I spent a lot of time walking in place on our treadmill, traveling nowhere. I probably lost weight, but I still didn’t own a scale and couldn’t measure the loss. I’d bought a scale before college, but it had drowned in a basement flood and I never replaced it. Before its untimely death, I stepped on it only to sadly discover I weighed 270 pounds, which made me mutter, “Why don’t I just go for 300?” There was something appealing about hitting a round number, but just as I couldn’t commit to a major, I couldn’t fully commit to being fat. I was too poor and too scared to buy a new scale because most of them didn’t measure over 300 pounds. I didn’t want to know if my problem with gravity had become that bad.
The treadmill survived the flood, but it broke during my lost summer. When my father decided it was too expensive to replace, I felt as if I were being sentenced to fatness forever. I could have started walking around the block, but my neighborhood had reckless drivers and no sidewalks. That was my excuse, but in reality I was too ashamed of my size to exercise in public. I could stand the chafing as my thighs rubbed together, but the piteous glares of neighbors would have rubbed me the wrong way.
Thus ended another period of yo-yo exercising. Strangely, I never yo-yo dieted. I never went on a diet at all, which was either completely boneheaded of me or completely brilliant, depending on how you look at it. I had heard that yo-yo dieting could mess with your metabolism, causing you to gain back even more weight and making it harder to lose weight in the future.1 Recent studies have shown that this may not be true, although weight cycling might weaken your immune system.2 Regardless, staying away from diet shakes and rice cakes saved me the emotional exhaustion that comes from trying dozens of fad diets and failing them all. I should have made an effort to eat a more balanced diet, though. I was under no delusions that the bag of peanut butter cups in my desk drawer was part of a healthy eating program, despite studies showing that chocolate can lower blood pressure.3
Even though I wanted to eat better, I was suspicious of people trying to sell me a book or a plan. They obviously had something to gain if I bought it. I was cheap and didn’t want to pay for an institutionalized program like Weight Watchers. If anyone was going to get paid for losing weight, it should be me. I’d be doing all the work. Those programs never released statistics on how many people were able to lose weight and keep it off, which made me wonder if they worked at all. I’d heard dieting usually included food deprivation, which I wasn’t willing to try. It also seemed really complicated. I didn’t think I could count calories or keep track of the carbohydrate/fat/protein ratios for all of my meals, nor did I want to.
The people who wrote diet books couldn’t agree on anything anyway, so I was hesitant to trust them. Some authors said carbs were bad; others said they were good. For several years everyone thought fat would make you fat, but then they decided maybe that wasn’t true.4 Diets were like religions. There were hundreds of them and everyone thought his or hers was the right one. Ultimately it was just a matter of faith. I wanted something solid. I wasn’t interested in dieting.
I didn’t want to fail either. I was already fat, but if I tried a diet and it didn’t work I’d be a big fat loser too. It was safer not to commit to a plan. Even when I started exercising the summer before college, I never made a formal announcement about it. My family knew what I was doing when they heard the treadmill in the basement and saw me tag along on boring doctor visits, but if I could have exercised and weighed myself in secret I would have. If no one knew I had tried, it would be far less embarrassing when I failed.
After two semesters off, I started college again and eventually found a part-time desk job designing print materials. I got to create business cards while sitting on my butt all day, saving my feet from the pain of standing for hours on end, as the cashiers did. I moved into an apartment, and I walked around the complex regularly, though only during the day. I was hesitant to venture into the neighborhood at night, which stopped me from making late-night junk food runs. I decided I’d rather have a dead craving for a jar of frosting than be dead. A month of snowfall stopped me from walking and I continued to get fatter. At least the extra insulation kept me warm.
