The long-haired blond in a lavender sweater running the video camera nodded in agreement. “That’s a good idea,” she said.
Whew. I had them fooled. Those ideas surely sounded better than my plot to sabotage the city’s elevators.
The short brunette leading the meeting spoke up. “Moving on to the next topic, do you think there are stereotypes about the obese and if so, what are they?”
I bit into the celery stick I’d snatched off the self-consciously healthy snack table. It would have been rather hypocritical to be serving cookies and chips at the obesity focus group. Carol, the overweight, middle-aged woman sitting next to me, started to speak. I assumed she was a mother of one of the group’s members.
“Well, I’ve gained some weight in the past couple of years,” she said softly as her blue eyes carefully studied the workmanship of the hardwood floors. “And I can’t say I really like it. I hope people don’t think I’m lazy. I’ve just got a busy life, and it’s hard to find the time to eat right and exercise.”
She seemed conflicted. I was still getting used to my new identity as the thin girl, while she was adjusting to her new identity as the fat woman. She might have stereotypes about fat people that now conflicted with her self-image. It was hard for me to imagine a time when I hadn’t been fat. Did this woman remember a time when she hadn’t been thin?
“It’s hard,” I told her, trying to be reassuring.
The proctor decided to jump in. “Carol, you missed the introductions since you came in late, but Jennette has lost over half her body weight.”
Carol’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.
“Wow, that’s impressive!” she said. I felt as if weight loss were now considered a skill I possessed. Check out Jennette, she can wiggle her pinkie toe and lose massive amounts of weight! Too bad it wasn’t a very handy skill. I could make myself thinner, but despite what this group thought, I didn’t really know how to make anyone else skinnier. I couldn’t possess people’s bodies and force them to eat healthy diets and exercise. If I had a practical skill, like woodworking, at least I could make my friends some spice racks.
“So, can I ask you something?” Carol asked. My hands tensed around my diet soda, and I started to feel anxious as I guessed what was coming next.
“What’s your secret?”
Everyone wanted to know the secret. It was as if I were one of a dozen people on the planet who knew the undisclosed blend of herbs and spices used in Kentucky Fried Chicken. Here’s the secret: If you take the second letter of every third word on the bottom of every page in this book, reverse it, and then translate it from Portuguese to English, the magical secret to weight loss will be revealed to you. Once you have wasted an hour of your time trying to find this quick and easy answer, you’ll figure out the real secret. There is no secret.
Weight loss was a personal decision requiring a lot of commitment and work, as serious as deciding to get married or moving to another city for a new job. Sometimes I felt as if I’d married my body and spent the last two years going through couples counseling working out our problems.
“Oh, I’ve been following a diet and exercising a lot,” I said, taking a sip of my soda.
“I wish I had as much willpower as you,” she replied.
“Willpower’s overrated,” I said before I burped. “Excuse me.”
Willpower was the ability to fight against intrinsic human nature. It could work for brief spurts, but it was a stopgap, sandbags built against a rising river that would eventually burst through the temporary dam, not a permanent solution. You could use willpower to hold your bladder on a long bus trip, but eventually you’d reach a point where you pissed your pants. You could try to stop eating, but it was an essential human behavior. Eventually your body’s will to survive would overthrow any willpower you had to stop eating.
I would often read blogs of people failing in their weight-loss efforts who lamented their lack of willpower, as if their wills were being run by a half-dead AAA battery. I doubted willpower was typically the problem. They’d just been trained to blame themselves for being fat, as if it were a personality flaw. If you were motivated enough to start a weight-loss blog and attempt a dieting plan, you at least had some willpower.
They spent a lot of time blaming their failures on lack of inner strength, when I suspected it had more to do with an environment that made it difficult to incorporate exercise or good foods into their lives, or perhaps ignorance about what a healthy diet and proper exercise were. It was such a waste of time to blame themselves when they should have been trying to figure out what the real problem was.
