Authors: Julie Haddon
Fat Chance (15 page)
Still holding J.D.’s gaze, I said with a perfectly straight face, “Don’t let this sweater-set fool you. I did
pageants
, remember? I
know
how it feels to pull a knife out of my back.”
J.D. was speechless. My metaphor had connected. Pageant girls are known for being perfect and polished, but they’re also known for being fierce. You don’t want to mess with them, and in six seconds flat I had assured the show’s casting team that my competitors wouldn’t want to mess with me either.
I had the mom-bob haircut. I had the ever-stylish sweater-set. And, evidently, I had the attention of J.D. Now all I needed was the chance to prove I had the emotional chutzpah not just to get through an interview, but to
win
.
L
ife during
The Biggest Loser
was a roller coaster—complete with high highs, low lows, and stomach-flipping spins. And if a roller-coaster ride is jolting for a normal person, try riding one when you’re morbidly obese. In the first forty-eight hours flat, I went from feeling thrilled about being on the show, to feeling abandoned because I didn’t get picked by the red or blue teams, to feeling exhausted after my first workout in the desert, to feeling elated because I slept
great
my second night at the budget motel. Up, then down, then up, then down—would it be like this forever?
A totally unhelpful reality on campus was that the production crew had a snack table that was always stocked. If I had a dime for every diet Sunkist that Hollie and I stole, I’d be a rich, rich girl.
Over the next three days, I felt rejected upon being kicked out of the gym, imprisoned by the sheer weight of the body I was living inside, suffocated by my mounting insecurities and self-reproach, depressed by the fact that I was
still
secretly sneaking snacks and utterly alone as I figured out that food remained my only friend.
From there I’d do a downward spiral into feeling silly that someone as incompetent as I had made the show, overwhelmed by looking in the mirror and realizing just how far I had to go, insignificant when I saw the workhorses I was competing against, guilty because I’d left my family in order to pursue a self-focused dream, embarrassed when I stood on the scale for the first time, remorseful when I recalled all the things my weight had kept me from doing and angry as I recounted all that fat had stolen from me.
It wasn’t pretty.
But then, just as surely as the spiral had descended, it would arrest itself and start moving the other way. I felt
grateful
to have been selected out of the quarter-million who had applied. I felt
powerful
when I ran my first mile. I felt
triumphant
as the pounds finally began to come off. And with every baby step I took, I felt
freed
from long-held fears.
The physical strain of the game was real, but it paled in comparison to the emotional battles I fought. It’s far easier to whip a set of biceps into shape than it is to strengthen a mushy mind.
O
ne of Jillian Michaels’ mantras is, “You don’t get fat because of diet and exercise alone.” She knew all along what it took me months to understand, that in addition to physical weight, there is always more weight that we carry. As I’ve mentioned before, Jillian’s theory was that if she could somehow get us to unearth those inner demons, we’d be a heck of a lot healthier as we faced the outer ones.
The philosophy made sense to me. After all, fat people can’t deny bulging saddlebags, cottage-cheese thighs and the spare tire that’s hanging from their waist. But they
can
try to deny the stuff that remains unseen. And for a time, my entire team and I did a decent job of denying that aside from our physical weight there was absolutely anything wrong. The alternative seemed unthinkable.
I’d lived all of adulthood behind the mask of “allrightness.” I was happy Julie, bouncy Julie, funny Julie and spontaneous Julie—Julie whom everyone knew and loved. On campus it seemed that every move I made, every word that I spoke, every emotion I finally agreed to share served only to chip away at the visage that my friends and family
knew as “me.” I knew they’d be watching the show from home, thinking,
That’s not the Julie we know
.
After my time on campus, I heard from many people back home that they had no idea I was so miserable inside. “Neither did I,” I admitted every time. “Trust me … neither did I.”
It was agonizing to bare my soul on national TV, but I’d come to my own personal breaking point, and all I could do was just break. And exactly as Jillian had planned, by the time that breaking point was upon me, I was too physically exhausted to keep the emotional tsunami at bay.
W
hen I watched
The Biggest Loser
from home I’d get so frustrated with contestants who always cried.
What do they have to be so upset over?
I’d wonder. That is, until I became a blubbering idiot myself. I had made a sport out of stuffing my true feelings in life, but once I allowed the wave onto shore, well … Katy, bar the door. You’ve never
seen
so many tears.
The reason that voting people off the show was so difficult is because all of us were on borrowed time to begin with. We were all considered “morbidly obese” at the show’s start, and when you eliminated a player, most likely you were eliminating one who was still morbidly obese. Most likely you were sending them right back to where they developed hypertension, diabetes and poor eating habits in the first place. And without having had enough time to make deep, sustainable changes, in essence, you were kicking them to the curb. The worst times were when I had to eliminate players who were older or heavier than I was. Those nights I felt like the selfish, inconsiderate clod who stays seated on the bus even when an elderly, disabled woman unsteadily stands there with no place to sit down.
