Finished Being Fat: An Accidental Adventure in Losing Weight and Learning How to Finish (3 page)

I reread the HCG book to check if this reaction was normal, if I could skip the second load day, or if it had any references to possible tummy explosions. The only thing I could glean from my studies was the warning that if the load was not done correctly or skipped, then your diet would not be successful and no weight would be lost in the upcoming weeks. Well, there was no way that I was going to risk that, so I force fed myself the rest of my list. I choked down the French toast with caramel sauce and a side of Alka-Seltzer.

The rest of the day was a miserable disgusting blur that I’ve tried to block out. My stomach had never felt worse, and since I’d had a C-section with my second daughter, that was saying something. Later I went back and figured out that I had ingested approximately twelve thousand calories that weekend. When I weighed myself the following day I was a whopping five pounds heavier than the morning I heard the thud.

I’ll give Dr. Simmeons, the HCG author, credit. If those two load days were an elaborate trick of reverse psychology, they totally worked. Never again would I binge on junk food when I was upset. I can’t even look at a pint of Ben and Jerry’s without the taste of bile at the back of my throat. What on earth was I doing to myself? Why did I keep putting my body through this crap? There’s no way that this could be good for you. If you had asked me at the time my answer would have been that I was tired. Tired of being fat, so drastic measures were required because I couldn’t bear the weight for one more day. If you asked me today, I would tell you it’s because I was unhappy. Yes, unhappy with the way I looked, but I think the heaviness I felt was the weight of all the things I’d started but failed to finish hanging around my neck.

A
round a month and a half later, I was down thirty-five pounds to 180/185, the same weight I was when I got married. You’d think I’d be happy when somebody gave me a compliment of how I looked. Instead I would smile and say thank you, but inside I was secretly thinking two things. First, that I was starving on five hundred calories a day, so I better look good. And second, I wondered what they were going to think if the weight came back on. Would they be surprised? Or would they say it was inevitable? Perhaps they’d even be disgusted. People close to me had been on this roller coaster before, so I envisioned them counting the weeks before the weight would begin creeping back on. Fear of gaining all I had lost plus a few extra kept me from enjoying the success of losing a size or two.

Christmas was two weeks away, and like Ebenezer Scrooge, I was haunted by ghosts of the past. The clock would strike one, but instead of the Ghost of Christmas Past, I would have the Ghosts of Fat Past, dozens lined up along the wall and out into the hallway. Each specter was a younger version of myself and an earlier diet attempt.

First in line was a chubby twelve-year-old girl. Just seeing her transformed my room into the vet’s office where I first learned I was fat. My well-meaning but misguided father had me step on the scale that only moments before had been used to weigh our black Lab. One hundred twenty. So? Dad had to spell out it for me: B-I-G. My three sisters were all short and petite, but it looked like I was going to take after my plus-sized daddy. At almost five feet tall and 120 pounds, I was built more like a football player than a ballerina.

Heart-to-hearts were not my dad’s strong suit. Poor guy. He had just gotten over the trauma of taking me to buy my first bra, and now he had to tell me I was fat. After the office visit, dad sat me down over a Diet Coke and awkwardly tried to warn me about my weight without causing me a lifetime of therapy. His life had been hell as the chubbiest kid at school. It didn’t get any better the older and bigger he got.

One of the reasons he was confronting me now was that he had just lost 115 pounds, going from 285 pounds to 170. His doctor had prescribed the now defunct fen-phen (legal speed, basically) and a high-protein diet (precursor to the Atkins diet). Now he was like a new convert at church, wanting everyone else to join him in his enlightenment. Twice a week he would take me to the YMCA with him, so I could slim down by using the Stairmaster. (Seriously, what idiot came up with the stairway to nowhere?)

Satisfied with his missionary work, he gave me a bear hug, told me he loved me and asked if I understood that he only wanted the best for me. I remember nodding sagely and saying that I did, but all my twelve-year-old brain understood was that there was something wrong with me. It was like the old song from Sesame Street: “One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong.” I was the odd man out in the family. Both mom and dad had slimmed down, and my sisters were naturally thin, so I was the only chunk. From that moment, I would scan the crowds for other little girls and critically assess if I was bigger than them. And if I was, then I would tell myself that I needed to work harder so I could look the same.

