Half-Assed

by Jennette Fulda

  It made me wonder, who was that girl on the blog who was so optimistic and motivated and inspiring? I did not feel like her today. She was out for a run and I hoped she’d return to my body tomorrow. I should read my blog and take my own damned advice instead of sitting around moping.

  I had no desire to leave my apartment, but I went for a walk. There used to be a time in my life when I could eat half the cupboards’ contents and barely feel a smidge of guilt, but those days were over. This was sad in some ways, but mostly not. Even after I took my walk, I wouldn’t burn off all the calories I’d eaten, but at least I’d burn some of them. I hoped the activity would make me feel peppier too. I hadn’t gotten half a mile down the trail before I started thinking, “You could just turn around now and go home. You don’t have to do this.” But I knew there was no turning back. If I turned back, I was screwed. Going back was not an option. If I looked back, I’d turn into a pillar of salt and somebody’s dog would lick me up and poop me out.

  Every step of that first mile was drudgery and I hated it, but by the second mile I started to feel a bit better, and by the third mile I was happy to be out there in the world, and by the fourth mile I was proud to be a person who could walk four miles at all. Especially when a onearmed man ran by me and I thought, At least you can do something about your weight. That guy’s never going to grow back his arm.

  I would probably still gain weight today. And I was never going to like that. But I would do my best tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and hope that I would lose weight on more days than I gained weight. And I could do this whether I had a blog or not. Onward I would go because backward was not an option.

  Then my mom found the blog.

  I was sitting on the plush brown couch in her apartment when she told me. We’d just finished a turkey dinner, though a meal with chicken would have been more reflective of my attitude about her discovery.

  “By the way,” she said apropos of nothing from the vinyl recliner. “I found your blog.”

  I wanted to curl up in the fetal position, which I could physically do now. I always knew that my relatives could find the blog accidentally, but I wasn’t sending out engraved invitations with the web address on them, either. I never thought my mom would crash my online party. That’s what I got for teaching her how to use Google. Now my family would know exactly who I was. This was the scariest thing about emblogessment. They would see me as I was around my online friends, which was not always the same way I was around my family. Yes, my mother had cared for me and fed me (obviously) and loved me, but we never know everything about those we love. I’d said things on my blog I’d never said to anyone. Losing weight had provided an opportunity for growth, a way for me to find out who I was, and most of that was chronicled on the blog. I’d put all my vulnerable, fleshy bits out there for everyone to see, and that came with the risk of getting poked with a stick.

  “Oh,” I mumbled through the hands covering my face. “What did you think of it?”

  “It’s really great!” she said. “Your rotating progress photos are fun.”

  Thank God she didn’t mention the muffins I’d baked in the shape of vaginas. I’d experimented in healthy erotic baking to celebrate my friend’s performance in The Vagina Monologues.

  I sped home that night and vowed to read all my archives. I had been too scared to read my two years’ worth of entries, but this event required instant mom-proofing. The thought of reading my blog in its entirety induced enough anxiety, fear, and paranoia that I started wishing for a Xanax and a chaser of rum. I couldn’t remember what I’d written. It would be like looking at old yearbook photos. What if I discovered I’d had a mullet? I couldn’t remember how revealing I’d been when I had assumed no one was reading. It was a lot easier to dance like no one was watching when no one was in the room with a camera phone.

  I booted up my computer, surfed to my site, and made a sharp right turn onto memory lane. Suddenly I was a fat girl again, thighs rubbing together as I walked down the sidewalk, panting and out of breath. Sadness and hopelessness littered the street like roadkill and potholes. I’d forgotten how unhappy I’d been, wondering if I’d ever find a way off this dilapidated road. But as I continued my trip, the pavement started to get smoother, and the construction project started to show progress. Flowers were blooming in the center of the parkway, and the all-you-can-eat restaurants started to disappear. The road ahead seemed to lead somewhere instead of stopping at a dead end.

  I’d finally figured it out, without the help of a cartographer. This was the journey we were all on. I’d just never realized how far I’d come. Good thing I’d left a map.

