Half-Assed (24 page)

It’s a shame that none of my physical education teachers were able to convince me that being fit could be fun or that it could enhance other
aspects of my life. Instead, gym was about the fear of group showering and avoiding dodge balls. Gym was about being picked on for being weak. Now that I wasn’t being screamed at by a blond with a mullet wearing track pants, I could see that my physical health directly affected my mood and my ability to think. A healthy lifestyle made my body feel better. It made my body
look
much better too.

It also made my body more useful. I could now run quickly to the corner to cross the street before the walk signal flashed red. I could carry twenty-four-packs of soda up the driveway and into the house without panting. I felt powerful, and I hadn’t had to usurp any South American nations or run for political office to feel this power. Fitness gave me confidence that bled into all areas of my life, not just those involving volleyball nets.

I felt confident enough to sign up for a 5K race. The formerfat-girl bylaws dictate that you must run a 5K or you will be forced to gain back all the weight. On the day of the run I was handed my T-shirt and a map of the race course. The map’s red line ran by the lawn at White River State Park and the zoo parking lot that I had barely been able to walk to after a concert three years ago. As I ran through the streets, passing fluorescent pylons and dodging paper water cups tossed to the ground, I imagined overlaying this moment with the past to overlap time in a split screen. I broke my stride for a second to wave at that fat girl who struggled to walk half as fast as I was running now, but she didn’t see me. She kept her head down and staggered forward with labored breaths, hoping she could make it another hundred yards and down the concrete steps. I breathed heavily too, miles more to go. I stepped up my pace and passed her by.

Decloaking

“W
ow, you look really great!” my dental hygienist said as I stared into the light hovering above me like an alien spaceship. Visiting the dentist
was
like being probed by aliens.

“Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of weight,” I replied, resting my clasped hands gently on my stomach. Two years ago I had grasped my hands tightly together as gravity pulled my heavy arms in opposite directions down the steep slope of my belly. Today they lay relaxed on my slightly rounded stomach even when I released my grip.

“I noticed,” the hygienist said.

My dental care provider had been very tactful. She hadn’t directly addressed my weight but had left the door open if I wanted to enter the room of that particular conversation. Smooth. They must have taught that technique during “Small Talk 101” in dental school, where they also covered how to make conversation with people with a dozen cotton swabs stuck in their gums.

“How much weight have you lost?” she asked as she reached for a shiny tool on her tray.

“Um ...” I rolled my eyes upward as if the response were written on the bottom of my eyelashes. The answer to this question kept changing, and I couldn’t remember what the proper number was this month. My starting weight of 372 minus my current weight of 197 would make it ...

“One hundred and seventy-five,” I replied, proud that I could do the mental math. “I weigh about 195 pounds now.” I sounded like such a liar. That number was absurd. How could I have been able to walk around with that much extra weight? I could barely carry my TV set up the stairs. The last two years must have been a fever dream occurring in a diabetic coma after I’d finally eaten too much frosting straight from the jar. When I’d lost only twenty to thirty pounds, I’d told everyone from the janitor to the deli waiter. Now I’d lost so much that it was becoming uncomfortable to mention. It was freakish. It sounded like I was bragging. I’d received so many compliments about my weight loss by friends, family, and blog readers that I’d reached a saturation point. I didn’t feel a need to fish for positive reinforcement anymore.

“Wow,” she said, her eyes wider and rounder than the mirror tool she held in her hand. “That’s amazing! That’s more than I weigh! You should be proud,” she said as she continued to pick plaque off my gum line.

“Thanks,” I mumbled without moving my jaw. It had been about two years since I’d popped a can of soda pop that didn’t have the word “diet” on it. My body mass index now qualified me as overweight instead of obese. It made sense that the dental staff would be particularly impressed by my transformation. They saw me only every six months, so it was as if they were viewing time-lapse photography. They saw me in a strobe light that flickered every six months.

