I didn’t have any distinct memories of what my knees or my hips felt like one hundred pounds earlier, but they seemed different. When I continued feeling up my side like a clumsy high school boy, I could feel my ribs and count how many I had. One, two, three, four, not as chubby as before. The next day when I rubbed my chin in thought, I noticed I was trying to roll the skin farther than was possible. My body was melting like an iceberg. I might be discovering a frozen caveman between my butt cheeks soon.
For months, whenever I put my hands on my hips and felt the edge of a bone I also felt a split second of surprise. Previously I had thought it was uncomfortable to rest my hands in fists on my hips like Peter Pan, but I realized it wasn’t that hard when you could actually settle them into the curve of the bone. It wasn’t much longer before my collarbones started to emerge. I tapped on them like a xylophone while staring at the computer screen.
My body was finally catching up with the way my mind had always perceived it to be. Anorexics have body dysmorphic disorder, which makes them think they are fatter than they actually are. Even when their ribs show through their flesh, in their heads they think they’re fat. Mentally I seemed to have an inverted form of anorexia, unable to truly grasp how fat I was.
The image of myself in my head was that of normal weight. If I were to draw a picture of myself, I’d make myself skinnier than I was without really noticing. In the movie The Matrix, this illusion was called residual self-image. Even though the character of Neo had a closely shaved head of hair in the real world, he had a full head of hair in the cyber reality of the Matrix. I was fat, I knew I was fat, yet if I were to enter the Matrix, I would have been thin.
This was clear if you looked at any of my Internet avatars, the icons I used on message boards or instant messenger to represent myself. Online everyone can exist in soft lighting, with Vaseline smeared on the camera lens. I sent the prettiest, most lovely version of myself out there, online or off. Unfortunately I couldn’t digitally erase the zit on my cheek before a date.
The desire to look good was evident in my “fat girl angle shot.” Classic signs: looking up at the camera to hide a double chin, high contrast, cropped from the neck up. My first online photo was a textbook example, complete with a high camera angle, hair across my face, and cavelike lighting—all obvious attempts to hide my fatness, or the fact that I could barely afford light bulbs.
This mental image was shaken whenever I saw photos of myself looming large over a thinner person standing next to me. One night I forgot to pull the venetian blinds down on the window next to my computer desk and was completely disgusted when I caught the eye of my reflection in the window. As I sat at my desk, the fat puddled all around me, particularly in my thighs and belly, making me look larger than I’d ever imagined possible. I quickly pulled the curtains closed.
The living color of video made me curse the invention of the cathode-ray tube. In my college speech class, all our speeches were taped. We had to review our performances to critique ourselves after each speech. The round, obese girl on the video was out of sync with the image of myself in my head. I did not move like that. I did not look like that. I could watch only a couple of seconds at a time, and then I’d fast-forward through the freak show, my sped-up swaying making me look like a bowling pin about to topple. When I was done, I took care to tape over my five minutes of arguments about why Indiana should adopt daylight saving time, erasing the image from existence in a way I’d never been able to do in real life.
Even though I could see the difference in the mirror or on a tape, these moments of clarity lasted less than a minute. For the majority of my day, I did not look at myself. I looked at other people. I was like a dog raised by cats who thinks she’s a kitten. It seemed to me that most people in the world were only mildly overweight or of average size. When I’d been my fattest, finding someone who was as obese as me was rare. Being surrounded by people who weren’t enormous made me think that I looked like them too.
Even when I worked with other fat people, I dissociated myself from them. At one job, I worked with an overweight, diabetic middle-aged woman. She would trudge slowly from the door to her chair like the air was made of thick chocolate syrup that she struggled to plow through. On some level, I knew that I could be her in twenty years, yet I would separate myself from her in my mind. She was not like me. I was not that fat. I did not look like that, though most likely I did. And even if I did, I still had time to avoid that fate if I got my ass off my ergonomic chair.