The population was getting fatter and fatter. I didn’t think it was because there had been a sudden drain on the country’s willpower. Our world was making it easier to become a fat person. If you didn’t actively adjust your environment and habits to account for that, you could end up getting fat, no deep-seated psychological issues with food required.
Willpower was good for getting me to speed up my grocery cart as I passed the Oreos strategically placed next to the milk section. It was good for making me avoid eye contact with the Girl Scouts selling cookies outside the grocery store. But using willpower as the energy source for a long-term weight-loss plan was like trying to power an aircraft carrier with a hamster running in a wheel.
Carol wasn’t deterred. “What diet are you on?” she asked. I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to make her believe there was one magical cure-all diet. I didn’t want her to try it and fail and think she was doomed to being fat forever. Occasionally someone would email me after reading my blog and ask what my typical daily food plan was. People seemed to think that if they ate the exact same foods as I did, they would become thin too. Maybe they would, but I found it important that I actually liked everything I ate. I doubted another person on the planet would like exactly the same foods I did, just as it was unlikely that someone would like every single MP3 in my music collection. Asking what diet I was on was like asking Yo-Yo Ma what kind of cello he played and then expecting to buy one and become a brilliant cellist. A good instrument was helpful, but you needed to know how to play it. I wasn’t a nutritionist, and I had no desire to become one, so I couldn’t prescribe meal plans for every person I met. Eating healthy was important, but people focused so much on food that they forgot it was equally important to find something that fit into their own lives. Maybe my reticence was the reason people thought I had a secret that I wouldn’t tell them. In reality, everything I learned was available in library books or online.
But Carol seemed interested, and I felt the pressure of all those eyes searching me for answers that I didn’t necessarily have. I told her what diet I was following and hoped I wasn’t leading her astray. I still felt like a dork whenever I uttered the word “carb.”
“Are you exercising too?” she asked.
“Yeah, some running and Pilates. It helps me de-stress,” I told her.
She sighed, “Yeah, stress is a problem for me. I tend to go for salty snacks when I’m anxious or feeling depressed.”
Carol’s daughter was sitting next to her and piped up. “I’ve been telling her maybe she should see a therapist to talk about the emotional eating stuff. I think it’s only when we work through all the reasons that we overeat that we can get thin,” she said.
I didn’t remember working through any emotional issues. I’d sorted out a lot of thoughts on my blog, but I didn’t recall having any major breakthroughs. But I’d also read journals by women who were brought to tears after they ate an entire package of chocolate donuts, including the crumbs left in the folds of their T-shirts. Some women told tales of overbearing mothers who nagged them constantly about how fat their size-8 asses were and put them on strict diets. I guessed emotional eating was more of an issue for some people than others. It was possible I’d had a breakthrough and didn’t even realize it.
“If she did it, so can you, Mom,” her daughter said as she reached over to squeeze her mom’s hand.
I restrained myself from rolling my eyes and sighing. I hated it when people said that. I did believe that everyone could lose weight, but my personal success neither increased nor decreased their chances of doing so. When someone won the lottery, it neither increased nor decreased my chances of winning the jackpot next week. People could lose weight because it was physically possible, not because of anything I had done. I think Carol’s daughter really meant to say, “Look, it’s not impossible!” Keeping it off was far more difficult than losing it. In one obesity study, subjects were fed a specific number of calories for several months in controlled conditions.1 Everyone lost weight, though some people’s metabolisms slowed down to compensate for the lack of food. It was when you were let out of the lab that you ran into problems.
It was unfair to tell someone it was possible to lose weight simply because I had done it. I had a lot of advantages; I was a single woman without any kids and a low-stress job that required only forty hours of work a week. I was the star of “The Me Show,” starring, written by, and produced by me. The only other life form I was responsible for taking care of was my cat. I could lead a pretty selfish life.