I was getting better at these exchanges about my weight. They weren’t that different from all the other scripts I practiced in life. When
someone said, “How are you doing today?” in the hallway I’d reply, “Just fine!” even if I wanted to crawl back into my bed and drool on the pillows. If someone congratulated me on my weight loss, I’d just say thanks and smile. People were rather predictable. There were only so many ways they reacted to my metamorphosis.

I preferred it when people simply said I looked good without specifically mentioning my weight. I could look great for many reasons—because I got a haircut, because I was wearing a cute blouse, or because it was a sunny day and I felt happy. Someone who said, “You look great since you lost all that weight” was implying I had not looked so great before. It was as close as you could come to building a time machine and traveling to the past to insult me.

The hygienist finished scraping my teeth and set the tool down in favor of the electric polisher and a tray of polishing paste. “You know, I would never have guessed you weighed 195. You look a lot thinner than that. Mint, strawberry, or piña colada?”

“Yeah, it was a lot. Piña colada.” I replied.

People were terrible at guessing my weight. Before I got too fat to ride the roller coasters, I bought a season pass to an amusement park for the summer and noticed a “Guess My Weight” game positioned in the thoroughfare. It was right next to the walkway over the highway, which granted it maximum crowd exposure and unlimited opportunity for embarrassment. Next to the barker was a scale with a circular face so large it could have doubled as Godzilla’s Frisbee. The barker had to guess your weight within five or ten pounds or you’d win a prize.

I never played this game. Public weigh-ins seemed reserved for the sanctity of Weight Watchers meetings, which I’d never attended since I was a diet atheist. I didn’t know how much I weighed, and I didn’t want to find out in front of packs of teenyboppers in short-shorts sucking down Diet Coke and Dippin’ Dots. However, I
was
curious to know
how well the barker could guess someone’s weight. Most people didn’t stand next to a humongous scale all day. If I were brave enough to risk insulting someone by guessing his or her weight, I couldn’t be sure that I was getting accurate feedback. Surely most people lied anyway. Without a huge scale you couldn’t know how wrong you were and make corrections in the future.

Recently Kirstie Alley had been on
Oprah
in a bikini, and one blogger said she must be lying about her weight. The blogger was about the same size as Kirstie and weighed more. I had no idea what Kirstie Alley really weighed. I did know that when you factored in height differences, ratio of fat to muscle, and other nonsense like how much sodium you’d had recently and when your last trip to the bathroom was, you couldn’t assume someone on TV weighed as much as you did just because she looked the same size.

People always seemed scared of guessing that I weighed more than 200 pounds. Nobody would even touch 300. Instead they copped for numbers right below the threshold. It was as if 200 were the magical fat number. At 199 you were still thin, but if you rolled over to 200 you had passed the point of no return. No one dared guess a number near my actual highest weight, perhaps because they feared insulting me. I wondered if the carnival barker made adjustments to avoid being mauled by angry fat people. If he thought someone actually weighed 205, would he round down to 199? How could I know if the carnival scale was even calibrated accurately? Carnies were notoriously stingy about giving away their pink teddy bears.

I had read that people became increasingly worse at estimating amounts the larger portions became.
¹
Most people can guess the calorie content of a small meal with little error, but if you stacked more and more ribs and potatoes on a plate you underestimated the calorie content by more and more too. Perhaps the same was true with weight.

The hygienist sprayed some water in my mouth. I swished the remains of my piña colada paste until she stuck the suction tube in my mouth. “The doctor will be by in a couple of minutes to check for cavities,” she said, writing some notes on my chart.

“Okay,” I said as she elevated the chair to a sitting position.

“So what have you been doing?” she asked. “To lose weight, I mean.”

I didn’t want to say I was on a diet because I hated that word. It sounded as if I were eating only rice cakes and tofu until the day I could finally fit into a size 4 dress, at which time I’d resume eating chocolate fudge brownies for breakfast. It belied the significance of the commitment that I’d made to living a new lifestyle, as if I were calling my two-year marriage with healthy living a “fling.” But there was no other word to use. It was such a mouthful to say I was living a new lifestyle and it sounded pretentious too. I was
sort of
on a diet because I was following some general guidelines, but they weren’t restricting my enjoyment of life or food in any significant way.

