Fat Chance (3 page)

The first woman piped up with a slow, steady twang. “Well,” she said, “I’m fat because I drive an ice-cream truck for a living.”

John Stamos chuckled and then asked several follow-up questions about life on an ice-cream truck before moving on to the next person, who had lost everything in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. An ice-cream-truck driver and a hurricane victim? How was I supposed to compete with that?

The third person was a beautiful young woman who explained that she was getting married soon and wanted to lose weight before her wedding day. She was so desperate for change in her life that evidently she even was willing to postpone her wedding date for a shot on the show. The other two had equally compelling and heartrending tales to tell, and as the conversation made its way down the line everything around me blurred out of focus as a full-on panic attack set in. “I’m Julie,” I practiced silently.
Now, what do I say after that?

Finally that gelled-haired head swiveled my way, and I knew it was my turn to speak. Before I even said my name, I leaned forward, craned my neck toward the other end of the row, and with a dose of recognition and a thicker-than-usual twang said, “I
knew
you looked familiar! I was the fat lady chasing your ice-cream truck yesterday! You shoulda slowed that thing down … I was hungry!”

Waves of laughter filled the room as I sat back against my chair and let my shoulders fall. When the impromptu moment eventually passed, I said simply and with a genuine smile, “Kidding aside, I’m Julie Hadden—a stay-at-home mom here in Jacksonville.” And with that, the bell rang.

I
dialed Mike’s cell phone number the moment I exited the room. “You’re already done?” he asked. The shock in his voice was undeniable.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I’m glad I did it, but it’s pretty much over.” Of course this news came as no surprise to Mike. With each syllable I spoke, I was validating his pipe dream suspicions. We agreed to meet at the food court to grab lunch and chat about the day. Partway through our meal I noticed the casting people walking by. They grinned at me, glanced down at my greasy oversized slice of pizza, and probably fully understood why I needed to audition for their show. “So, it’s really over?” Mike asked, after they’d passed. “You’re done, just like that?”

I explained that I’d overheard someone in my group of six ask one of the show’s representatives what would happen next. “We’ll contact you if we’re interested,” came the reply.

The next day, after church, lunch and a long and lovely nap—made possible by my wise husband’s thinking to turn off the phone ringers—my life completely and dramatically changed. It was almost eleven o’clock at night when Mike remembered to turn on the ringers again, and soon after, he noticed that we had six voice mail messages waiting. “Julie!” he shouted moments later. “
The Biggest Loser
people have called six times and want you to audition again. If you don’t contact them by eleven, they’re going to give away your spot!”

I bounced up and down and squealed like a giddy schoolgirl. And then I took a deep breath and called them back.

T
he casting director’s request was a no-brainer. “We’d like to interview you again,” he said, “but the date we have in mind falls on the Fourth of July. Can you make it?”

Was he serious? It could have been Christmas and I would have gone.

July Fourth arrived, and as I entered the appointed hotel room I noticed a single video camera positioned to my right. Despite the small crowd of onlookers, I immediately felt put at ease—both in my surroundings and in my own skin. Amazing what the prospect of real life-change can do for a person.

Minutes into my discussion with my interviewer, I slipped off my shoes, folded my legs up under me on the couch, shrugged my hands to chin-level as if surrendering all hopes of self-preservation and said, “Ask me anything you want.”

We got through questions about how my weight affected my sex life, what my friends would think about my being on a reality TV show and what aspects of my body I most disliked. At that point, I pulled off the cardigan portion of my sweater-set and tugged on a flabby underarm. “Well, this, for starters,” I said. Uncharacteristically, I then stood up, twisted into an about-face and jiggled my well-endowed butt. “And I don’t need to clarify why
this
is a problem.”

Just before I left the room, I was handed a piece of paper by the casting assistant. “Julie, I want you to make a video that shows your struggle in everyday life,” she explained. “Send it to this address, and make sure you write, ‘Attention: Christmas Package,’ on the envelope in big bold print, okay?”

I knew then that I might have more than a fat chance.

Who knows how much time elapsed, but eventually, after I had complied with the original request for a video, I received another phone call from someone requesting a second one. “Show us a few more of the realities that you face,” came the instruction.

My patient husband trailed me with a video camera for two days straight, capturing real life as a large woman. One scene showed me trying to make Noah’s top-bunk bed by standing on the bottom bunk; as soon as I shift my weight to tuck in the sheet, the entire bed almost falls apart. Another scene features me folding clothes. First you see Noah’s tiny tighty-whities and then me holding up a pair of what I affectionately referred to as my big-girl panties. Still another shot is of me attempting in vain to squeeze my oversized self into an old size-eight pageant dress that had been hiding in the recesses of my closet. Despite the sobering realities depicted in those images, I like to think my lighthearted, buoyant self shone through.

