We could sit in this discussion group all day and throw theories at one another. No one thing had made me fat, and no one thing had made me thin. It was a complex, intricate set of variables and circumstances. It was an advanced equation that I had to figure out how to balance. Everyone got her own math problem to solve: some from the introduction to algebra course, others from advanced calculus.
Starting seemed to be the hardest part. Getting my body to lose weight had been like trying to start a car that would have preferred to spend retirement rusting in a parking spot in the shade of an elm tree. I had to turn and turn the key, pop the clutch, give it more gas, until for some reason it magically kicked into life. I didn’t ask why; I just got it in gear and kept going before it could die again.
“How do you stay motivated?” Carol asked.
I should have just told her to screw motivation. If I waited for motivation to do the dishes, I’d have plates stacked on my counter so high that I couldn’t open the microwave. Which I currently did. I was never motivated to do my dishes. Yet I turned on the faucet and poured out some dish soap anyway. It wasn’t because I wanted to have fun with bubbles; it was because I had to. I couldn’t bring myself to eat off paper plates.
I’d read other people’s weight-loss stories in magazines and there was always a point in the story where they had a huge revelation that kicked them in the fat pants. They couldn’t fit in the roller-coaster harness or their uncle died from heart disease. But why wait until you’d wasted forty bucks on an amusement park ticket or you were buying huge black pants for a funeral? I thought I’d had my moment when I had gallbladder surgery, but I spent more than a year after that just as fat as I ever was. People waited for motivation to find them, but they needed to go out and find motivation. It’s doubtful that you would get to the bottom of that pint of ice cream and find the message “You need to lose weight” written on the bottom.
This was all easier said than done, of course. It’s hard to get unstuck, but it takes even longer to pull your feet out of the gum left on the sidewalk if you wait for someone else to come along with Goo Gone. You just have to do it, even though you don’t want to. If you saw diet and exercise as optional, you were screwed. It was nonnegotiable.
“Oh, I don’t know. It helps if you find exercise that you like to do.”
Carol nodded her head. “Well, I hope I can do it too. I don’t like being so fat.”
“Oh Mom, you’re not fat,” her daughter said.
Well, actually she was,
I thought. The problem wasn’t that Carol was fat, it was that “fat” was considered a dirty word. It had become an
insult when really it was just a description of how someone looked. It wasn’t any different from saying someone was tall or short, blond or brunette. Maybe if we weren’t so afraid to use the word we could stop seeing it as such a bad thing to be. Yet it seemed impossible to use the word “fat” without sending an emotional charge.
“You’ve just been making some bad food choices lately,” her daughter said.
I was making a lot of choices these days. I would always go for the slice of whole-wheat over the white bread. Sweet potatoes would beat normal potatoes in all my vegetable wrestling matches. I peeled the skin off the chicken even if that made me a poultry scalper. All those little choices in the day added up to something bigger. It was like stacking every brick to make a glorious cathedral or sitting at a loom every day, weaving thread in and out to make a glittering tapestry. Losing weight required a lot of constant thinking and decision making.
I had certainly chosen to become thinner, but my fatness was more a result of the choices I
hadn’t
been making. I had woken up that morning and come to this meeting. I did not go to Bermuda. Had I
chosen
not to go to Bermuda? In all the time I spent picking out camouflage socks that matched my green top, measuring the proper amount of water into my instant oatmeal, and locking the door as I left, not once did a thought bubble appear over my head saying, “Hey, I could go to Bermuda!” This was partly because I was not a cartoon character and partly because the thought never occurred to me. If I never even saw this as an option, it wasn’t fair to say I made a choice not to go to Bermuda.
Similarly, when I was fat I had never hit a situation in my daily routine when I had to consider “Do I get fat or do I stay thin?” I didn’t live on the
Let’s Make a Deal
set with Curtain Number One or Two to choose from. At the most, I encountered situations in which I had
to choose between two options that would lead me to either of the possible end points of thinness and fatness.
