I stepped off the elliptical. I looked to Kate, who was as over the whole workout as I surely was. I felt thankful she shared my discomfort. We walked back to the locker room, the two of us feeling released from prison sentences.
“Well, that was terrible,” Kate confided.
“Yes,” I commiserated. “Yes, yes, and a hundred more yeses. Is this how our summer will be?”
“No, it won’t be this bad. We’ll get used to it.”
I nodded, wanting dearly to believe her. I would have given anything to have been in Kate’s shoes. I would have given anything to have wanted to be at the gym for the plain and simple reason of getting in shape, as I’d seen Kate write on the fitness questionnaire we were asked to fill out when we joined. What must the people working the front desk have thought when the two of us walked in together? I wondered. The blond one’s here to tone up; the brunette’s here to overhaul her life. I had to stop myself from dwelling on it too long, for fear that resentment might brew.
Ten minutes later, I slouched beside Kate in her Mercury, the air conditioner blasting, our bodies already aching.
The sweat glossing my face began to dry in a tight, tacky way. I pushed the radio dial and found Britney Spears’s familiar purr. We listened, not needing to say anything beyond the exchange of a few reassuring smiles. She knew I was tired. I knew she was tired.
I looked out the window and thought of that scale. The number. The needle nosing almost as far as the machine would allow. For the first time, in all of my bigger-than-big life, I felt afraid.
I ran around my brain looking for a space just big enough to fit the blame. Damn that food. All that I’d eaten in twenty years came to mind, as lustfully, as vividly as pornography. Thick, rose-middled burgers, gooey with melted cheese and between sesame-seeded buns. Dripping butter pecan ice cream cones. The grease spots remaining after all the slices of a pizza pie had up and left their cardboard home. Potatoes—french and twice fried. Fingertips smudged a fiery Cheetos orange. The glossy yellow trickling onto my movie theater popcorn. Raspberry jelly oozing from the side of a powdery puffed doughnut. The corner of a sheet cake.
I struggled between wishing away all the food that had collected on my body as fat and fiercely missing every morsel. I hated the binge last weekend, and I wished I could do it again. I wanted to eat less, and I wanted immediately to eat more. I wanted to be angry but felt too hurt, too ashamed to thrash about. I wanted to fit in while also wanting, so badly, to say a careless “f- off” to all of society. I wanted to run each ounce off but felt more like taking up permanent residence under the covers of my bed. I wanted to be alone while wanting desperately to be held tightly.
I knew I was large. I knew that the scale wouldn’t ever have sided with svelte, but I hadn’t braced myself for 268. Nothing could have prepared me for such a fact.
And what was worse, what was even more paralyzing than realizing that I was pushing 300 pounds, was that I couldn’t close my eyes and make it go away. It wouldn’t just disappear. Only exercising and eating right could help.
I compared myself to the spectacle of people I’d seen on television shows. The half-ton man; the woman who never left her house again; the panel of obese teens on talk shows; the mother who was forklifted from her home, from the bedroom and bed she’d taken to as refuge for years when her legs could no longer stand her weight. Every big person I’d ever seen, in the flesh or in film and photograph, flashed before me. Is that what I’ve become? Or at the very least, am I on my way?
I was the girl who needed an intervention, the one in denial of her size. I felt I’d woken up to a body covered in excess. Why didn’t I stop sooner?
My motivation for losing weight had always largely been vanity. The health warnings I’d read in magazines, the ones I’d gotten from my pediatrician, seemed like idle threats to an invincible teenager. But as I approached 300 pounds at twenty years old, I was reminded of my mortality. I was no longer just big. I was obese, and worse, morbidly so, according to the height and weight charts I’d read online. I had reached a point where I no longer distanced myself clearly from the others, those on television: the really big people. It was just as my doctor had predicted in eighth grade. And it wasn’t just the peak I’d hit that stung. It was the numbers I imagined just past the peak. What lies beyond 268? Where do you go when you’ve only ever traveled northward on the scale? Though never particularly adept at math, I knew even on a very elementary level, that a safe prediction of my future weight meant 300 pounds … 315 … 330 … 345, and on and on.
