Half-Assed

by Jennette Fulda

  I decided to set early August of the next year as D-day. I wouldn’t be storming the beaches of Normandy, although that would be great cardio. No, this was the date my older brother had set for his wedding. I’d weigh 160 pounds or else ... I’d have to buy a bigger dress.

  No matter how long I’d been at this, I noticed that I always seemed to be a year away from my goal. The previous fall I’d celebrated my birthday by determining that at my current rate of loss I’d be at goal in a year. Many months later I was still a year away from goal. What strange twisting of space-time was this? It made me think of Zeno’s Paradox: To get from point A to point B you must first travel halfway there. Once you got halfway there you had to then travel halfway between the remaining distance. Then you had to travel halfway again. You had to continue doing this infinitely, which begged the question, “How the hell did we actually manage to go anywhere at all?” I didn’t know.

  I did know that we managed to get from point A to point B. I could get to goal too, but I would have to struggle through the dieting trifecta of doom first: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. During this time I had to pass candy displays built in the middle of the grocery store, monuments of tribute to a religion I no longer practiced. The landscape for those months consisted of fields of candy corn, a sky full of pumpkin pies, and a sea of eggnog with creamy foam breakers. The abundance of feast holidays during the winter months might have heralded from the need to eat more when it was colder. Or people just loved an excuse to eat like pigs.

  Thanksgiving and Christmas were supposed to be times to celebrate family and life, but it was also time to pay tribute to my gastric system. When I heard the magic clinking of green and red M&M’s being poured into a glass bowl, I still came skittering around the corner like my cat when he heard kibble bouncing into his bowl. Pavlov might have had something to say about that, but I wouldn’t have heard him over the crunching in my mouth.

  When I snuck a peek at the scale two days after Christmas to weigh the damage I’d done with chocolate-covered cherries and candy canes, I discovered I’d lost two pounds. Perhaps all the chocolate acted as a laxative? I couldn’t explain it. After my Christmas bender, I confessed my sins on the blog, like a good old-fashioned Catholic. Bless me, Father, for I have binged. I had been to a Catholic confession only once before I’d stopped going to church, but I spilled my eating sins online much more frequently, waiting for forgiveness from my readers. If only my body would have granted me indulgences like the church used to. For a small fee I could have gotten my dieting sins erased.

  The holidays were different these days because I did feel guilty. In previous years I could eat half a pumpkin pie and a tub of whipped cream on Thanksgiving and feel fine about it. I had no idea how many calories it had or how badly it would affect my body. Now I was enlightened, thrown out of the Garden of Eden with only an apple to munch on.

  As I went through life, I acquired and lost certain filters. The things happening in my life, be it my job or losing weight, shaped the way I looked at the world. When I worked at a copy store for a year designing resumes and business cards, I not only got a regular paycheck but also developed the “Compulsively Identify Fonts” filter. Customers frequently requested that we re-create an item exactly, so I had to learn to identify fonts. Within a week of starting, I nearly collided with a car on the expressway because I couldn’t keep my eyes off a billboard with an unidentifiable sans serif font. I saw the musical Ragtime and spent thirty seconds of the show distracted by a banner on stage, trying to determine if it used Bodoni Poster or Britannic Bold. I couldn’t watch television without randomly yelling out font names used in commercials, seeing glares not from light bouncing off the TV screen but from my family. When my job was eventually eliminated and we were all laid off, I was grateful because I finally stopped randomly yelling the names of dead font designers like a Tourette’s sufferer.

  Since I started losing weight, I had acquired the “You’re Actually Going to Eat That Crap?” filter. At my extended family’s Christmas Eve dinner it was kicked into overdrive at the sight of deep-fried chicken set next to potato salad slathered in mayonnaise, which was low fat only in comparison to a bathtub full of chicken fat. This filter made me a judgmental asshole, but I at least had the sense to be a silent judgmental asshole. I couldn’t turn off the filter even if I wanted to. Two years ago a pepperoni pizza made me think Yum! and now it made me think Is that cheese low fat?

  Unlike the font filter, this was a good filter to have. It kept me from gaining weight. But if I were to ignore it for too long, it would probably have faded away just like my other filters. It also made me painfully aware of how poorly my fellow citizens ate. I’d never realized this when I was one of them.

  Social eating was the most frequent trigger for a slipup. When I was in my own kitchen, the worst thing I could do, other than cut a finger off, was to eat an entire bowl of sugar-free, fat-free pudding. Out in the real world, the gun was loaded, the safety was off, and I was a dollar menu away from shooting myself in my pinky toe. I wanted to be part of the group and celebrate birthdays and anniversaries at restaurants, but it was difficult to do that without overeating. Sometimes I wished I were an alcoholic so I’d have a good excuse not to go out drinking.

