Excerpt from “Welcome To Heidi” – I’M STARVING

Two weeks ago, Welcome to Heidi burst onto the scene and proceeded to shake things up in Hollywood and beyond.  While the press attention has been unbelievable, the reason so many people “took” to this fictional memoir (some added embellishment was used in the making of this book)  is the honesty, boldness and the vulnerability that Heidi demonstrated, which is courageous to do, when your world revolves around the television industry.  Here is Chapter 6 from WELCOME TO HEIDI  “I’m Starving” – Donna Cavanagh    

The nicest thing you can ever say to me is, “You look anorexic.” Those words should always be followed by a “thank you” and dare I say – a hug. If you’re lucky enough to hear this phrase, it will most likely be said to you by a woman. A man will never say this to you, because a man has no concept of “too skinny.” All men are looking for sticks with tits. The second a woman says, “You look anorexic,” smile and hug her because it means you look perfect. Any woman who tells you that men hate skinny girls is a liar and probably a fatty. Please tell me the last time you saw a hot guy with a girl who doesn’t look like she needs to eat a steak. If you’re a girl who tells other girls they look anorexic, please press pause before you say it, and realize that at your core, you are truly jealous of how teensy tiny she looks. Realize that her bird-like body is making you angry. I know I will not be happy with my weight until a stranger stops me on the street and says, “We need to get you something to eat immediately. You are way too thin.” If someone isn’t trying to tie me down and feed me intravenously – I’m too fat.

I feel like I’ve been dieting since birth. For all I know, I cut off my feeding tube in the womb because I was getting too chunky. I have tried every diet known to man (isn’t that expression interesting?), from the cabbage soup one to the baby food one. Baby food is low in calories. Unless you eat all of the jars in all of the land at once. I ate seven jars in one sitting. It’s true what they say: Banana is the best. If I had a kid, it would starve to death because Mommy ate all the food.
Usually after about three days on a diet, I just get a new scale because I’m convinced that’s what the problem is. The only way you can really tell is by your clothes, which is why I keep all of my Fat Pants. They hang in the closet next to my Skinny Jeans, reminding them that we are all just a hanger away from Chunkerville. It’s like one happy dysfunctional family. I bet they talk to each other when I close the door at night, with the Fat Pants mocking the Skinny Jeans for lack of wear and how I have to lie down on my bed ‘70s-style to zip them up.

It’s impossible to know what size you really are anymore because designers are constantly messing with us and lowering the sizes of their clothes. Clearly they all got together and said, “Let’s convince people they are skinnier and change the way we label things.” The only thing more brilliant than that was the creation of the “boyfriend jean.” This is the most ingenious way of selling fat pants I’ve ever seen. My boyfriend jeans are a size 27, and they’re swimming on me, but that’s because they’re a size 8 Fat Pants. We all know the truth. Just because you give them a cute name doesn’t make me thinner. If you can fit into your boyfriend’s jeans, you need a diet.

Every day, a new study comes out that tells me what I have been eating to lose weight is now the number-one fat builder in the entire universe. One second you’re eating cardboard-flavored pasta, and the next you’re chowing down on some berries that came out of a koala bear’s ass. Women will do anything to lose weight, except give up shoes and purses. I am currently addicted to a diet ice cream cone that has only 150 calories and is most likely made of cancer. The problem is that I eat the entire box in one sitting, which pretty much kills the low-calorie concept. I need a supermarket that only has single servings of everything. I used to do the low-carb thing, but I needed a math degree and an atom-splitter to really figure out just how many carbs were in something. The box lies. I’m just saying.

I have no “off” button when it comes to food. I dream about my prison meal constantly. This is the last meal you get on death row, right before they “off” you. You can have anything you want. There are no limits. I’m not sure why I have a prison meal, because the only thing I might go to prison for is murdering someone who calls me fat, but I do have one – and you should too. I am not ashamed to admit that I judge others by what their prison meal is. My Dad told me his prison meal is soup. Jesus, that’s depressing. I mean – they already give you soup. There has to be something more you want. My prison meal changes quite a bit, but it always includes cake. Cake is the most important meal of the day. Anything can be cured with cake. I love the cheapest supermarket kind of cake you can find. I adore the grainy, gritty icing and those giant pink flowers.

