Photo-- Meet The Lady who was Fired for Being Too Fat

                Deborah Voigt was fired for being too fat to fit into a (size 12) little black dress for a production of Strauss's Ariadne aug Naxos at London's Royal Opera House in 2004, public outrage was immediate. "It's incredible someone can get away with saying those words," Voigt, 54, tells PEOPLE exclusively. "It's still open season on overweight women."

Voigt details her lifelong struggles with food in a new memoir, Call Me Debbie (cowritten by former PEOPLE writer Natasha Stoynoff). She writes about her first binge at age 5 (when she slugged back a jar of olives), her late night fast food runs once she got her driver's license, stuffing herself with Pepperidge Farm coconut layer cakes "until I passed out."

"At first I'd say 'I'll never go over 180 lbs., then it was 200 lbs.," she admits. "It just went up and up and up."

At the same time, she was becoming one of the world's leading opera stars. In that world it was fine, even expected, to be large. But once she became obese, some directors started to comment. "It was hard being Tosca at 300 lbs.," she says. "They're singing about her being so beautiful, and I'm feeling 'I am not and I will never be.'