Could people really comprehend their own physical changes without the proof of photographs and videos? Now you can buy a disposable camera at any drugstore, but affordable cameras have been available to most people only within the past century. Some people could have had drawings made or portraits painted, but that was probably beyond the budget of the average person. Even if you did sit for a painting, how much of the difference in your looks would you attribute to actual change, and how much to the artist’s interpretation?
Without my fat pictures and videos, I might not have believed how much I’d physically transformed. After those speedy first months the weight had come off slowly, just like it had arrived, slithering in and out of my life. There were days when I prayed I could wake up thin. I’d wish that I could raise a magic sword above my head, yell some enchanted words, and undergo a transformation sequence complete with glitter and sparkles and an unseen chorus singing my theme song, transforming me instantly from fat to thin. But if my shock at
seeing my old fat self was any indication, perhaps it was better that I was transforming slowly. If I were to suddenly wake up in a thin body, I wouldn’t know how to act. It’s easy to say, “Just be yourself,” but who I was had been shaped by how other people treated me, and right or wrong, that was determined by how I looked.
As strange as this transformation was for me, I was not entirely sure how it affected other people in my life. My boss hadn’t mentioned the subject. He’d complained that staring at a computer monitor all day for the last decade had hurt his vision, but if he hadn’t noticed that I was no longer in danger of breaking our cheap office chairs, he should have been checked for cataracts. My boss was friendly and easygoing, so I thought he would at least mention my metamorphosis in passing after the first hundred pounds, but day after day I sat in my office chair without a word from him about my appearance. At least if I one day transformed into a gigantic beetle I wouldn’t have to worry about my job security, provided I learned to type with my antennae. It wasn’t until I was weighing in under 200 pounds and told him I was writing a book about my weight loss that I first broached the topic. He said he had definitely noticed and had wanted to compliment me, but he was just playing it safe since he didn’t know how to tactfully approach the subject. It can be difficult to compliment someone’s weight loss without implying she looked like a big, fat blob before. As a man and as my boss, he was also hesitant to say anything about my appearance for fear that it would be misinterpreted as flirtation or harassment.
The dynamic between female friends could be tricky too. My oldest friend, Cristy, hadn’t been returning my phone calls. We met when we were both thin second-graders, and then we both got fat. I had gained weight first and felt a twisted sort of happiness a couple of years later when she started gaining too. I liked that I wasn’t alone in the elastic waistband. A year earlier I had Photoshopped a picture of us so we both
looked thinner. I was moving that image into the real world, but the supermodel-thin version of my friend still existed only in the picture frame. Cristy lived several hours away, so I saw her only a couple times a year. She’d never been in contention for the title of “World’s Best Email Correspondent,” nor had she been good at that old thing we used to do with envelopes and paper and pens, either.
It wasn’t uncommon for us to go months without talking to each other, but the silence was starting to become extreme. We had talked on the phone a couple of times, and I’d told her I had lost a lot of weight. I’d gotten some emails since then and a postcard from a Disney cruise, but that was it. The first ten months I attributed this to Cristy’s being her regular, busy, communication-challenged self. She was married, worked a full-time job, and went to school part time. As I flipped more pages on my monthly calendar, I got the creeping suspicion that my weight loss might be pushing us apart. How had my decrease in size made her feel? I thought she was genuinely happy for me, but that joy might be laced with pain. I wanted to lose weight, not friends. If the situation were reversed, I’d probably be jealous of her for doing something I couldn’t. I hoped that wouldn’t stop me from returning her calls. I was the same person, just in different packaging. She might be unsure that the stuff inside was still the same, as I had been when the manufacturer had changed the design of my favorite yogurt cups.
I hoped I was being paranoid and Cristy was just being Cristy. There might be something else going on with her that had nothing to do with me or with the continental drift in the tectonics of our relationship. The longer this went on, the more shocking it would be when we eventually did see each other again. What if it got to the point where she walked past me without recognizing me? If I dyed my hair, got contact lenses and a nose ring, I’d be more incognito than a member of the Witness
Protection Program. I called her sometimes, but I usually got voice mail because she worked a third-shift job and I worked nine to five.
