The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl (7 page)

WEEK 13
April 9
302 pounds
49 pounds lost—137 to go

“You know, if you’d peed before you got here,” said Donna, “you would have had a loss.”

“But I did pee before I got here!” I sulked. “Five times!”

The scales didn’t move this week, and I’m not happy at all. It’s far too early in the game to be stalling!

It’s been a shitty week all around. I started a new job, sort of. My government contract ended so now I’m back at my company’s head office. I hate being the new kid, more specifically the new fat kid. I almost felt svelte on Monday morning when I put on my new size 22 shirt, but then I arrived at the office and found I outweighed my new colleagues by at least 140 pounds.

I miss the public service already. Sure, I was the fattest lady there too, but everyone has their quirks in the public service. Perhaps it’s thanks to Equal Opportunities legislation. There were fat people, thin people, annoying people, old people, incompetent people, bossy people, and people with no fashion sense. There were people who were all those things at once. So I slotted in nicely to that mix. It was a wonderfully predictable and nonthreatening environment.

In contrast, my first impression of the private sector is that everyone is poised, perfectly groomed, and incredibly busy. I guess you have to look professional when every hour is billable. There’ll be no time for morning teas, Big Brother gossip, and bunking off early on a Friday.

I’ve spent my first week hiding at my desk feeling fat and inferior, my automatic reaction to being placed in any new situation. I hate meeting new people. I fear that no matter what I say or do, the only first impression I can leave is … fat!

My computer died yesterday, and it took me two hours to work up the nerve to call the help desk. Somehow I’d hoped I could heal it with my penetrating stare. I hated the thought of the I.T. guy coming up from his dungeon and seeing me: “Aha! Stupid fat chick’s broken her computer.” And I would feel compelled to say, “It was like that when I got here! I didn’t sit on it or anything!”

In the end I phoned right before I left for the day, and mercifully the I.T. pixies fixed it overnight.

I know I’m being pathetic; I just hate change. Change is scary and it gets in the way of my weight loss mission. And after eighteen months I was settled in the public service. I’d managed to endear myself to my colleagues with hard work and sparkling wit, showing them that there was more to me than my blubber. But now I’ve got to start all over again!

I’m also petrified of my new job and worry I’m incapable of doing it. My boss seems to think I’ll be fine because she’s already given me about 127 tasks and made me leader of the Content team. Me, a leader? I’ve only ever led myself. To the fridge.

Even so, Rhiannon and I went out for lunch on Saturday to celebrate this grand promotion. It was the first time I’d taken my fat out in public since the Weight Watching began, so I fretted over the menu. I ordered a healthy sounding grilled teriyaki chicken burger, but it arrived with an unexpected side order of fries.

How can anyone resist fries? So fresh, salty, and sizzling! They were delicious, but with every mouthful I was terrified that those lost pounds would instantly return. Which is rather sad. Am I going to be afraid of a handful of fried potatoes all of my life?

Scared of new jobs, new people, new challenges, and … fries. Could I be any more pathetic?

I’m alive! I’m coping! Work got in the way of writing for the past four weeks but not in the way of lard busting. I’ve lost another seven pounds, and suddenly everything is changing!

1. I can breathe.

I used to wake myself up during the night because my breathing was so loud and fractured. But now there’s less flesh around my neck and chest, so the wheezing has stopped!

2. I’m officially a size 22.

My size 24 jeans have been looking a bit dumpy lately, so I dug out an old size 22 pair from my wardrobe museum. Can you believe they fit perfectly? I hadn’t worn them since 1999, so you could say I’ve lost two years of blubber.

3. I found my vagina.

It’s been hiding for years, concealed by the sprawling tsunami of flesh that is my stomach. But this morning I stepped out of the shower and was startled by a bright red thing in the mirror. My pubic hair! So I am female after all, not just a lumpy mountain of flesh!

4. My heart will go on.

On Monday I had a fitness assessment with Fitness Chick Angela. She took my resting heart rate and it was down to 78 beats per minute. When she tested it last year it was 100 bpm. How was I not dead? No wonder I got puffed just washing the dishes. But now, thanks to the treadmill and the Vampire Method, I’ve scraped into the healthy heartbeat range.

“You’re doing brilliantly,” said Angela, drawing another smiley face on my chart. “Despite hiding from me for seven months!”

