Real Housewife Jackie Goldschneider faces her mortal enemy: food

A Jellybean was a threat. A cookie was an extinction event. As for pasta...!

There have been memoirs of anorexia before. But few can have painted a more harrowing picture than "The Weight of Beautiful," the new book by Jackie Goldschneider, a Tenafly real estate manager and journalist who is now best known as one of the stars of Bravo's "Real Housewives of New Jersey."

The obsessive computing of calories, the food diaries — like police reports — detailing each incriminating mouthful, the weighing and re-weighing, the secret eating of tuna salad in the ladies' room to forestall hunger, the endless excuses ("I'm just not hungry!"), the fairy tale wedding overshadowed by fear of the agonizing moment when the groom will actually have to put a forkful of wedding cake in the bride's mouth (she managed to keep most of the frosting on her lips, where it could be wiped off afterwards). Holy guacamole!

It's a kind of horror story — but not, Goldschneider trusts, one without hope for others trying to beat this problem. She did.

"I'm not going to lie, I still have some fears around food," said Goldschneider, whose parenting column "Minivan Musings" appeared in The Record.

"I'm about 80 percent recovered," she said. "There are foods I labeled as bad for so long that it takes me a minute to get there. But now I know food as enjoyment."

Letting the viewers in

Viewers of "Real Housewives" have watched some of this process unfold onscreen, where she's come clean to a TV audience that's been watching her since 2018. She's also, partly to facilitate her recovery, scaled back her participation in the show: after being a regular cast member seasons 9 to 12, she is now a "friend" to the housewives.

The fans have been fantastic, she says.

"The outpouring of love was outrageous," she said. "I would get hundreds of messages a night telling me, 'My mother struggled' or 'I struggle' or 'my daughter struggles,' telling me the show gave them hope or made them want to recover. It was amazing. I saw the power of sharing your story, and it really put it into my head: 'My God, if I could get there one day, if I can recover, I really need to put this story out there.' "

Her story no less heart-wrenching for being commonplace. It's an extreme form of a weight anxiety that the culture foists on all of us. Especially, on its little girls. Some 30 million Americans suffer from eating disorders, according to the National Eating Disorders Association.

"Unfortunately, I think my story is a lot more common than people think," she said. "But even if you don't have it to the degree I had — which plenty of people do — just struggling with it at all is so secretive and shameful. People don't want to talk about it at all. That's what keeps you sick."

In her case, it's the story of a massive programming conflict.

Mixed messages

On the one side, the values of a family just one generation removed from poverty. Her grandparents, fleeing the Nazis, had lived in a refugee camp in Siberia. Their food anxieties, passed down to her children, were very much alive at the dinner table when Goldschneider was growing up. Her family prized food, and ate each meal like it might be the last.

"My mother always had that kind of attitude like, the bottom is just waiting to fall out and there wouldn't be any more food," she said. "And she really overfed us. It didn't come from a bad place."

On the other side, a culture that fetishizes thinness.

She hasn't yet seen the "Barbie" movie. But she played with Barbie — and like many children, she internalized her unspoken message. "You see that's the standard of beautiful," she said. "I think it seeps into your mentality. Chubby is for Cabbage Patch Kids. It's not for a glamorous adult."

Growing up first in Staten Island and then Monmouth County, New Jersey, she had been self-conscious about her weight. By the time she was a senior at Manalapan High School, she was obese: invisible to her classmates, ashamed to shop for a dress at the mall, unnoticed by boys except for the one who saw her putting on lipstick in the hallway and muttered under his breath: "Don't bother, it won't help."

"There was a lot of shame," she said. "People just weren't interested in me when I was heavier."

Spiraling into obsession

Through Weight Watchers — and through sheer will — she managed to transform herself into svelte and sexy lady of her dreams. More accurately, everyone else's dreams. But that was just the beginning of the ordeal. What if the weight came back?

"I attached so much trauma to being overweight that I was scared of going back, and that fear kept me stuck," she said. "Food became my enemy."

She tried the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, Tasti D-Lite: a chain of 1990s ice creameries that pumped massive amounts of air into the soft serve to reduce the calorie count. "My gastrointestinal distress was real," she said.

She kept obsessive count of calories. Salads were eaten undressed. Thanksgiving consisted of dry turkey — period. Movie snacks consisted of exactly 25 Jelly Belly jelly beans — four calories apiece — cut in half. A dipped strawberry could only be dealt with by surgical intervention: the chocolate had to be painstakingly removed from the fruit by knife. A trip to Italy ("try the pasta!") was torture.

In exchange, she got society's rewards: a hunky husband, the approval of her peers, eventually a slot on "Real Housewives of New Jersey." People, she learned, didn't care how she stayed thin. As long as she was thin.

"You have to keep all the horrible ways that you remain thin a secret, because they don't want to know," she said.

The culture of thin

Why is America so thin-obsessed? It wasn't always. Back in the 1950s, the voom-va-voom ideal was Marilyn Monroe or Jane Russell. Women were supposed to be curvy, fully upholstered. Earlier still, in the age of Rubens, the ideal woman verged on plump.

Then came the waif look of the 1960s. And the heroin chic of the 1990s. And it's not likely to go away, Goldschneider said.

"I don't think society is budging on this any time soon, especially with social media," she said. "Thin bodies will always be held as the ideal. So people have to work on themselves instead, and realize that their health and beauty is not based on their weight."

In some pictures in "The Weight of Beautiful," Goldschneider actually appears dangerously thin. Emaciated. But 20 years of this began to take its toll — on both her mental and physical health. She had trouble conceiving. She once fainted in a supermarket aisle, and refused the juice that the worried manager brought to her. "Juice went over my minimums."

"I finally had my turning point where I said, I just can't do this to myself anymore, because I'm gonna die," she said. "So I opened up to someone I loved, which was my husband. So that door opened. I found people who were experts in this who could help me. There was a lot of therapy, a lot of work with a specialized dietician. I really put the work in."

Today, she's in a better place. Not only does she have a good relationship with her husband, Evan, and her kids (two sets of twins: Adin and Jonas, Alexis and Hudson), she also — equally important — has a good relationship with food.

She's even been known to enjoy it on occasion.

"I don't get social anxiety around food any more," she said. "I don't weigh myself. I won't know if I gain a little, if I lose a little. I really think not weighing myself is so important to the whole process. Because I don't know. So I can't put any importance to a number I don't know."

For help with eating disorders, contact the National Eating Disorder Association: www.nationaleatingdisorders.org

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Real Housewife Jackie Goldschneider's secret battle