Half-Assed

by Jennette Fulda

  After three days, I stopped updating the blog. When it comes to weight-loss blogs, no news is bad news. My next entry came in March, when I confessed I’d fallen off the wagon again. One day we will all drive flying cars, and people will still be falling off wagons. My impetus to hop back on was a pain in my chest, near my heart. I had lain in bed the night before, cat curled under my knees, wondering if I would embody the lyrics of Y Kant Tori Read’s song and have a heart attack at twenty-three. Obesity caused so many aches and pains that I was a hypochondriac, constantly trying to convince myself I wasn’t dying of heart disease or cancer, or that I didn’t need a new knee. After the bill for my surgery, I couldn’t afford a replacement knee, but mine had started creaking, especially on the walk downstairs from my fourthfloor office.

  My mother bought a treadmill and a smoothie blender. I started parking farther away in parking lots to sneak more exercise into my day. I bought a green lacy top a size too small as motivation to stick with the program.

  I lasted four days that time. If I kept lasting one more day on each attempt, I might be thin by the time those flying cars appeared.

  At the end of April, I posted only one entry. It denounced the grocery store designers who placed Krispy Kreme glazed donuts at the entrance of the store, as if that were my real problem.

  I tried a third time in July. I had learned that taking the stairs every day could lead to an extra five pounds of weight loss a year. Little spurts of calorie usage here and there added up through time, just like the fistful of spare change my father would dump into an old check box on his dresser every day after work. Once the box was full, we’d dump it out and sort the coins into paper rolls. We’d end up with tens of dollars in the shapes of brown cylinders to exchange for cash. I would gather up my weight in the same way and exchange it for a better body.

  When I descended the stairs at the end of the day, I stopped short at a pain in my right joint. I had to hobble down the six flights of stairs, taking baby steps, landing two feet on each step before descending to the next. How was I going to lose weight if my body wouldn’t cooperate with the simplest of exercises?

  In October I gave up soda. In November I took it back.

  Later in November I ordered a scale that measured up to 440 pounds. I don’t know why I’d tried to lose weight without owning one. It was foolhardy when I couldn’t tell how much I’d lost. My reckoning arrived in a big, brown cardboard box. Numbers are normally such cold and expressionless digits when posted on price tags or written on calendars, but they seemed so warm and encouraging when they told me how much I had achieved in a week.

  I pulled it out of the box and inserted two AA batteries into the back. I stepped on the scale until it went BEEP, BEEP, indicating it was done judging me, as opposed to most people, who only silently judged me. I hesitantly peeked at the number between my toes.

  368.8 pounds.

  I was relieved I hadn’t rolled my weight odometer over into the four hundreds. I felt as if I’d lost thirty pounds simply by stepping on the scale’s white plastic frame. I swore that these digits would be going down.

  Looking back at those early blog entries, I can see I was confident and full of hope, yet I sit here in the future like Cassandra, knowing I was doomed. It’s like reading a book I already know the ending to. “Silly girl! You’re not going to escape from the dungeon until chapter five. Didn’t you get the revised copy of the text?”

  Perhaps as you’re reading this you’re wondering, “When’s it going to happen? When’s she going to start losing weight for real?”

  I wanted to know too.

  I thought about giving up.

  I might not be capable of being thin. I might be like a notalent actress who should blow off auditions and drive my beat-up Chevrolet home from L.A. I typically scoffed at destiny. It’s a force that controls characters in fantasy novels, not real people like me without pointy ears who own only magic wands made by Hitachi. But “destiny” is the only word that described how I felt about my fat in my most fatalistic moments.

  Even if I did lose the weight, I had heard most people regained it. If I were to call the customer support number of any major dieting corporation for its rates of recidivism, I knew I wouldn’t get them. I had better odds in Vegas, and at least the food at casinos was free. I could just be grateful that I lived in a society in which food was plentiful enough for me to become so fat. Obesity was surely better than emaciation.

