon-vixen silhouette-says that some of Peter’s earliest memories are of pulling fudge pops out of his mother’s mouth. "I do believe that I got some habits from my mom. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I’m not blaming her," Veronica says. "I don’t remember pigging out with her. I don’t remember, like, ‘Okay, Mom, let’s get, like, a gallon of ice cream and sit and watch Dynasty.’ But she’d be eating the chocolate-covered frosted doughnuts from Entenmann’s on the three-minute ride home from 7-Eleven, so it was like, ‘Mommy does it. What’s the big deal?’"

Veronica was ten when she and her mother joined Weight Watchers together. "My parents really did their best to help me," Veronica says. "They kept certain foods out of the house-but it was almost like with any addiction, which eventually, of course, it turned into. If kids in the lunchroom had leftovers, I’d eat them. If someone had an extra Twinkie, they’d be, like, ‘Oh, Veronica, do you want this?’" On pizza day at school, she’d eat the other
kids’ crusts.
 

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