Half-Assed (11 page)

But I still had to live in a world that made healthy eating as easy as stuffing my ass into size 4 jeans. I’d avidly avoided eating out with friends or relatives while I was relearning how to eat. Reprogramming my brain was hard enough without having to deal with the social pressures of eating. Picking the healthiest item on a menu was going to be my advanced dieting entrance exam. I managed to put it off until the beginning of August, when I’d lost ninety pounds and weighed 282 pounds. My mom had a steak house gift card, which we decided to use to celebrate the fact that the day ended in a “y.” I fearfully stared down a menu full of deep-fried items. I searched through the menu, looking for the one item that wasn’t covered in butter or soaked in saturated fats.

“What is the chicken fried in?” I asked the waitress.

“Lard,” she replied. Damn, the restaurant wasn’t even bothering to lie about it. I’d seen buckets of lard sold at the grocery store and wondered why it didn’t sell 45-millimeter handguns next to them so you could just shoot yourself in the “baking needs” aisle.

The waitress started to place a basket of bread on the table. I looked at my mother tensely. I didn’t want to fill up on empty calories, but I didn’t want to stop her from enjoying some hot rolls if she wanted them.

“I don’t really need any bread, but if you want to ...” I trailed off, shrugging.

“No bread for us,” she told the waitress. “My daughter’s lost a lot of weight,” she said proudly. I looked down at my menu, somewhat embarrassed but hiding a small smile behind the laminated paper. I got the impression my mother wanted me to tell our server how much weight I’d lost, but I didn’t like to say unless directly asked. I didn’t want to brag, especially considering the fact that I was still very obese. If I said I’d lost ninety pounds I bet most people would have thought,
Damn, you must have been
humongous
before.

I was tempted by the “bad” foods on the menu. I knew it was hypothetically possible to eat fried foods and potato salads in small portions and still lose weight, but that style of eating was beyond me. I didn’t want to screw up what seemed to be working with a plate of french fries.

I skipped over the fried mushrooms in favor of the steamed vegetables, though I honestly would have preferred the fried mushrooms. The word “lard” kept echoing in my head, which made the decision easier. I talked to my lunch companion instead of stuffing my face with bread while waiting for the main meal. I ordered water instead of a soda. It was strange behavior. Wearing the menu on my head as a hat would have appeared normal in comparison.

The strangest thing was that I could now slide into the booth without my belly brushing against the table. I even had three inches to spare. It was the small things in life that mattered, and I was definitely getting smaller.

CHAPTER 7

The Incredible Shrinking Woman

“H
ey lady, have you lost weight?”

Saundra, the artist who worked down the hallway from me, was calling me “lady” because she couldn’t remember my name, but I didn’t care because she was the first person who did not share some of my DNA to comment on my weight loss. I had to lose only the equivalent of a small antelope to hear it.

“Oh yeah, I have,” I said, not quite sure how to react.

“You look great!” she said with a chipper smile. She seemed genuinely happy for me.

“Oh, uh, thanks,” I said as a grin crossed my face of its own volition, as if my mouth muscles had declared a coup against my visage. She was complimenting me. I knew there was a graceful way to take a compliment, but I hadn’t yet learned what that was. I’d have to Google that when I got back to the office.

I wasn’t used to being the center of attention. It’s possible I gained weight so I wouldn’t have to be. But if I were going to get thinner, I was going to have to deal with the fact that other people were going to notice. I’d been noticing it myself.

Lately, I had liked to play “Is she fatter than me?” It was a game that could be played anywhere, in the produce aisle of the grocery store, in line at the pharmacy, or even in the comfort of your own home as you watched television. All it required was a working pair of eyes and another female in your line of sight. You compared the size and shape of your body to that of your competitor’s until you determined who was fatter. The thinnest girl won. The prize was a mix of smug satisfaction and self-disgust that you were playing the game at all.

