Before the blog, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to meet a fiftysomething woman in the middle of nowhere who read blogs while knitting perched on a stability ball. But now I knew people in Australia and Scotland and even some place called Nebraska. As the months went by, people lost jobs and found new ones, got married or broke up. They ran marathons. Some even created whole new people. The residents of the blogosphere were rather cool, though the word “blogosphere” brought humorous images to my mind. I imagined us moving into the old Biosphere 2 project in the desert, a complex of geodesic domes where we could grow our own soy products.
It was always disturbing when a blogger went missing. There was one woman whose entries about how our lives were shaped by our size made me ponder my perspective on the world in whole new ways. She vanished in the spring. There was a woman who would analyze the emotional and nutritional reasons behind overeating in amazing detail. She evaporated in the middle of summer. The time between their posts kept getting longer and longer or they would only pop in to write, “Gee whiz! I sure haven’t posted lately, have I?” When they disappeared completely it was probably not because their laptops had been stolen. It usually meant only one thing.
They’d started gaining weight.
That or they were dead, a serious possibility for the morbidly obese.
Whenever I started gaining weight, I went out less and less. I avoided friends from high school or college who’d known me when I was thinner. It made sense that bloggers would do the same thing online. Ironically, this was the time they needed to keep blogging the most, but they were probably ashamed of the bruises they got from falling off the wagon. Sometimes I thought the wagon must have a maximum safe-weight capacity, which was why people kept getting pushed off. It wasn’t helping that they were avoiding the people who could relate to them most. My readers were a constant source of support and motivation. When I read their comments, I chose to believe most of the two-dimensional comments on my screen were attached to three-dimensional people who cared about me.
Had the missing completely given up hope? If you were blogging, you were thinking about your goal. If you stopped thinking about your goal, you would stop losing weight too. There was a girl who commented on my blog for several weeks, inspired by my progress and gung-ho to do the same. I was really rooting for her, and then she vanished. When she deleted her blog, I felt like I’d witnessed someone commit online suicide. I never did find out what happened to her.
I’d been there too, when nothing seemed to work, and I thought I’d be fat for the rest of my life. I wanted to hide away from the world and live under my bedspread in a blanket fort and train the bedbugs to perform tricks in a circus. But I knew that wasn’t the answer and not just because the bedbugs would unionize and cause labor problems.
I wanted to find all the missing bloggers and let them know that someone had noticed they were gone. Many of them remain missing, the reason for their absence still unknown. Only their blog archives remain standing like lost Mayan civilizations, the only proof of their creators’ previous existence.
Fat chicks weren’t the only ones interested in the blog. I got an email from a company requesting that I test its soda-making machine. I declined despite my curiosity. The company contacted me right before I was moving, and I didn’t want to carry a soda machine up the stairs in addition to my hundreds of pounds of books. I wrote a negative review for a yoga DVD and months later the instructor’s publishing company offered me a free copy of her new book to review anyway. I wondered if anyone had bothered reading my post. A TV show’s producer wrote to me about possibly appearing on a new talk show to discuss how my relationships had changed since losing weight. I turned the offer down.
People didn’t just want to send me weird crap to review. I offhandedly mentioned that my right hand got cold at work because it was on a computer mouse all day, far away from my body heat. The next week I came home to find a brown paper package on my welcome mat with a pair of knitted wrist-warmers sent by a reader. I should have gone the Rumpelstiltskin route and inquired what she could do with straw. Another woman sent me a book I’d mentioned I’d wanted but didn’t have the money to buy.
I started playing a sweepstakes in which every lid on my yogurt cups contained an entry code. One of my readers started sending me her contest numbers too. After consuming about sixty cups of yogurt and 3,600 calories from an unknown number of live bacteria cultures, I finally won a gift certificate with one of her codes. Gambling wasn’t just a painful addiction that could lead to financial distress and emotional turmoil. It could also lead you to eat lots of dairy.
The more weight I lost, the more people were impressed. It was no big deal when I lost a pound or two a week, but when I repeated that process for months on end, people were awed. Visitors were now seeing almost two years of progress at once, like a time-lapse photo. Some people started reading all my archives in a day, as if they’d died and my life had passed before their eyes instead of their own.
I was an inspiration. I had been told so 876 times. I got questions about what I was eating, what exercise DVDs I used, and what diet I was on. When had I become a weight-loss guru? Didn’t you have to at least drop out of medical school before you pretended to be a health expert?
I felt like a sideshow preacher being asked to heal the sick with her magic hands. I suppose anyone who reads enough about a subject can become an expert. I was certainly doing something right, but I wasn’t sure if I even knew what it was. It was like asking a bird what the four principles of flight were.
But I loved it. I had found two things I was good at—losing weight and writing—and I was getting praise for them both. I wanted more web traffic, and I wanted to lose more weight. I wanted to get to goal and host a celebration party inside of my fat pants.
I was helping people too, of course. I wasn’t a completely self-centered blog whore, even though blogging about my weight was by definition rather self-centered. It was important for people to know someone was out there succeeding. My blog wasn’t a guarantee that they could succeed, but it showed that losing the weight was possible. There was great power in showing people possibilities.
