Secrets of a Former Fat Girl (10 page)

Load up on the good stuff.

When there are healthy low-fat and low-cal foods on the menu, load up on these and leave just a little room for the other stuff—green salad, for instance. When I was on my journey, salad became my salvation. I was never a big salad fan before, but I learned that salad was something I could eat in mass quantities without racking up a load of calories. Instead of stuffing my face with pasta or bread or cake, I stuffed my face with salad. While there's no comparison flavorwise, it helped satisfy my drive to eat large amounts of food. Even now when there is salad on the menu at family gatherings (and there usually is because I bring it), I fill at least half my plate with leafy greens so there's only a smidgen of room for the gooey chicken casserole and the cream cheese Jell-O mold. Steamed veggies do the same thing, but I know very few people who serve them without some kind of sauce or at least a good dose of butter (they're just too boring otherwise). Then there are lean meats: They won't fulfill your need for mass quantities, but the protein in them will help satisfy your appetite. Lean cuts of beef, poultry without the skin, fish or shellfish—all are good choices. But watch the preparation method. You're safest with grilled, baked, roasted, or broiled. And exercise caution with fish; many cooks oversauce it so it may be richer than you think.

Lie.

Sometimes the best way to get out of a sticky situation is to fib a little. For instance, say you accepted that piece of cheesecake and managed to take only two bites, as you promised yourself. What do you say when Mom asks why you didn't wolf it down as you normally would? What would it hurt to say you're feeling a little sick to your stomach or feverish or crampy? I don't claim to understand the ways of God, but I don't think he'll damn you for telling such a minor untruth in the spirit of safeguarding yourself from a family firestorm. I've also found that lying can help make restaurant workers take you seriously. Too many times I've ordered a dish without cheese, and it's delivered covered with the stuff. But if I say “I'm allergic to cheese,” they get it right four times out of five (which makes me glad I'm not really allergic). If you're concerned about the damage this strategy might do to your soul, I understand (I'm Catholic, after all). Focus your energy on the other tips I've laid out here and whip this one out only as a last resort.

All these tips are working together to give you time to make your new life a habit. Secret #2 is all about helping you seal yourself off from the influences that might have dragged you down in your weight loss attempts of the past. It protects you from the external distractions—the critical comments, the probing questions, and the spoken and unspoken doubts—so that you can focus on the task at hand: getting healthy, getting fit, and getting stronger and more confident. But what about your inner critic, the voice inside whose favorite words are “you can't” and “never”? The next chapter will reveal the secret to dealing with the saboteur inside.

Secret #3: Adopt INO: It's Not an Option

I
had a mantra before I really even knew what one was. Here's how it all started: I was a pretty good student in high school, getting mostly A's and B's (except for that completely unfair D in trig that I'm still bitter about). I wasn't quite as smart as “The Brains,” as we called the kids at the top of the class, but close enough that I counted some of them as friends.

What kept me from superstudent status, I think, was less about pure ability and more about my study habits. Oh, I did my work (a good girl wouldn't slack on homework), but I wasn't the kind of kid who toiled away at the kitchen table late at night agonizing over a paper on some obscure historical event or drilling myself on the anatomy of a fetal pig. No, by 10:00
P.M
. I was snoozing.

I just didn't have the drive to excel. Maybe, I think now, it was because of my desire to stay invisible. I couldn't be the kid who won first prize at the science fair or who was chosen to read her A+ essay aloud to the class or who was singled out in any way. I held myself back, afraid of that blinding spotlight that would show every little failure and flaw.

In college, though, I learned to appreciate the value of the all-night study session. It was partly an image thing. I was the only one in my senior class headed to the 2,500-student campus in Austin where I'd chosen to spend my undergraduate years. I saw college as a chance to start over, to shed some of the nerdy image I'd been saddled with since grade school. After all, no one knew me. Oh, anyone could tell by looking at me that I was a Fat Girl, but other than that, there was no preconceived idea of where I belonged in the social structure of the place. At my school there wasn't even all that much of the typical college caste system where the lowly freshmen are not to fraternize with upperclassmen. Plus, no one knew my history. They didn't know, for instance, that the guy who took me to the senior prom got my name off a list of girls who were still dateless three weeks before the dance. (Anyone who was anyone, of course, had a boyfriend or was paired up months in advance.) They didn't hear about the time I started my period in the most obvious way, all over a pair of pale green elastic-waist pants, and walked around the school, oblivious. They might have noticed that I was a Fat Girl—had to, actually—but they didn't seem to quite get what that meant. And that was just fine with me.

