Half-Assed (20 page)

“You’re welcome,” I said, smiling a little, surprised by her gratitude. It was funny how people would do things for others that they wouldn’t do for themselves. “I guess healthy eating and weight loss are contagious. I need to infect you again.”

“That would be good,” she said. “Oh, do you have the recipe for the turkey meat loaf?”

My Online Waistline

I
t was just December 2006 that I had been waiting on a secret phone call from my contact in Japan. I didn’t want my mother to know, so I had set my cell phone to vibrate and tucked it into my pocket, pretending to be interested in Bruce Willis’s climbing an elevator shaft in the festive Christmas movie,
Die Hard.

This, of course, had to do with the blog.

If I let my mother know about the call, I’d have to reveal my secret identity as PastaQueen, weight-loss blogger extraordinaire and inventor of the rotating progress photos. I wasn’t ready to reveal my dual life just yet. This was the closest I’d ever felt to being a superhero.

I don’t remember why I started the blog. I guess I wanted to understand myself and to be understood by others. I suspect it was partly because I had a lot of fat issues that I needed to work out. Most of my life had been spent trying
not
to think about my fat, part of my unsuccessful life philosophy that if you ignored something it would go away. Posting my thoughts online put an end to that. The blog wasn’t a food diary or an exercise log. I barely cared what I’d eaten last week, so I doubted anyone else would. Instead it was a place
where I thought about my fat and all the baggage that came with it. If I thought about my problems, I started to understand them, and then I could work to overcome them. I wrote entries in my head while walking the endless loop of the treadmill, thinking and losing weight at the same time.

Fame whoring was probably involved too. I’d always enjoyed writing and knew some writers had carved out their own niches in cyberspace. If only a thousand people watched a TV show, it would be a flop. But if a thousand people visited your blog every day, it would be considered a mild success. It was a web “site” after all, a place to stake my ground and build something new.

I wasn’t too eager to pimp my wares at first. I didn’t tell anyone, online or offline, about the blog until nine months and a hundred pounds into my weight loss. I didn’t know if I were going to be a success story. I wasn’t eager to have my family and friends share in the disappointment if my “after” photo ended up looking just like my “before” photo, with different lighting and one more grease stain on my blouse. I felt vulnerable. I didn’t want anyone reading unless she’d stumbled upon the site while searching for an industrial weight scale.

I performed similar searches myself, looking for blogs written by people with butts as big as my own. Men dominated many arenas online, but women ruled the fat blogs. Women certainly have more to gain by losing weight since they are judged more on their looks than men. I didn’t know too many men who wouldn’t go outside without their mascara. I’d also learned obese people were paid less than their thin counterparts, and that the differential was the largest for fat, white women.
¹
Guess who was writing most of these blogs?

I decided to leave a comment on one of the sites. I entered my name and email address into the form and then paused. The cursor blinked in a white text box next to the “website” field. If I entered my
site’s address, anyone who read my comment could click on the link and read my blog. I entered my web address but then hammered the backspace button as if I were sending out Morse code. Then I stopped.

I entered my web address again and clicked “Submit.”

I left comments on other blogs during the next couple of weeks. After that, I noticed ads for diet programs, plus-size retailers, and weight-loss surgery popping up repeatedly when I was browsing, even on sites that had nothing to do with obesity. Somehow my computer knew that I was fat. I could only assume it had been gossiping about me with other computers behind my back. If I removed some of its memory as punishment, would it forget the circumference of my thighs?

I came home from work a few days later, checked my email, and found a notification in my inbox. Someone had left a comment on
my
blog. I had gotten a couple of comments before. One was from a woman who was on a “three dat diet” and said “Ineed help.” The only help I wanted to give her involved whacking a dictionary against her head. Maybe if I swung it hard enough, the proper rules of spelling would be transferred from the pages into her head? The other comment was from a woman who had confused me for the thousand-pound man I had written about.

The latest comment was from Mark, my Japanese contact, who had visited my blog after I left a comment on his. Several months later Mark asked me to post some entries on his site while he was away during the holidays. This was the source of my Christmas subterfuge. A couple of weeks later more people started visiting my virtual open house after another blogger wrote an entry about how much she liked my rotating progress photos. I had created interactive images that let users spin me around like clay on a pottery wheel, checking out the size of my ass from eight different angles. Someone said it was like dancing with me. Soon my dance card got pretty full.

My blog didn’t become popular overnight, but through the months more and more visitors started showing up on my site statistics page. I watched these statistics more closely than I will ever admit, and I was excited when I saw that a new site had linked to me or that my monthly page views had increased. It was a popularity contest in which the fat girl was actually winning.

I spent a weekend redesigning the look of the site, upgrading from the default template I’d been using. If people were dropping by, I felt obligated to clean up the place. I’d named my blog “Half of Me” because I needed to lose half my body weight. Actually, I needed to lose foursevenths of me, but that wasn’t as catchy. I took the progress photo of myself at my fattest, staring glumly at the camera, and split it down the middle, lopping off my head for good measure. I placed it in the left column, looming huge on the screen, though still not as large as I was in real life.

It was scary. My progress photos were much smaller and sequestered away on their own page, but this would be the first image people would see when they visited the site. It was shocking and unattractive. The truth often was. I was keeping my blog clandestine from the real world, yet my obesity was obvious to anyone with a functioning retina. It was a secret I kept hidden in a glass box, locked away but visible to all.

When I copied and pasted that photo into my site design, I felt as if I’d taken the eraser tool and begun to wipe away some of my shame. It was important to post photos that were real. Telling someone I was fat frequently sounded like a judgment of my character, as if it were something to be ashamed of. When I posted the pictures and started talking about my weight openly, I started to see weight simply as a description of myself, not a judgment of my character. I didn’t have to pretend to be the best Photoshopped version of myself. I didn’t have
to give myself perfect skin with the diffuse glow filter or eliminate my double chin with the clone stamp. I could just be myself, fat rolls and all.

