Half-Assed

by Jennette Fulda

  I loved it.

  If I were this sore, something had to be working. Some Pilates moves were cute, such as “The Seal,” which required me to clap my legs together three times and roll backward to clap them again. I threw in a couple of “arf, arfs” for fun. At first I had to do modified versions of the moves, bending my legs instead of fully extending them. I would roll only halfway backward instead of all the way to my shoulders. I had started stumbling through the routine at the end of February, but by the beginning of September I could do everything, including the teaser, or as I liked to call it, the motherfucking teaser. If there were ever a pose of the human body that required profanity, it was this one. I started lying down with my legs aimed toward the ceiling at a forty-five degree angle and my arms stretched out above my head. Then I sat up like the letter V for victory, my ass as the fulcrum, arms extended forward. I held the pose and then lay back down. I repeated the moves six times and collapsed.

  I had never felt so awesome in my life. Surely it wouldn’t be too long before I was bending like a pretzel and cramming myself into a pickle jar for my audition for the Cirque du Soleil.

  Later, when I had started to enjoy my time in the kitchen mutilating yellow squash, I decided it was time I finally started lifting weights. I’d talked about lifting weights forever. I’d even followed a half-assed routine a year ago without doing much research. I’d quit after a month. I had been eating fewer calories than I was burning, but since I hadn’t been strength training, part of the weight I’d lost was muscle, not fat. My body metabolized what it decided I could spare, and if I wasn’t using my muscles, they were fair game. This was bad. I didn’t want to lose muscle mass because it burned calories even when it was just sitting around, like my cell phone drained my battery just by being turned on. If I built more muscle, my metabolism would speed up and I could eat more. That sounded great to me.

  I would build muscle by lifting heavy dumbbells, which would make tiny tears in my muscle tissue. I would rest a day or two to give my muscle time to repair itself and grow bigger and stronger. I ate some protein and carbs right after my workout to give my body the materials to complete these repairs. It was a great excuse to eat three sweet-potato muffins. I would then repeat the process, slowly increasing my weights and the number of repetitions. Destroy, then rebuild. Destroy and rebuild again, like Rome.

  But lifting heavy things was hard. And it hurt. And it made my weight plateau. Muscle is more dense than fat. Muscle is like a box of books and fat is a box of pillows. Which one would you rather carry up the stairs? Muscle is more compact than fat, so even though my weight was staying the same, I was getting leaner and more shapely. The scale was just too dumb to realize that. Thankfully I’d witnessed the scale weave back and forth like a drunken driver before. I didn’t enjoy the stall-out, but I wasn’t crushed by it.

  I wanted a more toned, fit body, but I didn’t want to be as buff as Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. I wouldn’t have to fight killer cyborgs from the future ... as far as I knew. I wasn’t going to get huge muscles because women simply don’t have enough testosterone to become as ripped as men without drugs or supplements. As long as I avoided gamma bomb blasts and kept a cool temper, I wouldn’t end up looking like the She-Hulk.

  After three months of training I flexed my arms in the mirror and was astonished by the pleasing curves I saw. My shoulders were so round, my collarbones so defined, my armpits so hard to shave. Damn those pectoral muscles! I would have wondered if I’d had an arm transplant if not for the hanging underarm flab. I was going to enjoy showing off my new arms in the sleeveless dress I’d bought for my older brother’s wedding.

  Who needed sleeves when you had awesome biceps?

  I made a vow to keep trying new activities. I signed up for a kickboxing aerobics class offered through my county’s school system. I flailed through the kickboxing routines five seconds behind everybody else. I almost knocked out my classmate with a poorly controlled roundhouse kick, and she hadn’t even done anything to piss me off. I totally sucked, but I kept going to classes and eventually learned the difference between a hook and an upper cut. I’d never taken an aerobics class before, but I loved kicking and punching to cheesy techno songs. My small boobs were actually an asset because I wasn’t knocked unconscious by bouncing globes when I did jumping jacks.