I never used to play this sport because I always lost. I was fatter than everyone. It was a zero-sum game, but now I could win occasionally. I liked winning, but I also felt that it made me a very bad person. I shouldn’t have to feel good about myself by putting down someone else. Certainly it shouldn’t have been another female who struggled in the same culture as I did, which put such great value on what a woman looks like. We should be helping each other out, not cutting each other down.

Yet I constantly sized people up, male or female, fat or thin, so I knew what my relationship in society was to them. Was this person prettier than me? Was this person smarter than me? Did she have more money? Did he have more power? I needed to know where I stood in relation to others so I knew how to act around them. Frequently that first impression was determined by looks.

It was particularly silly because at 275 pounds I still had more than 100 pounds to lose. I was so much thinner, but people who passed me on the street knew nothing about my metamorphosis. They still categorized me as a fat girl when they did their own internal audit of my looks. The women I was now thinner than could have lost weight too. How would I know? Yet I still enjoyed seeing women who were fatter than me. I liked to remember where I came from.

My body had changed so much since then. I could fit my ass in a seat at the movie theater without my hip fat piling up against the cup holder. After I lost another six pounds to weigh 269, I was no longer morbidly obese, according to my BMI. It was just vanilla-flavored obesity for me. I was finally at a point where the weight-loss ads on TV would sometimes list my current size as someone’s “before” weight. I was probably the only 269-pound woman in the world who felt skinny, but compared to my old self I was a willow.

I felt a twisted sense of satisfaction that I had more weight to lose than anyone I knew, as though this would make my final accomplishment all the more grand. In school I would sometimes trade eyeglasses with a classmate and whoever had the worst vision “won,” as if you’d confirmed you had more of a right to four eyes than the other person. I felt the same odd superiority knowing that I might one day be able to say I’d lost 210 pounds, as if weight loss were a competition.

I felt like a winner as my body changed. When I was driving to work later that week I asked the windshield, “Has that building been painted?” The windshield never answered me, but I was pretty sure the siding hadn’t been that white the day before. I didn’t know what color the building had been previously, but I knew it had changed. That’s how I felt about my body.

While lying in bed one night, I rolled on my side and adjusted my legs on top of one another so my knees were touching. I suddenly noticed I could feel bones beneath the skin where previously there had been a cushy layer of fat. It was as if someone had popped the Bubble Wrap around my legs. I rubbed my hand up my side and could feel the outline of my pelvic bone. My gynecologist had told me I had a pelvis, but I thought she was just starting a rumor. Was it possible I might have a skeletal system too? I’d seen my foot bones in an x-ray when I banged my toe on the stairwell as a child, but I
sometimes doubted my other bones existed because they were tucked tightly under a comforter of fat.

I didn’t have any distinct memories of what my knees or my hips felt like one hundred pounds earlier, but they
seemed
different. When I continued feeling up my side like a clumsy high school boy, I could feel my ribs and count how many I had. One, two, three, four, not as chubby as before. The next day when I rubbed my chin in thought, I noticed I was trying to roll the skin farther than was possible. My body was melting like an iceberg. I might be discovering a frozen caveman between my butt cheeks soon.

For months, whenever I put my hands on my hips and felt the edge of a bone I also felt a split second of surprise. Previously I had thought it was uncomfortable to rest my hands in fists on my hips like Peter Pan, but I realized it wasn’t that hard when you could actually settle them into the curve of the bone. It wasn’t much longer before my collarbones started to emerge. I tapped on them like a xylophone while staring at the computer screen.

My body was finally catching up with the way my mind had always perceived it to be. Anorexics have body dysmorphic disorder, which makes them think they are fatter than they actually are. Even when their ribs show through their flesh, in their heads they think they’re fat. Mentally I seemed to have an inverted form of anorexia, unable to truly grasp how fat I was.

The image of myself in my head was that of normal weight. If I were to draw a picture of myself, I’d make myself skinnier than I was without really noticing. In the movie
The Matrix,
this illusion was called residual self-image. Even though the character of Neo had a closely shaved head of hair in the real world, he had a full head of hair in the cyber reality of the Matrix. I was fat, I knew I was fat, yet if I were to enter the Matrix, I would have been thin.

