Half-Assed

by Jennette Fulda

  I had read that people became increasingly worse at estimating amounts the larger portions became.1 Most people can guess the calorie content of a small meal with little error, but if you stacked more and more ribs and potatoes on a plate you underestimated the calorie content by more and more too. Perhaps the same was true with weight.

  The hygienist sprayed some water in my mouth. I swished the remains of my piña colada paste until she stuck the suction tube in my mouth. “The doctor will be by in a couple of minutes to check for cavities,” she said, writing some notes on my chart.

  “Okay,” I said as she elevated the chair to a sitting position.

  “So what have you been doing?” she asked. “To lose weight, I mean.”

  I didn’t want to say I was on a diet because I hated that word. It sounded as if I were eating only rice cakes and tofu until the day I could finally fit into a size 4 dress, at which time I’d resume eating chocolate fudge brownies for breakfast. It belied the significance of the commitment that I’d made to living a new lifestyle, as if I were calling my two-year marriage with healthy living a “fling.” But there was no other word to use. It was such a mouthful to say I was living a new lifestyle and it sounded pretentious too. I was sort of on a diet because I was following some general guidelines, but they weren’t restricting my enjoyment of life or food in any significant way.

  “Oh, I’ve been cutting out white flour, sugars, stuff like that. Eating more vegetables.” How could I possibly sum up everything I’d been doing in a succinct small-talk paragraph? I hated trying to simplify everything, but I doubted she wanted to hear my hour-long lecture on Weight Loss 101. Instead I came off sounding like an idiot who told people to eat less and move more. If only it had been that simple.

  She nodded. “My aunt has been doing that too. She says it’s remarkable how much better she feels.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s kind of amazing. It’s a world of difference. I really love it,” I said. Oh no. I had become one of those women who talked about her diet. Frequently women had tried to bond with me by talking about what they were eating or how much they hated their bodies. It was called fat talk. I wanted it banned.

  At a funeral luncheon I’d attended, a woman across the table started lobbing potato salad and chips onto her paper plate as I picked fruit off a serving tray. We made eye contact. “I keep saying I’m going to go on a diet, but I keep putting it off,” she said out of nowhere. I quickly glanced up and down her body and determined she wasn’t fat. “Yep,” she continued. “Got to go on a diet. Any day now.”

  I hoped that if I ever started talking like this woman, someone would drown me in the punch bowl. I didn’t care what she was eating. I didn’t care what she looked like. I didn’t care if she greased her tummy with butter wedges and belly-slid down the table to catch slices of German chocolate cake and raspberry cheesecake in her mouth. It surely would have livened up the affair.

  I didn’t know why she felt the need to apologize for eating and enjoying food. It seemed as if she were saying she was sorry she wasn’t thin enough or good enough. It sounded like she was insulting herself. Why did so many women relate to each other this way? Being dissatisfied with your body was more of a requirement to be female than possessing a vagina. Occasionally thin friends had whined to me about how fat they were when I was still at a size that I struggled to buckle myself into the front seat of the car. They were fat? Had they not noticed I needed a seat belt extender? I think they were so used to obsessing about their fat with friends that they automatically did the same thing with me.

  The odd thing about fat talk was that it became less acceptable the fatter I became. If a thin friend talked about how fat she was, it wasn’t a matter of life and death, but for me it was. If I said I needed to go on a diet it wasn’t just a flippant, self-hating remark but a serious and uncomfortable topic of conversation. I doubted this church lady would have yammered on about needing to go on a diet if my thighs were still as big as her torso. Fat was only okay to talk about if you didn’t have any on your body.

  I didn’t like talking about diets with other women, like my dental hygienist, because there was the strong implication that we should all be on one, as though we could never be thin enough or good enough or possibly be happy with how we looked, so we’d better watch what went in our mouths. God forbid that we actually enjoy what we were eating. If you dared to eat a donut you’d better be prepared to do penance at the gym. That wasn’t how I felt at all. I was still technically fat, but I thought I looked rather awesome. I ate foods that I enjoyed and paid attention to what I was eating, but I had started eating healthy so I could live longer. I didn’t want eating healthy to become my life.

  “I wish I could just lose these last fifteen pounds,” the hygienist said as my eyes searched for the dentist. There were no telltale screams or drilling noises to give away his location. “You make me feel like such a slacker.”

  I now inspired more shame in people than priests. I listened to all their food confessions. Too bad I couldn’t tell them to say ten Hail Marys to wash away their dieting sins. I could try empathizing with her and say the first hundred pounds were a lot easier than the second hundred, but that sounded flippant. I thought about patting her shoulder and saying, “That’s too bad.” I was never sure if these selfderogatory comments were a backhanded way of seeking tips. I didn’t have any advice on how to lose the last fifteen pounds because I hadn’t lost the last fifteen pounds yet. I was starting to become thinner than some of my friends, however. One of them dug her elliptical machine out of the basement in fear when she saw I was going to pass her on the way down the scales. I’d felt the same way when I had been fat and read an article about all the weight the thousand-pound man had lost and realized he was going to catch up with me.