I was also a real person who would email them back. I wasn’t an infomercial where you couldn’t be sure if the before and after pictures featured different actresses and digital effects. Just as I had been motivated to lose weight because my brother had, people said they’d started attempting to lose weight because of my blog. They tried Pilates because I’d mentioned I’d liked it. Reading the details of my loss week by week made the goal seem more achievable to people than if they’d just seen the beginning and end results. It had a thrilling live element too. You never knew what would happen next week. Would PastaQueen get to goal? Or would she crash and burn in a red-hot blaze of chili cheese dogs?
One day I checked my email and received this comment:I have spent the last two weeks in my office reading your blog (while no one was looking) and I have finally gotten to a point where I just don’t feel like I want to die anymore. I feel like there is hope. Thank you. SO MUCH. I have something to look forward to in my life. I can do this.
Wow. I stared at the screen and read the comment again. Damn. I’d just wanted to stop shopping in the plus-size section and now someone had told me I’d saved her life.
Holy crap, I was a role model.
Was I worthy of being a role model? I just wanted to reduce the size of my ass. As a bonus, the blog was a stamp of validation on the parking garage ticket of my life. It was a great change from the days when I never thought I’d do anything meaningful with my life and had kept the television company all day. Weight loss had become my big project. I’d never known how to make my life better, but I had been able to do it by writing my blog and reshaping my body and my mind. Now I was being treated like a glaring beacon of hope. I didn’t know what to think of that.
When I started losing weight, the blog was the only place I let my ideas and feelings about my weight be k
nown. God forbid I actually talk to friends and family about my fatness. I had always felt the most like myself in my writing. I could be bold and witty on the page or the computer screen, but in real life I was still the shy girl hiding behind a mess of curls. I often wished I was as brave as my blog. As I wrote more frequently, thought more about who I was, and engaged in positive selftalk with other women in the blogosphere, I found myself believing I could be the same funny, confident girl in the three-dimensional world as I was in the world of modems and fiber-optic cables.
Many people consider the online community to be fake or substandard to day-to-day human interactions, but the confidence I found in this “fake” universe started to slowly bleed into my real life. I started making small talk with strangers more easily, in elevators or theater halls. At a family reunion I actually talked to my family. I got the guts to sign up for a kickboxing class because other bloggers did aerobics. The closest I’d come to kickboxing previously was the time I stubbed my toe on a cardboard box of books during my move.
I hoped these people were fans of my writing. If they were just fans of my weight loss, that would be a little weird. Some visitors did seem more interested in my weekly weigh-ins than I was. After I posted a gain they would console me and tell me it was only a temporary setback. I already knew this. It was practically impossible to lose weight every single week. There was no reason to get hysterical about it. I felt like they were swarming me with full medical attention over a small paper cut. Some seemed to be living vicariously through my own weight loss. One visitor said she had to remind herself that just because I was losing weight didn’t mean she was.
It was a lot more fun celebrating major milestones with all my readers. What use was good news if you didn’t have someone to share it with? Eventually I started to weigh less than some of the bloggers I’d been reading. I hoped they didn’t hate me. I’d never been fond of the upstart freshman flautist, who practiced hard every night and eventually stole my chair junior year of band.
One of my readers compared my slimmer pictures to Jennifer Connelly or Katie Holmes. This was much more flattering than the last time I’d been compared to a celebrity. I’d submitted my picture to an online tool that calculated which famous person you most looked like and had been told I resembled Brendan Fraser.
The visitors were also a living encyclopedia of weight-loss information. When I wanted to start weight lifting, they were quick to recommend DVDs. When I proclaimed my new love of oatmeal, they posted links to tasty recipes. If anyone ever overstepped the bounds of the blogger/reader relationship by telling me to move back in with my mother or suggesting I go to therapy, there was always the “Delete Comment” button.
Surprisingly, I received very few hateful comments. I had thought my big, fat photos would be a big, fat target. When I did get nasty responses they were almost always misspelled and lacked proper capitalization, making them easy to rationalize away; I didn’t understand why people would think I would respect their opinion if they couldn’t be bothered to hit the shift key. Using improper capitalization and poor spelling when you commented on a blog for the first time was like meeting someone while you weren’t wearing any pants. It didn’t make a good impression.
In January my site traffic doubled. Weight-loss resolutions were great for my page views. I tried to post at least three to four times a week so they’d keep coming back, which was difficult to manage while working full time and sticking to an exercise schedule. One Monday morning I realized I hadn’t posted anything since Thursday and whipped up an entry quickly before I went to work. I read through it once for grammatical errors, posted it, grabbed a peach, and walked out the door.
By the time I got to work and checked my email, I realized why writers needed editors. My entry had accidentally implied that people who needed to lose only thirty pounds were not as serious about weight loss as people who had to lose more than one hundred pounds. This wasn’t what I had intended to say at all; I had just been sloppy choosing my words. I had meant to say that I’d always viewed this as a long-term project because I had so much weight to drop, but I phrased it in a way that could be read as disrespectful to people who hadn’t weighed nearly four hundred pounds.
