It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (14 page)

I LEFT SCHOOL THAT MAY
praying that this time would be different. That this would be the summer my weight would finally pack its bags and leave for good. That I’d never again see that look in Mom’s eyes. I desperately wanted to feel ready for change, to be empowered and resolved and committed, but mostly I was terribly scared.

By the time I’d arrived home late on Friday afternoon, I’d already planned to start trying to lose weight on Monday. And just as I’d done in the past, I launched a massive “farewell to fat” binge. That weekend, as I unpacked in my bedroom for the summer, I ate all I loved, taking care to fit in all my favorite foods before I’d start trying to lose weight on Monday. Entire rows of Double Stuf Oreos, twin packs of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls, a Roche Bros. chocolate cake, a ten-inch Meat Lover’s pizza. I ordered a half-dozen Dunkin’ Donuts—two French crullers, a Boston cream, a Bavarian cream, a chocolate glazed, and a coconut—pretending casually and coolly to the cashier that I was bringing the box home
to a hungry family of four. I cracked open can upon can of Sprite. I rang the Taco Bell.

On Monday I walked into the women’s locker room of the YMCA with Kate. I was relieved she’d decided to join me. She took our bags to an open locker while I headed to the corner that housed the scale. Dread settled over me as I stepped on it.

I never thought the needle would stop winding around that center dial. My eyes had taken to the polish—fuchsia and fiercely proud of it—neatly laquered on my toes.
I should repaint those. Some shade of coral, though, this time
.

Standing on the metal platform, so white and sterile, I braced myself. I had no hopeful number in mind, no fingers crossed. And even as a bigger than big girl for two decades, I felt unprepared when the needle slowed near three hundred pounds.
Really? No, I mean, let’s just be clear about this. Really?

I stepped off the scale, waited a beat, then repositioned myself back on, just to be sure of the number.

Two hundred sixty-eight.

The metal under my feet dampened. My heart picked up tempo. I breathed in too shallowly to steady me.

Two hundred plus sixty plus eight.

I don’t like that number
, I thought.

It wasn’t the two hundred that scared me so; I had seen those numbers before. It was that I sided with three hundred now.

How did … How could I … When?

Hang on a sec …

What?

I held my breath and wondered if closing my eyes might help to slow a now-spinning room.

I had known big. In fact, I had only known big. But this
number—those three earned digits—was sobering. Seeing it there, black bold on the starkest of white, tangible and true, I wanted to cry.

Standing there on the scale, I couldn’t ignore it all. Each pound was real and, worse, inescapable.

I thought back to the look on Mom’s face when she visited me at school. I remembered the terror in her eyes as she saw my declining health. Now, being confronted with the reality of the scale, I shared her concern. I saw myself with the same scared eyes.

The whole of me was terrified, a complete and uncondensed definition of overwhelmed.

I stepped back, lowered myself from that brutally honest scale, and looked to Kate, who stood behind me. I could tell that she hadn’t seen the number, but she’d gauged from my expression that it was bad. Her eyes expressed compassion. There was nothing to say. I managed a halfhearted smile, and in an earnest attempt at perky, I asked her, “Well? Shall we?”

We walked from the locker room to the main floor of the gym. Treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes lined the far wall. Free weights and Nautilus equipment formed an obstacle course before us. Each of the machines I passed appeared more foreign than the last. Bodies bared before me, none resembled mine. Even the most out-of-shape gym attendees strode confidently on an Arc Trainer, seeming to me a reasonable forty pounds from fit.

I was out of place.

I scanned the cardio options, eyeing each in a way to ask,
Which of you will make me feel least hopeless?
Or better yet,
Which of you promises not to tell everyone here that I have no idea what I’m doing?

The elliptical seemed best. For thirty minutes, I moved; my
arms pushed and pulled in sync with the gliding of my legs. And even though I’d set my machine on very little resistance, I felt beat by the time it kicked into a two-minute cooldown.
Thank you
, I thought. Sweat dripped, hot yet quickly cool, down the line of my spine. I felt the wet beads that were collecting on my scalp steam my naturally curly hair into a frizz of spirals. Blood rushed to flush my cheeks and tingled down my legs, unused to such rigor.

