This was the wake-up call I’d been waiting for. Lightning had struck. If I had been an alcoholic, I would have been on my way to rehab. If I had been a shopaholic, I would have been freezing my credit cards in blocks of ice in the freezer. I’d had my moment of clarity.
Only I didn’t. I stayed fat for at least another year. Wake-up call received. Snooze button pushed.
I
was wheeled into gallbladder surgery on a gurney. They put special pads around my legs that squeezed and released my legs like a massage. This was to prevent clotting, something I was at a higher risk for since I was so fat. I’m sure I must have paid extra for them, one more line item on the bill, hundreds of dollars farther away from paying off my credit card debt and enjoying a vacation in France.
I sat in bed in the pre-op room and tried to watch television. My mother tried distracting me with conversation. My mind couldn’t focus on anything. This was a routine surgery with little risk, but people died during procedures as routine as face-lifts. There could be a fluke accident. I could die. This could be the end of the story of me and I’d never gotten around to writing it down. I was embarrassed that I’d let it come to this. If something went wrong, my life would come
only
to this.
Attendants wheeled my gurney down hallways, through double doors, and into the sterile operating room. I felt so vulnerable, lying on a rolling bed as nurses towered above me. I stared at unfamiliar ceilings. Fluorescent lights left dark shadowy impressions on my eyelids when I blinked.
I was conscious when I scooted from the gurney onto the operating table. I felt bad for the medical staff who would have to lift me back onto the gurney after surgery. Would the words “Shamu” or “Jabba the Hutt” be bandied about in jest? What did people use for fat metaphors before Sea World and George Lucas? Would my unconscious mind be able to remember their comedy selections when I awakened in the recovery room? I should have hidden a recording device up my ass. Obesity made me paranoid about what everyone thought of me, but was it paranoia if it turned out to be true?
The anesthesiologist stood by my right side and asked me to give him my arm.
“What will this feel like?” I asked him, focusing only on the pair of eyes peeking out over the surgical mask. I can’t remember if they were blue or green or brown.
“I don’t know. No one’s ever told me before.”
He inserted the needle into my IV.
“Oh, it’s like a muscle cramp in my arm. It feels kind of—”
Then I was staring at another unfamiliar ceiling, waking up in recovery.
One advantage of having the surgery so young was that I recovered quickly. I didn’t just bounce back, I ricocheted off the walls. My weight loss was off to a great start. I had lost several ounces when my gallstones and organ tissue were pitched into a biohazard waste bin. When I looked at superthin supermodels in magazines, I wondered how they could possibly cram all their internal organs and bones into the slender envelope of their skin. Could there be a secret supermodel organ donation cabal?
There’s never a good time for surgery, but the timing was particularly terrible for me because I had gotten a real job as a web developer only a week before my attack. I was still on my college’s severely inadequate health insurance plan. After surgery, I threw billing statements back and forth with the HMO for more than six months, which I magnanimously refrained from folding into deadly ninja stars. Ultimately I ended up paying 70 percent of the total bill. You can make money by selling a kidney, so why did I have to pay so much to have this particular organ removed? My dreams of LASIK surgery, a shiny new car, and a trip to Europe would have to remain a byproduct of REM sleep. I was doomed to be a blind homebody whose car rendered abstract art on the garage floor with transmission fluid.
A blind,
fat
homebody.
CHAPTER 4
No Epiphanies
I
kept my promise about losing weight ... at first. The fear of death was fresh and the scars still pink and raised above my skin. I didn’t want to put my family through the affair of tracking down an extrawide coffin. I was filled with hopeful trepidation. This could be it. For real. The start of a remarkable transformation that would completely redefine how others would see me. I took the “before” picture.
I called a local gym and got a quote on what it would cost to join. Then I hung up and called the YMCA. Then I hung up and decided to walk around the block.