This erroneous self-image is partly what prevented me from acknowledging my weight problem. Even as the pounds kept piling on, my self-image remained skinny and allowed me to live comfortably in denial of the problem creeping up around me.
I hadn’t successfully eliminated all video imagery of my fat years, though. I was sorting through old data CDs and files on my computer when I found a video I shot for film class in college. It starred my cat, Officer Krupke, and revealed what he did when I left my apartment. It started to the bouncy tones of “What’s New, Pussycat?” but as soon as I left my place, “Cat Scratch Fever” kicked in and Krupke proceeded to order catnip online, watch Catwoman on TV, raid the fridge, and place his butt on my scanner for a cat scan. I was pleased to find that it was funny, but what wasn’t funny was how huge I was.
Had I really been that large and lumbering? I seemed to waddle like an overgrown penguin. I’d destroyed all my speech class videos, but I had forgotten about this piece of footage. Seeing pictures of my old, morbidly obese self was jarring, but seeing how all that weight had made me move was shocking.
I caught a shot of my refrigerator on the video as Krupke stole some sliced turkey from the second shelf. My eyes raised in judgment when I saw twenty-four-packs of regular, nondiet soda on the shelves. I wasted hundreds of calories a day sipping that liquid candy, making me fatter without filling me up.
My younger brother Jim had played the catnip delivery man, so I dragged him over to my computer to share in the shock. His jaw hit the keyboard hard enough to type nonsense words and leave keyboard marks on his chin. I was fat. He was fat. We were both so fat!
Could people really comprehend their own physical changes without the proof of photographs and videos? Now you can buy a disposable camera at any drugstore, but affordable cameras have been available to most people only within the past century. Some people could have had drawings made or portraits painted, but that was probably beyond the budget of the average person. Even if you did sit for a painting, how much of the difference in your looks would you attribute to actual change, and how much to the artist’s interpretation?
Without my fat pictures and videos, I might not have believed how much I’d physically transformed. After those speedy first months the weight had come off slowly, just like it had arrived, slithering in and out of my life. There were days when I prayed I could wake up thin. I’d wish that I could raise a magic sword above my head, yell some enchanted words, and undergo a transformation sequence complete with glitter and sparkles and an unseen chorus singing my theme song, transforming me instantly from fat to thin. But if my shock at seeing my old fat self was any indication, perhaps it was better that I was transforming slowly. If I were to suddenly wake up in a thin body, I wouldn’t know how to act. It’s easy to say, “Just be yourself,” but who I was had been shaped by how other people treated me, and right or wrong, that was determined by how I looked.
As strange as this transformation was for me, I was not entirely sure how it affected other people in my life. My boss hadn’t mentioned the subject. He’d complained that staring at a computer monitor all day for the last decade had hurt his vision, but if he hadn’t noticed that I was no longer in danger of breaking our cheap office chairs, he should have been checked for cataracts. My boss was friendly and easygoing, so I thought he would at least mention my metamorphosis in passing after the first hundred pounds, but day after day I sat in my office chair without a word from him about my appearance. At least if I o
ne day transformed into a gigantic beetle I wouldn’t have to worry about my job security, provided I learned to type with my antennae. It wasn’t until I was weighing in under 200 pounds and told him I was writing a book about my weight loss that I first broached the topic. He said he had definitely noticed and had wanted to compliment me, but he was just playing it safe since he didn’t know how to tactfully approach the subject. It can be difficult to compliment someone’s weight loss without implying she looked like a big, fat blob before. As a man and as my boss, he was also hesitant to say anything about my appearance for fear that it would be misinterpreted as flirtation or harassment.
The dynamic between female friends could be tricky too. My oldest friend, Cristy, hadn’t been returning my phone calls. We met when we were both thin second-graders, and then we both got fat. I had gained weight first and felt a twisted sort of happiness a couple of years later when she started gaining too. I liked that I wasn’t alone in the elastic waistband. A year earlier I had Photoshopped a picture of us so we both looked thinner. I was moving that image into the real world, but the supermodel-thin version of my friend still existed only in the picture frame. Cristy lived several hours away, so I saw her only a couple times a year. She’d never been in contention for the title of “World’s Best Email Correspondent,” nor had she been good at that old thing we used to do with envelopes and paper and pens, either.
