The Girl in the Mirror

I'd be like, Oh, it's like a tangerine. And then I would as I got bigger, I would be like, it's like a grapefruit. And then I was like, it's like a melon. And then after that, I was like, I hate this game. I'm never playing this game again. From the time she was a little girl, Elena Baker hated her body. She thought if she could just become thin, everything in her life would be different, would be better. So she went on a mission to lose a ton

of weight, and she did it. She lost close to one hundred pounds in five and a half months, and for a moment, it seemed to Elena like she was getting everything she wanted, until she started to realize she was losing herself in the process. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans. A show that dieds deep into the world of change and hopefully gets us to think differently at that change in our own lives. Ea Baker grew up in the nineteen eighties and a

conservative Mormon family. Like I just was remembering this song. I grew up singing. This is the actual lyrics. When I grow up, I want to be a mother and have a family one little two, little three, little babies of my own, and then it keeps going. Of all the jobs for me, there is no other I'll have a family four, a little five, little six, little babies in my home, and you know, and that's like just

par for the course of being Mormon. From an early age, Elena was sold on the idea that if she just looked a certain way and acted a certain way, she'd be worthy of love. I think a lot of it was media. You know. I grew up on Disney movies. I grew up on like princess stories. I was weirdly very affected by The Little Mermaid, who was my favorite movie. But Ursula was this like, you know, supposedly this this gigantic,

disgusting woman. And I just remember being sold the narrative that certain women, if they looked a certain way, were invisible and would pine after men and they would never be loved. And it's so weird to me that I I attached myself to that narrative so young. I actually had a conversation with my parents recently because I was like, do you remember when I decided I was worthless because

of the way I looked? And you know, as I spoke to my dad about it, you know, it was as young as eight years old that I was like, oh, I'm just one of the girls who will never be beautiful and will never be loved. Do you remember anyone ever saying anything to you about your body? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I mean everyone said things to me about my body. It seemed like it seemed like my body was like public domain, you know, So I have, you know, one

of the memory that was I think I was. I was in fifth grade and the yearbook for a school costs like seventy dollars, so my parents didn't want to buy me and my sister both yearbooks, so we shared a yearbook, so she had the front half. I had the back half, and I would love to look through her section because she was popular, she had friends. I would like read all of the people who signed her section.

And then I noticed that the two most popular boys in my grade had signed her section of the yearbook, and I thought for a second that they had just signed on the wrong side, but then it was addressed to my sister, and they didn't even know my sister. But one had written, how come you're so beautiful and your sister is so ugly? And the other had written, I wish your sister looked like you? And I was just I mean, I was devastated. I was crying. I had I had felt that I was worthless because of

the way I looked. I had suspected it based on the way people would would look at me or look at my body. But I think that was like actual written confirmation looking back at it. Sorry, I'm getting emotional remembering all this. But you know, my mother saw that I was worried about my weight, and so she became heavily involved, and I you know, to her credit, I

think she was just trying to help me. But that of course made it so much worse, because you know, if I went to have seconds at dinner, she would nod her head, and you know she didn't do with my brothers and sisters. She started taking me to specialist in doctors where they would, you know, make me get naked and measure me and weigh me, and you know,

they were worried I had a thyroid issue. And I looked back to that time where there was all of this effort to try to understand what was wrong with Elma, and I look at pictures and I was actually totally normal sized. Like it's it doesn't it's unfortunate. It's like all the effort to prevent this thing from happening ended up being the catalyst for that thing happening. Because something

happened to my mind. By the time I was sixteen, and you know, at my heaviest, at my heaviest, I was two hundred and sixty pounds, I was definitely in a place where I thought I didn't deserve to live, Like I was considering ending my life because of the way I looked. That's how that's how much I hated my body, how much I hated myself because I didn't feel like if I looked this way that I deserved any love or deserved to live. Elma continued to feel

this way about herself for years. One day, when she was twenty two, it all came into full focus. She and her family took a trip to an amusement park where there was a funhouse with a hallway of mirrors. And so, as a family were walking down this hallway of mirrors and I turned the corner and the mirror in front of me, I saw this woman in it and it was me thin but proportionately thin. It wasn't one of those like where they stretch you out really really long. It was just like what I would look