The thick, solid black line I always imagined as separating me from the biggest of big narrowed and faded considerably. You’re not far from them now, Andie. A few years, and you’ll be there, too.
I stared at my belly. Two very unwanted bulges rolled down my front. My thighs, in the loose-fitting shorts I’d worn, were rippled with waves of cellulite. The seat belt dug diagonally between my sagging, chubby breasts. I cursed each ounce of flesh. As if the fat had arrived of its own accord and set up a commune on my hips, thighs, and love handles, I wished it would leave, quietly but quickly. In those minutes, losing weight felt all at once easy and impossible. I knew how to do it. Even a person with the most basic health knowledge knows that to lose weight: You must move more. You must eat better. And you cannot binge-eat.
When you’ve never been thin, never met normal numbers on the scale, you don’t know that living in moderation is possible. My notions of thinness at that point revealed a stunted, misguided impression of all those who had bodies I admired. Half of the thin folk, I assumed, survived on salad. They ate sparingly and almost immaculately clean. This I imagined to be equally confining and elating, because being thin, after all, would be more satisfying than any food. The models, the hot Hollywood crowd—they all brought to mind immediately that common diet saying, “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.” I assumed it to be true. I already felt trapped, looking at a future of flavorless eating.
The other half of the thin folk I assumed were naturally slender. Raised by parents who did not struggle to eat moderately, they lived in bodies that regulated hunger and fullness with distinct signals, while mine had gone wonky. These individuals were more enviable, because whereas the former half of thin folk at least seemed to work to be bodily beautiful, this effortless half seemed to have won the genetic lottery. My genes were not so lucky. Dad, Nana, the people I most closely resembled—they waltzed straight past thick and stood squarely in fat. Those family members were future versions of me.
The thought shook me awake. A freezing cold shower seconds after leaving the warmth of bed. And yet I already dreaded the next day and the next exercise session. I made a mental list of all the reasons I couldn’t, I just wouldn’t, be able to keep it up. The excuses poured out of me. In minutes, I had ten fairly reasonable ways to defeat my own weight loss. I was lining obstacles up like traffic cones.
Kate dropped me at my house and leaned over to hug me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “And, yes, I almost always smell this good.”
I opened the car door and stepped out. Bending down into the passenger window: “I can drive tomorrow. Pick you up same time, same prison.”
She laughed. And with that, she reversed out of my driveway, and I made my way to the back door.
Sitting in bed with my laptop later that evening, I searched for body mass index (BMI) calculators and height-and-weight charts. Most of the information I found suggested that a healthy weight range for a twenty-year-old female standing five feet nine inches tall was, on average, between 130 and 170 pounds. To meet the high end of the range, I’d have to lose 100 pounds. I set my sights on weighing 140, but then part of me hesitated in pinpointing a number at all. I had no idea what my body would look like at any of the lower, healthier weights, and it seemed arbitrary to be so specific so far away. But I needed a goal to strive toward, so 140 it was.
The next day came and, with it, the gym. Kate and I pulled in
to our spot, the one inconveniently facing McDonald’s. I stared in lust.
“I should just keep driving straight ahead. Keep going ’til we’ve broken through the golden arches and the deep fryer is in the front seat with me and the McFlurry machine is in the back.”
Kate lifted her eyebrows and smirked, knowing the idea wasn’t the worst I’d ever had. The scent of french fries wafted through our open windows, hot and salty as the summer air.
