Finished Being Fat: An Accidental Adventure in Losing Weight and Learning How to Finish (2 page)

The process started with the sound that often accompanies the moment when you know your life has somehow gone awry…

D
aily routine: Wake up, feed kids, entertain kids, keep kids from killing each other, put kids to bed, put kids back to bed thirty minutes later, and then collapse into my own bed and fade into unconsciousness. Repeat.

My life was a lot like running on a treadmill, a whole lot of effort to get absolutely nowhere. Not that I had much experience with treadmills, mind you, but you get my drift. One morning, I woke up depressed and berated myself for all the things that I wasn’t. Wasn’t skinny, wasn’t accomplished, wasn’t happy. In a fit of masochism, I decided it would be a good time to take on my mortal enemy, the digital scale.

The scale and I have always had a hate/more hate relationship. I’ve tried sweet talking it, I’ve tried yelling at it, and I’ve even tried approaching it with cautious optimism. Power of positive thinking and all. Recently, I had given it the silent treatment, refusing to acknowledge its existence. But apparently I felt the need to punish myself, because there I was again, at seven in the morning, before the children were awake, naked and oh-so-carefully avoiding the adjacent mirror (because let’s be honest, who wants to see themselves naked first thing in the morning?) and ever so lightly (because it might make a difference) stepping on the scale. While I waited for the scale to stop blinking 0.00 and pronounce judgment, I began to pray.

“Please, God. Just let it be the same as last month. I’m not asking for it be lower, just… please, let it be the same.” God was apparently out of miracles. The scale read 216.4 pounds—ten pounds more than the last month. I looked around just to be sure my fourteen-month-old hadn’t sneaked up behind me, adding her sixteen pounds to the total. Nope, I was alone. So I hopped off and tried again, just in case. Maybe the scale had changed its mind, had a technical error, or something. But no, the evil scale seemed to take joy in my misery and now said 216.6.
Ahhhh!
I had gained a fifth of a pound in less than a minute.

Scenes from my future played out in my mind. I would gain a pound every hour. Within a week, none of my clothes would fit. By the end of the month, I would have to order everything from an online specialty store, Blobbos. In a year, my husband would need to physically roll me out of the bed and onto a Jazzy scooter because I had gotten so big that my legs wouldn’t support my girth. I was going to be like that woman from
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
When I died, they would have to cut a hole in my house just to get me out. Then I’d have to be buried in a packing crate because surely no one would make a coffin large enough to fit me.

I backpedaled off the scale so fast that I tripped. That’s when I heard the
thud
of my life hitting rock bottom. It was so loud it even woke my husband, Jarom. Well, it was either that or the crash from the scale reverberating off the travertine. I imagine he ran into the bathroom, expecting to find that I had slipped in the shower. He probably did not expect to see his naked, overweight wife sprawled on the floor, trying to beat the scale into submission.

“Betsy, what the heck are you doing?”

“I’m fat!” I wailed

My husband, always a man of few words, wisely said nothing and offered me a hand up. For a few minutes, we stood there, him patting my back and me sobbing onto his shoulder. After I had quieted down some, Jarom grabbed a pack of tissues and herded me back into the bedroom. He sat me down on the bed and wiped the tears and snot off my face, then did the same for his shoulder.

“Now start over and tell me what’s wrong.”

There weren’t enough hours in the day or words in the English language to describe what was wrong. At that moment, I felt like the most worthless human being on the planet. Every disappointment, every failure echoed in stereo through my head. It was too overwhelming to think about, so I tried to focus on the immediate problem of my weight.

“Somehow I gained ten pounds this month.” I sniffled.

Jarom stared pointedly at my nightstand and the ever-growing collection of pop cans, wrappers, and pizza crusts.

“To be fair, half of those are probably from the kids,” I said sheepishly. Throwing myself down onto the pillow, I exclaimed, “Ugh! What is wrong with me? I was doing really well this summer. But now…” I blew a raspberry and gave the thumbs-down sign.

Jarom lay down beside me. “I know what you mean. It’s been a year and a half, and we still don’t have closet doors or baseboards,” he said, referring to our recent house remodel.