I had always hoped I would someday become thin, just as I’d idly hoped I would someday become a rock star. But my pants were still as big as a potato sack and I wasn’t singing rock anthems to screaming groupies. Was this thin thing ever going to happen for me? I was in my twenties and I felt like time was running out to enjoy being thin if I ever lost the weight. I toyed with the idea that I might have deep-seated emotional issues that were leading me to overeat, but my internal searching didn’t turn up much. I hated the fat, but I didn’t hate myself. I thought I was a rather intelligent, witty person if you got to know me. There was just a lot of me to know. The fat was like a separate entity, not a true part of me. Those extra fat cells were uninvited guests on my body, just like the infestation of pharaoh ants in my ghetto apartment.
I was pretty shy though, always hiding behind a huge mess of frizzy hair. Fat girls were invisible. Maybe I was making myself fat so I could hide in plain sight? When I tried to figure out why I was so overweight, everything I came up with sounded like an episode of Dr. Phil that I would promptly turn off. Sometimes emotional hypotheses seemed like bullshit explanations. They were simple answers to complex problems. I just needed to walk more and make sure I wasn’t walking past an ice cream truck. But if it were that simple, how come I hadn’t been able to do it yet? What was I waiting for?
During my senior year of college, my father drove off for the coast, stopping only to mail a letter that did little to explain why he was divorcing my mother. I guess I wasn’t the only one doing some soul searching. In German, the word kummerspeck is used to describe the weight you gain from emotional overeating. It literally translates to “grief bacon.” If I weren’t staring at my powered-down computer in the dark wondering what had gone wrong in my parents’ seemingly perfect marriage, I was probably munching on the orange-chocolate sandwich cookies I’d recently discovered in the candy aisle. No revelations were printed on the shortbread.
If he’d left when I was eleven instead of twenty-one, I could blame my obesity on him. But I was already pushing 350 pounds by the time he took off, so I can assign only twenty pounds of weight to his eventual exit. I could try to divvy up the blame for the rest of the excess weight too—thirty pounds for sodas, forty for a slow metabolism, and at least five for finals week. That leaves thirty pounds for unresolved emotional issues, fifty-five for ignoring nutritional information, twenty for an urban infrastructure that didn’t require me to walk anywhere, and ten wild card pounds left over to blame on everything else. Assigning blame wasn’t going to make me thin or change what my dad had done.
At my college graduation, I was chosen to carry the departmental banner into the ceremony. Otherwise I would have skipped the whole ordeal. I was given the largest size robe, but it was still tight around my waist. While many of my fat photos stimulate the pain center of my brain, looking at my graduation photos makes electroshock therapy seem like a spa treatment. No one looks thin wearing a black sheet, especially not the 372-pound girl.
At the smaller departmental ceremony later on, I had to stand up to be recognized for an honor. I felt enormous.
That’s because I was.
CHAPTER 2
Living Large
One of the prerequisites for being a fat girl, besides owning at least one pair of pants with an elastic waistband, is that you must have horrible fat stories. If someone has not made you feel small for being so big, you won’t be allowed into the fat-girl clubhouse, even if you can’t fit through the door frame anyway. I sometimes feel as if I didn’t live up to my full discrimination potential because I don’t have as many fat-girl horror stories as some women. I really should have left my room more often.
The earliest fat shaming I can recall occurred in middle school, a time in my life I have worked hard not to recall. I prefer to believe that the un
iverse skipped past that time like the lame track on an otherwise stellar CD. In middle school, the student body was corralled like cattle onto the bleachers in the gym until the bell rang ten minutes before classes started. In between weekly brawls, fat girls made for good entertainment.
One morning a boy sidled up to me and tapped me on the shoulder, getting dirty boy germs on my shirt. “Hey, see my friend over there?” he asked, as if to verify I was not blind as well as fat. I turned and looked at a pack of three boys wearing jeans and shit-eating grins. They were flanked by another guy who held his head in his hands and looked as uncomfortable as I felt. “He really likes you,” my attacker said.