Sitting still in the driver’s seat for a moment longer, I thought back to the most touching of all weight loss stories I’d ever come across. Two years before that summer, I was in the waiting room of my doctor’s office thumbing through O, The Oprah Magazine (Oprah, if you’re reading—because I know you like to read—I adore you always and forever). Midway through the thick issue, I found a piece written by a woman who’d lost one-hundred-plus pounds. She credited much of her transformation to the support of Overeaters Anonymous. For the first time, I had felt connected to someone who shared her struggle with weight and the grieving associated with trying to eat less, to limit yourself. The writer was honest; she was vulnerable line after line in a way I hadn’t heard before. The part that stood out to me, as if highlighted in neon yellow, was when she recounted a night she felt particularly weak in her resolve to not binge-eat. She called her sponsor in desperation, feeling herself slipping off the ledge of her willpower. Her sponsor paused, considered her pain, her anxiety and lust to binge, and said:
“Can you do it today? Can you make it through today without bingeing? Just today, and tomorrow we’ll reconsider?”
The writer was struck, as was I in reading it over. “Uh, yes. I mean, yeah—yes, I can get through today,” she stumbled out in concession. In that moment, she realized that this phrase would be her mantra. It would be the question she’d ask herself, day in and day out, when she felt herself falling back into old habits. Can you do it today? The notion of just trying to take each day as it came. The commitment to the present moment, and only the present moment, without worrying about the big and daunting picture of all the days that followed. The mustering of strength and dedication for now, if not later.
That question stayed with me after having read her article. And at that moment, sitting in my car outside the YMCA at the beginning of my own weight loss journey, it floated into my head like a banner attached to a blimp in the sky.
Can you exercise today, Andie? Not tomorrow, not the next day, not even a month from now. Today? Eat the best you can, work your plus-sized heart out … today?
And, I found, I could.
The first three days—when I sobered to the fact that my life would be devoid of a deep fryer and two-for-one doughnuts, at least for a while, anyhow—were almost unbearable. During the day, I’d feel fine eating healthily. I bought health-focused magazines at the grocery store and pulled sample diet menus from them to try on my own each week. I mixed and matched as best I could to find the kinds of meals I liked most. I didn’t know the calories, the carbs, or the fat grams, only that the foods and portions in the meal plans were deemed healthy by whatever registered dietitian helped design them for the magazine. On an average day, breakfast was scrambled egg whites with a handful of baby spinach thrown in to wilt, one piece of whole wheat toast, and a cup of berries. Lunch was a salad with grilled chicken, feta cheese, and half a large pita pocket from the Greek restaurant up the street. Dinner was simply seasoned and grilled chicken, pork, or beef, served alongside a pile of steamed vegetables. Snacks were fresh fruit and anything labeled light, sugar-free, or fat-free. I had heard enough times about the myriad benefits of fresh fruits and vegetables to know that I needed to incorporate as many as I could.
Eating right in the daytime went well, but when the sun went down each night, I felt that deep longing for sweets. Come eight or nine p.m., my stomach felt hollow. I wanted cake. I wanted chocolate. I couldn’t watch television without looking to my lap, where I wished there could be a bowl of crunchy something, anything. I couldn’t deem the day done without having that urgent stuffed fullness. I needed to be sufficiently sugared for sleep. Anxiety, sweaty palms, my body writhing in discomfort. An addict, I cried, heartily and whole bodily, every night.
One week in, it got easier. And by easier, I mean I agonized less. Perhaps my stomach shrank, or my mind’s appetite did, whichever comes first.
Daniel was forty miles away at his dad’s house in Worcester for the summer. He had also gained a significant amount of weight during sophomore year, reaching nearly three hundred pounds. When he saw the steps I’d taken toward losing, he made the same commitment. Twice a week, we’d see each other and go out for healthy dinners, take long walks, and go to the movies, where our only shared snack would be a diet soda. I found tremendous comfort in having someone to go through the process with me. But, for him, it always seemed easier. His love of sports made exercise less of a chore. Daily, he’d find friends to play pickup games of soccer, basketball, or tennis. Combined with eating less, he lost forty pounds in three months.