This was clear if you looked at any of my Internet avatars, the icons I used on message boards or instant messenger to represent myself. Online everyone can exist in soft lighting, with Vaseline smeared on the camera lens. I sent the prettiest, most lovely version of myself out there, online or off. Unfortunately I couldn’t digitally erase the zit on my cheek before a date.

The desire to look good was evident in my “fat girl angle shot.” Classic signs: looking up at the camera to hide a double chin, high contrast, cropped from the neck up. My first online photo was a textbook example, complete with a high camera angle, hair across my face, and cavelike lighting—all obvious attempts to hide my fatness, or the fact that I could barely afford light bulbs.

This mental image was shaken whenever I saw photos of myself looming large over a thinner person standing next to me. One night I forgot to pull the venetian blinds down on the window next to my computer desk and was completely disgusted when I caught the eye of my reflection in the window. As I sat at my desk, the fat puddled all around me, particularly in my thighs and belly, making me look larger than I’d ever imagined possible. I quickly pulled the curtains closed.

The living color of video made me curse the invention of the cathode-ray tube. In my college speech class, all our speeches were taped. We had to review our performances to critique ourselves after each speech. The round, obese girl on the video was out of sync with the image of myself in my head. I did not move like that. I did not look like that. I could watch only a couple of seconds at a time, and then I’d fast-forward through the freak show, my sped-up swaying making me look like a bowling pin about to topple. When I was done, I took care to tape over my five minutes of arguments about why Indiana should adopt daylight saving time, erasing the image from existence in a way I’d never been able to do in real life.

Even though I could see the difference in the mirror or on a tape, these moments of clarity lasted less than a minute. For the majority of my day, I did not look at myself. I looked at other people. I was like a dog raised by cats who thinks she’s a kitten. It seemed to me that most people in the world were only mildly overweight or of average size. When I’d been my fattest, finding someone who was as obese as me was rare. Being surrounded by people who weren’t enormous made me think that I looked like them too.

Even when I worked with other fat people, I dissociated myself from them. At one job, I worked with an overweight, diabetic middle-aged woman. She would trudge slowly from the door to her chair like the air was made of thick chocolate syrup that she struggled to plow through. On some level, I knew that I could be her in twenty years, yet I would separate myself from her in my mind. She was not like me. I was not
that
fat. I did not look like that, though most likely I did. And even if I did, I still had time to avoid that fate if I got my ass off my ergonomic chair.

This erroneous self-image is partly what prevented me from acknowledging my weight problem. Even as the pounds kept piling on, my self-image remained skinny and allowed me to live comfortably in denial of the problem creeping up around me.

I hadn’t successfully eliminated all video imagery of my fat years, though. I was sorting through old data CDs and files on my computer when I found a video I shot for film class in college. It starred my cat, Officer Krupke, and revealed what he did when I left my apartment. It started to the bouncy tones of “What’s New, Pussycat?” but as soon as I left my place, “Cat Scratch Fever” kicked in and Krupke proceeded to order catnip online, watch Catwoman on TV, raid the fridge, and place his butt on my scanner for a cat scan. I was pleased to find that it was funny, but what wasn’t funny was how huge I was.

Had I really been that large and lumbering? I seemed to waddle like an overgrown penguin. I’d destroyed all my speech class videos, but I had forgotten about this piece of footage. Seeing pictures of my old, morbidly obese self was jarring, but seeing how all that weight had made me move was shocking.

I caught a shot of my refrigerator on the video as Krupke stole some sliced turkey from the second shelf. My eyes raised in judgment when I saw twenty-four-packs of regular, nondiet soda on the shelves. I wasted hundreds of calories a day sipping that liquid candy, making me fatter without filling me up.

My younger brother Jim had played the catnip delivery man, so I dragged him over to my computer to share in the shock. His jaw hit the keyboard hard enough to type nonsense words and leave keyboard marks on his chin. I was fat. He was fat. We were both so fat!