I Do It with the Lights On

by Whitney Way Thore

  I didn’t dare dream of messing up my diet this early, so I wrapped my arms inside my jacket and settled in for the movie. I thought about plugging up my nostrils and mouth-breathing for the duration of the film just to avoid the popcorn aroma. The movie transfixed me. I watched the dancers and remembered what it was like to sweat from every pore, to be lean, to feel pressure, to perform, and to succeed. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I’m on my way back there.

  By day ten of my detox there was good news and bad news. The good: I’d lost ten pounds. The bad: I had to leave abruptly that day to drive my mom down to Mississippi to tend to some family business for a week. I hadn’t had my license renewed since I’d been home back in the States, so I’d have to go to the DMV for that, too. Will gave me instructions to follow my diet the best I could, to try to walk at least three times, and on Friday, I could have my first cheat day—an entire day of unrestricted eating. I left the gym for the DMV and when it came my turn, still dressed in my tank top and hoodie, my sweaty hair pulled back, I realized that for the first time in quite a while it wasn’t hard to smile. I felt happy. When I got back in the car, I opened up Facebook. I didn’t update my status very often, as I felt I didn’t have much to say, and never wanted to be someone who recorded every mundane detail of her life. I wonder if I should say anything, I thought. I didn’t want to jinx myself. Eh, fuck it.

  Day 10 = 10 pounds lost. Post.

  When I got home my dad helped me load up the car with my scale, my George Foreman grill, various Mrs. Dash seasonings, and measuring cups. I kept a cooler of food in the front seat with my mom for the twelve-hour drive. I promised my dad I would keep to my plan, and I did. Every four hours on the road, I pulled over to gobble down my small meal or snack. During the week, I walked through the neighborhood, almost finishing a mile. I said no to every diet drink, sweet tea, or piece of gum that was offered to me. By the end of the week I’d lost another three pounds. I was elated and ready for my cheat day. The next morning I headed out of my uncle’s house to McDonald’s, where I indulged in not one, but two of my favorite sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits and I gulped down a large sweet tea. Later that evening I had a pasta dish when we went out to eat. This isn’t so bad, I reasoned. Go through hell for six days and eat on the seventh. Doable. When I woke up the next morning, I hopped on the scale to see the damage. I was dumbfounded. The scale said my cheat day had resulted in an additional ten pounds. That was every bit of weight I’d just lost. I called Will in a panic.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Get back on the plan. Come see me Monday.”

  Over the weekend, I managed to lose only a couple of the pounds I’d gained on my cheat day. Will talked to me about water retention but seemed surprised at my misfortune. He explained that most people gained two or three pounds of water weight after a day of unrestricted eating. But I had gained ten. This experience would foreshadow the rest of my weight-loss venture. It was an endless cycle, even when I ate one cheat meal, and a fairly sensible one at that. Anything that I didn’t make in my own kitchen from scratch, including the “Under 550 Calories” meals at Applebee’s, caused me to bloat and swell in my fingers and toes. On Saturdays I weighed in at least five, sometimes seven or eight, pounds heavier. I’d hit the gym, intermittently jumping on the scale to see if I’d lost anything. When I was done working out, I usually noticed my dark shirts encrusted with a curious white stain, but it happened only on Saturdays. One day I had a lightbulb moment: it was the salt from my Friday cheat meals drying in my sweat.

  One Friday, Ashley and I tried an experiment. We’d spent the afternoon sitting in my car, sipping sugary Starbucks coffees and talking. We decided to have lunch at Arby’s and ordered the same meal in the same size. When we got home we both weighed ourselves again, after having both done so that morning. Ashley’s weight had fluctuated three-tenths of a pound. Mine had gone up four pounds. How was this possible? What was wrong with my body? I tried to voice my frustrations to Will, but he assured me that if I stuck to the plan, I would see success. He asked me to trust him, and I did.

  On March 10, when I came home from Will’s on Friday morning, my parents were packing for a weekend trip. I told them the news: I’d lost thirty pounds in fifty-three days. My dad wrote me a check for $300 to celebrate the event. I recorded the milestone in a notebook I’d been keeping of my daily weights, exercise, and achievements.