I started a food diary, which, like all of my previous diaries, was abandoned after three days. The only thing more boring than writing down every item of food I’d eaten was reading every item of food I’d eaten. It was supposed to shock me into realizing I was consuming the gross national product of Ecuador daily. Mostly it just made me crazy trying to remember if I’d had a soda with lunch. I started a secret weight-loss blog. No one read that either.
After two days I fell off the wagon and into the chocolate stash in my bottom desk drawer. There were chocolate Riesen and mint
chocolate cups hidden behind my file folders of credit card statements and medical bills, forming a diorama of cause and effect. I hadn’t trashed the candy because I thought it would be wasteful to throw out food. My parents had never made me clean my plate as a child and they’d never lectured me about starving kids in Ethiopia, but it seemed wrong to throw out something edible instead of eating it. Food didn’t grow on trees ... except when it did. I had to find my chocolate bars a good home, like placing unwanted cats or puppies.
This was, of course, ridiculous.
There are not homeless people lurking outside fat girls’ kitchens waiting to devour unwanted baked goods. I wasn’t running a bundt cake relocation program. My brother had worked in the fast-food industry, and the amount of burgers and fries they tossed out at the end of the day was worse than a year’s worth of my foodwasting sins.
After three days, I stopped updating the blog. When it comes to weight-loss blogs, no news is bad news. My next entry came in March, when I confessed I’d fallen off the wagon again. One day we will all drive flying cars, and people will still be falling off wagons. My impetus to hop back on was a pain in my chest, near my heart. I had lain in bed the night before, cat curled under my knees, wondering if I would embody the lyrics of Y Kant Tori Read’s song and have a heart attack at twenty-three. Obesity caused so many aches and pains that I was a hypochondriac, constantly trying to convince myself I wasn’t dying of heart disease or cancer, or that I didn’t need a new knee. After the bill for my surgery, I couldn’t afford a replacement knee, but mine had started creaking, especially on the walk downstairs from my fourthfloor office.
My mother bought a treadmill and a smoothie blender. I started parking farther away in parking lots to sneak more exercise into my
day. I bought a green lacy top a size too small as motivation to stick with the program.
I lasted four days that time. If I kept lasting one more day on each attempt, I might be thin by the time those flying cars appeared.
At the end of April, I posted only one entry. It denounced the grocery store designers who placed Krispy Kreme glazed donuts at the entrance of the store, as if that were my real problem.
I tried a third time in July. I had learned that taking the stairs every day could lead to an extra five pounds of weight loss a year. Little spurts of calorie usage here and there added up through time, just like the fistful of spare change my father would dump into an old check box on his dresser every day after work. Once the box was full, we’d dump it out and sort the coins into paper rolls. We’d end up with tens of dollars in the shapes of brown cylinders to exchange for cash. I would gather up my weight in the same way and exchange it for a better body.
When I descended the stairs at the end of the day, I stopped short at a pain in my right joint. I had to hobble down the six flights of stairs, taking baby steps, landing two feet on each step before descending to the next. How was I going to lose weight if my body wouldn’t cooperate with the simplest of exercises?
In October I gave up soda. In November I took it back.
Later in November I ordered a scale that measured up to 440 pounds. I don’t know why I’d tried to lose weight without owning one. It was foolhardy when I couldn’t tell how much I’d lost. My reckoning arrived in a big, brown cardboard box. Numbers are normally such cold and expressionless digits when posted on price tags or written on calendars, but they seemed so warm and encouraging when they told me how much I had achieved in a week.
I pulled it out of the box and inserted two AA batteries into the back. I stepped on the scale until it went BEEP, BEEP, indicating it was
done judging me, as opposed to most people, who only silently judged me. I hesitantly peeked at the number between my toes.
368.8 pounds.
I was relieved I hadn’t rolled my weight odometer over into the four hundreds. I felt as if I’d lost thirty pounds simply by stepping on the scale’s white plastic frame. I swore that these digits would be going down.
