Half-Assed (7 page)

Fine. I wasn’t paying the server bills; I didn’t get to make the rules. Still, I was pissed. I weighed more than most of those people. I hated fat bigotry as much as any of them. I had never even been on a diet like
many of them. But my voice would no longer be heard because I wanted to be thin. Why was that such a problem? I wasn’t trying to convince anyone else to lose a couple of pounds. Weight was such a personal issue that I hadn’t even talked to my family about it. I couldn’t imagine telling a stranger on the Internet that he or she needed to lose weight. But neither could I honestly say that I was happy that I lost my breath when I tossed a ball around with the cat. Walking down the hallway and picking up a jingling ball three times shouldn’t be a workout.

The definition of the word acceptance is “to recognize as true.” Acceptance is the opposite of denial. If I really accepted myself as I was, it meant I’d recognized who I was to the best of my ability, flaws and all. It didn’t mean I was necessarily satisfied with all the materials that made the house of me. The kitchen tile needed to be replaced, the patio door was squeaking, and what
was
I thinking when I chose that wallpaper? But at least I’d taken a look around the place and written an honest appraisal. It didn’t mean I couldn’t hire a contractor. The house of me had a strong foundation, but I wanted to paint the walls a different color and add a Jacuzzi.

Just because I’d accepted who I was didn’t mean I had to cryogenically freeze myself as that person for the rest of my life. If I were the same person twenty years from now, I would have wasted my life as an organic air recycler. Acceptance did not equal complacency. I didn’t have to throw up my hands and say, “Okay! This is it. This is as good as it gets.” I could accept myself and be working to change myself at the same time. I knew it would be only when I truly accepted myself that real change would be possible.

However, I would not be able to change myself into someone with posting access to this message board. After my account was deleted, it was clear I wasn’t wanted, so I stopped visiting the site. I believed people shouldn’t hate themselves for being overweight, but I didn’t think
they should have to enjoy it either. I had accepted that I was fat. I just couldn’t
like
being fat. It wasn’t because I hated myself, an accusation some fat-acceptance members frequently threw at dieters. I wanted to lose weight because I loved myself and I knew I deserved better.

I think the site’s attitude was just a reaction to the poor way fat people are treated. Some thin people who’d never battled a weight problem assumed I was simply weak willed, that if I just laid off the Twinkies I wouldn’t be so fat. These were stereotypes used by people trying to oversimplify the issue. Fat was not a moral problem. It was a complex state caused by too many factors to name. I think the FA members got tired of being blamed for being fat when it wasn’t completely under their control. They didn’t like to be called lazy when they’d worked for years on diets that didn’t work. And even if I had been the laziest, weakest-willed person on the planet, being fat did not make me a bad person. Fat wasn’t good or bad. It wasn’t a scarlet F of shame written on my elbow. It was just fat. I deserved as much respect as any thin person and I shouldn’t have to live under a cloud of shame.

The antidote to shame is pride, but I thought some FA members took the pride so far that they were creating shame in the other direction, in an equal and opposite reaction. Whenever I tried hanging around fat-acceptance sites, I felt as if they were trying to make me feel bad for wanting to be thin, which was just as bad as anyone who tried to make me feel bad for being fat. Just because you believed fat was good didn’t mean thin was necessarily bad. There were certainly many bad things that came from the importance society put on being slender: anorexia, bulimia, and a diet industry that made millions of dollars without making millions of customers thinner. If society put importance on being fat there would be a different list of bad things: binge eating, forced feedings, and poorer gas mileage. Either way, there
were many things about being fat that simply sucked, my surgery bill being one of them. My knees had only so much cartilage left.

