Why Are Half My Sisters Fat, and the Other Half Thin?

From ELLE

This piece originally appeared in the August 2005 issue of ELLE.

"I can't be around our family," my younger sister Jill* declared, her face a study of strained emotion. We were at my parents' house last Thanksgiving weekend, sitting in her old bedroom, which still bore remnants of her high school days: pictures from her sweet 16 and rumpled twin beds. I plopped down across from her, preparing for a long night of talking and tears. I'd been out for the evening at my twentieth high school reunion while my family had gathered at my oldest sister Nancy's for pizza. The tangled details of that night are less significant that the theme of the story, which, inevitably in our family, had to do with food.

It all started when Jill's salad didn't arrive with the pizza delivery. She asked if she could share the salad ordered by my older sister Debra and her husband, but my brother-in-law claimed there wasn't enough. As Jill recounted the exchange, I must have been looking at her quizzically because she broke down as she explained the humiliation she felt at having to ask for food and then being denied-merely the latest slight she'd suffered over the eminently visible fact of being fat.

Although my sisters and I share versions of the same flat feet, thick hair, and gently sloping eyes and none of us tops 5'4", our personalities are unmistakably distinct: Nancy, 42, with her lawyerly competitiveness and teary vulnerability; Debra, 41, who lives a frenzied yet yoga-filled life; me, a 39-year-old journalist whose workaholism is tempered by frequent hikes in the woods; and Jill, the artistic one, who at 34 has a self-deprecating wit that can spill into self-destructiveness. Yet sometimes, the interplay of our birth order and character traits feels less relevant to our family narrative than the fact that two of us are heavy and two of us are thin. Right now I'm probably the lightest at 105 pounds, though Debra's weight has dropped below mine in the past. Nancy has battled her weight since her teens, when in my memory she was merely plum; today she's in the range of 200 pounds. Jill's weight has recently reached 300, a size that inflicts indignities like worrying over wearing a seat belt on a plane.

Instinctively, then, I understood how Jill had heard my brother-in-law's refusal to share his salad as an indictment. My initial attempts to soothe her that night were met with anger, finally spoken, which I had felt simmering all weekend. "It's hard to be around you," she sputtered, sounding at once accusatory and apologetic. "It's easier to just talk on the phone."

As always during these episodes, I tried mostly to listen and absorb the sting of her words, knowing that by sheer dint of being her sister I was skirting the line between comforter and tormentor. "I understand," I said, and she nodded.

"I feel like such a failure," she choked out. "I don't know what to do."

Recently, a friend laughed as she looked over some of the titles on my bookshelf: Food and Loathing, Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology, and Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression. Strangely, as I was buying these books, I never considered that I might be seeking some understanding of my family conflicts. I know about flaws in the data on low-carb diets, and I can critique the mass media's portrayal of our much-hyped obesity epidemic. I've discussed our national preoccupation with banishing fat from cultural, political, and feminist perspectives. My latest interest is science-specifically the research exploring why some people are fat and others are thin, an area that's exploded in recent years, challenging the most basic assumptions about concepts like willpower. The language of the lab-emotionally uncomplicated, free of judgement-appeals to me. The white-coat experts I track down at universities are tackling a puzzle, and I hope they can provide clues to my own. How do I make sense of my sisters and me, the lure of food, our shared and divergent histories?

There was a time, in childhood, when my sisters hardly seemed separate from me, when weight didn't exist and we had only food. We watched as my grandmother picked apples off a tree in our backyard, covered the kitchen table in flour, and pulled from the oven long trains of apple strudel, which we ate in blissful silence. My grandparents on my mother's side owned a bakery, and fresh bread arrived nearly every day in big paper bags. We learned to prefer the crust, which my mother cut of in extravagant hunks, handling them like prizes.

