Obsessed: America's Food Addiction Read online

  One night, my mom made “hamburgers” and Laura wolfed one down. I asked her, “Want another?” She said yes, and I laughed as she took a bite of it. “So you do like deer meat after all,” I announced. “That burger was made from venison,” Laura recalled later. “It was not the kind of food we ate at my house, where a typical entrée was not venison but meatloaf.”

  I remember feeling like my parents were different. Everything about us felt different, and at the time, I just wanted to be an American. I wanted to eat American food. My mother didn’t cook like other moms. I wonder if that somehow encouraged my feeling that I was missing out on something and promoted my cravings and binging.

  I found what I craved at Laura’s house, and I loved eating there. Her parents had a cabinet I dubbed the “junk machine.” It was filled with the kinds of snack food we never had at home. Potato chips, cookies, all kinds of cereals including peanut butter Cap’n Crunch! My all-time favorite was the cake frosting. They always had two or three canisters of Duncan Hines vanilla and chocolate icing on the shelf. My mom made her own icing, but I thought these people really knew how to eat, enjoying rich and super-sugar-infused, ready-made icing. I ate it right out of the plastic canisters, as if it were yogurt.

  Laura’s parents were always amused at how much icing I could eat. To this day, when I visit their home they greet me at the door with a quick hello and wait while I rummage through my favorite cabinet. “I grew up in a household where there were no restrictions on what foods we could have in our home,” Laura recalls. “My mother would buy snacks that children love, and Mika had this insatiable appetite for them.” Yes, I did!

  Laura and I ended up going to different high schools, but we got together almost every day after class. On the way home, we would stop at the local 7-Eleven and buy mounds of candy and ice cream to eat while we did our homework. Laura could eat a few bites of each one and be satisfied, but I didn’t stop until I had devoured the last bite, even scraping clean the family-size container of ice cream.

  I don’t know why a serving or two wasn’t enough, but I always had to get to the bottom of the carton. It would kill me to put an unfinished pint of Häagen-Dazs back into the freezer. Back then I had no idea why I had that kind of insatiable urge. I only knew that if my eating was interrupted, I would fixate on going back for more.

  I knew what I was doing was wrong, but it didn’t change my behavior. My mother noticed that I would sometimes steal away to eat junk food, and she would chastise me for it. “Mika, you’ve got to have more discipline,” she would say. “Mika, you are just compulsive!” I don’t think she knew how true that word was. I was a compulsive eater, and I was developing a dangerous pattern that would chart the course for a very dysfunctional relationship with food.

  Here’s how it played out for me as a teenager. I was a poor student who had trouble focusing. Junk food and candy seemed to be about the only things I could keep my attention on. I always felt hungry, but it was a nagging, irrational hunger. It was the kind that can never really be satisfied, and it got in the way of my fulfilling my potential as a student and a person. I just didn’t have enough focus left to be able to listen in school or retain information.

  I know now that I had some sort of a sensory disability, because I retain auditory information, but not what I read. My mother took me to visual therapy for several years, where I was supposed to train my eyes to focus, and I wore thick glasses. I am absolutely certain my academic challenges played into what became an almost debilitating battle with food and diet.

  While I have a successful career today, I really believe I could have done much more. More importantly, I could have enjoyed the journey, the joys and blessings in life, if only I had been able to turn off the messages urging me to eat. It was a self-destructive cycle. My teenage mind thought, Okay, I can’t be the smartest girl in school, but I can get that food in me and that’ll feel good. That feeling kept me isolated, even in my own home.

  I come from a family of overachievers. My dad was the national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter and an architect of the Camp David accords; he is a gifted foreign policy expert/strategist/Harvard graduate/everything. My brother Mark is US ambassador to Sweden, brother Ian was a key player in the Pentagon during the Bush years, and my mother is an accomplished artist. In our family, intellect was a valued commodity, and I never felt mine measured up. I never really thought I brought much to the table, so junk food filled the emptiness I felt. I couldn’t bring that to the table, but I could stash it away and gobble it up later.