I also had the nagging feeling that this was about more than just fat and thin. It was about a philosophy toward life. The members of the fat-acceptance movement were encouraging me to give up hope of ever being smaller. It was as though they had decided I’d be locked away in fat prison forever, so I should just hang some drapes over the steel bars to make the place homey. My body
was
like a prison, isolating me from relationships and experiences that I so desperately wanted. I kept hearing the subliminal message, “Stop trying. You’ll never make it. Forget about digging an escape tunnel. It’ll just add six more months to your sentence.” Underlying all the adipose tissue was a philosophical debate greater than fat or thin, pretty or ugly. It was the battle of whether it was better to strive for the impossible dream or to settle for what I had. Which one would cause more casualties?

Many fat-acceptance members believed obesity wasn’t a choice but a permanent life sentence handed down by your genetics and metabolism. After reading the most recent research, I agreed that it was much harder for some people to lose weight than others.
³
Factors you had little control over could make you fatter. People struggling to get by couldn’t afford the lean meats and fresh vegetables that the middle class could.
⁴
Some people seemed to gain weight if they ate half a cookie, while others couldn’t bulk up no matter how much cake they ate. Some scientists speculated obesity could even be caused by a virus.
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None of this was fair, and it created a very uneven playing field, but that didn’t mean it was impossible to lose weight. Deciding it wasn’t a choice sounded like a choice itself.

Simply believing you could do something was essential for success. The placebo effect is well documented. If you give sick people a pill they believe will make them better, it will usually improve their health
even if they’re just chewing on a Mentos. In one study, girls who took a math test after being told boys were better at math scored worse than girls who didn’t hear this information.
⁶
The very act of believing you couldn’t do something made it less likely that you could. It was a selffulfilling prophecy.

If there were simply a self-acceptance movement, maybe I could have joined that.

The rebukes I got from FA members for wanting to lose weight were strikingly similar in tone to the criticisms fat people got for being fat. In both instances people claimed to be criticizing me for my own good and wanted to know why I couldn’t see the error of my ways; they just couldn’t agree on what the error was, getting fat or trying to get thin. The members of the FA movement were promoting what they thought was the best life philosophy for fat people, but I also knew that it would really piss them off if I lost 200 pounds and kept it off for the rest of my life. Many of these people truly believed that fat people could never permanently lose weight. If I did it anyway it would strike a blow to their personal philosophy. While they probably believed getting me to give up before I even tried was in my best interests, it was also in their best interests to defend the worldview they depended upon to keep themselves sane. I didn’t need them to look out for my own good. I didn’t like being told what I could or couldn’t do. I didn’t want to give up.

I liked the FA movement best when it was promoting things I hadn’t believed to be possible, like wearing a bathing suit in public without being ashamed. I wanted to continue focusing on possibilities, not limitations. I wanted to be a medium in an average-size world. I wanted to cross my legs and hook one ankle behind the other. I wanted to feel my collarbones. I wanted to live in a country without crash dieting, where people didn’t hate themselves for their size, be it fat, thin, or shifting in between.

When I finally accepted myself, I accepted that I didn’t want to be fat. And that was okay.

 

 

 

I
wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to buy shirts with the word “extra-large” on the tag. My younger brother, Jim, was waging a war on fat. When he ran on the treadmill the basement door would rattle on its hinges in fear of the oncoming campaign. He’d constructed a barrier on the top of our refrigerator with large plastic powder bottles featuring bodybuilders on the labels. My long-neglected smoothie blender was conscripted to mix creatine shakes.

And he lost weight. He beat back the army of fat cells, carved out a spot in the enemy lines, and held his ground. He wanted to draft me to join the fray too.

It must have been hard for my family to see me get so big, and not just because I took up more space on the couch when we were watching TV. If I were worried about me, they must have been too, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about something made it real. I had now become the fattest person in the family, but I kept the topic off-limits.

