Half-Assed (2 page)

By the end of high school, I was pushing 260 pounds. I decided the time between high school and college would be a great period to lose weight since few people at my new school would know how fat I’d been. I could adopt a whole new identity and no longer be “the fat girl.” I started walking on my dad’s treadmill in the basement. I needed to weigh myself, but I didn’t have a scale, so I went to the doctor’s office every week during my brother’s allergy shot to use the one there. I sat between sniffling children and toy trains every Wednesday, managing to lose forty pounds without changing my diet or catching chicken pox.

Too bad no one told me college would be a twenty-four-hour buffet. The dorm’s convenience mart was the only store open late at night, stocked with snack cakes, ice cream pints, and chocolate milk. The closest grocery store was about a mile away. It was clearly entrapment. I ran out of money on my meal card before the semester was over, whereas my roommate started buying her friends lunch so she would use all her funds before they expired. I didn’t think I was eating more than anybody else, but the negative cash balance on my meal ticket implied otherwise. Was I eating away homesickness or did overweight underclassmen simply need more calories than skinnier students? Ever the overachiever, I gained the freshman fifty.

The university’s exercise center was across campus from my dorm room. I reasoned that by the time I got to the center, I would have exercised enough that I’d have to head back to my room. In some twisted form of logic, this convinced me that I shouldn’t bother going at all.

I registered for an 8:00 AM advertising class that was booked in an auditorium too small for all the students. Two weeks into classes we were moved to a lecture hall. It was full of tables with mesh wire baskets hanging underneath and swivel seats mounted on poles a fixed distance away from the tables. I turned one of the yellow plastic chairs to the left and sat down, letting out a grunt when the shiny silver wires of the basket pressed into my thighs like string around sausage. I got up and sat on the stairs in the back of the room for the rest of the lecture, avoiding eye contact with the other students. I was prepared to explode in a rant about inadequate seating if anyone accused me of blocking the exits or violating the fire code, assuming I didn’t break into tears first. That afternoon I dropped the class. I didn’t need to take a stupid advertising course anyway.

I could have learned something from my freshman roommate, Karen, who did abdominal workouts on our floor. This was brave of her. We vacuumed only once a semester, and one afternoon I’d seen a cockroach as big as my thumb scuttle across the floorboards. I didn’t think great abs were worth the possibility that a roach might scurry across your face. I was fascinated by her dedicated workout schedule. My family had a committed relationship with the VCR too, but it involved Blockbuster videos, not exercise tapes. Did other people exercise as much as Karen did? We had sent each other introductory letters before the semester started. In mine I made sure to mention that I was fat, as if this were something she needed to be warned about, like leprosy. I watched her do crunches from the bottom bunk. The top bunk had
been out of the question for me. I feared I would break the frame and asphyxiate my bunkmate in my sleep.

“I’m thinking of changing my major,” she said between leg raises.

“Oh, really?” I asked her. Her foot was getting dangerously close to knocking over the textbook I’d carefully balanced beside the bed to hide my secret stash of Ho Hos hidden underneath. “What to?” Mentally I added, “And move your foot slightly to the left, would you?”

“Foreign language and international economics,” she replied as she got up. The instructor on her video kept yelling out commands until she stopped the tape. I couldn’t tell if he were German or Austrian or perhaps an alien from a planet with very high gravity, which would explain his muscular physique.

“I’ve got to see my advisor about it, but I’m going to run first,” she said as she grabbed a ponytail holder and put her hair back. I avoided putting my hair back like that because I was afraid it would accentuate my fat face. Big hair made it look smaller. “See ya later,” she said as she dashed out the door.

I still didn’t have a major. A friend had innocently asked what I wanted to do with my life after college and I’d started hyperventilating on her parents’ sofa. At least I was still in school. A girl on the fourth floor who was fatter than me had dropped out after the first week. I wondered if she’d felt out of place because of her size. I reached under the bed for the Ho Hos. Sometimes I’d buy a box of the chocolate cupcakes and eat it alone in two days to dull the stress of my uncertain future. I didn’t want anyone else to know about my bingeing because I didn’t want to share my emotional problems or my cupcakes with anyone. It was bad enough that the curly-haired clerk at the convenience store had to know. I thought of him as my sugar dealer.

