Half-Assed (8 page)

The new year came. Noisemakers officially sounding off the beginning of the dieting season. On my blog I posted this on January 13, 2005.

Another in a long line of bold statements. It had many older sisters and cousins. This time it even included profanity. It was different only because this time it was true.

 

 

 

T
here are lots of ways to measure weight-loss progress. I took my measurements, but I didn’t know how accurate they were since I never seemed to get the same number twice. My sixty-inch tape measure couldn’t fit all the way around my hips anyway. In high school gym class my coach had demonstrated a method of measuring body fat by using calipers to measure several points on the body. I didn’t know where I could find someone to do that nor did I want a stranger fondling my underarm fat. There are some scales that will estimate your body weight by sending an undetectable electrical pulse through your feet. I couldn’t find one that would weigh people of more than 330 pounds.

I had heard one of the most accurate ways to determine someone’s body fat was to weigh him or her underwater. Fat was buoyant, so you
could calculate your body composition based on the measurements. I was offered the opportunity to be weighed this way as extra credit for a college psychology class (the researchers were always looking for coeds to experiment on), but I didn’t volunteer. I couldn’t imagine myself floating around naked in a tank for a bunch of scientists in lab coats. I would have felt like a polar bear swimming by the glass observation area at the zoo. The only way I could weigh myself like that at home would be if I stole the lobster tank from the grocery store. Even if I figured out how to sneak it out of the store, I’d still have to scrub it clean of lobster poop.

I decided to stick to the bathroom scale to track my progress. It measured only my gravitational attraction to the earth, not my levels of fat and lean muscle mass, but it was easy to use and objective. I could also plug my weight and height into a formula to determine my body mass index. A BMI under 18.5 is considered underweight, 18.5 to 25 is normal, 25-30 is overweight, 30 and above is obese. The BMI was developed in the mid-1800s by Adolphe Quetelet as a tool to determine people’s ideal weight based on statistical data.
⁸
Insurance companies started using it to help ascertain the risk of insuring clients. Its medical relevance is questionable, unless you’re comfortable letting your statistician or insurance adjuster handle your medical procedures. I certainly felt as if I’d had a colonoscopy after I saw my latest auto policy rates. The BMI is somewhat flawed since it categorizes muscular athletes like Shaquille O’Neal as obese. I understood it wasn’t perfect, but I found it handy to get a general sense of what weight range I should be aiming for. In college I’d set my goal weight to 140, but if I were under 169 my BMI would be “normal,” so I decided to loosen my standards for thinness. I was also working as an independent contractor, so BMI mattered a lot when I unsuccessfully applied for a personal health insurance policy. The
more likely you were to actually use health insurance, the more likely you were to be denied it.

Being overweight was like being in debt. Instead of owing money, I owed calories. I arbitrarily set my goal weight at 160, a number that would set my body mass index as normal but wasn’t so low that it seemed unattainable. It also ended in a zero. There was an unspoken law that your goal weight had to end in a zero or a five.

It takes approximately 3,500 calories to burn a pound of fat. Multiply that by 212 pounds to lose and I was 742,000 calories overdrawn. My body was charging interest via my disintegrating health. I could hear it when my knees creaked and see it in those little pink scars from my surgery.

A 24-year-old woman who weighs 160 pounds and engages in light activity will burn about 2,200 calories a day, give or take. Divide 742,000 by 2,200 and you’ll find I was about 337 days ahead on my eating. Essentially, I’d eaten almost a year’s worth of food that I hadn’t needed to. I was overdrawn and overweight.

The math is a bit more complicated than that, of course. As I got larger I needed more calories to sustain my weight, so I shouldn’t technically count that as excess. To properly figure out how many calories overdrawn I was, I’d have to remember how to do calculus, which I don’t because I never thought it would have any practical application in my life. If my precalculus book had included word problems about fat girls, I probably would have changed my mind.

It’s not surprising that I had credit card debt as well. Twelve cavities and a broken transmission had been bad for my credit rating. Solving both problems demanded similar approaches. I had to figure out what I owed, pay down a little at a time, and chart my goals and progress. I needed to catch up on my exercise payments. Flossing would be a good idea too.