The problem was I didn’t know some of the choices I was making were going to make me as fat as I became. I knew Twinkies weren’t a health food, but I had no idea exactly how bad they were for me. If there had been a moment that morning when I had considered going to Bermuda instead of the meeting, I would have also had to consider that such a choice would probably get me fired when I didn’t show up for work the next week. It would also drain my savings account, which I’d worked hard to bulk up. If I had flown off anyway and then discovered I’d upset my family by missing our planned dinner party, would I have chosen to alienate them?
Similarly, I wasn’t choosing to be fat when I knew little about nutrition and exercise, when I had no concept of how many calories I was taking in every day and didn’t even know how many calories I
should
be taking in. I was still personally responsible for my actions, actions that led me to obesity, but I was ignorant or at least partially ignorant, which prevented me from making a conscious choice to be fat. The word “choice” implied intent, which I lacked. I was like a driver who rear-ended the car in front of me while fiddling with the radio station—I was responsible for the accident, but I hadn’t chosen to hit someone. I’d chosen to take my eyes off the road and had paid the price.
I spent one summer in high school at an academic camp where I ate pizza almost every day for lunch. I also had a not-so-secret affair with the soft-serve ice cream, and I wasn’t the only one, that whore. While I knew the ice cream was a bad idea, it never occurred to me that eating that much pizza was going to keep me fat too. I don’t know how I made it past admissions with this blatant stupidity. I was personally responsible for my food choices, but I wouldn’t say I was choosing to be
fat when I chose pizza. I was just a nutritional idiot who didn’t realize the full repercussions of my actions. If the dozens of people I saw at the McDonald’s drive-through every evening truly knew how much a Big Mac cost them in terms of energy input and output, half of them would probably squeal their tires for the closest Subway. They might even get out and jog there to burn off the extra calories from that morning’s Egg McMuffin.
Having options was another factor in choice. Some people had lives that were more predisposed to make them fat. If you had decided to eat healthy, what did you do when the cafeteria had only donuts or danishes left for breakfast? How easy was it for you to exercise if you lived in an urban environment? Is it really a choice not to go to the gym if you can’t afford a membership?
Saying that fat people choose to be fat is at the very least oversimplifying matters, and at the most, it implies we have more control over our lives than we actually do. Not everything that happens to you is a direct result of a choice you made. If it were, we’d all be allpowerful and all-knowing. If an idiot rear-ends your car, it isn’t your fault simply because you chose to go for a drive. Some things happen to us that we have no control over. Choices we make sometimes have consequences that we are unaware of when we make our decisions.
That’s not to say we have no control, either. Fat people can get thinner. I still had the fat pants to prove it. I made different choices and altered my behavior, and now I had seen the rewards. But a lot of my success came from awakening to the fact that I
hadn’t
been making choices. I wasn’t debating “Should I run tonight or not?” The thought never occurred to me. I didn’t know that eating a big bowl of macaroni and cheese would leave me tired. I never considered eating something better. However, I did know that eating a jar of frosting with a spoon wasn’t making me the next Kate Bosworth either. That one was
all on me. It was the difference between accidental manslaughter and premeditated homicide.
I chose the actions that ultimately made me fat, but I wasn’t always aware that the food I was eating had so many calories, and I didn’t always have a treadmill in my bedroom. I was responsible for being fat, but it wasn’t always a choice.
I had no idea how to tell Carol this, though. I finished chomping on my celery stick and the discussion concluded. Sadly, we did not solve the obesity epidemic of central Indiana that afternoon. I got up to get my jacket from the hat stand. Carol came over to see me off and said, “Congratulations again. You seem really happy.”
I was happier, but it wasn’t just because I was thin. I had changed a lot on the outside, but only because I’d changed so much on the inside. People saw this brightness in me and assumed it was because I was skinnier.
“You don’t look like you need to lose any more weight, either,” she added. There’s a sentence I’d never thought I’d hear someone say to me.
“Thanks,” I said as I opened the door. “And good luck.” I shut the door softly between us.