  “Let’s go get matching tattoos to commemorate this,” Tal suggested to Ashley and me that night, tickling my impulsive streak. A half hour later the three of us were staring at the wall of a tattoo shop downtown.

  “What should we get?” I asked, flipping through laminated pages of hearts, stars, and skulls. “What’s the most important thing we have in common?”

  Tal spotted a minuscule, ambiguous wing that could also pass for a leaf or a feather. Small was a requirement because I wasn’t ready to tattoo any parts of my body that would be drastically diminishing in size.

  “I like it! We should put them on our ankles. And it’ll remind me that my feet can take me anywhere.” I didn’t realize until it was all said and done that our ankles would perfectly resemble the Goodyear tire logo, but you win some and you lose some, right? To this day, every few months or so, either Tal or I text each other: Is our tattoo a wing or a feather? and the other will respond: A wing. Five minutes later: I think.

  The decision to tattoo something permanently on my body that I associated with weight loss was a turning point of epic proportions. Prior to that day, I was worried that my weight loss was just a phase, kind of like the two-week period in elementary school when I answered only to the name Sasha, or when I discovered Ani DiFranco in college and grappled for a whole month with the feeling that I was, and had probably always been, a lesbian. But now I knew my weight-loss kick wasn’t going to pass. In the nine years since I’d first started gaining weight, I’d never once managed to lose more than twenty pounds. Losing thirty made it feel real.

  Galvanized by this breakthrough, I ramped up my exercise even more. On Mondays and Wednesdays I trained with Will in the morning, then went home for coffee (by this time, I was taking it black) and a nap (because I’m logical like that). When I woke up, it was back to the gym for another workout—maybe twenty minutes on the hardest level of the StairMaster or an hour-long date with the treadmill. I could now jog three miles without stopping and I felt invincible. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I spent the mornings dragging my mom to the YMCA where, much to her chagrin, I’d purchased her a senior membership. On those nights, I attended Will’s boot camp classes where I shone as the biggest but most devoted person in the group. On Fridays, I attended my regular session with Will and then took the rest of the day off. Saturdays and Sundays I was back at it with swimming, playing soccer with my dad, or running the steps at the local high school. This strenuous regimen was made possible by the fact that I was living at home with my parents who actively discouraged me from getting a job in favor of concentrating 100 percent of my attention on losing weight. And losing weight had become the only meaningful thing in my life. With no job and few friends, the only triumphs or disappointments I experienced were hitched to three glowing digits. I had no boyfriend or boss; my avid allegiance knew only one master: the scale.

  My goal was to lose fifty pounds in ninety days, which happened to fall directly on my birthday. After ninety days I’d made it to 48 pounds lost, so I’d have to wait to celebrate that milestone. I’d made Will promise me that he would perform the Cupid Shuffle (I’m really dating myself here) and let me film it when I hit minus fifty pounds.

  I was satisfied with losing 48 pounds by my birthday. It was a Thursday night (i.e., not my cheat day), so I waited until the next night to celebrate. Heather, Tal, Todd, Ashley, and a few other friends met me for hibachi. I was excited about being able to eat it. We enjoyed a delicious meal and returned to my parents’ house. As per tradition, Heather bought me an ice cream cake and my dad made a toast before we dug in. He’d been in his rob
e, sipping merlot for at least two hours, and he spoke about my achievements and how proud he was of me, clapping me on the back and hugging me. I was so happy to make him proud that I forgave him when he kept butting his head into the playroom to say “just one more thing” and continue boasting about me.

  The next morning I had gained eleven pounds from the celebration, but I was so close to the fifty-pound mark and I would not be denied. I worked myself to the bone for two days, hopping on and off the scale after each mile I ran that weekend. On Monday morning I still had three more pounds of water weight to lose. I headed to the Y at six-thirty and ran some more. By 9:55, when I was finished with my workout with Will, all eleven pounds of water weight had disappeared, and by the middle of the week I hit my fifty-pound goal. I bought iron-on letters from a craft store and made T-shirts for Will and myself that proclaimed Club 50 on the front. On the back, Will’s read, Will: Beast Mode Since Birth. Mine read, Whitney: Beast Mode Since January.

