Fat Chance (5 page)

Years prior I had read that there are roughly seventeen thousand grains in every teaspoon of sand. What came to mind as I sat slumped over on a scratchy comforter on top of a squeaky bed in a dark room of a budget motel was that if God’s thoughts toward me were so gracious and numerous, then he obviously saw me differently than I saw myself. It would be the first of many spiritual lessons I’d learn while on the show.

“Why
am
I here?” I said out loud, echoing Jillian’s demands. Since my first audition at the open casting call in Jacksonville, I had considered myself the smallest, most unlikely person to be cast on a show like
The Biggest Loser
. I had considered myself the weakest link. But why?

The answer came to me in waves, as if whispered from God himself.

I had spent so much of my life being held back because my weight was excessive. Now I felt like I was being held back because I was too light. Would I ever be “just right”? I was told by the cast and crew alike
that I was funny and fun-loving, that I’d be the last one to cause any trouble for anyone, that I was a “great girl.” But nobody thought I could actually win; I didn’t have enough weight to lose, and on a big-people show, the biggest people take home the prize.

Somewhere along the way, I had turned over my belief to their doubts. But thanks to some divine insight from a very loving God, that would all change the next day.

T
he following morning, although uninvited, I showed up at the gym with the rest of my teammates. Jillian’s reception was more than a little cold. “Hey,” she chirped toward me, her arms crossed against her chest, her head cocked and looking totally self-assured. “Why are you here?”

With fresh resolve, I squared my shoulders and said, “I’m here because I
deserve
to be here. And I’m here because I’m determined to live the life that I was made by God to live. I can work hard, Jillian. I can
do
this.” All at once, I felt “just right.”

As if in slow motion, Jillian eyed me up and down. I stared right back, hoping she couldn’t see my fast-thumping heart through my jumbo-sized sports bra. As I took in her face, I could have sworn I saw the beginnings of a grin. The edges of her lips twitched upward ever so slightly as a single word made its way out of her mouth: “Excellent.”

With that, my teammates and I worked out.

B
eing forced by Jillian to explore why I really wanted to lose weight was a beautiful gift from God. Not only did it pave the way for a deep and abiding friendship with the hard-core trainer I’d eventually come to love, but also it solidified early on my desire to achieve both a new waistline and a new life.

Despite all of the blood, sweat and tears—and there had been plenty of each already—I reasoned that if persevering in my
The Biggest Loser
experience could right the wrongs of thirty-five years of settling for less than the life God had in store for me, then persevere I would. And perhaps even win the whole thing too. After all,
someone
had to take home the title, right?

I figured, Why not me?

T
HIS MORNING UNFOLDED like most weekday mornings do since being back from
The Biggest
Loser
. I pulled on exercise clothes, shoveled apple slices into my mouth and headed to a local park to meet my trainer Margie for a seventy-five-minute workout.

If Jillian Michaels taught me the value of exercise, Margie Marshall now forces me to live out that value on a near-daily basis. I adore Margie, and I also despise her—a paradox that is fully warranted, given the torture chamber her cheery classes always prove to be. Take this morning’s workout, for example.

Amazingly, I arrived at the park on time, and ahead of two other women who are under Margie’s tutelage as well. Eventually there were five of us gathered there, eagerly anticipating the tricks our beloved trainer had up her sleeve for the day. We began with five minutes of running around an adjacent set of soccer fields, followed by multiple one-minute rotations of exercises including push-ups, sprints, plyometric jumps, mountain-climbers, jumping rope and planking ourselves atop a basketball. I was huffing and puffing by the end of that section, but absurdly, I was still having fun.

Toward the end of our time together, Margie asked us to run suicides. She’d dotted dozens of tennis balls along the field, twenty or thirty yards apart, and had us compete with each other to see who could race to the first ball and bring it back to the bucket the fastest, and then race to the second ball and bring that one back too—on and on in this way, until every ball had been retrieved.