I thought so little of my physical attractiveness that I doubt I would have realized if someone actually did hit on me. However, I could tell I was just the big butt of their joke. I turned back to stare at the fascinating air molecules swirling in front of me, wishing I were as invisible as the oxygen I was inhaling in frustrated breaths. The boy continued to stare at me, waiting for some sort of reaction. I wouldn’t look at him. He didn’t exist. I didn’t exist. This wasn’t happening. Someday I would become thin and beautiful and I would wreak vengeance on all of these boys, even if I didn’t know their names.
Bored with his prey, the boy bounded back up the bleachers. If I could rewrite the story, I would throw in a scene in which I tripped him and then kicked him in the balls.
I was shy, so I didn’t venture outside of school much. Most of my time was spent indoors watching other people’s lives on television rather than living my own. The brick and drywall of our house became a safe zone from the war fought at school. My brothers never made fun of my fat and my parents never nagged me about it.
Outside of the home, insults could happen anytime, anywhere, at the most unexpected moments, like a roadside bomb exploding. KABOOM! I would suddenly be reminded that I was fat and that I should hang my head in shame toward my potbelly. Insults don’t bounce off a jiggly belly as well as the laws of physics and elasticity would have you believe. I’d never talked to the girl across the street who was a year ahead of me at a different high school. Our first verbal exchange didn’t make me regret that. As I walked across the driveway to my parents’ car, I saw her perched in an open window on the second floor with a friend.
“Jelly roll!” one of them yelled.
I stopped in confusion. “What?” I asked, throwing my question across the street.
“Jelly roll!” they now replied in unison as they started giggling. The words stung as if they’d tossed sticks and stones. Why was she doing this? Weren’t there ants that she could burn with a magnifying glass instead? “Jelly roll” wasn’t even a good insult. The boys on the bleachers were far more creative.
The next year they moved out after a kitchen fire. I liked to imagine it happened when she was baking jelly rolls.
Sometimes attacks seemed accidental. As I was walking across the school courtyard thinking about my math homework, one of two boys behind me murmured, “Doesn’t Jennette have the biggest ass you’ve ever seen?” Their snickering hit me like shrapnel. The boys on the bleachers wanted to confirm I wasn’t blind, and the boys behind me seemed to think I was deaf. Did everyone think fat people were disabled? I did have a huge ass, so in a twisted way I was just hearing the facts. But high school boys have a way of wielding the truth as a weapon.
And I never fought back.
Among your fat-girl stories, there is a mandatory requirement of at least one traumatic shopping experience. If you have never been reduced to tears in a dressing room, please check your waist measurement; you may not actually be fat. Or you’re one of the handful of fat girls who never had body issues and always rocked your fatness. If so, congratulations; you are way more awesome than the rest of us who let our thunder thighs steal our thunder.
My worst fat-girl shopping experience came near the end of high school, a time when senioritis should have kept me from caring about anything. At graduation the boys and girls wore robes in our school colors, red and white. They arranged our seating so we spelled out the first initial of my school’s name. Snap, click, a picture was taken for the guidance counselor’s wall to celebrate that he was finally rid of us. The white gowns weren’t a solid white, just a cheap, sheer nylon, so the girls had to wear white or pastel dresses under their robes. Comply or risk not participating in the ceremony.
My high school made a 250-pound teenage girl buy a white dress. I should have sued it for child abuse.
I may as well have been searching for a six-toed, purple, hairless yeti since they are far more common than a flattering white dress on a fat girl. After my first unfruitful day of shopping, I wanted to cry all the way home like the little piggy I felt like. Instead, my mother and I rode home in silence. I rolled down the window so the glass wouldn’t reflect the image of my fat face. The car pulled into the driveway and I got out as quickly as I could, heading straight for the stairs and my bedroom. I didn’t bother turning the lights on. The three hundred-thread-count pillowcase muffled my sobs and absorbed my tears. Shame and self-loathing are best savored in private.
But I still didn’t have a dress. The next day my mother and I descended upon the last fat-girl clothing store in the area. If we failed to find something, I was going to march to the department store next door and buy a white bed sheet to wear as a toga.