My mother was thin growing up, and when I was little I used to study her wedding picture, the long-sleeve ivory dress cinched at her perfect waist. She gained weight only after her pregnancies, and by the time I was 10 she'd reached 180 pounds. My father was moderately overweight and joked a lot about food, rubbing his stomach late at night and saying we should remind him never again to make fried salami before bed. But I didn't sense that his weight caused him shame as I did with my mother. Though she didn't talk about her struggles then, I have a clear image of her after I walked into the kitchen one night, sitting with reddened fingertips in front of a bowl of her favorite pink pistachios. I might as well have intruded on her having sex; her expression told me I'd seen something private and vaguely bad. I don't know if my mother's creeping weight was behind our one-sweet-a-day rule, but the unintended result was that eating candy took on an added thrill. Debra and I would smuggle contraband $100,000 Bars into our shared bedroom and huddle under the sheets, where we'd try to muffle our giggling and the sound of crinkling wrappers.

By high school, food had started to separate us. Nancy-athletic but fuller-figured, with curvy hips and C-cup breasts-was the first to go on a diet. Though she was a star of the tennis team and number one in her class, I sensed a fragility in the way she would shift from clove cigarette-smoking cool to fighting back tears, and by freshmen year she'd started attending Weight Watchers. Debra, never a chubby kid, had her vulnerabilities too, but they were held back with the discipline she applied to practicing the flute for hours a day. If she felt insecure, her slim body gave her cover, an assumed acceptance. Even bravado: Nancy had plenty of boyfriends, but Debra could waltz into the living room when boys were visiting and casually announce, to my amazed 15-year-old ears, that if she'd known we had company she'd have put on underwear.

I'm sure I wanted Debraness to rub off on me. On the first day of high school I borrowed one of her sundresses, pulling the purple cotton fabric over my head like a shield. I played tennis too and didn't have time to worry about weight but nonetheless started recording "bad" and "good" food days in my journal. Like most of my friends I dieted, trying the four day meat, green beans, and tomato juice regimen for days on end; I took to it, a perfectionist who once holed up in the basement until I'd taught myself to juggle because a coach had said it would quicken my reflexes.

Jill, who was still in junior high when I left for college, was developing her own covert relationship with food. Unlike Nancy, who would tell anyone she'd started a new diet, Jill retreated to the dark: She turned one of our downstairs rooms into a private fort, watching TV and eating with a blanket draped over her lap. A talented painter with a storyteller's dramatic sense, Jill wouldn't merely declare she didn't like the piano; she'd tell you how her lessons were torture. She has described to me in comic detail how she once drank a half gallon of milk in one day on the cabbage soup diet and topped off our meat and beans regimen by bingeing on the fourth day. "I can't remember ever not thinking how fat I was," she has said. But while I could see her getting bigger, the issue of weight felt like an electrical field, both galvanizing and threatening our relationship.

A generation ago, I might have been taught that being fat was caused by frustrated penis envy or sadistic impulses. (As Ellen Ruppel Shell writes in her book, The Hungry Gene, some researchers even tried to isolate, without success, a "fat personality.") But today, genes trump Freud. The thinking on weight has changed, especially since the seminal discovery in 1994 in a New York lab of the hormone leptin. Leptin signals to the brain how much fat is in the body-without it, a mouse eats with crazy abandon, mistakenly trying to fend off starvation. Only a handful of people in the world have been known to make no leptin, and as Shell writes, they become so obsessed with eating that they grow to 65 pounds by age two or pick through the trash for food. Studies have shown that with the exception of these rare cases extra leptin won't make people thin, but the discovery sent researchers down new paths of hunger signals, hormones, and brain receptors.

It's now well accepted that genes play a significant role in weight. Some of the most compelling proof comes from studies of twins, which show that the degree of similarity in body mass index (BMI) among identical twins is far greater than that among fraternal. A recent study of adult Swedish twins concluded that complex behaviors like emotional eating have a strong genetic link (just as binge eating may). Even fidgeting, now linked to thinness, appears to be inborn. Equally convincing are studies showing that adopted kids are much closer in weight to their biological parents than to the parents who raised them. One of the scientists I talk to, Tony Comuzzie of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, has for 14 years studied hundreds of people in single families. "We can see very clearly there is a familial contribution to obesity," he says. A variation like that among my sisters is not unheard of, and in fact people like us may provide vital clues.

