Half-Assed

by Jennette Fulda

  I never planned what I was going to eat until I was hungry, which was like waiting until I was drunk to start driving. As a child I would bang the cupboard doors open and closed, pushing aside cans of baking soda or shortening, searching for something to satiate my appetite instantly. Sometimes I’d discover a Carmello bar hidden behind the saltines. When I saw squirrels digging up nuts in the backyard, I wondered how many pounds of chocolate were hidden in drawers and cupboards and closets in our home at one time. Typically I would slam the final cupboard door closed and yell, “There’s nothing to eat!” as if we lived in a model home stocked with Styrofoam fruit. My mother would ask us to add items we wanted to the grocery list, but I could never think of anything to write down.

  I didn’t have a spouse with whom to trade sexual favors for a hot dinner. I couldn’t hire a chef to cook all my food. And no amount of bribery was going to get my roommates to cook for me every night. I couldn’t afford to eat out every night, either. That would be difficult to do anyway since the healthiest item on most fast-food restaurants’ menus was a wilted salad, and restaurant portions were usually gargantuan; today’s small beverage cup was yesterday’s large. I always overate when I was given big servings.

  It was inevitable: I would have to learn how to cook. The best way to control what I ate was to prepare it myself. This was going to be painful, literally. My feet began to hurt if I stood for more than five minutes, but if I could survive a nine-hour gallbladder attack, I could withstand bowing arches after ten minutes in front of a skillet.

  My diet book had some recipes in the back, but they included strange ingredients like “shallots” and “littleneck clams.” I didn’t even know clams had necks. I started a search for recipes online and nixed anything too complex. Anything that involved separating egg whites or getting out the sifter was a no-go. I wasn’t even sure we owned a flour sifter. I also had zero tolerance for weird ingredients. I was not averse to buying one or two new spices or veggies for a recipe, but if it turned into a grocery store scavenger hunt that required me to find eye of newt, it was out. No toil or trouble.

  I bought a recipe book that had “15-Minute Recipes” in the title. I found quick and easy recipes on Internet message boards. I mutilated enough vegetables with my poor knife skills to fill a mass grave, but as with any skill, the more I practiced the better I got. I figured out how to slice a tomato without slicing off my thumbs, though the red gooey insides did resemble blood. I collected six or seven quick recipes that didn’t make me curse my sense of taste. It was repetitive, but it was safe. I wasn’t feeling adventurous; I just wanted something that worked.

  I envied my younger brother, who was a food freestyle master. I once watched him season some pork chops with a random assortment of spices and toss them in a skillet with some canned tomatoes for pizzazz and hope it would be edible when the sauces stopped sizzling. I preferred to have directions with precise measurements, specific cooking lengths, and tastiness ensured. If I were going to spend all that time chopping and mixing, I wanted to be pouring the result down my throat, not down the garbage disposal.

  By summer, cooking became normal to me. It wasn’t enjoyable, but it was a tolerable part of my day, like the half-hour commute to work. There is comfort in the familiar, even if the familiar is painful. I was being indoctrinated.

  I was surprised that the food tasted good. I’d always thought of healthy food as bland, ill-tasting mush manufactured out of soybeans. Diet foods were marketed as having no fats, no sugars, and no carbs—all the stuff that tasted good. Yet now I was eating healthier without scraping the taste buds off my tongue with a spork after every meal.

  I started wearing down the linoleum on my shopping route through the grocery store after only a month. Good choices became easier to make and I experienced significantly less terror among the cheese wheels. I realized my new approach to eating had reached my subconscious when I yelled at someone in a dream for daring to offer me a bowl of white rice. Any concerns that dream might have raised about my state of mind were outweighed by the feeling of empowerment I got when I passed pints of ice cream without opening the freezer door. While I wasn’t anorexic or bulimic, I started to understand why women with eating disorders said they liked the control it gave them over their lives.