  I felt my own hints of guilt when I encountered overweight friends. I didn’t want to make them feel bad about themselves, but I wasn’t going to gain weight again just to make them feel better. I was careful to try not to brag about how much I’d lost or to mention food or exercise around them. When my best friend had complimented me on my weight loss and told me she was proud of me, I’d tried to downplay it and said, “Well, I’m still technically fat.” I thought it was preferable to saying, “I am the most awesome person on the planet. Bow down before me and balance this bowl of seedless grapes on your head.”

  I was actually glad to see the dentist as he plopped down on the rotating stool next to my chair, ending my conversation about the evils of white flour. I passed the checkup without the discovery of any new cavities and made my way out to the lobby to pay my bill. As I waited in line behind another patient, the wooden door swung open and another hygienist popped her head out.

  “Hey, I wanted to tell you how great you look!” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. Smile. Head tilt. I was getting so good at this.

  “What have you been doing?” she inquired. The man in line flashed me a curious glance.

  “I changed my diet and I’ve been doing a lot of walking,” I said, again trying to simplify my life into a twelve-word sentence.

  “That’s it?” She gave me a surprised look.

  “Basically, yeah.” The man in front of me finished paying and left. I approached the counter.

  “Wow! That’s fantastic!” she said, taken aback. “Congratulations!”

  “Thanks,” I said. Smile. I could take this show on the road.

  She closed the door and left. As I waited for the credit-card machine to print out the slip for me to sign, I wondered if the hygienist had expected me to say “weight-loss surgery” when answering her question. The increasing popularity of weight-loss surgery was making it unusual for someone to lose almost two hundred pounds the old-fashioned way. It was a shame that strangers assumed it was the only answer. I didn’t particularly mind if they thought I’d had surgery, but it seemed to impress people a lot more when they found out I hadn’t. I was glad I’d avoided going under the knife, but I didn’t
think I deserved extra credit for it, although everyone else did.

  I don’t know how I would view what I had done if it had happened to someone else. I hoped I’d just be happy for her and not judge how she’d gone about it. If the whole dieting and exercise thing hadn’t worked out, I probably would have been counting backward from one hundred on a surgeon’s table in another ten years. If something had gone awry during my early transitioning stages, I could easily have been testing the weight limits of the dentist’s chair during my appointment. I wasn’t a better person simply because I’d figured out how to lose a lot of weight without a surgeon’s intervention. I wasn’t sure I completely understood how I’d done it, anyway.

  I was proud of all my hard work. Weight loss was something I had made happen, not something that had happened to me. I wasn’t sure that I’d feel the same way if I’d had surgery. I felt really comfortable in my body despite the drastic remodeling it had undergone. Two years ago I had suspected that I would always feel like a fat girl even when I lost all the weight. Strangely, I didn’t feel that way at all. I felt in control of my transformation. It wasn’t like someone had mugged me on the street and stolen all my fat.

  But I had mixed feelings about all the compliments I was getting. People looked at me and saw only what wasn’t there. I had worked very hard, worked my ass off, in fact, but people were acting like I’d just juggled flaming bananas with my toes while blindfolded. Weight loss was hard work, but was being fat such a bad thing to be?

  Back when I was fat, a coworker had brought in pictures of her new granddaughter to show everyone at the call center. Everyone crowded around the photos, glad to have an excuse to stop asking people on the other end of the line about their detergent preferences. “She’s beautiful!” they said. “Such a pretty one!” another woman cooed. “Gorgeous eyes, and a cute nose too.” This kid couldn’t even control her bowel movements, but her life was already made. She was pretty and people loved her for it. Granted, she was a bit young to be complimented for her jump shot or her math skills, but I had noticed that people on game shows never talked about their fat and ugly kids during their twenty-second interviews. Pretty was power. I wondered if the strangers I had called on the phone about their buying habits heard my alto voice and thought I was a slender and sexy girl instead of a woman with her ass spilling out of her seat. I might not have been stripper material, but I probably could have gotten phone sex work.

  As a child I had denied that looks were important. In my adolescence I became angry at everyone who discriminated against me because of my appearance. Now I’d just accepted that pretty, thin people were treated better. It was easiest if I just tried to manipulate that to my best advantage. I felt funny at first, admitting that one reason I wanted to lose weight was because I did care about my looks and I did care about what people thought. I wanted to be above all that shallow nonsense. But I wasn’t immune to looks discrimination myself. When I saw a man with creepy eyes and arched eyebrows in the hallway, I had to remind myself that bushy brows didn’t necessarily mean he was a serial killer. I suspected part of the human brain was permanently wired to make judgments about people based on their looks. I could only acknowledge my biases and do my best to work around them. Fat people weren’t the only ones who got treated differently because of how they looked. My five-foot-one friend got patted on the head by strangers who thought her height was cute, although her personality had more bite than her petite frame implied.

