I was taken aback because, in my experience, even Koreans who know English well are hesitant to use it outside of the classroom. “Thank you,” I said as I stepped forward. The guy took a step forward, too. He asked me my name, told me I had beautiful eyes, and then asked for my phone number. Certain that he was looking for an English lesson, I gave it to him, got my food, and left without giving it another thought, until the guy, Ji-hoon, texted me and asked me on a date.
I learned through texting that Ji-hoon had lived abroad in Australia for a few years. Now, at twenty-seven, he was a university student studying to be an engineer. Ji-hoon came on so strong in the beginning that I was slightly turned off, but he was determined and tireless in his quest to date me. He sent me text messages relentlessly, each one beginning with a different pet name. He had crowned me his “Burger Queen,” a tribute, of course, to where we met, but his creativity didn’t stop there. One day I was his “round, robust darling” and the next he called me his “plump princess.” When he called me his “elliptical goddess” he admitted that he’d run out of synonyms for “curvy” and had consulted the thesaurus. So when I finally invited Ji-hoon to my apartment, I asked him why he was so interested in me. It’s no secret that fat women don’t fit into the Korean beauty standard, and I’d thought a Korean man finding me physically attractive was next to impossible.
“I have a fat brother,” Ji-hoon explained, running his hands through my hair. “So I was conditioned at an early age to get used to fat people. And you are so beautiful; you’re like a supermodel.”
Ji-hoon and I got along well. He shared my sense of humor and we laughed a lot. For the first time in all my years in Korea, I had an intimate partner who could help me do things that had always been difficult. And in retrospect, it was no coincidence that I met him at a fast-food joint—Ji-hoon loved to eat. In fact, Ji-hoon, as tiny as he was, ate more than any human being I’d ever known before or since. He noted that quantity of food was more important than quality, and he routinely ordered an appetizer, two meals, and a dessert all to himself. When that settled an hour later, he’d pop off the couch and ask, “Ice cream?” before hurrying off to the corner store and returning with the ice cream, chips, and candy, which he’d finish off before bed. As much as I wondered if his eating habits were “normal,” I was, in a sense, grateful for them. When I was with Ji-hoon, I never worried that he would think I was a pig if I ate five pieces of pizza instead of two. I never had to make myself uncomfortable by asking for food at all, because Ji-hoon had it covered. Even on days when he wasn’t with me, he’d call for sushi or Korean or Italian to be delivered to my apartment. Until I started dating Ji-hoon, food delivery was a luxury I never got to enjoy because of the language barrier, but now I was discovering all kinds of delicious food, Korean and otherwise, that I hadn’t had easy access to while I was in Korea. Feeding someone is an act of love, and it was only one of the ways he sought to take care of me. A couple of months into our relationship, I could feel my clothes getting tighter. I wasn’t sure if Ji-hoon noticed; he always remarked about how I was perfect, but he’d wag his finger at me and say, “But no bigger, okay?”
I wasn’t sure if I really loved Ji-hoon, but he was a Band-Aid on the wounds that Korea had inflicted on me. When we went out in public, he proudly held my hand and showed me physical affection in spite of all the people who looked at us like we were circus freaks. One night when we were out at a club, a drunk American military guy sidled up next to me and asked me to teach him how to dance. I knew by the glances he kept throwing to his friends and his tone of voice that he was making fun of me. Ji-hoon knew it, too, and he took a swing at the guy (and got us kicked out). Another night, while we were having drinks with friends, a group of girls asked if they could take my picture, and when I politely declined, they kept trying to covertly snap photos of me while laughing and talking in Korean about how fat I was. Ji-hoon marched over and knocked an expensive Canon camera right out of the hands of one of the girls. But his protective, aggressive streak wasn’t always directed outward—he’d begun turning on me, becoming irrationally jealous and controlling. He constantly accused me of cheating on him; he broke my furniture in fits of rage; he stalked me outside of my apartment when he should have been in class. After several months, I’d finally had enough of his possessiveness and hair-trigger temper, and I broke up with him. He left me twenty-seven voicemails, tried to force his way into my apartment, and stood beneath my window shouting that I was a whore.
The next six months in Korea were darkened by the familiar shadow of depression. I went to work, came home to my apartment, and drank alone until I was numb. On weekends, I sometimes stayed in bed all day, while Henchi sat nestled on the windowsill or on my pillow, refusing to leave the bedroom until I did. During one phone conversation with my mom, as I tried to describe the futility I felt, I told her that as long as I was in Korea, I didn’t think I could ever be happy. It had been years and I was sure I was as culturally assimilated as I could ever hope to be, but I couldn’t handle the way my body felt like a target. My mom reminded me of all the wonderful qualities I possessed and urged me to stay positive. But even then, I told her, it wouldn’t change the way other people saw me. In the end it didn’t really matter how awesome, worthwhile, or beautiful I thought I was if no one else could recognize it. I rationalized that even the most genuinely happy person in the world couldn’t survive in a place that didn’t want them. Growing up as a privileged white girl, I’d never experienced such a resounding sense of “otherness” that could incite disdain and even abuse.