It's not like I all of a sudden did a 180 and became some uninhibited, outspoken, take-charge kind of girl with a social calendar as packed as Paris Hilton's. But I did feel more comfortable reaching out to the girls in my dorm and was more receptive to their efforts to reach out to me. It didn't hurt that most of them were in the same situation as I was. They were from all over—New York, Virginia, Florida, and other towns in Texas—and didn't know anyone, either. We all needed one another, so there was less risk of rejection than I'd experienced trying to navigate my clique-heavy high school.

Even so, the last thing I wanted to be pegged was as a nerd, and only a nerd would be organized and conscientious enough to be finished studying in time to get eight hours of sleep the night before a test. No, the cool kids had to cram, and I wanted to be one of the cool kids.

There was a more
practical reason, too: The work was harder. I was taking psychology and philosophy, studying Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and learning about Jung and Freud. Not exactly what you'd call light reading. At my little liberal arts college in the fall of 1978, there was kind of an anything-goes approach to education. There were very few course requirements. I started out thinking that I would major in economics. I had no idea what people who majored in economics did with their lives or even what economics itself actually entailed. I thought it had something to do with government and politics, and I was interested in those things. Econ 101, though, was so excruciatingly boring that I barely made it through the semester, let alone an entire four years. And did I really want to be chairman of the Fed? I don't think so.

Then I thought I'd go pre-law, which is how I found myself reading German philosophers. The actual name of my major is General Studies, which is as close to
whatever
as you can get. I took a lot of the English and philosophy classes that were recommended for pre-law types, but I was able to dabble in a little bit of everything: art history, pottery, psych, computer science, religion, biology, and photography—oh, and PE. I took a tennis class once from the ancient old man who was still coaching well into his eighties. And I vividly remember volleyball class because one day during drills I got slammed in the face with a spike so hard that I thought I had whiplash. I even learned to play racquetball during my college years (it was kind of a craze back then). So I wasn't a complete lump. I tried to get moving, to eat light and eat right, and to get that needle on the scale to move in the desired direction or at least to hold steady. But it wasn't meant to be: I reached my heaviest weight ever just after the end of my senior year.

The obvious reason for my losing battle (how's that for a pun?) was that I had no off switch for my appetite. And there was something else: I'd found myself some partners in crime. Some of my best friends as a freshman—lucky me—were girls who shared my fervor for food, my zeal for meals. What had been my secret shame back home didn't have to be kept secret anymore. As horrible as that shame was, I think it helped rein me in somewhat: sneaking bites under the watchful eyes of my family instead of snuggling up with a whole layer cake out in the open for anyone to see. In the comfort of the dorm, I was free, I was out. My appetite was unleashed.

In fact, probably the most compelling reason for pulling all-nighters with the girls in the dorm was the food. During our many breaks over the course of the evening, we'd raid the lobby vending machine, making a game of trying to steal snacks with a clothes hanger. (Our appetites usually trumped our patience and our skill, and we'd end up pulling out the roll of quarters anyway.) We'd get someone with a car to take us on a Taco Bell run, and I'd order not one but two items: a Bell Beefer with Cheese (a spicy ground beef concoction on a bun, sort of like a sloppy joe) and a Bean Burrito with Cheese. (Do you notice a theme? I was all about the cheese.) When we wanted something sweet, we'd stop by Dunkin' Donuts for an apple fritter the size of a dinner plate. Sometimes we went to the grocery store on the corner for a bag of Nacho Doritos and a six-pack of diet Dr. Pepper (at least it was diet). I couldn't imagine missing out on all the food, er, fun.

But I had a little problem: I wasn't able to keep my eyes open long enough to make it through Johnny Carson's monologue, let alone a 1:00
A.M
. food run. I did the usual things to fight off sleep—learned to like coffee, tried No-Doz (and freaked out so badly I never did it again), and even smoked cigarettes, thinking that keeping my hands occupied would help. (It didn't, and I hated the smell.)

Coffee and Cokes helped, but not enough. There had to be something else I could do. So, I kind of started talking to myself. Not in the psychotic-guy-on-the-subway kind of way. I made up something like a mantra that I'd repeat in my head over and over: “Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes.”

It wasn't just about staying awake to finish my philosophy homework or to have a midnight rendezvous with Ronald McDonald. It was about shutting out the fear that made me give up on myself and go to bed; the fear of excelling, of standing out, of revealing myself, of risking the scrutiny of others. I knew that those few more hours at the books or at the typewriter (this was before PCs) could make a difference in the quality of my work, and I was calling on my inner life coach to get me there. It was as if I had a little Dr. Phil sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear: “Whatever it takes.”

