![]() ![]() "Well, this is good, too," she would say as she put more food on to her daughter's plate. Her mother, Agnes, caught on to this ploy and began to do the same in return. "Would you like to taste this?" By the time dinner was over, Karen's plate was clean but she had dispersed her entire meal to everyone else. "Here, you have some," she would say as she enthusiastically scooped heaps on to others' plates. She would rave on about her delicious meal and then insist that everyone try it for themselves. Another of her strategies involved offering samples of her food to others around the table. She rearranged and pushed her food around the plate with a fork as she talked, which gave the appearance of eating. Friends and family began to notice extreme changes in Karen's eating habits, despite her attempts at subtlety. In fact, this was the first time he paused to consider she might be taking the diet too far. "A hundred and five? You look great now." "Well, I'm just going to get down to around 105." Having witnessed Karen's meticulous routine of counting calories and planning food intake for every meal, Richard complimented her initial weight loss during a break from recording as the two dined at the Au Petit Café, a favourite French bistro on Vine Street near the A&M studios. A lot of us girls in that era went through moments of that. "She weighed 110lb or so, and looked amazing… If she'd been able to stop there then life would have been beautiful. "She lost around 20lb and she looked fabulous," recalls Carole Curb, the sister of Karen's then boyfriend, record executive Mike Curb. She purchased a hip cycle, which she used each morning on her bed, and because it was portable the equipment was packed and taken with her on tour. She fired her trainer, and immediately set out on a mission to shed the unwanted pounds on her own. She was discouraged and vowed she was going to "do something about it". Watching the Carpenters on a Bob Hope television special that autumn, she remarked that she had put on some extra weight. Instead of slimming down as she had hoped, Karen started to put on muscle and bulk up. She hired a personal trainer, who made visits to her home and recommended a diet low in calories but high in carbohydrates. Karen was shocked when she saw photos from an August 1973 Lake Tahoe concert where an unflattering outfit accentuated her paunch. We don't like to eat before a show because I can't stand singing with a full stomach… You never get to dinner until, like, midnight, and if you eat heavy you're not going to sleep, and you're going to be a balloon." Even so, eating while on tour was problematic for Karen, as she described in 1973: "When you're on the road it's hard to eat. (She was 5ft 4in tall.) She levelled off at around 8st 8lb and maintained her weight by eating sensibly but not starving herself. Although she was never obese, she was what most would consider a chubby 17-year-old at 10st 5lb. Karen's quest to be thin seems to have begun innocently enough just after high school graduation when she started the Stillman water diet. By September 1975 her weight fell to 6st 7lb (41kg). At least she would control the size of her own body." And control it she did. In 1996 journalist Rob Hoerburger powerfully summed up Karen Carpenter's tribulations in a New York Times Magazine feature: "If anorexia has classically been defined as a young woman's struggle for control, then Karen was a prime candidate, for the two things she valued most in the world – her voice and her mother's love – were exclusively the property of her brother Richard. Offstage, away from the spotlight, she felt desperately unloved by her mother, Agnes, who favoured Richard, and struggled with low self-esteem, eventually developing anorexia nervosa from which she never recovered. But there was a tragic discrepancy between her public and private selves.
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