  I was able to do all the crunches even though other people were flopping on their mats like trout on a boat deck. At the end of class we stretched on our mats. I’d been doing Pilates long enough that I could lie on my back and point my left leg toward the ceiling while the right leg lay flat on the mat at a ninety-degree angle. I noticed most of the other students had to bend their right legs to achieve the position. I smiled secretly in smug superiority. Then I turned my head to the left. The woman next to me had her right leg flat on the mat and her left leg bent straight back behind her head. Clearly, her muscles and ligaments had been replaced by rubber bands. Suddenly I didn’t feel so superior.

  Once that class ended, I signed up for tennis lessons. I was idly considering buying some in-line skates too after observing the skaters on the trail. It might be fun, assuming I didn’t lose control, slam into the red bridge rail, and tumble ass over end into the river. After that, maybe I’d try martial arts? I’d probably watched way too much Buffy and Xena and La Femme Nikita on TV, but ass kicking looked like fun. By the time I was sixty maybe I’d get around to the luge.

  I had been tricked. I’d started all this healthy eating and exercising only so I could get what I wanted—thin. Now I was actually enjoying it. It was like the time I’d tried a free trial of Netflix thinking I could get a free month’s worth of DVDs and then quit once I’d gotten my free rentals. Now I had hundreds of movies in my queue and would never be able to watch them as quickly as I added them. Thank goodness I’d never joined a bug-eating club. I might find myself swatting flies, dipping them in Dijon mustard sauce, and enjoying it.

  Weight loss in itself was a somewhat empty reward. All the cool things that I could do because of my new fitness and health were the real prize. The buzz of fitting into a new dress size and seeing the descending numbers on the scale was a great high, but eventually it wore off. Now I could get a runner’s high several times a week. A year after I’d first run a mile I was still ecstatic that I could run that far without being chased by a bear. I was thinking less like a dieter and more like an athlete. I certainly was starting to feel like one. I owned two sports bras now. I wanted to try everything. I wanted to see what this new body could do.

  For most of my life I had considered my body the transportation vehicle for my brain—a head attached to a torso with arms and legs was fine, but if I had to stick my brain in a jar and scuttle around on robotic spider legs I would have managed. My internal world was the important one, not the external.

  In college our teaching assistant had walked into the psychology lab one day carrying a human brain in a jar. He wasn’t a psycho killer. The brain had been donated to science, which evidently meant to us. Everyone in the small classroom pushed aside cheap plastic chairs to gather around the brain sitting on a folding table. The dull gray organ floated like a bath toy in the preservative fluid. It looked just like a movie prop. I lasted about ten seconds before I was hit with a wave of nausea and pulled back to my chair in the undertow.

  Typically I was squeamish around blood and human organs, but that wasn’t the cause of my sickness. That brain had belonged to a real human being; it had stored all his memories, processed all his thoughts, enabled his entire being. And now a bunch of freshmen were gawking over it on their way to four credit hours. Everything that made him himself was now encapsulated in a piece of organic matter that could be easily squished if an underclassman got clumsy with the jar. I might have considered my mind to be the most important part of me, but as I stared at the brain, I faced the reality that it was just as fleshy and vulnerable as my skin, as breakable as my bones.

  As I became more and more fit, I star
ted to realize that my brain and my body were not separate entities that could be ripped apart. My brain required nutrients and chemicals to run properly, just as a car required gas and oil to run. When I was eating well and exercising, my mind functioned better. I could focus for longer periods and think more clearly. Ultimately I was just a collection of molecules powered by small electrical currents. If I fed myself the proper nutrients and stimulated the release of healthy chemicals via exercise, my body and my mind ran better.

