Half-Assed (23 page)

As I experimented in the kitchen, I learned how to slightly alter recipes. It was similar to how I learned programming techniques during my day job as a web developer. After sampling some tasty mintchocolate fudge pudding at a friend’s house, I was tempted to buy more, but I scoffed at the price of pudding cups. It was cheaper to buy the dry mix, but it didn’t come in the chocolate-mint flavor. I figured all I needed was some mint extract, which I dumped into a regular batch of chocolate pudding. I licked a wobbly lump off the spoon and it tasted amazing. I was shocked. I was more shocked when I licked the teaspoon after measuring the mint extract and experienced the taste equivalent of looking directly at the sun. On the bright side, I would never have to buy mouthwash again.

Real foodies probably consider this stuff second nature, but it had never occurred to me that you could make up your own recipes. I imagined recipes had been perfectly chiseled on stone tablets and handed down to us by God. How had anyone figured out how to make something as complicated as bread? Even my failed food experiments were somewhat rewarding because they allowed me to be creative in a task I had otherwise found routine and tedious. I used to secretly snicker at women who proudly displayed their prize-winning bundt cakes on morning talk shows, but now I realized that cooking was an outlet to express creativity just like painting or music. Flour, shortening,
and sugar were more likely to be found in a housewife’s home than oil paints and canvas.

Ironically, I knew more about cooking now than I ever had when I was fat. I needed to keep trying new foods to keep myself interested. I didn’t want to get in a rut and go back to my old ways out of boredom. I was applying this same strategy outside of the kitchen too.

I weighed about 210 pounds now, which on a five-foot-nine woman was only eight pounds away from being considered overweight instead of obese. When I’d first started exercising the only thing my joints could handle was walking. If I’d tried breaking into a run I would have found myself wailing by the back of the treadmill, grasping my knee in pain like Nancy Kerrigan and shouting, “Why me?!” But now my body could actually do things.

I’d started testing the limits of my abilities one year into my weight loss, in January of 2006 when I weighed 245 pounds. I tried following an aerobics video that was so old I owned it on VHS instead of DVD. An energetic female instructor told me I’d have lots of fun bouncing along to some Motown favorites. I had first tried to groove with her when I’d weighed 350-something pounds. Back then I would hit the stop button only seven minutes into the tape, and that included the thirty seconds of FBI warning. I had realized there was no way I could move as fast as the exercisers on the video, and I tossed the tape back on the shelf.

When I inserted the tape this time, I watched the tracking automatically adjust the horizontal line of static off the screen and guessed I wouldn’t last much longer than seven minutes. Twenty-six minutes later I hit the stop button, and not because I’d collapsed on the remote control. I wasn’t even physically exhausted yet, just too frustrated to learn the steps. I still hadn’t watched that tape all the way through. There could have been porn at the end, and I’d have been none the wiser.

This was amazing. I’d seen progress in the decreasing sizes on my clothes tags, but now I had proof that I was actually getting more fit. I’d spent a year walking nowhere on the treadmill, but I was definitely getting somewhere.

But aerobics still didn’t appeal to me. I needed something to add to my routine other than walking or I might quit out of boredom. I tried Pilates the next month. It was supposed to improve my posture and flexibility and give me a cute butt. Some other weight-loss bloggers had been talking about it, so I thought I’d give it a try. I spent $20 on a DVD, bought a mat, and started miming visits to the gynecologist’s office on the living-room floor every other day for months. I looked absolutely ridiculous, rolling around on my huge ass. The instructor told me to scoop out my abdominals like I was leaning over a beach ball, which wasn’t hard to imagine since my front pouch resembled one. Pilates helped me shed any scrap of dignity I was clinging to. Once I accepted that I was going to look like an utter fool whenever I tried something new, I felt free to do basically whatever I wanted. Pilates also kicked my ass, or more accurately my abs. Two days after bending my body in positions I had never before attempted or known possible, it hurt to laugh, sneeze, or moan in pain.

I loved it.