“Guess we’re both great at starting… not so good at finishing.”

“True.”

My husband listened patiently while I bemoaned my fat rolls for at least another half hour. I was too focused on my startling weight gain to let the truth of what I had just said sink in. A fire burned in my belly as I started thinking about the quickest way to drop fifty pounds. Upset made way for excitement. I was going to shed all these unwanted pounds… again. So what if I had done this same dance twenty times before? I was lost to the “starter’s high.” Like falling in love, starting a new project flooded my body with endorphins and gave me a single-minded focus on the task ahead, for at least a few weeks.

***

This was the simple truth that I had missed at the time. I was addicted to starting, but once that initial high faded and things got hard or boring, I would quit and start something else to get my next fix. I really should have seen it ages ago. My house is a monument to all the numerous things I’ve started over the years. You can’t go five feet without running smack-dab into one of my grand plans.

Let’s start in the garage. Buried deep in the back left corner, you would find everything you needed to start a small picture framing business. Sticks of molding, suede mats, glass, sample corners, and joining equipment sat unused, gathering dust. About four years before, we had a James Christensen print framed, and it cost about five hundred bucks. Holy cow, the frame cost more than the print! With a little digging, we discovered that there was about a 400 percent markup on materials. Why spend a fortune when you could do it yourself? Better yet, why not make some money on the side framing things for friends and family. And so our little in-home business, Fit To Be Framed, was born. And here in the garage it was buried when we started the great house remodel. We tell ourselves that someday we’ll dig all that stuff out again, when we have more time.

If you move on to the kitchen, you’ll find a hodgepodge of kitchen cabinets. This was one of Jarom’s projects. When we were remodeling the house, Jarom decided that he really wanted to make all the cabinets himself. So he bought a book, table saw, and planer, and started figuring out how to make cabinets. Since I really wanted a kitchen in the meantime, we collected old cabinets from family and filled in the holes with IKEA ones. Seamed together like Frankenstein, it was bulky, but it worked. Dreaming of the beautiful mission-style cabinets he would make, I waited. Life interfered, as it usually did, with work, kids, and a general lack of funds. Every time we pass through the kitchen, we remark on what a great kitchen we’ll have… someday.

My craft room was a shrine to all the things I wanted to do. When I started having kids, I wanted to be the perfect mommy and cutely chronicle their every moment in a scrapbook. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the path of good intentions is lined with scrapbook paper. The west wall had an eight-foot-tall by six-foot-wide shelving unit to organize and hold all the patterned paper I owned. There were bins for rubber stamps and bins for ink. Stacks of scrapbooks, some empty, some half filled, toppled over on the floor. Sacks of fabric sat abandoned next to the sewing machine and half-sewn quilt. Inside the desk were tools for stained glass and pane upon pane of glass in every color.

I loved to create (still do). Whenever I saw something cool that someone had made at the craft store or on TV, I had to run out, buy the materials, and try to make it. Inevitably, my creation looked nothing like the example, so I’d get disheartened and discouraged from any further attempts. So my collection grew and then sat, only to be dragged out to make the occasional thank-you card or for the annual church craft night. It was a tragedy to think of all things I could make but didn’t. My husband claimed the real tragedy was all the money I’d spent on them.

There are so many more examples I could give, but the one that ate at my soul every time I passed it was the fourteen-year-old Kurzweil digital piano in the dining room. Oh, the plans I’d had for this one. In 1997, I was off to college to study music and become a world-renowned composer. Scrimping and saving all the money I could from a crappy telemarketing job, I went shopping for the piano that would help me fulfill my destiny. Tiny BYU housing meant that a baby grand was out of the question, so I went looking for an upright that took less space.

That’s when I saw her—lacquered cherry wood and digital technology blended seamlessly into the most beautiful instrument I had ever seen. It had a floppy drive so you could record directly and transfer songs easily. There was a MIDI port that let you plug directly into a computer and print sheet music from your compositions. Harps, trumpets, violins—you could sound like a whole orchestra with this baby. This was my ticket; and for the small sum of six thousand dollars, this piano and I would conquer the world. Included in the purchase price was a two-hour recording session at the store. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Visions of cutting an album and becoming a superstar danced through my head.

