Fat Chance (21 page)

It’s interesting to me now that I would be ridiculously grateful for one of those “unplanned pregnancies” in just a few short months’ time.

A
fter a string of babyless months, Mike and I agreed to begin fertility treatments. If you ever need a totally demoralizing experience, just pay a visit to your local infertility clinic. The staff is nice enough, but as you stare at the hopelessly blank faces of the people sitting in the waiting room, you get the distinct sense that both you and they must have done something
terribly
wrong. Women and men are supposed to be able to conceive babies, and they both feel a little less human when they cannot.

In her memoir,
Inconceivable
, author Julia Indichova describes what it was like to be told by her doctor that although she had delivered a perfectly healthy daughter years prior, she could no longer become pregnant. (Could I ever relate.) It would have been fine for Indichova, except for the fact that she and her husband Ed so deeply wanted to be pregnant again. She was in and out of fertility clinics for months on end, desperate to crack the code on conceiving another child, and the end result of all those visits was, in her words, a certain “narrowing” of herself.

“I feel a narrowness in my chest,” Indichova writes, “a constriction that keeps me from taking a deep breath. I think of the impersonal narrow corridors, leading to examining rooms. I think of narrow lovemaking zeroed in on the one thing that’s unattainable. I realize how afraid I am to open up to the sadness, afraid to let Ed see … I must keep moving. I can’t just sit around agonizing over my options while my childbearing days gallop away from me. I must fight against all the grave faces that say it’s useless—all these appointments, all this flapping of my wings.”
¹³

I could have written those very same words because for me, the fight was equally tough. But for all the agony infertility elicits from women, it levels an equal blow to men. Men, for example, were not made to point semen into a plastic cup with a whole waiting-room’s worth of people hovering outside. Their egos aren’t meant to bear the walk of shame from that waiting room out the office door, down the hall and to the parking lot, where the car is waiting that will encase what is always a painfully silent drive home.

Time and again Mike and I would cradle nothing more than a God-given desire, fearing only a worst-case scenario would be born. There were no answers to our questions about whether the treatments would work. There were no answers to Noah’s questions about why the sibling he so diligently prayed for just wasn’t showing up. There was nothing but more and more questions. And a lot of waiting around.

U
nbeknownst to me, in the same month that I discovered I’d been cast on Season 4 of the show, a single mom in Jacksonville discovered that she was pregnant. It would be many months later that she and I would cross paths and string together the timeline of our mutual journey. But now with those pieces intact, I see God’s perfect hand of provision at work.

In those early days after being cast, I remember crying out to God. “Please heal my body!” I’d plead. “Please help me finish what I’ve started so that Mike and I can conceive.” Who could have known that at the very same time another woman who was roughly my age was crying out to God too.

“You hear about these circumstances happening to other women,” she would later write, “but as a thirty-two-year-old single woman, this was new territory for me.”
¹⁴
Like so many women who find themselves single, pregnant and deathly afraid, she immediately sought out easy answers. “I knew I needed to make a decision,” she says; “I just didn’t know what decision to make.”
¹⁵

As God worked in her mind and body, he was working in my mind and body too. Hour by hour, day by day, I noticed that as I made drastic changes to my diet and forced my arms, my legs and my abdomen to
endure endless hours of exercise, the symptoms of my condition disappeared. No longer was I losing my hair. No longer was my body
refusing
to lose weight. I was becoming stronger, both physically and mentally, and with strength came the rising of my hope—hope that with healing would come pregnancy and with pregnancy would come the contentment so desperately sought.

Admittedly, my body was still covered in fat, but sources other than my mirror were telling me that progress was being made.

Every week on the show, contestants had to visit
The Biggest Loser
doctor so that he could run a new body-composition scan to determine body-fat percentage, bone strength and muscle mass. It’s called the iDEXA and is something like a CT-scan for your entire body. All I know is that the chart it produces is really pretty. There are bright, vibrant colors like yellow and blue, but the ratio of my colors initially gave the doctor reason for concern.

Here’s how it breaks down: When you see yellow on the scan, that means there’s fat. When you see blue, there’s muscle. And when you see white, you know that’s a bone. At the beginning of my time on campus, my iDEXA image was a big blob of yellow with a teeny-tiny piece of white in the middle—all fat with a little bone thrown in for good measure.

The doctor looked at me and said, “Julie, you have no blue. You’re nothing but bone and fat.” As you’d guess, it wasn’t a very enjoyable conversation from that point forward.

Halfway through the show I was lying on the examination table during one of my weekly appointments and happened to glance over when my iDEXA image popped onto the screen. For the first time I actually saw
blue
. “Look!” I cheered. “I have
muscles
!”