  I found myself pondering how many calories were in a single M&M. I didn’t know because I’d never eaten only one M&M, unless I unearthed it in the sofa cushions while searching for the remote control. Surely stale M&M’s lost calories with age, like the half-life of radioactive materials. After doing some division, I determined that there are 3.4 calories in a milk chocolate M&M. I looked it up after attending a baby shower for a woman (and baby) I didn’t even know, because it had been a better question to ponder at the time than “If I faked a folding-chair malfunction to break my arm, would they let me leave for the hospital immediately or make me wait fifteen minutes for an ambulance?”

  As with any social event, I had to face “The Trial of the Buffet Table.” The candy-corn cups and vanilla cake and sherbet were easily avoided because I’d eaten two hours beforehand. Vanilla wasn’t even in the same league of dieting temptations as chocolate. Each guest also received a foam flower centerpiece in a miniature flowerpot containing a bag of M&Ms. Earlier in the year I had read a study that showed people were more likely to eat candy if it were put within easy reach.4 You didn’t have to be a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to know that! I’d figured it out by the third handful.

  I lasted an hour before I started digging into my flowerpot, just a couple at first and then some more until I’d eventually eaten thirty candies out of boredom. At least I’d squashed my ability to scream by filling my mouth with chocolate. Otherwise I would have yelled, “Why must the baby have two dozen blankets?! Is she going to be sleeping in the freezer?”

  At least I didn’t face pressures like this at work. My company had three employees including me. There were no birthday parties with cupcakes, no boxes of donuts lying in the lobby, no Christmas parties where I’d have to trip the waiter serving hors d’oeuvres to prevent myself from pigging out. It was just me, the microwave, and my Lean Cuisines. Once or twice my boss suggested ordering pizza and I told him, “No thanks.” I didn’t have health insurance, but the low-pressure eating environment was doing wonders for my health.

  My health had been doing wonders for my family’s health too. Several months after my mother sold the house and we had all moved to our own apartments, she called me. “Hey,” I said, recognizing her familiar voice. I put down my fork. I was eating dinner way too fast like I always did. I needed to slow down and enjoy the food, but I still ate as if I were trying to win a hotdog-eating contest.

  “Hi,” she replied warmly. “I was just calling to thank you.”

  “Oh, for what?”

  “For keeping all that junk food out of the house,” she said. “I’ve been kind of bad lately, eating a lot of ice cream. My blood sugar has gone up.” My mother was not diabetic bu
t her mother had been, and the doctor was being particularly rigorous in preventing Mom from following in her footsteps. She checked her blood sugar frequently and went in for quarterly checkups. “I just wanted to thank you for keeping us eating healthy.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, smiling a little, surprised by her gratitude. It was funny how people would do things for others that they wouldn’t do for themselves. “I guess healthy eating and weight loss are contagious. I need to infect you again.”

  “That would be good,” she said. “Oh, do you have the recipe for the turkey meat loaf?”

  CHAPTER 13

  My Online Waistline

  It was just December 2006 that I had been waiting on a secret phone call from my contact in Japan. I didn’t want my mother to know, so I had set my cell phone to vibrate and tucked it into my pocket, pretending to be interested in Bruce Willis’s climbing an elevator shaft in the festive Christmas movie, Die Hard.

  This, of course, had to do with the blog.

  If I let my mother know about the call, I’d have to reveal my secret identity as PastaQueen, weight-loss blogger extraordinaire and inventor of the rotating progress photos. I wasn’t ready to reveal my dual life just yet. This was the closest I’d ever felt to being a superhero.

  I don’t remember why I started the blog. I guess I wanted to understand myself and to be understood by others. I suspect it was partly because I had a lot of fat issues that I needed to work out. Most of my life had been spent trying not to think about my fat, part of my unsuccessful life philosophy that if you ignored something it would go away. Posting my thoughts online put an end to that. The blog wasn’t a food diary or an exercise log. I barely cared what I’d eaten last week, so I doubted anyone else would. Instead it was a place where I thought about my fat and all the baggage that came with it. If I thought about my problems, I started to understand them, and then I could work to overcome them. I wrote entries in my head while walking the endless loop of the treadmill, thinking and losing weight at the same time.

  Fame whoring was probably involved too. I’d always enjoyed writing and knew some writers had carved out their own niches in cyberspace. If only a thousand people watched a TV show, it would be a flop. But if a thousand people visited your blog every day, it would be considered a mild success. It was a web “site” after all, a place to stake my ground and build something new.

  I wasn’t too eager to pimp my wares at first. I didn’t tell anyone, online or offline, about the blog until nine months and a hundred pounds into my weight loss. I didn’t know if I were going to be a success story. I wasn’t eager to have my family and friends share in the disappointment if my “after” photo ended up looking just like my “before” photo, with different lighting and one more grease stain on my blouse. I felt vulnerable. I didn’t want anyone reading unless she’d stumbled upon the site while searching for an industrial weight scale.

  I performed similar searches myself, looking for blogs written by people with butts as big as my own. Men dominated many arenas online, but women ruled the fat blogs. Women certainly have more to gain by losing weight since they are judged more on their looks than men. I didn’t know too many men who wouldn’t go outside without their mascara. I’d also learned obese people were paid less than their thin counterparts, and that the differential was the largest for fat, white women.1 Guess who was writing most of these blogs?

