Obsessed: America's Food Addiction Read online

  OBSESSED

  ALSO BY MIKA BRZEZINSKI

  Knowing Your Value: Women, Money,

  and Getting What You’re Worth

  All Things at Once

  OBSESSED

  America’s Food Addiction—and My Own

  Mika Brzezinski

  with Diane Smith

  WEINSTEIN

  BOOKS

  Copyright © 2013 by Mika Brzezinski

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Weinstein Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

  Editorial production by Marrathon Production Services, www.marrathon.net

  Design by Ellen E Rosenblatt/SD Designs, LLC.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 978-1-60286-177-0 (e-book)

  Published by Weinstein Books

  A member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.weinsteinbooks.com

  Weinstein Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  First edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my daughters Emilie and Carlie

  This book is about making good decisions

  by yourself and for yourself

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Mika’s Story

  Chapter 2: The Value of a Healthy Thin

  Chapter 3: Diane’s Story

  Chapter 4: Fat: Whose Fault?

  Chapter 5: Fighting the Food Demons

  Chapter 6: Mika and Diane: Making Progress, Still Struggling

  Chapter 7: It’s How You Think

  Chapter 8: It’s What You Eat, and How You Eat It

  Chapter 9: It’s How You Move

  Chapter 10: Leading the Conversation

  Chapter 11: Teach Your Children Well

  Onward: What I’ve Learned Today

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing this book has been both wrenching and rewarding as I faced deep truths about both food and friendship . . . so first of all I would like to thank Diane for being a real friend and letting me say what I had to say, and taking it and running with it.

  Thanks to all our other friends who took part in what we hope will be an ongoing conversation about this very real public health crisis.

  Thank you to Harvey Weinstein, David Steinberger, Amanda Murray, and Georgina Levitt, the wonderful people at Weinstein Books who jumped at the concept for this book.

  Special thanks to our wider circle of friends who supported us every step of the way, especially Joe Scarborough, my co-host on Morning Joe and wingman on the issue of obesity. Joe takes constant beatings from me on the air, but he truly stands by me in the fight to make our food environment healthy.

  I want to thank my boss Phil Griffin for always encouraging me to be transparent and real, despite the consequences. My thanks to Alex Korson, our executive producer on Morning Joe, for helping us get everything done.

  To all the extraordinary women and men we interviewed, a heartfelt thanks for sharing your insights with us. Thank you for inspiring us.

  Karyn Feiden, thanks for your deft touch and vision. Paula Brisco, thanks for your clearheaded thinking and practical wisdom. To Dan Tully and Emily Cassidy, thanks for focusing on the details. Lauren Skowronski, you are always right with me.

  Diane and I want to thank our husbands. Tom Woodruff supported Diane’s health challenge and pitched in with research, shedding light on subjects from science to public health policy. Thank you to my husband, Jim Hoffer, who worried about me taking on one more project, but who embraced this one when he saw that it would help make Diane and me healthier and happier people. Jim and Tom encouraged us to tell the truth and try to make a difference.

  To my daughters, Emilie and Carlie, when the going got rough and putting these words on paper felt a little too raw and too personal for me, you were my constant inspiration to try to get better.

  OBSESSED

  INTRODUCTION

  As I have moved through the process of writing this book—drafts, edits, revisions, etc.—I’ve sought the unvarnished opinions of friends, colleagues, and family members to answer a question that has troubled me from the beginning: How does a person who is not overweight write about her lifelong obsession with overeating without sounding like a narcissistic, woe-is-me skinny girl with an overinflated image of herself, particularly to those who share her obsession with food but happen to be overweight, or even obese?

  I can report back to you that the answer to my question was almost unanimous: you can’t. No matter what you say or how you say it, you’re going to sound like a privileged skinny bitch with food issues. Oh yeah, and a TV show. And a woman who was born into a wonderful, prominent family and has a blessed life.

  None of that suggests any kinship with the legion of suffering women whose debilitating relationship with food actually shows when they stand in front of the mirror in their closet. Yours doesn’t, so your opinion is not necessarily welcome here.

  So here’s the deal. I get it. I am acutely aware of the eye-rolling derision with which many may view my role in this book. I stipulate up front that a good degree of my success in life was gained through my appearance. I did not earn my genetic makeup, any more than I chose the family I was born into.

  I am a lucky woman, and I know it.

  On the other hand, I have worked hard, taken risks, and experienced as many failures as I have successes. I’ve been hired and fired more times than I would like to recall, have struggled for two decades to bring balance to my professional and family life, have been paid less because I am a woman, and have struggled through one eating disorder after another. But each challenge taught me a lesson I would not have learned otherwise.