The next few teenage ghosts were proof that I never quite got there. I really came to treasure the days I spent with dad at the gym. But when he stopped going, his weight went up, and so did mine. Each year the scale added another ten pounds. I was always trying to find ways to get small. Since I was a complete klutz, school sports were out of the question, so I kept my attempts focused on what I ate. Or sometimes didn’t eat. When I was unhappy about my looks, I would commit to starve myself until I looked better, thinner. Yeah, that lasted until dinner. Seeing an after-school special about bulimia on TV, I thought I’d give it a try. After the first dry heave, I resolved to never to do that on purpose again. My parents’ doctor gave me some “vitamins” to boost energy and curb cravings, about eight pills a day. Total bust, but I want to go on the record that giving a teenager, especially a depressed teenager, a bunch of pills is a horrible idea. However, that’s a whole different chapter.

My favorite ghost transported me back to my first year of college. I got hit with the freshmen fifteen… erm… twenty. The Atkins diet was the new hip story gracing all the women’s magazine covers. Mom and I, both unpleasantly plump, decided to give it a whirl. It was initially a success. I lost twenty-eight pounds, which put me at about the same weight I was in eighth grade. But the distribution of those pounds was much better now that I was taller and had boobs.

My older but littler sister would flaunt her bag of Oreos at me, complaining snidely that she just couldn’t gain weight no matter what she did. Those cookies looked good, but not as good as I did. All my hard work was paying off, and for the first time I was happy with my body. I finally had some self-confidence, and that was the first thing my husband-to-be noticed about me.

Jarom and I first met on a big group date to see the Christmas lights in Salt Lake City. The power I had gained from my very first diet success was a heady thing. Feeling bold and unstoppable, I tried my hand at flirting. Since I was an amateur, it was more along the lines of grade school flirting, where I teased him about his awful cowboy boots and called him Cowboy. He reciprocated and teased me for being so perky, calling me Sunshine. We were both so bad at the whole courtship ritual, we really were the perfect match. After we had both gone home, he told one of our mutual friends that I was completely psychotic, but that didn’t stop him from asking me out for New Year’s Eve, and every week after.

Having my first real boyfriend was great for my social calendar, but not so good for diet plans. It started out small with one pound here and there from our dates to Olive Garden. Then came the break-ups and the make-ups. Being an emotional eater, it was easy to find an excuse to indulge in chocolaty therapy. By the time we got married a year and a half later, I had put back on the twenty-eight pounds I had lost and gained another ten to boot. Doesn’t exactly make for the ideal bridal gown fitting does it?

The remaining spirits represented the next ten and a half years that I waged war on the fat. Short of surgical solutions, I had tried every fad, celebrity-recommended diet out there. Cleanse diets, packaged meal plans, ephedrine products. I even tried ordering myself a Bowflex Body. Who knew you actually had to work to get that body and not just pay the six installments of $99.99? When popular diets failed, I thought up my own. Once my brother in-law hosted a weight-loss competition, so I came up with the Five-Bite Diet, (patent pending). Basically you could eat whatever you wanted in a meal, but only five bites. Portion control at its finest, but it worked. I won the contest, took home the fifty bucks, and enjoyed being a size ten for about two months. Then like every other plan mentioned, as soon as the diet stopped, the weight crawled or jumped back on.

Constant practice had made me a pro at losing weight; I even lost weight when I was pregnant. It was effortless in the sense that I didn’t try, but let me tell you that throwing up every single day for nine months was not easy. Both times after the girls were born, I was thirty pounds less than when I started. You’d think that with a big head start like that and a year of nursing ahead, I would have continued to whittle away the fat. Wrong. As soon as throwing up ended and I was able to eat again, the pounds flew onto my butt and tummy. I told myself that I needed the extra six cinnamon rolls since I was nursing and thereby eating for two. Blame the nine months of forced bulimia, but my appetite was unending. After a year of nursing my last daughter, Autumn, I was bigger than ever before topping the scale at the thud-worthy 216.6 I told you about.

