Fat Chance (24 page)

I
AWAKENED AT the crack of dawn this morning to catch a flight to Louisiana for an engagement I agreed to months ago. My publisher ran a contest for their magazine subscribers called “New Year, New You,” and in addition to all sorts of support for a full twelve months, the winner would receive a weekend visit from a personal trainer, a motivational coach, a nutritionist and me—a once-obese woman who knew well the road she was about to walk. The trouble is, I was supposed to kick off the entire weekend by paying her a surprise visit and ringing her doorbell at three o’clock this afternoon. And based on what I’ve just been told by airline personnel here in Jacksonville, it appears I now will be arriving in Louisiana sometime around, oh, four-thirty.

My alarm shattered the blissful silence surrounding me well before five o’clock this morning, which launched me into the crazy-person’s routine of packing my suitcase, throwing together Noah’s lunch for school, grabbing Jaxon’s favorite blanket so that he could finish sleeping on the ride to his grandmother’s house and so forth. I know, I know. I should have done it all last night. Welcome to my world.

As it turned out, I arrived at the airport on time, if not a bit disheveled. I speedily hugged and kissed Mike good-bye and rushed inside toward the ticket-counter area, where I realized that I wasn’t the only person in this town who got up at an ungodly hour. There had to be ninety-five people already waiting in line, and this was the line for the
self
check-in—you know, the one that is supposed to make the entire process smooth and seamless and fun.

Not so much, today.

I finally reached the front of the line, spotted an open kiosk, swiped my credit card for proof that I am, in fact, Julie Hadden, scanned my e-ticket confirmation and then cringed as three disheartening words appeared on the screen: “Itinerary Not Recognized.”

I stared at the ticketing agent standing a few kiosks over until she acknowledged my presence, and as she stepped over to my end of the counter, I said, “It’s not letting me check in for my flight.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Let’s see what’s going on.” She then proceeded to program the proverbial space shuttle, pausing and groaning every now and then for effect. I glanced at my watch and grimaced. Six fifty-four—thirty-one minutes until my plane was due to depart. I had blown more than half an hour standing in line, and still I might miss my flight? I silently reviewed my self-talk themes, which I carry with me for situations just like this. “You’re a nice person. You’re a
good
person. You’re a person who loves God and country. Not to mention, there’s probably at least one
The Biggest Loser
fan in the general vicinity. Keep your cool, Julie. Keep your …”

Ms. Agent suddenly stopped typing. “I’m so sorry, but…”

There was no way the rest of that sentence could contain good news.

“… you can’t go,” she continued.

“Wha-what did you say?” I asked. Clearly I was being punked. I swiveled around, sure I’d find a candid camera staring me down.

“Yeah,” she said, reclaiming my attention. “You can’t go.”

“I can’t go? To
Louisiana
, you mean? On the flight I paid for?”
Keep your cool, Julie. Keep
…

“Mm-hmm. Your flight was overbooked. And we resold your ticket. But we don’t have time to get your luggage on the plane anyway, so…”

“But my flight doesn’t leave for thirty minutes!” I said, with a little more passion than I intended.

“Actually, twenty-nine. And there’s a thirty-minute cut-off on all checked luggage.”

“Wait, wait, wait. So I got here on time and with proof of a paid-in-full ticket for this flight, and now you’re telling me that I can’t get on my plane?”

“That is correct,” she said in an annoyingly helpful tone. “But because of your trouble, I won’t charge you to rebook your flight.”

Keep your cool, Julie. Keep your cool.
“Uh-huh. And so—”

“So we can put you on the next flight, which leaves here at nine o’clock …”

While she tapped out another six-thousand characters on her keyboard, I started doing the math on whether I could still make my Atlanta connection and get to Louisiana in time for the shoot. “That would work,” I offered, determined to keep my cool.

“… Oh, but that one’s oversold as well. Hmm …”

Doughnuts were created for moments like these. Doughnuts and Ben Stiller movies. In my mind’s eye I replayed the scene from
Meet the Parents
, where Stiller’s character Greg Focker walks up to the gate agent, hands over his ticket, and then hears her say in a perfectly perky tone, “I’m sorry, Sir, but we’re only boarding rows nine and above right now.”

He looks at her stiff up-do, her rosy cheeks and her painted-on smile and says, “But I’m in row eight. It’s only one row off.”

“Yes, we’ll be calling your row shortly, Sir. Now please, step aside.”

Frustrated, Focker turns around and scans the utterly vacant gate area, finding only a custodian with a vacuum cleaner a hundred feet away who’s mowing long rows into the muted gray carpet. He turns back around and gawks at the airline representative with a look that says, “Surely you’re kidding.”

“Please step aside, Sir,” she says again, pasted-on smile still firmly in place.

And so Greg Focker reaches for his suitcase, takes four steps backward and waits while the empty room stays empty and not a single soul boards the plane.

Five seconds later, the gate agent picks up the intercom phone, tilts her perky head back and forth in cadence with her words and says to her audience of one, “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for waiting. We are now boarding all rows. All rows, you may board now.”

A totally dispirited Focker picks up his bag, takes four steps forward and hands over his ticket once again.

Back in Jacksonville, I was having a surreal airport experience of my own. “Then when do you think I can actually get out of here?” I asked with as much grace as I could muster.