Perhaps if I’d rewound that tape and done some sit-ups myself, I could have averted the stretch mark that I saw on my left inner elbow as
I ripped open the cellophane on my Ho Ho. I’d seen it for two semesters now whenever I rested my head in my hands or laid my arms on a desk. It was a bright pink line that ran for an inch on my otherwise vampire-pale skin. I traced it with my finger during boring lectures. I was tempted to take a red permanent marker to my flesh and add two horizontal strokes, making it a scarlet “F” for fat.

Stretch marks on my belly or breasts were easily hidden with shirts and jeans, and no one ever saw the red, sweaty, chafed mark running beneath my gut flab. My dorm had changing-room stalls that hid my body from sight during showers. I had lots of stretch marks, but only the ones on my breasts were welcome. I may have been a big girl, but I had a small chest. It was impossible to find a bra with a large band size and a small cup size. So I wore bras that didn’t fit or struggled with bra-strap extenders that altered the proper alignment of the straps, causing them to constantly slip off my chubby shoulders. I wanted clothes that fit.

Eventually I stopped spending my money on Twinkies at the school’s convenience store, but only because I took time off after sophomore year. I couldn’t keep filling my schedule with classes like Japanese film or linguistics forever. My new exercise program included surfing the Internet and running through the anime block on the Cartoon Network.

I spent a lot of time walking in place on our treadmill, traveling nowhere. I probably lost weight, but I still didn’t own a scale and couldn’t measure the loss. I’d bought a scale before college, but it had drowned in a basement flood and I never replaced it. Before its untimely death, I stepped on it only to sadly discover I weighed 270 pounds, which made me mutter, “Why don’t I just go for 300?” There was something appealing about hitting a round number, but just as I couldn’t commit to a major, I couldn’t fully commit to being fat. I was
too poor and too scared to buy a new scale because most of them didn’t measure over 300 pounds. I didn’t want to know if my problem with gravity had become that bad.

The treadmill survived the flood, but it broke during my lost summer. When my father decided it was too expensive to replace, I felt as if I were being sentenced to fatness forever. I could have started walking around the block, but my neighborhood had reckless drivers and no sidewalks. That was my excuse, but in reality I was too ashamed of my size to exercise in public. I could stand the chafing as my thighs rubbed together, but the piteous glares of neighbors would have rubbed me the wrong way.

Thus ended another period of yo-yo exercising. Strangely, I never yo-yo dieted. I never went on a diet at all, which was either completely boneheaded of me or completely brilliant, depending on how you look at it. I had heard that yo-yo dieting could mess with your metabolism, causing you to gain back even more weight and making it harder to lose weight in the future.
¹
Recent studies have shown that this may not be true, although weight cycling might weaken your immune system.
²
Regardless, staying away from diet shakes and rice cakes saved me the emotional exhaustion that comes from trying dozens of fad diets and failing them all. I should have made an effort to eat a more balanced diet, though. I was under no delusions that the bag of peanut butter cups in my desk drawer was part of a healthy eating program, despite studies showing that chocolate can lower blood pressure.
³

Even though I wanted to eat better, I was suspicious of people trying to sell me a book or a plan. They obviously had something to gain if I bought it. I was cheap and didn’t want to pay for an institutionalized program like Weight Watchers. If anyone was going to get paid for losing weight, it should be me. I’d be doing all the work. Those programs never released statistics on how many people were able to
lose weight and keep it off, which made me wonder if they worked at all. I’d heard dieting usually included food deprivation, which I wasn’t willing to try. It also seemed really complicated. I didn’t think I could count calories or keep track of the carbohydrate/fat/protein ratios for all of my meals, nor did I want to.