I am so food-obsessed that I cannot keep anything good in the house and by “good,” I mean anything with any kind of taste. I tend to wake up at 2 am to eat, and I’ll eat anything. I once took down jar of Marshmallow Fluff. Don’t ask me why I had Marshmallow Fluff in the house in the first place. My refrigerator usually only has condiments in it, and my pantry is filled with things no one needs – like cloth napkins and corn-on-the-cob holders.

I have also eaten out of my garbage can. Pause. Vomit. Rinse. Repeat. It’s true. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve done it – more than once. In fact, I’ve done it so many times that I now have to take my garbage out of the house and down the street to someone else’s cans after a dinner party, because if there are any leftovers in the garbage, they will soon be in my belly. The reason the leftovers have to go in the cans down the street is because I once ate out of my own street garbage can, and my neighbors saw me. I had to pretend I’d thrown out a receipt. I made mini-cheesecakes just last week, and after I ate one, I threw the rest away and then spent the entire rest of the night just opening the cupboard where my garbage can is and eating out of it like it was a cookie jar or in this case – a mini cheesecake delivery system.

I tried putting perfectly good chocolate chip cookies down the garbage disposal once, but that didn’t work. I had mistakenly bought the bag the night before and was afraid that if I kept the cookies around one second longer, I would inhale them faster than you can say” fatty fatty two by four.” I had made it through an entire morning and afternoon without eating them, but now it was night-time again, and that’s when the Sugar Vampire comes out and starts tearing into the cabinets looking to feed. So – I took the four chocolate chip cookies and shoved them into the garbage disposal, turned the water on, and flipped the switch. All of a sudden, the sound of metal being chewed by metal ripped through the house. I turned off the water, then the disposal, took out the cookies, and removed one of those tiny dessert spoons I own, but don’t know why, from the unit. Then I shoved the cookies back in, turned on the water, turned on the disposal, and again – metal-shredding, ear-bleeding sounds came from the sink.

I turned the water and the disposal off again, took the cookies out again, and retrieved yet another dessert spoon. Once again, the cookies went back in, the water went back on, the disposal switch was flipped and yes – once again something that sounded remarkably like silverware was being eaten in my disposal. I shut it all down again, pulled the cookies out again, and pulled out a third and final spoon. It was like some kind of magician’s disposal. This thing was literally creating dessert spoons down in that deep dark hole. I didn’t put the cookies back in right away, because I looked at that disposal and I thought to myself, “God wants me to eat these cookies. God put those spoons in there to stop the destruction of four perfectly good and, might I add, very sturdy, chocolate chip cookies.” I didn’t eat them. But I wanted to.

My girlfriend once emailed me at 2:22 am to ask if it was okay to eat a bag of Nestle chocolate chips. I was able to answer her right away, because I was up eating a bar of baking chocolate. This doesn’t even taste good. But that did not stop me. I told her, “Of course it’s okay. Isn’t that why you buy them?” (I know she’s not baking cookies. Jews don’t bake cookies. Jews buy cookies.)

I realized that if I could just figure out how to sleep through the night, I would lose 10 pounds instantly. I constantly wake up with food wrappers and crumbs around me in my bed – remnants of a sleepy, fat-filled binge. If I had a boyfriend this activity would never happen. No woman is getting up in the middle of the night and bringing a chocolate cake to bed, and if she is, she should probably get a divorce. But getting a boyfriend just to curb my voracious nighttime appetite seemed a bit extreme. So I got the next best thing – sleeping pills.