  I wondered why I had to come to this realization on my own when it should have been covered in health class or PE. I had thought physical education was pointless. I went to school to be educated, not to feel inferior because I couldn’t climb the rope. When would I ever need to climb a rope, anyway? When I read an article about a middle school teacher in Pensacola, Florida, who let kids out of gym class for a dollar a day, I was immediately envious that my PE teachers hadn’t been so entrepreneurial.1

  Of course, maybe they had been and I never heard about it because I was so good at avoiding gym class. In middle school, I learned how to play flute so I could take band during gym period. In high school, I was required to take only one semester of gym, which I took during summer school so I could cram more electives into my regular schedule. I attended every day, four hours a day, for four weeks. The suffering was condensed into bite-size portions that took up one-sixth of my day. But there was also a fear that had nothing to do with my inability to serve a volleyball over the net. If I missed more than two classes, I’d have to take the whole course over again because of absenteeism. The only thing more horrible than gym class was the thought of taking gym class twice.

  It’s a shame that none of my physical education teachers were able to convince me that being fit could be fun or that it could enhance other aspects of my life. Instead, gym was about the fear of group showering and avoiding dodge balls. Gym was about being picked on for being weak. Now that I wasn’t being screamed at by a blond with a mullet wearing track pants, I could see that my physical health directly affected my mood and my ability to think. A healthy lifestyle made my body feel better. It made my body look much better too.

  It also made my body more useful. I could now run quickly to the corner to cross the street before the walk signal flashed red. I could carry twenty-four-packs of soda up the driveway and into the house without panting. I felt powerful, and I hadn’t had to usurp any South American nations or run for political office to feel this power. Fitness gave me confidence that bled into all areas of my life, not just those involving volleyball nets.

  I felt confident enough to sign up for a 5K race. The formerfat-girl bylaws dictate that you must run a 5K or you will be forced to gain back all the weight. On the day of the run I was handed my T-shirt and a map of the race course. The map’s red line ran by the lawn at White River State Park and the zoo parking lot that I had barely been able to walk to after a concert three years ago. As I ran through the streets, passing fluorescent pylons and dodging paper water cups tossed to the ground, I imagined overlaying this moment with the past to overlap time in a split screen. I broke my stride for a second to wave at that fat girl who struggled to walk half as fast as I was running now, but she didn’t see me. She kept her head down and staggered forward with labored breaths, hoping she could make it another hundred yards and down the concrete steps. I breathed heavily too, miles more to go. I stepped up my pace and passed her by.

  CHAPTER 15

  Decloaking

  “Wow, you look really great!” my dental hygienist said as I stared into the light hovering above me like an alien spaceship. Visiting the dentist was like being probed by aliens.

  “Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of weight,” I replied, resting my clasped hands gently on my stomach. Two years ago I had grasped my hands tightly together as gravity pulled my heavy arms in opposite directions down the steep slope of my belly. Today they lay relaxed on my slightly rounded stomach even when I released my grip.

  “I noticed,” the hygienist said.

  My dental care provider had been very tactful. She hadn’t directly addressed my weight but had left the door open if I wanted to enter the room of that particular conversation. Smooth. They must have taught that technique during “Small Talk 101” in dental school, where they also covered how to make conversation with people with a dozen cotton swabs stuck in their gums.

  “How much weight have you lost?” she asked as she reached for a shiny tool on her tray.

  “Um ...” I rolled my eyes upward as if the response were written on the bottom of my eyelashes. The answer to this question kept changing, and I couldn’t remember what the proper number was this month. My starting weight of 372 minus my current weight of 197 would make it ...

  “One hundred and seventy-five,” I replied, proud that I could do the mental math. “I weigh about 195 pounds now.” I sounded like such a liar. That number was absurd. How could I have been able to walk around with that much extra weight? I could barely carry my TV set up the stairs. The last two years must have been a fever dream occurring in a diabetic coma after I’d finally eaten too much frosting straight from the jar. When I’d lost only twenty to thirty pounds, I’d told everyone from the janitor to the deli waiter. Now I’d lost so much that it was becoming uncomfortable to mention. It was freakish. It sounded like I was bragging. I’d received so many compliments about my weight loss by friends, family, and blog readers that I’d reached a saturation point. I didn’t feel a need to fish for positive reinforcement anymore.