  I looked up to my older brothers, and when they started running to stay fit, I started running, too. Pretty soon I realized this was more than just fun. I saw that if I could run enough I could eat almost anything I wanted, because I’d burn off the calories and control my weight. I became compulsive about that, too. It was like being on a hamster wheel. Eat more. Run. Eat more. Run. Eat more. Run.

  Looking back, I think now that one reason I was attracted to junk food was all of the commercials I saw on TV. I bought into the message that happy families ate at McDonald’s. Mine never did, but that didn’t diminish the power of the message and the images that accompanied it. I started eating those Big Macs and I did feel happy. They offered an immediate reward and pushed me toward an enduring relationship with food that was unhealthy and, ultimately, self-destructive.

  My mother kept trying to save me from myself. “You have no discipline, Mika! You need to show some restraint.” She meant well, but it wasn’t helpful. Her words just made me want to eat more, so I did. I got chunky, and my face became bloated from all the salt and sugar I was ingesting. But I kept on eating.

  You have no discipline, Mika! You need to show some restraint.—Mika’s mother

  Neither my mother nor I really understood what was going on back then. Focusing solely on my lack of discipline didn’t address the core of the problem. With research beginning to suggest that some people are addicted to certain foods, we are beginning to understand just how difficult it can be to control our impulses. Notice that I didn’t say it is beyond our control; it’s not, but the challenge is far from being entirely of our own making.

  When I went off to college my bingeing got worse.

  It wasn’t just sweets. I couldn’t eat a single slice of pizza; I had to eat a large Domino’s pizza, sitting alone on my lower bunk in Georgetown University. The entire thing! Afterward I’d be horrified with myself, but I’d still feel hungry. If I ordered Domino’s with a bunch of other students, I would be upset because I knew there wouldn’t be enough for me, and that I would still be hungry after we ate. So I would go back to my dorm room after dinner with the girls and order another one for myself. As I packed it away I felt a kind of peace, but with that comfort came a lingering sense of self-loathing.

  I made up for the indulgence over the next three or four or even five days by eating nothing at all. I mean absolutely NO FOOD. I would drink some water and go for a run. Not a jog, a run. Ten miles, if I could stand it. I gulped down over-the-counter diet pills, which made me nervous and made my skin break out. For a brief period of time I resorted to bingeing and vomiting, the classic bulimic pattern. Fortunately, my body wasn’t able to put up with this destructive pattern—it didn’t last long simply because I wasn’t very good at it.

  Despite my eating disorders, I never got fat, but I certainly damaged my body and pushed the envelope. It was a miserable way to live. I did not feel good about myself. And I did not look good, inside or out.

  After two years at Georgetown I transferred to Williams College. (My mother likes to tell people that I had the lowest SAT scores of anyone who ever got into that college.) I took my little problem with me. Even now, it’s embarrassing to talk about. Instead of studying and taking in what the professors were saying, or what the kids around me were saying, I was thinking, Okay, I’ve got to get out of here and run. I’m going to run ten miles. I would run those ten miles and return too exhausted and hungry to do my homewo
rk. It was so stupid. What a waste of a college experience.

  At Williams I used to gorge on these huge salads from the cafeteria. You may think it’s hard to gorge on a salad, but I took humongous portions. I would try and fill my whole body up with salad, along with gallons and gallons of water, just to make my cravings stop. I was desperate to do that.

  Maintaining the cycle of overeating, starving, running, and overeating again was exhausting, and it didn’t work indefinitely. Eventually, after a period of deprivation I would break down and go back to eating entire pizzas, cramming junk food into my mouth and consuming more calories in a night than I had in the previous week.

