Half-Assed (26 page)

I may have been smaller than I’d ever been, but I was ready to take up space in the world.

Half-Assed

T
he liquor store clerk looked at my ID, then at my face, then at my ID again. After a slight hesitation he rung up my raspberry vodka, and I sighed in relief. It would still be another few months before I could renew my driver’s license, but until then I’d have to deal with triple takes from alcohol salesmen and bouncers after they inspected the photo of me at my fattest, taken under fluorescent lights. Sometimes I’d pretended to have a skinnier sister. Now I seemed to be her.

Half of me was gone. I had finally done it. One hundred and eighty-six pounds were lost, hopefully never to be found again, which according to my driver’s license meant I now weighed sixty-four pounds. After a little more than two years, one day I woke up, went to the bathroom, stepped on the scale, and the magic three numbers rolled up like three cherries on a slot machine. Jackpot!

I commemorated the event by taking a photo of myself standing in one leg of my fat pants. I used my camera timer, so I had to use my new athletic abilities to hop across my kitchen, pivot, and smile in less than ten seconds without slipping on the linoleum and cracking my skull on the stainless steel sink. At least I was prepared for the Potato
Sack Racing World Championships, should they ever be held. I invited all my blog readers to that party in my fat pants. There certainly was room for everyone.

So was I officially thin now? No one had waved a checkered flag as I’d hopped across my kitchen. My body mass index was 27.5, which was solidly “overweight,” equidistant from being categorized as either “normal” or “obese.” Would I be thin when I could no longer shop at the plus-size stores? Would it be when my body fat percentage was 25 percent? Surely I would be thin by the time my boobs finally stuck out farther than my belly, though at the rate the twins were decreasing that might never happen. When I stuck a pencil under my front flap of fat, it clattered to the floor instead of clinging above my pubic hair. By Hollywood standards I was still a fat ass, but I was on the thin side for a Botticelli beauty.

Most of the things that sucked about being a fat person had disappeared from my life. When I visited my older brother in Boston, I traipsed up and down the Freedom Trail, through a park by the harbor, and back to the train without panting like a Labrador. The next day I toured Cambridge with a skinnier friend from high school and secretly smiled when he said he was tired of walking, though I knew I could go for another mile or two.

The hallway to the elevators in my brother’s apartment complex was coated in mirrors. Mirrors on the left, mirrors at the end; there was even a mirror on the ceiling of the elevator. I guessed this was some sort of vampire detection system. I checked out my image whenever we were coming or going. Each time I thought,
Damn, I look good.
It was great not being disgusted by my image. I highly recommend it. When we flew back home I didn’t have to ask for a seat belt extender. I didn’t feel like a fat person anymore. My life was no longer like a fat person’s, but there was some residue. There was the skin.

Everyone wanted to know about the state of my skin. I felt like the spokeswoman for Neutrogena. It was a taboo subject to bring up, so my blog readers typically asked about it via email instead of leaving a comment publicly on the blog. They would usually tack on the qualifier that I didn’t have to talk about it if it were too personal. I didn’t consider it that personal of a question, any more so than if I were to ask, “How are your kidneys today? Still filtering waste products? Good to hear!”

Many people think the liver is the largest organ of the human body, but it’s actually the skin. The skin reportedly has a surface area of 1.5-2.0 square meters. I wondered how much space mine took up. So many weight-loss surgery patients were having procedures to remove excess skin that it had become the fastest-growing field in plastic surgery.
¹
I had lost weight more slowly than gastric bypass patients, so people were curious if I had gotten better results or if I looked like a melted candle anyway.

My skin had gotten looser. Skin looseness is a weird phenomenon that I suspect you have to see to understand. My body at its fattest was like a Ziploc bag filled with water. It had been squishy, but firm. If you drained half the water without letting any air in, the bag was still squishy, but it flopped around easily. That’s how the loose skin was. It wasn’t just skin either. Skin is only several millimeters thick at the most, like on your eyelids or between your fingers. Fat and other tissue was attached beneath it.

