Half-Assed (27 page)

At which time I discovered the spare was kind of flat too.

I figured it didn’t matter which deflated tire I rode home on. I got out of there and inflated the tire at a gas station later. Kneeling on cold concrete, squatting down to check the position of the jack, forcing those damned lug nuts off—all that would have exhausted me two years ago.
Now I just muddled through it without much physical stress at all, though I had small bruises on my knees for days afterward.

I felt like I could conquer anything, fat or flats. Now that I was basically thin, I’d have to start looking for a new goal. I could be so much more than the girl who lost all that weight. Now that I’d lost the weight, I felt I could do anything.

The Secret

T
welve pairs of eyes focused on me from around the circle. They were waiting to hear my expert opinion.

I was at the focus group I’d been invited to a week earlier by a college girl trying to score an A on her final project. Her team wanted to brainstorm ideas about how to reduce obesity in central Indiana so they could create an educational campaign for their visual communications class. I’d always secretly liked the fact that there was an obesity epidemic; it made me feel less alone and less to blame if there were millions of other people with the same problem.

The only problem now was I had no idea how to reduce obesity in central Indiana.

My best idea was to snatch fat people off the street, bind them up in the back of an unmarked van, and dump them in Ohio. If we took away their cell phones and identification they would be stranded in the Buckeye state and Indiana’s problem would be solved. This strategy worked pretty well for the trapper who had caught a raccoon in our crawl space and relocated it to another county.

These people seemed to think I was a weight-loss expert. They sure had been happy to see someone attend their meeting who wasn’t related to them. Their faces had been so eager when they greeted me at the door, as if they were surprised I’d actually come inside instead of turning around in the driveway and making a quick getaway.

“Well, I read that if you make stairwells prettier by painting them and putting up nice art, people will be more inclined to use them,” I said. “And if people are allowed to wear casual clothes to work, they’ll move around more. Who wants to hike up four flights of stairs in high heels, right?”

The long-haired blond in a lavender sweater running the video camera nodded in agreement. “That’s a good idea,” she said.

Whew. I had them fooled. Those ideas surely sounded better than my plot to sabotage the city’s elevators.

The short brunette leading the meeting spoke up. “Moving on to the next topic, do you think there are stereotypes about the obese and if so, what are they?”

I bit into the celery stick I’d snatched off the self-consciously healthy snack table. It would have been rather hypocritical to be serving cookies and chips at the obesity focus group. Carol, the overweight, middle-aged woman sitting next to me, started to speak. I assumed she was a mother of one of the group’s members.

“Well, I’ve gained some weight in the past couple of years,” she said softly as her blue eyes carefully studied the workmanship of the hardwood floors. “And I can’t say I really like it. I hope people don’t think I’m lazy. I’ve just got a busy life, and it’s hard to find the time to eat right and exercise.”

She seemed conflicted. I was still getting used to my new identity as the thin girl, while she was adjusting to her new identity as the fat woman. She might have stereotypes about fat people that now
conflicted with her self-image. It was hard for me to imagine a time when I hadn’t been fat. Did this woman remember a time when she hadn’t been thin?

“It’s hard,” I told her, trying to be reassuring.

The proctor decided to jump in. “Carol, you missed the introductions since you came in late, but Jennette has lost over half her body weight.”

Carol’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“Wow, that’s impressive!” she said. I felt as if weight loss were now considered a skill I possessed. Check out Jennette, she can wiggle her pinkie toe and lose massive amounts of weight! Too bad it wasn’t a very handy skill. I could make myself thinner, but despite what this group thought, I didn’t really know how to make anyone else skinnier. I couldn’t possess people’s bodies and force them to eat healthy diets and exercise. If I had a practical skill, like woodworking, at least I could make my friends some spice racks.

“So, can I ask you something?” Carol asked. My hands tensed around my diet soda, and I started to feel anxious as I guessed what was coming next.

“What’s your secret?”