Like others, Comuzzie is trying to figure out which genes account for common forms of obesity, since only infrequently is a single mutation the culprit. Interestingly, some of the chromosomal regions that his research points to are close to pathways that may affect emotions. "This is an area we are just getting into: Why is it when you eat certain foods you really do feel happiness?" he asks. Another researcher, Arlen Price of the University of Pennsylvania, who is studying more than 100 pairs of sisters with huge disparities in weight, notes that a simple worm has been found to have 300 genes tied to fat storage. He's looking at which genes siblings have in common and notes that the exceptional genes might be those that enable people to resist becoming overweight.

But neither Price nor Comuzzie is a biological determinist. Genes operate in an environment, and the question of whether one of these two forces exerts more pull than the other still provokes disagreement. I've talked with two men with conflicting views. Jeffrey Friedman, a researcher at Rockefeller University in New York, gained fame when he was credited with the discovery of leptin. He goes so far as to compare weight with height, which is largely beyond our control. "People like me think weight is mostly about brain chemicals," he said in a talk last February. Kelly Brownell, the director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, lays more blame on the environment. He's less interested in twin studies than in those showing how people who immigrate to the United States put on weight. "As long as we have an environment filled with fattening foods, you're going to find obesity," he says.

Of course, both men are right. Generally speaking, people are programmed to eat when food is available, having evolved from times of feast and famine. David Cummings, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington, in Seattle, notes that "the body has far more powerful mechanisms to keep you from losing weight than from gaining it," which is why dieting can make you dream of food. "The question is: Why does one person have to eat three Big Macs to feel right and another person need only one?" Experts used to speak of a set point for weight, but now many recognize that weight clearly changes throughout life; Cummings posits a 5 to 10 percent "ballpark" range, dictated by genes and moderated by environment.

Shell, the Hungry Gene author, notes that in a sedentary world with so much high-calorie fare, environment may override whatever biological protections people have. It "took away some guilt," Shell says, to realize that lack of discipline doesn't explain why she's not a size 2. "Biology is not destiny, but biology does drive the inclination." Still, she points out, the environment is all we can change. If she had a debilitating weight problem, she tells me, she'd try to leave the country.

While much remains unknown about the interplay of genes and environment, one finding intrigues me: Childhood environment doesn't appear to impact weight later on. "By the time adults are in their twenties, thirties, or forties, what Mama put on the table when they were five probably doesn't matter all that much," Price says. I think of our shared apple strudel and our very different lifestyles today. Debra likes to cook for her husband and two kids, whereas Jill lives alone and eats a lot of processed foods; Nancy depends on her car to get around the suburbs, while I walk every day in a city. That's just a sliver of what "environment," which encompasses huge realms like culture and class, can mean.

Simple explanations, such as those offered by diet gurus and pop psychologists, don't hold up. Weight, experts say, is overpsychologized and too often explained away by emotional issues. Thin people eat for comfort just as fat people (who aren't all starved for love) do. If you put 100 people on an identical exercise schedule and diet, you'll get very different results. In fact, my sisters and I suggest that no single theory applies, and I hear that we're a nice fit for the complex genetic model: No one can really explain us. (One geneticist even suggested, though I don't believe it possible, that my younger sister and I could have different fathers.) Friedman believes there's comfort in science because it lifts the blame for being fat. Yet in our culture, where no amount of beauty or success offers protection from the stigma of being overweight, his conclusions could confer a cruel fate on people I love.

Maybe the meaning of weight matters more to our story than the reasons behind it. I think of a study that looked not at genes but emotions. Published late last year in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, it showed that about one third of obese people would accept a 5 percent (or greater) risk of death for a 20 percent weight loss. So while I've been told that 80 to 90 percent of dieters eventually regain their weight, I'm happy to talk with George Blackburn, the associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard. "It would be a shame if people say it's hopeless because [weight is] genetic," he tells me, walking a tricky line. While acknowledging tat few effective long-term treatments for obesity exist, he says, "We know at every single size that people can improve it, by new behavior, new lifestyle." This is what my sister Jill wants to believe. She dismisses genetics, choosing instead to focus on how much less she weighed in college. The idea that she's meant to be fat offers her no comfort at all.