  CHAPTER 14

  Acquired Tastes

  I wanted to eat the star fruit because it was cute.

  I bought most of my fruits at the grocery store based on looks. I didn’t know if that thin layer of wax on an apple’s skin made it taste better, but it sure did make it look shiny. I always reached for the apples with the deep, red coloring over the ones with spots or discolorations. If apples were people, I was a bigoted looksist. The star fruit was a light yellow-green, kind of waxy, and the size of a miniature football. When I picked it up and stared down its end, it looked like a five-pointed star.

  I ripped a plastic bag off the dispenser, bagged the star fruit, and gently placed it in my cart. When I got home, I eagerly grabbed my cutting board and cut off several slices of the fruit. They were shaped like delightful little stars. They reminded me of an art project in grade school in which we cut a star shape into the bottom of a potato and used it as a stamp. I bit into the green star and savored the slightly crunchy, lime-like taste. This wasn’t bad. It was kind of expensive to buy on a regular basis, but the adorable shape made the eating experience so much fun.

  When I returned to the grocery store a week later it didn’t have any star fruit in stock. As I looked around, I realized there was a lot of fruit that I usually ignored. There were vegetables I still didn’t know the names of. I had never bought any of these items because ... I had no good reason. I typically shopped for food off a list or grabbed items I was familiar with. I tuned out any extraneous data the way I ignored most ads in magazines. Some of the exotic items like the star fruit were expensive, but buying an eggplant wasn’t going to bankrupt me. I had always stuck to the familiar fruits, the apples and bananas, because they were safe and comfortable and not purple. I couldn’t recall eating anything purple. Wasn’t that usually nature’s warning sign not to eat something? I’d been eating healthy for about two years, and it was unlikely I was going to get completely derailed by a sudden obsession with mangos. It was time to widen my food horizons.

  And I needed blogging material.

  I decided I would “Lick the Produce.” I wrote an entry every month about new foods I’d tried. I wasn’t too upset that I’d lived a life without turnips, but after I ate some sweet-potato fries I realized life would have been sweeter with the tuberous roots in my life. I felt stupid when I realized eggplant was purple only on the outside, not the inside, and I’d actually eaten it many times in spaghetti sauce at the Olive Garden. I randomly picked items from the store even though I had no idea how to cook them. I relied on recipe websites to tell me what to chop off the green onions and how to scrape out a spaghetti squash. Grocers didn’t print cooking instructions on the vegetables. This is why I steamed a dish full of radishes. The Internet made me do it.

  My readers were quick to tell me that steaming radishes was a bit odd. I’d initially written them off as too bitter to try again. When I tried them as a garnish on a salad or roasted with soy sauce and olive oil, I was glad I’d given them a second chance. I wondered if the reason so many people hated eating vegetables was because they just didn’t know how to prepare them correctly. I certainly hadn’t.

  I’d always assumed people who ate healthy food led miserable lives but didn’t realize it, like all those people who used AOL. I thought people who shopped at organic grocery stores we
re granola-crunching hippies who never ate sugar or fat or anything that tasted good. When I was fat, I couldn’t conceive that anyone could eat healthy foods all the time and enjoy it. I was wrong on two counts. First, this stuff tasted good even though it was good for me. Second, I still ate unhealthy food from time to time. I had once wished I was like a friend of mine who didn’t like the taste of chocolate so I’d never have the urge to eat a bag of M&M’s. But now I was glad I hadn’t had our tongues swapped in a back-alley surgery in Mexico. I ate foods that were part of a wellbalanced diet, but I balanced that diet with small portions of sugarrich, fat-filled sweets from time to time. Cutting treats out entirely wouldn’t be very balanced. Everyone should be able to have a slice of her own birthday cake. Hell, she should have three.

  I wasn’t going to give up my enjoyment of food to become thin. I had once envied smokers and alcoholics because they got to eliminate their vices from their lives, whereas I would always have to eat. Now I realized I had the better end of the deal because I was managing to eat responsibly. I just hadn’t done it all at once. I slowly introduced myself to all these new foods, just like I slowly switched my cat’s food by blending it with his old kibble. If I had put him on his new prescription diet food all at once, I would have received an indignant glare and a poopy present at the foot of my bed. People were the same way. If I’d tried changing my diet all at once, I wouldn’t have pooped on my bedspread, but I would have thrown a hissy fit.

