Fat Chance (25 page)

We dashed to the store, pulled a sugary log of bliss from the refrigerated case, rushed back home and began to slice away. I decided that I’d make only four cookies, so that I wouldn’t be tempted to eat any myself. Noah could eat however many he wanted—which would probably be two or three—and then Mike would eat the rest. Perfect plan, right? Except for the fact that the rest of that little pleasure-log was still taunting me from inside the fridge.

Within two days’ time I had eaten in its entirety what remained of the unbaked cookie dough. Had I not learned anything on the show? Jillian would have
died
.

Undoubtedly, things were not getting any easier for me, now that I was home.

T
he second myth I bought was that one little, itty-bitty bad choice wouldn’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

For the most part—cookie-binge excluded—I tried to eat well. And I continued my exercise trend, although I certainly wasn’t working out three or five or seven hours a day. Still, despite my fairly healthy habits, almost immediately after my return home I began to gain weight again.

One day when I was strong enough to actually handle introspection, I thought honestly about what could be the culprit. Instantly, I knew the answer. I had quit drinking water, replacing it with diet soda instead.
It seemed like a small decision to me. I mean, my eating patterns were mostly “clean.” My exercise was frequent. I was
undoubtedly
behaving better than I had been before
The Biggest Loser
. But without intending to, I had let one bad choice sabotage all of my progress to date.

I confided my misstep to Hollie one day, and from that point forward the harassment was nonstop. My cell phone would ring, and on the other end of the line I’d hear, “Jules, how much water have you had today?”

“Uh, none,” I’d admit.

“Go get a glass and fill it up. Right now. While I’m on the phone. [Insert pregnant pause.]
Now
, Julie. I’m waiting!”

Ugh
. “Fine. I’m going.”

It’s a fair statement to say that Hollie singlehandedly drove me to drink.

I made the same mistake with food, believing that cheating a little here or there wouldn’t add up to anything significant. I’d indulge from time to time in a piece of
Cheesecake Factory
chocolate cake or a large basket of hot wings, which equals a mere
150 percent
of my daily caloric-intake goal all by itself. One itty-bitty bad choice, right? Ten pounds in less than a month, I would learn the hard way that choices
do
matter, each and every one.

A
third theme that I discovered was patently false is that hard work always equals radical results.

Between my season’s finale and the next season’s finale, which I had planned to attend as a guest, I vowed to myself that I’d get rid of the ten pounds I had so quickly put back on. Really, now, how hard could that be? In
The Biggest Loser
land, ten pounds was just a normal week’s weight loss. I upped the ante on my workouts with Margie and committed to running on “off” days, and still it took me nearly three months to get those ten pounds to budge.
Three
months!

The truth is, it was a heck of a lot more appealing to sit on the couch and devour Reese’s peanut-butter cups while watching
American Idol
than it was to tug on my Spandex and hit the gym. But even on days when I didn’t feel like it, I had promised myself that I would continue what I started forever—whether I saw dramatic results or not. Every choice I made was a choice that would lead me further down the path of
success or cause me to regress. That much I knew. And if it was the last thing that I did, I was bound and determined to succeed.

I
’ll never know where I picked up my errant assumptions about what life would be like once I was thin. But whenever expectations and reality collide, the fallout can be rough. It would take me several weeks, a boatload of self-talk and a slew of challenging conversations with family and friends to establish my footing once more, but when that initial semblance of stability entered the scene at last, I knew that all those efforts were paying off.

One of the earliest “challenging conversations” was with Noah, back on that Crisco-discovery day.

Kids love anything that resembles a game, so I decided that instead of just tossing out every food item that didn’t pass muster with my new eating plan, I’d instead make the culinary-cleansing fun. I turned over a box of plasticky fruit snacks or some other, equally disgusting excuse for food, and said, “See this word, Noah? That spells
fructose
, and it means sugar.” I told him to find every single box, bag or can that had “high fructose corn syrup” listed in the first three ingredients and immediately to throw it away.

Within seconds, I heard him strike pantry-gold. “Look, Mom!” he’d cheer. “This one has it, second word in the list!” He would toss the box into the already bulging garbage bag and head back to the pantry to hunt for more.

We would eventually add “enriched” to the search, after I explained what it meant in terms he could understand. “Honey, think about how sad it is when we take something good that God made, and we make it bad. That’s exactly what has happened to an ‘enriched’ food item.” I told him that when people strip back all of the wonderful, natural, vitamin-filled fibers in order to make something white and fluffy, the nutritional value of that food goes all the way down to zero. “And the way I tell if the stripping has occurred is to see if the food sticks to the roof of my mouth. If it sticks, it’s been stripped,” I said. “Which means we should make a better food choice next time, deal?”