The way the skin looked depended on how gravity was draping it, like fabric flung across a dressmaker’s mannequin. When I was standing up, it all flowed downward and looked respectable. My thighs and what I could see of my butt were getting saggy. The gut flab known as the pannus was still there, though considerably smaller than it had ever been. I could now visually confirm I had female anatomy without digging out the hand mirror.

My upper arms looked like someone cut the sleeve pattern for my skin four sizes too big. I didn’t know if my breasts were less firm in comparison to other women’s since I had never had the opportunity to fondle another woman’s boobs. They looked remarkably perky for what they’d gone through, at least what remained of them.

The skin was most noticeable when I was doing push-ups while wearing sweatpants and a sports bra. The skin dangled toward the mat like a hammock draped from my breastbone to my pubic bone. If I were actually able to do a full push-up, I suspect my skin might have brushed the ground on the descent.

The extra skin didn’t bother me. I was fascinated by it, not disgusted, as if I had grown a sixth finger. I’d seen pictures of people who had much worse skin problems than I did. I’d seen a skin-removal surgery on cable for a woman whose breasts looked like a pair of tube socks with coins at the bottom. My skin was in incredibly good condition for someone who’d lost almost two hundred pounds. I was young, I’d never smoked, and never tanned, so the skin had retained a lot of its elasticity. At my last doctor’s visit my physician told me it would tighten up even more, but I didn’t really believe her. I was never under any illusions that I would score the cover of the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition when this was all done. I had low expectations, and they were being exceeded.

I was more concerned with function than form. My body could do so many cool things now. I could point my leg out straight from my body at a right angle. I could bend my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them easily. My body was awesome! I didn’t mind the loose skin. I felt like I did about the Oldsmobile I’d owned that had been dented by a woman jabbering on her cell phone as she pulled out of a parking space. Her insurance company paid me $700 to get it repaired, but I just pocketed the money and kept driving the car. I
thought the dent nicely distracted from the small rust stain developing near the gas tank. It still ran fine, so I didn’t see any need to spend the money on an aesthetic problem.

I hadn’t entirely ruled out getting plastic surgery to remove the extra skin, but I wasn’t in any rush. I had read other people’s accounts of their tummy tucks, which sounded more painful than a three-month stay with the Spanish Inquisition in the Iron Maiden bedroom suite. The term “tummy tuck” suggested a very simple procedure. You can easily tuck in hospital corners when you make your bed or tuck your shirt into your pants. If I had a tummy tuck, it would be weeks before I was healed enough to make my bed, and my pants wouldn’t fit for months because of the swelling. I would spend the first two weeks lying on the couch in pain, eating painkillers like M&M’s. It would take at least another month or two before I could walk around comfortably and pick up objects off the floor, and up to six months for all the swelling to disappear. And since I wouldn’t be able to exercise for months, I’d lose some of the fitness and flexibility that I so valued.

My decision would depend on what my body ended up looking like, and how much that bothered me. If it annoyed me enough, I might submit to the horrors of voluntary plastic surgery. The cost would be a factor too, as would getting that much time off work. I was leaning toward staying out of a hospital gown, even though I could tie one around my back now. Not too many people saw me naked besides my doctor, anyway. The skin didn’t bother me and my physician didn’t seem concerned about it. I would just have to carefully screen any other people who might see that much skin to make sure they weren’t going to freak out and dump me over it. But if they did, I was better off without them anyway. The money could probably be better spent on a trip to Europe or on whatever fancy technological gadget I was coveting this month.

The loose skin was fun to play with. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get rid of it. It was like warm bread dough. I would squeeze it when I was in the restroom and roll it around between my fingers. If we were blind men and women who decided what was beautiful by touch, the obese would be regarded as supermodels.

 

 

 

A
lthough I was thinner now, I still had to think about food and exercise several times a day. It was part of the regular maintenance required for my body, just like combing my hair, brushing my teeth, and showering. It was something I had to do, lest I be the crazy, smelly girl with fuzzy white teeth and a beer belly. Someone left a comment on the blog saying I was obsessed with dieting and weight loss, but that was like accusing me of being obsessed with going to the bathroom because I had to pee five or six times a day.