I debated whether I wanted to stay in Korea. I loved making money and traveling, but I’d also unexpectedly secured an audition with the dance therapy department at the renowned Pratt Institute. I was positive I wouldn’t get in, though, and I didn’t want to be stuck in the States with no job prospects. One minute, the thought of leaving Korea seemed scary, but in the next it seemed like the obvious answer to my problems.
On the street, I was used to taunts and jeers, gross disrespect, prying questions about my weight and body, and now even violence, but I’d also made some wonderful friends. One of them, named Narae, made it her mission in life to make me comfortable in her country. She made and brought me breakfast every day, even though I begged her not to.
Narae’s mother prepared traditional Korean meals to give to me on holidays because I was spending them alone. Occasionally, a stranger would do something so kind it would blow my mind, like the time I stood at the crosswalk getting drenched in a downpour and a young, beautiful woman pressed her open umbrella into my hand, wrapping my fingers around the handle before she flitted off in her high heels, protecting her head from the rain with only her hands.
Despite these acts of kindness, the streets still felt like a war zone. There was a particular group of men who’d taken to harassing me daily at the crosswalk on my way to work. They worked at an auto body store, and each day, as I was waiting for the light to change, they would yell and gesture at me. One day, when I’d had enough, I turned around and yelled, “What are you looking at?” in Korean.
This angered them, and they stepped off their property, getting in my face, yelling “Fuck you!” at me. When I arrived at work, I relayed the story to a Korean friend who was so horrified that she told one of our managers, who called the auto body store and let the boss know what his employees were doing to me. They were fired on the spot. Having my manager stand up for me in this way was both incredibly touching and unexpected, but the incident pushed me over the edge.
My contract was up for renewal the next month, and I found myself sitting alone, making pro and con lists to try to figure out my next step. As I looked back on the last few years, I realized I’d accomplished a significant number of things, and I hadn’t jumped on a plane back to the States when the going got tough, like some ESL teachers did. I’d survived a breakup, discrimination, harassment, and even physical abuse—and I’d thrived, working my way up the entire MoonKkang syst
em. I hadn’t lost all my hope or optimism, but all of the difficult encounters had begun to sap my spirit, and that frightened me. I knew one thing for sure: if I went home, I would commit myself to losing weight. Korea was my first experience with overt bigotry due to my weight, and it sparked in me an indignation I’d never felt before. Surely, I hadn’t deserved to be treated like this, but the only thing I could think of that would guarantee that I wouldn’t be treated like this again was losing weight. I packed my life back up into suitcases, took Henchi, and boarded a plane back home, determined to fix my problems—to fix my body—once and for all.
7
LOSING 100 POUNDS DIDN’T MAKE ME HAPPY
The morning of January 17, 2011, was gray and rainy. My dad’s voice, brimming with excitement, woke me with a start.
“Let’s get goin’, girl!”
Having gotten only a couple hours of sleep, I rolled over away from my dad and buried my head under the pillow. He snatched it away immediately.
“C’mon, girl! This is the first day of the rest of your life!”
I could think of at least a hundred things I’d rather spend the first day of the rest of my life doing than waking up at the crack of dawn to go meet my new trainer, Will, but by this time my dad had drawn the blinds and flooded my cocoon with light. I peeled myself out of bed slowly, jiggling my limbs to shake the lethargy off.
As I drove to No Gear Fitness, I zeroed in on the rhythmic squeaky sound of my windshield wipers and willed myself not to cry. Besides sleep deprivation, I was wrestling with fear of failure, performance anxiety, and the uncomfortable sensation of being stuffed into a pair of two-sizes-too-small Lycra athletic pants from Walmart. There was so much riding on the next hour, and I couldn’t recall a time in recent memory when one singular event had held so much power over the course of my life. I’d told myself, in no uncertain terms, that if I couldn’t accomplish my goal this time, I would have to resign myself to being fat forever, and I couldn’t bear to think about a life like that. This was the day I would start over, and from here on out, no mistakes could be made. This was the fresh start, the redo, the clean slate, the last chance—and the self-imposed finality of it was petrifying.
The day I started training with Will, 329 pounds (2011).
A few minutes later I cautiously inched my way inside the gym. The old sweat smell, the humid air, and the clanging of machines seemed simultaneously foreign and familiar, and I felt wildly out of place. Will was physically intimidating, the kind of guy who might make your palms sweat if he looked at you the wrong way, but his eyes were soft and he had a friendly smile. The first thing he wanted to evaluate was how long it would take me to walk a mile on the treadmill. I glanced nervously at the clock. ”What if I can’t finish in time?” He laughed at my question, but I didn’t crack a smile in return. I was genuinely worried that it might take our entire fifty-minute session for me to walk a mile, but I stepped onto the treadmill anyway. After five minutes I felt like I was done for. After five more I felt some electricity in my legs, so I picked up the pace a little bit. Pretty soon I was doing some semblance of jogging, and when the red lights on the treadmill read 1.00, only eighteen minutes had elapsed. Nowhere near as bad as I thought.