If I were this sore, something had to be working. Some Pilates moves were cute, such as “The Seal,” which required me to clap my legs together three times and roll backward to clap them again. I threw in a couple of “arf, arfs” for fun. At first I had to do modified versions of the moves, bending my legs instead of fully extending them. I would roll only halfway backward instead of all the way to my shoulders. I had started stumbling through the routine at the end of February, but by the beginning of September I could do everything, including the teaser,
or as I liked to call it, the motherfucking teaser. If there were ever a pose of the human body that required profanity, it was this one. I started lying down with my legs aimed toward the ceiling at a forty-five degree angle and my arms stretched out above my head. Then I sat up like the letter V for victory, my ass as the fulcrum, arms extended forward. I held the pose and then lay back down. I repeated the moves six times and collapsed.

I had never felt so awesome in my life. Surely it wouldn’t be too long before I was bending like a pretzel and cramming myself into a pickle jar for my audition for the Cirque du Soleil.

Later, when I had started to enjoy my time in the kitchen mutilating yellow squash, I decided it was time I finally started lifting weights. I’d talked about lifting weights forever. I’d even followed a half-assed routine a year ago without doing much research. I’d quit after a month. I had been eating fewer calories than I was burning, but since I hadn’t been strength training, part of the weight I’d lost was muscle, not fat. My body metabolized what it decided I could spare, and if I wasn’t using my muscles, they were fair game. This was bad. I didn’t want to lose muscle mass because it burned calories even when it was just sitting around, like my cell phone drained my battery just by being turned on. If I built more muscle, my metabolism would speed up and I could eat more. That sounded great to me.

I would build muscle by lifting heavy dumbbells, which would make tiny tears in my muscle tissue. I would rest a day or two to give my muscle time to repair itself and grow bigger and stronger. I ate some protein and carbs right after my workout to give my body the materials to complete these repairs. It was a great excuse to eat three sweet-potato muffins. I would then repeat the process, slowly increasing my weights and the number of repetitions. Destroy, then rebuild. Destroy and rebuild again, like Rome.

But lifting heavy things was hard. And it hurt. And it made my weight plateau. Muscle is more dense than fat. Muscle is like a box of books and fat is a box of pillows. Which one would you rather carry up the stairs? Muscle is more compact than fat, so even though my weight was staying the same, I was getting leaner and more shapely. The scale was just too dumb to realize that. Thankfully I’d witnessed the scale weave back and forth like a drunken driver before. I didn’t enjoy the stall-out, but I wasn’t crushed by it.

I wanted a more toned, fit body, but I didn’t want to be as buff as Linda Hamilton in
Terminator 2
. I wouldn’t have to fight killer cyborgs from the future ... as far as I knew. I wasn’t going to get huge muscles because women simply don’t have enough testosterone to become as ripped as men without drugs or supplements. As long as I avoided gamma bomb blasts and kept a cool temper, I wouldn’t end up looking like the She-Hulk.

After three months of training I flexed my arms in the mirror and was astonished by the pleasing curves I saw. My shoulders were so round, my collarbones so defined, my armpits so hard to shave. Damn those pectoral muscles! I would have wondered if I’d had an arm transplant if not for the hanging underarm flab. I was going to enjoy showing off my new arms in the sleeveless dress I’d bought for my older brother’s wedding.

Who needed sleeves when you had awesome biceps?

I made a vow to keep trying new activities. I signed up for a kickboxing aerobics class offered through my county’s school system. I flailed through the kickboxing routines five seconds behind everybody else. I almost knocked out my classmate with a poorly controlled roundhouse kick, and she hadn’t even done anything to piss me off. I totally sucked, but I kept going to classes and eventually learned the difference between a hook and an upper cut. I’d never taken an aerobics
class before, but I loved kicking and punching to cheesy techno songs. My small boobs were actually an asset because I wasn’t knocked unconscious by bouncing globes when I did jumping jacks.

I was able to do all the crunches even though other people were flopping on their mats like trout on a boat deck. At the end of class we stretched on our mats. I’d been doing Pilates long enough that I could lie on my back and point my left leg toward the ceiling while the right leg lay flat on the mat at a ninety-degree angle. I noticed most of the other students had to bend their right legs to achieve the position. I smiled secretly in smug superiority. Then I turned my head to the left. The woman next to me had her right leg flat on the mat and her left leg bent straight back
behind her head
. Clearly, her muscles and ligaments had been replaced by rubber bands. Suddenly I didn’t feel so superior.