  Maintaining the cycle of overeating, starving, running, and overeating again was exhausting.—Mika

  My idea of fun on a Saturday night was to drive twenty miles to the Price Chopper in North Adams, Massachusetts. I would meander through the aisles and fill my cart with popcorn, sweet cereals, muffins, and chocolate cake (I still ate the icing with a spoon). My favorite guilty pleasure was Entenmann’s chewy chocolate chip cookies. I could eat an entire box in a single sitting.

  After a binge, I would sleep it off like a drunk. A very close college friend of mine struggled with anorexia and bulimia and went to a rehab center. At the time that felt like one step too far to me. I used to think that I didn’t need help like the girls who went to rehab, but looking back now I wish I had joined them. I wish I had been yanked out of school and forced into a rehab center. I really was sick, and maybe an intervention would have helped me to break the cycle a lot sooner.

  Instead, I just kept up the bad habits. Laura and I were lucky enough to spend the summer after college graduation in France together. My father had given us a choice: study at the Sorbonne or enroll in a smaller program in Versailles. After debating the pros and cons—better French program at Sorbonne versus better running opportunities at Versailles—we ended up in Versailles. It sounds pathetic now, but one of my most enduring memories of that remarkable summer was eating so many of my meals at a McDonald’s we found there.

  I continued to test the limits of my metabolism. I packed twenty more pounds on my frame, and I had bad skin and bad hair as well. I was overloading my system with calories and nutrients I didn’t need. I wasn’t healthy, and even worse, I was in denial.

  This went on for years, well into my mid-thirties. It haunted me when I launched my career in TV news in Connecticut, where I met my husband, Jim, and started my family. In television, like it or not, looks are a critical component of success. And I was determined to succeed, which made my struggle with body image and the food I ate even more intense. It was part of my inner dialogue every minute of every day.

  At WFSB-TV in Hartford I felt as though all the other women on the news team were beauty queens, and in fact some of them were. I met one when I was on the verge of getting my big break. At least I thought I was. I had certainly paid my dues. I’d been working at Eyewitness News as a freelance reporter, chasing fires, murders, you name it. I had gone all over the state to get a good story, and I thought it was about to pay off. I was expecting my first contract, a boost in pay, and a seat at the morning anchor desk.

  And then, in a heartbeat, everything changed. Instead of handing the prize to me, the station gave the morning news anchor slot to a young woman named Virginia Cha. Virginia was bright and young, an Ivy League grad, but she had no experience as a TV journalist. She was, however, a former Miss Maryland, and I thought that was why she landed the coveted position. I dubbed it the Beauty Queen Syndrome.

  Eventually, Virginia and I became friends. She has had a successful career, and I’m very happy for her. But I sure wasn’t back then, and that experience only fueled my desperate effort to be thin. I changed my hairstyle, wore red lipstick, and ran every waking hour that I wasn’t working. Ironically, in that tormented state of mind food seemed to be my only friend. That set up a terrible tension: when the TV business wouldn’t accept me the way I was, I turned to food for comfort, but I also fought desperately against its seductive call.

  I eventually got the morning anchor job I wanted at WFSB, and then jumped from the local TV station to the CBS network. But that success didn’t cure my food issues. Far from it.

  If you look back at me during my first big network job, CBS News Up to the Minute, which aired from two to five in the morning, I always look a little out of joint. My face is puffy and I look stressed. The person inside that body was paying too high a price to fit into the dress size that the outside world demanded of her.

  The cravings continued. At times I ate voraciously. Other times I forced myself not to eat at all. Invariably, when I did eat I was drawn to the worst foods possible.

  When I worked at CBS, someone would bring in a birthday cake and everyone took a piece. One piece. Not me. I’d eat all the icing off one piece, then all the icing off another. I’d trick myself into thinking it was healthier just to eat the icing because it had less fat than the cake. By the time I had polished the icing off four pieces, I felt physically ill from sugar overload. I didn’t understand then how sugar can trigger a reward response in our brains that makes a craving hard to ignore. I didn’t acknowledge that I had an eating disorder, and I certainly didn’t seek treatment for it. All I knew was that I was haunted by food in a terribly unhealthy way.

