She started to diet. She bought calorie counters, exercise books, and magazines. She tried to fast but found it too punishing. She tried to exercise but it was boring and uncomfortable. She loved starting diets, because it was easy to be perfect at first, and early progress came quickly. She could lose 10 pounds in four days; it may have been water but it was still a result. When progress slowed she broke the diet, returned with relief to unrestrained reading-and-eating, and got ready to start over. Her mother supported her attempts, rewarded her successes with desserts, and otherwise paid constant attention to what Sheila ate. Her father didn’t. He tried to bait, egg, lure her into exercise. She put on 15 to 40 pounds a year.

Even though she was steadily gaining on a long-term basis, some of the diets produced a loss for awhile. There were whole weeks, once even months, when Sheila went far enough down to notice all the differences. And then back up, noticing again. Above a certain weight, she really couldn’t cross her legs knee over knee. Above a certain weight she wouldn’t hug herself. Above a certain weight, she developed the rash.

She breached 200 by the time she was 14 and 5’4.” That’s when the itch began, under her breasts and on her belly. The problem worsened until she had to complain to her mother. The doctor told them it was because of the airless moist conditions under her breasts and between the folds of her stomach; she was actually hosting a fungus. “Gross!” Sheila thought. “That’s it: I’m definitely taking this weight off now.” The doctor advised her to use talcum powder and sent them to a nutritionist.

Unfortunately she made no progress. She started a new diet almost every day but she continued to gain. The rate of gain slowed, but she was 243 by her junior year of high school, and she had stopped adding height to her 5’6″ frame. She had beautiful red hair and baby-fine skin, but her attitude seesawed between quiet and anger, and her grades suffered because she wouldn’t read anything except fiction. She still had the rash, and she had developed an allergy to talc.

Her mother took her to a new doctor when Sheila was 19. That was after a rough year that doesn’t get talked about, when Sheila wasn’t having much to do with her immediate or extended family and was spending most of her time in a church. She went on a medically-supervised diet. It wasn’t one of those liquid regimes, but it was strict. This doctor explained to her that each pound is 3500 calories, so if she’d eat 500 calories less a day, she’d lose one pound a week. She’d lose more if she exercised, the doctor added, but not much more, which comforted her and also made the program seem credible.

He put her on a 600 calorie daily diet at first. He said he’d be practical; he told her she could actually have 800 calories if she needed, and he prescribed appetite suppressants at least for the beginning. He explained that her calories were to consist of proteins and eight vegetables, but no other carbohydrates. She ate chicken, she ate fish, and she ate spinach, carrots, broccoli, parsley, green beans, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers.

She dropped weight fast. At the rate of almost 10 pounds a month, it took her a year to get near 130, but that’s how she stood when she went to college. She still missed reading-and-eating (and thought she always would), but she was delighted with her figure. Her mother bought her a new wardrobe and her father started talking about the dangers of boys.

The doctor put Sheila on “maintenance.” She was allowed 1200 calories a day, and up to 30% of them could come from the carbohydrates she’d been denied. He told her she could maintain her new weight forever as long as she didn’t eat more than 1200 calories a day. Sheila calculated that she could have about three ounces of salted sunflower seeds for 300 calories, and they’d provide little carb and an hour a day of reading-and-eating. Since she had been taking in around 800 calories a day before she went on maintenance, she used up most of her new allowance with daily bouts of seeds and an occasional cookie.