There was a moment where, in between relieved gasps of air, I felt trapped on that machine.
Is this what it’s like to get, to be, to stay, thin?
I wondered. I was sure I never wanted to relive those thirty sweaty minutes. I glanced around me at the others. Sweat suited them. Their faces, so focused and willful, expressed they were as tired as I felt, and yet their determination was intact. Grunting as she finished her final seconds of sprinting, the woman on the nearest treadmill smiled in a relieved, proud way.
What’s different about her and me? How does she finish, looking strong and confident, while I, the one who needs to be here as badly as bad can be, finish thirty minutes feeling exhausted of spirit?

I stepped off the elliptical. I looked to Kate, who was as over the whole workout as I surely was. I felt thankful she shared my discomfort. We walked back to the locker room, the two of us feeling released from prison sentences.

“Well, that was terrible,” Kate confided.

“Yes,” I commiserated. “Yes, yes, and a hundred more yeses. Is this how our summer will be?”

“No, it won’t be this bad. We’ll get used to it.”

I nodded, wanting dearly to believe her. I would have given anything to have been in Kate’s shoes. I would have given anything to have wanted to be at the gym for the plain and simple reason of
getting in shape, as I’d seen Kate write on the fitness questionnaire we were asked to fill out when we joined.
What must the people working the front desk have thought when the two of us walked in together?
I wondered.
The blond one’s here to tone up; the brunette’s here to overhaul her life
. I had to stop myself from dwelling on it too long, for fear that resentment might brew.

Ten minutes later, I slouched beside Kate in her Mercury, the air conditioner blasting, our bodies already aching.

The sweat glossing my face began to dry in a tight, tacky way. I pushed the radio dial and found Britney Spears’s familiar purr. We listened, not needing to say anything beyond the exchange of a few reassuring smiles. She knew I was tired. I knew she was tired.

I looked out the window and thought of that scale. The number. The needle nosing almost as far as the machine would allow. For the first time, in all of my bigger-than-big life, I felt afraid.

I ran around my brain looking for a space just big enough to fit the blame.
Damn that food
. All that I’d eaten in twenty years came to mind, as lustfully, as vividly as pornography. Thick, rose-middled burgers, gooey with melted cheese and between sesame-seeded buns. Dripping butter pecan ice cream cones. The grease spots remaining after all the slices of a pizza pie had up and left their cardboard home. Potatoes—french and twice fried. Fingertips smudged a fiery Cheetos orange. The glossy yellow trickling onto my movie theater popcorn. Raspberry jelly oozing from the side of a powdery puffed doughnut. The corner of a sheet cake.

I struggled between wishing away all the food that had collected on my body as fat and fiercely missing every morsel. I hated the binge last weekend, and I wished I could do it again. I wanted to eat less, and I wanted immediately to eat more. I wanted to be
angry but felt too hurt, too ashamed to thrash about. I wanted to fit in while also wanting, so badly, to say a careless “f- off” to all of society. I wanted to run each ounce off but felt more like taking up permanent residence under the covers of my bed. I wanted to be alone while wanting desperately to be held tightly.

I knew I was large. I knew that the scale wouldn’t ever have sided with svelte, but I hadn’t braced myself for 268. Nothing could have prepared me for such a fact.

And what was worse, what was even more paralyzing than realizing that I was pushing 300 pounds, was that I couldn’t close my eyes and make it go away. It wouldn’t just disappear. Only exercising and eating right could help.

I compared myself to the spectacle of people I’d seen on television shows. The half-ton man; the woman who never left her house again; the panel of obese teens on talk shows; the mother who was forklifted from her home, from the bedroom and bed she’d taken to as refuge for years when her legs could no longer stand her weight. Every big person I’d ever seen, in the flesh or in film and photograph, flashed before me.
Is that what I’ve become? Or at the very least, am I on my way?

I was the girl who needed an intervention, the one in denial of her size. I felt I’d woken up to a body covered in excess. Why didn’t I stop sooner?