  Losing weight became my singular obsession. I’d started eating less than my 1,100-calorie diet called for, consuming only just enough to get by. I replaced my cheat day sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit with a homemade sandwich of wheat bread, a scrambled egg, two pieces of real bacon, and a slice of American cheese. I compulsively weighed myself every time I walked by the scale, even running downstairs in the middle of the night if I’d woken up, like an impatient child waiting to see if Santa had come. I took all my PCOS medications, a routine that had previously eluded me. I sobbed uncontrollably when one Friday I discovered my dad had eaten the ice cream I’d purchased for my cheat meal before I had a bite. I dreamed about food that never touched my lips. I got off on outperforming boot camp class members half my size. I relished when strangers in whatever gym I happened to be in came up to me out of the blue to tell me how impressed they were.

  One Monday morning in the gym, I broke down with Will. I hadn’t lost my cheat day weight yet. He asked me why I was so upset.

  The day I hit my fifty-pound goal (2011).

  “Because,” I blurted, “I’ve been throwing up everything I eat on Fridays!” His demeanor turned very serious. “Whitney,” he said sternly, holding my gaze with his, “you gotta get all this crazy shit outta your head!” I’d never heard Will curse before, so I knew he meant business. And I knew he was right, but I didn’t know how to do it. It didn’t seem fair. I’d heard about other people my size dropping a hundred pounds by cutting out soda and walking a mile every day. Yes, I lost weight every week, sometimes one-and-a-half pounds and sometimes six, but I had to work my ass off for it. I was killing myself and felt like I had zero margin for error.

  On Friday mornings after my session and weigh-in with Will, I’d call my father with a report, and I was feeling increasingly obsessed with my progress. My dad took more pride in me than I did. He was the one who talked me off a thousand different ledges, day or night. He was the one who prepared me a nightly foot bath of ice water and Epsom salts to ease the pain in my feet. He was the one who would be by my bedside at seven-thirty to spoon-feed me plain Greek yogurt with agave syrup while I lay in bed, begging for one more hour of sleep. My dad was my coach, not my enemy. I knew this to be true—so why was I so afraid of disappointing him? Could it be that he had told me this was the single most exciting time in his life, after marrying my mother, my brother’s birth and my own? It was no secret that my dad was living through me, floating through bad days at work on the memory of how much weight I’d lost that week. And I knew that it was something he’d always wanted for me, not only for my health, but because he knew it would make me happy.

  He knew that if I lost weight, I would get my due. I wouldn’t have to deal with asshole boyfriends and prying eyes and nasty judgments. I’d have my pick of men who deserved me. I could stop watching my old dance videos and actually perform the routines instead. I could live up to my potential. He told me time and time again that he was amazed by me.

  “You,” he’d say, “are doing the hardest thing in the world. You could be a lawyer, or a doctor, and it wouldn’t be half as hard. What I see you do day in and day out, the iron will it takes—the work ethic it takes, the sheer determination it takes—there’s only one percent of people in the entire world who can do what you’re doing.”

  The following months boasted a slew of accomplishments. May 6: 59 pounds lost. May 27: 67 pounds lost. I called Todd and told him I was ready to dance.

  “Bring the choreo. Something I can do,” I said. Todd brought Adele and some beautiful choreography to go with it. Just like old times, we slid the furniture to the perimeter of the room and used our reflection in the TV as a mirror. We danced for hours until we were ready to film it.

  In the beginning of the video, Todd introduces us: “This is Todd and Whitney, 2011. Carrying the dream. Decades strong…”

  Watching this video now gives me chills, as I’m watching the beginning of Fat Girl Dancing, even though we didn’t call it that at the time. Who could have ever imagined where our dream would carry us? I posted the video on my Facebook page, for all of my nine hundred friends to see.

  By June, I’d lost 8.5 inches from my hips, seven from my waist, three from my thighs, and 2.5 from my biceps. I was really slimming down, and I fantasized about taking some kind of dance class. One of my friends had mentioned an adult beginner’s ballet class offered in the City Arts building—the same place I used to rehearse for community theatre shows as a teenager. We decided to go.