  The experiences I relate in this book would be no different had I weighed 115 pounds or 215, and the fact that I am closer to the former does not negate the fact that, but for fortunate genetics and the will to change my life, I would be closer to the latter. But if that were the case, I would not be working in television, a visual industry that demands a certain look. It may seem harsh, but, as I wrote in my last book, in order to know your value you must have a clear-eyed understanding of what people are buying. To the extent that I may currently have that look, I am grateful.

  So the question is how do I make my point—that absent a fundamental change in the way we consume, prepare, and market food to our children and all citizens, we will never be able to attack the myriad eating disorders that affect millions of Americans today—without coming out and addressing my own internal food issues, despite an external appearance to the contrary?

  I’ll tell you how. It’s too important an issue to ignore. I’ll just do it.

  This is the book I have been afraid to write . . . terrified actually. It deals with an issue that is radioactive for me. How I eat, diet, and look has tied me up in knots my entire life, and I know I am not alone. I have been held hostage by food since I was thirteen years old. My body started filling out more than the figures of other girls in my class, and that set off what has become a thirty-year battle with my body image. Food has been my enemy. My determination to be thin has led me to extremes, and I’ve done damage to my body and my mind in the p
rocess.

  It has taken me a very long time to find a way back to health and balance, both physically and emotionally. I’m not there yet, but I’ve come a long way, and it’s time that I have the guts to talk about it. My battle is not over, but I think my story, and the stories of my friends and confidantes, many of them public figures who have had the courage to speak out about very private matters, might help you. I’m going to come clean, and you’ll see that you and I have a lot more in common than you might think.

  This book is all about the need to nurture a conversation and start turning back the tide of the obesity epidemic. It’s time we have a real and public dialogue about food and weight, and the threat they pose to the nation’s security. We have to. Right now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that two in every three Americans is either overweight or obese. We also have 12.5 million children, ages two to nineteen, who are obese—that’s three times as many as we had in the 1980s.1

  This book is all about the need to nurture a conversation and start turning back the tide of the obesity epidemic.—Mika

  Between the increases in disordered eating and the rise in obesity, our kids, especially our girls, are in grave danger. As a mother I know that unless we intervene, my own two daughters will face challenges that might be even more frightening than those with which I have struggled. I cherish my girls, Emilie and Carlie, and I have to do everything I can to prevent them from becoming as obsessed with food as I have been. I owe it to them to work out my own issues and to start talking about what’s going on in our society, and how we can change.

  I have never told my own story, not even to my closest friends, until now. But thanks to friends who have helped with this book, including the late Norah Ephron, Gayle King, Chris Christie, Jennifer Hudson, and countless others, my double life ends now. The truth is out. It’s not a pretty one, but I no longer care. Light really is the best disinfectant, and it is way past time to shine it on America’s screwed-up attitude toward food and what it is doing to us all.

  One thing that has always driven me crazy about my internal body image wars is that friends and family members assume that being thin is my natural state. It most definitely is not. The truth is that I live under a daily tyranny of food cravings, and I fight against them constantly. I resent those around me who seem able to eat whatever they want, and I resent those who look at me, like my friend and co-author Diane Smith once did, and think, Seriously, Mika, what would you know about being fat?

  The truth is that I live under a daily tyranny of food cravings, and I fight against them constantly.—Mika

  Believe me, I know a lot. For years, I suffered from an almost uncontrollable urge to eat certain foods. My disordered eating patterns extended from late nights in high school, when I would jam two or three Big Macs down my throat, to all-night eating sessions alone in my dorm room, to an Ambien-addled night when I walked downstairs as if in a trance, in front of my horrified husband, who watched me scarf down an entire jar of Nutella with my bare hands.

  I am finally ready to lay out the truth about all that. But it is really important that we put my struggles with the power of food—and Diane’s, and possibly yours—into a larger context. This is not just a story about each of us as individuals. It is also the story of a nation that makes eating hard to control.

  Of course we are each responsible for our own behavior, and in the end we make our own decisions about what we eat. But we don’t do it in a vacuum. With so many Americans either overweight or obese, something larger must be going on. It can’t be that all of us just lack moral fiber. Some of the problem has to be the kind of food available to us, and the environment in which we eat it.

  It’s becoming more and more obvious that our national obesity crisis is not just a “discipline” issue. It is also an inevitable response to all sorts of forces around us, from the images we have about women’s bodies in society to the policies that make it harder for kids to get healthy food at school and easier for agricultural subsidies that put cheap food filled with sugar, fat, and salt within easy reach.