  As much as I now loved a dessert of fat-free vanilla yogurt topped with mango cornflake cereal, I had a distinct memory of hating vanilla yogurt as recently as high school. It had been too tart for my tastes. When I’d first switched to diet sodas I’d spent three weeks wondering if losing a couple of pounds was worth drinking liquid that tasted like drain water. Now I found regular sodas to be far too sweet. I’d heard the phrase “acquired taste” before, but now I was starting to realize what it meant. Just because something tasted different didn’t mean it was bad. If I kept eating a food regularly, I often really started to like it after adjusting the flavor. (Brussel sprouts were not one of these items.) Once I stopped bombarding myself with sugar all the time, I started to appreciate subtler tastes that had been drowned out by all that corn syrup. I didn’t even want sugar that much anymore. I glided past the bags of chocolate marshmallow pinwheels in the grocery store with only a half-second pause in my step.

  I was collecting healthy recipes faster than I could actually cook them. I loved all the new taste experiences happening in my mouth. Just a little less than two years ago I’d resented every single minute I’d spent in front of the skillet grilling a chicken breast. Now I was spending up to half an hour or more preparing meals and had more than thirty pages of recipes in my binder. Cooking used to be a strange new activity; now it was just a normal part of my day. I was genuinely excited to learn how to roast cauliflower and grill zucchini. I dragged my mother to Bed, Bath and Beyond to show her the flexible wonder of silicone muffin pans.

  Smack me with a spatula, I liked to cook.

  The first inkling I was going mad was when I made a soufflé more than a year ago. I’d never made a food with its own accent mark. I don’t know why my family hadn’t had me committed when they saw me digging beneath the mismatched Tupperware containers without lids, searching for the mixer. Perhaps they were afraid I’d see the men in white coats holding out a straitjacket and attack them with beaters set to puree?

  I had no idea what a soufflé was other than a food cooked on sitcoms solely for comedic value. It always collapsed after a character made a loud noise. Making a soufflé involved separating egg whites. That just sounded hard. I would never have made the attempt if my mother hadn’t shown me the nifty gadget she had procured long ago, at a Tupperware party well before my birth, which easily separated the yolk from the whites.

  When I beat the egg whites in the mixer they got frothy and stiff as the protein strands unraveled and formed structures around air molecules. They looked like frosting, which was a shame because they still tasted like eggs. I dutifully folded in some seasoned apples and let the concoction bake in the oven. It came out ... okay. I’m sure my ambivalence had nothing to do with the burned edges around the top.

  I was considering making the soufflé again just so I could use the egg white separator. I loved gadgets. A stroll through the kitchen section of the housewares store was like visiting a foreign culture. It was amazing how many devices I could buy that served only one purpose. They were like graduate students with overly specific dissertations. My absolute favorite gadget was the egg slicer. I loved to nestle a freshly boiled egg in the valley of its base and then pull the wire rack down through its tender body. The wires cut cleanly and easily through the white and the yolk, leaving perfectly circular slices. I could punch the yolk out like a hole puncher.

  Cooking was also a good excuse to beat the crap out of things. After a bad day I didn’t need to eat a bag of chocolate when I could smash out my feelings on a bag of clumpy frozen spinach. It was also cheaper than $200 an hour for a therapist. I was thinking of getting a meat hammer so I could whale on some fat chicken breasts in the name of faster cooking times. And I loved my big knife; it was as long as my forearm and looked like it had been stolen from the set of a slasher movie. I felt so powerful, effortlessly slicing through zucchini skin. Plus, I didn’t need to fear prowlers.

  Recipes also appealed to the computer geek in me because they were open source. When I bought a recipe book, I got the source code for the food—as the chef, I could compile the recipe as written into the final product, but since I also had the code, I could make changes to suit myself, add subroutines or variables by sprinkling in extra ingredients. As in the software world, some food was closed source, such as the recipe for Pepsi or KFC’s blend of herbs and spices. However, you could always try reverse engineering the recipe yourself.