***

Rehashing every bad dieting experience was exhausting. But now the ghosts were gone and, Dickens be darned, I could finally sleep. In reality, sleep rarely came anymore, and my mind constantly raced with worries and worst-case scenarios. What was I going to do now? How was I going to keep the fat away for good? Tomorrow, the HCG diet would be officially over and I could finally start eating more than three slices of turkey breast and an apple two times a day. Aside from the whole starving part, it had been easy since I’d been told exactly what and how much to eat. But now I was going to be on my own, the book saying only to slowly add foods back into your diet. Where was the chapter with detailed meal plans, and just how slow was “slowly”?

Panicked, I leapt from the bed and hopped onto the Internet. Surely there must be forum for this. Every site I clicked had horror stories of what happened in the maintenance phase. Some people now found themselves allergic to dairy for first time, or worse, intolerant to wheat. What if that happened to me? I’ve already established that the whole no-bread thing wouldn’t work for me. Page after page, I found instances of dieters gaining weight but saying that it was okay because they could just do the HCG diet again.

Oh heck no. There was no way that I could ever do another three weeks of five hundred calories a day. My nose started to tickle and my vision blurred. I heard a voice.

It’s hopeless. Within six months you’ll be even fatter than before.

Was someone there? Jarom was snoring loudly, so unless he had recently learned ventriloquism, it wasn’t him.

You can’t do it. As soon as you go back to eating all that crap you normally do, you’ll be a failure… again.

Wait, I knew this voice. It was the little voice in my head that reminded me of all the things I’d screwed up. No, I’m not schizophrenic; I didn’t hear actual voices; they were just my own thoughts replaying all my failures on an endless loop with bonus snide commentary. Dickens’s ghosts would have been a welcome exchange—at least they came once and left Scrooge alone. But my ghost stayed with me as my constant companion. Though I referred to it as a ghost, perhaps demon would be more accurate. Surely, a voice that said so many evil discouraging things must be from hell. Whatever it was, it had held power and sway over me and my decisions for years.

Born from failures and self-loathing, it rose from the darkest parts of my soul. Whenever the high and initial excitement of starting a new project faded, that little voice was there, waiting in the background for its opportunity to strike. In my hometown in West Virginia, I had been a big fish in a little pond. At thirteen years old, I composed a five-movement piece for piano, then moved on to writing ensemble pieces. At sixteen, I left high school to go to college so I could become a famous composer. I bought my precious piano, ready to blow everyone away.

When I got there, no one was terribly impressed with what I’d done, and I learned that I was now a very little fish in a very big ocean. Every time I heard someone criticize my work, my mind would burn it into memory for future playback. Soon, for every compliment I received, my mind would repeat five earlier complaints. Performing became next to impossible for me because I was listening to the little voice instead of the music. I never even officially declared my major because I was so terrified that I wasn’t good enough to pass the initial entrance auditions.

Everyone else is so much better than you. How could you miss that chord? Geez, do you need a metronome? A five-year-old could have played that better than you. You really need to practice more. Ha, and you thought you were something special. You so don’t belong here.

And after telling myself that long enough, I decided it must be true. I didn’t belong with that caliber of musicians, so I quit school and quit music all together. And that’s why the piano just sits in my home, because I hadn’t been able to find joy in the music again, not while reminding myself that I hadn’t been able to hack it, that I’d quit.

Same thing happened with my next pursuit, writing. When music didn’t pan out, I went with my second love of storytelling. I’m a bookworm, and when life isn’t too hectic, I can read a book a day. From sci-fi and grocery store romances to literary classics and nonfiction, I loved the written word. Every once and a while the book I’d chosen would be terrible and I would think, “Hey, I can write better than this, so if this junk can be published, then so can I.”

Poised at the computer, I would begin to pen the next great novel. The words flowed through my brain and out through my fingers, the rhythmic keystrokes creating their own kind of music. Before I knew it, I had fifty pages finished and ready for edits. The first read-through I would be really excited, only changing small grammatical errors, adding commas, and so on. I would pump myself up thinking about my name on the
New York Times
bestseller list, maybe even getting interviewed on the
Today Show.
Second and third read-throughs were met with less enthusiasm, and I started hacking out sentences and big chunks of paragraphs. With each edit, I doubted more and more my ability to be an author. The little voice would pop up and agree.