Bigger (The Nicky Beets series) (8 page)

When I arrived home, Chuck greeted me with a kiss and a tight hug.

“I’m sorry for being a jerk yesterday,” he said. “I want to support you.
I’ll do anything to make you happy. Plus, you look hot all sweaty.”

I laughed and swatted Chuck’s hands away as he grabbed at my butt. “Thank
you for saying that, and believe me, you do not want to touch this until it has
been soaped down and rinsed off.”

“Mmm, need any help with that?” he grinned deviously at me as I limped
toward the shower.

Later, clean and ravenous, I threw together a healthy chicken stir-fry
with broccoli, and Chuck politely commended my cooking and pretended there was
nothing else he’d rather be eating. I was relieved I wouldn’t have to contend
with his diet-hating while trying to shed the weight.

After the dishes were cleared and washed, I settled down in front of the
computer with a yawn. I needed to post dinner photos and check on comments from
the previous day’s blog post, but I hoped to make the task quick since
exhaustion was setting in.
 

I pulled up the web site and gasped; yesterday’s post had eighty-two
comments! Most popular posts didn’t get more than forty or fifty comments in a
single day. I clicked the link to view them and made a quick assessment. Most
of the comments were really touching and supportive.

One from a reader I was familiar with – Sarah N. – said:
Nicky, I think most of us are behind you
100% on this! I know I struggle with the same problem: I love food, but food
does not love me (especially my thighs). I wish there was some happy medium.
Best wishes! Looking forward to hearing more about it!

Sarah’s comment made me smile. And then of course there were a few trolls
in there, telling me of course I was fat; look at all the terrible things I’d
been shoving into my face.

Anonymous (aren’t trolls always anonymous?):
Why don’t you learn portion control? You’re obviously eating too much
and not exercising. Maybe if you just got off your ass once in a while this
wouldn’t be an issue.

Hadn’t I admitted I ate too much and didn’t exercise enough in the post?
Still, I apparently needed to be punished by this anonymous reader. I sighed.
The Internet is a wonderful and yet terrifying place to roam.

I clicked on “new post” to set up the evening’s entry.

I posted the photos of the stir-fry and then wrote a short post.

Day One – Success!

Thanks so much to everyone who
commented on yesterday’s post – I feel so encouraged after reading what
you had to say. Well, most of you. There’s always the anonymous few who feel
compelled to remind me exactly why I’m fat, as if I didn’t already know!

So, is it too early to call a diet
and exercise program a success on Day One? Possibly. But as far as the day
went, I did well. I ate well – low carb – and went to yoga.

If he could, I’m almost certain
that the yoga instructor would restrict me from coming to his class and
tainting the whole place up with my grunting and panting in sweatpants. I think
he was talking solely to me when he reminded the entire class tonight that this
is an “intermediate level” class. Did he expect me to just leave when he said
that? I think as revenge I’ll go back on Monday. In fact, I know I will. I
signed up for the monthly fee, so I have a feeling I’ll be seeing a lot more of
my mustachioed instructor, and he’ll be seeing a
lot
more of me, too.

As I powered the computer down, I felt drugged, and knew I’d sleep like
the dead. I kissed Chuck good night and hobbled on sore legs to bed, where I
immediately fell into a deep sleep and didn’t awaken until my alarm went off at
six the next morning.

The second morning of my diet, the scale said I’d lost four pounds. I’d
certainly been on low-carb diets and knew the magical weight loss that resulted
when I stopped eating bread, pasta, rice, and sugar, so this was little
surprise. Still, it was encouraging to see that the hard work I’d put in for
one day appeared to be working.

I continued to meet Roxanne for yoga and stayed true to my diet over the
next week. But I was getting sick of eggs for breakfast, chicken salad for
lunch and some variation of meat and vegetables for dinner. During the day I
would chew vigorously on sugarless gum or snack on vegetables and hummus if I
felt insanely hungry. I kept a giant water bottle on my desk and swigged from
it every couple minutes. The result was an increase in my trips to the
bathroom, but keeping my stomach full of water also seemed to stave off hunger.