Will led me to the back room, where we did what he called “dynamic warm-ups”—high knees, Russian walks, under-the-fence-over-the-fence. Then, I ducked underneath a rope and punched on either side. The exercises were easier to execute than I’d thought they’d be, but when our time was up and we walked to the front of the gym to weigh in, my legs hit Jell-O status.
“I’m going to put you on a ten-day detox,” he announced as I stepped on the scale. “Three hundred and twenty-nine.”
Three hundred and twenty-nine? My jaw was on the floor. The last time I had weighed myself in Korea I was 280-something. I’d been able to maintain a weight of approximately 280 pounds for the last two years of college and the first two years of Korea, and now I was forty-nine pounds heavier? I knew I had gained weight from all the social dinners and snacks with Ji-hoon; my clothes had gotten tighter over the months we’d dated, but they’d all still fit. I estimated that I’d gained ten pounds or so, but here I was, having gained practically fifty pounds without realizing it. The shameful number flashed on the scale like emergency blinkers.
Will, oblivious to my devastation, penciled in the number on a paper in his file folder and then handed me a couple of loose-leaf sheets with meal plans and a grocery list. “See you Wednesday,” he said.
I was so physically worn-down and emotionally drained that I skipped the grocery store, telling myself I’d go the next day. When I got home, I headed straight for the warm protection of the couch and sent myself out of the real world and back into sleep. Later that evening when I woke up, I went to Heather’s house to tell her about how the session had gone. Her husband, Jared, had trained with Will that day, too, but his session was after mine.
“Will said you did really good for a first session,” Jared told me. My inner child who always needs a gold star swelled with pride.
“I’m not even that sore,” I bragged.
“You will be. The day after I started, I couldn’t even lift Ava out of her crib.”
The next morning Jared’s prediction came to fruition. I could barely lift myself out of bed, let alone tend to an infant. I had never, in all my years of physical activity, felt anything close to the excruciating pain that permeated every bone, muscle, and tendon of my body. My core was so fatigued that I could barely sit up. I couldn’t lower myself onto the toilet. Instead I grabbed the towel rack, aimed, and fell. I thought back over the amount of formal exercise I’d done over the last ten years. Sure, I’d walked to and from work and around my neighborhood every day in Korea, but even a night out of vigorous dancing used to make me stiff. The mornings following such an evening were a nightmare, especially for my feet. The arches would tense up and the balls were so sensitive that just getting to my bathroom in my bare feet required me to hang on to furniture to help lessen the pain. Now my muscles felt like they were on the verge of a total and complete shutdown.
I lumbered down the stairs, slowly and yelping in pain, and climbed into my car to go to the grocery store. As I leaned on my cart for support, taking small, shuffling steps through the aisles, I wondered if I could even make it through my entire list. I tossed broccoli and lettuce into the cart. Then chicken breasts, turkey bacon, apples, and something called apple cider vinegar. By the time I got home I could only muster enough energy to throw the food in the fridge and collapse back onto the couch.
The next morning the soreness was even worse. My mom heard me squealing and called downstairs: “Whitney! You can’t go anywhere like that. Just call him and tell him you’re hurt. This is ridiculous.”
“No!” I yelled back, cursing myself for somehow getting this out of shape. “I can’t not show up the second day.”
When I arrived at Will’s gym, after savoring every second of near-motionlessness in my car (aside from the pain that shot through my calf every time I pushed the brake), I gingerly lowered myself onto the couch just inside the door and waited for him to finish up with another client. When he was done, he strode toward me smiling.
“Honestly,” I said, “I’m not a wuss, but…”
“You’re sore?”
“Yes. So bad that I just really don’t think I can even…”
Will stared at me, no hint of sympathy on his face. “You made it to the couch, didn’t you? If you can walk in that door, you can train. C’mon.”
I hobbled behind him, struggling to keep up. But he was right. I could train. Once we got about twenty minutes in, my aching muscles started to loosen up some, and somehow I got through an entire second session without losing consciousness or dying right there on the floor.
After my third session with Will on that Friday, my friend Ashley, who had basically moved into our extra room downstairs, and I decided to go see Black Swan. My muscles were really tender and I had a
hard time going up the barely raised theatre steps.
“Everyone’s looking at me like, ‘Daaaamn, that fat bitch can’t even walk!’ They don’t know I’m sore from working out!” I joked. I’d been eating by-the-book clean for four days now.
• Breakfasts of a hard-boiled egg and piece of turkey bacon.
• Then, a workout.
• Next, a drive-through Starbucks for a venti iced coffee with skim milk and two Splendas.
• Go home.
• Eat an apple and a handful of nuts. Sleep on the couch. Make a salad with blueberries for lunch. Late afternoon, eat an apple and two ounces of cheese.
• Watch TV.
• Waddle to the kitchen one more time around seven P.M. for two ounces of chicken and a cup of broccoli. Sleep. Repeat.
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