  Was thin even something I should want? I wanted to be considered attractive by the average male, but I didn’t want to define myself only by my relationship to men. I wanted to find clothes more easily, but retailers seemed partly to blame for ignoring a steadily growing portion of the population. I wanted to feel comfortable in a crowd and unashamed of myself when meeting new people, but that might be a mental problem I needed to overcome, not a physical one.

  The fat-acceptance movement had a lot to say about this topic. I was traipsing along the Internet, throwing stones into cyberspace, when I heard about organizations such as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). I clicked on websites that preached that fat people should accept themselves at the size they were and that society should accept that not everyone could be thin. They fought fat discrimination and declared that the diet industry did more harm than good. There was even a group of plus-size cheerleaders flashing the cellulite on their chubby legs beneath short black skirts. Joining the synchronized swimming group was out of the question, though. I could barely even dog-paddle.

  I cruised a lot of these websites, burning a fraction of a calorie with each mouse click, trying to get a better sense of the movement as a whole. There were interesting discussions about whether the health consequences of obesity were exaggerated because of a moral panic.1 The moderates seemed reasonable enough when they argued that you could be fat and fit. Plenty of chubby people finished marathons every year. But I didn’t believe that meant all fat people were healthy either, especially the fatter they got. I couldn’t gauge the cholesterol level of the 500-pound woman at the grocery store just by looking at her, but I could see that she had to use a motorized scooter because she couldn’t walk. She didn’t seem to be a paragon of health. There was a point at which fat no longer seemed like something to be accepted but a matter of life and death.

  There was a difference between being forty pounds overweight and being 400 pounds. If you got flesh-eating gangrene because you couldn’t clean your ass properly, you had a problem. If you were so overweight that you stopped breathing while you slept, you definitely had a problem. And you’d wish you had either one of those problems if your toes were chopped off, not to fit into Cinderella’s slipper and fool a prince, but because they had turned black and rotted off from diabetes. None of the sites I visited talked about this. For a movement that was about acceptance, there appeared to be some denial going on.

  I liked the idea of equal rights and self-esteem at any size. I wanted to be paid the same as my thin counterparts, but statistics showed that was unlikely to happen.2 I certainly wanted to like my body as much as the obese burlesque troupe seemed to like theirs, though I wasn’t sure where I could find a pair of fishnet stockings in my size. Its members didn’t seem ashamed of being fat. I’d never seen that before. I didn’t even know that was possible.

  I bookmarked some of the fat-acceptance sites, but I still wanted to lose weight. This did not go over well. One day I logged into my account on a fat-acceptance message board to leave a comment and discovered I was not allowed to post. At first I assumed this was because Internet gremlins had caused an error while munching on the server’s motherboards. Later, I learned it was because weight-loss bloggers were not allowed on that site. It turned out this was detailed in the registration agreement, which I had scrolled through quickly without reading when I’d created my account. I should really start reading those things before I accidentally sign away my firstborn child, assuming I haven’t already.

  Fine. I wasn’
t paying the server bills; I didn’t get to make the rules. Still, I was pissed. I weighed more than most of those people. I hated fat bigotry as much as any of them. I had never even been on a diet like many of them. But my voice would no longer be heard because I wanted to be thin. Why was that such a problem? I wasn’t trying to convince anyone else to lose a couple of pounds. Weight was such a personal issue that I hadn’t even talked to my family about it. I couldn’t imagine telling a stranger on the Internet that he or she needed to lose weight. But neither could I honestly say that I was happy that I lost my breath when I tossed a ball around with the cat. Walking down the hallway and picking up a jingling ball three times shouldn’t be a workout.

  The definition of the word acceptance is “to recognize as true.” Acceptance is the opposite of denial. If I really accepted myself as I was, it meant I’d recognized who I was to the best of my ability, flaws and all. It didn’t mean I was necessarily satisfied with all the materials that made the house of me. The kitchen tile needed to be replaced, the patio door was squeaking, and what was I thinking when I chose that wallpaper? But at least I’d taken a look around the place and written an honest appraisal. It didn’t mean I couldn’t hire a contractor. The house of me had a strong foundation, but I wanted to paint the walls a different color and add a Jacuzzi.