  I decided to leave a comment on one of the sites. I entered my name and email address into the form and then paused. The cursor blinked in a white text box next to the “website” field. If I entered my site’s address, anyone who read my comment could click on the link and read my blog. I entered my web address but then hammered the backspace button as if I were sending out Morse code. Then I stopped.

  I entered my web address again and clicked “Submit.”

  I left comments on other blogs during the next couple of weeks. After that, I noticed ads for diet programs, plus-size retailers, and weight-loss surgery popping up repeatedly when I was browsing, even on sites that had nothing to do with obesity. Somehow my computer knew that I was fat. I could only assume it had been gossiping about me with other computers behind my back. If I removed some of its memory as punishment, would it forget the circumference of my thighs?

  I came home from work a few days later, checked my email, and found a notification in my inbox. Someone had left a comment on my blog. I had gotten a couple of comments before. One was from a woman who was on a “three dat diet” and said “Ineed help.” The only help I wanted to give her involved whacking a dictionary against her head. Maybe if I swung it hard enough, the proper rules of spelling would be transferred from the pages into her head? The other comment was from a woman who had confused me for the thousand-pound man I had written about.

  The latest comment was from Mark, my Japanese contact, who had visited my blog after I left a comment on his. Several months later Mark asked me to post some entries on his site while he was away during the holidays. This was the source of my Christmas subterfuge. A couple of weeks later more people started visiting my virtual open house after another blogger wrote an entry about how much she liked my rotating progress photos. I had created interactive images that let users spin me around like clay on a pottery wheel, checking out the size of my ass from eight different angles. Someone said it was like dancing with me. Soon my dance card got pretty full.

  My blog didn’t become popular overnight, but through the months more and more visitors started showing up on my site statistics page. I watched these statistics more closely than I will ever admit, and I was excited when I saw that a new site had linked to me or that my monthly page views had increased. It was a popularity contest in which the fat girl was actually winning.

  I spent a weekend redesigning the look of the site, upgrading from the default template I’d been using. If people were dropping by, I felt obligated to clean up the place. I’d named my blog “Half of Me” because I needed to lose half my body weight. Actually, I needed to lose foursevenths of me, but that wasn’t as catchy. I took the progress photo of myself at my fattest, staring glumly at the camera, and split it down the middle, lopping off my head for good measure. I placed it in the left column, looming huge on the screen, though still not as large as I was in real life.

  It was scary. My progress photos were much smaller and sequestered away on their own page, but this would be the first image people would see when they visited the site. It was shocking and unattractive. The truth often was. I was keeping my blog clandestine from the real world, yet my obesity was obvious to anyone with a functioning retina. It was a secret I kept hidden in a glass box, locked away but visible to all.

  When I copied and pasted that photo into my site design, I felt as if I’d taken the eraser tool and begun to wipe away some of my shame. It was important to post photos that were real. Telling someone I was fat frequently sounded like a judgment of my character, as if it were something to be ashamed of. When I posted the pictures and started talking about my weight openly, I started to see weight simply as a description of myself, not a judgment of my character. I didn’t have to pretend to be the best Photoshopped version of myself. I didn’t have to give myself perfect skin with the diffuse glow filter or eliminate my double chin with the clone stamp. I could just be myself, fat rolls and all.

  Now that I wasn’t the only one watching my weight, I felt more responsibility to keep going. I posted my poundage every Saturday to track my progress. I would have hesitated if one of my coworkers asked me how much I weighed. I hadn’t even told my family what my highest weight was until I’d lost a hundred pounds of it, yet I had no problem posting that integer online for millions of people to see. I figured my friends and family were unlikely to find the blog, and I didn’t particularly care what a bunch of strangers thought about a headless fat girl from Indiana.

  I started to get some regular readers who told me my journey was a “thinspiration” and it wouldn’t be long before I was in
“one-derland,” the place where my weight would begin with the digit one. We were all on a weight-loss journey, but I don’t know where we were supposed to be going. Maybe we’d hit the all-you-can-eat buffet when we got there and start all over again? Wherever it was, the thought of having to post a gain for more than two weeks in a row kept my foot off the brake. Private failure would have been tolerable. Public failure was not an option. I was convinced that if I gave up, they’d knock down my door with a twenty-pound dumbbell and chain me to the treadmill with a yoga strap until I promised to reach goal.

  I was a somewhat cynical person, preferring chicken soup for my stomach, not for my soul, but I found myself becoming more and more of a shmoopy cheerleader. All my newfound wisdom kept spilling out of my head to be mopped up in the blog. My readers made me feel so good. They were happy for me when I lost weight and reassured me during the long plateaus (when they weren’t annoying me with unsolicited advice). We were all fighting fat and we formed bonds like any war buddies. One woman emailed to tell me she had prayed for me to lose weight during my latest plateau. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or to get a post office box for my public domain listing.