like if I was a different person. If I was it was a thin woman. And I mean I could not be torn away from that mirror. I mean I just stood in front of the mirror and I was like, what does thin Elma look like when she runs in place? What does thin Elma look like when she flips her hair? And I was just like flirting with myself. I mean, I was just like playing with this woman. I looked like a member of my family, Like I looked like my sisters, and I had no concept that I could

look that way. And I also felt like this this person I had felt like I was, deep down inside was visually presenting itself to me in the mirror. This narrative that every fat woman has a thin woman inside of her. I felt like if I was her to the world, they would let me be the person who I wanted to be. What were those things that you wanted to be that you felt the world wasn't allowing you to be? It was free? I wanted to be free,

and I wanted to be loved. So you're looking at fun House mayor Elena, and she's she seems free and lighthearted, and she's she's reaching her dreams. Like that's what you saw it? Yeah, I saw someone who every door would open for Wow, And I thought, what if I became her? Like, would my life be easier? Would it actually be different? Would I get things I wanted if I did the thing I've been told my whole life to do, which

is just lose weight. And so that was when I became absolutely determined that I was going to take this on and I was going to become her. What made that moment different, like what led you to actually then go and lose all this weight? I think it was just absolute determination. It was like, I could not get this. I would close my eyes and I would see that woman and I could not get her out of my head. And I thought, this is going to be the time that I do it. You lost a lot of weight

in a very short amount of time. Yeah, what did you have to put yourself through to get to that point? You know? The program was, you know, you ate a very minimal amount of food. You exercised, you know, at least half an hour a day, you drank eight you drink eight glasses of water. And then you also you took fentermine and a couple other supplements. And the fentermine it's basically similar to speed. It's an emphentamine and it

curbs your appetite. I was Mormon. I'd never even had a cup of coffee, so I didn't know that you could take something and it would make you act differently. And at the time, I was also very religious, so I was praying and I was asking for through the grace of Jesus, Christ helped me change this aspect of myself. And then I'd started taking speed, And so I have journals from that time period that are hilarious because the journals, I just think it's like the love of Christ is

helping me. So I'm like, you know, I've never I feel like I'm totally possessed by the spirit of God. Like I've never motivated, and I'm constantly cleaning. I've never been this clean, you know, I'm just like, but in reality, I was just like totally on speed. And when I lost all of that weight, especially because I lost it quite fast, my skin was so so loose. I mean it was just like I could take it and pull it like six to eight inches off of my body.

I mean I looked kind of like a melting candle. I just had so much extra skin, and you know, that was really disappointing actually, because I had thought that I would get a do over, that I would finally get that body that I had dreamed of, and instead I was just covered in loose skin. And so I had four surgeries to reconstruct my body. First I did a tummy tuck, Then I did a circumferential body lift. Then I did implants to fill in kind of the empty pockets that my breasts had once been, and then

they cut up my legs. So now in my body I have running up the side of my legs. I have these like seams. I have a scar completely back to front around my waist like a belt, like as if you know, I was cut in half by a magician or something, and the process of getting those surgeries, I mean it is violent. Just a few days after the surgery, I went to go pee and as I went to sit down, I split the seam on the inside of my crotch and it just gaping hole popped open.

And I called a friend and was like panicking, and she amazingly was like, I'll be there in twenty minutes. She showed up with a bottle of white wine and valium and gave me a valium. And then the doctor had said that you had to push gauze back in, like you had to pack the wound with gauze, and so she I spread my legs and she packed me up, almost like you're putting the stuffing back into a teddy bear. Yeah,

it was. It was a tremendous, tremendous amount of effort to almost try to return myself to a place that that that I felt I needed to be in as a woman in order to be sexually desirable by a man. I mean, that was why I was doing it. I mean, I guess you used the best word. The surgery was violent. Was there ever a moment when you thought this shit's not worth it? I mean, this is so not worth it. Like I'm literally having doctors cut me into pieces in

order to make this happen. Yeah, I mean it's so funny. Like I It's like I never stopped to think, you know, you don't have to do any of this. You know, you don't actually have to do any of this to be loved. But it was like suddenly I got to play this role I had studied and dreamed of my whole life. So it was like a performance piece. I mean, like I love getting to watch like how I could affect men, you know, like because I'd never affected them before.

