Secrets of a Former Fat Girl (11 page)

It was during one of my seemingly interminable runs around the dusty track I had begun to frequent that it came to me. I was at around lap eight when the whiner in my head started doing her thing. “Can't we quit now? Pleeeeeze?” she asked. “After all, we've made it through two whole miles. That's like fourteen in the Fat Girl time/space continuum, right?”

For a second there I almost gave in. Two miles was pretty good, damn good. But no—I'd planned to do three miles, and that meant I had four more laps to go. I was playing a game of mental tug-of-war with that stubborn inner whiner when it popped out: “It's not an option,” I said to myself.

And there it was.

Those four little words ended the internal argument right there. The effect was like a steel door slamming shut in an empty warehouse. It had such a finality to it, you could almost hear the echo. “It's not an option.” With that phrase I'd shut off a whole world of possibility, a world where giving up was not just acceptable but the norm.

I got through the full three miles that night, blurting out “It's not an option” every time the whiner started making noises about quitting. Soon after, I started using “It's not an option” (INO, for short) to get my butt to the track every day. That's right—every single day. Skip a session? INO. I didn't trust myself early on to take even a day of rest; it would be too easy, I feared, to get sucked back into my old sedentary routine. I wanted exercise to become routine. I wanted to need it as much as I needed to brush my teeth in the morning or put in my contacts. I wanted to feel odd, off-kilter, almost unable to function without it.

Obsessive? Maybe. Okay, definitely. I didn't know it at the time, but I was merely swapping one obsession for another. As a Fat Girl, I'd been obsessed with food my whole life. My mind was filled with thoughts of food, and I needed something else to occupy my brain cells. Exercise—running, to be specific—was it.

Because of INO, I ran in the rain, I suffered on the treadmill, and I wrenched myself out of bed in the early morning if I knew I wouldn't be able to run after work. INO helped me kick food off the top spot on my list of priorities. There was a new object of my obsession. And it felt
good.

INO was just as
effective when I finally did take on my diet about three years into my Former Fat Girl quest. By that time my exercise obsession had already carved me down from a size 16 or so to a size 8. Then, for reasons I'll explain later, I decided to go on Weight Watchers.

The Weight Watchers of the mid-80s was a bit different than it is now. You were allowed a certain number of servings from the different food groups: breads/grains, dairy, meat/protein, fruits/vegetables. Every time you ate a serving from a group, you'd mark it down. Once you exhausted, say, your six-serving bread/grain quota (which I could do before noon), that was it. No more bread that day. You were forced to tap the other food groups for the rest of the day's meals. In that way the program actually compelled you to eat a balanced diet. Today's version is somewhat looser. You're given a set number of “points” each day and a guide to how many points a serving of each food will set you back. If you choose to, you could spend your whole day's worth of points on chocolate (hmmm, I see a new ad campaign in Weight Watchers' future). Then again, that would tap you out pretty fast, and you'd be left sampling from the zero-point menu: ice cubes, water, diet drinks, and Splenda. Yum.

People often say Weight Watchers—both the ancient version I was on and the modern one—teaches you portion control. The portion part I buy. WW had me weighing my break fast cereal with a tiny little kitchen scale, parceling out sliced strawberries in a cup measure, and making note of the number of ounces in a yogurt container. Don't get me wrong: That was a big lesson for a girl who was used to eating a half pound of pasta at one sitting (and toying with the idea of going back for seconds).

The “control” part, though, has to come from you. After all, you're the one who has to put on the brakes when the bread basket's sitting there, overflowing, within reach. You're the one who has to resist rummaging through the pantry for a midnight snack when you've already maxed out your points for the day. You're the one who has to fight back all those inbred urges that make you want to eat when you aren't even hungry anymore.

For me that's where INO came in. Whenever I was tempted to stray beyond the limits of the WW diet, I whipped out INO. Again, I was superstrict about it. A slice of pizza? INO. Even though a mere slice wouldn't have broken the WW bank, I couldn't rely on myself to stop at one. An after-work beer? INO. I knew myself well enough to know that I wouldn't be able to resist a refill and the nachos, nuts, or whatever other bar food found its way to the table. A slice of cake, even just a bite? INO. Not for this sugar addict.

“It's not an option” helped me take the boundaries set for me by the Weight Watchers diet and the boundaries I'd set for myself exercisewise and make them mean something. Until I discovered INO, it was anything goes; the rule was there were no rules. I could eat anything, do nothing, or eat nothing, do everything, whatever. If I was to become a Former Fat Girl, that had to stop. For me INO was like putting blinders on a race horse: It helped block out all the distractions and kept my eyes trained on what lay ahead.

If you have any doubts about the power of INO to change your life, think about this: Right now other “mere words” have just as much power over you. Words like “I am weak” and “I am not worthy.” Words like “I can't” and “I will always be a Fat Girl.” These words are defining you; they are shaping the way you live now. Secret #3: Adopt INO (It's Not an Option) can help you fix all that.

Chant Like a Former Fat Girl

INO will help you do the thing that beyond anything else you must do to become a Former Fat Girl—and it could be the most difficult—and that is to say no. You're working against years of Fat Girl programming that has you thinking you're incapable of refusing that second piece of cake even though you're not hungry for it. Your appetite has trumped your willpower for so long that you don't believe you can turn the tables.

Even more than that, INO gives you a way of saying no to the people and responsibilities you automatically put ahead of yourself and your own needs. It gives you permission to put yourself first, an essential step toward Former Fat Girlhood. Using it as a tool, you can rearrange your priorities and elevate yourself to the proper position on your to-do list: the top.