  Surprisingly, I didn’t miss candy and chips and cookies that much. Once I stopped eating them I stopped craving them. I’d spent the first week without them in a light-headed, low-carb daze, fixated on the moment after my induction period when I’d finally be able to eat an apple. But once the junk food was out of my life, I saw how bad our relationship together had been, and I was glad we’d broken up. I still missed fast food. Not the food, just the fast part. I was always planning now, more prepared than any Boy Scout. I predicted when I was going to get hungry, and I started cooking before I was chewing on the refrigerator’s insulation strips for sustenance.

  I had a plan for exercise too.

  I think my mother bought the treadmill partly so I’d stop hating my father. A couple of years earlier our old treadmill had started making loud, rattling noises whenever I walked on it, like a huge cell phone set to vibrate. My dad then hauled it to an exercise equipment store to be repaired. When he was quoted the price for repairs, he left it at the store for scrap. I was devastated, because I saw the treadmill as my best hope for weight loss. I didn’t have a job, so I couldn’t pay for the repairs myself. I was a hamster without a wheel to run in—a very fat hamster.

  Even though money was tight after my dad left, Mom celebrated the new year by spending several hundred dollars on a treadmill. She was worried about my health and knew I’d kept up with walking indoors in the past. She couldn’t click an “undo” button for Dad’s actions, but she could fix this one mistake.

  Then the treadmill sat in our spare room for a year.

  When it was first delivered, I walked on it four days in a row, inhaling that new-exercise-equipment smell as I strolled along. Then I redirected that use of electricity to the television set. Now, nearly a year after the delivery men had dropped off the heavy piece of machinery in my old bedroom, I laced up my tennis shoes and stepped on its foot panels once again. I slipped the magnetic key into the power console and clipped the end of the attached string to my waist. The key would automatically slide out and shut off the treadmill if I stumbled. I’d still fall on my face, but at least the tread wouldn’t sand my eyebrows off. I hoped I could keep up with the breakneck speed of two and a half miles per hour.

  I carefully adjusted the settings on the huge console as if I were plotting a complex trip through hyperspace. Then my cat crawled onto the tread. He flung his body down whimsically beneath me, lazing about as though my legs formed the apex of his throne. I could learn a lot about confidence from my kitty, who had never let his weight problem get in the way of his schemes to rule the world. But my need for exercise trumped any plans he had for megalomania.

  The fastest way to get a cat off a treadmill is by hitting the start button.

  The control panel emitted a few small beeps like a dump truck backing up, though I swear I didn’t move an inch. As the pneumatics hissed to change the elevation, I started a slow and steady pace of two and a half miles per hour. This would be fast if I had legs the length of a Chihuahua’s. At my weight it was all I could handle. I had a wide stance because of my thunder thighs, so I walked close to the edges of the tread. I lightly grasped the side rails during each step so I wouldn’t fall off. My poor form might strain my muscles, but it made me feel safer. I huffed and puffed enough to demolish any little pigs’ houses in the vicinity. I trundled forward until I was exhausted, gratefully pressing the big red STOP button and resting on the front rail as my motionless feet slid slowly behind me, leaning me forward like a ski jumper. I glanced at the flashing display.

  Four-tenths of a mile. It was a start.

  Eventually I started taking the stairs at work again, this time pausing on each floor to catch my breath and let people go by on
the spacious landings. The stairwell itself was too narrow to let people zoom past me. I was like an overturned double-wide semi blocking the highway, preventing people from passing. When I reached my destination on the fourth floor, I stopped for a full minute at the top of the stairwell to catch my breath. I didn’t want to walk down the hallway and into my office out of breath and red-faced. I was thankful that people who passed me avoided eye contact. I would do my best to ignore them too and pretend my face was red solely from exertion and not embarrassment.

  I started parking farther out in parking lots. This worked exercise into my daily routine and also made it incredibly easy to find a parking spot. My former modus operandi when attacking a parking lot was to loop up and down the aisles like a needle passing back and forth through fabric until I found a spot near the door. In college, the lack of parking spots on campus led to particularly predatory habits. Frequently I would shadow people, humming the theme to Jaws quietly to myself until they reached their cars and evacuated their parking spots. Then I’d pounce, filling the space rapidly like air hissing into a vacuum. Now I would just go up an aisle until I found a space and take it, no matter how far it was from the door. The time it took to walk from the outer limits of the parking lot was far less than the time I had previously spent hunting for the best spot. I wasn’t just getting cardio, I was saving hours of my life.