The weight loss was beginning to seem incidental, anyway. I was enjoying being fit and powerful for its own sake, regardless of whether all that running was helping me fit into that snug tartan skirt I’d bought from the thrift store. So many women focused solely on the weight loss, their self-esteem wobbling with every movement of the scale. I preferred to think like an athlete, feeding my body what it needed and pushing it to its limits, and the weight loss tended to follow. I needed to do what I was doing because I loved it. I wasn’t a blogger because I wanted to be a millionaire. I couldn’t eat healthy and exercise only because I wanted to lose weight.

I wouldn’t give up my vinyl-coated dumbbells resting next to the TV set even if I never lost another pound. I took pride in carrying a twenty-pound lamp across a retail store under my arm, much to the horror of the elderly, female cashier who rushed to offer me a cart before I’d even set the box down on her conveyor belt. The light certainly wasn’t lightweight, but it wasn’t as if I’d chained a nightstand
and matching vanity to my back as I traipsed down the aisles. It irked me that people assumed I was weak because I was female. Part of the reason I’d hauled the item across the store was
because
it was work. It was the same reason I parked far out in the parking lot and took the stairs. Where other people looked for ways to take exertion out of their lives, I was constantly sneaking in ways to make my body work a little harder.

I delighted in hauling a tub of kitty litter up the creaky wooden steps to my apartment. It weighed twenty-seven pounds, which at the time was exactly one pound less than the distance to my goal. When I first began dropping weight, I measured how many pounds I’d lost in terms of kitty litter tubs to get a sense of how heavy I’d been. One tub became two became three until the numbers went so high I stopped being able to convert weight to tubs anymore. Now the kitty litter was relevant again because I could carry the amount of weight I had to lose.

I’d come so far, but I was always learning something new. I was never going to graduate from weight-loss school. I was reminded of this when I bought new running shoes. My old pair had worn through the inner lining of the heel. This had happened before, but I assumed my feet were deformed and misshapen and narrow in the heel. As I was tying my new shoes, I decided to lace them up all the way to the top instead of stopping on the second-to-last hole as I usually did. I’d never laced my shoes up all the way because that made them too tight. I preferred them loose so I could slip my feet into them in the mornings without having to untie and retie the laces.

Yes, I was too lazy to tie my shoes. Take it as proof that even lazy people can lose weight.

After lacing my shoes up, I went running. My shoes were clinging tightly to the back of my feet instead of rubbing loosely against them as
they had always done before. They fit so much better; it was amazing. I also felt amazingly stupid when I realized I had traveled hundreds of miles in improperly laced footwear. Too bad the conflict in the Middle East wasn’t as easy a problem to solve. I could only hope that another two years from now I didn’t discover I’d been doing something equally foolish like drinking water from the wrong side of the cup, at least when I wasn’t trying to get rid of the hiccups.

Even if I didn’t know how to tie my shoelaces, the confidence I’d gained from conquering so many obstacles was spreading into other areas of my life. Near the end of winter when I walked to my car one night after work, I noticed the front passenger tire was somewhat deflated. I inspected the rim and noticed a dent. I needed the spare tire, and not the one around my waist, though that one was pretty deflated too. I lifted the trunk and started unscrewing the lid to the tire compartment. I paused. I could just call up to my office and get one of the guys I worked with to help me. I considered the option for twenty seconds before mumbling, “Screw that. I can change my own damned tire.” It was light out, and I was in a safe area, so there wasn’t any reason not to.

I spent the next thirty minutes figuring out how to work a jack and forcing the lug nuts to let go of their clinging emotional need to stay attached to my tire. I leaned my entire body weight onto the wrench to gain leverage, somewhat lamenting that I was lighter than I used to be. Ultimately the nuts were no match for my new muscles. I prevailed and attached the spare tire.