Fat Chance (9 page)

I
’ve spent the vast majority of my life being fat, and I’ve had plenty of fat friends along the way. What was surfacing for my
The Biggest Loser
teammates as we learned about each other’s goals only served to validate what I’ve long believed: for nearly every obese person I know, physical weight is just a cover for the emotional weight he or she bears.

I saw a psychiatrist on TV one time who was counseling overweight teens and their exasperated parents. “What are you
really
hungry for?” he asked each of the kids. “I mean, aside from the food, what is it you crave?”

The kids’ responses caused tears to spring to my eyes. How easily I could relate. How easily
any
obese person could relate.

“I just want time with you!” one teenager cried out to her mom, a single woman working two jobs to support her family.

“Acceptance,” another said as he looked sheepishly at his overbearing father.

“Approval from the other kids at school,” a young boy said. “I’m tired of them teasing me because I’m fat.”

I too had been hungry for those things—for approval and acceptance and a sense that I mattered—and I, too, had tried to eat my way full. But food would never be able to satisfy the sort of deep-down hunger I felt.

S
ince my days on
The Biggest Loser
, I have done a fair amount of public speaking. I stand before women’s groups and MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) meetings and community gatherings, and without exception when I get to this part of my story—the realization that my physical weight wasn’t just about diet and exercise but was reflective of deeper turbulent waters rushing far below the surface—I see streams of tears chase their way down scores of cheeks.

“I went to the show thinking the only weight I carried was the kind that can be measured in pounds,” I explain. “All those years of being overweight, I never knew there were other burdens I was carrying;
I had become a master at diverting the frustration I felt toward everyone else instead. My family told me that my weight was my problem, but I thought that
they
were the problem—
their
criticism,
their
negative attitudes,
their
disappointment with who I was. I would push all the blame onto them and go on my merry way, filling the role of the happy fat girl—Jokester Julie—never once having to admit what lurked beneath.

We all carry weight that God does not intend for us to carry. Call it the human experience or call it sheer insanity, but somehow we walk through this life tethered to things that serve no purpose but to weigh us down. For some people it’s anger—a boiling rage they feel in their soul. For others, it’s the quicksand of a lifetime of racked-up regrets. For still others, it’s the dreadful quandary of feeling insignificant in their own skin.

It could be a financial weight, the weight of fear over infertility, the weight of deception—living two or three lives or more. Like me, it could be as straightforward as a terrible lack of self-esteem.

It could be a weight we’ve chosen to pick up, or a weight someone else has placed on us—abuse. Neglect. A lifetime of being misunderstood.

But whatever the weight we carry, it’s proof that there’s always far more to the story than what shows up on the bathroom scale.

W
hen you think about it, it really is lunacy that we voluntarily lug around so much extra weight. Wouldn’t it be easier to walk and run and sleep and
live
without all that? Speaking from personal experience, it’s a heck of a lot easier to pretend to be perfect—whether weighted down or not—than it is to admit when something is wrong. Or at least that’s how it seems. The truth of the matter is that eventually we crumble under the weight of the façade we try so hard to hold up. It’s scary to confess, for instance, that we struggle with insecurity—that despite our confident cover, we’re not who everyone thinks that we are. Or who everyone needs us to be. The reality of admitting who we really are? That can feel heavier than the physical weight we bear.

Men and women often come up to me after a talk I’ve given and with brushed-away tears speak of their struggles with weight. They talk about how they are
consumed
by the extra forty pounds they are carrying, and how they are at their wit’s end regarding how to lose them. I look into their downcast eyes and see so clearly the real battle they fight.
I see the fear. I see the insecurity. In some cases, I see the remnants of verbal abuse. “Your physical weight is the least of your worries,” I want to say. “Don’t you see the bigger picture here? Truly, now, what are you hungry for?”

They don’t know it, but they have on a goal-shirt I can read. It’s written all over their faces, all over their hearts, all over their words. “Look down and read your
real
goal, ” I yearn to cry out. “Be willing to face the hard truth.
”

There are people who would find such joy on the other side of a major change, but something deep inside says, “Losing the physical weight is only going to force me to take a closer look at the real reason for my burdensome state.” And man, can that message mess with a person. They buy into the lie—as I did—that they’re not worth the effort, they cast aside the lightness of life and they pad their way back toward the fridge. They want genuine change. They just don’t want it badly enough.