Looking back at those early blog entries, I can see I was confident and full of hope, yet I sit here in the future like Cassandra, knowing I was doomed. It’s like reading a book I already know the ending to. “Silly girl! You’re not going to escape from the dungeon until chapter five. Didn’t you get the revised copy of the text?”
Perhaps as you’re reading this you’re wondering, “When’s it going to happen? When’s she going to start losing weight for real?”
I wanted to know too.
I
thought about giving up.
I might not be capable of being thin. I might be like a notalent actress who should blow off auditions and drive my beat-up Chevrolet home from L.A. I typically scoffed at destiny. It’s a force that controls characters in fantasy novels, not real people like me without pointy ears who own only magic wands made by Hitachi. But “destiny” is the only word that described how I felt about my fat in my most fatalistic moments.
Even if I did lose the weight, I had heard most people regained it. If I were to call the customer support number of any major dieting corporation for its rates of recidivism, I knew I wouldn’t get them. I had better odds in Vegas, and at least the food at casinos was free. I could just be grateful that I lived in a society in which food was plentiful enough for me to become so fat. Obesity was surely better than emaciation.
Was thin even something I should want? I wanted to be considered attractive by the average male, but I didn’t want to define myself only by my relationship to men. I wanted to find clothes more easily, but retailers seemed partly to blame for ignoring a steadily growing portion of the population. I wanted to feel comfortable in a crowd and unashamed of myself when meeting new people, but that might be a mental problem I needed to overcome, not a physical one.
The fat-acceptance movement had a lot to say about this topic. I was traipsing along the Internet, throwing stones into cyberspace, when I heard about organizations such as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). I clicked on websites that preached that fat people should accept themselves at the size they were and that society should accept that not everyone could be thin. They fought fat discrimination and declared that the diet industry did more harm than good. There was even a group of plus-size cheerleaders flashing the cellulite on their chubby legs beneath short black skirts. Joining the synchronized swimming group was out of the question, though. I could barely even dog-paddle.
I cruised a lot of these websites, burning a fraction of a calorie with each mouse click, trying to get a better sense of the movement as a whole. There were interesting discussions about whether the health consequences of obesity were exaggerated because of a moral panic.
1
The moderates seemed reasonable enough when they argued that you could be fat and fit. Plenty of chubby people finished marathons every year. But I didn’t believe that meant all fat people were healthy either, especially the fatter they got. I couldn’t gauge the cholesterol level of the 500-pound woman at the grocery store just by looking at her, but I
could
see that she had to use a motorized scooter because she couldn’t walk. She didn’t seem to be a paragon of health. There was a point at which fat no longer seemed like something to be accepted but a matter of life and death.
There was a difference between being forty pounds overweight and being 400 pounds. If you got flesh-eating gangrene because you couldn’t clean your ass properly, you had a problem. If you were so overweight that you stopped breathing while you slept, you definitely had a problem. And you’d wish you had either one of those problems if your toes were chopped off, not to fit into Cinderella’s slipper and fool a prince, but because they had turned black and rotted off from diabetes. None of the sites I visited talked about this. For a movement that was about acceptance, there appeared to be some denial going on.
I liked the idea of equal rights and self-esteem at any size. I wanted to be paid the same as my thin counterparts, but statistics showed that was unlikely to happen.
2
I certainly wanted to like my body as much as the obese burlesque troupe seemed to like theirs, though I wasn’t sure where I could find a pair of fishnet stockings in my size. Its members didn’t seem ashamed of being fat. I’d never seen that before. I didn’t even know that was possible.
I bookmarked some of the fat-acceptance sites, but I still wanted to lose weight. This did not go over well. One day I logged into my account on a fat-acceptance message board to leave a comment and discovered I was not allowed to post. At first I assumed this was because Internet gremlins had caused an error while munching on the server’s motherboards. Later, I learned it was because weight-loss bloggers were not allowed on that site. It turned out this was detailed in the registration agreement, which I had scrolled through quickly without reading when I’d created my account. I should really start reading those things before I accidentally sign away my firstborn child, assuming I haven’t already.