I shoved metal hangers across metal racks to make nerve-racking screeching sounds. It provided the perfect background sound to accompany the horror I experienced when I turned around. It couldn’t be. No. Not now. Not here.
It was my freshman English teacher, Mrs. Warren, with the long black hair that descended her short, squat frame past her butt.
“Jennette, fancy seeing you here!” she bubbled.
I stood paralyzed, as if caught in the glare of her shiny, silver, square earrings. I hated seeing teachers outside of school walking around pretending they were normal people with actual lives. Once I had spotted my math teacher at the grocery store and ducked behind a row of diet pills to avoid her. It was the best use for Fen-phen I’d ever found.
“Uh ...” I mumbled. Then my mother swooped to my rescue.
“Hi! I’m Jennette’s mom. We met at open house night,” she said as she offered her hand to Mrs. Warren. “We’re just here shopping for a graduation dress,” she continued, as her personality filled the room and I blended into the background.
As they kept gabbing, I started wandering to the dressing rooms with two dresses that might not make me look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’s chubby little sister. As I turned the corner, I nearly dropped the clothes hangers in shock.
There, exiting the dressing rooms, was Mrs. Fielding, my current senior English teacher, who taught from her chair because standing all day hurt her feet. I was shopping at the same store as not one, but two, of my English teachers. If they had been math teachers instead, they’d have known the odds against this happening. Mrs. Fielding stepped back in surprise as we locked eyes.
“Jennette, fancy seeing you here!” she said. Then she noticed my entourage and greetings were exchanged. All of us. Together. At the fat-girl store. At the exact same time.
There must have been one killer sale going on.
“Why don’t you go and try on those dresses?” my mother said.
“Yeah, we can have a little fashion show and tell you what we think,” seconded Mrs. Warren.
At this point my memory goes blank. I can’t recall the ordeal of trying on several white dresses for half of the English faculty at Everett High School. I’ve read that the mind blocks out traumatic memories for its own protection. I figure it’s for the best.
I did finally find a dress that wasn’t completely atrocious. I sold it online after eBay was invented. I’ve never run into my former English teachers while shopping again either, but only because I moved to another state.
Near the end of high school I became friends with Felicity. I liked that she got free movie rentals. She liked that I
was fatter than she was.
One easy way to make yourself feel thin is to hang out with someone who is fatter than you. I didn’t do this much because not many people could make me feel thin. When I was still only moderately fat in middle school, a girl who was fatter than me moved into a rental house down the street. I can’t remember her name. I can remember sitting at our out-of-tune piano when what’s-her-name appeared next to me. For the first time in my life, I felt small, like a cotton T-shirt that had shrunk three sizes in the dryer. If I’d known how to, I would have played a dramatic minor seventh chord to accompany my shock. Did people feel this tiny when they stood next to me?
I never became good friends with the nameless girl from down the street, but Felicity started calling me a lot our senior year. She was one of only two people who asked me to do stuff in high school to coax me out of my room.
Felicity was pushy and I was a pushover, and so our dysfunctional friendship began. I didn’t think she was fat, but like many teenage girls she thought she really needed to lose fifteen pounds. Superman may have x-ray vision, but Felicity could spot a six-ounce weight loss or gain on anyone’s body. She would frequently mention who she thought had lost weight. I found this fascinating and disturbing. I wanted to be thinner, but I wasn’t betting on the prom queen’s dress size. Felicity even joined Weight Watchers for a while. I’m sure all the truly fat girls at her meetings must have wondered what a thin girl like Felicity was doing in their cult.
Felicity and I eventually “broke up” during our first year of college. She was high maintenance and I had gotten to a point where I was afraid to answer the phone. My family was too cheap to get caller ID. I had started avoiding her when I went home for visits and would tell people not to mention that I’d been in town. I was hoping our friendship could just fade out like many high school relationships. I hated conflict and didn’t know how to dump her gracefully.
Half-Assed Page 2
