Finished Being Fat: An Accidental Adventure in Losing Weight and Learning How to Finish (14 page)

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I can’t control what other people do or say. It’s just not within my sphere of influence. The only thing I can do is put my best effort out there and be confident in the knowledge that I’ve done everything I could. Someone is going to try to rain on my parade. It’s inevitable, and there’s not a darn thing I can do to stop them. What I can do is decide how I’m going to respond. As a rule, I try to give as much thought to the comment as the person did in making it. After all, why should I spend weeks crying over what somebody said off the top of his or her head?

Throughout this year, I had to learn to deal with not only my own little voice but also all the other nuts from the peanut gallery. Locking myself in my room or using earplugs wasn’t really an option. While there is something to be said for being a hermit, avoidance was no longer my answer.

I
gnoring what other people said soon became second nature. What I was still having issues with, however, were the things I said to myself. Or it might be more accurate to say the problem lay in the way I saw myself. The little voice in my head was so quiet now that I could hardly hear it. I no longer berated myself about quitting or my accomplishments. I proudly stood by all the things I was finishing. This problem was deeper and much more sinister. While I had learned to take credit for the things I had done, I still wasn’t happy with who I was. When I looked in the mirror, I saw someone who was different, flawed… broken.

I was born with severely crossed eyes, a condition known as strabismus. I got my first pair of coke-bottle glasses at six weeks old. Two years and eight surgeries later, the doctors managed to sever and reconnect the muscles in my eyes, allowing them to appear mostly straight. Unfortunately there wasn’t much they could do for the vision itself. My eyes were unable to focus at the same time on the same object, resulting in being classified as legally blind. Only one eye was able to see at a time, meaning I had almost no depth perception. I’m pretty sure people used to think my mom beat me as a kid because I was covered head to toe in bruises from walking into things. When I got a black eye and the school nurse asked where it came from, she didn’t believe I had actually run into the doorknob.

The doctors kept tinkering on my eyes with more surgeries and eye patches. In first grade, the kids ran away from me because they thought I was a pirate. Now if I were cool, I would have pretended to have a peg leg too and chased after them saying “Arrr.” Instead I kept mostly to myself and stayed in with the teacher at recess. When I wasn’t wearing a patch, the eye I wasn’t actively using would wander off.

Kids, being kids, saw my weakness and attacked. They were the lions, and I was a nice juicy zebra. The children fit into two categories: ones that were honestly confused about where I was looking and the kids that were just plain mean. The former (and adults still do this surreptitiously) would glance around, trying to figure out what I was looking at. The latter would find some excuse to come talk to me but then make a specific point to stare off into space for the entire conversation. Then they ran back to their friends and laughed.

When confronted with adversity and bullying, a person can toughen up and develop a thick skin. Not me, I got thicker, but my skin was paper-thin. Each harsh word and joke at my expense cut deeply and I felt it down to my soul. In sixth grade my parents thought I might have asthma, but it turned out I was just hyperventilating from panic attacks at school. That’s the same time I realized I was a little bit bigger and sturdier than most kids. I was different; something about me was wrong.

I became obsessed with fitting in, being normal… finding perfection. If I could be the perfect ideal, then everyone would love me and the children wouldn’t tease me anymore. I wanted to look like Barbie, and no matter what I tried, I didn’t. The confluence of factors mentioned above created one chubby, depressed teenager. I learned quickly to put on a façade for my parents and teachers. The last thing I needed was to end up in the nuthouse.

But that was all fake, and I knew it. At school, I would play the part of the clown and laugh with the rest of kids when someone put dog food in my locker. At home I spent hours on my knees, praying for God to fix whatever was wrong with me that everyone hated so much. When that didn’t help, I prayed to go to sleep and not wake up.

Obviously, the Lord opted not to recall my serial number, so I decided that he needed a little assistance. Without any planning or premeditation, I woke up one morning and swallowed two weeks’ worth of pills that my parents’ doctor had given me to assist with weight loss. This is why I said giving a depressed teenager a bunch of pills was a very bad idea. Luckily for me, the roughly one hundred pills were mostly vitamins, calcium, and a mild appetite suppressant. If they had included the fen-phen and thyroid medications that my parents were taking, I would have been toast. Would have made the worst obituary ever… death by diet pills.