After sixteen months, I finally met up with Cristy at a women’s study conference close to my city. I had lost about 150 pounds since I’d seen her last. I was in the back of the room when she hurried in to present her project. I snuck up behind her, braced for her unpredictable reaction. She smiled and exclaimed, “Jennette!” and got up to embrace me in a hug, fitting her arms around my entire body for once. “You look great!” she said with a smile in her eyes and not just on her mouth.
I was relieved she recognized me. We spent the rest of the day together and I purposely avoided talking about anything related to weight. I had always wondered why no one had staged an intervention on me when I was almost 400 pounds. I got my answer when I was far too chicken to ask one of my best friends if she hated me because I was thinner. It would have been impossible to do without bringing up the topic of her own weight, and I really didn’t want to go there. I even made a point of eating the chocolate fudge brownie served with lunch just to show that I wasn’t a dieting Nazi who wanted everyone to eat tomato salads. If I had still been fat, I might have avoided eating the chocolate dessert just to show everyone that fat people didn’t subsist only on brownies. Both approaches were rather dumb. I doubt that anyone cared what I ate for lunch. I don’t remember what anyone else had. My lunch was not a political statement.
It wasn’t until I was weighing in under 200 pounds and told her I was writing a book about my weight loss that I brought up the topic. The secret to approaching your friends and coworkers about an uncomfortable topic: Write a book about it. It just becomes research. As she put it, “I was thrilled for you and super jealous. And while I wasn’t overtly avoiding you (I just suck), I know it crossed my mind as to how this would change our friendship, both in good and ‘bad’ ways.
Like getting ice cream together, or something. I love you, and I’m both ecstatic and awed by your hard work and great results. Whatever issues I have with my fat ass have nothing to do with our friendship, except that now you’re my role model, too.”
We still go out for ice cream together.
CHAPTER 8
The Girl in the Mirror
T
he restroom mirror was missing.
This was a problem because I could not check out how cute I was. I used to wish there were no mirrors in the world, like the king and queen’s campaign to have all the spinning wheels destroyed in Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom. But now I looked forward to going to the ladies’ room during my work day so I could see how much skinnier I had become. I needed to confirm that fact every few hours. I was afraid the front paunch might reappear while I was typing.
It had been a year and I still wasn’t thin. I weighed 242 pounds, down 130, but still obese according to my body mass index. I was feeling much skinnier. I actually weighed eight pounds less than what my driver’s license said. If workers at the Department of Motor Vehicles had a dollar for every pound people have lied about on their driver’s licenses, they wouldn’t have to work at the DMV anymore. The last time I weighed this much, I felt so fat that I had speed walked past my reflection. Now I felt so thin that I was striking poses like I was in a Madonna video. If anyone wants to feel good about herself, gaining a hundred pounds and then losing it is one way to go. It made me feel like
a superstar. Until the janitor hung a replacement mirror on the wall, my love affair with myself was going on a break. I’d have to wait until I could go home and admire myself between the toothpaste spittle spots on my own bathroom mirror.
I had never been vain before. I didn’t know how to apply eyeliner without scraping my cornea. I shaved my legs as frequently as new Supreme Court justices were appointed. My lack of concern about my image probably helped me gain so much weight in the first place. Those days were over. The mirror let me admire the results of my hard work and recalibrate my self-image on a daily basis as I shrank.
There is a painting by Pablo Picasso called
Girl Before a Mirror
that depicts a woman in warm colors looking at her reflection in an ovalshaped, floor-length mirror. Her mirror twin is painted in cold colors with a slightly different appearance, as though the girl can’t see herself as she really is, or the way the world sees her isn’t the way she is inside. I’d had a print of this painting hanging in my living room for years, but I felt like I understood it more than I ever had before. I certainly felt beautiful, but I wasn’t sure if what I saw in the mirror was the same thing people were seeing outside the looking glass. I didn’t know if it even mattered.