“I know,” I said sheepishly.

“Ooh, and you’ve lost fourteen pounds too!” she squealed as I hopped on the scale.

“Wow!” I tried to look surprised. “A whole fourteen pounds!”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I’d technically lost fifty-six, since I’d gained forty-two since our last meeting. Why ruin a beautiful moment? She was showering me with hugs and kind words and I was glowing with Good Little Fat Girl pride. I’m paying a handsome monthly fee for that kind of external validation! The more people who tell me I’m doing well, the more I might start to believe it myself.

I’ve discovered the joys of Microsoft Excel. My brand spanking new weight loss spreadsheet has a dazzling array of columns streaking across the screen—Date, Week, Weight, Pounds Lost, Pounds to Go, Percentage of Goal Achieved, Percentage of Start Weight Lost. I just plug in my weight each week and it spits out all the data! Not only in pounds, but stones and kilograms too! Did you know that as of Week 21, I’ve lost 29.5 kilograms, 18.5 percent of my starting weight, and now have eight stone nine pounds to go? These statistics give me the same cheap thrills I used to get from a jumbo bag of marshmallows!

I’m obsessive in analog too. There’s a year planner in the back of my work diary in which I record my results each week. I love staring at the figures after a hard day’s Web editing. I calculate my average monthly loss, then draw little graphs of how long it’s taking me to lose a ten-pound block. Then I calculate weekly averages, and based on those averages, I can forecast how many weeks of good behavior it will take to reach my goal weight.

All this cold hard data is strangely comforting. If I don’t like my weigh-in result, I can manipulate the data and spit out a statistic that will make me feel better.

There are many different instruments of torture at the gym and I passionately loathe them all—the exercise bike, stepper, and elliptical trainer, pedaling and plodding my way to nowhere. They say you’re supposed to do cardio three times a week: Does this mean I’m to be completely bloody bored three times a week for the rest of my life?

The rowing machine, however, is quite a charmer. Our gym has two at opposite ends of the cardio suite, so Rhiannon and I take one each and pretend we’re college lads out on an English river.

“Hallo, old chum!” she yells over the techno music.

“I say, lovely day for a row!” I shout back.

The rowing motion is strangely hypnotic and makes my shoulders burn. Sometimes I feel almost sporty. Last night I got carried away completely, trying to beat my best time for 500 meters.

“Eat my dust, old chap!”

“Not fair!” said Rhiannon. “I’ve got a slow boat!”

After tonight’s grueling workout we soaked our aching muscles in the spa. I finally summoned the nerve to get into the damn thing. I’d been using my lack of swimsuit as an excuse, but Rhiannon said, “Just stick on a T-shirt and knickers and live a little!”

The spa is set on a platform in the middle of the changing rooms, flanked by plastic plants and wood paneling for that porno set ambience. From this secluded position, I watched the patrons come and go. I was awed by how they casually peeled off their sweaty workout clothes and strolled to the showers without a trace of self-consciousness. I always turn up dressed and ready to go, and then either go home stinky or change my clothes in the shower room. I don’t expose so much as a lily-white toe!

I couldn’t resist peeking at other chicks’ boobs in a critical, comparative, scientific kind of way. Being of the heterosexual persuasion, I don’t get to see naked breasts very often. It was incredibly enlightening. Who knew there were so many varieties? I’m so accustomed to my own gelatinous girls that I never appreciated that there are also little ones, pointy ones, bouncy ones, and ones with wacky nipples. Such diversity; but all had their own charm.

It made me think about how much time I spend fretting about my body. This bit is too big, that bit is too blobby, that bit is too ugly, that bit’s just plain wrong. Being so paranoid and critical is exhausting. Who’s to say what’s normal anyway? Why can’t I appreciate what I’ve got?

I now realize what I desperately want out of this lard-busting caper, more than a size 12 dress or a number on the scale. I’m aching to be comfortable in my own skin, with all its quirks and flaws, just like the women at the gym seem so comfortable in theirs. I want to be happy just being me.

But I’m not quite sure how you’re meant to get there.

“Oh my. Goodness me. Crikey!”

The Mothership stood on the front veranda of her house, clutching her heart theatrically as I climbed out of the car.

“Ma, don’t be a drama queen!”