 

As silly as that might
sound, I was on to something. I started switching on the “Whatever it takes” tape in my head anytime a seemingly impossible deadline loomed: during late nights in the campus newspaper offices laying out the week's edition with only a skeleton staff to help; writing my fifty-plus-page senior thesis. I found myself not giving up so easily and starting to excel both in the classroom and outside of it. This mantra, coupled with the more nurturing and accepting environment of my college campus, gave me the push I needed to put myself out there little by little once again. I started getting involved in campus activities—on the yearbook staff, in student government, and on the newspaper. This was a very small place, remember. There was a core group of about twenty students who did just about everything on campus, and I became one of them. But you didn't really have to do much more than show up to earn it. Larger schools, such as the University of Texas where I got my master's, were far more competitive. Student government campaigns are more sophisticated there than the legislative races in Alabama where I now live (which might not be saying all that much). In that cutthroat setting I would have needed more than a mantra to get me to step into the fray.

“Whatever it takes” helped me inch out of my shell academically but only to a point socially. Sure, I became one of the “doers” on campus and accumulated a good group of girlfriends, but what about the boys? I haven't mentioned any (except the poor guy who took me to the prom) because there
weren't
any. Seriously. My senior year of college I could still count on one hand the number of guys I'd even kissed, with the exception of relatives. I didn't even have a first date until my junior year in high school. George was one of two guys in the group I hung around with, and I think he “dated” every one of us at least once. I'm not sure why he all of a sudden latched on to me; I think it was just my turn. Anyway, we went to dinner and faked our way into a dance club where we swayed to Lionel Ritchie's “Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady” (I'm cringing with embarrassment even now). And, yes, we made out in his car—kissing only. I was sixteen and had never made out before. (How proud my mom must be reading this!)

Oh, I had crushes, but not on George. No, I thought there must be something wrong with him if he actually liked me, or there was some other motive at work (that it was just my turn, as I mentioned before). Any guy I even suspected of being attracted to me, and there weren't many, had to be flawed.

You know how that is: Only someone warped could think that you, Fat Girl you, would be any more than a pal. Even that is a stretch. Because how could anyone else bear to look at you long enough to have a conversation when you can't even stand to look at yourself in the mirror? And that's fully clothed. Naked? Not even a possibility.

No, my secret crush in high school was John, the other guy in my circle of friends. He was dating one of the girls in our group, and I think on some level that's why I picked him. He was safe. After all, I would never betray a friend by making a move on her guy. A great excuse for not risking my heart, isn't it? How noble of me.

Even when he and my friend Katie were on the outs, which they were regularly, there was never any real danger that he would get too close. I made sure of that. In my Fat Girl way I had made him more of a buddy than a boyfriend. With him I became like one of the guys, cracking jokes, swearing like a sailor, showing off my smarts—almost posturing like guys do. I didn't know any other way to be with guys. After all, that's how I related to my brothers and (with the exception of the swearing part) my dad.

I'm now convinced that my Fat Girl programming kept my heart sealed off from any kind of intimate relationship with a man. I just couldn't conceive of the idea that any guy in his right mind could be attracted to me. The funny thing was, during the height of my crush on John, my weight was actually at a low point. I was playing tennis semiregularly (partly because John did), and I had taken to running at night with my little dog, Daisy. But I couldn't seem to shake that Fat Girl mentality.

For years I managed to effectively neuter the rare guy who showed interest in me as anything more than a buddy; I cluelessly sucked all the sexuality and sensuality out of the relationship. I just didn't know any other way. I was oblivious to even the most overt expressions of interest from a guy. For instance, when I was a senior in college—and my weight had shot back up almost as high as it would ever go—there was a freshman who kind of followed me around like a puppy dog. I didn't think twice about the fact that he always seemed to be hanging out in the student newspaper offices where, as editor, I also spent a lot of time. One day one of the other editors referred to “the crush” Kevin had on me as if it were common knowledge. I scoffed and quickly found a reason to leave the room. I remember actually thinking, “How could he like me? I'm
fat
!” With that attitude, no wonder I was always the friend, never the girlfriend.

It would be years
before I experienced any kind of breakthrough in the romance department. (Don't worry, you'll get the details later.) But there was no denying that “Whatever it takes” was a pretty powerful tool. After all, it had helped me begin to push beyond the Fat Girl limits I'd set for myself, the limits that kept me stuck in mediocrity.

Early in my journey toward becoming a Former Fat Girl I began wondering whether some kind of mantra could get me through the sessions at the track when I'd rather be anywhere else, or the times when the dessert cart was staring me in the face, just begging for me to take the bait.