Maybe joking around is the only way I’m able to acknowledge how bad my situation was, something I couldn’t do when I was living it. Distance brings perspective. I don’t want to treat the old fat girl too harshly, though. My humor is self-deprecating because I don’t take myself that seriously, not because I want to rip myself down.
There is a temptation to kill the fat girl I once was, to stab her in the neck and bury her in the azaleas. But I think she’s immortal. I can run her over with my car, drown her in the toilet, asphyxiate her with a yoga strap, but she can’t ever really die. She may give out a death rattle, lie limp on the floor, but she’s just faking for my benefit. The fat girl will always be a part of who I am. I can’t unmake myself by becoming thin.
I used to think weight loss was retroactive. If I became thin I could erase the time in my life when I was fat. All my old photos would morph to show a skinny girl smiling proud. If she didn’t exist in the present, all the pain of the past would disappear. All the opportunities she missed would be lined up in front of me, so now I could go to the prom or wear a bathing suit to birthday pool parties. But it doesn’t work like that. I don’t get a do-over. I can have plastic surgery to remove this loose skin and sell all my fat clothes on eBay. I can move to an apartment complex where no one knows I was obese, but I will always have been the fat girl.
And that’s okay. The fat girl had her issues, but she was pretty awesome too.
As I write this, I’m still about ten pounds away from my goal weight. I might have reached goal by the time you read this. Maybe not. Somewhat anticlimactic, eh? That’s not how the story usually ends. There’s a template for weight-loss stories: Girl gets fat, girl loses weight, girl reaches goal and rides into the sunset on a horse without breaking its back. It’s like a game of Mad Libs: [Name] lost [huge number] pounds by eating [tasteless health food] and doing [painful exercise]. You could write that book yourself.
When I began this trip, my goal was a number, three digits that I hoped would appear on the digital box on my scale without having to switch the unit of weight from pounds to kilograms. But my real goal didn’t have anything to do with numbers. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to like my body. I wanted to feel comfortable in the world. All those things are true now. As long as that continues to be true, the numbers on the scale don’t matter as much. They matter, just not as much.
The numbers on my scale haven’t yet aligned in the manner I aimed for, but I have reached my goal. It didn’t happen suddenly but sneaked up on me like my cat, sitting quietly at my feet until the moment I looked down and saw him staring into my eyes. It was like waking up from a long car trip as a child after being nestled in the back seat and wrapped in the white noise of the highway, awakening to turn my sleepy eyes out the car window and seeing our back door reflecting the porch light, wondering, When did we get home?
There is some fear in writing the preceding thousands of words and holding myself up as a gleaming beacon of weight-loss success, of saying, “Look how healthy and happy I am! Aren’t I great?” It is like balancing on the top of a pedestal as I wave to you all, waiting for it to be kicked out from beneath me. I hope I don’t wobble and break my nose on the linoleum floor. I don’t know what my life will be like next year or in five years or in twenty years. None of us do. Someone I love could die and I might seek solace in tubs of ice cream. I could get married and have kids and find no time for exercise other than picking up toys. I could simply become blasé about the whole process for no reason at all and say, “Screw it!” before pitching my Pilates mat to Goodwill.
But I will fight harder than I do in any kickboxing class to stop those things from happening.
I will always have to monitor my weight. I will always have to make decisions about what I eat until the day they stop making food. There will always be days when the couch and a pair of slippers look more appealing than the trail and my dirty running shoes.
I may have lost the weight, but it could still find me again. I can try to shake it off my tail, run a red light, or careen over the railroad tracks right before the train passes by. But I can always see it in my rearview mirror a couple of car lengths behind me. I have to keep moving, weaving through traffic, or it will catch up with me again. I have to keep the gas tank full.
There’s never an ending to this story. There’s never a final page. There’s just a point where you stop writing.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1 I had heard that yo-yo dieting: “Weight Cycling,” National Institutes of Health, http://win.niddk.nih.gov/publications/cycling.htm
2 Recent studies have shown: Karen Collins, “Yo-yo dieting may have a bad rap,” MSNBC.com, 8 July 2007, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19621031
3 I was under no delusions: Dirk Taubert et al., “Chocolate and Blood Pressure in Elderly Individuals with Isolated Systolic Hypertension,” JAMA 290.8 (2003): 1029-30.
