It Ain't Over (4 page)

“I felt pulled two different ways. On the one hand, I thought, ‘You’re fat—accept it.’ On the other, I told myself, ‘You don’t have to be this way; you can change.’ ”

Without saying a word to her family or friends, Natasha stopped eating fried food, junk food, and sugar of any kind except for fruit. “It was very, very, very, very hard. I had to force myself to avoid whole aisles of the grocery store because just looking at junk food made my mouth water. But I found that if I only put healthy food in my fridge and cabinets, that’s what I would eat. Things were harder to control at work—there were boxes of doughnuts, vending machines full of goodies, fried fatty foods for breakfast and lunch—it was everywhere. I hid at my desk, feeling isolated.”

Of course, there were some weak moments. “One Saturday, after cutting off all of my hair and panicking about what I’d done, I went to Burger King, ordered a Triple Whopper and ate it so fast I think I bit my finger. Twenty minutes later, I had to pull over by the side of the road to throw up. My stomach couldn’t handle the grease. Since then, I’ve had small slipups, but nothing like that.”

When Natasha went back to the doctor three months later, she had dropped
60 pounds. Her doctor was shocked and delighted. “She joked, ‘Let me see your stomach to see if you went to Mexico and had gastric bypass surgery without telling me.’ ” As Natasha continued losing, her doctor kept asking for before-and-after photos to use as inspiration for other overweight patients.

At around 370 pounds, Natasha gathered the strength to start exercising. In just a few weeks, she lost five quick pounds by taking a 20-minute daily walk around a small park. Encouraged, she decided to start going to the gym. “All of the machines had warnings that they were for people 350 pounds or less, but I figured that was just an estimate and it wouldn’t be a problem.”

On her second day using the treadmill, disaster struck. “I noticed that the treadmill was starting to tilt forward, and it must have been making noise, but I had my headphones on so I didn’t hear it. The next thing I knew, the machine cracked apart, the monitor went flying off, and I was rolling on the floor. I was so embarrassed, I left there as quickly as I could.”

For the next four days, Natasha just sat on her living room couch, feeling really down on herself. “I couldn’t believe it. I was even too fat to exercise.” But she was determined to keep exercising, so she ordered some exercise DVDs; at first, she just watched them. Finally, she got up and followed along for a few minutes, then a little longer, and a little longer, until she was doing entire workouts.

Over the next several months, she lost 30 more pounds. Then a friend introduced her to Zumba. “My first instructor was a size zero and moved way too fast for me to keep up. Plus, I had read a tip about Zumba that you should stand in front so you can see the instructor and watch what you’re doing in the mirror, so that’s what I did. At the beginning of one class, a woman rudely asked me if I could move to the back because no one could see around me. I was so angry, but I just swallowed, gave her a look, and said, ‘No.’ I danced through the whole class trying to hide that I was crying.”

As she had before, Natasha used the embarrassing experience as
motivation. She found a better Zumba class taught by a teacher who was more her speed, and started going four days a week while continuing to walk on weekends. She dropped down to 290, then hit a frustrating plateau. Knowing she had to do more, she gave up her favorite indulgence—peanut butter—and forced herself to go back to the gym. This time, she used the elliptical machine, and though she found it boring, she loved the way it melted fat from all the right places on her body. “It whittled my waist and made my thighs and hips more toned,” she says.

Two years after starting what she calls her “fitness journey,” Natasha weighed 280 pounds and felt amazing. “I went on a plane and was able to use the regular seat belt without an extender. That was a mind-blowing moment for me—to just sit down and buckle up like everyone else. I was so proud, I cried.”

Now closing in on her goal weight of 170 pounds, Natasha has added stair-climbing and weight lifting to her fitness routine and remains extremely disciplined about what she eats.

“My kids are eating better, too,” she says. “They drive their grandmother crazy when they look at the food labels on snacks she gives them and say, ‘This has too many carbs!’ ”

Natasha gets additional motivation from a weight-loss support group she started. “I began blogging about my weight loss on Facebook and, for the first year, no one really commented. But when I started saying I’d lost 75 pounds and posting pictures, a lot of people asked me for advice. I decided to hold a onetime meeting at my church to answer everyone at once. Then word spread and I started getting more questions. I figured it would be easier to hold a weekly meeting. We started with 12 women and it quickly grew to 30. We have a sisterhood. It motivates me because I can’t tell people to keep pushing themselves if I’m not doing it myself.”

Natasha’s weight-loss success also gave her the confidence to try for a sales
position at her company that she had long coveted. Because the job involved face-to-face meetings, she had always assumed her weight would get in the way, but this time, when a position opened up, she applied. “I went on three interviews and blew them away. I got the job, beating out candidates with more experience, and I tripled my salary.”

It’s hard for Natasha to describe how it feels to have gone from a size 32 to a size 10. “It’s surreal to not break the heels off a pair of shoes after wearing them for only two weeks, to walk into a store and buy a dress right off the rack, to wake up and find that my hands and feet aren’t swollen, to have so much energy that I can’t fall asleep at night because I’m so excited about my new life.”

Natasha is a new woman—someone she doesn’t always even recognize herself. “The other day, I was walking past a building when I saw a normal-sized woman wearing the same orange-colored shirt that I had on. Then I realized it was
my
reflection!”