Obviously I didn’t die, but boy I sure felt bad enough that I wished I had. The mask of happiness that I had so carefully constructed fractured, allowing everyone to see just how messed up I really was. My parents tried to get me help and every quack had a theory on what was wrong with me. Juvenile schizophrenia? Nope. Manic depression. Still a no. In the meantime, they pumped me so full of drugs that I couldn’t feel a single thing. With a cold indifference I saw my nervous breakdown as further evidence of just how far from everyone else I really was.

Finally, when I was sixteen, my newest doctor settled on a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. What was so traumatic? Life, I guess. I felt too much, but that was better than the hollow nothingness the over-prescribed lithium gave me. The doctor immediately took me off all the heavy-duty stuff and found a nice balance with Zoloft. It didn’t fix me, but it made my emotions easier to deal with. But the medication couldn’t stop me from comparing myself to everyone else and knowing that I didn’t measure up.

The next fifteen years were filled with highs and lows in weight and emotions. I wanted to be someone else, anyone else. Someone that didn’t need to take medication, someone that didn’t have weight problems, somebody that had two working eyes, and the list went on and on. Recently, when the doctor took me off the antidepressants for the first time since adolescence, I felt like I was one step closer to fitting in—to assimilating with all the regular people (horrible attitude, I know). I would no longer feel the secret shame I associated with taking the pills.

Initially, when the extra pounds started coming off, I was ecstatic. Soon I would look just like everybody else. But before long, the newness of my smaller body wore off and I began to look at my new shape more critically. I’d lost seventy or so pounds and now weighed around 145 pounds. That still sounded like a lot. My sister in-law was just a little shorter than me and she was under 120 pounds. Aside from the number itself, I didn’t look like I thought I would. I was hoping to have a smooth hard body with a flat tummy and perky breasts. Instead I still had stretch marks all over and loose, saggy skin. And while I had gone from a size 16/18 to a
4/6,
my top half had also dropped from a double D to a middle B.

When I went to the gym, I couldn’t help but notice that I still didn’t look like all the cute petite girls in Zumba class. They were bigger on top, smaller in the middle, and appeared generally more delicate. As for me, I was still nowhere close to delicate. I could look at myself for ages in the mirror after my shower, pointing out all my flaws. While I could now see all my ribs, the rib cage itself was much wider and broader than the other girls I wanted to be like. In particular, I wanted to look like my husband’s two little sisters. They were slight, where I was thick. After a family dinner, I lamented this fact to Jarom.

“It’s not fair. Why don’t I look like your sister?” I said while undressing.

“Well, for starters, I’m really glad you don’t look like my sisters.”

I thumped him with the pillow. “You know what I mean. I’m frustrated because even though I’m working my butt off, I don’t think I can ever be that little. I’m pretty sure that if you took our skeletons and laid them out, side by side, I still wouldn’t look like her. I’d still be bigger.”

“You’re probably right. That’s the way genetics works.”

“Well, that sucks. Fix it.”

“I can’t. It’s just the way you were built.”

“Then I was built wrong.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. It’s all wrong. I’m all wrong.”

Saying it out loud took more than I had to give at that moment, and I broke down into quiet sobs. My tank was on empty, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I was giving everything I had to keep my family afloat, train for the marathon, keep the weight off, and resist the lure of the pie in the fridge. I had changed so much and worked so hard and the thought that all my efforts would never be enough to take me where I thought I needed to be tore me open.

My husband waited patiently for me to get myself under control. Or enough that I could form a cohesive sentence. “My bones are too thick, my eyes don’t look straight, and I’m an emotional wreck. I’m just exhausted.”

And I was—tired, that is. I hadn’t been sleeping because of all the things with my daughter. I also knew that I wasn’t taking in near the amount of calories my body needed to repair itself after the two- to three-hour runs in the mornings. Yep, I was both tired and terrified that if I ate what I needed to I would get fat. Terrified too that if I had to take antidepressants again I would prove once and for all that I was deficient, that I needed an outside source to become whole. I blubbered something to that effect to my husband. Instead of gathering me into his arms as I had come to expect, he got mad. It’s pretty rare for Jarom to get angry, but when he does, watch out.

