Quotes from Frances Kuffel

A grin might have split me down the middle and my questions might come spilling out. Am I pretty? How much bigger am I than you? Do you love me—still love me, or love me more for having done this? Did you love me before? Was it possible to love me when I was fat? What do you love now? Am I gonna be OK—be a person, be Frances? Will I figure this out? How? What have I done?

I had a concise list of what I wanted out of life, three things (my merry mantra): to be thin, to publish a book with my name on it, and to fall in love with a man who loved me back. (In the wisdom of my thirties I revised this to be a sane man.) The last two items were predicated on being thin.

Pam Peeke's formula, "For every twenty-five pounds removed, it takes one year to mentally adjust. So be kind to yourself, okay?

Earlier that spring, in an Amazon discussion of the comments women get for being fat or losing weight, Lindsay observed that "Nobody who gets thin gets rid of their problems, they just trade them in." The only part she got wrong is that we trade in a few problems (like airplane seats), keep the oldest ones (why we got fat, how being fat has shaped our psyches), and receive a handful of new ones in return.

The first thing we agreed upon was that the first ingredient of relapse is the cold-water shock of success.