Once that class ended, I signed up for tennis lessons. I was idly considering buying some in-line skates too after observing the skaters on the trail. It might be fun, assuming I didn’t lose control, slam into the red bridge rail, and tumble ass over end into the river. After that, maybe I’d try martial arts? I’d probably watched way too much
Buffy
and
Xena
and
La Femme Nikita
on TV, but ass kicking looked like fun. By the time I was sixty maybe I’d get around to the luge.

I had been tricked. I’d started all this healthy eating and exercising only so I could get what I wanted—thin. Now I was actually enjoying it. It was like the time I’d tried a free trial of Netflix thinking I could get a free month’s worth of DVDs and then quit once I’d gotten my free rentals. Now I had hundreds of movies in my queue and would never be able to watch them as quickly as I added them. Thank goodness I’d never joined a bug-eating club. I might find myself swatting flies, dipping them in Dijon mustard sauce, and enjoying it.

Weight loss in itself was a somewhat empty reward. All the cool things that I could do because of my new fitness and health were the real
prize. The buzz of fitting into a new dress size and seeing the descending numbers on the scale was a great high, but eventually it wore off. Now I could get a runner’s high several times a week. A year after I’d first run a mile I was still ecstatic that I could run that far without being chased by a bear. I was thinking less like a dieter and more like an athlete. I certainly was starting to feel like one. I owned
two
sports bras now. I wanted to try everything. I wanted to see what this new body could do.

For most of my life I had considered my body the transportation vehicle for my brain—a head attached to a torso with arms and legs was fine, but if I had to stick my brain in a jar and scuttle around on robotic spider legs I would have managed. My internal world was the important one, not the external.

In college our teaching assistant had walked into the psychology lab one day carrying a human brain in a jar. He wasn’t a psycho killer. The brain had been donated to science, which evidently meant to us. Everyone in the small classroom pushed aside cheap plastic chairs to gather around the brain sitting on a folding table. The dull gray organ floated like a bath toy in the preservative fluid. It looked just like a movie prop. I lasted about ten seconds before I was hit with a wave of nausea and pulled back to my chair in the undertow.

Typically I was squeamish around blood and human organs, but that wasn’t the cause of my sickness. That brain had belonged to a real human being; it had stored all his memories, processed all his thoughts, enabled his entire being. And now a bunch of freshmen were gawking over it on their way to four credit hours. Everything that made him himself was now encapsulated in a piece of organic matter that could be easily squished if an underclassman got clumsy with the jar. I might have considered my mind to be the most important part of me, but as I stared at the brain, I faced the reality that it was just as fleshy and vulnerable as my skin, as breakable as my bones.

As I became more and more fit, I started to realize that my brain and my body were not separate entities that could be ripped apart. My brain required nutrients and chemicals to run properly, just as a car required gas and oil to run. When I was eating well and exercising, my mind functioned better. I could focus for longer periods and think more clearly. Ultimately I was just a collection of molecules powered by small electrical currents. If I fed myself the proper nutrients and stimulated the release of healthy chemicals via exercise, my body and my mind ran better.

I wondered why I had to come to this realization on my own when it should have been covered in health class or PE. I had thought physical education was pointless. I went to school to be educated, not to feel inferior because I couldn’t climb the rope. When would I ever need to climb a rope, anyway? When I read an article about a middle school teacher in Pensacola, Florida, who let kids out of gym class for a dollar a day, I was immediately envious that my PE teachers hadn’t been so entrepreneurial.
¹

Of course, maybe they had been and I never heard about it because I was so good at avoiding gym class. In middle school, I learned how to play flute so I could take band during gym period. In high school, I was required to take only one semester of gym, which I took during summer school so I could cram more electives into my regular schedule. I attended every day, four hours a day, for four weeks. The suffering was condensed into bite-size portions that took up one-sixth of my day. But there was also a fear that had nothing to do with my inability to serve a volleyball over the net. If I missed more than two classes, I’d have to take the whole course over again because of absenteeism. The only thing more horrible than gym class was the thought of taking gym class twice.