By the end of seven days, I was down twelve pounds, a personal record for
one-week’s worth of diet and exercise. I still had a long way to go but I was
quite happily noticing my two pairs of work pants were fitting just the tiniest
bit more loosely and overall I was starting to feel less lethargic. I was
waking in the mornings sore from the previous evening’s hour-and-a-half yoga
torture sessions and practically skipping to the scale to see if I’d lost
weight. Each morning thus far, the scale was my friend and had only good news
for me. It made starting each day committed to the program a little easier.

And it was making the thought of attending the firm’s upcoming Christmas
party a little less daunting. With the event only a little over a week away, I
was actually looking forward to getting dressed up and having a good time.
Normally I avoided the annual Christmas bash like the plague, as it usually
resulted in co-workers having too much to drink and saying or doing embarrassing
things that, come Monday morning, we were all supposed to pretend we hadn’t
noticed. But, this year I was feeling abnormally spunky. Not to mention the law
firm was throwing the gala at the swanky Four Seasons, and the hotel was
substantially discounting room rates for employees who wanted to stay the night
after the party. I RSVP’d
yes
and
booked a room for Chuck and me.

I would definitely need a new dress. I hadn’t worn a dress since Laurie’s
wedding, and I’d outgrown that some time ago. New shoes were in order. Most of
the shoes I owned were flats and this party definitely called for a sassy heel.
And while I was at it I should probably schedule a hair appointment and get a
manicure and pedicure.

At a size twenty-four, nice dresses are hard to come by. Oftentimes, I
couldn’t find my size in department stores, even if I went straight to the big
girls’ section. They certainly didn’t make the cute dresses that smaller women
wore in larger women’s sizes, so invariably I’d end up in something that was not
only dull but usually unflattering, to boot. I trolled the plus-sized stores
online and wasn’t surprised to find a dearth of party-appropriate dresses, but
finally settled on a black, swishy knee-length sheath with elbow sleeves and a
shiny patent leather belt I could fasten around my rib cage. While I was at it,
I ordered a pair of dark nylons and a body-shaper, knowing that shopping for
plus-sized undergarments in public would be bad for my psyche. The rest of my
ensemble could be purchased in regular department stores, and I would take
Laurie with me for good measure.

We set out the Saturday before the party for Nordstrom, where I was
fairly certain I’d be able to find accessories to complement my relatively
plain dress. After about forty-five minutes of browsing jewelry counters, I
settled on a chunky necklace with large burnished gold links that had velvet ribbon
threaded through them. An asymmetrical display of faux jewels and flowers hung
on the end of the necklace and looked very hip, very
now
to me.
 
Normally I
never wore anything anywhere in the realm of what would be considered stylish.
The designer necklace cost me one-hundred-fifty dollars, but I reasoned I
hadn’t bought anything nice for myself in a long time. Hell, I’d been wearing
the same two pairs of pants to work for the last six months.

Next we started in on the shoes. Boots were out – my calves were
too large to fit into even the ample-looking wide-calf boots.

As Laurie and I were browsing the shoe department, a spindly, short
fellow with a nametag reading Gabe appeared quietly at my side to inquire as to
whether he could be of assistance. I told him I was looking for something
appropriate for a black-tie event, and moments later he held up a shoe that
made me catch my breath. I wanted to rub my cheek on it and maybe groan a
little, but I refrained. It had a four-inch heel and the body of it was made of
structured lace. It had a peep toe and a funky little bow on top of it and as I
stood in a pair of them I felt about twice as pretty as I had when I first
walked in the store.

“Can I just tell you how happy I am that the eighties are back?” I said
to Laurie. I’d rolled my jeans up to mid-calf and was turning around, admiring
the shoes from all possible angles. “These are so Madonna.”

“Well…” Laurie took in the heels with raised eyebrows and one hand on her
hip. She was wearing a faded second-hand T-shirt paired with a long linen skirt
and strange hemp shoes she’d made herself. To say she was out of place in
Nordstrom would have been an understatement. “Tell me how you feel about this.
Those shoes are almost six hundred dollars.”