“I’m not! I haven’t seen you for two months!”

After twenty-five years in education, Mum is incapable of switching off her teacher voice. It boomed across the street, as if she was reading a story to her kindergarten class.

“I mean, wow. You’re shrinking! Rhiannon, isn’t she shrinking?”

“Yes!” Rhiannon grinned and rolled her eyes. “She’s shrinking.”

Mum thrust a giant bunch of dahlias into my chest. “These are for reaching your Seventy Pound milestone.”

“Aww Ma, you big cheese!”

“I’m very proud of you. I’m very proud of both of you!” She patted our heads as if we were oversized Labradors. “Now, who’s going to make the Mother a cup of tea?”

I hate going back to Cowra; it feels like returning to the scene of the crime. I cringed as we drove past my old haunts—the KFC, the Chinese take-away, the cinema where I worked one summer and had unlimited access to free popcorn.

I hate Coles supermarket most of all, which unfortunately was our destination today. It’s the beating heart of this rural metropolis, the modern equivalent of a town square; which makes it extremely dangerous. There’s always a 95 percent chance I’ll run into someone in the aisles, which is hell since I’ve doubled in size since I left town six years ago.

“Now this is just a quick trip to Coles,” Mum promised. “I only need a few things!”

But there’s no such thing as a Quick Trip to Coles. We’ll go in for a loaf of bread, and Mum will inevitably be distracted by what she calls the Chuck-Out Bin, the place where reduced-price near-death cheese and yogurts lurk. To her, an expiration date is not a recommendation but a challenge.

That’s my cue to hide my hefty arse behind a display of cornflakes or a tower of oranges and quietly panic. Who will ambush me today? What nosy questions will they ask? How will they react to my bulk? Please hurry up, Mum. What if I see one of my old teachers and they discover their dedicated student turned out to be such a crushing disappointment?

It was particularly traumatic during my postuniversity jobless bum phase. The questions were always the same. “So I hear you’ve finished your degree! What have you been up to?”

You mean, aside from becoming hideously obese? Well, I rise at noon but leave the blinds down so no one thinks I’m home, and then it’s ice cream and
Days of Our Lives
for breakfast. And then I curl up in a nest of rejection letters and cry great self-indulgent sobs, and then it’s nap time until
MacGyver
comes on.

“Oh, not much,” I’d eventually say.

“So have you got a
man
yet?”

“Oh, not yet.”

“Well, dear, it will happen when you least expect it!” Cue sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “And same goes for your job situation, I’m sure!”

And then I’d descend into gloom for days, picturing them rushing home to tell their families, “That Shauna, she peaked way too early.”

You’d think I’d feel less neurotic now that I’ve got a good job and I’m losing weight, but I don’t particularly.

“Ma, I think I’ll just wait in the car while you two go in.”

“But you can’t—”

“I’m twenty-three now! I’m old enough to wait in the car by myself!”

“Well all right,” she relented. “But don’t touch anything.”

I think I’ll keep a low profile in Cowra until I get down to a size 16, which was my approximate lardiness when I finished high school. It will be as if that whole pesky morbid obesity thing never happened.

Next stop on the itinerary was my grandparents’ house. Nanny and Poppy are two of my most favorite people in the world. They lived on a farm much the same as ours, with crops, tractors, cow pats to step in—but things couldn’t have been more different inside the house. They had cake! Ice cream! Mashed potatoes! Harmonious relationships!

Like all good farmers, my grandparents worked hard, but there was always time for a cup of tea. I used to sit at the kitchen bench, eyes wide as Nanny dragged out the biscuit tins and sliced up a homemade cake. I’d wriggle in my seat, overwhelmed by choice and wondering how much I could eat before Mum would say, “No more for you, young lady.”

I thought Nanny and Poppy’s house was a veritable palace of fat and sugar, but they actually had a moderate approach. Nanny cooked hearty meals in sensible portions, always with lots of vegetables. Dessert and cakes were reserved for special occasions or a treat for the grandkiddies. Food was just food with Nanny and Poppy. It didn’t mean anything. They didn’t use it as a weapon or a punishment. Mealtimes were beautifully ordinary, with no tense silences or bitter arguments; no one making pointed comments about your thighs one minute then demanding you finish your lamb chop the next.