I cried when I realized that I was the weakest link. I cried when I got on the scale and thought about my mother and all of her friends and my husband and all of our friends knowing my real weight. I cried when I had to vote people off the show. I cried when I thought
I
might be voted off the show. I cried when my teammates struggled and I cried when I struggled. I cried when I received praise for my hard work, and I cried when other people got more praise than I did, especially when I’d worked equally hard.
I cried because I missed my family, and then I cried wondering
whether they really missed me. I cried when I felt alone, and I cried when I realized I’d made new friends—friends just like me, who “got” what it meant to be fat.
I cried because God had allowed me to shed all those tears, and then I cried as he wiped each of them away.
Toward the end of the show, when the pool of contestants had been whittled down to the black team’s final four, Jillian had a running joke she loved to tell. She’d say, “If we were all standing on top of a tall building and I told the four of you to jump off, Isabeau would try to negotiate—‘Can we do it from a floor lower?’ Bill would want to go even
higher
than the roof—‘I can do better than this!’ Hollie would cuss me out and storm off. And Julie? She’d take a flying leap on my ‘go’ but sob the entire way down.”
Sadly, she had it about right. I had reverted back to the adolescent version of myself—at best, a wobbly, emotional wreck.
Tears, tears and more tears I cried, until thankfully, one day things finally clicked. I had been emptied and flattened and emotionally wrung dry. But by his grace, God gave me the tools I needed to strengthen not just my body, but my
mind
.
T
hroughout my life, many situations should have served as a wake-up call for me regarding my health … or lack thereof. You would think that when I heard straight from my doctor’s mouth that I could not birth another child until I dropped forty pounds, I’d be motivated to change. But nope! That wake-up call I snoozed right past.
After the twenty-fifth time of hiding behind those racks at Target to avoid friends I hadn’t seen in a while …
surely
that was a wake-up call. But nope! Still didn’t opt to change.
How about the sixty-fourth occasion of insisting on sex with the lights turned off? Nope, that wasn’t a motivator either.
What about my southern-born family saying, “Good
Lawd
, child, that butt is getting so
big
!” each and every time they saw me?
You guessed it: a great big whopping
nope
.
As I say, many things should have motivated me in the past but didn’t. And I know I’m not alone in this. I know overweight people who have lost friends to heart attacks and then the following week hear their
own doctor say, “You’ll be dead in five years if you continue this way.” Think that prognosis causes them to change? Nope, not even
close
.
I know people who try to donate blood and are told by the nurse that their blood is so bad it just can’t be drawn. Surely
that’s
motivation to change. I wish it were, but nope.
There are friends who can’t walk up a flight of stairs without gasping for fleeting breath, but even that doesn’t faze them at all.
Honestly, it would be far easier to judge all those people if I weren’t so much like them myself. Despite what my doctor, my family and my sex life told me, it wasn’t until
I
was motivated to change that I changed.
Still, if I really wanted to achieve my deeply desired goals, I’d have to learn to hear from those who had my best interest at heart.
O
ne of the most sobering realizations I made during my
The Biggest Loser
stint was that I had spent a good portion of my life not trusting a single soul. And while it’s true that I was the only one who could motivate me, at some point, even that revelation would warrant trust. I was about to get schooled in the annoying nuances of trust—for my trainer, my team and myself.
When you are separated from your family, your friends and all indications of home, and you can’t yet trust the competitors you’re trying to outlast, you seek out whatever lifeline you can find. Whether I liked it or not, Jillian was going to have to do.
Because of her stick-to-itiveness with contestants who appeared on previous seasons of the show, Jillian had proven her worth to me vicariously. But at the beginning of our time together, I wasn’t sure I trusted her with
me
. She seemed ruthless. Harsh. And lacking a certain southern charm. But over time I’d look past all of that. The day would finally dawn when I’d see Jillian as someone just like me.
E
arly on in the show, the black team gathered together under a tree after an afternoon of normal, challenging workouts. We were all still getting to know each other, and getting to know Jillian as well.
She pulled us all in for a team huddle because we had a weigh-in the very next night. “Guys, Bob’s a great trainer, and I’m sure Kim will
compete hard, so I’m going to lay out for you the only advantage I see for us,” she began.
As she spoke, she passed out copies of two of her books,
Winning by Losing
and
Making the Cut
.
6
“Inside, there’s a survey about whether you’re a fast oxidizer or a slow oxidizer,” she continued, “and I’m going to craft individual eating plans based on how you respond … ” My mind was chasing other thoughts as Jillian’s voice continued to fill the air.
I stared at the cover of one of the books and saw Jillian’s flawless figure staring back at me. She was captured in a pristine pose, and the lighting was just right. I glanced up at her in real life and then glanced back down at the book in my hands. She was the same here as she was there—how was it
possible
to be that ripped?
She jabbered on and on—something about focusing on the weigh-in and making sure our food intake was what it needed to be—but all I could think about was her body that was perfect and my body that was not. The contrast, admittedly, was tough to take in.