Half-Assed

by Jennette Fulda

  Then I gained weight.

  It was only two pounds, but it was the first time the numbers had gone up since I’d started monitoring my weight. My first instinct was to blame it on my menstrual cycle. I always lost less weight the week of my period. Then I’d lose several pounds the week afterward. My body was retaining water, so even though I hadn’t gained fat I had gained weight. The scale was too stupid to notice this. I felt bad for all the women who competed on The Biggest Loser show, since they were obviously at a disadvantage compared to the men thanks to this fluke of the menstrual cycle.

  My girly hormones might also explain why I’d felt the need to eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from the vending machine that week. I hadn’t been walking as much lately, either. I wasn’t being completely lazy; I’d just had two colds in three weeks, and I already wheezed enough when I exercised. If I tried breathing through a layer of phlegm, I might suffocate. I spent evenings on the couch instead, worrying and fretting that a microscopic virus might mark the end of my successful loss and herald the beginning of a long gain. Small slides were how bad habits started. A few days off could become a few weeks, and then a few months, until I was left wondering where it all went wrong. I needed to get back into the routine before the path I’d worn down was overgrown with weeds.

  Of course, the cold might make me lose weight. The chicken broth diet was probably slimming.

  I was also starting to get bored. Bored with my food. Bored with walking. Weight loss was a repetitive task. Eat right, exercise, sleep, repeat. Forever. I opened up my cookbooks again and looked for new recipes that wouldn’t require me to buy something weird like muskrat root. I had to keep answering the same question every night, “What are you having for dinner?” I was sick of it. Why couldn’t other people answer the question for me? And then do all the cooking? And while they were at it, could they lose all this weight for me too? My family had erratic work hours and could not be counted on to cook dinner regularly, so I was responsible for all of my own meals. The year before I would have just gone to McDonald’s or Taco Bell if I didn’t want to prepare something. Now that wasn’t an option. Instead, I was leaving plates of leftover food in the microwave for my shocked yet grateful mother.

  I noticed I wasn’t sweating during my walk as much as I used to, so I kicked up the treadmill speed by a couple of tenths of a mile and increased the incline. I didn’t enjoy hauling my huge ass up the slight hill, but I did it anyway.

  I was doing a lot of things I didn’t particularly want to do. I suppose that might be the definition of discipline. I had to override my desire to do what I wanted in the short term to get what I wanted in the long term. I couldn’t support the fast-food industry and expect to get a slender body. Living healthy took so much time and effort. I’d barely worked on my other personal projects since I’d started. My bag of crochet work looked so lonely leaning against the bookcase, but I doubted needle arts burned many calories.

  There was a battle raging between two parts of myself, Current Me and Future Me. Current Me was gung-ho about losing weight, eating healthy, and eschewing the elevator in favor of the stairs. Future Me would think about how close the convenience store was and how easy it would be to buy a bag of Reese’s Pieces without anyone’s knowing. I hated that bitch. Those two girls were locked in an endless boxing match with an infinite set of rounds.

  Then one day Future Me bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

  I had made a few small transgressions from my eating plan out of ignorance. I’d bought a salad at a fast-food place and later looked up the nutritional information online, only to discover the dressing had more fat than I did. The server went rather heavy on the bacon bits too, as if he were flinging pork confetti at a parade. If we were playing the blame game, I didn’t deserve a penalty for that. I did deserve a foul for the ice cream.

  I collapsed on the couch after work, sick of writing code and sick of the headache that Excedrin had not cured. I was out of Lean Cuisines and yogurt and diet sodas, and I knew I had to go to the grocery store if I wanted to eat lunch tomorrow. I looked at my reflection in the TV set, trying to talk my likeness into going to the store for me. She just sat on the couch and stared back at me.

  There was one good reason to go to the store. That’s where they kept the ice cream. I suddenly wanted to get off the couch. I returned with lots of healthy food and one pint of ice cream. A half hour later only the healthy food was left.