I started to get some angry comments. That wasn’t right. The Internet was supposed to love me. I was an inspiration. They’d told me so. They wanted to hoist me up in my ergonomic desk chair and parade me through the streets as I threw sugar-free candies to the crowds.
Now the Internet hated me. My parade had turned into a lynch mob.
I had sometimes been scared to post entries about personal topics or controversial ideas, but I did it anyway because words weren’t made for cowards. Usually I was rewarded with an “I totally agree” or a “Hell, yeah!” While I knew it shouldn’t matter if anyone agreed with me, it totally did. It became easier and easier to speak up when I knew people liked what I was saying. Sometimes there was a polite dissent, which usually led to interesting conversations. Now people were more pissed than I’d ever seen them before.
I tried to explain my error in the comments section. Some regular readers beat me to it and jumped to my defense. I could smell the gas leak filling the room with combustible materials. I needed to turn off the valve before someone lit a spark and my blog exploded. I disabled comments on the entry. I was scared to check my email for a day afterward. Every time my computer dinged with a new message, I’d take a deep breath as I clicked on my inbox, hoping someone hadn’t taken time to write me a nasty email. To my surprise no one bothered to send me hate mail. Hmmm. It was possible I was not as important as I thought I was.
In the scheme of things, it was only a minor tiff. When I’d first started blogging, a mommy blogger had written a post implying that women who gained weight after they got married were guilty of false advertising to their husbands. That’s not exactly what she wrote, but that’s what people heard and that’s all that mattered. The Internet eviscerated her. They dragged her into the public square, plucked the keys off their keyboards, and stoned her to death with F11 buttons. Then they strung her up with their mouse cords to hang. I didn’t agree with everything she had said, but no one deserved that. I had cringed when reading their comments and it wasn’t even my blog. I imagined she must have been curled under her desk rocking back and forth in the fetal position and mumbling to herself, “It’s just a blog. It’s just a blog.”
Luckily for me, no one would even remember my stupid blog blowout a month later. The Internet was capricious. I’d put a lot of my self-worth into the popularity of my blog, but my readers could turn on me unexpectedly. It was a conditional love. There were many people I’d met through the blog whom I considered true friends, but most of my readers were strangers. They might feel as if they knew me because they’d read my blog, but I had no idea who most of them were. They were usually very nice, but it might be in my best interest not to let my self-esteem get too wrapped up in what they thought of me. How many of them would still love me if I gained back a hundred pounds? It might make me more sympathetic and real, but people loved a good success story.
And I desperately wanted to be a success story. So many people gained back the weight. They might keep it off for a year or two or three, but a study had recently been released saying dieting didn’t work and that most people gained all the weight back within five years.2 The study didn’t bother me too much because it defined dieting as “severely restricting one’s calorie intake to lose weight,” which I wasn’t doing. I would have sucked at that anyway. I’d recently forgotten to bring my cheese sticks to work again and had sat at my desk letting the hunger gnaw away instead of going to the vending machine. By the time I got home I almost ate the plastic wrapper with the cheese because I was so hungry. I just couldn’t do the starvation thing. The press release for the study also said, “Eating in moderation is a good idea for everybody, and so is regular exercise,” which was what I was doing. So if I eventually failed it wasn’t going to be because diets didn’t
work. I wasn’t on a diet.
I still gained weight sometimes, and I made myself report it online as part of my promised weekly weigh-in. There were some weeks I seriously considered lying. Who would know? They couldn’t come to my house and weigh me. They didn’t demand photographs of my feet on the scale. I could fudge a pound or two and no one would know.
I just couldn’t do it, though. These people took comfort in knowing someone had lost so much weight. I couldn’t pretend it was a piece of cake, even if I weren’t eating much cake. Weight loss could be so hard. It was important for them to know that you could win the war and still lose some battles. My blog kept me from making excuses. I had to face that number every week no matter what.
I edited the template and rebuilt my site to reflect the new larger number on the scale, and I immediately felt depressed. I might have just been bored or I might not have had enough caffeine, or it could have been premenstrual hormones. Whatever. I ravaged my kitchen like the Vikings pillaging a village and immediately regretted it. I didn’t want to let these people down. If I failed, it was as though we all failed. It was like having your favorite baseball team lose the World Series, which was ridiculous and self-important of me to think. I may have been calling myself PastaQueen, but I wasn’t queen of the weight-loss bloggers. If my site disappeared there would always be women to take my place. But I still wanted to prove it was possible to lose lots of weight and keep it off. I had so much sympathy for people who did regain the weight. I understood how it could happen, but I did not want to join the I-regained-one-hundred-pounds club. It could save its membership card and keep me off the club’s mailing list.
I watched some TV. No one expected me to be perfect, except me. I loved so many things about the blogging community, but I didn’t owe it anything. The only pressure was the pressure I put on myself. But on days like this I felt like I was slipping just a bit, as if I had twisted my ankle and was waving my arms to avoid falling face first, splat, onto the gravel path. I hadn’t fallen over yet, but it could happen and I had to keep waving my arms or gravity would have its way with me.
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