If I could reach back in time and yank that stupid girl by the hair, shaking her into reality, I would most assuredly do so.
Within a year of that asinine comment, I would be approaching two hundred pounds.
And, well, we know where I went from there.
I spent most of my adult life daydreaming of being 165 pounds again. Over the years I hatched plan after scheme after program to get me there. I read all the latest diet books. I watched all the current health documentaries. I signed up for nutritional classes, for support groups. I joined walking clubs and fitness centers. I bought fresh new notebooks and filled the pages with detailed eating plans and elaborate exercise charts. I excitedly showed Michael my “Work It Girl, Phase 1 & 2” outline, sure that this time it would work. Over the years, it became a (good-natured) joke between me and my husband: “Work It Girl, Phase 10,280! This is the one!”
I know it’s hard for outsiders to believe, but I honestly thought, each and every time, that my latest plan would work. Every diet book, every weight guru drills into us the same theme: “If you are determined, and if you work hard, you will succeed.” I approached weight loss as if I were studying for a big exam: I read everything I could get my hands on, I studied caloric charts and memorized fat gram contents, I outlined detailed food intake plans and exercise routines. I put in hours and hours of time, but ultimately I got very little success in return.
I can remember being about eleven years old and desperately wanting to shed my chubby tummy. My brothers teased me endlessly, and the kids at school knew right where to go if they wanted to hurt me: “Fat pig!” was a common retort from my adversaries on the playground. During the summer months I became convinced that all my schoolyard problems would be resolved if I lost a little weight before September.
So there I was, barely a fifth grader, tuning in to the Richard Simmons Show every morning. I wrote down eating tips, I listened to the motivational stories, and I sweated to the oldies with the end workout routine. I tried to ride my bike a little more around the neighborhood, and I walked to my friends’ houses instead of having Mom drive me. I even tried to cut back on all the chips and soda around the house. Looking back it was a pretty healthy effort at weight loss, save for the fact that I was still in grammar school! I doubt if I lost any real weight, however; all it really did was mark the beginning of a lifelong struggle of desperately trying to combat nature.
I’ve already mentioned the weight loss I did achieve when I was a senior in high school. Truth be told, it was my only successful effort at shedding pounds without the aid of diet drugs or surgery. How did I do it? Where did I find the willpower? If I knew the answer to that, I would have employed it many times over again! All I know is that it was really, really hard. I can remember going to bed early, in tears, because I was so hungry and wanted to eat so badly. I recall forcing myself to drink diet soft drinks and hating every minute of it. But at the end of the effort was the reward: I’ll never forget putting on a short black skirt and having men stop and stare at me as I walked down the mall. Yeah—that feeling stands out the most!
After I was married and the weight started to pile on, I tried to find that elusive willpower again. I would go for about two weeks, managing to avoid fast food and sticking to Diet Sprite and baked potato chips. But I always, always fell off the wagon. I’d buy a candy bar and eat it fast before I really had a chance to think about it, or I would give in to temptation and stop at McDonald’s. I’d slip up, and I’d allow it to devastate me. I was never able to pick myself up, dust myself off, and keep going. I would instead wallow in self-pity, eating all I wanted, vowing to get it out of my system and then right the wrong. I thought maybe that was the way to go—thinking back to that New Year’s Eve when I ate everything and then went on to lose a bunch of weight on my own. I tried to recreate that elusive magic, time and again.
It never happened.
I became convinced I was not in charge. Willpower was a force that was going to be bestowed upon me from Heaven above, and I had to just sit and wait for it to hit. I prayed. I read. I studied. I waited. I felt weak, and I needed help. I thought if I wanted it bad enough, help would just magically appear. I was not the one in control of my destiny.