The agony finally came to an end, and I knew that if I never again saw another tennis ball in my life, I’d be perfectly content. As that thought made its way through my mind, I glanced sideways to find Margie launching those evil yellow spheres as far as her arm could throw them, one hundred of them in all. “Okay, ladies!” she cheered, with the annoying enthusiasm of someone who
wasn’t
about to have to run all over creation like a headless chicken. “As soon as you bring me all of the balls you see out there, class is officially dismissed!”

With both hands on my hips, I eyed the giant Easter-egg hunt before me and said through grinding, gritted teeth, “You have
got
to be kidding.”

In fact, she was not.

I don’t know why it still surprises me when Margie pulls one of her frequent ultracruel and hyperactive stunts. She’d always been a bit crazy, even before I started to train with her. But “crazy” is what I was instructed by Jillian to find. “When you get home,” Jillian had said during my final days at
The Biggest Loser
campus, “I don’t want you to find some narcissistic diva to train you. I want you to find someone who is passionate about you and who is
crazy
about working out.”

Margie, of course, fit that bill.

I had known of Margie through a mutual friend before I even auditioned for the show, and word on the street was that she was so serious about physical fitness that she couldn’t find even one friend who would work out with her. “They’d throw up every time they went to the gym with me,” Margie later explained, as if perplexed by their distaste for abuse. “Finally they just refused to go.”

When I returned to Florida from
The
Biggest Loser
campus, Margie contacted me and said that she would love to help me maintain my newfound figure and that perhaps we should work out together. I could tell in one conversation flat that she was the trainer for me.

That was a full year ago
, I thought, as I forced my legs to race back and forth across the Easter-egg-dotted field. In a flash of insight, it occurred to me how different the previous twelve months had been compared to the thirty-five years leading up to them. Little more than a year ago, I couldn’t have brought in a sack of groceries without enduring severe heart palpitations and stress. Now I was sprinting across a soccer field with a (semi) smile on my face.

Revelations like those are hitting me frequently these days, and they always pack an unexpected punch. They bring to mind the person I used to be, not the woman I am today. In my mind’s eye I see her—the overweight, underwhelming version of me—with the same fine-tuned clarity of a burglary victim who can remember every nuance of her ransacked house. I wore her skin and shame for so much of my life that I find it’s a daily battle to let her die—to let go of her self-doubt and fear—and let the new me be beautifully born.

E
arlier this week, I drove the few miles to the park where Margie and I meet. The air was thick and cloudy, and partway through our workout, it started to rain. Margie is unfazed by bad weather, but I for one hate being wet. I considered dashing to my car to grab another layer, but the only available garment would have been the extra-small jacket I keep stashed in the trunk for Noah, who seems to lose everything he touches and seems
always
to be cold. It would help a little, I supposed, but the sleeves would be way too short. Quickly, I moved to other options, which is when it hit me: I could borrow something of Margie’s.

Holy cow.

I could actually borrow something from Margie—
Margie
, who has a flawless figure and no visible fat. I could borrow something from
that
woman. I could
fit into something
that Margie can wear. The revelation brought tears to my eyes and a distant memory back to mind.

When I was a fresh-faced kindergartener, the other five-year-olds and I spent an hour every day in recess. I remember like it was yesterday playing outside one afternoon when it started to rain. Young, blonde, beautiful-in-every-way Mrs. Robertson raced toward the playground under the protective covering of an umbrella and ushered us kids through the doors that led back into Arlington Heights Elementary School, where we were instructed to select dry alternatives to our school clothes from the lost-and-found box.

If my memory serves me well, and if the few pictures I still possess tell the truth, I wasn’t exactly obese at the tender age of five. But when every other girl your age is twiggy and wispy, somehow you gather that a shapely bottom and tree-trunk legs don’t contribute to a “look” that will work.

Grudgingly I tugged at a pair of pumpkin-hued shorts until they broke loose of the weight of the other clothes in that dreaded lost-and-found box, held them up in front of my young face and eyed them with intense suspicion. Would they slip over my already ladylike thighs? Would their snap-closure come together to confine my proudly plump tummy? Or would they be the source of ridicule all the rest of my kindergarten days? I knew then that I wasn’t at all like the person I was supposed to be. It was the start of a laundry list of what “fat” would steal from me.