  If I were to tape-record all these compliments and play them backward on a tape maybe I’d hear a secret message that said, “Thank you for conforming!” I was becoming thin now. I was blending in. I was living up to the expectation that I become a slender, socially acceptable female. I was starting to reap the benefits of thin privilege. When a thin, young, white girl had gone missing in Aruba last year, I had gotten sick of watching the news coverage because I knew that Nancy Grace wouldn’t have sent a search party after my fat ass. Now I was thin enough that my disappearance might warrant a spot on a news crawl at the bottom of the screen. This wasn’t something I was proud of, but it was making my life easier. I could be proud that it wasn’t the driving reason behind my new lifestyle. I felt so good lately. The weight loss was starting to seem incidental. If I never lost another pound but still got to feel this fit and powerful, I could deal with it.

  As I walked through the lobby to exit the building, an obese woman in a baggy blouse and black pants entered through the door with a jingle of the bell. She was out of breath from the walk across the parking lot and looked tired. I was suddenly flooded with relief. Thank God I’m not like that anymore, I thought. The limited mobility. The public shame. The restricted clothing options. Been there. Done that. Still had the fat pants. I never wanted those pants to fit again.

  I passed by her and smiled as I left. She didn’t know I used to be bigger than her. I felt like I was in the obesity witness protection program. I had always been fat, but now I wasn’t. It was a gigantic issue that had shaped who I was, physically and as a person. Now people didn’t have to know unless I told them. Skinny actors who played fat people in movies got to take their fat suits off at the end of the day and go back to their lives. I was taking mine off and returning to a life I hadn’t quite had before.

  I wanted to tell her about how I had changed, that I had become more than I was, and less, all at the same time. But I just averted my eyes and headed for the parking lot. I didn’t want to be like the family I had walked past on the trail who handed me a flyer asking if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I didn’t need to save all the fat girls of the world. My own relationship with my body had nothing to do with hers. I wasn’t Mother Teresa to the chubby.

  Not everyone felt that same way about me, though. I got an anonymous comment on the blog that said I would never be the “equal” of naturally thin people because I could never be “permanently or safety [sic] thin.” Anonymous sounded really bitter. Usually people who felt secure about their bodies didn’t feel the need to leave snide comments on weight-loss blogs. I guessed Anonymous was either a thin person who thought his size was the only thing going for him or a fat person who wanted to be thin but couldn’t. Now he went around telling fat people it was impossible to lose weight so he could feel better about himself. He would probably throw a pizza party if I ever regained the weight because it would prove his own fatalistic philosophy correct. It really aggravated some people if you did something they thought was impossible.

  I decided to keep the weight off just to piss him off. Health and mobility were good reasons too, but weight loss as vengeance had more fire and brimstone. The best revenge would be to live happily ever after.

  Some scientists believed that the reduced obese, as I was now called, were metabolically different from people who had never been fat.2 Some studies suggested I would burn 15 percent fewer calories when I exercised because my body was trying to get back to my fatter set point. I didn’t know if this were true or not, but if I had to run 15 percent farther every day, so be it. It sucked. It wasn’t fair. Oh well, I never got that pony I wanted as a little girl either. I had gotten more fat cells than people who’d always been thin. Once my fat cells reached a certain threshold size, they stimulated the creation of new fat cells that would never go away.3 In this sense, I was different.

  But the anonymous coward’s comments seemed to imply that thin people were lumped into two groups: The formerly fat were the nouveau riche, but the always slender had old money they’d invested in thin stocks decades ago. This seemed ridiculous to me. Sure, I was still learning how to navigate people’s changed perceptions of me as a skinny person, but that didn’t mean I was only passing for thin. Honestly, I was still fat-ish.

  But I thought of myself as a thin person, which was all that seemed to matter. To some extent, being fat was a state of mind. Fat was a way you could feel as well as a description of yourself. I thought of Felicity, my high school friend who was thinner than I had ever been, an
d how she berated herself for her imaginary chub. I knew I still weighed more than she had, but I felt thinner than she ever had. I didn’t feel as if I needed to act a certain way because of my size anymore. There was no need to hide in my room or cover up my arm flab. I was much more acceptable to the world in my current form, but I cared less about what they thought than ever before. My new attitude was like a comb I’d gotten after all my hair had fallen out.

  A couple of days later I needed to upgrade my cell phone plan. My phone was one of the models the cavemen had used to call their wives and ask if they felt like a woolly mammoth or saber-toothed tiger for dinner. My provider was going to cut off my service at the end of the year if I didn’t get a new phone. I entered the mall through the secondfloor walkway from the parking garage. I turned the corner quickly to escape the siren smell of the Cinnabon store only to be faced with a woman clothed in tackiness. Leopard-print leggings clung tightly to her legs and she strode confidently forward on suede boots with three-inch heels. She wore a red leather jacket over a black tank top, all topped off with frizzy blond hair in a ponytail held back with a leopard-print scrunchy. She looked equal parts awful and ridiculous.

  As I strode forward, I took a step back mentally. I didn’t have any right to judge what this woman was wearing. I might think she looked as if she had skinned a polyester cheetah, but I could tell from the swagger in her step that she felt good about herself. A fat girl who dared venture into the food court in a tank top would risk similar judgments from onlookers, but she would have every right to bare arms. No one had a right to say, “You shouldn’t wear that,” as long as your outfit didn’t violate public decency laws. I admired the tacky woman’s boldness, even if I didn’t admire her outerwear.