As my body began to find strength and healing, I gained confidence that anything really
was
possible with God. During those days when my faith was being formed that he really could change something as seemingly fixed as my decades-old body composition, he was forming another miracle too.

For many months, Jaxon’s biological mother had all but denied the fact that she was carrying a baby, simply because she didn’t know what to do. “I hid my pregnancy and contemplated the issue for months,”
she admits, “not knowing how my family would react to the situation. … Finally, after many sleepless nights, I made my decision to place my child for adoption.”
¹⁶

As she tells it, there was an ad in a local circular for a Christian adoption service called “Angelic Adoptions” that a friend of hers found and forwarded on to her. Despite her internal confusion, she couldn’t help but be drawn to the name. Several hours of deliberation later, on a cool, crisp December day, she decided to make a call.

O
n Thursday, December 13, 2007, I flew from Florida to California, eagerly anticipating
The Biggest Loser
Season 4 finale. As I boarded that jet, I remember feeling stronger and more slender than I’d ever felt before. Of course, that feeling had come at a fairly steep price. I don’t know about you, but when a quarter-million dollars is on the line, a girl can sink to some pretty special lows. I had spent the previous week juicing and running my way to a size four, determined to take home the prize, having no clue that the real prize would not be coming to me in currency.

Once I arrived in LA, I was ushered to a secluded room in a hotel, where I was allowed to put down my things and freshen up before heading off to be fitted for my finale outfit, spray-tanned and weighed-in. I wasn’t allowed to see my trainer, my castmates or the other members of the final four, which was especially devastating to someone like me, who wilts without hourly human interaction.

I went to my stage-rehearsal, which I had to endure all by myself, with no host, no audience and no other contestants around. I practiced breaking through the paper, I practiced walking in my impossibly high heels, and I practiced smiling the victor’s smile. Had I really made it this far? It was hard to contain the sense of satisfaction that was welling up inside.

The day of the finale dawned, and by the time I was escorted from my hotel room to my dressing room in the studio, I was ready to burst with
excitement and pride. All of my sweat. All of my hard work. It was
all
about to be paid off, in the form of some cold, hard cash and the “first female Biggest Loser” title. How cool would that be!

Production assistants knocked on my door to usher me backstage, where the final four were positioned for their grand entrance. They held up sheets and formed giant cotton dividers around us so that we couldn’t see each other as we shuffle-stepped our way in the dark. My three teammates—Hollie, Isabeau and Bill—and I giggled and chatted from inside our sheets like mischievous school children. Surely they shared my sentiment: I couldn’t
wait
to see what they looked like.

As we made our way from the back hall to the rear of the stage, I could hear the crowd cheering and Top 40 music blaring through the speakers. Through the cracks of the stage set I could see the audience dancing and singing during what was obviously a commercial break before our big debut.

I caught sight of Bob and Jillian coming back stage from the other side and watched them like a hawk until Bob finally sensed my stare and looked over. It was the first time he had seen me since I had been on campus, and as he took in the version of me that was forty pounds lighter than he remembered, his jaw dropped to his chest. I laughed out loud from across the stage and motioned for him to get Jillian’s attention. Without breaking his gaze he elbowed his fellow trainer. I could read his lips as he said, “Jill!
Look
at Julie!” Jillian’s head swiveled my way, and as her eyes fell on my figure, I posed and laughed some more. “You like?” I joked.

Her hands flew to her face, and her eyes lighted up with pride. “Oh. My.
Gosh
!” she mouthed. I blew kisses her way and then readied myself to finally take the stage.

O
nce Mike and I were allowed by the show’s producers to have phone conversations and write letters back and forth, I noticed a theme in his correspondence. Evidently God impressed upon Mike that he and
I should consider adoption as a way to expand our family. I’m not really used to hearing audible voices from the heavens, but Mike says on this issue, “God really did speak.” I was more than a little skeptical.

As soon as I returned home from LA, amid the whirlwind of activity that accompanied returning to normal life after being gone for four months, Mike and I talked further about his adoption idea. That weekend we had a conversation about our possible interest in adoption with our friend Haley, who is part of our church family and who, along with her husband, had recently adopted a child through the Angelic Adoptions agency. Was this really the path we also should take? My heart was definitely growing tender toward the thought.

The very next day Haley went to the agency to complete her last batch of paperwork and overheard a pregnant woman talking to a counselor about her preferences for the type of family that would adopt her baby. She wanted her son to be part of a Christian family. She wanted him to have an older sibling who was already in the home. She wanted to know that his new grandparents lived close by and that cousins and extended family would be present to help him to grow and mature. She wanted him to have a stay-at-home mom. On and on went her list.

Haley was still there when the woman left, and she overheard the counselor say to another staff member, “I don’t think we have any families that fit that profile …”

“I think I know just the one,” Haley said.