  As I experimented in the kitchen, I learned how to slightly alter recipes. It was similar to how I learned programming techniques during my day job as a web developer. After sampling some tasty mintchocolate fudge pudding at a friend’s house, I was tempted to buy more, but I scoffed at the price of pudding cups. It was cheaper to buy the dry mix, but it didn’t come in the chocolate-mint flavor. I figured all I needed was some mint extract, which I dumped into a regular batch of chocolate pudding. I licked a wobbly lump off the spoon and it tasted amazing. I was shocked. I was more shocked when I licked the teaspoon after measuring the mint extract and experienced the taste equivalent of looking directly at the sun. On the bright side, I would never have to buy mouthwash again.

  Real foodies probably consider this stuff second nature, but it had never occurred to me that you could make up your own recipes. I imagined recipes had been perfectly chiseled on stone tablets and handed down to us by God. How had anyone figured out how to make something as complicated as bread? Even my failed food experiments were somewhat rewarding because they allowed me to be creative in a task I had otherwise found routine and tedious. I used to secretly snicker at women who proudly displayed their prize-winning bundt cakes on morning talk shows, but now I realized that cooking was an outlet to express creativity just like painting or music. Flour, shortening, and sugar were more likely to be found in a housewife’s home than oil paints and canvas.

  Ironically, I knew more about cooking now than I ever had when I was fat. I needed to keep trying new foods to keep myself interested. I didn’t want to get in a rut and go back to my old ways out of boredom. I was applying this same strategy outside of the kitchen too.

  I weighed about 210 pounds now, which on a five-foot-nine woman was only eight pounds away from being considered overweight instead of obese. When I’d first started exercising the only thing my joints could handle was walking. If I’d tried breaking into a run I would have found myself wailing by the back of the treadmill, grasping my knee in pain like Nancy Kerrigan and shouting, “Why me?!” But now my body could actually do things.

  I’d started
testing the limits of my abilities one year into my weight loss, in January of 2006 when I weighed 245 pounds. I tried following an aerobics video that was so old I owned it on VHS instead of DVD. An energetic female instructor told me I’d have lots of fun bouncing along to some Motown favorites. I had first tried to groove with her when I’d weighed 350-something pounds. Back then I would hit the stop button only seven minutes into the tape, and that included the thirty seconds of FBI warning. I had realized there was no way I could move as fast as the exercisers on the video, and I tossed the tape back on the shelf.

  When I inserted the tape this time, I watched the tracking automatically adjust the horizontal line of static off the screen and guessed I wouldn’t last much longer than seven minutes. Twenty-six minutes later I hit the stop button, and not because I’d collapsed on the remote control. I wasn’t even physically exhausted yet, just too frustrated to learn the steps. I still hadn’t watched that tape all the way through. There could have been porn at the end, and I’d have been none the wiser.

  This was amazing. I’d seen progress in the decreasing sizes on my clothes tags, but now I had proof that I was actually getting more fit. I’d spent a year walking nowhere on the treadmill, but I was definitely getting somewhere.

  But aerobics still didn’t appeal to me. I needed something to add to my routine other than walking or I might quit out of boredom. I tried Pilates the next month. It was supposed to improve my posture and flexibility and give me a cute butt. Some other weight-loss bloggers had been talking about it, so I thought I’d give it a try. I spent $20 on a DVD, bought a mat, and started miming visits to the gynecologist’s office on the living-room floor every other day for months. I looked absolutely ridiculous, rolling around on my huge ass. The instructor told me to scoop out my abdominals like I was leaning over a beach ball, which wasn’t hard to imagine since my front pouch resembled one. Pilates helped me shed any scrap of dignity I was clinging to. Once I accepted that I was going to look like an utter fool whenever I tried something new, I felt free to do basically whatever I wanted. Pilates also kicked my ass, or more accurately my abs. Two days after bending my body in positions I had never before attempted or known possible, it hurt to laugh, sneeze, or moan in pain.