4 For several years everyone thought fat: Delroy Alexander, Jeremy Manier, and Patricia Callahan, “The Oreo, Obesity And Us: For every fad, another cookie,” The Chicago Tribune, 23 August 2005.
CHAPTER 3
1 To qualify for the surgery: “Gastrointestinal Surgery for Severe Obesity,” National Institutes of Health, http://win.niddk.nih.gov/publications/gastric.htm
2 Out of 16,155 cases studied: David R. Flum et al., “Early Mortality Among Medicare Beneficiaries Undergoing Bariatric Surgical Procedures.” JAMA 294.15 (2005): 1903-08.
3 Many more suffer complications: Robert Steinbrook, “Surgery for Severe Obesity.” New England Journal of Medicine 350.11 (2004): 1075-79.
4 This surgery is gaining popularity: Paul E. O’Brien, Wendy A. Brown, and John B. Dixon, “Obesity, weight loss and bariatric surgery,” Medical Journal of Australia 183.6 (2005): 310-314.
5 Disappointingly, most patients: G. D. Foster et al., “What is a reasonable weight loss? Patients’ expectations and evaluations of obesity treatment outcomes,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 65.1 (1997): 79-85.
CHAPTER 4
1 There were interesting discussions: Abigail C. Saguy, “In a moral panic over obesity,” UCLA Today, 23 May 2006.
2 I wanted to be paid: Victoria Colliver, “Study finds obesity takes an economic toll on workers, firms,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 24 April 2007.
3 After reading the most recent research: Gina Kolata, Rethinking Thin, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
4 People struggling to get by couldn’t afford: Adam Drewnowski and S. E. Specter, “Poverty and obesity: the role of energy density and energy costs,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79.1 (2004): 6-16.
5 Some scientists speculated obesity: Julie Steenhuysen, “Too fat? Common virus may be to blame,” Reuters, 20 August 2007.
6 In one study, girls who took a math test: Belinda Goldsmith, “Girls do badly at math when told boys better,” Reuters, 24 May 2007.
7 Stress and lack of sleep are bad for you: “Lack of sleep may be deadly, research shows,” Reuters, 24 September 2007.
8 The BMI was developed: Stephanie Wilson, “How Body Mass Index Works,” How Stuff Works, http://health.howstuffworks.com/bmi4.htm
CHAPTER 5
1 I was also kind of horny: Colette Bouchez, “Better Sex: What’s Weight Got to Do with It?,” WebMD, 25 March 2005, http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/guide/sex-and-weight
CHAPTER 9
1 We were supposedly the first generation: Samuel H. Preston, “Deadweight? The Influence of Obesity on Longevity,” New England Journal of Medicine 352.11 (2005):1135-37.
2 The National Bureau of Standards conducted: “Short History of Ready-Made Clothing,” National Institute of Standards and Technology Virtual Museum, http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/apparel/history.htm
CHAPTER 12
1 In the western corner: Rebecca Popenoe, “Ideal,” Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, eds. Don Kulick and Anne Meneley (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), 10-11.
2 This was a theo
ry that: R. B. Harris, “Role of set-point theory in regulation of body weight,” Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology J 4.15 (1990): 3310-18.
3 It built up my ability to persist: Po Bronson, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The inverse power of praise,” New York Magazine, 19 February 2007.
4 Earlier in the year I had read a study: Brian Wansink, James E. Painter, and Yeon-Kyung Lee, “The Office Candy Dish: Proximity’s Influence on Estimated and Actual Candy Consumption,” International Journal of Obesity 30.5 (2006): 871-5.
CHAPTER 13
1 I’d also learned obese people were paid less: Damon Darlin, “Extra Weight, Higher Costs,” The New York Times, 2 December 2006.
2 They might keep it off for a year: Traci Mann et al., “Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not the Answer,” American Psychologist 62.3 (2007): 220-33.
CHAPTER 14
1 When I read an article: “Teacher for $1 allegedly let kids skip gym a day,” Associated Press, 16 February 2006.
CHAPTER 15
1 I had read that people became increasingly worse: Brian Wansink and Pierre Chandon, “Meal Size, Not Body Size, Explains Errors in Estimating the Calorie Content of Meals,” Ann Intern Med 145.5 (2006): 326-32.
