Designated Fat Girl (10 page)

Another example: When I worked at the radio station, employees were offered free gym memberships through one of its sponsors. I happily signed up, thinking this would be it, this would be what motivated me, what made me turn the corner. As part of the sign-up, I got a free session with a trainer. Great! An expert who could tell me exactly what I needed to do! I was a let’s-make-a-plan kind of girl, and this was going to be just the plan I needed.

The trainer was a nineteen-year-old stud named Ricky. He had a hard body and a killer smile, and I was beyond mortified. To make matters worse he acted as though he drew the
short straw by having to work with the big fat radio girl. He weighed me (kill me now) and took my body fat measurements (okay, just shoot me). And then he started going over strength-training exercises. Strength training? Did I look like I needed strength training? I feigned a headache and got the hell out of there, making a beeline for the hot dog joint across the street. Again, hot tears spilling down into my food didn’t stop me from eating.

I did go back to that gym, sans trainer. But it clearly was not the place for me. All young, beautiful hard bodies were there, trolling for dates just as much as looking to exercise. I was so self-conscious, I couldn’t do much of anything.

Now could I have made these two situations better? Of course. I could have kept looking for a Weight Watchers group that worked for me, even if it meant driving to another town. I could have joined another gym, perhaps one that catered to women. Money was certainly an issue (when is it not?), but with the cash I was spending on food, I’m sure I could have scraped up the funds needed. But with every experience like the old lady Weight Watchers or the hard body gym, I just felt more and more defeated. Helpless. Hopeless. Out of time and out of luck.

It was during the really desperate times that I would go back to one idea that refused to go away: gastric bypass surgery. Reading about Carnie Wilson’s experience with the procedure and seeing her successful results made a great impression on me, but I was still skeptical. Sure, I felt pretty desperate, but having surgery seemed so drastic to me. When I first started to think it over, I’d never been hospitalized before, never had
any sort of surgery. I couldn’t imagine willingly going in and allowing doctors to cut away. But the results were undeniable: Al Roker looked fantastic, Carnie Wilson was a knockout, and probably the story that had the most impact on me was Blues Traveler front man John Popper. I caught a VH1 special that detailed his experience and could hardly believe it when he said he’d lost two hundred pounds in a year. Holy crap! After a heart scare, his friends talked him into exploring gastric bypass. He said he thought there was no way he would lose the weight, no way he’d be able to give up McDonald’s french fries or Burger King hamburgers. Boy could I relate to that! After having the surgery, though, he couldn’t imagine he ever ate at those places. He’d always seen himself as a frog, and now he was slowly becoming a prince.

After watching that special, I was blown away. Was I missing something right in front of my face? I had tried so hard for so long, and I was just watching the years slip away without any solution. Was it finally time to make a permanent change?

In 2002 I thought I was ready. I started off the New Year like I did every January, full of promises and plans to lose the weight and keep it off. I did well for a bit, but then something small and inconsequential sent me straight to the drive-thru. As I polished off two chili cheese dogs and a jumbo bag of fries, I thought about how all my efforts had led to only three days of healthy eating and exercise—how someone saying the wrong thing to me made me throw away all my hard work. I knew I had a problem; I was well aware that I was simply looking for any excuse to overeat, to self-sabotage. Fed up, I vowed then and there that if I didn’t do something in the next six months,
if I didn’t manage to stick to a plan and make significant headway with this problem, then I was making an appointment with a gastric bypass surgeon. I was finally disgusted with myself enough to self-issue an ultimatum—and I meant it.

And then, wouldn’t you know it, word started coming out against gastric bypass. Suddenly it wasn’t the cure-all everyone had hoped for; for all the Carnie Wilsons and Al Rokers out there, there were plenty of people who suffered serious complications from the procedure.
People
magazine did a piece on it in 2003, profiling several gastric bypass surgeries gone wrong, including a woman who had to have her arm amputated! I used that negative information to climb back onto my high horse about gastric bypass.
That’s what happens when people take the easy way out,
I told myself. It seemed like such a good idea: Go to the doctor and have him make it so you can’t overeat. Finished, end of story. But of course nothing is as easy as that, and I felt this was proof. I quickly got off of the idea, deciding that I needed to lose the weight “on my own” in order for it to really count.