  I spent those saved hours on the treadmill, walking several nights a week after I came home from work. I had to keep walking even when I felt as if I’d left my lungs half a mile behind me. I had to keep moving my feet up the incline even when the muscle fibers in my thighs seemed flammable. Exercise became the process of building up a tolerance for pain. If I kept at this long enough, I would be able to trade my mattress for a bed of nails without caring.

  It was surprising how much time this was taking. I had known it would take at least two years to reach my goal, but I didn’t realize I’d be dedicating an hour or two every day to making meals and exercising. This was going to wreak havoc on my TV-watching schedule.

  As with the cooking, I eventually didn’t mind exercise, even if I didn’t exactly love it. Walking became easier over the months. This was good because I was becoming more fit, and I enjoyed walking from the car to the front door of my office building without gasping, but it was annoying because I had to keep pushing myself harder, walking farther or faster, trying to find the point where I was exerting myself without risking injury. One sprained ankle and I’d have to stop walking to heal. Who knew if I’d be able to get back into the routine again? My habits were new and tremulous, delicately balanced on the tip of a fulcrum like a teeter-totter. Only the slightest push could tip everything out of equilibrium and send my butt crashing to the ground.

  After the first week of walking, I was down four pounds. I explored the grocery store the next week and lost six more. The week after that, I was down another ten. Twenty pounds in three weeks. This was awesome! And kind of scary. It was considered healthy to lose only one or two pounds a week. I hoped I wasn’t on a tapeworm diet after all.

  If I didn’t own the scale I wouldn’t have known I’d lost weight. Twenty pounds out of 372 was only 5 percent of my body weight. There was a reason I had never noticed when I was gaining or losing weight. It was like peeling rubber bands off a rubber-band ball, each band reducing the mass almost imperceptibly.

  Even if I had kept up this insane pace, which probably would have induced kidney failure or death, it would have taken me ten months to reach my goal. My birthday was in the tenth month of the year, so I would definitely be a year older by the time I was thin. Ten months—I could create a whole other human being in that time and still have an extra month to decorate the nursery. I consoled myself by thinking that a year from now I’d be a year older anyway; I couldn’t stop it from passing, but I got to decide what I did with that time.

  About a month after I’d cracked open my cookbooks and wiped the cat hair off the treadmill, I was driving down the highway home from work, thinking about what I would make for dinner. The Parmesan chicken recipe had been tasty and pretty easy, but I’d set ground turkey out to thaw, so I should probably make something with that. As I sailed past the entrance to the movie theater filled with buttered popcorn, I had a sudden revelation. I would be doing this for the rest of my life. No more stopping at White Castle for handy little burgers I could hold in one hand and devour as I drove home. No more laps around the McDonald’s drive-through. No more stopping at Dairy Queen, even though I had a coupon for a free Blizzard. Things had changed. Forever. I had started the long process of brainwashing myself into healthier habits. As the movie theater moved into my rearview mirror, I was overwhelmed with the idea that I’d be managing these habits for the rest of my life. I was going to live another ten to twenty years because of all this healthy eating too, so I’d be stuck doing it even longer.

  This wasn’t a “diet,” it was a “lifestyle change.” I didn’t even know what the word “diet” meant anymore. Being on a diet implies that you eventually will go off the diet. I had decided not to do anything that I was not prepared to do for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to plug a hole in the dam with my finger; I wanted to seal it with epoxy or concrete. “Don’t get crazy,” became my number one rule. When I was hungry, I ate. If I really, really, really wanted a food, I ate it. I didn’t want to fixate on something I couldn’t have only to binge on it later. I didn’t count calories because I knew it would drive me insane, obsessing over every detail, although I did measure out reasonable portions for my meals. But I did tell my family that I was on a diet. It was simpler than saying, “I have changed my lifestyle,” and sounded a lot less pompous. I was regulating my diet of food for the day, but I would never be able to stop without gaining back the weight. I wanted to lose the weight only once. I didn’t want to be a dieting Sisyphus, burning calories rolling a gigantic donut up a hill only to eat it at the top, repeating the task eternally.