It wasn’t uncommon for us to go months without talking to each other, but the silence was starting to become extreme. We had talked on the phone a couple of times, and I’d told her I had lost a lot of weight. I’d gotten some emails since then and a postcard from a Disney cruise, but that was it. The first ten months I attributed this to Cristy’s being her regular, busy, communication-challenged self. She was married, worked a full-time job, and went to school part time. As I flipped more pages on my monthly calendar, I got the creeping suspicion that my weight loss might be pushing us apart. How had my decrease in size made her feel? I thought she was genuinely happy for me, but that joy might be laced with pain. I wanted to lose weight, not friends. If the situation were reversed, I’d probably be jealous of her for doing something I couldn’t. I hoped that wouldn’t stop me from returning her calls. I was the same person, just in different packaging. She might be unsure that the stuff inside was still the same, as I had been when the manufacturer had changed the design of my favorite yogurt cups.
I hoped I was being paranoid and Cristy was just being Cristy. There might be something else going on with her that had nothing to do with me or with the continental drift in the tectonics of our relationship. The longer this went on, the more shocking it would be when we eventually did see each other again. What if it got to the point where she walked past me without recognizing me? If I dyed my hair, got contact lenses and a nose ring, I’d be more incognito than a member of the Witness Protection Program. I called her sometimes, but I usually got voice mail because she worked a third-shift job and I worked nine to five.
After sixteen months, I finally met up with Cristy at a women’s study conference close to my city. I had lost about 150 pounds since I’d seen her last. I was in the back of the room when she hurried in to present her project. I snuck up behind her, braced for her unpredictable reaction. She smiled and exclaimed, “Jennette!” and got up to embrace me in a hug, fitting her arms around my entire body for once. “You look great!” she said with a smile in her eyes and not just on her mouth.
I was relieved she recognized me. We spent the rest of the day together and I purposely avoided talking about anything related to weight. I had always wondered why no one had staged an intervention on me when I was almost 400 pounds. I got my answer when I was far too chicken to ask one of my best friends if she hated me because I was thinner. It would have been impossible to do without bringing up the topic of her own weight, and I really didn’t want to go there. I even made a point of eating the chocolate fudge brownie served with lunch just to show that I wasn’t a dieting Nazi who wanted everyone to eat tomato salads. If I had still been fat, I might have avoided eating the chocolate dessert just to show everyone that fat people didn’t subsist only on brownies. Both approaches were rather dumb. I doubt that anyone cared what I ate for lunch. I don’t remember what anyone else had. My lunch was not a political statement.
It wasn’t until I was weighing in under 200 pounds and told her I was writing a book about my weight loss that I brought up the topic. The secret to approaching your friends and coworkers about an uncomfortable topic: Write a book about it. It just becomes research. As she put it, “I was thrilled for you and super jealous. And while I wasn’t overtly avoiding you (I just suck), I know it crossed my mind as to how this would change our friendship, both in good and ‘bad’ ways. Like getting ice cream together, or something. I love you, and I’m both ecstatic and awed by your hard work and great results. Whatever issues I have with my fat ass have nothing to do with our friendship, except that now you’re my role model, too.”
We still go out for ice cream together.
CHAPTER 8
The Girl in the Mirror
The restroom mirror was missing.
This was a problem because I could not check out how cute I was. I used to wish there were no mirrors in the world, like the king and queen’s campaign to have all the spinning wheels destroyed in Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom. But now I looked forward to going to the ladies’ room during my work day so I could see how much skinnier I had become. I needed to confirm that fact every few hours. I was afraid the front paunch might reappear while I was typing.