Trish B.,
¹
53

Hagerstown, Maryland

V
ince was late again. Trish had asked him to be home tonight on time so she could get to her book club, but it was getting close to six and he was still MIA.

He’d been doing this a lot lately—coming home late, or showing up only when one of their young sons had a game or practice. It was starting to feel like he didn’t want to come home at all.

As Trish waited, she went out to collect the mail. Flipping through the usual assortment of ads and bills, she came across an envelope with a return address she didn’t recognize.

At first she thought it was a thank-you note from a wedding she and Vince had attended many months earlier, when his assistant from his former job had gotten married. The cover of the card was a cut-out photo of Vince and the bride.

“I remembered the picture being taken,” says Trish. “All of the men were lined up and the bride lay across their arms, and everyone was laughing. Vince was in the middle, holding her at the waist.”

But the photo on the card showed just Vince and the bride. Everyone else in the group had been cut out; the bride seemed to be floating horizontally in midair.

“Then I read the inside,” Trish says. “At first the words didn’t make any sense. There were allusions to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, which had just come to light in the news. There were also references to Moby-Dick and ‘Dick-tation.’ ” The card was signed “Loosey,” which Trish initially thought was a strange typo for Vince’s nickname for the bride, “Lucy.”

Trish read the note several times as she walked from the mailbox back to the house. “I kept looking at the picture—him holding her, all the rest of the men cut out, the strange message. And then it hit me,” she says. “It was one of those moments when the world starts spinning, and you’re thrust into an alternate reality. I got dizzy.”

In a flash, Trish found herself connecting the dots. Since he’d changed jobs recently, Vince had stopped wearing his wedding ring (he said it interfered with his golf swing). He hadn’t put Trish’s photo in his new office, and had begun snapping at her whenever she asked for news about people from his old job. He never wanted her to go with him on any of the business trips his new job required. She’d been troubled by the distance that seemed to be widening between them.

She knew something was wrong, but she’d never suspected
this
.

It was 6:45 when Vince came home from work, too late for her to make it to her book group. She showed him the card.

“I waited for him to deny it, but he just looked at it for a long time, then turned red,” Trish says. “I started to cry, and I begged him to tell me what it
meant. He didn’t answer. He just stared at me with teary eyes and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

“I began shrieking, ‘Did you sleep with her, did you sleep with her?’ ” Trish recalls. “And he said, ‘Just once.’ I ran up to our room and hid in the bathroom, breathing fast and not knowing what to do. I was crying and kept saying, over and over, ‘I don’t believe it.’ Vince followed me upstairs, warning me that the boys could hear me, and asking me not to scream. But I wanted to scream. I wanted to break the door down. I wanted to punch him so hard.”

Vince kept apologizing, but insisted it wasn’t an affair. He said that he and Lucy had had a one-night stand after an office party, and that the real reason he’d left his old job was to avoid a scandal. He said he loved Trish and wanted to save their family. Trish wanted to believe that, but the past few years had been tough on her, and she wasn’t so sure Vince loved her at all anymore.

This was not what Trish had hoped for in her marriage. As a child, she would fall asleep at night to the sound of her parents’ murmured bedtime conversations. Those comforting “whispers in the night,” as she called them, assured Trish that all was well. She’d wanted that deep connection, too. That real intimacy.

Vince and Trish had shared some of that as newlyweds, but those days were long gone. Trish, an English teacher with a master’s degree, had stopped working after the children were born. The young family had moved from the city to the suburbs, where as a stay-at-home mom, she felt increasingly isolated. The marriage felt strained. Then came the bombshell in the mailbox.

“I’m not sure he ever understood how wounded I was by his lie,” says Trish. “It was the worst thing I could imagine. I alternated between sadness and anger after that, questioning every late night, every golf date, every
moment when I felt that we had lost control of our marriage. But in some weird way, it was a relief. At least now I knew.”

Life went on, but things changed. Trish was clingy and defensive, needing to know Vince’s whereabouts at all times. On the surface Vince was a model husband, coming home from work when he said he would, spending time with the boys, even wearing his wedding ring again. But he had shut down emotionally, and didn’t want to talk to Trish about anything except the boys. He traveled often for work, and Trish tried to get used to sleeping alone. There were no more whispers in the night.

In 1999, both Vince and Trish turned 40. The birthdays were joyless, the year grim. But on New Year’s Day—the first day of the new millennium—things got even worse.

“Lucy called our house to see if Vince was okay,” says Trish. “She said he had called her the day before from a park and told her he was going to kill himself. She told me Vince loved her and wanted to be with her, but that he didn’t want to leave his family.”

Trish hung up and ran to the garage, where Vince was getting the boys ready for sledding. “I was crazy, shouting things like, ‘So I guess your midlife crisis has blond hair!’ I was livid.”

This time Vince didn’t deny anything. He didn’t want to argue in front of the boys, so he took them and left the house. After he was gone, Trish called Lucy back.

“That’s when she told me everything,” says Trish. “She told me that they had never stopped seeing each other, and that he had left his first job so they could be together. She had been traveling with him on his business trips. She and her husband had split up, and now she was living in an apartment that Vince paid for. He had promised her marriage, a home. He’d told her he was living in another wing of our house—I had to laugh at that one; there was no
‘other wing’—and that I was aware he was seeing her, which I wasn’t; and that we were not sleeping together, which we were. And he said the only reason he was staying was for the boys.”