On January 15, 2005, I started walking again because that’s what I always did. It seemed quaint to start the journey of a thousand miles with one step. At my size there weren’t many other options. You’re probably wondering what diet I followed too. I’m not going to tell you. There are plenty of books that will be happy to tell you what to eat. There isn’t one diet to rule them all. Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers—you’ll find people who’ve lost hundreds of pounds on any of them. Typically their results are not typical. I did research, compared options, and eventually settled on something that could fit into my life. It was something I could see myself doing forever without hating my existence.

On February 6, 2005, I wrote in my blog:

I started plowing down through the numbers, leaving decimals and fractions in my wake. I checked my scalp. My hairs weren’t sticking out on end. Lightning had not struck me in a thunderclap of epiphany. There was no moment of revelation, no burning bush. There was no sign from God. But I was on my way.

This was it,
for real
.

CHAPTER 5

Diet and Exercise

I
t would have been simplest if I could just stop eating. I wanted to tell my body to switch to backup power and burn those fat cells instead of demanding more food. I could pop a multivitamin a day to ward off scurvy. I’d hibernate in the woods with the bears all winter, wrapped in a coat of fat that would melt off my bones by the springtime. Instead, my only realistic option was to consume fewer calories than I burned. I hoped I wouldn’t find myself holding up the local Krispy Kreme in a sugar-crash psychosis, wielding a grapefruit spoon like a shiv.

I needed to eat healthy, but what did that mean? Would I have to consume only locally grown organic foods? Become a vegan? Give up carbohydrates? What exactly was a carbohydrate besides the latest health buzz word? And how was I going to learn all this without adding “registered dietician” to my resume?

Figuring out what was healthy seemed as subjective as determining who was the prettiest girl in a beauty pageant, but I had to start somewhere, even if there were flaws in the concepts I’d learned. If I kept doing what I was doing, I’d keep getting what I always got—fat.
I started with the diet book my brother had found helpful, hoping the publisher wouldn’t issue a revised copy the next year recalling the previous advice.

Thankfully the book didn’t refer to foods as “good” and “bad,” as though we could assign philosophical concepts of morality to the items we eat. There wasn’t a “wrong” way to eat either, except if you tried stuffing cheeseburgers up your ass. It did list certain foods to enjoy and others to avoid. I copied down a list of items that weren’t up for arraignment in food court and got in my car, saying a silent thank-you to Oldsmobile for its extra-long seat belts.

Then I drove to McDonald’s.

Before I started this healthy-eating nonsense, I was going to have a “farewell to junk food” bash. I ordered a Big Mac, large fries, and a soda so large that it barely fit in my cup holder. I drove back home and ate every piece of my meal, even the lettuce that fell into small puddles of mayonnaise on the plastic wrapper. Feeling full, I got back into my car and headed for the grocery store. I wasn’t supposed to shop on an empty stomach anyway.

I waddled through the automated sliding doors and avoided looking at my image in the closed-circuit security monitors. The official greeter welcomed me to the store as I quickly grabbed a cart. I stopped at the red tile that marked the beginning of the produce section. I had not spent much time among the radishes and rutabagas in the few years I’d shopped for my own groceries. If someone removed all the stickers labeling items, I wouldn’t have been able to identify 40 percent of the produce. What were those funny white bulbs with stalks of hair messier than my own? What should I call the long green vegetables in the next bin that were thinner than I’d ever be? Like a substitute teacher, I didn’t know any names.

I wasn’t sure if I should buy new foods or just stick to the vegetables that I could name. I walked up and down the aisles, avoiding the misty
jets of water that kept the celery fresh. I leaned over to strangle a head of broccoli when my eyes beheld the pastry section nestled in an alcove behind the rows of lettuce. Croissants, cookies, and coconut cake, oh my. I needed to get out of there before I did something stupid. I pushed my weight behind the left side of the cart to make a sharp right turn and dashed to the safety of the dairy section, though my dash was more like a slow jog.

