Instead of a bougie fitness studio with celebs, I work out at Gold’s Gym in North Hollywood, a real-ass gym with weights and no Lululemon babes or spinning. The guys are too busy lifting to hit on you. Which is good because I’m busy getting strong for roller derby.
Today at Gold’s, a trainer with gleaming hair, red carpet makeup, and biceps the size of Kate Moss’s leg is putting her client through the paces.
When she finishes, I march up to her. “Girl, I need muscles. Can you train me?”
She slowly eyes me under her camo cap. “Will you do exactly what I say?”
I blurt, “Hell yes,” not knowing what I’m agreeing to or whether I can hack it but a hundred percent in.
Thus begins my training with the glam bodybuilder named Francesca. She distracts me with chatter while I heave a sheer volume of weight I’ve only imagined until now. Sometimes I hiccup with laughter while straining under the weights. The subversiveness of being a fashion model who body builds spurs me on.
Francesca gives me a ridiculous diet to follow: only whole, clean foods, no junk or sugar or even protein powder. She says I will not get athlete-strong otherwise.
I immediately enter the stages of grief. I bargain with her, I push back at her, I tell her she doesn’t understand, sugar is my ride-or-die! I eat fine, I didn’t sign up for being a goddamn health nut, just let me have a donut! Then I get really, really depressed, because sugar is my friend. And because I know Francesca is right.
My go-to emotional comfort is chocolate Kisses, caramel cheesecakes, pints of gelato with butter cookies. Haribo, Twizzlers, Godiva, Nutella. You can be anywhere in the world and there is a corner store, or Italian alimentari, or Australian milk bar. When you’re a sugar junkie and you are sad or lonely or self-sabotaging, you can always get your fix. Giving up that dependability feels harrowing.
But doing sugar for me is all or nothing, like doing “one” line of coke or having “one” bite of cake.
After a final hurrah of desserts, I move on to the stage of acceptance. I plan meals dense in nutrients. I weigh out four ounces of protein to add to yams or rice or veggies, chilled in glass containers. I carry around turkey jerky and a liter of water. I eat meals and more meals.
The underbelly of all of this is terror. I’m scared shitless that if I eat this much, no matter how healthy, I will gain weight. It’s hard enough staying thin as a model.
Food has scared me for decades. I cannot be trusted with it; if I go into a grocery store for eggs and veggies, I walk out with ice cream and chips. If I cut carbs for one day, I binge for three. And there is always the worry that I’ll end up purging.
Francesca doesn’t get that eating to gain muscle is not possible for an eating disordered person. What she’s asking is impossible. To eat five times a day, every three hours. To consume triple digits in carbs and keep them down. To sit with my belly full of food and not panic even though the food is whole, clean, organic.
Would you put an addict in a dope house? An alcoholic in a bar?
I don’t push back because I’d feel too exposed around Francesca. I’m vigilant about hiding my means of coping. Decades of deprivation, purging, and erratic nutrition have hardwired my body to cling to calories for dear life and turn them into fat.
I’m what you call “skinny-fat”—I appear to be thin but am actually carrying a high percentage of body fat with a low amount of muscle mass. Being over forty means more muscle loss, although it’s not inevitable—strength training will change your body composition. You’ve got to lift, bro. But the “bulking” required to put on muscle sounds horrifying. Consuming surplus calories to gain muscle and strength, with the potential of gaining fat? What am I, a draft horse?
But my body begins doing the unexpected. It is taking all of this food, all of these calories and carbs and nutrients, and…I don’t know, using them? Before when I ate half as much, the food was…random. Not strategic, or whatever this is. Food was about dulling my feelings or rebelling against my hell-bent deprivation. Now it’s what I’m supposed to say yes to.
Yes is scary. It is not numbing myself with drugs, food, alcohol, and men. It is about becoming more of myself, not disappearing myself. My reluctant yeses and my fledgling self-care begin to send the message that maybe I deserve it.
All this eating and training and feeling and writing…I feel myself waking up. Becoming dimensional. Since I was twenty my identity has been that of a model. A privilege, but also a mindfuck. As a model, you are a product and you are sexualized and you are expected to deliver. It’s not personal, but you cannot help but make it so: it’s you who is getting admired or rejected.
Now my self-concept is expanding to include my personhood, with its layers and messiness, its traumatic beliefs from the past. Philosopher Annette Baier called the skills and abilities of being human the “essential arts of personhood,” which I hope I’m starting to get the hang of.
As if that weren’t enough, I am weightlifting three times a week, and training for roller derby three times a week. I revolve my life around the bursts of energy needed and earn a bone-deep tiredness. I try not to think about how this will affect my career.
But it turns out that skating and lifting and living makes me more bookable as a model, not less. Despite my bruises, despite over-forty models with more magazine covers than me and a bigger name than mine. I’m leaner, more at home in myself, and give fewer fucks about how I’m perceived on set. Photographers and designers respond to that. While it’s affirming, and I need the money, I don’t just want to be a prop on a set.
For the first time I sense my body as a living being, not just an object.