It was delightful. I mean I remember I was walking down the street in New York and I passed like this very beautiful woman and she kind of looked me

up and down and like nodded her head. And and then I would pass you know, attractive men and attractive women, and they would do this thing where they kind of look at you a nod and I was like, oh my god, there's like a secret club for the attractive people and the nod is like their secret handshake, and you know, I'm getting like a trial membership or something, you know. And I remember being at a deli and I had put you know, the items I was planning on buying up on the counter and I didn't have

enough money. I realized, you know, it's like twenty dollars. I looked at my pocket, I only had ten. So I started kind of looking at the items and I was like pulling some down and then the deli guy just like shrugged his head and he was like, just take it. And I was like what and he was like, take it. You're fine, and then he kind of smiled at me, like you know, you're a pretty girl. Take it. And so I walked out and I was like, wait, beautiful people get free stuff, Like how is this real?

And then I just I wanted to know if that was a thing. So I started going to delis and I would do like I would do a bit where I would put the stuff up, they would, you know, give me the price, and I would pretend that I didn't have enough money and they would say like, you're good, take it. And that was to me. I mean, I was like this can't be real, Like you can't get

this much from just looking differently. And that's where it started to shift from like, oh my god, this is so fun to feeling a little bit sad or jaded, where I was like this is so unfair, like the person I was when I was fat, Like I was so kind, I think partly because I couldn't just ride by on good looks. I was always like trying to be helpful, trying to be loving, you know, baking people cookies or or whatever, like doing things for people, a lot of like acts of service to be a part

of people's life. And I really do feel like that woman deserved the love and attention that this sudden, like thin version of me just automatically got without doing anything. She realized that new Elma, as she was beginning to see herself, knew Elma could pretty much get anything she wanted, including boyfriends, something old Elna had only dreamed of. On one particular date, knew Ellena and a guy were eating

frozen yogurt, chatting about calories. I think, you know this is gonna sound mean, but I just can't tolerate fat people. And I just remember the word choice, like tolerate, you know, like people can't tolerate lactose, but like tolerate. And I, you know, I wanted to say something, but I also wanted to be in the room, Like I wanted to be there, and I wanted to be chosen by him, and I wanted to just be the pretty girl who

got the guy. And so I like took his hand and I was like, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, it's hard for them because you know, they're judged based on their appearance and they might actually be very good people deep down, and you're not giving yourself a chance to see that, you know, not that I would know anything about it, you know. Yeah, And I regret not actually just standing up and saying what I really thought, but at the time, I just I

didn't want to get kicked out of the club. Is that the moment you realized, oh, no, I think knew Elna might be a worse person than old Elnah. Definitely, definitely, because it was this moment where I I was like, oh, this is the trade off, right, Like you can get what you want, but you have to give up other parts of yourself and how bad do you want this? And you know old Elena had been actually like I

had been this like larger than life person. I mean I was like audacious and bold and like I was funny and like in some ways, the bigness of my body allowed for the bigness of my personality. Knew, Elma, I was embarrassed of this person I used to be, like.

I wanted to erase her from the earth. Yeah, it's interesting because the version of thin Elna you saw in the fun House mirror that day relied on old illness personality, like old Elena's values, right, you saw that freedom in her because she still had that mindset that you cherished about yourself and childhood, right like outspokenness, irreverence, bold, right, willing to speak up. And I guess, yeah, you just didn't expect, you you might lose that along the way,

or that there would be tradeoffs involved. Totally. Yeah, that when you change, you know, you you make these compromises along the way that you end up losing the core thing that you were changing for. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. It took Elma Baker four major surgeries and countless diet pills to transform herself into the thin woman she saw in the

fun house mirror back when she was twenty two. By the time she was in her thirties, Ellena got married and was working as a producer at the radio show This American Life, and she decided to do a story about her transformation from Old Elna to New Elna. What was it like writing this deeply personal story about yourself and sharing it with the world. What what about that process made you think about yourself differently? I remember saying to myself, like, if no one were to read or

hear or see this, what would I actually say? And so that's why in the story I admitted to the fact that even though I had lost eight years earlier, in order to hold on to the thinness and never go back, I had had to basically stay on diet pills for fourteen years. Sorry, by diet By diet pills, do you means speed yeah, fentermin Yeah, it was on fendermine again. And so I, you know, I confessed that.

