Introduction HOW I WAS DISCOVERED...AND HOW I FINALLY DISCOVERED MYSELF
I grew up hiding two major secrets. These secrets were the keys to my personality, and they controlled my every move. They are also responsible for why I decided to write this book.
The first secret: I was (and continue to be) absolutely boy crazy. Why was that a secret? Because -- early on, at least -- I found it worked better for me. My parents were both forty-something when I was born, and though I've always been close to my mom, we are from different generations, and boys and sex were subjects we didn't discuss much. As for my father, bless his heart, I think he believes that I am a thirty-two-year-old virgin. I am the youngest of six children -- and the only girl -- and all of my big brothers had friends. And since we lived right across the street from a park, and our house was always stocked with sodas, chips, and other goodies from my dad's restaurant supply business, our house in San Clemente, a southern California beach town, was the place to hang. I have been surrounded by men since the day I was born.
Ironically, though, that's what made me hide my boy craziness. It started with my first crush at the age of five. Paul was a teenager who lived across the street, and I thought he looked like Elvis Presley. I had a little record player and a 45 of "Love Me Tender." I used to play that record over and over, imagining that it was Paul singing the song to me. My brothers teased me mercilessly about this, and eventually one of them broke my 45. That was the last time I shared my feelings about boys with my brothers.
But my brothers weren't the only males whose behavior convinced me to stay mum. As I grew up, I saw what happened whenever a similarly boy-obsessed friend of mine (and I had several such friends) let a guy know she had a crush on him. He would make fun of her or, worse, avoid her completely. What I learned to do instead was to become pals with whomever I had a crush on and keep my fantasies about him to myself.
And I had plenty of other crushes in high school. Few knew the real reason I changed my class schedule so much -- I wanted to be where the boys were! I even took Algebra 2 a year early -- which meant I had to slog through both geometry and algebra at the same time -- simply so I could get into a class with a lot of older guys.
And, boy, did I make my dad and my brothers -- all of whom were jocks -- happy when I signed on to take statistics at football and basketball games. I couldn't have cared less about the sports, but by doing stats I got to stand on the sidelines with the football players and ride the bus with the basketball team. Just me and the boys -- the way I like it! I became buddies with dozens of guys, and I continue to have a lot of male friends today. These male friendships have given me a deep insight into what makes men tick, insight that I will share with you in this book.
But there was a flaw to my keep-your-fantasies-to-yourself strategy. Becoming buddies with a guy first, in hopes that the guy's interest in me would eventually turn romantic, didn't work any better than my friends' aggressive I-love-you-I-love-you-I-love-you-forever behavior. Sure, I became "one of the guys," but that's the way it stayed: I was one of the guys instead of WITH one of the guys.
I now know that often it's up to us to make our interest known. I'm not suggesting we revert to the panting "I've got a MAJOR crush on you" notes that never worked for my girlfriends in high school. I'm suggesting an intense but brief-as-a-spark come-hither look in your eyes or a touch on his arm that's just a split second longer than "friendly." In Chapter 5, "The Approach," I go into detail about why my new strategy works and how to pull it off.
I probably would have figured this out years ago -- even in high school -- but there was a big obstacle (literally) that crushed the kind of confidence a girl must have to go after a guy. And that obstacle was secret number two: I loathed myself because I was fat.
I have always been big. I was a chubby baby, the biggest girl in school, and I continue to weigh more than what society has deemed acceptable. I can't remember a time when I didn't think about my size, and some of my earliest memories have to do with people's reaction to it. The neighborhood kids could be cruel. "Katie, waity, two by four, couldn't fit through the bathroom door," they sang.
In my immediate family we have always survived by way of affectionate teasing, and very rarely did that teasing go somewhere that really hurt. Though my parents have always been big, my brothers were thin and I was the only child with a weight problem. I have no memories of my brothers ever really being cruel about my weight. Their teasing was more along the lines of "Katie's hungry again!" if I happened to point out a Dairy Queen when we were on the road. (Nowadays, I'm the only one in the family who does not battle weight gain.)
