Secrets of a Former Fat Girl (20 page)

Sure, they knew I was overweight, chubby, “husky” (awful term). It wasn't like they were blind. They teased me about it, even. But they had no idea what was going on inside. They didn't understand all the underlying emotions, all the secret shame I was carrying around, because unless you've been there yourself, you
can't
know.

They didn't get that I wasn't just trying to drop a few pounds or even a lot of pounds, I was trying to change my whole life. My family, Nana included, thought a piece of meat was a piece of meat; a hot fudge sundae was a hot fudge sundae. They didn't know that to me they were anchors, they were handcuffs, they were snares that were threatening to keep me from having the kind of life I wanted. They didn't know that my happiness, my vision of myself, my self-confidence were all tangled up in being a Fat Girl.

Figuring out that the Pushers didn't really intend to sabotage me made me less angry and frustrated, but it didn't change the reality I was dealing with: the temptation, the discouragement, and the doubt I sensed—all things that could derail my plan. Every time I pushed my plate away, the people I loved most felt as if I was pushing them away, just like I felt that they were pushing me back to that Fat Girl place when they tried to talk me into eating
just one meatball
. I had to figure out how to be the person I wanted to be, the person I was becoming, without threatening the people who loved the Fat Girl I was leaving behind.

Really, I had covered
some of this territory before. I had kept my intentions a secret for as long as possible because I knew how other people can react when you start moving in an unfamiliar direction. I knew how scary that can be for them. But I couldn't hide it anymore. I was becoming a Former Fat Girl before their very eyes—physically
and
emotionally.

At this point my weight was steadily dropping. At the beginning of my stint on Weight Watchers, I was at about 150, and I dropped anywhere between 3 and 5 pounds a week. I actually started to look forward to my weekly weigh-ins. I couldn't wait to see how many pounds I'd lost. I couldn't care less about the meetings. I didn't need a cheerleading session; I got all the juice I needed from the scale, from the highs I got after I completed each run, from the way my clothes were fitting and my life in general was improving. Every week when I got the verdict from the Weight Watchers' official weigh-in person, it was like adding fuel to a fire. It stoked my motivation to stick to my daily “budget” of servings, to keep moving, to keep believing.

After the first four weeks or so, the weight loss slowed down; some weeks I lost half a pound, some weeks none. On weigh-in day I learned to wear the lightest clothes possible, no jackets, no lined wool pants, no big, embellished belts, no chunky earrings, no clunky shoes. I wanted to get credit for every ounce, to have a reason to give myself credit. Every weigh-in was an opportunity to celebrate, to pat myself on the back for a job well done.

I might sound superficial, vain, and overly focused on my appearance—and maybe I was, maybe I still am. But for me it was all connected. I wanted to feel good about myself, to feel more confident, to finally do something
just for me
—not to please other people but to please me. It had all started with running, which wasn't as much about getting to a certain weight as about the power surge I felt inside when I walked to my car, sweaty and satisfied, after each trip to the trail or the track. The scale had become another way to get that rush that comes when you see yourself getting closer to your goal.

My parents weren't the only ones who noticed the changes I was making and started pushing in response. Some of my closest friends gave me a hard time whenever I ordered my salad dressing on the side or the veggie burrito with no cheese or sour cream. It was almost as if my mere presence at the table made them defensive about what they were putting in their own mouths.

I first tried talking about it with them—explaining why, from the technical end, shunning slabs of animal fat (and flesh) was a good thing for me to do healthwise and weightwise. (Note the emphasis on me. I made it a point to avoid preaching or teaching. The last thing I wanted to do was become a Pusher myself.) I tried to explain that I couldn't eat a package of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies for dinner or a bacon burger with cheese without beating up on myself, without feeling like a failure, without feeling perfectly humiliated.
It's fine for you
, I told them,
but I am not like you.

Talking only went so far. My parents' restraint always seemed to wear off within a few days of our conversation, and they'd go back to pushing. I could see them biting their tongues as they gazed at what seemed to them like Barbie-doll-size portions of food on my plate. I could see them straining to keep from snatching up the serving spoon and forcing a glob of mashed potatoes on me. I could see the guilt in my friends' eyes as they picked at their desserts while I sipped a cup of decaf (with skim milk and Sweet 'n Low). Weren't we all raised to think that sharing is a good thing? And there I was, asking them not to.

When the going got tough—when I felt my resolve weakening under the pressure from the Pushers—I took the classic way out: I simply avoided them. I made some excuse not to eat with the friends who were most likely to make some crack about my dinner order. I cut back on my visits home.

The interesting thing was that I didn't have to resort to that too often. I had tools to help me stay focused on my goals, tools I had never had before. I had the power and self-confidence I'd built through exercise. I had INO. I finally knew in my heart that I was not like Becky, who could scarf down a box of cookies for dinner without feeling like a complete loser. I had seen a glimpse of the body I could have; I knew (approximately) how far I was from the finish line. For the first time in my life I was focusing on what
I
wanted, and I sure as hell wasn't going to let anything stand in my way. It was like I'd seen the purse of my dreams at a sample sale, and I was fighting tooth and nail to get to it before someone else snatched it up. I was willing to push, shove, and pinch my way through the crowd, through the distractions and temptations, through the cutting comments and criticisms that threatened to hold me back.