My motivation for losing weight had always largely been vanity. The health warnings I’d read in magazines, the ones I’d gotten from my pediatrician, seemed like idle threats to an invincible teenager. But as I approached 300 pounds at twenty years old, I was reminded of my mortality. I was no longer just big. I was obese, and worse,
morbidly so
, according to the height and weight charts
I’d read online. I had reached a point where I no longer distanced myself clearly from the others, those on television: the
really
big people. It was just as my doctor had predicted in eighth grade. And it wasn’t just the peak I’d hit that stung. It was the numbers I imagined just past the peak. What lies beyond 268? Where do you go when you’ve only ever traveled northward on the scale? Though never particularly adept at math, I knew even on a very elementary level, that a safe prediction of my future weight meant 300 pounds … 315 … 330 … 345, and on and on.

The thick, solid black line I always imagined as separating me from the biggest of big narrowed and faded considerably.
You’re not far from them now, Andie. A few years, and you’ll be there, too
.

I stared at my belly. Two very unwanted bulges rolled down my front. My thighs, in the loose-fitting shorts I’d worn, were rippled with waves of cellulite. The seat belt dug diagonally between my sagging, chubby breasts. I cursed each ounce of flesh. As if the fat had arrived of its own accord and set up a commune on my hips, thighs, and love handles, I wished it would leave, quietly but quickly. In those minutes, losing weight felt all at once easy and impossible. I knew how to do it. Even a person with the most basic health knowledge knows that to lose weight: You must move more. You must eat better. And you cannot binge-eat.

When you’ve never been thin, never met normal numbers on the scale, you don’t know that living in moderation is possible. My notions of thinness at that point revealed a stunted, misguided impression of all those who had bodies I admired. Half of the thin folk, I assumed, survived on salad. They ate sparingly and almost immaculately clean. This I imagined to be equally confining and elating, because being thin, after all, would be more satisfying
than any food. The models, the hot Hollywood crowd—they all brought to mind immediately that common diet saying, “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.” I assumed it to be true. I already felt trapped, looking at a future of flavorless eating.

The other half of the thin folk I assumed were naturally slender. Raised by parents who did not struggle to eat moderately, they lived in bodies that regulated hunger and fullness with distinct signals, while mine had gone wonky. These individuals were more enviable, because whereas the former half of thin folk at least seemed to work to be bodily beautiful, this effortless half seemed to have won the genetic lottery. My genes were not so lucky. Dad, Nana, the people I most closely resembled—they waltzed straight past thick and stood squarely in fat. Those family members were future versions of me.

The thought shook me awake. A freezing cold shower seconds after leaving the warmth of bed. And yet I already dreaded the next day and the next exercise session. I made a mental list of all the reasons I couldn’t, I just wouldn’t, be able to keep it up. The excuses poured out of me. In minutes, I had ten fairly reasonable ways to defeat my own weight loss. I was lining obstacles up like traffic cones.

Kate dropped me at my house and leaned over to hug me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “And, yes, I almost always smell this good.”

I opened the car door and stepped out. Bending down into the passenger window: “I can drive tomorrow. Pick you up same time, same prison.”

She laughed. And with that, she reversed out of my driveway, and I made my way to the back door.

Sitting in bed with my laptop later that evening, I searched for
body mass index (BMI) calculators and height-and-weight charts. Most of the information I found suggested that a healthy weight range for a twenty-year-old female standing five feet nine inches tall was, on average, between 130 and 170 pounds. To meet the high end of the range, I’d have to lose 100 pounds. I set my sights on weighing 140, but then part of me hesitated in pinpointing a number at all. I had no idea what my body would look like at any of the lower, healthier weights, and it seemed arbitrary to be so specific so far away. But I needed a goal to strive toward, so 140 it was.

The next day came and, with it, the gym. Kate and I pulled into our spot, the one inconveniently facing McDonald’s. I stared in lust.

“I should just keep driving straight ahead. Keep going ’til we’ve broken through the golden arches and the deep fryer is in the front seat with me and the McFlurry machine is in the back.”

Kate lifted her eyebrows and smirked, knowing the idea wasn’t the worst I’d ever had. The scent of french fries wafted through our open windows, hot and salty as the summer air.