  Two weeks after I changed my eating habits and actually developed some exercise habits, I was no longer tired in the afternoons. I didn’t find myself dropping quarters in the vending machine for a three o’clock sugar fix. My menstrual cramps were significantly less painful. My hair was less oily. I was less moody, and I stopped snapping at my family. I fell asleep quickly and slept the night through.

  I was also kind of horny.1 Fat cells don’t just sit around being fat; they also raise the level of a hormone called SHBG (sex hormone-binding globulin), which binds to testosterone and diminishes sex drive. By losing weight I was freeing up testosterone, which stimulated my libido.

  All it took for me to feel better was to eat better and walk a little. For years I’d been a hypochondriac, wondering if every headache were a symptom of brain cancer. I’d enjoyed the temporary pleasure of ice cream and candies at the expense of feeling good all the time.

  All this healthy living was starting to make me feel alive. I’d never even realized I felt half dead.

  CHAPTER 6

  Stumbling Blocks

  There were a dozen yellow and red roses on my desk. There was no card, but I knew they were from my mom. They appeared in the middle of March after I’d lost forty pounds in two months to weigh 330 pounds. The flowers were a much better show of support than the Hershey’s Kisses she’d given me on Valentine’s Day. I didn’t eat roses.

  By the beginning of April, I was down another ten pounds. Bizarrely, I even lost seven pounds the week I ate too many Cadbury Creme eggs for Easter. I’d now lost the equivalent of the two tubs of kitty litter that I always struggled to carry inside from the car. I just had to repeat that loss three more times, but it wasn’t going to happen on the same brisk schedule. For the next several months my rate of loss stabilized to about ten pounds a month. The rational part of my mind that worried about loose skin was glad that the rapid rate was decreasing, but the pleasureseeking part of my brain was going to miss those thrilling months in which I lost five or six pounds a week. I’d been waiting
my whole life to be thin. I didn’t want to wait any longer.

  Four months was the longest I’d ever been able to sustain a period of weight loss. My good mojo was partly my own doing and partly luck. I was more educated than I’d ever been before. (I could name four types of fats, three macronutrients, and two types of cholesterol.) My plan focused on foods I could eat, which was a more positive approach than focusing only on foods I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t tempted by sour cream and onion potato chips because my family kept them out of the house or at least hidden under their beds. There were no stressful events to send me running to the frozen desserts section of the grocery store. My treadmill was still working, and we had a service plan this time in case it did break. I also knew that it would take more than a year to get to goal, so I was settling in for a long ride. There was no shortcut.

  I was pretty sure my clothes were getting looser. All my pants had elastic waistbands, so I wasn’t sure. My brother and mother claimed my face looked more slender, but they knew I’d been trying to become thinner. My boss and coworkers hadn’t said a thing.

  There was a box at the bottom of my closet marked SKINNY CLOTHES, which was full of garments that most people would have labeled FAT CLOTHES. My younger brother’s girlfriend had seen the box one day and commented, “Huh, I have a box like that too.” She wasn’t even fat. Maybe every girl, fat or thin, has a box of skinny clothes in the closet, a box of hope waiting to be opened before its contents have gone out of style.

  I pulled on a couple of the shirts. They fit. I pulled on a pair of pants and was able to walk around in them, but I’d have to wait another ten pounds if I wanted to sit down and breathe at the same time. I’d never cared much about clothes and had been perplexed by my friends who read lots of fashion magazines, but when I looked in the mirror, I felt so sexy and cool, at least in relation to how unsexy and uncool I’d felt just three months earlier. There might be something to this whole fashion thing after all.