  Just because I’d accepted who I was didn’t mean I had to cryogenically freeze myself as that person for the rest of my life. If I were the same person twenty years from now, I would have wasted my life as an organic air recycler. Acceptance did not equal complacency. I didn’t have to throw up my hands and say, “Okay! This is it. This is as good as it gets.” I could accept myself and be working to change myself at the same time. I knew it would be only when I truly accepted myself that real change would be possible.

  However, I would not be able to change myself into someone with posting access to this message board. After my account was deleted, it was clear I wasn’t wanted, so I stopped visiting the site. I believed people shouldn’t hate themselves for being overweight, but I didn’t think they should have to enjoy it either. I had accepted that I was fat. I just couldn’t like being fat. It wasn’t because I hated myself, an accusation some fat-acceptance members frequently threw at dieters. I wanted to lose weight because I loved myself and I knew I deserved better.

  I think the site’s attitude was just a reaction to the poor way fat people are treated. Some thin people who’d never battled a weight problem assumed I was simply weak willed, that if I just laid off the Twinkies I wouldn’t be so fat. These were stereotypes used by people trying to oversimplify the issue. Fat was not a moral problem. It was a complex state caused by too many factors to name. I think the FA members got tired of being blamed for being fat when it wasn’t completely under their control. They didn’t like to be called lazy when they’d worked for years on diets that didn’t work. And even if I had been the laziest, weakest-willed person on the planet, being fat did not make me a bad person. Fat wasn’t good or bad. It wasn’t a scarlet F of shame written on my elbow. It was just fat. I deserved as much respect as any thin person and I shouldn’t have to live under a cloud of shame.

  The antidote to shame is pride, but I thought some FA members took the pride so far that they were creating shame in the other direction, in an equal and opposite reaction. Whenever I tried hanging around fat-acceptance sites, I felt as if they were trying to make me feel bad for wanting to be thin, which was just as bad as anyone who tried to make me feel bad for being fat. Just because you believed fat was good didn’t mean thin was necessarily bad. There were certainly many bad things that came from the importance society put on being slender: anorexia, bulimia, and a diet industry that made millions of dollars without making millions of customers thinner. If society put importance on being fat there would be a different list of bad things: binge eating, forced feedings, and poorer gas mileage. Either way, there were many things about being fat that simply sucked, my surgery bill being one of them. My knees had only so much cartilage left.

  I also had the nagging feeling that this was about more than just fat and thin. It was about a philosophy toward life. The members of the fat-acceptance movement were encouraging me to give up hope of ever being smaller. It was as though they had decided I’d be locked away in fat prison forever, so I should just hang some drapes over the steel bars to make the place homey. My body was like a prison, isolating me from relationships and experiences that I so desperately wanted. I kept hearing the subliminal message, “Stop trying. You’ll never make it. Forget about digging an escape tunnel. It’ll just add six more months to your sentence.” Underlying all the adipose tissue was a philosophical debate greater than fat or thin, pretty or ugly. It was the battle of whether it was better to strive for the impossible dream or to settle for what I had. Which one would cause more casualties?

  Many fat-acceptance members believed obesity wasn’t a choice but a permanent life sentence handed down by your genetics and metabolism. After reading the most recent research, I agreed that it was much harder for some people to lose weight than others.3 Factors you had little control over could make you fatter. People struggling to get by couldn’t afford the lean meats and fresh vegetables that the middle class could.4 Some people seemed to gain weight if they ate half a cookie, while others couldn’t bulk up no matter how much cake they ate. Some scientists speculated obesity could even be caused by a virus.5 None of this was fair, and it created a very uneven playing field, but that didn’t mean it was impossible to lose weight. Deciding it wasn’t a choice sounded like a choice itself.