At some point that fall, I received word from an NBC representative that the show had gone into hiatus. “And we don’t know when it will resume,” he admitted.

Months and months went by, which really proved challenging for someone who typically spent her days fretting about how to lose weight. How was I supposed to get motivated about losing weight now that my fat-camp dream, a la
The
Biggest Loser
, might just come true? Regardless what NBC said, I still had great hopes that I’d be cast. Soon enough I’d have all the help I needed—for now, I figured, I’d live it up.

My hopes crested when I finally heard from the show’s lawyer. Evidently, I needed to submit to an extensive background check, which to me meant that I really was in the running to be selected as a cast member. My hunches were right, and sometime in April 2007, I was informed that I had made it to the final audition and would need to fly to Los Angeles to be pitted against thirty-five others who were vying for spots on the show.

The naysayers in my life were stunned.

C
oming from Florida, I was the last person to arrive in LA. In short order, I was escorted to meetings with more interviewers, a psychologist, a medical doctor and a nutritionist, as well as told to complete what must have been a five-hundred-question survey that probed my family history, my relational intelligence and my reasons for being fat. At last, I was taken to a prep session for what I was told would be my “final interview.”

I entered a large meeting room at the hotel and remember thinking that I had never seen so many beautiful fat people in my entire life. I immediately took note of my would-be-teammate Isabeau, although I didn’t yet know her name.
Will they cast two girls with platinum-blonde hair?
I wondered skeptically.

We were asked to have a seat, and then the show’s executive producer, J. D. Roth, said, “We want to hear your story in this interview. We don’t want you to be especially happy or sad or contrive
anything
that’s not true of you. We simply want to understand why you’re here.”

With that we were dismissed to our hotel rooms and told that within the next three-hour block, we’d be called down for our interview.

The entire elevator ride to my floor, I cried. After making my way into my room, I let the door slip shut behind me, I fell onto the bed, I dialed Mike’s cell phone, and as soon as he picked up, I cried some more. “I don’t have a story!” I sobbed. “I have to go down there and tell my story, and I
still
don’t have a story to tell!”

My gracious and loving husband spoke whatever words I needed to hear just then, and by the time I emerged for my interview, I felt competent and capable and strong.

S
potlights shone on a single red velvet chair, positioned in the center of the interviewing room. Surrounding it was an arc of forty chairs or so, dimly lit and possessed by faces I could not see.
Intimidating
—it’s the only word that came to mind.

As I took the seat that obviously was intended for me, I chuckled nervously and said, “Whew! I’m sweating like a Twinkie at a Weight Watchers meeting.”

A nameless, faceless voice piped up from the back. “Are you nervous, Julie?”

“Like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers!” I shot back.

Laughing, another voice cheered, “Give us another one!”

But I couldn’t fulfill the request. “Sorry,” I said with a shrug and a smile. “That’s all I’ve got.”

The lighthearted exchange calmed my spirits and settled me for what was to come. At some point, someone said, “So, tell us about you.”

I wasted no time in telling the truth. “The first thing you should know is that you absolutely sent me over the edge this morning, with the whole we-want-to-know-your-story plea. I cried all the way to my room!”

“Why?” several people said in unison.

“Because I don’t
have
a story. Or at least that’s what I thought. But the more I considered it, the more I realized that I
do
have a story to tell. And it’s the same story so many wives and mothers would tell you, if they were sitting here instead of me. I love my family, and it’s with the best of intentions that I invest everything I have in them. But at the end of the day there’s nothing left for me. I am my own last priority.”

I paused to collect my thoughts and then continued. “I’m tired of being this way. I’m tired of looking like I’m headed to a funeral every day, with all the black I wear. I’m tired of waiting until nightfall, when no one’s around to see me, to play outside with my son. I’m tired of worrying about whether I’ll live to see my son grow up, or whether I’ll sit by my husband in a rocking chair when we’re eighty, or whether I’ll even make it to forty years of age. I’m
tired
of
being
fat
.”

The room was strangely quiet as I spoke, and when I finished, silent tears rolled down my cheeks. I should have been curious about what my interviewers were thinking, but I was not. I had spoken straight from the heart and could only hope that it was enough.

In the end, of course, it was.

M
aking the shift from being a viewer of
The Biggest Loser
to being a contestant on the show proved far more challenging than what I had expected. At eleven o’clock at night following the final round of interviews, eighteen of us received a knock on our hotel door and instructions to meet downstairs in one of the on-site ballrooms. Once seated, J. D. Roth congratulated us on successfully completing such a rigorous casting process and informed us that, officially, we comprised the cast of
The Biggest Loser, Season 4
. In response, some laughed, some cried and still others cheered.