  When we entered the class, I couldn’t believe what I was doing. It took a lot of balls for a self-proclaimed dancer to attend a class in the style of dance she was worst at performing. My last ballet class had been nine years ago. I feigned stretching, inhaling and exhaling slowly, waiting for the teacher to arrive. And when she did, I was so relieved. Ms. Garen was approximately 106 years old (okay, I later found out she was actually ninety-three), with leathery skin and an orthopedic boot on her ankle. As she made her way to the front of the room, I whispered a thank-you to the universe. I was going to be okay.

  But the universe had other plans that day, and Ms. Garen, in all of her geriatric glory, was no joke. Before we even left the barre, I was covered in sweat, suffering cramps in muscles I didn’t remember I had. As we completed some basic positions, Ms. Garen met my gaze. I looked away in fear, of course.

  “This is not your first ballet class.” It should have been a question, but she stated it.

  “Yes. No. It’s not. Ma’am.”

  When we broke to go across the floor, I took a deep breath and tried my best, despite barely being able to whip my body around in one full revolution. Don’t even make me talk about the spotting situation or the grande jeté. As I haphazardly bounded toward the opposite corner, Ms. Garen stood next to my friend, resting on her cane.

  “It’s really such a shame,” she said, gesturing toward me. “She would be a great dancer if she weren’t so fat.”

  My notebook continued to fill up with numbers, measurements, and sentiments. July 15: 80 pounds lost. Three-week plateau is over. Lowest weight in 7 years!! Only twenty more pounds until I lose one-half of my goal weight!

  However, I was beginning to feel restless, and I craved something more to look forward to every day than hard-boiled eggs and beating my circuit times. I’d convinced my dad that I needed to work, but he disagreed. He thought working would cause me to lose sight of my weight-loss goals, but I told him I was going crazy. I applied for several copy-editor jobs but didn’t hear anything back, so I headed to retail. Target hired me on the spot. Now that I had a job, I realized that sporting the red and khaki for minimum wage wasn’t really fulfilling me, either. Something else was missing.

  On a whim, I joined OkCupid. I’d heard that online dating wasn’t “weird” anymore, and I had no life outside of the gym and Target. I wasn’t sure I was ready to go back to ballet, but I’d heard of something called Zumba. They offered a class at the Y, so I looked up the class schedule and made plans to attend.

&n
bsp; When I got to Zumba, I claimed a spot in the front row. I knew this would make me vulnerable; other students could laugh at me, or worse, make a stink about not being able to see the instructor because of my huge body. But I couldn’t stomach the thought of being stuck in the back, either, and unable to see the instructor myself. As soon as class started, I felt myself coming alive. I’d never done Zumba before and it was an enchanting mix of Latin rhythms. It was different than a traditional dance class—there was no instruction, no counts, no breaking down of the movements. The instructor just went and you had to follow, but the thumping beats and sexy hip gyrations came naturally to me. When the hour-long class was finished, I was exhausted and my toes were numb. I started toward the door but then changed my mind and approached the instructor.

  “I just wanted to tell you I had such a wonderful time. I used to dance and I’ve just lost eighty pounds and this was so fun.”

  “Used to dance? What were you just doing? No ‘used to’ about it!” she said.

  “I would love to get a Zumba teaching license someday, when I get to my goal weight. I’m almost halfway there.”

  She asked for my name and said, “Whitney, I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t mean it. You should be teaching Zumba now.” She handed me her card.

  When I got to the car, I immediately called my parents and told them that an amazing Zumba instructor had just told me that I should be teaching it, after just one class! I looked up the website on the card and discovered they were offering a certification day in Raleigh the next week. Not allowing enough time to talk myself out of it, I whipped out my credit card and signed up.

  A few days later I was sitting on the patio, drinking a detox tea with Ashley and screwing around on the Internet. I saw that a message had popped up on my OkCupid app. It was from a guy named Chad. Through conversation, I learned that he was an EMT and originally from California. He was cute, too—half white and half black, or “Halfrican,” as he described himself on his profile, and husky. Well, let’s be real, he was fat, but because we afford men different adjectives than women, he would most likely be described as husky. He asked me about my day, and I told him about my plans to get my Zumba license. “Cool,” he wrote. “You’ll have to teach me how to dance.”