  “Wow,” she said, her eyes wider and rounder than the mirror tool she held in her hand. “That’s amazing! That’s more than I weigh! You should be proud,” she said as she continued to pick plaque off my gum line.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled without moving my jaw. It had been about two years since I’d popped a can of soda pop that didn’t have the word “diet” on it. My body mass index now qualified me as overweight instead of obese. It made sense that the dental staff would be particularly impressed by my transformation. They saw me only every six months, so it was as if they were viewing time-lapse photography. They saw me in a strobe light that flickered every six months.

  I was getting better at these exchanges about my weight. They weren’t that different from all the other scripts I practiced in life. When someone said, “How are you doing today?” in the hallway I’d reply, “Just fine!” even if I wanted to crawl back into my bed and drool on the pillows. If someone congratulated me on my weight loss, I’d just say thanks and smile. People were rather predictable. There were only so many ways they reacted to my metamorphosis.

  I preferred it when people simply said I looked good without specifically mentioning my weight. I could look great for many reasons—because I got a haircut, because I was wearing a cute blouse, or because it was a sunny day and I felt happy. Someone who said, “You look great since you lost all that weight” was implying I had not looked so great before. It was as close as you could come to building a time machine and traveling to the past to insult me.

  The hygienist finished scraping my teeth and set the tool down in favor of the electric polisher and a tray of polishing paste. “You know, I would never have guessed you weighed 195. You look a lot thinner than that. Mint, strawberry, or piña colada?”

  “Yeah, it was a lot. Piña colada.” I replied.

  People were terrible at guessing my weight. Before I got too fat to ride the roller coasters, I bought a season pass to an amusement park for the summer and noticed a “Guess My Weight” game positioned in the thoroughfare. It was right next to the walkway over the highway, which granted it maximum crowd exposure and unlimited opportunity for embarrassment. Next to the barker was a scale with a circular face so large it could have doubled as Godzilla’s Frisbee. The barker had to guess your weight within five or ten pounds or you’d win a prize.

  I never played this game. Public weigh-ins seemed reserved for the sanctity of Weight Watchers meetings, which I’d never attended since I was a d
iet atheist. I didn’t know how much I weighed, and I didn’t want to find out in front of packs of teenyboppers in short-shorts sucking down Diet Coke and Dippin’ Dots. However, I was curious to know how well the barker could guess someone’s weight. Most people didn’t stand next to a humongous scale all day. If I were brave enough to risk insulting someone by guessing his or her weight, I couldn’t be sure that I was getting accurate feedback. Surely most people lied anyway. Without a huge scale you couldn’t know how wrong you were and make corrections in the future.

  Recently Kirstie Alley had been on Oprah in a bikini, and one blogger said she must be lying about her weight. The blogger was about the same size as Kirstie and weighed more. I had no idea what Kirstie Alley really weighed. I did know that when you factored in height differences, ratio of fat to muscle, and other nonsense like how much sodium you’d had recently and when your last trip to the bathroom was, you couldn’t assume someone on TV weighed as much as you did just because she looked the same size.

  People always seemed scared of guessing that I weighed more than 200 pounds. Nobody would even touch 300. Instead they copped for numbers right below the threshold. It was as if 200 were the magical fat number. At 199 you were still thin, but if you rolled over to 200 you had passed the point of no return. No one dared guess a number near my actual highest weight, perhaps because they feared insulting me. I wondered if the carnival barker made adjustments to avoid being mauled by angry fat people. If he thought someone actually weighed 205, would he round down to 199? How could I know if the carnival scale was even calibrated accurately? Carnies were notoriously stingy about giving away their pink teddy bears.