In the winter of 1997, I reached critical mass. It had been years since I’d had significant weight loss. I was approaching 280 pounds, and I grew panicked. My dreams of being a television reporter were slipping by with each passing day; I wasn’t getting any younger, and I thought I had a very narrow window in which to get my career started. Not to mention the toll my now-morbid obesity was taking on my marriage. Michael and I had only been married four years, and he was baffled by what was happening to me. He never once said anything negative to me about my weight—he was more concerned about what it was doing to me, to my self-esteem and quality of life. He wanted to help, but felt powerless and frustrated. I beat myself up daily, wondering why in the world I couldn’t get it together.
I went to my ob-gyn for my annual checkup and dissolved into tears as I opened up about my turmoil. She listened patiently as I explained the many ways in which I’d tried to shed the pounds. She ordered a full blood work-up to see if she could find a problem, but in the meantime she had a question for me: Had I ever considered diet drugs?
Up until that point, my thoughts on diet drugs were almost all negative. We’ve all heard about women getting amped up on Dexatrim or other appetite suppressants bought at the drugstore. We’ve all seen the episodes of The Facts of Life or Beverly Hills, 90210 in which one of the main characters abuses diet pills and finds herself in trouble. My mom was even part of that elite club. Back when she had me, she said doctors were really tough on women about getting baby weight off quickly after giving birth. They frequently prescribed “black beauties” to help new moms burn off the fat. The pills were speed! My mom said they worked great: She lost all her excess weight in no time—and her mind, too—as she stayed up all night cleaning the house, organizing closets, and doing everything else except sleeping. Diet drugs, to me, sounded dangerous and reckless, something I felt I should avoid.
My doctor explained that there was a new combination of drugs called fen-phen, a weight-loss regimen that was seeing a lot of success. These drugs were only prescribed to extremely heavy patients, so the potential of abuse by people who shouldn’t be taking them was all but eliminated. Whatever side effects caused by these drugs—and they really weren’t sure what those were long-term—were tempered with the great benefit of shedding weight off of morbidly obese patients whose very lives were threatened by their excess pounds. The risk seemed to be justified.
Could this be the answer? Could I solve my problems simply by taking medicine? It seemed doubtful to me, but nothing else was working at that point. My doctor was recommending it, so why not give it a chance? How bad could it be? I agreed to try it, without much hope or expectation.
It was like freedom in a bottle.
The drugs made me not care—about much of anything, really—but specifically, I didn’t care about eating. It wasn’t that I was not hungry per se, I was just indifferent toward food. And that was incredibly liberating. I could go about my day and not obsess over whether I would binge eat fast food; I truly didn’t want to. As the weight started to come off, my confidence began to build. For the first time in a long time, I had real hope. The scales were finally going in the right direction, and I felt I had that elusive control I’d fought so hard to find.
People started to notice my weight loss, and that fueled me even further. I began to exercise, and I loved it. I walked for miles around the track at the local high school, listening to Sugar Ray, Smash Mouth, and Third Eye Blind on my Walkman, feeling young, alive, and vital. I daydreamed about finally getting back into reporting, realizing my dream of continuing my on-air career. I was able to take an interest in clothes and start to look forward to buying pretty things again. Life was beginning to feel good once more.
If the drugs had negative side effec
ts, I was unaware. The most discomfort I ever felt was dry mouth, which actually worked in my favor, causing me to drink lots of water and avoid soft drinks. I never felt dizzy or disoriented, never had that heart-racing feeling you sometimes hear about. I became convinced that these drugs were meant for me, that they were the key to reclaiming my life.
I still loved to eat and found that it was okay to do so. I just manipulated the times that I ate around the times I took my medication. For example, if I was craving a particular food, I would plan to have it for breakfast. Sure, spaghetti with meat sauce sounds a little gross first thing in the morning, but it worked for me. I stuffed myself until I was satisfied, then a couple of hours later, I took my pills and was fine for the rest of the day. I didn’t obsess over the foods I couldn’t have, I just planned them for when I could eat them. I never felt deprived, and most important, the results made me feel fabulous. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this solution sooner.