I stopped breathing for a moment and stood stock still with my gaze
affixed to the small mirror that sat at shoe-viewing level. A red flush creeped
up my chest and my neck and sweat beads popped out spontaneously on my forehead
as I grappled with the idea of paying six hundred dollars for the heels. To
date, I’d never paid more than seventy-five dollars for a pair of shoes. I’d
prided myself on not joining what seemed like a fashion competition amongst the
girls at work, who upstaged each other each week with their new, and very
expensive designer shoes, handbags, and sunglasses.

Realistically I knew the reason I’d never bought or worn expensive stuff
was because I preferred to fade into the background, rather than be noticed.
Hence the handful of sensible black and brown items hanging in my closet and
the few cheap, outdated and undesirable comfortable shoes I owned.

If I was truly turning over a new leaf by losing weight, I imagined my
wardrobe would need an overhaul. Not an overhaul that included pairs of
six-hundred-dollar heels. But seeing as how I’d been trudging around in
economical, androgynous flats from shoe warehouse stores for the last four
years, it felt a bit like balancing the scales to buy something so outrageously
expensive.

Just this once
, I reasoned, it
would be OK to purchase a six hundred dollar pair of shoes.
 

Gabe quite happily rang up the shoes and I, in a slight panic, paid as
quickly as I could. With Laurie hustling along bewilderedly after me, I rushed
out of the store before I could change my mind or, God forbid, buy something
else.

With the Christmas party a week away, I had a little extra incentive to
continue progressing on my diet and exercise program. I decided to do some
light jogging on the evenings I wasn’t doing yoga, much to my boss Robin’s
delight. I told her of my plan one morning and she spent the rest of the day
flooding my e-mail inbox with links to running websites and books I could buy
that said they could transform me from an overfed couch potato into a
well-muscled athlete in a matter of months.

“I don’t want to become a marathoner,” I protested to Robin. “I just want
to lose some weight.”

“Well how do you expect to lose weight if you don’t push yourself a
little harder each time you run?” she asked.

Suddenly and quite annoyingly, Robin was starting to make sense to me.
After all, I’d been thin before and could even have been considered an amateur
runner at one point, having participated in a couple of 5K runs with little
effort.

I knew Robin was technically correct. If I was going to start running, I
would need to set goals. But, they would need to be simple goals. There was no
way I could even fathom running a marathon just a few months from now. Going
from obese to svelte marathon runner that quickly wasn’t feasible.

Robin found a website claiming I would be able to run three miles after
only eight weeks of training. I was skeptical, but I printed out the training
schedule and planned to complete the first day of the program that evening.

At five o’clock, I shut down my computer and slipped into a cramped
bathroom stall with a backpack full of workout gear. I’d become accustomed to
this ritual, since I also did this before every yoga class. Leaning against one
wall of the stall, I managed to change into stretchy pants, socks, tennis
shoes, a sports bra and an oversized T-shirt. I pulled my arms through the
sleeves of an enormous sweatshirt and secured my frizzed mane with an elastic
band.

Head down, I exited the bathroom and made for the elevator lobby. I
jabbed the button with the down arrow just as Carl Pelter, one of the young
junior associates who’d been with the firm a scant three months, sauntered into
the lobby carrying a leather briefcase and navigating his cell phone’s touch
screen with one thumb. It was my misfortune that Carl was California-boy
handsome, with the broad shoulders of a water-polo player and bleached blond
hair of a weekend surfer. He looked up distractedly to note that the elevator
button had already been pressed and then glanced my way with a tight smile,
apparently not recognizing me at first. Carl did a double take and then
realized he ought to know me.

“Oh, hello,” he offered. “You work for Robin …”

“Yes, Nicole Beets,” I replied.

“Of course,” he said. “Sorry, I’m still learning everyone’s names.”

I smiled tightly in return and prayed for the ability to make myself
invisible.

Carl gave me another once-over, taking in my baggy exercise clothes.