Fat Chance (16 page)

When Jillian finally came up for air, I took advantage of the pause. “Jillian?” I said. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

Undeterred by the interruption, she said, “No, honey, of course not. What’s on your mind?”

I looked around at my teammates and mustered the courage to respond. “When you look at us,” I said, “are you …
disgusted
… by what you see?”

To this day, I have never again seen the look that appeared on Jillian’s face when I posed that question. It was a strange mix of pity and anger, of horror wrapped up in devastation that the subject would even come up. After nearly five full seconds, Jillian spoke. “Of
course
not!” she answered. “Why on earth would you ask me that?”

I hadn’t meant it in the harsh way she was taking it. I meant the question sincerely, and in the same obvious vein as asking a teetotaler if she is sickened when she sees a drunk slouched on the sidewalk, clinging to a near-empty bottle of scotch.

“You’re someone who cares a great deal about fitness and her body,” I started. “I mean, it’s clear that you take good care of yourself….” I looked up at her eyes, which were looking back at mine, and kept going. “I just figured that unfocused people like us must absolutely repulse a disciplined person like you.”

Apparently it took two therapy sessions worth eight-hundred bucks to get Jillian over our little exchange. “How could Julie
think
such a thing about me?” she had asked her therapist, who wisely responded, “Julie doesn’t think that you are disgusted by her and her teammates; Julie
herself
is the one who feels disgusted.”

A few days later, when the entire black team was in the gym working out, Jillian garnered my trust even more. She walked toward us while we ran our hearts out on the treadmill and said with a sincere grin, “I get how you guys feel, you know.”

It was an uncommonly empathetic comment, coming from her.

Sure you do, you tiny, ripped liar
, I thought but certainly did not say.

“No, seriously,” she replied as she took in our skeptical eyes. “I’ll bring the pictures to prove it.”

The next day Jillian showed up to our workout with the promised photos in hand, and as I scanned the images before me, my jaw fell slack. The shots were taken in the 1980s, so I excused the bad perm and ridiculous attire. But what was with the unibrow, the distant look in the eyes, the sixty extra pounds? Oh. My. Gosh. Jillian
did
know how we felt. She hadn’t always been the stunning woman my teammates and I gawked at every day. When she yelled at us and demanded our best, it’s because she had been there herself. And she knew what it would take for us to reach our potential, the same way she had stretched to reach hers.

When I go to the gym these days and see a heavy girl just
killing
herself on the elliptical machine, I can’t help but cheer her on. I know what she’s feeling, because I’ve been there myself. And although she can’t yet see it, I know exactly how she’ll feel when she’s fit.

In the time it took for me to look at one photo, my trust in Jillian was sealed. She wasn’t an evil tyrant; she was a chubby girl who’d been reformed. And now she was determined to help others find similar reformation too. Learning to trust her intentions—and her actions—would pave the path for me to trust others too. My teammates, for instance, and eventually even myself.

B
ack on day ten of the special brand of torment known as
The Biggest Loser
, the black team had made its first appearance on campus. Under the cover of darkness an unmarked van dropped us off just
outside the gym. Quietly and with a fair amount of urgency, we scurried into the weigh-in area, where we would wait for the other teams’ arrival. After almost half an hour, we heard the chatter and the footsteps of red- and blue-team members who were making their way to the gym. My heart raced and I thought about how stunned they’d be to see us standing there, the six men and women they left stranded at the Last Chance Café back on day one of our collective experience. Would they be able to tell how hard we’d been working in the desert for ten days straight?

As the blue and red teams neared, two giant doors emblazoned with
The Biggest Loser
logo slid open so that they could enter the part of the gym that was designated for weighing-in, and the first thing they saw was the black team standing on risers at the front of the room. Jaws dropped, eyes widened and audible groans could be heard as Bob, Kim and their shocked teams saw Jillian standing before them, her hands stuffed into her back pockets and her muscular arms bursting out from both sides. She wore black motorcycle boots that stretched to her knees with her skintight jeans tucked inside and a posture that said, “Come and get us. We dare you.”

After the shouts of sarcasm and laughter died down and the others got settled onto their team risers, Alison said, “Red team … blue team … meet the
black
team.” They were not amused. They had established their rhythms, their routines and their strategies for success. All they saw when they looked at us was one big fat disruption.

T
he first few days with our newfound competition would not be pleasant ones. They wouldn’t let us sit at “their” tables during mealtimes and ostracized us at every opportunity. We were clearly the nerds, and they were the cheerleaders and jocks. While they may have taken some satisfaction from making us feel estranged, what they did not consider was that social lepers stick together. The trust that was forged among the black team during those early “outcast days” likely led to our undeniable domination in the end.