It had been a year and I still wasn’t thin. I weighed 242 pounds, down 130, but still obese according to my body mass index. I was feeling much skinnier. I actually weighed eight pounds less than what my driver’s license said. If workers at the Department of Motor Vehicles had a dollar for every pound people have lied about on their driver’s licenses, they wouldn’t have to work at the DMV anymore. The last time I weighed this much, I felt so fat that I had speed walked past my reflection. Now I felt so thin that I was striking poses like I was in a Madonna video. If anyone wants to feel good about herself, gaining a hundred pounds and then losing it is one way to go. It made me feel like a superstar. Until the janitor hung a replacement mirror on the wall, my love affair with myself was going on a break. I’d have to wait until I could go home and admire myself between the toothpaste spittle spots on my own bathroom mirror.
I had never been vain before. I didn’t know how to apply eyeliner without scraping my cornea. I shaved my legs as frequently as new Supreme Court justices were appointed. My lack of concern about my image probably helped me gain so much weight in the first place. Those days were over. The mirror let me admire the results of my hard work and recalibrate my self-image on a daily basis as I shrank.
There is a painting by Pablo Picasso called Girl Before a Mirror that depicts a woman in warm colors looking at her reflection in an ovalshaped, floor-length mirror. Her mirror twin is painted in cold colors with a slightly different appearance, as though the girl can’t see herself as she really is, or the way the world sees her isn’t the way she is inside. I’d had a print of this painting hanging in my living room for years, but I felt like I understood it more than I ever had before. I certainly felt beautiful, but I wasn’t sure if what I saw in the mirror was the same thing people were seeing outside the looking glass. I didn’t know if it even mattered.
I returned to my office desk and crossed my legs one over the other. I was crossing my legs all the time now just because I could. A year ago I was as likely to be able to cross my legs as I was to run cross-country. Now my thighs were slim enough to accommodate the proper angle required for this traditional ladylike pose. I looked at my wristwatch as I began to type and noticed I was down four notches on the band, about an inch. I was amazed there had been that much fat in my wrist; I thought the skin there covered only bone and veins and ligaments. My best excuse for not giving blood was rapidly disappearing. Nurses had al
ways had trouble finding my veins, but now my arms sported faint blue lines scattered under my translucent skin instead of the red stretch marks I’d so hated. The scores of stretch marks on my belly had faded to a shiny color, like streaks of raindrops on a windshield. If I inhaled deeply they would pucker slightly out from my body. They were my fat scars.
I still had about eighty pounds to lose before I hit my arbitrarily determined goal weight. When I was washing all my flabby bits in the shower, I started to wonder exactly how that excess weight was distributed. It was like trying to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. My belly alone must have had at least twenty-five pounds. I guessed at least another twenty-five pounds in my ass. If my arms had five pounds each, that would leave twenty pounds in my legs. That couldn’t be right. Maybe my ass wasn’t as big as I thought? Unfortunately, I couldn’t swivel my head around to check because I wasn’t possessed by the devil. I’d just have to go with what I saw in the mirror. I could have been overestimating my arm weight. The upper arms looked like bat wings, but how much did they really weigh? I was hesitant to underestimate them since I’d never suspected there could be so much fat in my wrist.
My mother insisted that my shoe size would get smaller too, but I didn’t think I had that much fat in my feet. I had heard a snide comment or two about the size of my ass, but no one had ever accused me of having chunky toes. There wasn’t a special shoe store for fat people. But she argued that my arches might become less bowed as my weight decreased, which could cause me to go down a size or two.
As I continued working, I felt chilly despite the sweater buttoned up over my long-sleeve shirt. I felt cold lately, and I was considering investing in a space heater. Either that or I’d break down my absent coworker’s desk to build a fire on top of the photocopier. I could use my Lean Cuisine packaging for kindling. At first I had been convinced that my office was cold because it was situated in a converted warehouse that had self-washing floors. The fact that water leaked between the window frames during thunderstorms had to have been a new age design scheme, not a sign of rust and decay and poor insulation from the elements. My boss didn’t think it was cold, but I had always suspected he was an alien from the planet of lava men.
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