One night I was channel surfing when I caught part of the reality show
The Biggest Loser
, on which people competed to lose weight. It was unusual to see fat people on television. Overweight people get a lot of shit about watching too much TV, but fat people are rarely ever cast on shows. When
The Sopranos
went off the air, the percentage of fat actors on television must have been cut in half. I especially hated it when a thin actor wore a fat suit. It felt like the fat version of blackface. We got to laugh at all the stupid stereotypes the actor was portraying without having to feel bad about laughing at an actual fat person. I was curious to watch these reality show contestants playing out my fantasies at the fat farm. It seemed as if most of them wanted to lose weight more than they wanted to win the money. Thin was the real prize, not the cash.
When I heard the sound of rubber soles on parquet floor, I clicked the button for the next channel on the remote faster than if I were ringing in on
Jeopardy!
I didn’t want to be caught watching shows about fat people for the same reason I didn’t wear a T-shirt that said, “Ask me about my obesity problem.”

But they noticed anyway, the caring, concerned bastards. Jim would go on and on about the diet he was on. I’d walk into the kitchen and inhale the strawberry dust cloud of powdered protein milk shake, becoming a victim of second-hand shake. He’d mumble something about insulin levels and the evils of white flour. I’d chomp on garlic and onion bagels with the confused look of a cat being lectured on thermodynamics. He’d talk about the benefits of whole grains and vegetables and I’d wonder if there were such a thing as a half grain.

He was simply excited to share his new knowledge. He never called me fat, and he never pressured me to go on a diet. He just left the diet book lying around and walked around eighty pounds thinner.

It was really annoying.

He was, after all, the same person who introduced me to the dollar menu at McDonald’s. At least I knew he genuinely cared about my health and not just my looks. I’d often heard people say that I should lose weight because it was unhealthy, but coming from strangers it seemed like the politically correct way of saying, “Fat people are disgusting.” The health thing was just a handy coincidence. There are many other unhealthy habits that don’t have the social stigma that obesity does. Stress and lack of sleep are bad for you, but people who work eighty-hour weeks and sleep four hours a night are often applauded for their work ethic, not denounced for weakening their immune systems.
⁷
I sometimes asked strangers not to smoke around me, but it wasn’t because I cared about their future visits to the oncology ward. I just didn’t like inhaling the fog of someone’s cigarette smoke. I doubt everyone who told me
fat was unhealthy genuinely cared about my risk for heart disease. If people wanted a better view than what I was providing, they could buy a house in the Hamptons.

I was hesitant to try Jim’s plan, though. My diet prejudice was still in full effect. I believed you could eat healthily, but I was suspicious of anything that came packaged in a book or could be labeled a “fad.” It was the end of 2004 and we were at the peak of the low-carb craze, a time when you could order a double cheeseburger without the bun and the cashier wouldn’t blink. But I didn’t have much left to lose. Actually, I had a lot to lose. That was the problem. I was willing to consider extreme options like dieting.

Yet I was still afraid of being gullible or wrong. I hated being wrong. I didn’t want to try something that would later be shown to be absurd and ineffective. I didn’t want to hear, “You tried the Tapeworm Diet? Did you replace all your brain cells with fat cells?” I was already fat. I didn’t want to be stupid too. I didn’t want to endanger my health either. Ironic, yes, but I didn’t want to trade my obesity problems for crazy dieting problems.

But Jim was thinner and not crazy as far as I knew. He wasn’t eating raw leeches for breakfast. He didn’t consume only blue foods on Fridays. He wasn’t drinking raw eggs in the morning and running fifty miles a day. But as a twenty-year-old he
had
read that a human male reached his physical peak at twenty-one and muttered, “Oh, crap.” Then he did something about it.

The diet book sat on my desk for a couple of weeks near the end of the year. I decided it would be as pointless to start a diet during the holiday bingeing season as it was to shovel the driveway while it was snowing. Even though I devoured chocolate-covered cherries and sugar cookies during Christmas, I amazingly weighed the same 372 pounds as I had before Thanksgiving. I hadn’t even been exercising.

I read the book before the end of the year. It didn’t tell me exactly what carbohydrates were, but I had a much better picture of how my body processed them. I finally learned why diabetes made you blind and caused your toes to fall off. Mostly I learned about the intricacies of the dance between my food and my body, steps I should have learned years ago but that were never covered in health class.