  I felt so much better. I hadn’t had any ice cream since December. Strangely, I didn’t even feel all that bad about eating it. I hadn’t purposely strayed from my diet since I’d started. It felt good to break the perfect spree. In high school I’d gotten all As for three years. By senior year I wasn’t just scared of bees with wings and stingers but of big ones in capital letters on my report card. I’d been academically perfect for so long that it would have been traumatic to screw up right before becoming valedictorian. I managed to sustain my streak through high school, but when I gotaBin my first semester of college, I was relieved. Being perfect was way too exhausting. I’d had my ice cream. I’d enjoyed it. My perfect dieting streak was broken. Now I’d just get back on track and make sure this didn’t become a habit.

  I lost a pound that week anyway. I hadn’t even walked for three days. My body made absolutely no sense. Some weeks the scale was a distracted referee who missed reprimanding me on a foul. Other weeks it made a bad call despite my lack of errors.

  I didn’t feel bad about chomping down on the cherry chocolate chip ice cream, but I did determine its caloric content: 1,040 calories. That was not something I’d done before. In my previous life, I’d gone back for two or three soft-serve ice cream cones at the all-you-can-eat Sizzler buffet and never regretted it at all. Now I had a heightened awareness of how different foods would affect my body, and I doubted I could ever flip off the light switch on this enlightenment. I’d always vaguely known that a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese was bad for me, but discovering it had 740 calories was shocking. That was half a day’s worth of food for some people. Fleshing out the details was like the difference between knowing there was a war going on in another country and seeing photos of a child mutilated by a land mine. The specific was far more shocking than the generalization.

  It didn’t seem to hurt me that badly anyway. Only a couple of weeks later, at the beginning of June, I stepped on the scale and a smile curled on my face when I saw the number 298. I was out of the 300s! I could weigh myself on regular bathroom scales now! I realized this milestone was just a fluke of our base-ten numbering system. If we had eight fingers I probably would have gotten excited when I hit 320 pounds, which is 500 in octet. But I wasn’t going to let mathematical overanalysis get in the way of a party. I was under 300 pounds! I was already one-third of the way to my goal after only four and a half months. There was no reason to feel bad about canoodling with Ben & Jerry from time to time.

  The next time I ate ice cream I felt differently.

  The woman backing out of the parking spot behind me at the bookstore had not mastered the ability to drive and talk on her cell phone at the same time. The price of my brother’s birthday gift card was twenty bucks, but it cost me $700 damage to my back driver’s side door. I came home and ate his cupcakes. And some ice cream. And some cake the next day. And then some cookies for the Fourth of July, though by that point I’d already been awarded a check by the driver’s insurance company, so I had no good excuse for pigging out. I’d actually earned money from the accident. At best I could claim that I thought the sounds of fireworks were signs of the coming Apocalypse and I’d decided to go out with my mouth mashed full of snickerdoodles. Two weeks later I was so tired of cooking dinner that I decided to buy an Extra Value Meal at McDonald’s.

  “No! Don’t do it!” my brother called from the kitchen as I escaped through the back door. I pretended I didn’t hear him. My family’s support had gotten me a long way, but it wasn’t going to get me to the drive-through.

>   My first ice cream indulgence had been an isolated incident, but this was becoming a multiple-week bender. I felt bad, not just emotionally, but physically. All that sugar made me sleepy and moody. I’d forgotten how much better I felt when I ate well. I’d gone through most of my life in a sugar coma and I had no desire to go back. I didn’t want to become someone who apologized whenever she ate a piece of cake, but I couldn’t recklessly eat whatever I wanted to anymore, either. If I did that I’d be trading my fortieth birthday cake for a daily injection of insulin.