“Oh, I’ve been cutting out white flour, sugars, stuff like that. Eating more vegetables.” How could I possibly sum up everything I’d been doing in a succinct small-talk paragraph? I hated trying to simplify everything, but I doubted she wanted to hear my hour-long lecture on Weight Loss 101. Instead I came off sounding like an idiot who told people to eat less and move more. If only it had been that simple.

She nodded. “My aunt has been doing that too. She says it’s remarkable how much better she feels.”

“Oh yeah, it’s kind of amazing. It’s a world of difference. I really love it,” I said. Oh no. I had become one of those women who talked about her diet. Frequently women had tried to bond with me by talking about what they were eating or how much they hated their bodies. It was called fat talk. I wanted it banned.

At a funeral luncheon I’d attended, a woman across the table started lobbing potato salad and chips onto her paper plate as I picked fruit off a serving tray. We made eye contact. “I keep saying I’m going to go on a diet, but I keep putting it off,” she said out of nowhere. I quickly glanced up and down her body and determined she wasn’t fat. “Yep,” she continued. “Got to go on a diet. Any day now.”

I hoped that if I ever started talking like this woman, someone would drown me in the punch bowl. I didn’t care what she was eating. I didn’t care what she looked like. I didn’t care if she greased her tummy with butter wedges and belly-slid down the table to catch slices of German chocolate cake and raspberry cheesecake in her mouth. It surely would have livened up the affair.

I didn’t know why she felt the need to apologize for eating and enjoying food. It seemed as if she were saying she was sorry she wasn’t thin enough or good enough. It sounded like she was insulting herself. Why did so many women relate to each other this way? Being dissatisfied with your body was more of a requirement to be female than possessing a vagina. Occasionally thin friends had whined to me about how fat they were when I was still at a size that I struggled to buckle myself into the front seat of the car. They were fat? Had they not noticed I needed a seat belt extender? I think they were so used to obsessing about their fat with friends that they automatically did the same thing with me.

The odd thing about fat talk was that it became less acceptable the fatter I became. If a thin friend talked about how fat she was, it wasn’t a matter of life and death, but for me it was. If I said I needed to go on a diet it wasn’t just a flippant, self-hating remark but a serious and uncomfortable topic of conversation. I doubted this church lady would have yammered on about needing to go on a diet if my thighs were still as big as her torso. Fat was only okay to talk about if you didn’t have any on your body.

I didn’t like talking about diets with other women, like my dental hygienist, because there was the strong implication that we should all be on one, as though we could never be thin enough or good enough or possibly be happy with how we looked, so we’d better watch what went in our mouths. God forbid that we actually enjoy what we were eating. If you dared to eat a donut you’d better be prepared to do penance at the gym. That wasn’t how I felt at all. I was still technically fat, but I thought I looked rather awesome. I ate foods that I enjoyed and paid attention to what I was eating, but I had started eating healthy so I could live longer. I didn’t want eating healthy to become my life.

“I wish I could just lose these last fifteen pounds,” the hygienist said as my eyes searched for the dentist. There were no telltale screams or drilling noises to give away his location. “You make me feel like such a slacker.”

I now inspired more shame in people than priests. I listened to all their food confessions. Too bad I couldn’t tell them to say ten Hail Marys to wash away their dieting sins. I could try empathizing with her and say the first hundred pounds were a lot easier than the second hundred, but that sounded flippant. I thought about patting her shoulder and saying, “That’s too bad.” I was never sure if these selfderogatory comments were a backhanded way of seeking tips. I didn’t have any advice on how to lose the last fifteen pounds because I hadn’t lost the last fifteen pounds yet. I was starting to become thinner than some of my friends, however. One of them dug her elliptical machine out of the basement in fear when she saw I was going to pass her on the way down the scales. I’d felt the same way when I had been fat and read an article about all the weight the thousand-pound man had lost and realized he was going to catch up with me.