Brigid Berlin’s prolonged weight-loss process

Brigid Berlin’s prolonged weight-loss process enters the diary as both a personal change and a series of public encounters. After seeing herself in Bad at 300 pounds, she began dieting; the diary then marks her progress through successive weights, from 197 to 190 to 161. Those figures are accompanied by scenes of absence and return, praise and teasing, and Andy Warhol’s efforts to bring her back into work at The Factory.

The film as a turning point

Brigid Berlin’s diet began after she saw herself in Bad and, as the diary puts it, saw herself weighing 300 pounds. By the time she called later that year, she was down to 197. The entry dwells less on the mechanics of dieting than on how it had altered her daily life: Warhol described her as lying in bed at the George Washington Hotel, waiting for the weight to come off, and complained that she had become boring to talk to because she did and thought nothing. His account is openly exasperated and comic, so it records his response as much as it establishes her experience.

Warhol proposed that she work at The Factory answering phones, imagining that she could let some of the weight come off while doing the job. The entry says she would not take that offer. His joke about the thirty-nine years it had taken her to lose weight, and the possibility that it might take another thirty-nine years for her to start working, turns the diary’s attention from her changing body to her perceived inactivity. It also shows that the change did not immediately bring her back into the social and working life Warhol wanted for her.

Numbers, photographs, and return

The diary’s next clear milestone comes on December 10, when Brigid Berlin visited The Factory for the first time since starting her diet in August. She was then down to 190; Warhol noted that the last time he had seen her, she weighed 260. Everyone fussed over her, and he took photographs. Her return is thus registered not only as a lower number but as a social occasion, with the altered appearance made visible to the group and preserved by the camera.

By March 1977, she had reached 161. The diary records that she was coming by to collect Christmas and birthday presents she had left unclaimed, linking the new weight to a renewed visit after weeks of absence. When she arrived at her mother’s home a few days later, Warhol described her coming down the staircase looking gorgeous, like a version of her mother, Honey. He focused particularly on how much her body had changed, remarking that her ass was no longer there. The praise and bluntness coexist: her appearance is celebrated, while her body remains the object through which the diary measures the transformation.

Work, attention, and the diary’s perspective

At the March visit, Warhol again offered Brigid Berlin a job at the office. Their conversation lasted twenty minutes and centered on what had happened to her body. He also warned her not to watch Bad, reasoning that seeing herself at her heavier weight, accompanied by farting sounds, would make her furious at the people who made it. The film therefore remains present after it helped prompt the diet: it is both the image that precipitated her response and a comic record Warhol thought she would resent revisiting.

Across these entries, weight loss is narrated as a progression of figures, punctuated by the moments when Brigid Berlin appears before others and becomes the focus of their reactions. Warhol’s photographs, the group’s fussing, the comments on her looks, and the repeated job offers give the process a social dimension, but the account is filtered through his sardonic judgments. The diary documents a substantial physical change while also revealing the limits of its own viewpoint: Brigid Berlin’s motives and feelings are largely absent, even as her body and her return to The Factory are repeatedly observed.