The people who wrote diet books couldn’t agree on anything anyway, so I was hesitant to trust them. Some authors said carbs were bad; others said they were good. For several years everyone thought fat would make you fat, but then they decided maybe that wasn’t true.
⁴
Diets were like religions. There were hundreds of them and everyone thought his or hers was the right one. Ultimately it was just a matter of faith. I wanted something solid. I wasn’t interested in dieting.

I didn’t want to fail either. I was already fat, but if I tried a diet and it didn’t work I’d be a big fat loser too. It was safer not to commit to a plan. Even when I started exercising the summer before college, I never made a formal announcement about it. My family knew what I was doing when they heard the treadmill in the basement and saw me tag along on boring doctor visits, but if I could have exercised and weighed myself in secret I would have. If no one knew I had tried, it would be far less embarrassing when I failed.

After two semesters off, I started college again and eventually found a part-time desk job designing print materials. I got to create business cards while sitting on my butt all day, saving my feet from the pain of standing for hours on end, as the cashiers did. I moved into an apartment, and I walked around the complex regularly, though only during the day. I was hesitant to venture into the neighborhood at night, which stopped me from making late-night junk food runs. I decided I’d rather have a dead craving for a jar of frosting than be dead. A month of snowfall stopped me from walking and I continued to get fatter. At least the extra insulation kept me warm.

I had always hoped I would someday become thin, just as I’d idly hoped I would someday become a rock star. But my pants were still as big as a potato sack and I wasn’t singing rock anthems to screaming groupies. Was this thin thing ever going to happen for me? I was in my twenties and I felt like time was running out to enjoy being thin if I ever lost the weight. I toyed with the idea that I might have deep-seated emotional issues that were leading me to overeat, but my internal searching didn’t turn up much. I hated the fat, but I didn’t hate myself. I thought I was a rather intelligent, witty person if you got to know me. There was just a lot of me to know. The fat was like a separate entity, not a true part of me. Those extra fat cells were uninvited guests on my body, just like the infestation of pharaoh ants in my ghetto apartment.

I was pretty shy though, always hiding behind a huge mess of frizzy hair. Fat girls were invisible. Maybe I was making myself fat so I could hide in plain sight? When I tried to figure out why I was so overweight, everything I came up with sounded like an episode of
Dr. Phil
that I would promptly turn off. Sometimes emotional hypotheses seemed like bullshit explanations. They were simple answers to complex problems. I just needed to walk more and make sure I wasn’t walking past an ice cream truck. But if it were that simple, how come I hadn’t been able to do it yet? What was I waiting for?

During my senior year of college, my father drove off for the coast, stopping only to mail a letter that did little to explain why he was divorcing my mother. I guess I wasn’t the only one doing some soul searching. In German, the word
kummerspeck
is used to describe the weight you gain from emotional overeating. It literally translates to “grief bacon.” If I weren’t staring at my powered-down computer in the dark wondering what had gone wrong in my parents’ seemingly perfect marriage, I was probably munching on the orange-chocolate sandwich
cookies I’d recently discovered in the candy aisle. No revelations were printed on the shortbread.

If he’d left when I was eleven instead of twenty-one, I could blame my obesity on him. But I was already pushing 350 pounds by the time he took off, so I can assign only twenty pounds of weight to his eventual exit. I could try to divvy up the blame for the rest of the excess weight too—thirty pounds for sodas, forty for a slow metabolism, and at least five for finals week. That leaves thirty pounds for unresolved emotional issues, fifty-five for ignoring nutritional information, twenty for an urban infrastructure that didn’t require me to walk anywhere, and ten wild card pounds left over to blame on everything else. Assigning blame wasn’t going to make me thin or change what my dad had done.

At my college graduation, I was chosen to carry the departmental banner into the ceremony. Otherwise I would have skipped the whole ordeal. I was given the largest size robe, but it was still tight around my waist. While many of my fat photos stimulate the pain center of my brain, looking at my graduation photos makes electroshock therapy seem like a spa treatment. No one looks thin wearing a black sheet, especially not the 372-pound girl.

At the smaller departmental ceremony later on, I had to stand up to be recognized for an honor. I felt enormous.