I could easily find the time to cook and exercise. I was doing okay financially after I’d paid off all my credit cards and my gallbladder surgery. I could spend money on fitness equipment and kickboxing class and fresh produce. I had never yo-yo dieted, so I wasn’t mentally exhausted by the idea of watching what I ate. I also hadn’t experienced any major life changes in the past two years. My move had been only across town, not to another state or country. Everyone I loved had been kind enough to stay alive, so I could stay focused on my weight-loss goals. Honestly, my life was kind of boring, and as far as weight loss was concerned, that was a boon. I got religion about my new lifestyle and had the time and resources to pursue it.
I didn’t know much about Carol’s life, but I doubted hers was similar to mine. She probably had to cook for her high school-age daughter. If she had a husband, she might be cooking for him as well and eating larger portions in an effort to keep up with him at the dinner table. Her job could be stressful, which might lead her to snack on candy bars from the vending machine. I didn’t know if she lived in a neighborhood with sidewalks where it would be safe to walk or if she could afford a gym membership to go exercise. If anything were out of control in her life or unsatisfying, she might search for comfort and control by indulging in tasty foods. If money were tight, a bag of potato chips would always be cheaper than a bag of apples. I’d never seen someone double-coupon a pound of pears.
The stupidest things had sometimes kept me from overeating. If my cat curled up on my lap while I was watching TV, I wouldn’t get up for that second fudge pop because I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt his mewing. When I served my meal on smaller plates, it looked bigger and stopped me from eating bigger portions. When I started walking on the trail, I headed for thirty minutes in each direction instead of the total fifty minutes I had done on the treadmill because the math was easier to figure out on my watch.
None of this meant Carol couldn’t lose weight. It just meant it was harder for some people than others. I had friends who could eat a bucket of lard and still didn’t seem to gain a pound. They would only gain twenty bucks, because I bet them they wouldn’t eat a bucket of lard. Disadvantages weren’t an excuse, just an explanation. “Because it’s hard” wasn’t a good reason not to at least try to do something. It was important to pave the path of least resistance, to make it as easy as possible for you to live a healthy lifestyle.
We could sit in this discussion group all day and throw theories at one another. No one thing had made me fat, and no one thing had made me thin. It was a complex, intricate set of variables and circumstances. It was an advanced equation that I had to figure out how to balance. Everyone got her own math problem to solve: some from the introduction to algebra course, others from advanced calculus.
Starting seemed to be the hardest part. Getting my body to lose weight had been like trying to start a car that would have preferred to spend retirement rusting in a parking spot in the shade of an elm tree. I had to turn and turn the key, pop the clutch, give it more gas, until for some reason it magically kicked into life. I didn’t ask why; I just got it in gear and kept going before it could die again.
“How do you stay motivated?” Carol asked.
I should have just told her to screw motivation. If I waited for motivation to do the dishes, I’d have plates stacked on my counter so high that I couldn’t open the microwave. Which I currently did. I was never motivated to do my dishes. Yet I turned on the faucet and poured out some dish soap anyway. It wasn’t because I wanted to have fun with bubbles; it was because I had to. I couldn’t bring myself to eat off paper plates.
I’d read other people’s weight-loss stories in magazines and there was always a point in the story where they had a huge revelation that kicked them in the fat pants. They couldn’t fit in the roller-coaster harness or their uncle died from heart disease. But why wait until you’d wasted forty bucks on an amusement park ticket or you were buying huge black pants for a funeral? I thought I’d had my moment when I had gallbladder surgery, but I spent more than a year after that just as fat as I ever was. People waited for motivation to find them, but they needed to go out and find motivation. It’s doubtful that you would get to the bottom of that pint of ice cream and find the message “You need to lose weight” written on the bottom.
This was all easier said than done, of course. It’s hard to get unstuck, but it takes even longer to pull your feet out of the gum left on the sidewalk if you wait for someone else to come along with Goo Gone. You just have to do it, even though you don’t want to. If you saw diet and exercise as optional, you were screwed. It was nonnegotiable.