INO was invaluable in helping me overcome my need to please and my talent for rationalizing that putting other people first—just about at all cost—was somehow the noble thing to do. It helped me say no when the demands of family and friends threatened to disrupt my running routine; it helped me say no to seconds of Mom's cheesy, oozing lasagna even though I knew such a rebuff might hurt her feelings. It helped give me the courage to break out of the Fat Girl mold that other people expected me to conform to, and start living my own way.

When I think about it now, I wasn't as much putting others
before
me as I was putting myself
last
. That might seem like a game of semantics, but it's not. My lack of self-confidence and self-respect made me feel like I didn't deserve to be first. As I worked the Former Fat Girl program, as I began to reshape my self-image, I began to see that for me to get what I wanted in life, to get anywhere other than where I was, I had to put my needs first. And INO helped make it happen.

To use INO you have to define the rules of your new life. How often do you want to exercise? What are you trying to do with your diet? Once you have some kind of plan, INO can help you follow it. I know what you're thinking: “Ugh. Another diet? Another exercise program? Just what I need.” I promise—that's not what I'm talking about here. Where you get your “rules” is up to you. You might be the kind of person who grooves on a cookie-cutter program that someone else sets out for you. Chances are, though, that you've cycled through your share of those, and if they lived up to their hype, you wouldn't be reading this book. But I don't believe in regrets. With every crazy diet you've been on, you've learned something about yourself, something that will help you figure out what
will
work for you. The challenge is tapping that knowledge. That's what I'm here to help you with.

The idea of living (and eating) by some set of rules yet again is hard to even think about, I know. When your life is so full of stress (as most of ours are), you savor the freedom to eat what you want and do what you want with the little downtime you have. Indulging your appetite for food, for mindless TV watching, for lounging and leisure might be the only way you nurture yourself. And the last thing I want to do is deny you that. But you know on some level that the overeating and inactivity are hurting you more than helping you. Any sense of comfort that these things give you is false. Rather than nurturing your spirit, they're sapping your strength. They are what's standing between you and the life you want.

Once you know your new limits, you have to find a way to nurture yourself within them. It's a delicate balance: You must be firm enough with yourself to put into place the changes that will make you a Former Fat Girl, but not so by-the-book that you drive yourself back to the same old patterns that held you down before. How do you strike that balance? These Former Fat Girl Fixes will help.

The Obstacle: Knowing What Your Rules Should Be

A new weight loss theory is born every minute. Okay, so I made that up, but it's not too far from the truth. There's a lot of crazy, confusing advice about the right way to eat and exercise. When you set out to create the rules for your new life, what advice do you follow?

Former Fat Girl Fixes

List the rules you eat by now.

Before you go all knee-jerk on me and say, “I thought the problem is that I don't
have
any,” think for a minute. There are patterns to the way you eat and the way you behave that are probably not working for you. I, for instance, always had a snack at around 3:00
P.M
., no question. It didn't matter if I had a three-course lunch; the snack was just something I did (and it wasn't some virtuous piece of fruit—more like a Snickers or a bag of Doritos). Here's another one: When I had spaghetti, my bowl had to be filled to where the blue pattern started on the rim. Anything less just wasn't enough. I never asked myself if I really wanted that snack or that much pasta. Those were my unconscious rules, and there were others: It was okay to have seconds on anything as long as my mom and dad would let me. I could order dessert if other people were ordering dessert. I could even order two if other people were ordering two. Sandwiches always had cheese on them. Pizza always had pepperoni. There was no such thing as just one cookie, just one potato chip, or just one bite. Plates were always cleaned unless they contained anything green, peas and lima beans in particular. Get the picture?

The first step in making INO work for you is to get in touch with the rules you're living by now. Here's how: Pull out a sheet of paper and write fifteen statements that begin with the words “I always” or “I never.” Include anything related to your relationship with food. Why fifteen? Because I want you to stretch, to make yourself really examine what you might be doing that threatens to sabotage you on your way to becoming a Former Fat Girl. If you hit fifteen easily, go for twenty. If twenty is easy, go for twenty-five. You may need to give yourself a couple of days or even a week to get a good list together. Different rules can emerge in different situations (at work, at leisure, in social activities, and so on). Push yourself. Get it all out there—because you can't create new rules unless you know what the old ones are.

Tap your inner diet database.

If you're a veteran of as many weight loss plans as I am, you have a wealth of information in your head that could help you on your journey to Former Fat Girlhood. For instance, if you were ever on Atkins or Sugar Busters, you know how you pined for a thick piece of sourdough bread or a nice potato (white, please). If you ever took the super-low-fat route, you know how sick you got of that rubbery stuff they call fat-free cheese. If South Beach was your plan of choice, you know how poorly your number-phobic brain handled the whole GI index thing. You might already know from past experience what you hate about treadmill walking or that you can't stand exercising when it gets below 57.4 degrees outside. I'll bet you learned some positive things, too, like the fact that music can make just about any type of exercise more tolerable but only if it's R&B (no disco or classic rock for you). Or maybe you didn't mind having just that Slim-Fast shake for breakfast, but what tripped you up was that you needed a lunch you could actually chew. Or maybe going without dessert during the week wasn't so bad but you really missed it on the weekends when you were ready to live a little.

To get to all that data, here's another little exercise. At the top of a blank sheet of paper, write down the name of a weight loss regimen you tried in the past—a diet, an exercise routine, what have you. Then list at least three things about the program that worked for you and at least three things that didn't. Do that for each of the different approaches you've tried (three to five ought to be enough). Include programs of your own creation as well—say, for instance, the month you had only soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Again, stretch yourself. The “didn't work” column will probably be easy for you to fill up; feel free to list more than three. The stuff that worked will likely be a struggle to come up with; force yourself to list at least three, and if that's easy, come up with a few more. This is the second step in creating a set of rules that will get you to your Former Fat Girl goal, rules that you can stick with (helped by INO) for the long haul.