  Thankfully there were no birthdays to celebrate for several months. By now my healthier ways had become habits that I was able to pick up again. I’d never dropped them completely anyway, just fumbled the ball a couple of times without letting it completely hit the ground. Besides, I didn’t have much else to do. I hadn’t made many friends since we’d moved out of state several years ago. Friday nights were not spent at clubs with techno music blasting through speakers; they were spent on the treadmill with techno music blasting through my tinny earphones.

  I still resented the fact that I had to bother with any of this. I’d never dieted because I wanted eating to be simple. This was complicated. I felt ridiculous counting out exactly thirty pistachios for my midafternoon snack. If I counted out twenty-nine by mistake, was I going to be chewing on the plastic bag in ravenous hunger before lunch? If I counted out thirty-one was I doomed to a life of obesity? I wished I could instinctively eat whatever I wanted without worrying, but the last time I’d done that I’d gained 200 pounds.

  I was still confused about what was “good” or “bad” for me. A dozen cookies were definitely bad, but one cookie was okay, right? When did the number of cookies I ate become too high to be part of a healthy diet? I didn’t know, so I stuck to a small set of foods that I knew were “safe.” I was hesitant to try anything new that might screw me up. I was still wrapping my head around all the new information I’d learned in the past five months. My brain was full. I wanted to find a place where I was nutritionally responsible but still indulged occasionally without giving myself unnecessary reprimands. A life without ice cream wasn’t a life worth living.

  But I still had to live in a world that made healthy eating as easy as stuffing my ass into size 4 jeans. I’d avidly avoided eating out with friends or relatives while I was relearning how to eat. Reprogramming my brain was hard enough without having to deal with the social pressures of eating. Picking the healthiest item on a menu was going to be my advanced dieting entrance exam. I managed to put it off until the beginning of August, when I’d lost ninety pounds and weighed 282 pounds. My mom had a steak house gift card, which we decided to use to celebrate the fact that the day ended in a “y.” I fearfully stared down a menu full of deep-fried items. I searched through the menu, looking for the one item that wasn’t covered in butter or soaked in saturated fats.

  “What is the chicken fried in?” I asked the waitress.

  “Lard,” she replied. Damn, the restaurant wasn’t even bothering to lie about it. I’d seen buckets of lard sold at the grocery store and wondered why it didn’t sell 45-millimeter handguns next to them so you could just shoot yourself in the “baking needs” aisle.

  The waitress started to place a basket of bread on the table. I looked at my mother tensely. I didn’t want to fill up on empty calories, but I didn’t want to stop her from enjoying some hot rolls if she wanted them.

  “I don’t really need any bread, but if you want to ...” I trailed off, shrugging.

  “No bread for us,” she told the waitress. “My daughter’s lost a lot of weight,” she said proudly. I looked down at my menu, somewhat embarrassed but hiding a small smile behind the laminated paper. I got the impression my mother wanted me to tell our server how much weight I’d lost, but I didn’t like to say unless directly asked. I didn’t want to brag, especially considering the fact that I was still very obese. If I said I’d lost ninety pounds I bet most people would have thought, Damn, you must have been humongous before.

  I was tempted by the “bad” foods on the menu. I knew it was hypothetically possible to eat fried foods and potato salads in small portions and still lose weight, but that style of eating was beyond me. I didn’t want to screw up what seemed to be working with a plate of french fries.

  I skipped over the fried mushrooms in favor of the steamed vegetables, though I honestly would have preferred the fried mushrooms. The word “lard” kept echoing in my head, which made the decision easier. I talked to my lunch companion instead of stuffing my face with bread while waiting for the main meal. I ordered water instead of a soda. It was strange behavior. Wearing the menu on my head as a hat would have appeared normal in comparison.

  The strangest thing was that I could now slide into the booth without my belly brushing against the table. I even had three inches to spare. It was the small things in life that mattered, and I was definitely getting smaller.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Incredible Shrinking Woman

  “Hey lady, have you lost weight?”

  Saundra, the artist who worked down the hallway from me, was calling me “lady” because she couldn’t remember my name, but I didn’t care because she was the first person who did not share some of my DNA to comment on my weight loss. I had to lose only the equivalent of a small antelope to hear it.