I knew I was in trouble. I felt sick—and not just from the physical toll of carrying around so much weight. I felt as though I was losing my mind. I couldn’t get anything accomplished in my life. Every minute of every day was consumed with what I was eating, or when I was going to eat again. I was so hard on myself, declaring the day an unqualified failure if I ate even a morsel of food that was supposed to be off-limits. I would string together a few good days of eating well and exercising, and then I would throw it all away over something minor, like drinking a can of Mountain Dew while at work on a stressful
day. That one twelve-ounce soda would lead me to eat a large pepperoni and sausage pizza or two, foot-long cheese and meatball subs. When I was thinking logically, I knew one can of soda wasn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. But logical thinking was a rare occurrence in that state of mind. Perhaps I was just looking for an excuse to binge eat. And those excuses were quite easy to come by.

I withdrew from my family, avoiding gatherings for special occasions because I couldn’t stand to see the looks on their faces, disappointed as they realized I was as heavy as ever. I remember one Christmas, before I had kids and couldn’t shirk family duties, actually being ecstatic because Michael had to work the holiday. It allowed me to spend the day at home, alone, instead of being forced to attend another family event. I spent Christmas all by myself, hiding from the world and eating whatever I wanted. I was really happy and relieved, and that’s what ultimately scared me the most. Who is happy when she spends the holidays alone? Someone who is not well, I was sure.

I wasn’t able to avoid all family gatherings, and such was the case with that family beach trip in 2002, the one that started with such good intentions but evolved into me sneaking out at night to make a McDonald’s run. Seven whole days of facing my in-laws, with a backdrop of sand and surf, bathing suits and suntan lotion. Could I be more miserable? I didn’t think so, although the gods did smile upon me somewhat: It rained almost every single day, severely limiting our time by the ocean. Let me tell you: Rain at the beach is a fat girl’s friend!

There was at least one sunny day, and it was the day I reached a critical point, personally. We’d spent all morning
at the beach, watching our nieces and nephew dance in the surf. I tried to tell myself I didn’t stand out in the crowd at all, dressed in my black T-shirt (black at the beach!) and longish khaki cropped pants (long pants! at the beach!). I was relieved when someone suggested we pack up and head back to the bungalows to fix lunch. I was loaded down, carrying a beach umbrella on a pole in one hand and a folded-up beach chair in the other (a chair that, by the way, I refused to sit on because I was afraid it would collapse under me). My butt was numb, having spent the whole morning sitting on a towel on the hard sand. We had a long way back to the cottage, and the sand was deep, my steps quite heavy. I was sweating like a pig, beads of perspiration flowing down my spine like a river. Even though I’d started out in the lead, every single family member passed me as my steps grew slower and slower.

Eventually I reached the steep staircase that led back up to street level. Taking a deep breath I started the slow journey, carrying more than three hundred pounds of flesh and various unused items of beach paraphernalia. I slowly trudged up the wooden slats, and when I finally reached the top, I made an abrupt stop. The bright sunlight started to dim, as though a huge rain cloud was passing through. But this was a cloudless day, and I knew something was wrong. I tried to steady my breath, and found that I had very little to work with. The sky above me started to spin a little, and I opened my mouth to call out to my group. Michael had already reached and crossed the street—I could see him walking way ahead with his brother, swinging our niece’s hand. All of their backs were to me: my mother and father-in-law, Michael’s grandmother, Michael’s
sister, and her kids. I tried to call to them, but no sound came out of my mouth—there was no breath to make any words. The sunlight was really dimming now, and I could feel my legs start to buckle.
Please turn around,
I thought to myself. The voice inside my head sounded as weak as I felt.

And just like that, my sister-in-law, Molly, turned back to look at me. It was a casual movement, as if she were going to ask me what I wanted for lunch, or what I’d thought of that season of
Survivor.
It was an insignificant move to her, but it meant everything to me.