Sometime during my freshman year of college, food began to preoccupy me in a way it hadn't before. I started eating secretly, too many slices of pizza, cookie after cookie from a box my roommate kept that I'd have to run out to replace. None of this is novel, of course. College campuses like mine were full of women who analyzed oppressive beauty standards by day and engaged in secret food rituals by night. I cycled through dieting and binging, the result being that I started to gain weight. More, even, than my unhappiness over my body, what I remember from this time is loneliness. On college breaks I'd sit across from my mother in the kitchen, knowing that after she was asleep I'd be back rummaging through her cabinets. I suspect that she noticed my changing body but figured I was like her: unwilling, or unable, to talk about it. On my twenty-first birthday, perhaps trying to boost me up, she sent one of her loving notes. "Beautiful Laura," it started, "What a wonderful moment you find yourself in." I'm not sure I could have articulated what was really happening, my disconnection from my body, the mysterious tug of habit that brought stabs of shame.

I didn't confide in my sisters either, through I once saw a glimpse of my behavior in Debra. I was visiting her one weekend when she was in grad school, in her slightly depressing basement apartment. "Let's go to the Pathmark," she said, as if conjuring our long-ago collusion with the candy bars. We piled treats into our cart, the market dark and empty on a Saturday night. Back at her dimly lit kitchen table, we dug in. I hadn't revealed myself this way with anyone else yet stopped short of talking about what we were doing. Why I'm not sure, but I do see how weight, with its hold over each of us, has played into the rivalry that lurks in our relationships, an undercurrent that made even our reading of eulogies at my grandmother's funeral feel oddly competitiveness. (Who was closest to her, the most eloquent? Jill, saying the pressure was too much, didn't get up.) We were primed from childhood to stake out some difference, a claim on attention in our chaotic household where no one seemed to get quite enough. While we all strived toward success, deeply supported by our parents, as girls our looks inescapably mattered-if only in the way my grandmother spoke of the need to get married or people's eyes grazed over us as they sized us up.

One psychologist I interviewed, James Rosen, a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont and an expert in body image, tells me that in a family of four girls the mere fact that our bodies were different would have heightened our interest in physical appearance. We'd be picking up cues from each other's social experiences, leading to fear that fatness might become our fate or to the judgements such fear can breed. I try not to think about whether Jill has gained weight since the last time I saw her, as she's convinced we all do, yet sometimes she herself makes the topic hard to avoid. "Can you tell I'm bigger?" she asks again and again. I've heard whispered criticisms from my sisters, such as how Nancy's house is stocked with sweets. But for the most part nothing needs to be said-nor could it be. A few years after college, I sat in my parents' living room and watched as Debra dug through a bag of my mother's old dresses from her skinny days-dresses that by this point, I couldn't fit into. I felt the space between us expand as she tried them on, smoothing the wrinkled fabric over her stomach and turning so we could see, her body calling to mind that of my mother's as a young woman, with all the unspoken approval that carried.

In my midtwenties, I sensed that getting away might help me shake my obsession. In my memory there's a breakthrough moment, a scene with me on a park bench in a western city three thousand miles from the New York suburb where I grew up. I was buoyant in a new writing job at a newspaper. Life was promising, except, of course, I wasn't thin. Suddenly I was struck with the obvious thought that however I'd been tackling my weight issues, it wasn't working. Since my first diet, I'd gained more than 30 pounds; at 5'1", I was a size 10. For the first time in years, I considered whether I could let this struggle go. I felt embarrassed and bored with myself; something snapped. I headed to a nearby food stand and bought a turkey sandwich with cheese and mayonnaise and ate the whole thing.

It took willpower, strangely, not to diet. I made myself eat dessert publicly. I had no idea where I was heading. I started running more and taking long bike rides, after which I'd crave potatoes and let myself eat them. Slowly, my food urges began to lift. I noticed that I was leaving food on my plate, that I felt hungry and full. "What diet have you been on?" someone in my office marveled.

