INSATIABLE (continued)

By the time she got to high school, Veronica had grown from a big girl into an overweight teenager, but she’d learned to control her eating - at least in public. Instead of begging for Twinkies, she’d beg her brother to eat them so she wouldn’t. And then, when no one was looking, she "snuck-ate." Years later, when she cleaned out her childhood room, she found her drawers full of wrappers from contraband Suzy Qs and Yodels.

Her weight zigzagged up and down, depending on whether she was dieting or bingeing (as you might imagine, over the years, Veronica and the women in her family have tried, and failed at, in Anita’s words, "every diet in the world, whether it was a staple in the ear, hypnosis, or Weight Watchers"). But it wasn’t until Veronica headed off to college and got involved with her first "real" boyfriend that she became truly obese. "The relationship was crummy, and I ate all the time," she says. On top of her regular meals, she kept cold cuts, bread, and a stash of Oreos in her room. "My suitemates were like, ‘But you’re so pretty!’" Veronica says, mimicking the tone used by mothers of girls who pierce their noses or shave their heads. And then her weight edged over 200. "I said to myself, ‘I’m in big trouble here, big trouble. I’m 200-plus pounds, I can’t stop eating’ - I’m going to cry - ‘I can’t go on like this.’" She decided to make a run for it: She broke up with the boyfriend, moved to New York, and transferred to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she earned a degree in fashion marketing.

And she was happier - but still pretty fat. A little over 210. "My cousin [Dina], who’s like a sister to me, was getting married, and I was her [co-]maid of honor. She came to me one day and was like, ‘The dresses are one-shouldered. And we can’t change the dresses for you.’ She wasn’t being mean. She was just being honest." Veronica had a panic attack. "And that’s when I went on the liquid diet. . . . For six months I ate nothing but shakes. Nothing. God as my witness. I chewed gum. I drank diet soda. I smoked my brains out. And I ate no food for six full months. And I exercised, and got down to like 147 pounds. Or 150. And - I looked really great for the wedding. Everyone thought I looked just wonderful." But the emotional "void" that she’d been stuffing with food persisted. "So I’d fill it with shakes. ’Cause you know what? At the end, I started compulsively overeating my shakes."

Veronica figured out how to make the shakes into "cookies" and "pudding" by adding less water and microwaving them. She started eating eight packets a day instead of the recommended four. "I knew it in my heart, I am so gross. And I said to myself, ‘It’s only a matter of time - you’re going to fall off the wagon. And then it happened.’" One weekend she bought some stonewashed jeans (give her a break, it was the ’80s) for her new figure. Then she went off the liquid diet, and by the next weekend she couldn’t get the jeans past her thighs.

After college, she landed a great job as a promotions manager for In Fashion, a now-defunct magazine. "I was, like, ‘Oh, well, now, I’m not going to eat now. I’m working for a fashion magazine.’ " But her chic new environment just forced her eating further underground: "I’d be totally professional, everyone thought I was so on top of my job, and I was, I loved it, but then I’d come home and I’d take the pearls and the skirt and the stockings and the pumps off and I’d wash all my makeup off and I’d stick my hair in a ponytail and I’d put on my sweats and I’d start ordering away." Her brother, Peter, who’d never quite understood why his sister didn’t simply stop eating so much - Eat one cookie, he says he’d think, not a box - moved in with Veronica and began to see the depth of her problem. He told their mother, "You know, Ronnie’s really anxious around food." Veronica says it was the impatience of a junkie waiting for her hit: "I’d get nervous around food, like I had to
get it in me."

When In Fashion folded a year later and Veronica was shunted over to Soap Opera Digest - not exactly her dream job - she fell into a depression. She went on Prozac, but it didn’t lift her mood or help her lose weight. Now she didn’t know how much she weighed because her scale didn’t go over 300 pounds. "I would walk down the streets of New York and I just felt invisible, even though I was so massive and I knew I wasn’t invisible," she says. "You go into a supermarket, and you always think that - and people do-they look in your shopping cart." It wasn’t just adolescent self-consciousness anymore. She heard people call her a pig. In fact, she heard someone call her a "f---king pig." Once, when Veronica was standing at a light, a woman in a car puffed out her cheeks and made a fat face at her.

Eventually, she broke down in a sales meeting, sobbing, "I can’t take this." She committed herself to a psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed with an eating disorder. Veronica then checked into an eating-disorders clinic on Long Island, but found the program and the people - in particular her anorexic roommate, who cried when the nurses made her drink orange juice - more traumatizing than her own issues. She fled. Next up was a Sunrise, Florida, eating-disorders rehab, followed by a halfway house in Tampa. But the treatments didn’t take, and after another career disappointment and another troubled relationship with a live-in boyfriend, Veronica found herself back on the Jersey shore. Her parents bought her the apartment she lives in now, and she went to work for one of her father’s garbage companies.

Life was reduced to a joyless movable feast: After throwing on her size-54 bra, a T-shirt, and leggings (no underwear - even the largest from the Lane Bryant catalog were too tight) and maybe smudging on a bit of makeup (if she could stand to look at herself), Veronica would jump in the car and head straight to the 7-Eleven across the street from her building. She’d pick up a 20-ounce coffee with cream and sugar, a bagel, two or three Dunkin’ Donuts (she especially liked the Boston cream ones), and maybe a sugar cookie, Danish, or coffee roll. She’d spread the food on the passenger seat and wedge the coffee between her legs and dunk and eat breakfast number one during the ten-minute drive to work.

Near the office, she’d stop at a second 7-Eleven, a Quick Chek convenience store, or the Burger King drive-through to pick up her second breakfast. "I’d bring something for my assistant, who was eighty-five pounds soaking wet. I’d be like, ‘Oh, Dora, I brought us breakfast.’" At around 9:30 or 10:00, a food truck would come by for the mechanics and garbagemen. "And I’d be, like, ‘Oh, greasy-spoon truck, let’s go.’" Soon it would be lunch, and she and Dora would hit a Taco Bell or McDonald’s, or get a few slices of pizza and some onion rings. "I’d be exhausted by all the junk I’d eaten by 1:00, still have to work, and then eventually at 3:30, I’d be like, ‘Okay, who wants to run out and grab us something?’"

She’d work until 6:00 or 7:00, and then make another circuit to score dinner. "I’d stop and get Dunkin’ Donuts, or a pound of macaroni and buy cheese and put butter on it, or I’d get a quart of lo mein, and fried rice, and two egg rolls. And then I’d have to get a half-gallon or quart of ice cream and a candy bar. I mean, I’d have it all planned out: ‘Here’s all my sugary stuff, and here’s all my salty stuff.’" She’d strip down and pull her hair back just as she’d done in New York (even getting undressed for these "food orgies" had become a ritual). "I’d have the TV on, watching, like, Melrose Place, and just sit and eat, and then smoke, and eat and eat, and smoke, and eat," she says. "Then I’d pass out from the sugar. I mean, I wouldn’t fall on the floor, but I’d be like, ‘Omigod, I have to go to bed.’" She’d wake up at around 9:00 p.m. - "with still, like, the sugar around my mouth" - and start eating again until she cried herself to sleep or knocked herself out with a Tylenol PM. She figures she was eating at least 10,000 calories a day, and her weight climbed to more than 350 pounds. Everyday tasks became an ordeal. "Taking a shower was an effort. Getting out of bed in the morning, rolling over. It was exhausting just carrying all that weight around. You do stuff like put off going to the bathroom because you don’t feel like getting up out of your chair."

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