In the beginning, I played every chance I could, some days racking up as much as six hours of practice time. Every spare moment not in class was spent with my new best friend. As for my dating life… well, who needed romance when you could write your own love song and record it for the world to hear?

But the world never heard it, because once the excitement of the dream wore off, the barbs of criticism and rejection rubbed me raw. Giving up, my dreams were locked away, and the piano went into storage until I got married and had a house of my own. Songs from the past were still stored on the hard drive; the piano’s memory much better than my own. Sometimes I would hear their echoes, stirring feelings lying dormant, building until I was dizzy with the prospect of starting over and finally achieving my dreams. For more than ten years the cycle repeated itself, but like any addiction, the high I got from beginning again got shorter and less intense until one day the music stopped inspiring me at all. Now it sat silent in the foyer, a constant reminder of what I could’ve been and what I let slip away.

***

Diets had become much like the music. I had tried and failed so many times that it was nearly impossible to maintain the burning fever of purpose for more than a week. Sure, initially I would get pumped with the prospect of losing weight, but the idea of starving myself, taking pills, or whatever crazy thing I would try this time, got less appealing by the minute. However, there was one thing though that I always looked forward to when starting a new diet: “The Farewell Tour of Fast Food.”

Each time I recommitted myself to eating healthier, I spent a few days saying good-bye to my dearest friends: Wendy, Ronald McDonald, the Colonel, Ben and Jerry, to name a few. Aside from the unfortunate side effect of an expanding waistline, these loyal companions had never let me down over the years. When I’d had a rough day at school, McD’s had a meal guaranteed to make me “happy.” C on a test? Wendy’s french fries dipped in a Frosty helped with the disappointment. A+ on a test? Well, a milkshake or root beer float with my fried chicken would be perfect to celebrate. There was no heartache that a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough couldn’t soothe. When nobody else was around to listen to me cry at eleven o’clock at night, the fridge was always open and the drive-thru lane was “great even late.” No matter the emotion, there was a snack for that. Comforting and constant, I could always count on my friends to help me weather the ups and downs of life and pant sizes. It would have been extremely rude to just quit visiting without some kind of closure.

I’m sure the tour added on a little weight, but what was one last pound or two when you already had to lose at least fifty? Planning my meal schedule carefully, I made sure to give my farewells to all my favorite foods. Who knew when I would have a chance to eat their calorie-rich goodness again? At each location, memories of past defeats and victories flavored every bite. Looking back now, I wonder if the real goal was to taste the yummy food or to ease the pain one more time. I don’t honestly know. Food was a physical fix to an emotional problem. And if my waistline was any indication, then I had a lot of emotional problems to fix.

***

One of the reasons I selected the HCG diet this last time was because of the two “load” days. This diet actually had my farewell tour built in. The creator must have been fat himself and thus understood the need for closure. The diet protocol claimed you needed those first two days of fat loading to last you through the next three weeks of starvation. Whatever, I didn’t care about the whys. All I cared about was what foods I could fit into those golden forty-eight hours. I made a list… a very long list. Didn’t want to leave anything out.

For those two days, I ate anything and everything I could think of. Cinnamon sweet rolls as soon as I woke up, then Krispy Kreme Donuts for brunch. For lunch, I decided on In-N-Out’s double cheeseburger and fries. Halloween candy rapidly disappeared from the pumpkin-shaped bowl. Jarom even made my favorites for dinner, lasagna and spoon bread. Fortune smiled upon me because Ben and Jerry’s had just released a limited batch of Pumpkin Cheesecake, a perfect midnight snack. Best day
ever!

Until I woke up at about 4:00 a.m., sure I was going to die. Was it possible to overeat to the point of your stomach exploding? Because that’s what it felt like. If I went to the hospital, I was sure the nurse would laugh at me and my stupidity, then send me home with a couple of Tums. So I just lay in bed and suffered in silence. In the morning, when it was time to do it all over again, I wanted to run and hide. Half of my list still remained, but the thought of putting a single thing in my mouth made me want to hurl.