2 Some scientists believed that the reduced obese: R. L. Leibel and J. Hirsch, “Diminished energy requirements in reduced-obese patients,” Metabolism 33.2 (1984):64-70.
3 Once my fat cells reached a certain threshold size: J. K. Hewitt, “The genetics of obesity: What have genetic studies told us about the environment?” Behavior Genetics 27.4 (1997): 353-58.
CHAPTER 16
1 So many weight-loss surgery patients: Matthew Herper, “Fastest-Growing Plastic Surgeries,”Forbes. com, 15 May 2006, http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2006/05/70889
CHAPTER 17
1 In one obesity study they locked subjects: R. L. Leibel, M. Rosenbaum, and J. Hirsch, “Changes in Energy Expenditure Resulting from Altered Body Weight,” New England Journal of Medicine 332.10 (1995): 621-8.
CHAPTER 18
1 It happens. A lot: Suzanne Phelan et al., “Recovery from relapse among successful weight maintainers,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 78.6 (2003): 1079-84.
2 A survey done by: Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/06-05-16-02.all.html
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all my blog readers. If you hadn’t been watching my weight at the same time I was, I might never have gotten here. Thank you to all the other weight-loss bloggers for sharing your stories and letting me know I’m not alone. I would name you all, but I know I’d forget someone, so if you ever commented on my blog, just insert your name in the blank here. Thanks, _!
Thank you to the women of BlogHer.org and especially Kalyn Denny of Kalyn’s Kitchen for raving about my blog at the annual conference and hooking me up with my editor. Thank you particularly for not charging 10 percent!
Thank you to both of my editors. Brooke Warner believed in this book, helped me develop the idea, and got me started writing it. Krista Lyons-Gould gave me encouraging and insightful comments and cut out my bad jokes. Thank you both for putting up with my overactive spam filter.
Cristy Cummings Landaw has been my friend through thin and thick and thin again. Thank you for not being the least bit surprised that I wrote a book one day. I sent early drafts of the beginning chapters to Jennifer Thompson, who helped build my confidence and convince me I could figure out how to write a book after all. Cheryl Chastine took time off from studying to check for obvious medical errors. Fred Choi was my second-harshest critic after myself and this book is better because of it. Donna Martin offered her proofreading experience without being paid.
Thanks to Wendy McClure for being my book Yoda and not even making me carry her around the swamps of Dagobah on my back.
Big props to Deborah Lewis-Fravel and Christine Slaughter who helped come up with the title. Thanks to all the readers who proposed title suggestions as well.
Thank you, Dr. Maureen Morehead, my high school creative writing teacher, for teaching me about imagery.
My kitty, Officer Krupke, spent many days locked in the bedroom so I could write this book without the editorial interference of his paws on the keyboard. Kkjljdfklasjdfhlk is not a word, Krupke.
And of course, thanks to my family, who are far more important to me than losing a single pound. Thank you for loving me, fat or thin, and not screwing me up, at least not in any irreversible way.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennette Fulda was born weighing 8 pounds 5 ounces, but she eventually tipped the scales at 372 pounds before losing more than half her body weight through diet and exercise. She chronicles her weight loss journey in the popular blog Half of Me (pastaqueen.com), which has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, Glamour, and named a “Site We Love” by the website for Mo’Nique’s F.A.T. Chance. She also contributes articles to Capessa at Yahoo! Health and the Condé Nast health and fitness blog Elastic Waist. When she is not working her ass off, she works in Indianapolis as a web developer and writer. To access exclusive bonus materials, visit www.halfassedbook.com.
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Half-Assed
A Weight-Loss Memoir
Copyright © 2008 Jennette Fulda
Published by
Seal Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fulda, Jennette.
Half-assed : a weight-loss memoir / by Jennette Fulda.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-580-05278-8
1. Fulda, Jennette. 2. Overweight women—United States—Biography. I.
Title.
RC628.F85 2008
362.196’3980092—dc22
[B]
2007049499
The events described in this book are true as I remember them, which is as close to the tr
uth as I can ever get. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect innocent dental hygienists, English teachers, and others.
Half-Assed Page 23