Just as my family didn't comment on my weight gain, neither did they on my loss. Was Debra trying to connect when she told me excitedly about Dean Ornish, the ultralow-fat diet guru, even offering to send me a copy of his book? I misstepped by practicing my new habit of eating dessert while out to lunch with Nancy and my grandmother, feeling awful later when my sister told me how insensitive it was of me given her own efforts to diet. I was happy to be thin and wince to think I may have shown off my body. But other times I'd tread so carefully I wasn't myself. During holiday weekends Jill would coax me downstairs, where she'd camp out in front of the TV. My father kept a treadmill down there, and I'd want to run on it. "Stay with me-don't get up," she'd plead, and sometimes I would. Other times I'd persist. "You're obsessive-you're no better than Debra. You're turning into an anorexic!" she'd lash out, and I wondered if she was right. Was running an implicit judgement of her? Was it selfish?

Debra became even thinner-worryingly so-around the time of her wedding. My mother got diabetes and started eating less of her beloved bread crust. Nancy and Jill each spent time at the renowned Duke diet center in North Carolina, where they lost weight temporarily. We lived through various crises-a car crash left my father in the ICU for a week and Nancy endured a high-risk pregnancy-but weight was the drama we always shared.

"Add up my calories," Jill is saying. We're on the phone late at night. She proceeds to name every morsel that has touched her lips that day. "I think I'm going to try for 2,200," she says. "Is that too high?" Then the next day: "I'm going to stick to 1,800 for a few days." Jill tells me I have to keep her from bingeing but then calls back to confess it's too late. The calorie calls are easy; there's also the despairing one about having to go to a wedding where many of the guests will be old classmates who last saw her "75 pounds ago."

Jill has listened to me obsess too, about boyfriends and work, but our near-daily weight talks, I began to realize, weren't making me feel any closer to her. We would cover the same ground again and again but never go deeper. I agonized over how best to be supportive when both change and acceptance were so elusive. My guilt over being thin made it hard for me to admit that our conversations could leave me impatient, even angry at their one-sidedness, but I came to recognize that they served me, too: I didn't have to reveal much either. This year, Jill made her own shift. She joined a weight-loss program where she feels encouraged and optimistic, where success isn't gauged by weekly weigh-ins. She still wants to lose weight, but now I also hear, "I have better things to do with my life than focus on this issue," along with anger that when she weighted just 150 or 160 pounds she felt so fat. After a recent conversation during which I opened up about the pressure I get from our mother to have children, I realized we hadn't talked about weight at all. Then I was hit with a sadder realization: how unusual this was.

I've seen signs that my other sisters have struggled to let go of weight too. A while back, as she talked me through a failed relationship, Debra said, "Don't worry if you need to eat for comfort right now." Still a musician, she'd become a mother and had been doing a lot of yoga; she sounded softer. Another time, at the beach, Nancy and I sat on a towel and she said, "I feel at peace about my size," nodding at some thin women in bikinis. But then the subplot yielded to the original script. Earlier this year, though she couldn't have weighed more than 110 pounds, Debra told me she'd been dieting. Nancy, who took off 20 pounds after being diagnosed with diabetes, lamented to me recently over a stressful work episode, "I'm self-medicating with food." As for me, I wish I could say I don't worry about the five pounds I gained this year.

Weight may never fully leave us. Still, I keep returning to a moment last summer. My family spent a week at the beach in New Jersey, and on one of our last afternoons I lingered with my two older sisters by the ocean, where Nancy had pulled our chairs close to the water's edge. Jill waited for us back at the house. She said she didn't like the sun, but I knew that the beach offered nowhere to hide. When we got back late she was annoyed, even more so when my older sisters rejected the idea of ordering pizza for dinner and instead decided to make fish. I told Jill I'd order with her anyway, and after we'd placed the call my mother and I escaped to the store for juice and a few other things we didn't need. As we walked back, I braced myself, not knowing what we'd find. My three sisters were sitting at the dining room table, pizza boxes thrown open, eating and laughing. There was, again, only food, with all the pleasure and togetherness it brought. I walked toward them and joined in.

*Names and identifying details have been changed.