“So what you’re saying is that because I have to take medication for diabetes, I’m defective.”

“No, I’m not talking about you. It’s not your fault that your pancreas decided to stop with the insulin. Don’t be stupid.”

“And it’s your fault that something in your brain stopped making serotonin?”

“Well, no, but I could probably deal with it better.”

“What? Just buck up and be happy? So if you can’t control your emotions perfectly, you’re not as good? You’re not allowed to be afraid or cry or have a tough time?” Jarom kept getting louder, almost to the point where I was concerned he would wake the kids.

“It means I’m broken. Because normal people don’t have these problems.”

Jarom stopped fuming and became still and quiet, a bad sign. “So does that mean that you think Lily is broken? That we should ask God to take her back? Do you love her any less because she isn’t the perfect, happy girl you want her to be?”

The only sound in the room was my sharp intake of breath. It was a good one too, because I don’t think I breathed again for a few minutes. Jarom had said the most awful thing I had ever heard in my life. I was offended that he would even think such a horrible thing. How could he possibly think that I would change my baby to anything else or think she was less? Probably because that was exactly how I felt about me, and he was afraid I would judge her by my own harsh standards. I’d never held the measuring stick of normalcy up to anyone else; I was too busy judging myself to judge anyone else. What if I had somehow unintentionally given Lily that impression, though, that she wasn’t enough?

Previously, I had stopped crying so that I could argue with Jarom, but now I began with a new intensity. My heart broke at the mere thought that I might have made my little one feel anything less than treasured for exactly who she was.

“No. She’s Lily, and she’s perfect just the way she is,” I stammered out in between gasps for air.

Not that he would ever admit it, but Jarom’s eyes held a little bit of shine from water overflow too. “I know, and you are too. You’re Betsy, and you’re perfect just the way you are.”

We didn’t say anything else, just snuggled and went to bed. Well, Jarom went to bed. I couldn’t sleep because my brain was busy processing. The angry insinuation that I might devalue Lily because of her situation was like a slap to the face. It also did more for me than the one hundred pep talks he’d given me in the past. I couldn’t look at myself as a mistake anymore, not without implying that Lily wasn’t good enough too. It wasn’t like hitting a switch and saying “Aha! You’re cured!” But it did get the gears in my mind spinning, thinking about what exactly I had been trying to fix all this time.

***

Over the next week or so, I began looking at everyone with the same lens that I looked at myself with. Those perfect girls at the gym, they only accounted for maybe 10 percent of the population. And just between you and me, I’m pretty sure those teeny-waisted, well-endowed women might have had a little work done. Not that there is anything wrong with having plastic surgery. I’m just saying that it would be nice if they wore a shirt or something alerting me to that fact. You know like, “Yes, I know I’m gorgeous, and it was worth every penny.” That way, I wouldn’t feel the pressure to live up to an unnaturally high standard.

For every one of them, there were nine other women all wonderfully flawed and unique. Why hadn’t I seen them before? It’s like I had blinders on that only let me see the women that I thought were better and prettier, and I lost the rest in background. I’m not sure if you have ever noticed, but background takes up most of the picture. And the picture of what a woman is would be composed mostly of the women I had previously dismissed as inconsequential.

The ladies in my Fat Pack are powerful, beautiful, and amazing women. And every single one of them moaned and groaned about something they don’t like about themselves. My tummy is too big; my arms are too short; my knees are too knobby. One of the other trainers, Star, played college rugby and was super buff. She was toned and looked awesome. If there was anything that I thought I could ever come close to realistically achieving, she was it. We were similar height and body types and we tended to pack muscle on easily (fat too if we’re not careful). Star’s self-observed weakness was that her thighs and calves were too large for her taste, even though they were solid muscle. She also wanted to be teeny, tiny, and delicate. I was floored. She looked great and still she wanted to be someone else too. Where was my ideal? What was the perfection I had been reaching for? I had been killing myself working out seven hours a week in addition to my running, just trying to be the right size and shape. Well, who the heck gets to determine what “right” is?