“Oh, I don’t know. It helps if you find exercise that you like to do.”
Carol nodded her head. “Well, I hope I can do it too. I don’t like being so fat.”
“Oh Mom, you’re not fat,” her daughter said.
Well, actually she was, I thought. The problem wasn’t that Carol was fat, it was that “fat” was considered a dirty word. It had become an insult when really it was just a description of how someone looked. It wasn’t any different from saying someone was tall or short, blond or brunette. Maybe if we weren’t so afraid to use the word we could stop seeing it as such a bad thing to be. Yet it seemed impossible to use the word “fat” without sending an emotional charge.
“You’ve just been making some bad food choices lately,” her daughter said.
I was making a lot of choices these days. I would always go for the slice of whole-wheat over the white bread. Sweet potatoes would beat normal potatoes in all my vegetable wrestling matches. I peeled the skin off the chicken even if that made me a poultry scalper. All those little choices in the day added up to something bigger. It was like stacking every brick to make a glorious cathedral or sitting at a loom every day, weaving thread in and out to make a glittering tapestry. Losing weight required a lot of constant thinking and decision making.
I had certainly chosen to become thinner, but my fatness was more a result of the choices I hadn’t been making. I had woken up that morning and come to this meeting. I did not go to Bermuda. Had I chosen not to go to Bermuda? In all the time I spent picking out camouflage socks that matched my green top, measuring the proper amount of water into my instant oatmeal, and locking the door as I left, not once did a thought bubble appear over my head saying, “Hey, I could go to Bermuda!” This was partly because I was not a cartoon character and partly because the thought never occurred to me. If I never even saw this as an option, it wasn’t fair to say I made a choice not to go to Bermuda.
Similarly, when I was fat I had never hit a situation in my daily routine when I had to consider “Do I get fat or do I stay thin?” I didn’t live on the Let’s Make a Deal set with Curtain Number One or Two to choose from. At the most, I encountered situations in which I had to choose b
etween two options that would lead me to either of the possible end points of thinness and fatness.
The problem was I didn’t know some of the choices I was making were going to make me as fat as I became. I knew Twinkies weren’t a health food, but I had no idea exactly how bad they were for me. If there had been a moment that morning when I had considered going to Bermuda instead of the meeting, I would have also had to consider that such a choice would probably get me fired when I didn’t show up for work the next week. It would also drain my savings account, which I’d worked hard to bulk up. If I had flown off anyway and then discovered I’d upset my family by missing our planned dinner party, would I have chosen to alienate them?
Similarly, I wasn’t choosing to be fat when I knew little about nutrition and exercise, when I had no concept of how many calories I was taking in every day and didn’t even know how many calories I should be taking in. I was still personally responsible for my actions, actions that led me to obesity, but I was ignorant or at least partially ignorant, which prevented me from making a conscious choice to be fat. The word “choice” implied intent, which I lacked. I was like a driver who rear-ended the car in front of me while fiddling with the radio station—I was responsible for the accident, but I hadn’t chosen to hit someone. I’d chosen to take my eyes off the road and had paid the price.
I spent one summer in high school at an academic camp where I ate pizza almost every day for lunch. I also had a not-so-secret affair with the soft-serve ice cream, and I wasn’t the only one, that whore. While I knew the ice cream was a bad idea, it never occurred to me that eating that much pizza was going to keep me fat too. I don’t know how I made it past admissions with this blatant stupidity. I was personally responsible for my food choices, but I wouldn’t say I was choosing to be fat when I chose pizza. I was just a nutritional idiot who didn’t realize the full repercussions of my actions. If the dozens of people I saw at the McDonald’s drive-through every evening truly knew how much a Big Mac cost them in terms of energy input and output, half of them would probably squeal their tires for the closest Subway. They might even get out and jog there to burn off the extra calories from that morning’s Egg McMuffin.
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