After about eight months, I’d lost fifty-five pounds. I was down to about 230, lower than I’d been in years. My dream of being a television reporter was starting to feel attainable again; I really felt as though I could do anything I wanted to. I hadn’t been this excited about the future in a long, long time.
And then the rug was yanked out from under me.
My mom called me at work. It’s kind of ironic that I am a self-proclaimed news junkie and like to think I know everything before others, and yet my mother—a decidedly non–news junkie—called me with the news.
“Jennifer! Did you see the news on Channel 5? They said those diet drugs cause heart damage. They’re pulling them off the market!”
I wasn’t too worried at first. My mom tended to be kind of alarmist about this kind of thing—not to mention not very accurate. Surely she was wrong; surely the report referred to another kind of diet drug. After all, my doctor had suggested these pills. They weren’t dangerous! There had to be a mistake.
There was no mistake. The makers of fen-phen were pulling the drugs off the market after several reports of heart valve damage. Some people had even died.
My immediate reaction was to go into self-protection mode. Look at how much weight you have lost, I told myself. You don’t need drugs anymore! You’ve started to exercise, you’ve cut down on bad foods, you can do this! The rest of the weight will come off easily!
It never once occurred to me to be worried about my health. I was twenty-five and felt invincible. My weight—at least in my warped way of thinking—had nothing to do with health and everything to do with vanity. Never mind that I had just spent eight months taking a combination of drugs that some claimed did permanent damage to their hearts. I felt fine! No need to worry about that.
No, my immediate concern was to ensure my future weight loss, to make sure I could continue to drop pounds. And for a little while, I did. I kept up the exercise, and I tried to stay with the same eating habits. Slowly the overwhelming hunger started to creep back in, no matter how hard I pushed it away. I managed to beat it back and maintain what I had lost for about a year. But eventually I succumbed to my never-ending cravings for all things bad. The negativity in my mind really started to do a number on me: You can’t do this by yourself. You tried for years, and look where it got you. The only time you really lost weight was when you had the drugs, when you had help. Don’t even try, you will fail.
The weight came back, and then some. Sure I tried to beat it. Every day I once again started something new, some different way to take control, to do it myself. For example, I once signed up for Weight Watchers. I liked the thought of using everyday, normal food, just in moderation. I had such a limited palate, I thought this would be the eating plan that would work for me. I showed up for the first meeting at the Baptist church in my small town. There wasn’t anyone in the room younger than fifty. Embarrassed, I weighed in, in front of everyone, and then sat for the group discussion. All the talk focused around cooking for families and eating sensibly at work. No one talked about obsessing every minute of every day about what they ate. Not one person offered up that they stuffed themselves until they were sick, hiding food in their homes and their cars. I had absolutely nothing in common with the group, and worse, I felt like some sort of freak. I didn’t go back.
Another example: When I worked at the radio station, employees were offered free gym memberships through one of its sponsors. I happily signed up, thinking this would be it, this would be what motivated me, what made me turn the corner. As part of the sign-up, I got a free session with a trainer. Great! An expert who could tell me exactly what I needed to do! I was a let’s-make-a-plan kind of girl, and this was going to be just the plan I needed.
The trainer was a nineteen-year-old stud named Ricky. He had a hard body and a killer smile, and I was beyond mortified. To make matters worse he acted as though he drew the short straw by having to work with the big fat radio girl. He weighed me (kill me now) and took my body fat measurements (okay, just shoot me). And then he started going over strength-training exercises. Strength training? Did I look like I needed strength training? I feigned a headache and got the hell out of there, making a beeline for the hot dog joint across the street. Again, hot tears spilling down into my food didn’t stop me from eating.
I did go back to that gym, sans trainer. But it clearly was not the place for me. All young, beautiful hard bodies were there, trolling for dates just as much as looking to exercise. I was so self-conscious, I couldn’t do much of anything.