For once I was less concerned about disappointing everyone else than about disappointing myself. I was willing to risk what I had thought was the most precious thing—their love and approval—in the quest for my own happiness because I finally figured out that
my
happiness was what mattered most—not my parents', not my siblings', not my friends', and not my boss's. For too long I had placed more value on what the people around me thought and felt. Now it was my turn.

I had to choose between pleasing them—whoever “them” happened to be—and pleasing me.

I chose me.

So there I was,
breaking out of my role as the self-sacrificing people pleaser and playing against type in pretty much every other area of my life, too. Take my job. I was working at the business weekly, struggling to hang on despite the abundance of grunt work I had to do (which included delivering bundles of issues to vendors around Austin out of the trunk of my beat-up Datsun). I had planned to finish my master's thesis on my off hours, but I couldn't muster up the motivation to even get started. As the months ticked away and my thesis went untouched, I realized that I was using it as a convenient excuse to stay in Austin and not go for that “real” magazine job I'd dreamed of.

I had to do something. In the same way I was cutting out the things in my life that had gotten my weight to an unhealthy high—the ice cream, the burgers, the fries—I had to cut myself loose from this anchor that was keeping me from taking that next career step. The thesis had loomed like a mountain in my mind; from a distance it looked formidable, forbidding, like you'd have to have superhero powers to scale it. That's how I used to see running five miles or losing 50 pounds. I could only imagine the before and after; I didn't have a clue about what to do in between, how to make it happen.

But I did now. I knew that five miles were twenty laps, and I could get there one lap at a time. I knew that losing 50 pounds was a matter of 2 pounds a week, and 2 pounds a week was a matter of six servings of bread a day or four servings of protein a day. You get the picture.

So I looked closer at that looming, scary mountain of a thesis and began to make plans that would take me to the top. One was to reduce my hours at work. I figured I'd never get anything done if I continued to work from nine to five. So I proposed becoming a part-time investigative reporter at the business journal, keeping the stuff I liked about the job and leaving the grunt work to some unfortunate coworker. In my mind it was a win-win: My boss wanted us to stop kissing the local businessmen's butts and get more down-and-dirty stories in the paper anyway, and my plan would allow me to throw myself into the job. I boldly laid it all out for him, and he said no. He didn't like the part-time thing, didn't want to let me keep my benefits, yadda, yadda, yadda.

The funny thing was, I wasn't devastated, mortified, or humiliated. So he didn't go for it, so what? This was just a little bump in the road on the way to what I wanted. It was like one of those tough days on the running trail when I was hot or tired or both. What did I tell myself when that happened? It's not an option. It's not an option to quit because I just don't feel like running. It's not an option to let my boss's
no
stop me, either.

So I came up with Plan B. Needing some kind of steady gig to support myself, I talked to my old college professors about teaching a couple of classes a semester until I had the thesis done. The money stunk, I had no insurance, but I would try to do some freelance writing to fill in the gaps and piece together a life somehow. I held my nose, quit my safe, stable job with health and dental insurance and paid holidays, and jumped into the pool of financial insecurity with both feet.

And guess what? I didn't sink!

Oh, I was poor. Thank God for my Sears credit card; it fixed my car more times than I can remember. But I did it: I went out and hustled up pitifully paying freelance work. I entertained and instructed college students in the fine art of journalism as best I could. I pulled all-nighters in the University of Texas computer lab, inputting data, writing code, and pounding out results. Looking back from where I sit now, I see a different person from the Fat Girl I had been for so long. I was putting myself out there like never before—pitching stories to editors, creating lectures for my students, and tackling computer analysis as if it was second nature to me. At the time, though, I didn't think much of it, and that's a good thing. Because if I had stopped and thought too much, the old Fat Girl fears and insecurities would have come flooding back.

Put Your Happiness at the Top of the List

You probably know from all those previous attempts at losing weight that the most important people in your life aren't necessarily going to be your biggest cheerleaders, at least at first. You've heard the questions and the comments, the “That's
all
you're having?” And you hear every one of them as an expression of doubt, whether it's intended to be or not. It's so tempting to give in, to think “You're right. Why am I fooling myself? I can't change.”

What's different is that this time you've already begun shoring up your self-confidence with exercise, with INO, and with all the Former Fat Girl fixes. You're not as fragile as you used to be. Taken together, the Former Fat Girl fixes create kind of a force field around you, so it's more difficult for the innocent comments (even sharply aimed arrows) to penetrate your heart, to prick your spirit, to wound your soul. That is, in a sense, what the Former Fat Girl plan is about: It's about building the mental and emotional toughness you need to succeed. It's about hacking into the Fat Girl programming that has determined your every move thus far and swapping in new Former Fat Girl code. (As you can see, I'm also fluent in computer geek.)

Still, you need specific tactics to deal with the Pushers because another thing that's different this time is your level of commitment—and the people around you can sense that. They can see you're serious about becoming a Former Fat Girl, and as you move in a new direction, they might begin to feel a little threatened. They start to realize that this time
you might just do it
. You might become that new person you've always wanted to become, and where would that leave them? They're afraid they won't recognize or relate to you anymore. And they love you just as you are; they don't understand why you have to change.

And then there are those in your life, family or friends, who might be Fat Girls themselves. They know what you're going through, but they might not be all that jazzed about your journey, either. They may see it as a reflection on them or even a betrayal. Your strength only makes their weakness more obvious. Your success only makes them feel more like failures.

While understanding all this can help you be more forgiving and less frustrated, you need concrete ways to stay strong when people and circumstances challenge you. I can help you steel yourself against the Pushers with My Former Fat Girl Fixes.