  Simply believing you could do something was essential for success. The placebo effect is well documented. If you give sick people a pill they believe will make them better, it will usually improve their health even if they’re just chewing on a Mentos. In one study, girls who took a math test after being told boys were better at math scored worse than girls who didn’t hear this information.6 The very act of believing you couldn’t do something made it less likely that you could. It was a selffulfilling prophecy.

  If there were simply a self-acceptance movement, maybe I could have joined that.

  The rebukes I got from FA members for wanting to lose weight were strikingly similar in tone to the criticisms fat people got for being fat. In both instances people claimed to be criticizing me for my own good and wanted to know why I couldn’t see the error of my ways; they just couldn’t agree on what the error was, getting fat or trying to get thin. The members of the FA movement were promoting what they thought was the best life philosophy for fat people, but I also knew that it would really piss them off if I lost 200 pounds and kept it off for the rest of my life. Many of these people truly believed that fat people could never permanently lose weight. If I did it anyway it would strike a blow to their personal philosophy. While they probably believed getting me to give up before I even tried was in my best interests, it was also in their best interests to defend the worldview they depended upon to keep themselves sane. I didn’t need them to look out for my own good. I didn’t like being told what I could or couldn’t do. I didn’t want to give up.

  I liked the FA movement best when it was promoting things I hadn’t believed to be possible, like wearing a bathing suit in public without being ashamed. I wanted to continue focusing on possibilities, not limitations. I wanted to be a medium in an average-size world. I wanted to cross my legs and hook one ankle behind the other. I wanted to feel my collarbones. I wanted to live in a country without crash dieting, where people didn’t hate themselves for their size, be it fat, thin, or shifting in between.

  When I finally accepted myself, I accepted that I didn’t want to be fat. And that was okay.

  I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to buy shirts with the word “extra-large” on the tag. My younger brother, Jim, was waging a war on fat. When he ran on the treadmill the basement door would rattle on its hinges in fear of the oncoming campaign. He’d constructed a barrier on the top of our refrigerator w
ith large plastic powder bottles featuring bodybuilders on the labels. My long-neglected smoothie blender was conscripted to mix creatine shakes.

  And he lost weight. He beat back the army of fat cells, carved out a spot in the enemy lines, and held his ground. He wanted to draft me to join the fray too.

  It must have been hard for my family to see me get so big, and not just because I took up more space on the couch when we were watching TV. If I were worried about me, they must have been too, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about something made it real. I had now become the fattest person in the family, but I kept the topic off-limits.

  One night I was channel surfing when I caught part of the reality show The Biggest Loser, on which people competed to lose weight. It was unusual to see fat people on television. Overweight people get a lot of shit about watching too much TV, but fat people are rarely ever cast on shows. When The Sopranos went off the air, the percentage of fat actors on television must have been cut in half. I especially hated it when a thin actor wore a fat suit. It felt like the fat version of blackface. We got to laugh at all the stupid stereotypes the actor was portraying without having to feel bad about laughing at an actual fat person. I was curious to watch these reality show contestants playing out my fantasies at the fat farm. It seemed as if most of them wanted to lose weight more than they wanted to win the money. Thin was the real prize, not the cash. When I heard the sound of rubber soles on parquet floor, I clicked the button for the next channel on the remote faster than if I were ringing in on Jeopardy! I didn’t want to be caught watching shows about fat people for the same reason I didn’t wear a T-shirt that said, “Ask me about my obesity problem.”

  But they noticed anyway, the caring, concerned bastards. Jim would go on and on about the diet he was on. I’d walk into the kitchen and inhale the strawberry dust cloud of powdered protein milk shake, becoming a victim of second-hand shake. He’d mumble something about insulin levels and the evils of white flour. I’d chomp on garlic and onion bagels with the confused look of a cat being lectured on thermodynamics. He’d talk about the benefits of whole grains and vegetables and I’d wonder if there were such a thing as a half grain.