I spent the rest of that summer following my own decidedly healthy path of exercising every day—taking group fitness classes, using the cardio equipment, jogging or walking with Kate—and trying to eat well. I lost just over thirty pounds in those three months of summer. I won’t say it was fun, but I will say that, like anything new, and like any challenge you embark on, it was exciting at first to see the numbers on the scale fall. I had my best friend with me. And Britney Spears was still making music that moved me.
At the end of the summer of 2005, I went back to school feeling better about my body. Mom took me shopping for new outfits. Proud of my weight loss and mindful that she couldn’t reward me with food, she showed her love with gifts. At the large outlet mall near our home, she bought me a new wardrobe to show off my smaller figure. Reuniting with old friends back on campus, I’d hear, “You look great!” or “Have you lost weight?” It was rewarding.
And though I continued my efforts to make healthier food choices, aim for smaller portions, and walk to classes a few times a week, I dropped my rigorous workout routine so I could focus on classes and socializing. Without my own kitchen, I wasn’t preparing my meals any longer. Fruits and vegetables were scarce. Instead, I was lured by the familiar temptation of greasy late-night pizza slices, snacking to stay awake; Sunday-morning brunch plates pooled with maple syrup; and a constant influx of takeout in my dorm. Staying strong and committed seemed impossible when my environment was booby-trapped with indulgence. And to top it off, that fall, Amherst opened up a burger joint called Fatzo’s that sold cheese-smothered Tater Tots and one particularly juicy “Cowboy Burger” that involved smoky hickory barbecue sauce, onion rings, and Monterey Jack cheese. I couldn’t help but love it.
And then there was the matter of alcohol.
Even in the years long before Dad died, I swore I’d never take a sip of the stuff. Not a drop would cross my lips. I remembered all the ways it hurt Mom, scarred Anthony, poisoned Dad. I couldn’t so much as look at a bottle of liquor without seeing it as a symbol of heartache. But as I got older, my drive to teetotal softened. In the years following his death, I learned more from Mom about how broken Dad was—that there was more than just the love of the drink at work. He had been abused as a child and suffered from crippling, lifelong depression. Alcohol wasn’t the cause of his problems; it was his misguided solution.
I saw other adults in my life drink alcohol in moderation with no ill effects. At holiday parties, my uncles drank beer. Mom even sipped the occasional hard lemonade. Gradually, I stopped viewing alcohol as an evil to be avoided at all costs, and by the time I was sixteen, I, like most high schoolers, was curious to try it.
The first time I drank, Nicole and I had been invited to a house party after a Friday-night football game. Everyone would be there, I was assured. The invitation alone flattered me.
I enjoyed the feeling of a slight buzz, the mild euphoria, the way my inhibitions were cut free by Smirnoff. I liked the
way laughter grew as the night went on, the way social status ceased to matter, the fact that after three beers all of us appeared thin. And mostly, while I had fun with alcohol, I felt no serious attachment to it. The part of my brain that lived in a steady state of worry and paranoia kept an eye on my boozy behavior. It reminded me of my past when it seemed I had forgotten. The one thing that left me sad, left me as guilty as I’d ever felt, was the thought of how much my actions might hurt Mom if she found out. I pictured her face, the grooves of lines made from years of worry, and I felt a secret shame.
When I entered college, I embraced drinking as an integral part of campus life. Booze bound us all socially. Nicole, Sabrina, Jenny, and I drank cocktails on Thursdays, on Fridays, on Saturdays. There was no getting around the party scene of college life. And more, there was no way I wanted to withdraw from it. The years I’d spent in Amherst were the most fun I’d ever had, and drinking, though admittedly illegal and five shades of risky, was as much a part of that as skipping classes to sleep in. I don’t regret one shot or one hangover.
One year into my stay at UMass, I fessed up to Mom. I promised her I’d be careful, that I’d be aware of all the ways I could easily fall into genetically addictive patterns. And though she might have been choking back tears at the time, she knows as well as I do that I’ve always kept that promise.
It Was Me All Along Page 11