And there was also a section of the story where I was interviewing my husband and he admitted that he wouldn't have loved me or been attracted to me. I can't remember exactly what he said. I think it was he would never have dated me if I was fat, and I secretly knew that deep down, but to have it directly affirmed was also just really really painful, really

really shocking. And so the piece itself. Once that piece aired, I had been under such a deadline to finish it and put it out in the world that I hadn't really stopped to think, like what am I saying about myself out loud? I felt like it was important and that's why I did it. But Yeah, after that piece came out, I felt like I felt a little like I showed I had shown my ass to the world. Instead of feeling proud, I was a little bit mortified. I was like, Oh, no, everyone knows now that I

have an addiction to diet pills. You know they also know that, um, you know that I have a value system that's completely out of whack, and you know that this marriage that I have is also kind of there's something really false or fake about it? Like what do you? How do you unsee these things? Because I had, unintentionally, by being so honest, I had revealed a secret that I had been trying to keep from myself. What was

that secret? Just that I was really unhappy and that I was that this was all kind of a lie, you know, and if you just keep going, you just keep going, keep going, don't stop, don't think, don't think, don't think, you can outrun all of that. But unfortunately I had like put a hard stop and I basically said, like, look,

you can't look away here it is. It's so interesting how a piece of art can sometimes do that right where for the first time, you're you're reading about this person Elna from with the third person perspective in mind, and suddenly things become really clear or salient that when you had the first person perspective and we're running it five hundred miles per hour, you just never had noticed. Yeah, I definitely felt like I wasn't intending to make something

that would be this inconvenient. It was a real wake up call for me. So basically I felt like, Okay, so I stood on a podium basically and announced to the world what my problem was, and now I can't not see it and I can't go back like I had forced my own hand. Basically, around this time, Ellena ran out of diet pills and couldn't find a way to get them anymore, so she went looking for an alternative. And so I was like, Okay, I'm gonna go to a therapist. I'll pretend I have ADHD and I'll just

get at her all. And so I'd never been to therapy in my life ever, and I decided I would go mainly just to get adderall. So I go to this first therapy session and I'm, you know, pretending that I have all the symptoms of someone with ADHD in order to get this adderall. But he kept asking these these pretty pointed personal questions that we're pushing me to reflect on, like, Okay, actually, what is really going on

with me? And I started to see that therapy was a potential option to actually get to the root of the problem. And I knew this would be much harder. This would be the hard way versus the easy way, which would just be to take pills, which is basically what I've been doing for I think at that point, like over fourteen years of my life. But I also

knew that like that wasn't sustainable. I didn't want to be on diet pills as an eighty year old woman, you know, that's why I decided that I would actually try to look at my mental health. I mean, I've read at this point, I think one hundred and fifty self help books. I've been to group therapy. I've been to two different therapists. I am, you know, I meditate, I work with a monk, I work with shaman's, I've

done psychedelic therapy. Like, I have really tried to understand the root of this this behavior and and I began to see that there was a different way to do this, and that was like by being in touch with my feelings. And you know, I would say the last several years of my life have been very much dedicated to finally learning how to feel and that it's okay to feel. You seem to be just relentlessly committed to changing yourself. Right, So maybe that your twenties were spent on physical and

thirties are spent on mental. Do you see similarities between the two And do you ever think at one point do I trying to change and just be? I will say, like my neurosis is fixing myself. And I will say that for the first time in my life, for a good four month period this year, I went on sabbatical. I was living in the woods and allowing myself to like do things I did when I was a little kid, you know, like walk barefoot and grass, climb trees, play.

