The Lost Decade : Rosemary Green knows what it’s like to be obese. And she dosn’t pull any punches in her new book, detailing 10 years in her nearly quarter-century struggle with her weight--a battle she is winning

BEAVERTON, Ore. —  “Rosemary! How many calories in a pear?”

Allen Green is proud of his wife who, like a carny, can guess your weight. But she goes one better: She can tell you exactly how many accursed calories you are about to drop into your sinful maw.

“How many ounces in the pear?” Rosemary Green shoots back, illustrating the attention to detail--no, make that crazed obsession--that is behind her new book, “Diary of a Fat Housewife” (Warner Books).

Rosemary Green weighs 135 pounds. She reached her goal weight in the nick of time, just before her book came out. This gives her a total weight loss of 185 pounds from her 5-foot, 9-inch frame. The return to her pre-six-children figure took about half of her life, although the diary covers a mere decade of agony, self-loathing, brave resolutions and humiliating defeats.

In her book she tells what it’s like to be morbidly obese. Some of it is kind of funny, like when she decided that exercise was a pain--not because it was so difficult, but because it was too darn noisy. As she performed jumping jacks, her stomach would fly up and then slap down against her thighs, like a pancake flipped on the griddle. She says it sounded like “jump, slap, jump, slap, jump, slap.”

But some of what she describes in the book and during an interview at her suburban Portland home is just plain scary.

She tells how the immense weight on her body drained her of energy and caused her emotional and physical pain. She tells how body odor was a constant concern because bacteria would build up between the fat rolls, how the weight of the fat caused the skin to tear, how the tears took forever to heal because of the sweat.

But that’s the whole point of the book--to scare you; to make you drop your complacent attitudes (read denial) about obesity; to make you say, “Ha!” the next time you hear someone say, “Big is beautiful.” Green already gets hate mail from the fat acceptance people, even though her crusade--including a book tour and a recent appearance on ABC’s 20/20--has barely begun.

“Big is not beautiful,” rails Green, who was jolted into action after her husband chose to gaze longingly at a honeymoon photograph rather than at her. “It’s ugly and disgusting. I cannot describe in gross enough terms the ugliness of a body that has big globules, fat rolls of ugly, jiggly fat.”

Just the same, Green says her heart aches when she sees obese people. She feels their pain, having lived it for so many years. Still, she’d like to take fat people by the scruff of the neck and shake the denial out of them.

She knows denial well. Even as the scales crept up to the 300-pound mark and beyond, Green continued to focus only on the center of her face--her eyes, nose and mouth--when she looked in the mirror. She’s lucky. That part of her, she says, always stayed pretty and showed what it took for her to be named her high school’s Rose Festival princess.

“Fat people still see themselves as they used to be,” says Green, one of nine children, whose parents and siblings are or were obese. “But you know, I reached the point where my nose was starting to get fat.”

Now she claims to be the “last honest fat person in America.” Not many other fat people, former or current, are likely to reveal the shocking behaviors that she calls “fat secrets.” Here are a few examples:

* After Halloween, when her kids were at school or elsewhere, Green would eat all their candy. Then she’d rush to the store to buy replacement candy.

* She’d buy five candy bars at a time and eat them all at once.

* She’d lock herself in the bathroom to eat cake.

* After eating chocolate, she’d sometimes share morsels with her family so that their chocolate breath would make it impossible to detect her chocolate breath.

* Feeling queasy after devouring four candy bars, she once ate a whole box of chocolate mint cookies, telling herself that the mint was like Rolaids.

The book is hardly a how-to manual, rather a glimpse into the hellish abyss in which an obese woman dwells. The emotional horrors she describes bring to mind “The Lost Weekend,” but Green’s account is more like the lost decade.

She finally broke obesity’s mighty grip with a diet plan of her own invention, which she intends to market, something she calls the Winning at Thinning Action Plan. Basically, it’s all about putting her obsession down on paper.

In a loose-leaf binder, she still maintains a daily checklist. She checks off prayer, followed by menu planning and matters of hygiene, including showering, flossing, manicuring her nails and putting on makeup. In another section she lists everything she intends to eat that day, and at night she notes any changes that have occurred.

Green, whose poor eating habits are rooted in childhood, charts her weight and her goals, and clips out magazine photos of attractive models and clothes to inspire her. She keeps track of calories ingested and calories expended. The notebook also holds her hand-written diary, which she continues to write, hoping someday to publish a sequel, “Thin Again.”

“We need to say diets do work,” says Green, who is wearing tight jeans that accentuate her long, rocket-to-the-moon legs. “ Diet is not a four-letter word. Thank God I was on a diet!”

*

Now leggy and lean, she’s a convert to low-calorie, low-fat food, which she weighs or measures before putting in her mouth. (It’s a maintenance program following a medically supervised diet that helped her take off the final poundage.)

The look suits Green just fine, and gives her vigor and youthfulness that belie her 42 years. For Allen Green, 54, it all brings back memories of the teen beauty queen he married when she was fresh out of high school. But this is the same woman who had to have her wedding ring cut off her bulbous finger within the first year of their marriage 23 years ago.

“I didn’t expect my high school sweetheart to return to me,” Allen Green says. But he insists that he never considered leaving Rosemary, even when this self-described “connoisseur of beauty” saw his wife tip the scales at more than 300 pounds. As a Mormon, “Divorce is just not in my vocabulary.”

But the couple’s strong faith also contributed to Rosemary Green’s torment. Believing as she does that the body is a temple, she felt she had committed a sin: defiling the temple by deforming her body.

“I know it’s a sin to be obese like that,” she says soberly. “One of our purposes in this life is to serve our fellow man, and when you become so obese that your fellow man has to wait on you all the time, there’s something wrong with that.

“Weight loss is a form of repentance and paying the price. I had to pay the price.”

*

Reading Green’s book is like watching Sisyphus try to roll the boulder up the mountain. But for good measure, this Sisyphus wears a hair shirt and a crown of thorns. You rejoice with her when she manages to drop 10 or 20 pounds, but you soon get the picture that she won’t be keeping it off for long. It’s hard not to peek ahead at the diary entries, which list the day’s date and weight, even though you know what’s in store. In just a few pages, you’ll be hearing poor Green beat herself up again.

In a way, it’s discouraging that she ends the book still weighing more than 200 pounds. Her last entry is full of hope and encouragement, but, knowing her track record, you can’t help but think, “Yeah right, lady.”

Green recognizes that she’ll have to stay on a diet for her entire life to fight her tendency toward out-of-control eating. To that goal, Green hasn’t touched chocolate in years. If anybody else brings home chocolate or other tempting treats, it gets put in a kitchen cupboard with a padlock, for which everyone knows the combination but Green.

But she says it’s worth it, especially since she’s finally able to wear her wedding gift again. On their wedding night, Allen Green gave his bride a pearl choker, but it was soon destined for a corner of a drawer because, Rosemary Green says, “It literally became a choker.”

But something else is making the dieting--past and future--all worth it for her. These days, Green is wearing her wedding ring again.