I returned to my office desk and crossed my legs one over the other. I was crossing my legs all the time now just because I could. A year ago I was as likely to be able to cross my legs as I was to run cross-country. Now my thighs were slim enough to accommodate the proper angle required for this traditional ladylike pose. I looked at my wristwatch as I began to type and noticed I was down four notches on the band, about an inch. I was amazed there had been that much fat in my wrist; I thought the skin there covered only bone and veins and ligaments. My best excuse for not giving blood was rapidly disappearing. Nurses had always had trouble finding my veins, but now my arms sported
faint blue lines scattered under my translucent skin instead of the red stretch marks I’d so hated. The scores of stretch marks on my belly had faded to a shiny color, like streaks of raindrops on a windshield. If I inhaled deeply they would pucker slightly out from my body. They were my fat scars.
I still had about eighty pounds to lose before I hit my arbitrarily determined goal weight. When I was washing all my flabby bits in the shower, I started to wonder exactly how that excess weight was distributed. It was like trying to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. My belly alone must have had at least twenty-five pounds. I guessed at least another twenty-five pounds in my ass. If my arms had five pounds each, that would leave twenty pounds in my legs. That couldn’t be right. Maybe my ass wasn’t as big as I thought? Unfortunately, I couldn’t swivel my head around to check because I wasn’t possessed by the devil. I’d just have to go with what I saw in the mirror. I could have been overestimating my arm weight. The upper arms looked like bat wings, but how much did they really weigh? I was hesitant to underestimate them since I’d never suspected there could be so much fat in my wrist.
My mother insisted that my shoe size would get smaller too, but I didn’t think I had that much fat in my feet. I had heard a snide comment or two about the size of my ass, but no one had ever accused me of having chunky toes. There wasn’t a special shoe store for fat people. But she argued that my arches might become less bowed as my weight decreased, which could cause me to go down a size or two.
As I continued working, I felt chilly despite the sweater buttoned up over my long-sleeve shirt. I felt cold lately, and I was considering investing in a space heater. Either that or I’d break down my absent coworker’s desk to build a fire on top of the photocopier. I could use my Lean Cuisine packaging for kindling. At first I had been convinced that
my office was cold because it was situated in a converted warehouse that had self-washing floors. The fact that water leaked between the window frames during thunderstorms had to have been a new age design scheme, not a sign of rust and decay and poor insulation from the elements. My boss didn’t think it was cold, but I had always suspected he was an alien from the planet of lava men.
To prove that I wasn’t crazy, I bought an indoor-outdoor thermometer and took it into the office. Then I said some naughty words and stopped at the drugstore the next day to buy one AAA battery. I popped it into the thermometer and waited to see if my working conditions were horrible enough to warrant a lawsuit.
It was 72.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
I was wearing a lightweight sweater, a blazer, and a blouse, and I still felt as if I’d been locked in a freezer. I guessed my body was either missing the warm insulation of my fat or reacting to my weight loss by lowering my metabolism. There wasn’t much I could do about it besides investing in wool socks.
I wasn’t just looking better, I was feeling healthier too. When I later got down to 225 pounds, I stopped at the blood-pressure machine at the pharmacy. I stuck my hand through the cuff so it could be squeezed like a fresh melon. I was surprised that my arm fit somewhat comfortably and the machine didn’t completely cut off my circulation when it choked my arm. The last time I’d used the machine I thought I’d have to gnaw my arm off at my elbow to exit the store. The cuff deflated and released my arm. I checked the numbers with anticipation as if I were hoping for a high score on Tetris. The display read: 122/71. Woo-hoo! I wanted to take a victory lap around the feminine hygiene aisle, throwing tampons in the air like confetti. My family had a history of hypertension, but that reading was perfectly normal. I was glad to break from family tradition.
I checked the clock on my computer and saw that it was after five o’clock. I gathered up my things to leave and said goodbye to my boss. As I walked down the hallway I started to think about what to make for dinner that night and what exercises I needed to do before I started cooking. I was now eating like a thin person and exercising like a thin person, but I was still fat. If I ended a smoking habit, as soon as I took the last puff of smoke I could say I had quit. But after I’d started acting like a thin person, it was still going to take a long time to quit being fat.