Maria remembered the time when her good friend Wendy dispensed with all the small talk. She was calling Maria back then to talk about her weight. So there was none of the usual chitchat about the mundane and the politically mundane, Wendy got straight to the point. She was alarmed because she had started to gain some of her old weight back. Maria picked right up on this and asked if there was something eating at her. Get that? Eating at her. Wendy said that’s why she was calling Maria. She learned from her struggles with weight, from knowing Maria, and from reading Escape to Thin that emotions and emotional patterns were heavily involved in weight control. So Wendy and Maria made a date to talk more about this.
When they met a week or so later at Wendy’s house, Wendy took Maria into the den, where the two women settled themselves, Wendy on the couch and Maria in an overstuffed rocker close to Wendy. At first, Wendy rooted around for an answer to her weight gain. Maria asked her friend, “Has there been anything different going on in her life?”
“No,” Wendy said. “Not that I can think of.”
Maria followed up by asking Wendy to “Try to name, guess at if you need to, any changes in your life since you started putting on weight.”
Wendy couldn’t think of any changes, and Maria encouraged her to work at it some more. “Try,” Maria exhorted her friend.
Wendy ran through all the usual things in her life. Her children were fine, her marriage was okay, work was work, her parents were healthy. “No,” she said. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Maria took a chance at being a pain and tried to get Wendy to narrow down her observations, to think more specifically. Maria knew there had to be something that happened. But Wendy couldn’t get to anything else. She said to Maria that she was back on her old diet, the one that worked so well for her before. So, for the time being, Maria knew that she had to leave it like that. She had learned that people can’t be pushed. Pushing at them wasn’t a form of help. And it spoiled the possibility of helping at a future time.