Now I have tried every kind of sleeping pill there is, from the prescribed, like Ambien, Lunesta, and yes, even Klonopin, to the natural, like melatonin and some kind of root that tasted like dirt mixed with poo. There were a few things that made me see things while awake – like double rainbows – and a few that made me see things while asleep – like murderous bloody rampages with me as a knife- wielding killer lunatic. I would have taken sleep-eating or sleep-driving, but sleep-killing seemed a bit over the top. I didn’t have trouble falling asleep; it was staying asleep that became problematic. Did I snore? Was that waking me up? Again, this would be a good time to have an all-male sleepover, but the end game was them discovering I sounded like my grandmother, and that didn’t seem fun.

I’ve thought about tape-recording myself to find out what is waking me up at night. But I already know what that would look like. Me going to sleep. Me waking up. Me getting up to pee. Me going back to sleep. Me waking up. Me watching television on my iPad. Me going back to sleep. Me waking up. Me changing pajamas because mine are soaking wet. Me going back to sleep. Me waking up and going downstairs to eat a block of cheese or make a snack tray to take back to bed. Me going back to sleep with gum in my mouth. Me waking up because I swallowed the gum. Me going back to sleep. Me waking up 10 minutes before the alarm goes off. Fun.

My doctor decided that it wasn’t a sleeping problem, but an anxiety problem, and said that I was afraid to sleep in my house and woke up frequently to make sure there were no intruders. First of all, by “doctor,” I mean the guy I pay 10 bucks to see because he’s in my health plan. Second of all, I have two 120-pound dogs – only an idiot would break into my house because the barking, thrashing, and charging of the doors and windows when they hear a leaf blow by is earth-shattering. However, I like my doctor, so I decided to try something he said would work. It’s called Sinequan. I took it for about a year, and for the most part it worked pretty well, but I had also gained some weight at the same time and was having a really hard time losing it. That’s when I discovered the horror. I Googled the sleeping pill, and the second I typed in the words “Sinequan and…” the words “WEIGHT GAIN” popped up. And that was the end of that drug. I mean, the words “WEIGHT GAIN” will stop me from doing anything. I could be dating John Hamm, but if I see “WILL CA– USE WEIGHT GAIN” when I Google his name, I’ll dump his ass faster than you can say “Modern-Day Fred Flintstone.”

I’ve tried exercising to lose weight, but they say that your body weight is 80 percent what you eat, which means mine is 80 percent cake. I can’t seem to find an exercise system that doesn’t make me want to die. I’ve done them all –Yoga, Pilates, Bar Method, Aerobics, Step, etc. I like them for a few months, and then I’m miserable and finding excuses not to go to class, like – I’m tired. I used to go to something called “Barry’s Boot Camp.” Kim Kardashian was in my class a few times. Her ass is remarkable. It’s like a table. I wanted to rest my water on it – and my towel – and my keys, purse, and shoes. There was room.

Recently, I made the huge mistake of looking at myself naked in the mirror, and I noticed that I now have back rings. If you don’t know what back rings are, congratulations, you win. They are rolls of fat on your back. They are indentations you should have at your waist, but they sit above that area and fold over. Go look at your Mom – she has them. I don’t want them. I was so upset by this discovery that I almost didn’t get dessert at dinner, and I almost didn’t stop at the grocery store on the way home to buy a bag of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies that I almost didn’t eat in bed.
Kate Moss once said, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” but that’s a lie, because nothing tasted as good as the cupcake I had for lunch yesterday. People say to me all the time, “Why are you worried about what you’re eating, you’re so skinny?” Because I haven’t eaten in like a year!!

If you really want to see what kind of damage a small woman can do with food, watch me eat the week before my period starts. This is the time of the month I literally can’t stop shoving things down my cake hole. I am careening through my 50s, and I still get my period. This is not useful to me. I could find more things to do with a chainsaw. I do not need to be fertile. If I have any eggs left, they have most definitely expired and if I could reproduce, I would absolutely pop out a retard. I can’t wait until the day I start menopause. I will celebrate by eating a cake. From a supermarket or out of the garbage. Whichever comes first.