It’s incredibly frustrating to see people with all the potential in the world dig in their heels and refuse to change. Your heart wishes you could lift every extraneous burden off of them, that you could just hand them the wings they will need to soar. But the truth is, we have to face our weights for ourselves. The move is ours alone to make. Which, by the way, is why my Weight Watchers experience at age eight didn’t work. My well-meaning mother had a vision for me that I hadn’t quite bought into myself. And despite her noble intentions, it was my move, alone, to make.

My team’s goal-shirts carried so much meaning because the words were more than mere slogans; they were tangible proof that the six of us were no longer comfortable in our pain. Each of us finally knew what we were hungry for, and we were determined to persevere until we were really and truly full.

J
illian Michaels has a philosophy that when you begin to change your body, the rest of you changes too. As physical strength powers up, emotional weights power down. It’s a theory I agreed to pretty early on, because when you wake up one day and realize that you can work out
for ninety minutes straight without vomiting, it really is true: Suddenly, you’re wildly intolerant of the fear, the regret and the insecurities you carried your whole life.

The challenge, then, is hanging on until you see that new you emerge.

When my teammates and I started to push ourselves physically, our various weights—fears, insecurities, assumptions—tried to push back against our progress. It was tempting to use that as an excuse, to whine that it was utterly inhumane to make fat people do skinny-people things and that if we
were
made to run up a steep hill, for instance, there should at least be a stack of Oreos at the top.

But we knew that for the sake of our goals, we had no choice but to hang on—just a little while longer, a little more sweat, a few more reps … hang on.

T
o date, the largest man to compete on
The Biggest Loser
is participating in the season that’s airing as I write this book. He weighed in at 454 pounds his first week on the show and was given Jillian as his trainer, poor guy. Last week the camera caught him on a treadmill, walking when he was supposed to be running. In typical Jillian-fashion, she hopped up onto the base of the treadmill, looked this young man in the eye and said, “Run!”

He kept walking.

“I said
run
!” Jillian bellowed.

“My legs hurt,” he whimpered. “I can’t run!”

Jillian stared at him for several seconds as the viewing audience held its collective breath. Then, with a surprising amount of tenderness, she asked, “What is
really
wrong with you?”

He choked up as he kept walking, his gaze firmly fixed on his feet. “All I can focus on is that I’m hurting,” he said. “I can’t focus on where I’m headed with this whole thing because I can’t even imagine myself not-fat.

“I’ve
never
been not-fat,” he continued. “I’ve
never
pushed through pain. I’ve
never
been where I’m going, and I can’t for a second imagine myself there.”

One of my favorite worship choruses says, “I want to know you; I
want to see your face. I want to know you more.” It’s a song sung to God, but the lyrics took on fresh meaning for me during my days on
The Biggest Loser
campus. I did want to know God more through my experience on campus, but I also wanted to know more of the woman he had created me to be. Like the contestant on the treadmill said, though, I had never known that person. I had never met her. I had never seen her face. And it’s hard to pursue a vision you just don’t see.

I wanted to know what the burden-free Julie looked like, who she would be. I knew she existed, and that she had been ordained by God, but where was she hiding? And how was she going to be found?

During the finale show that caps off every season of
The Biggest Loser
, contestants get to rip their way through large sheets of paper that feature life-size images of each person’s “before” body. On more than one occasion during those early days when I craved a vision of the me I would become, I’d daydream about that finale-moment. I’d be falling apart during an especially rigorous workout, and instead of talking to me about the agony I was experiencing, Jillian would come up to me and say, “So, Jules, are you going to wear red lipstick to the finale? I think red would be good.” Or, “About that finale: are you thinking slacks or a dress?” Or, “Will your hair be up or down? Are you doing heels, or what? You’re
short
, you know.”

Jillian already knew what I was slowly sorting out: If I could just catch a glimpse of who I’d be on the back side of all my hard work, the work wouldn’t seem so hard after all.

I
f part of the life experience is acknowledging the weight we were never intended to carry, then the other part is learning that it’s possible to lay it down.

Hebrews 12:1 says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” I had read that verse a dozen times before, but I’d never noticed how relevant it is to the process of losing weight.

What finally enabled me to start visualizing the “me I would be”
was the practice of thinking about contestants from
The Biggest Loser
seasons previous to mine. I’d think about the players who had gone before me and who had endeared themselves to me by their hard work and their determination to honor their goals. And I’d think about the
dramatic
transformation they’d known as a result of refusing to quit. It was yet one more example of my being accidentally biblical in my approach to life. Without intending to, I’d crafted my own “cloud of witnesses” that could inspire me and push me and see me through to the end.