“Well,” said Ms. Agent, while still staring at her screen, “there’s one at ten-fourteen. Oh, but whoops, it would be illegal to book you on that
one because you wouldn’t have enough time to make your connection in Atlanta …”

“Listen, lady, have you seen my biceps? If you don’t start coming up with some viable options for getting me
out
of here, on a plane and
to
the state of Louisiana
THIS
afternoon, believe me, things are going to get ugly.”

Actually, I didn’t say that. I’m pretty sure I just stared at her, dumbfounded and deflated and ready to call it quits.

S
omewhere along the way I picked up the assumption that after my stint on
The Biggest Loser
, I’d exist in a permanent state of euphoria, kind of like Maria twirling down the flower-dotted Austrian mountainside in
The Sound of Music
—thin, carefree and with a lovely song on my lips. I’d waltz my way through daily life, inspiring others to lose weight just as I had and I’d sleep restfully each night, content with the course of my life.

Travel hassles didn’t
exactly
fit the picture of what I thought life would look like.

But it’s been this way ever since I returned home from the show. Daily life still proves to be a struggle. Inspiring others to lose weight sometimes requires eating three meals in a row in stuffy airports and sleeping on starchy budget-hotel sheets. And restfulness doesn’t really come by way of starch.

This is the problem with buying into myths—they never prove themselves true. As I look at my life today, I see three clear myths I swallowed—hook, line and sinker. The first was that, despite the fact that physical, mental and spiritual transformation had been
ridiculously
difficult from day one, after I was done with the show, surely things would get easier.

Yeah, right.

M
aking my reentry into home-life was uncomfortable and complex and weird. Clearly, this was still my home: I recognized the furniture, the appliances and the pictures on the wall. But I had changed so much that I felt like a stranger in my own skin, not to mention in
my house. Sure, there were some perks. I had gotten used to sleeping in a twin bed in an un-air-conditioned dorm room, but now I found myself in a cushy king-size bed … and with a man by my side. What’s more, I didn’t have to wait in line to take a shower. I could use the telephone whenever my little heart desired. And there weren’t cameras rolling, waiting to record my every move.

But the downs seemed to outweigh the ups.

On
The Biggest Loser
campus the only thing I had to focus on was working out—frequently, passionately and with as few tears shed as possible. Now I was back home, where my list of responsibilities was long. Given the new skills and perspectives I had learned the past many months, I had no idea how to prioritize all those to-dos.

In addition to reacclimating to the daily routines of life, there was a relational chasm that had to be bridged.

Noah and Mike had become so close while I was gone that interacting with them upon my return felt odd. The women in my life—my mother, my mother-in-law, my sister, my grandmother—served as Noah’s surrogate moms while I was away, but Mike was the one who bore the most significant burden. And God blessed his efforts in unique ways. Mike would tell you that my being gone for months on end was the best thing that could have happened to Noah’s and his relationship, and in my view, he would be right.

Before I left for the show, Noah was a momma’s boy through and through, mostly due to the fact that I
lived
for the child. As an obese person it was far easier to shift the focus to my son than to risk drawing attention to myself: Noah was the air that I breathed, and he knew it. How grateful I am that
The Biggest Loser
interrupted a pattern that was destined for destruction. A boy needs his dad, and I unwittingly was robbing Noah of that relationship by trying to be all things to him, all the time.

When I returned, he and Mike were both still crazy about me, and I about them, but it didn’t alter the fact that I was like a junior-high kid who switched schools and then came back two years later to discover that her best friend found a new best friend while she was gone. It was the same husband, the same son and the same setting, but somehow everything now was different. There were shared experiences that I hadn’t known, inside jokes that I didn’t get and a continuation of the life I’d left that I no longer wanted to live.

That last realization hit me most profoundly when I opened the door to our pantry the first afternoon I was home. I absolutely flipped out. I mean, there was Crisco in there! To my knowledge, Crisco is only used for two things: baking unhealthy cakes, and coating a cast-iron skillet. And nothing healthy has
ever
been cooked in a cast-iron skillet. Ask me how I know.

I stood there staring at boxes and boxes of fake-fruit snacks, bags of white flour, a giant jar of candy that I used to sneak on a near-daily basis, can after can of overly preserved vegetables. “I forgot they even
made
canned vegetables,” I said to myself. How I missed the fresh, organic LA life I’d known.

I’ve seen interviews on TV with recovering alcoholics who talk about how devastating it is for them when they go back to the street corner where they used to sleep and are reminded of the poor choices they once made. They see in that slab of asphalt the laziness, ignorance, complacency and indulgence that formerly characterized their lives, and the reminders are almost too much to bear. Those pantry shelves were my own personal slab of asphalt, and as I took them in, a wave of fear washed over me like none I’d ever known. “Dear God, don’t let me again become the me who lived this way.”

It would prove a challenging goal to pursue, the goal of moving not backward but ahead.

O
ne of the things that Noah and I used to do prior to my being on the show was to bake cookies together. Before you get any wild ideas about how much of a Suzy Homemaker I was or am, I should add that they were, and still are, of the slice-and-bake variety.

We’d make them for breakfast (I know, I know) or for a snack while we watched movies on Friday night. Or Tuesday night. Or
any
night, if I’m being honest.

Once I was back home, and during the same week that I had my pantry meltdown, Noah looked at me pleadingly and said, “Mommy, can we make cookies?”

I felt badly for having been gone for so long that I would have obliged almost any request from that child. “Well, of
course
, sweetheart,” I said. “Whatever you want.”