The cheese aisle wasn’t any easier to navigate. I appreciated the variety of culinary choices available since I had no desire to eat grits every day like my Depression-era ancestors. However, I had no idea if I needed low-fat cheese, fat-free cheese, or cheese made from part-skim milk. Did all these varieties even taste like cheese, or was I buying a synthetic cheeselike compound that was created in a lab next to a vat of Silly Putty?

I grabbed two tubs of different types of ricotta, comparing the nutritional information on the back, only partially understanding what the numbers and percentages meant. They made as much sense as the Spanish soap operas on cable. My smattering of substandard Spanish classes in middle school had never explained why the maid was slapping the priest in the confessional booth. Protein, sodium, calories from fat—all of this surely meant something, but I didn’t know what.

A gray-haired woman with a perm knocked her cart into mine. I was inhibiting the trade of curd-based substances by blocking access to the shredded mozzarella. I randomly picked a tub of ricotta and moved on. Tempted to grab a cylinder of potato chips in a cardboard display case at the end of an aisle, I stepped up the pace. My exercise plan so far consisted of running away from food. If I hired one of the stock boys to chase me around the store with a licorice whip, I’d be thin by Christmas.

As long as I stuck to the edges of the building, I could avoid most temptations. The produce, dairy, and meat sections were safe zones that
lined the outer boundaries of the store. I tempted fate when I darted into the aisles where the packaged cookies dwelled. I made one or two swoops into the aisles to get diet sodas and sugar-free gelatin. I wanted to head for the candy section out of habit. I had always loved grabbing a box of Junior Mints and chomping on them on the ride home. Today the only thing I’d be chewing on in the car was my fingernails. Picking out healthy food was like taking a pop quiz in nutrition that I hadn’t studied hard enough for. Fearful that the Toll House elves might toss a bag of cookies into my cart if I lingered too long, I headed to the checkout line.

Fat-free yogurt, string cheese, and Lean Cuisines rolled down the conveyor belt ahead of me. I felt as if I were buying someone else’s groceries. For the first time, I wasn’t worried that the cashier would silently judge my purchases, unlike the time I bought a can of frosting purely for the purpose of eating it off a spoon. A junkie might need a spoon, heroin, and a lighter to get a fix, but I had substituted white powder with buttercream to mainline sugar. I had created an elaborate story to tell the cashier if she gave me a judgmental glance. “I have a sister, a skinny sister of course, so it’s okay for her to be eating junk, and I just finished baking her a chocolate birthday cake (double-layered chocolate fudge,
Betty Crocker
cookbook, page 126) when I realized I didn’t have powdered sugar, and since I had to go to the grocery store anyway, I decided to get the premade frosting, which I will now take directly home and smother on her cake with a spatula.”

This was also the same imaginary party for which I was buying a dozen two liters of soda when they were on sale. But my elaborate backstories never stopped the cashier from swiping the bar code over the mean red lines of the scanner while jokingly saying, “You must be really thirsty.”

I paid the cashier, returned home, and carried my numerous plastic bags into the kitchen. I was prepared for eating healthy or surviving the
Apocalypse. I opened the refrigerator to store my scavenged goods; a spatial dimensions IQ test ensued, rearranging everything to fit.

The kitchen counter wasn’t any better. Astronomers discovered the existence of Pluto only because of its gravitational effects on other planets. I knew we had a kitchen counter because all those papers and dishes had to be resting on something. In a gesture of support, my mother cleared the section of the counter between the light switch and the sink for me, so I would have somewhere to cook. Now I wouldn’t have to relocate stacks of paper and coffee-stained mugs before figuring out what to do with all these vegetables I’d bought. I didn’t even like vegetables.

I liked to eat food, but I didn’t like to make it. Cooking was a task I left to my roommates or the teenage wage slave at the pizza delivery joint. I’d learned some basic cooking skills from my mom, but the most complicated meals I’d made included shaking and baking or grilling cheese. Many nights my meals were prepared simply by hitting the “Start” button on the microwave. Amazingly, this was more culinary education than some people got. One summer I brought the girl I babysat over to my house to play a video game. As we walked through the kitchen her eyes widened at the sight of brownies in an old scratched silver pan on the counter.