My trust for others was expanding, but would I ever be able to trust myself? In due time I’d be invited to find out.

A
t nine in the morning, about three months into our
The Biggest Loser
experience, after pulling on a fresh black-team T-shirt and packing a lunch, my teammates and I were driven off-campus for the day. Evidently, we were going to be put to work to see what it was like to live in the real world for a change. As the campus became a dot in the rearview mirror, I was sobered by the reminder that there existed an entire universe outside of our happy
The Biggest Loser
bubble, a universe we were all going to have to return to someday. I know I wasn’t alone in wondering if I’d find a way to survive.

Suddenly we were characters in that M. Night Shyamalan movie,
The Village
, in which a group of people, led by the town’s elders, had been living a simple, peaceful life in a secluded place sometime in the 1800s. Or so they thought. Through a wild series of events they came to discover that their village was nothing but a facade. In reality it was 2004, and a fast-paced, modern world was spinning all around them.

How do you survive when your airtight bubble bursts? It’s the question that was on all of our minds as we stepped out of campus life for the day.

After I finally grew accustomed to the idea of being thrust into the real world for a full day, I then discovered that our real world would involve a pizza parlor. And putting me inside a pizza place is like asking an alcoholic to fill in for the bartender—some things just aren’t wise to do.

We walked from the car to the pizzeria, and I could smell the pepperoni from the parking lot. “It’s okay, belly,” I soothed. “We’re gonna do
just
fine.” Once inside, the manager introduced himself to us and then showed us to our appointed stations. Not only would I have to
smell
the toppings, but, evidently, I’d have to
touch
them too. I looked down at the giant buckets full of crumbled Italian sausage and grated mozzarella cheese and thought,
Surely life is not this cruel …

Pizza in any form is my kryptonite. Thick crust, stuffed crust, toppings galore—however you care to serve it is absolutely fine with me. On our once-a-week “high-calorie” days on campus, other contestants always wanted variety—Chinese food one week, hamburgers the next—but not me. I say if there is any opportunity for pizza, then pizza is what must
be consumed. At the job site that day, it was like I was sick in the hospital and a long, lost friend had stepped into my room. “Where have you
been
all this time?” I wondered aloud as I stared down at a pile of thick pepperoni circles. “I’ve missed you more than you can possibly know!”

In the end, the experience was cathartic. Like someone with a terrible fear of heights surviving a skydiving debut, I had stared down my biggest fear—at least as it related to food—and won. I had trusted myself in the most untrustworthy of situations and proven that I could prevail.

T
here were other tools God gave me for sorting out the tangled mess of emotions I held, like
tenacity
, a character trait I’d never before possessed.

Sometimes my goal was making it through the day; sometimes it was making it through that particular workout; and sometimes I had my focus narrowed down to nothing but the very next movement. “You can do it, Julie,” I’d reassure myself. “You can lift up your arm one more time.”

When things got tough, tenacity said keep going. I could either keep going, or I could do nothing, and doing nothing simply wasn’t an option.

During one workout in particular, Jillian made me stand on the gym floor and then jump onto a plyometric box that was eight inches off the ground. I know, I know, eight inches is nothing. But it might as well have been Mount Everest for the mindgames going on in my head. I’ve never been a good jumper, and as I thought back on the two painful knee surgeries I’d endured my thoughts just got the better of me. “Jump!” Jillian screamed to my face, but flat-footed there I remained. In that moment I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I’d fail. But then tenacity whispered, “You can do this. Just try.”

I would ice my knees after an especially challenging run and sit there thinking the entire time, “Maybe I should just give up. Maybe this game’s not for me.” My bones and my background were telling me to quit, but tenacity held me there. “You’ve quit every time before,” I would think. “You’re
here
because you’ve quit, in fact. But a quitter is not who you are.”

To finish what I’ve started, for once
—would my actions prove my mantra true, or would I cave to weariness and doubt?

In those moments I knew that if quit on that day, I’d be quitting every day ’til I died. I imagined myself five or ten years later, looking back on that give-up moment and wondering who I might have become had I allowed my newfound tenacity to have its way in my mind and my heart.

S
ometimes, during our “dark-day” workouts, when cameras weren’t rolling and things were a little more laid back, music would be played in the gym. One morning a member of another team brought in a CD with Suzie McNeil’s song titled “Believe.”

The first time I heard her beautiful, ragged voice strain out the chorus to that song, it felt like my heart took flight. “If you just believe,” that chorus goes, “you can move mountains with dreams. The higher you climb, the better it gets, ’cause you will see things you’ll never forget … if you just believe.”

The higher you climb, the better it gets
—based on the experiences I’d known to that point, I could think of words no truer than those.