Everyone wanted to know the secret. It was as if I were one of a dozen people on the planet who knew the undisclosed blend of herbs and spices used in Kentucky Fried Chicken. Here’s the secret: If you take the second letter of every third word on the bottom of every page in this book, reverse it, and then translate it from Portuguese to English, the magical secret to weight loss will be revealed to you. Once you have wasted an hour of your time trying to find this quick and easy answer, you’ll figure out the real secret. There
is
no secret.

Weight loss was a personal decision requiring a lot of commitment and work, as serious as deciding to get married or moving to another
city for a new job. Sometimes I felt as if I’d married my body and spent the last two years going through couples counseling working out our problems.

“Oh, I’ve been following a diet and exercising a lot,” I said, taking a sip of my soda.

“I wish I had as much willpower as you,” she replied.

“Willpower’s overrated,” I said before I burped. “Excuse me.”

Willpower was the ability to fight against intrinsic human nature. It could work for brief spurts, but it was a stopgap, sandbags built against a rising river that would eventually burst through the temporary dam, not a permanent solution. You could use willpower to hold your bladder on a long bus trip, but eventually you’d reach a point where you pissed your pants. You could try to stop eating, but it was an essential human behavior. Eventually your body’s will to survive would overthrow any willpower you had to stop eating.

I would often read blogs of people failing in their weight-loss efforts who lamented their lack of willpower, as if their wills were being run by a half-dead AAA battery. I doubted willpower was typically the problem. They’d just been trained to blame themselves for being fat, as if it were a personality flaw. If you were motivated enough to start a weight-loss blog and attempt a dieting plan, you at least had some willpower.

They spent a lot of time blaming their failures on lack of inner strength, when I suspected it had more to do with an environment that made it difficult to incorporate exercise or good foods into their lives, or perhaps ignorance about what a healthy diet and proper exercise were. It was such a waste of time to blame themselves when they should have been trying to figure out what the real problem was.

The population was getting fatter and fatter. I didn’t think it was because there had been a sudden drain on the country’s willpower. Our world was making it easier to become a fat person. If you didn’t actively
adjust your environment and habits to account for that, you could end up getting fat, no deep-seated psychological issues with food required.

Willpower was good for getting me to speed up my grocery cart as I passed the Oreos strategically placed next to the milk section. It was good for making me avoid eye contact with the Girl Scouts selling cookies outside the grocery store. But using willpower as the energy source for a long-term weight-loss plan was like trying to power an aircraft carrier with a hamster running in a wheel.

Carol wasn’t deterred. “What diet are you on?” she asked. I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to make her believe there was one magical cure-all diet. I didn’t want her to try it and fail and think she was doomed to being fat forever. Occasionally someone would email me after reading my blog and ask what my typical daily food plan was. People seemed to think that if they ate the exact same foods as I did, they would become thin too. Maybe they would, but I found it important that I actually
liked
everything I ate. I doubted another person on the planet would like exactly the same foods I did, just as it was unlikely that someone would like every single MP3 in my music collection. Asking what diet I was on was like asking Yo-Yo Ma what kind of cello he played and then expecting to buy one and become a brilliant cellist. A good instrument was helpful, but you needed to know how to play it. I wasn’t a nutritionist, and I had no desire to become one, so I couldn’t prescribe meal plans for every person I met. Eating healthy was important, but people focused so much on food that they forgot it was equally important to find something that fit into their own lives. Maybe my reticence was the reason people thought I had a secret that I wouldn’t tell them. In reality, everything I learned was available in library books or online.

But Carol seemed interested, and I felt the pressure of all those eyes searching me for answers that I didn’t necessarily have. I told her what
diet I was following and hoped I wasn’t leading her astray. I still felt like a dork whenever I uttered the word “carb.”

“Are you exercising too?” she asked.

“Yeah, some running and Pilates. It helps me de-stress,” I told her.

She sighed, “Yeah, stress is a problem for me. I tend to go for salty snacks when I’m anxious or feeling depressed.”