  In this book I am going to be talking about all of this. Diane and I will be very honest about why we have sometimes eaten so badly, and we ask that you start being honest with your friends and family, too. Only by realizing that we are all in this together can we appreciate the need to think more about the forces that have put us here. And then we can get very specific about what you and I can do to turn things around—for ourselves, our children, and our communities.

  I was in my early thirties when I realized that the way I ate was on a collision course with my dream of being a news reporter. I was a wife, a mother, and a journalist, and I just had to stay healthy if I was going to juggle all those responsibilities successfully. But staying healthy was hard when I was behaving like a junkie hungering for the next hit of crack. My mind wandered to food all the time. I can’t begin to tell you how much time I have wasted with those thoughts. I have literally spent years of my life obsessing over food, chasing after food, gobbling down food—and then punishing myself for eating too much and trying to erase the effects.

  I’m not afraid to say I am addicted to certain foods. To me, addiction is the right word: the one that fits the pattern of my behavior and helps to explain some of the poor choices I have made. Not everyone agrees. Some of the scientists, doctors, and therapists who spoke with Diane and me as we were writing this book are still skeptical about the idea that food can be addictive, because obviously it satisfies one of our most fundamental biological needs. We have to eat in order to survive, just as we have to breathe. In fact, I’ve heard people laugh at that idea and say, “What’s next? Are you going to tell me we’re addicted to air, too?”

  I was behaving like a junkie hungering for the next hit of crack. My mind wandered to food all the time. I can’t begin to tell you how much time I have wasted with those thoughts.—Mika

  But while we do have to eat, we don’t have to eat cake and chips and over-the-top entrées loaded with high-calorie ingredients and chemical flavorings. And those are the kinds of foods that trigger an addiction-like response. In these pages, you’ll be hearing from people who are doing groundbreaking research on food addiction; research that is helping us understand what compulsive eating has in common with substance dependence.

  Hear me out and then think about this during your next meal, or when you head to McDonald’s. Although you might go out absolutely determined to order a salad, you will in all likelihood be drawn instead to items on the menu that are “hyperpalatable” or “ultraprocessed.” These are foods that have been packed with sugar, fat, and salt; foods we have processed, produced, and ingested in massive amounts over the last thirty or forty years. They are the foods many researchers blame, at least in part, for making our country one of the most obese on earth.

  It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that these are also the foods I’ve been addicted to for years. The ugly truth is that millions of Americans like me have become “hooked” on foods that stimulate the body’s internal pleasure system. They give us the feeling of reward that calls us back for more. It’s a biological response built into the pathways of our bodies.

  There’s a reason you don’t see people stuffing themselves with fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and nuts. Have I ever sat down and eaten a supersize bowl of broccoli? No way! But like millions of Americans, I have polished off a big bag of potato chips or a pint of ice cream at one sitting. I know I’m not alone when I admit that I have dived headfirst into burgers, fries, and other hyperprocessed foods.

  I’m not obese or even overweight, and I am less obsessed with food than I once was, but I still struggle. I fantasize far too often about what I’m going to eat next, even as I maintain (most of the time) a diet that some people think is way too rigid. I know these kinds of struggles are taking place in families across the country, and I know a lot of people are losing them.

  How sad for the next generation. Statistics show not only
that more children are becoming obese, but that more children are also being treated for “disordered eating.” So we’ve not only got a lot of overweight kids, we’ve got a lot of kids at a healthy weight with unhealthy food habits. Every parent wants to raise healthy and happy kids, but instead we seem to be setting them up for a lifelong losing battle with food.

  Whose fault is it that America is getting fatter by the year? Is it all about personal responsibility, as the food industry maintains? Or has processed food been deliberately engineered to make us crave it? Could food industry lobbyists in the circles of power in Washington be partly to blame for the obesity crisis that is costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars every year?

  Experts tell me that a lot of other factors are also helping us become fat. We offer gym at far too few schools and allow soda and candy to be sold in the vending machines of far too many. We build communities without sidewalks or safe recreation. We have a culture in which every business meeting and every social gathering is considered an occasion for eating. With fast food outlets at every corner, we can satisfy our cravings at the drop of a hat, with budget-priced junk food that is within easy reach 24/7.

  Let’s face it: the odds are stacked against us.

  No wonder we have a crisis of many dimensions. It’s a health crisis. In her book A World Without Cancer, Margaret Cuomo tells us that 30 percent of cancers are associated with obesity, diet, and lack of exercise. It’s an economic crisis, because it can be harder for overweight people to find good jobs. It’s a personal crisis for all of us who don’t feel good about the way we look or how we eat, and are embarrassed to admit it. It’s even a national security crisis, burdening the military with overweight recruits and a shrinking pool of potential candidates; according to our military leaders, one out of four young people in America today is “too fat to fight.”2