A couple of weeks later it was warm enough to go outside without a jacket, so I headed straight for the trail. It was odd to think I was excited to go outside. I’d always hated the outdoors growing up. In fifth grade, I’d hid under a table so I wouldn’t have to go out to play kickball. I’m sure the class’s pet guinea pig was happy to have the company or at least happy to be tormented by one fifth-grader instead of thirty. I laced up my shoes tightly, headed for the gate, and started walking to warm up my muscles. I passed a woman with an amazing physique. Thankfully I’d stopped playing “Is she fatter than me?” lately and had started playing “How many reps will make me that ripped?”
I picked up my pace and broke into a slow run. The rasp of air rushing through my nasal passages sounded like intermittent static on the TV, sparking off and on while someone adjusted the antenna. I was now able to complete an eleven-minute mile, but I knew my pace wouldn’t break any land-speed records or even beat the eight-year-old on training wheels ahead of me. I didn’t care.
I felt breeze on the back of my sweaty neck and was hit with a sudden blast of joy. Even though I didn’t have a boyfriend, and I didn’t have a million dollars, and my toilet was probably in the process of breaking, I was experiencing these unexpected hits of happiness more and more lately. I was closer to joy now than ever before, as if I had moved next door to it and caught glimpses of it mowing its lawn and getting the mail from time to time.
The sun was burning hydrogen and helium to create dazzling light that sparkled off the water below the bridge. The hot and cold air collided to form a breeze that brushed my hair back in the wind. As I inhaled for two steps, exhaled for one, I felt the rhythm of my running flowing through me like the air in my lungs. Ryan Adams was singing in my ears telling me I was so alive, so alive. I couldn’t disagree.
If there were a secret, this was it.
CHAPTER 18
Killing the Fat Girl
S
o, that’s the end, right? I got thin and now I get to live happily ever after. I’ll never step foot in the plus-size section of another department store. I’ll eat sugar-free gelatin desserts for the rest of my life. Someday I’ll meet the perfect man, and we’ll laugh at my fat pictures and joke about how ridiculous it is that I ever looked like that. Let’s close the book on this fairy-tale story, put it on the shelf, and knock back some champagne with my fairy godmother.
Too bad I could still get fat again.
It happens. A lot.
1
If the diet industry knew how to successfully help people maintain long-term weight loss, it would have put itself out of business decades ago. People like me have a fat chance of staying thin. I’m going to roll the dice anyway and gamble that I can maintain my weight. It’s better to play the game even though I might lose than to sit it out entirely.
I’m on permanent probation. I’ll be making weekly check-ins with my parole officer forever. His office is my bathroom floor and his face displays three numbers. He lets me walk all over him. If I stop exercising and stop eating right, I
will
go back to fat prison. There is no leniency.
I have to think about food and exercise more than I’d like to, but that’s the price I pay, and it will probably never go away.
My metabolism will slow down as I age and ten or twenty pounds might start to creep back on. There are weeks now when the numbers start to climb back up, and I worry that I might have to dig out a larger pair of jeans. I don’t have a box of skinny clothes at the bottom of the closet any more, just a box labeled FAT CLOTHES (IN CASE OF EMERGENCY).
I don’t think I’m going to get fat again, but who ever plans to gain back the weight? No one plans a car accident, either. When things are going well it’s difficult to remember how hard life was before. But to gain back all two hundred-and-something pounds, I would have to completely stop caring. I can’t unlearn everything I’ve learned. I think my chances are good for success because I’ve accepted the fact that my body needs constant care and attention. I haven’t been cured of obesity, I’m just in remission. There is no fat vaccine. I have realistic goals and I won’t be heartbroken if I never wear a size 4 dress.
The funny thing is, that fat girl hiding in my mother’s photo albums, the one in the ugly clothes with the slumped shoulders, she had a pretty good life. She had a cat who curled up on her soft, fleshy belly for naps. She had a family with a sense of humor, who never made her feel bad about herself. She got good grades and was frequently the teacher’s pet. She always had a safe place to sleep, food to eat, and a place to call home. Given the choice between that life and the life of a skinny starlet in rehab, I’d put the fat suit back on fast enough to jam the zipper.