Carol’s daughter was sitting next to her and piped up. “I’ve been telling her maybe she should see a therapist to talk about the emotional eating stuff. I think it’s only when we work through all the reasons that we overeat that we can get thin,” she said.

I didn’t remember working through any emotional issues. I’d sorted out a lot of thoughts on my blog, but I didn’t recall having any major breakthroughs. But I’d also read journals by women who were brought to tears after they ate an entire package of chocolate donuts, including the crumbs left in the folds of their T-shirts. Some women told tales of overbearing mothers who nagged them constantly about how fat their size-8 asses were and put them on strict diets. I guessed emotional eating was more of an issue for some people than others. It was possible I’d had a breakthrough and didn’t even realize it.

“If she did it, so can you, Mom,” her daughter said as she reached over to squeeze her mom’s hand.

I restrained myself from rolling my eyes and sighing. I hated it when people said that. I did believe that everyone could lose weight, but my personal success neither increased nor decreased their chances of doing so. When someone won the lottery, it neither increased nor decreased my chances of winning the jackpot next week. People could lose weight because it was physically possible, not because of anything I had done. I think Carol’s daughter really meant to say, “Look, it’s not impossible!” Keeping it off was far more difficult than losing it. In one obesity study, subjects were fed a specific number of calories for several
months in controlled conditions.
¹
Everyone lost weight, though some people’s metabolisms slowed down to compensate for the lack of food. It was when you were let out of the lab that you ran into problems.

It was unfair to tell someone it was possible to lose weight simply because I had done it. I had a lot of advantages; I was a single woman without any kids and a low-stress job that required only forty hours of work a week. I was the star of “The Me Show,” starring, written by, and produced by me. The only other life form I was responsible for taking care of was my cat. I could lead a pretty selfish life.

I could easily find the time to cook and exercise. I was doing okay financially after I’d paid off all my credit cards and my gallbladder surgery. I could spend money on fitness equipment and kickboxing class and fresh produce. I had never yo-yo dieted, so I wasn’t mentally exhausted by the idea of watching what I ate. I also hadn’t experienced any major life changes in the past two years. My move had been only across town, not to another state or country. Everyone I loved had been kind enough to stay alive, so I could stay focused on my weight-loss goals. Honestly, my life was kind of boring, and as far as weight loss was concerned, that was a boon. I got religion about my new lifestyle and had the time and resources to pursue it.

I didn’t know much about Carol’s life, but I doubted hers was similar to mine. She probably had to cook for her high school-age daughter. If she had a husband, she might be cooking for him as well and eating larger portions in an effort to keep up with him at the dinner table. Her job could be stressful, which might lead her to snack on candy bars from the vending machine. I didn’t know if she lived in a neighborhood with sidewalks where it would be safe to walk or if she could afford a gym membership to go exercise. If anything were out of control in her life or unsatisfying, she might search for comfort and control by indulging in tasty foods. If money were tight, a bag of
potato chips would always be cheaper than a bag of apples. I’d never seen someone double-coupon a pound of pears.

The stupidest things had sometimes kept me from overeating. If my cat curled up on my lap while I was watching TV, I wouldn’t get up for that second fudge pop because I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt his mewing. When I served my meal on smaller plates, it looked bigger and stopped me from eating bigger portions. When I started walking on the trail, I headed for thirty minutes in each direction instead of the total fifty minutes I had done on the treadmill because the math was easier to figure out on my watch.

None of this meant Carol couldn’t lose weight. It just meant it was harder for some people than others. I had friends who could eat a bucket of lard and still didn’t seem to gain a pound. They would only gain twenty bucks, because I bet them they wouldn’t eat a bucket of lard. Disadvantages weren’t an excuse, just an explanation. “Because it’s hard” wasn’t a good reason not to at least
try
to do something. It was important to pave the path of least resistance, to make it as easy as possible for you to live a healthy lifestyle.