My breath was back. I drew in sharply as Molly made her way toward me. “It’s hot!” she exclaimed. “You okay?”

No, but I was getting there. Suddenly the sky wasn’t as dim, my head wasn’t as swimmy. I didn’t yet trust my voice to work, so I just nodded and let her talk. I was able to get my breathing under control as we slowly walked, Molly happily chatting about her family, her kids, her life. I listened in silence, grateful for a sister-in-law who liked to talk and didn’t seem to notice my lack of contribution.

We got back to the bungalow, and Michael followed me when he noticed I went straight to our bedroom. I lay on the bed and burst into tears, telling him what had happened. I also confessed the awful bingeing that had started a couple of days before. Worry clouded his face, but no anger. No judgment. Just love and concern, and it made me cry even harder.

The episode on the beach scared me into action. I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but I felt it was a warning. I had to do something. The day we returned home, I called a doctor I had heard about from my coworkers, one who specifically dealt
with bariatric patients. I made an appointment for the following week. I also called a therapist who had been recommended to me a couple of years earlier. I lined her up for the next week as well.

I was frightened enough to try to do something—again. Did it stop me from overeating until the appointments? No. But why would it? I knew I had a plan, that I was going to take action, so I felt I had a license to eat until then.

I had heard great things about the bariatric doctor I was going to see. It intrigued me that she was someone who devoted her practice to overweight patients—it made me feel as though my problems were legitimate and medically based. And surely she’d know what to do. This could be the answer I was looking for!

And it was. I soon learned that her weapon of choice was diet drugs. Turns out only part of fen-phen was yanked from the market; phentermine was still available, and this doctor had seen great results in her patients. I was more than a little skeptical. Did I really want to go down this road again? My feelings were still hurt from the last time, even though five or more years had passed. I just felt so cheated, so wronged. Again, I was never worried about the possible heart damage. My only concern was that losing the drugs stopped my weight loss dead in its tracks—and eventually I’d gained it all back.

My other worry was whether or not it would be effective. I’d had such great success with the combination of drugs, would just one of them do the trick? And how did I know this medication wouldn’t soon be taken off the shelves as well?

The doctor explained that phentermine worked as the appetite suppressant, and she thought that was ideal for my problem. I couldn’t really argue with that—it seemed to me that
if you took away the overwhelming hunger, you took away most of my issues. Plus, the doctor said, in order for her to prescribe the drug to me, I would have to commit to seeing her every two weeks so that she could monitor my blood pressure and other vitals. She would perform an EKG before giving me the pills, just to make sure my heart was fine. And she would quiz me extensively about my eating and exercising plans. Taking this medicine was not a long-term solution, she stressed. I was going to have to develop habits that would take me through the rest of my life. It would not be easy, but she felt I would find success.

Really, what alternative did I have? Nothing else was working, and besides, I liked the things she proposed. Eating plan? Exercise plan? Regular check-ins with her in which I would be held accountable? I loved plans! I loved goals and charts and appointments. Since I was obsessing about it all the time anyway, this was perfect!

I enthusiastically signed up, and then almost immediately suffered from sticker shock. I knew the pills would not be covered by insurance—I’d learned that during my fen-phen days. And man, were they expensive! Seventy-five dollars a month. Plus my doctor wanted me to try Xenical, a drug designed to remove fat from food before its digested. Some people experienced pretty nasty side effects (read: accidents!), but I was game. Even on my best diet days, I still had plenty of fat in my diet. I figured this drug could only help. But again, Xenical was not covered by insurance. Another seventy dollars a month! Not to mention the doctor’s visits every two weeks, which, you guess it, were not covered. Another two hundred dollars a month!

I’ll never understand the rationale of insurance companies. Most will not pay for you to see a nutritionist, to join a gym, or to take an appetite suppressant. But they will pay tens of thousands of dollars for weight-loss surgery. In fact that’s the only weight-loss tool they will pay for. Does that make any sense? No wonder so many people are turning to that alternative—it truly is their only (affordable) option!