Now could I have made these two situations better? Of course. I could have kept looking for a Weight Watchers group that worked for me, even if it meant driving to another town. I could have joined another gym, perhaps one that catered to women. Money was certainly an issue (when is it not?), but with the cash I was spending on food, I’m sure I could have scraped up the funds needed. But with every experience like the old lady Weight Watchers or the hard body gym, I just felt more and more defeated. Helpless. Hopeless. Out of time and out of luck.
It was during the really desperate times that I would go back to one idea that refused to go away: gastric bypass surgery. Reading about Carnie Wilson’s experience with the procedure and seeing her successful results made a great impression on me, but I was still skeptical. Sure, I felt pretty desperate, but having surgery seemed so drastic to me. When I first started to think it over, I’d never been hospitalized before, never had any sort of surgery. I couldn’t imagine willingly going in and allowing doctors to cut away. But the results were undeniable: Al Roker looked fantastic, Carnie Wilson was a knockout, and probably the story that had the most impact on me was Blues Traveler front man John Popper. I caught a VH1 special that detailed his experience and could hardly believe it when he said he’d lost two hundred pounds in a year. Holy crap! After a heart scare, his friends talked him into exploring gastric bypass. He said he thought there was no way he would lose the weight, no way he’d be able to give up McDonald’s french fries or Burger King hamburgers. Boy could I relate to that! After having the surgery, though, he couldn’t imagine he ever ate at those places. He’d always seen himself as a frog, and now he was slowly becoming a prince.
After watching that special, I was blown away. Was I missing something right in front of my face? I had tried so hard for so long, and I was just watching the years slip away without any solution. Was it finally time to make a permanent change?
In 2002 I thought I was ready. I started off the New Year like I did every January, full of promises and plans to lose the weight and keep it off. I did well for a bit, but then something small and inconsequential sent me straight to the drive-thru. As I polished off two chili cheese dogs and a jumbo bag of fries, I thought about how all my efforts had led to only three days of healthy eating and exercise—how someone saying the wrong thing to me made me throw away all my hard work. I knew I had a problem; I was well aware that I was simply looking for any excuse to overeat, to self-sabotage. Fed up, I vowed then and there that if I didn’t do something in
the next six months, if I didn’t manage to stick to a plan and make significant headway with this problem, then I was making an appointment with a gastric bypass surgeon. I was finally disgusted with myself enough to self-issue an ultimatum—and I meant it.
And then, wouldn’t you know it, word started coming out against gastric bypass. Suddenly it wasn’t the cure-all everyone had hoped for; for all the Carnie Wilsons and Al Rokers out there, there were plenty of people who suffered serious complications from the procedure. People magazine did a piece on it in 2003, profiling several gastric bypass surgeries gone wrong, including a woman who had to have her arm amputated! I used that negative information to climb back onto my high horse about gastric bypass. That’s what happens when people take the easy way out, I told myself. It seemed like such a good idea: Go to the doctor and have him make it so you can’t overeat. Finished, end of story. But of course nothing is as easy as that, and I felt this was proof. I quickly got off of the idea, deciding that I needed to lose the weight “on my own” in order for it to really count.
I knew I was in trouble. I felt sick—and not just from the physical toll of carrying around so much weight. I felt as though I was losing my mind. I couldn’t get anything accomplished in my life. Every minute of every day was consumed with what I was eating, or when I was going to eat again. I was so hard on myself, declaring the day an unqualified failure if I ate even a morsel of food that was supposed to be off-limits. I would string together a few good days of eating well and exercising, and then I would throw it all away over something minor, like drinking a can of Mountain Dew while at work on a stressful day. That one twelve-ounce soda would lead me to eat a large pepperoni and sausage pizza or two, foot-long cheese and meatball subs. When I was thinking logically, I knew one can of soda wasn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. But logical thinking was a rare occurrence in that state of mind. Perhaps I was just looking for an excuse to binge eat. And those excuses were quite easy to come by.
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