Now that I wasn’t the only one watching my weight, I felt more responsibility to keep going. I posted my poundage every Saturday to track my progress. I would have hesitated if one of my coworkers asked me how much I weighed. I hadn’t even told my family what my highest weight was until I’d lost a hundred pounds of it, yet I had no problem posting that integer online for millions of people to see. I figured my friends and family were unlikely to find the blog, and I didn’t particularly care what a bunch of strangers thought about a headless fat girl from Indiana.

I started to get some regular readers who told me my journey was a “thinspiration” and it wouldn’t be long before I was in “one-derland,” the place where my weight would begin with the digit one. We were all on a weight-loss journey, but I don’t know where we were supposed to be going. Maybe we’d hit the all-you-can-eat buffet when we got there and start all over again? Wherever it was, the thought of having to post a gain for more than two weeks in a row kept my foot off the brake. Private failure would have been tolerable. Public failure was not an option. I was convinced that if I gave up, they’d knock down my door with a twenty-pound dumbbell and chain me to the treadmill with a yoga strap until I promised to reach goal.

I was a somewhat cynical person, preferring chicken soup for my stomach, not for my soul, but I found myself becoming more and more of a shmoopy cheerleader. All my newfound wisdom kept spilling out of my head to be mopped up in the blog. My readers made me feel so good. They were happy for me when I lost weight and reassured me during the long plateaus (when they weren’t annoying me with unsolicited advice). We were all fighting fat and we formed bonds like
any war buddies. One woman emailed to tell me she had prayed for me to lose weight during my latest plateau. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or to get a post office box for my public domain listing.

Before the blog, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to meet a fiftysomething woman in the middle of nowhere who read blogs while knitting perched on a stability ball. But now I knew people in Australia and Scotland and even some place called Nebraska. As the months went by, people lost jobs and found new ones, got married or broke up. They ran marathons. Some even created whole new people. The residents of the blogosphere were rather cool, though the word “blogosphere” brought humorous images to my mind. I imagined us moving into the old Biosphere 2 project in the desert, a complex of geodesic domes where we could grow our own soy products.

It was always disturbing when a blogger went missing. There was one woman whose entries about how our lives were shaped by our size made me ponder my perspective on the world in whole new ways. She vanished in the spring. There was a woman who would analyze the emotional and nutritional reasons behind overeating in amazing detail. She evaporated in the middle of summer. The time between their posts kept getting longer and longer or they would only pop in to write, “Gee whiz! I sure haven’t posted lately, have I?” When they disappeared completely it was probably not because their laptops had been stolen. It usually meant only one thing.

They’d started gaining weight.

That or they were dead, a serious possibility for the morbidly obese.

Whenever I started gaining weight, I went out less and less. I avoided friends from high school or college who’d known me when I was thinner. It made sense that bloggers would do the same thing online. Ironically, this was the time they needed to keep blogging the most, but
they were probably ashamed of the bruises they got from falling off the wagon. Sometimes I thought the wagon must have a maximum safe-weight capacity, which was why people kept getting pushed off. It wasn’t helping that they were avoiding the people who could relate to them most. My readers were a constant source of support and motivation. When I read their comments, I chose to believe most of the two-dimensional comments on my screen were attached to three-dimensional people who cared about me.

Had the missing completely given up hope? If you were blogging, you were thinking about your goal. If you stopped thinking about your goal, you would stop losing weight too. There was a girl who commented on my blog for several weeks, inspired by my progress and gung-ho to do the same. I was really rooting for her, and then she vanished. When she deleted her blog, I felt like I’d witnessed someone commit online suicide. I never did find out what happened to her.

I’d been there too, when nothing seemed to work, and I thought I’d be fat for the rest of my life. I wanted to hide away from the world and live under my bedspread in a blanket fort and train the bedbugs to perform tricks in a circus. But I knew that wasn’t the answer and not just because the bedbugs would unionize and cause labor problems.

I wanted to find all the missing bloggers and let them know that someone had noticed they were gone. Many of them remain missing, the reason for their absence still unknown. Only their blog archives remain standing like lost Mayan civilizations, the only proof of their creators’ previous existence.

Fat chicks weren’t the only ones interested in the blog. I got an email from a company requesting that I test its soda-making machine. I declined despite my curiosity. The company contacted me right before I was moving, and I didn’t want to carry a soda machine up the stairs in addition to my hundreds of pounds of books. I wrote a negative review
for a yoga DVD and months later the instructor’s publishing company offered me a free copy of her new book to review anyway. I wondered if anyone had bothered reading my post. A TV show’s producer wrote to me about possibly appearing on a new talk show to discuss how my relationships had changed since losing weight. I turned the offer down.

People didn’t just want to send me weird crap to review. I offhandedly mentioned that my right hand got cold at work because it was on a computer mouse all day, far away from my body heat. The next week I came home to find a brown paper package on my welcome mat with a pair of knitted wrist-warmers sent by a reader. I should have gone the Rumpelstiltskin route and inquired what she could do with straw. Another woman sent me a book I’d mentioned I’d wanted but didn’t have the money to buy.

I started playing a sweepstakes in which every lid on my yogurt cups contained an entry code. One of my readers started sending me her contest numbers too. After consuming about sixty cups of yogurt and 3,600 calories from an unknown number of live bacteria cultures, I finally won a gift certificate with one of her codes. Gambling wasn’t just a painful addiction that could lead to financial distress and emotional turmoil. It could also lead you to eat lots of dairy.