I think that that actually brought out a side or a person in me. That is what I thought all the hard work would bring out. It just brought out like joy, and it brought out playfulness. I thought that the way to bring that person into the world was to criticize and pick at myself enough that I would be able to be perfect and then I could be free. And it turns out that like the level at which I was picking myself apart and critiquing myself made it as if like there was no fertile soil within me

for anything to grow. I was poisoning myself on a daily basis. And once I stopped doing that, then just sort of naturally, I started to blossom and feel silly and free and like joy. You've talked a lot about old Elna and new Elna, and I'm wondering who you are today. I mean, I feel like my hope is I burned it to the ground enough, you know, And so the difference now is that like I don't care

what you see. I care if I'm happy. I'm letting my intuition, I'm letting my body my feelings, like I'm letting that guide me in terms of like this is who I am and what I want, and I no longer care what you're telling me is right and wrong, because when I was living based on what the world told me was right and wrong, I was committing acts of violence against myself on a daily basis to fit into a system that was broken and messed up and

never really created to actually benefit me. I think one potential lesson from your story for me is the reminder that when we do change one thing about ourselves, that change doesn't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes we want it to, but it can lead to so many other unexpected changes that we just can't predict, and we can control it either, right, Like there's this fallout, there are these ripple effects that basically spiral out of our control after we've made that

first intentional effort to change something. Do you have any reflections on that? Yeah, I think like when I saw that woman in the mirror and I wanted to become her, and I made a commitment that I would do anything it took to become her. I did not know what I was signing up for, you know. I thought I would just get like a like almost like a wish, like I would get to step through the mirror, and I would walk out the other side as her. I

would be the same person I'd always been. I would continue to act the way I'd always acted, and and I would forever get to be her. I wouldn't have to like diet every day for the rest of my life to stay her, and I wouldn't have to change my personality to get the things that she got. It's sort of like that nursery rhyme. There was an old woman who swallowed a fly. I don't know why she swallowed a fly. Then she swallowed the spider to get the fly that you know will insider, and then she

keeps swallowing new things like that. That's kind of what change brought into my life. It just brought like new things that I had to solve or fix because I became addicted to the need that something had to change in order for me to be happy, and so I never gave myself any moment to be or relax or appreciate it because there was more to do, and then I can finally sit down and relax and appreciate it.

And I think, like, if I hadn't have taken a pause, I think I probably would have done that to my deathbed, and I would have just missed my whole life. I wonder if this experience has made you more cautious about trying to change other parts of yourself because you've now seen how interconnected things are, right, and so yeah, uh, you know I wish I wish it had more cautious. You know, you need to. I just I mean I

would in fact it had. I think, if anything, it made me addicted to changing right because you know, this thing had been impossible for me. I thought, there's no way I'll ever not be fat. And then when I took it on and I learned that I could change it, I was like, well, I can fix anything. Then if if anything's wrong, I can apply like my full self to it and focus and change it. And you know that's far more true for something like weight, because there

is like a science to it. It's how reason calories out, and it's not as true to something like I'm going to fix my mental health like it. It's just not as fixable or you know, other aspects of my life, whether it's career, you know, whether it's romance where there's other people involved, where you don't have control. I can't apply the same strategy, and yet I'm behaving as though I can, which is in and of itself like a

form of insanity. Apologies for the selent metic question, but I'm interested in how your relationship with change has changed. M I am someone who has totally transformed in this lifetime, and I have lived multiple Like it's like I've been reincarnated a few times in this one life, and I appreciate everything that each of these huge transformations has given me, Like each one of them has given me a lifetime worth of lessons, and each one of them came from

a really true, deep need to change. It's just that like, you won't get what you wanted. In fact, if anything like, it'll be so much harder, and you will lose so much, and you will the stability you had, but like you will grow, and for me, that ultimately is worth it. Hey, thanks for listening. If you're enjoying a slight change of plans, please make sure to subscribe, rate, and share the show.

With friends and join me next week. When I talk with the man in his early thirties who's in the middle of treatment for stage four bone cancer, I felt like I was doing pretty much everything in my power to not get cancer, and yet here I am. It really makes you understand that you are not in control, and it's a little refreshing in a way, like you can sort of release the grip on the steering wheel a little bit and that kind of easiest tension throughout

your entire body. A Slight Change of Plans is created an executive produced by me My Shunker. Big thanks to everyone at Pushkin Industries, including our producer Mola Board, associate producers David Jaw and Julia Goodman, executive producers Mia Lavelle and Justine Lange, senior editor Jan Guera, and sound design

and mixed engineers Ben Talliday and Jason Gambrel. Thanks also to Louis Gara who wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith who helped arrange the vocals, incidental music from Epidemic Sound, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker