Fat Chance (2 page)

As I trained Julie those first few times, I saw the courage of a champion peeking through. She did not whine, she did not complain, she did not stop and she did not quit. As stronger contestants unraveled, it was Julie who kept pushing through.

Some judge of character I am, right?

Early into the season, after an especially tortuous workout one morning, I pulled aside a very sweaty Julie, looked intently into her eyes and told her the story of Valentino Rossi. “It wasn’t about the bike,” I explained. “His victories came because
he
was well-made. And although anybody in a right mind would tell me to bet on the bigger, stronger guys on this campus, I’m choosing to bet on
you
, Julie. You’re my Yamaha.”

For four months straight, Julie endured the worst that my beatings could offer a girl and emerged a woman who knew her own strength. What was flabby became firm. What was slow became fast. What was timid became brave. And
nothing
could hold her back now.

T
he two years following his very bold move, Valentino Rossi would capture back-to-back Grand Prix titles—and do it, unbelievably, on a Yamaha. After his victory lap on Valencia’s course in Spain, Rossi swung himself off his bike, fell to his knees and planted a kiss on the track. Funny how I witnessed a similar reaction from a thirty-something stay-at-home mom while she was netting a victory of her own. Several weeks before the finale, overcome by the joy that accompanies finding courage she didn’t know she had, Julie Hadden fell to her knees and kissed the scale that in the end would declare her a full 45 percent thinner than she’d been.

Back at the finale, as she sobbed her way toward an ear-to-ear smile, I shook my head in absolute admiration of the “too-small, too-weak” girl who’d proven her critics dead wrong. It was a picture of courage personified that I’ll remember for a long, long time.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that you can build courage in the same way you build physical strength. While most fat people can’t curl twenty-pound weights their first day in the gym, a few weeks into their regimen, you wouldn’t believe how their capabilities have changed. In the same way, even those who are utterly paralyzed by panic and fear will one day emerge victorious and strong, if they suck it up and do the work that transformation demands.

The process played out for me starting in my early teens. I was in desperate need of a catalyst and a motivator, of an educator and an encourager, when I got all of that and much more. A martial-arts instructor stepped into my life, and despite my hefty weight, my cavernous wounds and my wavering self-esteem, he bet on me to win. It was a vote of confidence that propelled me into the soul-level passion for fitness I’ve been thriving on ever since.

If you’re in need of an advocate who will cheer you on toward change, I’ve got just the one for you. Let Julie—and her compelling book,
Fat Chance
—inspire you and change you and draw out your courage. You are worth the life you long to live. You are capable of bringing it to pass. And the time has come for you to finally bet on
you
to win.

Y
OU KNOW YOU’RE FAT when you wake up one morning and find that your gargantuan breasts have somehow merged with your double chin to form a mountain of flesh that is completely blocking your line of sight to the alarm clock. That oh-so-suffocating day dawned for me in March 2007, just thirty days before I hoped to be cast for Season 4 of the reality TV show,
The
Biggest Loser
. “For the
love!
This is ridiculous,” I thought as I struggled to part the great divide and find the time.

My mind raced as I took in the neon numbers staring back at me. “Ten o’clock? Noah is going to be
so
late for school.” But as suddenly as it had appeared, my panic dissipated into peace as the familiar smell of cinnamon rolls wafted underneath the closed bedroom door.
Ah, Saturday.
My husband Mike had let me sleep in, bless his soul.

For quite some time I hadn’t been sleeping well, but the previous night had broken all records for insomnia; I was restless every single hour. I’d been struggling with the general aches and pains associated with being obese, but the little stuff of being overweight was now becoming big stuff—simple things like breathing were becoming increasingly difficult. And I assumed that if I made the show, at some point I’d need to breathe.

As I lay flat on my back that morning and tried in vain to catch my breath, I looked down at my puffed-up hands and wiggled my fingers—ten little sausages in their casings. The rest of me was no better off. My arms, my hips, my legs, my feet—every part of me felt stretched to its limit,
tender and achy and numb. It was an all-over hurt I was experiencing, like the hurt after a car wreck.
Truly
, I thought, as if realizing it for the very first time,
something has got to give
.

For a split second, I thought back to the documentaries I’d seen on TV where emergency workers who were trying to remove severely overweight people from their bedrooms had to cut a giant hole in a wall and pluck them out with a cherry picker or hoist them up with the same contraption that is used to lift a whale. I cut my eyes toward the bedroom window and exhaled a sigh of relief when I saw no EMTs standing outside.

I rolled over to my side, my big belly gurgling as it shifted and flopped down onto the mattress as though it were a separate entity entirely and thought, “Seriously. I am
big
!” It should have concerned me that despite these all-too-real reminders that my size had gotten out of control, I continued to fantasize about those cinnamon rolls. But still I made my way to the kitchen, an addict in search of her fix.

H
aving a cinnamon-roll addiction doesn’t exactly contribute to a figure that’s svelte. I’d ballooned to more than two hundred pounds by the time I auditioned for
The Biggest Loser
, but interestingly, at five-feet-two-inches tall I remained the smallest person in the running for the cast that season. The irony wasn’t lost on me, the one who always had been the Large Marge in the room.

Despite my excitement at the prospect of being on national TV, auditioning wasn’t my idea. In the summer of 2006, my girlfriend Melissa found out that producers from
The Biggest Loser
were hosting an open casting call in our hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. Shortly thereafter, my cell phone rang, and I spotted Melissa’s number on the screen. “Julie!” she exclaimed as soon as I picked up. “You’re
not
going to believe who’s in town!”

After indulging a few of my unsuccessful guesses, she enthusiastically spat out the answer: “
The Biggest
Loser
! They’re doing an open casting call!”

“Really?”
I cheered.

“Yes!” said skinny, never-has-struggled-with-her-weight Melissa. “And … well, I think you’d be …
great
… on that show.”

I
first started watching
The Biggest Loser
during Season 2, and while I could relate to the contestants, I didn’t see myself
or
them as “morbidly obese,” to quote the show’s announcer. I focused so much on what their “after” state would look like that I guess the “before” reality somehow faded away. These people were polished and pretty pursuers of a completely new life, and I couldn’t help but cheer them on.

That season, I resonated most with Suzy Preston—a wisecracker whose witty remarks and animated expressions had me captivated from the start. She had short, blonde hair like me and at five-feet-four with ninety-five pounds to lose, we seemed to share similar dimensions. I’d watch Suzy and the other contestants compete in challenges, fight through temptations, work out every now and then and think, “That’s something I could actually do!” Much like a high school swimmer watching Michael Phelps go for gold in the Olympics, I saw the people on the screen living my dream and wanted more than anything to join them.

Since childhood, that “dream” had been to go to fat camp. My chubbiest friend at the time, Tammie, and I even made a pact that if either of us ever won the lottery, we’d take the other one to fat camp. Of course, we
also
agreed that we’d probably be the most rebellious campers the camp had ever seen. We’d be the ones plotting ways to break into the snack shack late at night and eat our way through boxes of Snickers and Twinkies, figuring when you’re as rich as we’d be, you could eat whatever you want.

Tammie had struggled with her weight as long as I had, and both of us knew that the only way we were going to drop a hundred pounds each was if we signed up for a massive kick in the pants. These days, people look to gastric-bypass surgery or a Lap-Band insertion. Back then, assuming you didn’t care to have your jaw wired shut, fat camp was the
do-or-die choice. But honestly, what’s more fun than camp? With that rhetorical question in mind, I gathered up my purse, my courage and my assumptions about life on
The Biggest Loser
, and I headed for the casting call.

I
asked half a dozen friends and family members to come with me to my
The Biggest Loser
audition, but every one of them declined. They loved the show and supported my desire to try out, but given the fact that 250,000 people were auditioning for it, they thought my efforts were a colossal waste of time. To be fair, the odds
were
staggering, and being cast on a nationwide reality show just doesn’t happen to people “we” know. Plus, there was the fact that I wasn’t exactly famous for my track record of completing the things I set out to do. I always had wonderful intentions, but somehow, someone or something seemed to distract me from accomplishing the goal. And so I would go to the casting call alone, me, the one who doesn’t even go to the
bathroom
by herself.

As I entered the atrium of our local mall, I realized that my friends and family might have been right. The main floor was flooded with hundreds of prospective contestants, some with neon poster-board “Pick Me!” signs in hand, some with colorful Afro wigs, one in a full-body sumo-wrestler costume. Handprinted signs pointed me toward the line where I would stand for hours, left to my insecure thoughts about how I stacked up next to the far more interesting people all around me.
Fat chance
—it’s what I remember thinking about the likelihood that I’d actually make the cut, lose the weight, change my life for good.

A casting assistant from the show ushered us into a meeting room six at a time. As soon as my group entered and sat down, a tall, thin, official-looking man with thick, gelled-back hair that made him look exactly like John Stamos during his
Full House
days glanced at us and said, “Tell us about yourselves, one by one.” He looked at the
woman sitting at the other end of the line from me. “We’ll start with you, and keep it brief. Ten minutes and the bell will ring, which will signal your group to leave.”

I did the math and concluded that even if the other five people talked fast, I wasn’t going to have much time to share my story. What’s more, I realized in that moment that I didn’t even have a story to share.