  “Oh yeah, I have,” I said, not quite sure how to react.

  “You look great!” she said with a chipper smile. She seemed genuinely happy for me.

  “Oh, uh, thanks,” I said as a grin crossed my face of its own volition, as if my mouth muscles had declared a coup against my visage. She was complimenting me. I knew there was a graceful way to take a compliment, but I hadn’t yet learned what that was. I’d have to Google that when I got back to the office.

  I wasn’t used to being the center of attention. It’s possible I gained weight so I wouldn’t have to be. But if I were going to get thinner, I was going to have to deal with the fact that other people were going to notice. I’d been noticing it myself.

  Lately, I had liked to play “Is she fatter than me?” It was a game that could be played anywhere, in the produce aisle of the grocery store, in line at the pharmacy, or even in the comfort of your own home as you watched television. All it required was a working pair of eyes and another female in your line of sight. You compared the size and shape of your body to that of your competitor’s until you determined who was fatter. The thinnest girl won. The prize was a mix of smug satisfaction and self-disgust that you were playing the game at all.

  I never used to play this sport because I always lost. I was fatter than everyone. It was a zero-sum game, but now I could win occasionally. I liked winning, but I also felt that it made me a very bad person. I shouldn’t have to feel good about myself by putting down someone else. Certainly it shouldn’t have been another female who struggled in the same culture as I did, which put such great value on what a woman looks like. We should be helping each other out, not cutting each other down.

  Yet I constantly sized people up, male or female, fat or thin, so I knew what my relationship in society was to them. Was this person prettier than me? Was this person smarter than me? Did she have more money? Did he have more power? I needed to know where I stood in relation to others so I knew how to act around them. Frequently that first impression was determined by looks.

  It was particularly silly because at 275 pounds I still had more than 100 pounds to lose. I was so much thinner, but people who passed me on the street knew nothing about my metamorphosis. They still categorized me as a fat girl when they did their own internal audit of my looks. The women I was now thinner than could have lost weight too. How would I know? Yet I still enjoyed seeing women who were fatter than me. I liked to remember where I came from.

  My body had changed so much since then. I could fit my ass in a seat at the movie theater without my hip fat piling up against the cup holder. After I lost another six pounds to weigh 269, I was no longer morbidly o
bese, according to my BMI. It was just vanilla-flavored obesity for me. I was finally at a point where the weight-loss ads on TV would sometimes list my current size as someone’s “before” weight. I was probably the only 269-pound woman in the world who felt skinny, but compared to my old self I was a willow.

  I felt a twisted sense of satisfaction that I had more weight to lose than anyone I knew, as though this would make my final accomplishment all the more grand. In school I would sometimes trade eyeglasses with a classmate and whoever had the worst vision “won,” as if you’d confirmed you had more of a right to four eyes than the other person. I felt the same odd superiority knowing that I might one day be able to say I’d lost 210 pounds, as if weight loss were a competition.

  I felt like a winner as my body changed. When I was driving to work later that week I asked the windshield, “Has that building been painted?” The windshield never answered me, but I was pretty sure the siding hadn’t been that white the day before. I didn’t know what color the building had been previously, but I knew it had changed. That’s how I felt about my body.

  While lying in bed one night, I rolled on my side and adjusted my legs on top of one another so my knees were touching. I suddenly noticed I could feel bones beneath the skin where previously there had been a cushy layer of fat. It was as if someone had popped the Bubble Wrap around my legs. I rubbed my hand up my side and could feel the outline of my pelvic bone. My gynecologist had told me I had a pelvis, but I thought she was just starting a rumor. Was it possible I might have a skeletal system too? I’d seen my foot bones in an x-ray when I banged my toe on the stairwell as a child, but I sometimes doubted my other bones existed because they were tucked tightly under a comforter of fat.