Other relatives, however, weren't always so gentle. My Great Aunt Chrissy, for example, used to constantly comment about what I ate or how much I weighed, and my gram would argue with her in my defense. Sometimes these arguments upset me so much that it almost hurt to breathe. And they left their mark on my developing sense of self.
One of my most painful experiences occurred in high school, after a couple of close friends and I got into a fight. I don't remember what the fight was about; what I do remember is the letter they wrote me when we were in the midst of it. It said something to the effect that I was disgusting because I was fat and that I had no self-respect since I was allowing myself to stay fat. These girls knew I battled my weight, they knew I tried diet after diet. They knew I cared about how I dressed, how tan I was...how I looked. How could they say I had no self-respect?
Through all of the years of teasing and mean remarks, I stayed strong on the outside. I always put on a happy face. I was outgoing and active. I didn't hide out. I rarely let people know how deeply they were hurting me. Instead, I'd go quietly to my room and cry, sobbing "Why me?" over and over again into my pillow.
My weight affected my every move. It was always my excuse. If a guy didn't like me, it was because I was big. If I didn't make a sports team or a play I'd tried out for, it was because I was big. If someone near me laughed, they were laughing at me because I was big.
Still, I kept up the strong front, and if you do that long enough you actually do become strong. It's that strength that has enabled me to travel the world and to get where I am today. But for years there was one thing I did not have the strength to battle, and that was the contempt I had for my own body. I starved it, subjected it to every fad diet that came along, took it to a variety of so-called weight-management experts, and even appealed on its behalf to the biggest expert of all: "Please, oh please, God," I used to say at the end of my nightly prayer, "please help me lose weight."
I don't do any of that anymore. Today, I am happy with who I am. I love my body just the way it is. I take care of myself and live my life. But the recovery of my self-esteem took years...and it started with just one sentence.
THE SENTENCE
In 1991 I had been modeling for a year and was living in Manhattan. My roommate at the time, Kelly Repassy, was one of the top plus-size models in the industry. She worked all the time and was always jaunting off to exotic locations for photo shoots. I was still considered a new model. And while I had managed to work a lot in Los Angeles and Miami and was now playing in the big league..., I wasn't working much at all. My self-esteem was at rock bottom because I'd been in the city for five months and not only was I broke, I was gaining weight. In those five months despite all my dieting efforts, and my lack of money, I'd still managed to grow from a size 16 to a size 18. I was miserable. This California beach girl wasn't cutting it in the Big Apple.
Then BBW came to town for a shoot. BBW, the magazine for big, beautiful women that has since suspended publication, was based in Los Angeles and had helped give me my start as a model. They booked me for a day of the shoot and booked my roommate for three days. I was excited because here was my chance to work with a model of her level. This was an important shoot for the magazine, so both the editor and the publication director were on the set. My self-esteem shrunk even smaller: I felt like the proverbial small fish in a big pond.
It was during the lunch break in the studio of a famous photographer that I heard the sentence. The publication director, a stern, stocky woman with long black hair, leaned over to me and said, "You know, Katie, we love you at BBW. You are one of the prettiest models we've ever used. But there is something in your eyes that says you don't like yourself. Katie, you have a choice: You can either learn to accept yourself the way you are, or do something about it."
I had a choice! I did not have to be thin. No one had ever pointed that out to me before...and it had never occurred to me on my own.
I couldn't get her words out of my head. I'm a Libra -- the scales, you know -- and I tend to weigh out my options via "plus and minus" lists whenever I have a tough decision to make. That night I sat down and made the most important plus and minus list of my life. I wrote "size 14" on one piece of paper. That was the smallest I had ever been as an adult, and it had lasted only six months. I labeled another sheet of paper with my size at the time, the size I am to this day -- size 18. Then I divided each paper into "positive" and "negative" columns and evaluated the most important aspects of my life -- basically, men, health, activities, clothes, and career. I worked on these lists until I fell asleep.
The next morning, I got up and read over my work from the night before. It was an amazing thing, but the size 18 column listed one more positive than the si...