  I was haunted by food in a terribly unhealthy way.

  —Mika

  By 1996 I was the anchor of Up to the Minute, which required me to drive from my home in Norwalk, Connecticut, to West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. I had to be in New York by nine at night, and then make the same ninety-minute trip home at five in the morning. I was always lonely on those predawn drives home from work. My one consolation was that Diane and I had some of our longest talks at that time, because she was driving from Norwalk to Hartford to host a morning radio talk show. She would keep me awake and on the road.

  Only another woman in the broadcasting business could understand what that kind of schedule required. All my other friends were sound asleep because they were people with conventional lives—or at least conventional schedules. At that point I had been working either an overnight or early morning shift for over a decade. The schedule was taking a toll on my body, my mind, and, most importantly, my family.

  For the sake of my children and my marriage, I had to make a change. I was desperate to land a new job when my agent arranged a meeting with a woman who was a vice president at NBC. I was hopeful, but less than confident as I walked into the interview. I looked like a wreck. I had poison ivy all over one arm, I was fifteen pounds overweight, and I had developed a substantial double chin. (To a casual observer, I probably looked okay, but in the insanely competitive and sometimes cruel world of cable TV news, I was a shapeless blob at best.)

  My low self-esteem and crazy schedule didn’t help my appearance. I had a two-year-old and a newborn baby, and I still hadn’t lost the baby weight. I had no time to shop, or get my hair cut, or dress for success. I was still running, but I was so tired all the time that it seemed like I was just running in place. And the running wasn’t burning off calories the way it used to; it just made me want to eat more.

  This NBC vice president took a look at me and gave it to me straight. “You know what, Mika?” she said. “You’ve got to get your act together. You look terrible. You look terrible. You’re overweight, your outfit’s wrong, and what’s that on your arm? Go drink some water, lose some weight, and call me in six months.”

  I was devastated, because I needed to get off overnights so badly. But I thought, My God, she’s right. This is TV. I’ve got to look my best, and I don’t. The message I sent the second I walked into her office was “Hi, I don’t take care of myself and I am not happy.” The second message, if she cared to take another look, was “I don’t like how I look.” And if she wanted to give me one minute more, you know what that network executive would have seen? That my life was a mess.

  When you walk through a door that can change your
life, you had better send the message that you have your act together. I did not. So I just sat there, horrified by what she was saying, and equally horrified with myself, because everything she was saying was true.

  That network executive may have saved my career. My value was reflected in the visual message I was sending. To pretend I wasn’t sending it would have been my biggest professional mistake. To ignore her would have been mistake number two. I needed to learn from her tough talk and take action to become a healthier person, inside and out.

  I went back home and took a hard look at the reality of my life—working overnights, raising two small children, and trying to keep a big house together—and felt a surge of self-pity. I thought, How am I going to do this? Everything is working against me. I’m exhausted. I don’t sleep. I don’t have enough money for a trainer to help me get in shape or for cosmetic surgery to take care of this double chin. How do I do this?

  And then, suddenly, I had the answer. You just have to. It was a pivotal moment in my life. I wasn’t immediately sure what I had to do, or how to do it, but I knew I was taking the first step in the right direction. I was done abusing myself.

  It was time for some major changes, starting with making a commitment, no matter what else was going on, to set aside ninety minutes a day for me—to get healthy, eat right, and work out.

  It was time for some major changes, starting with making a commitment, no matter what else was going on, to set aside ninety minutes a day for me—to get healthy, eat right, and work out.—Mika

  This was a heavy lift because as an overnight anchor in New York City, I was already away from my kids too much. It meant that I had to let others take over some of my parenting duties while I took time to rebuild myself. Call me selfish if you want, but my feeling better and doing well at work was also going to benefit my family.