I was careful to walk Noah through the fact that all of these new habits weren’t necessarily about him. He’s so skinny that he could eat an
entire chocolate cake every day for a year and not gain a single pound. But because we’re a family, and because one member of our family (that would be me) tends to struggle with overindulging in things that are white and fluffy and endlessly yummy, we
all
have to agree to certain parameters so that
all
of us can succeed. In a beautiful display of selflessness, my then-six-year-old son trotted off to his room and returned with a metal canister of candy that he kept in his closet, loot that had been collected from several birthday parties, church carnivals and trick-or-treat outings over the years. “This probably should go away too,” he said with a grin, “because you know where I keep it!”

I had never been so delighted to be accused of being a thief.

W
hen I returned home I realized that in my absence Noah had be-come a self-made
The Biggest Loser
version of Dustin Hoffman’s character in
Rain Man
. He learned every stat from my season of the show, memorizing every contestant’s starting weight, finale weight and the reason why he or she got kicked off. “Phil was too big of a threat,” Noah would say with authority. Or, “I bet they got rid of Jez because they thought he could lose weight on his own at home.”

Noah was so obsessed with the nuances of the show that my first few months home were spent with him grilling me about every last detail he couldn’t quite figure out on his own. We dished like teenage girls, guessing people’s motivations and gossiping about the actions they took. But it was that string of ongoing conversations between Noah and me that led to more serious discussions about how to live a strong and healthy life. And now, almost two years later, I think he’s actually getting it. Just last week I overheard him talking to his buddy Luke during lunch, which they were enjoying outside. “Hey Luke,” Noah said with a huge bite of sandwich stuffed inside his cheek, “you know your juice should always have a ‘100’ on it, right?”

Luke was perplexed. “Huh? What are you talking about?”

“
Well
,” Noah continued in his most scholarly, eight-year-old voice, “a one hundred is the very best grade. If it has, like, a 10, then that means
there’s only, like, ten …
fruit
… in it, and the rest of it is just
sugar
. And that’s a really
bad
deal. So, whenever you buy juice, you tell your mom to make
sure
it has a 100 on the label, ’kay?”

You go, Noah. Pure fruit juice rocks.

In the same breath that I affirm Noah when he gets it right on the fruit-juice front, I encourage him to appreciate the balance I’m learning to strike. Granted, if I were a single woman, my pantry would like look a miniature Whole Foods store. I’d be able to afford all-organic produce, and I’d love feeling like I was standing in
The Biggest Loser
’s kitchen every day of the week. But I’m not single. I have a husband and two sons who need a normal wife and mom who can deal with the normal stuff of life. They need to have boys’ nights when they can watch
The Munsters
and eat Taco Bell followed by a giant bowl of buttery popcorn without wondering whether or not I’ll freak out. Noah needs me to show up at his school’s Christmas party with cupcakes to pass out to his buddies instead of toothbrushes. Mike needs me to make a juicy hamburger for him every once in a while. It’s called
life
. And I for one intend to live it. With that said, I still had some work to do if I wanted to fully embrace the post-show version of me.

S
ome people who have been on
The Biggest Loser
wind up changing their entire lives as a result of their experience on the show. They get done with their time on campus, they go back home and they ditch everything that used to define who they were—their spouses, their homes, their professions and more. Really. It’s remarkable, and sad, to see.

Thankfully, that just wasn’t my experience.

Before the show I was extremely unhappy with me, but on other fronts my happiness-meter soared. I loved my marriage, my son, my home and my friends. I loved
all
of my life, it seemed. I just thought that a thinner version of me should be living it. Much like tolerating the absolute wrong actor being cast in your favorite sitcom, I relished the story line God had given me to experience, even when the character was altogether off the mark.

When I returned from campus, I remember thinking, “So
this
is what it feels like to have the right person in the
right role with exactly the right plot.” I had become the person who should have been living my life all along.

In the same way that
The Biggest Loser
experience had summoned a more fully alive version of me, the experience called out a brand-new Mike as well. While I was preparing to live a new life, he was graciously planning to help manage it.

Take today, for example. During my airport fiasco I called Mike, which surprised neither him nor me. And Mike did what he always does: He listened to me, and then he
agreed
with me. (Husbands, take note. That one step will get you anything your little heart desires.) But it didn’t stop there. After intently listening to my detailed description of the annoying ticketing agent and the three flights I would
not
be on, and graciously agreeing with my assessment that life was unfair and that airports are awful and that regardless of what happened I clearly would be missing the video shoot in Louisiana at three o-freaking-clock, my husband then slid into solution mode faster than you can say “irrational woman.”