Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 1: What a (Fat) Girl Wants

Hi, my name is Amber, and I'm a fat girl.

Hi Amber.

And yeah, I said it..."fat." People act like that word is the n-word of body shapes. Euphemisms may make people feel better (I could be husky, plump, curvy, heavy, big, or whatever else) but as any writer will tell you, often the simplest words are the best. Those same writers (and Billy Crystal in Throw Momma From the Train) will say that you should write what you know. Well, this I know.

I've been fat for almost as long as I can remember. I wasn't one of those 70-pound kindergartners who ends up in background shots for news stories about childhood obesity, but by middle school I had started plumping up like baking bread. Coincidentally, that was around the time I discovered that Mountain Dew and Doritos were FUCKING AWESOME.

Since then, it's been a steady rise with a few brief excursions down to "not as fat" land. By the start of college, I was in the 170s. I actually lost weight my freshman year because Nico and I occasionally dragged each other down to Case Gym at 8am to zone out on a recumbent bike for a half hour before our 10am classes (Jesus Christ, just typing that reminds me how fucking awesome college was. 10am is the start of the day? Holy hell.). Given that I'm barely 5'4", I should be between 110 and 145 lbs, give or take (though I seriously doubt I'd look normal at 110lbs). Right now I'm around 193, with a BMI over 30. As the Wii Fit so cheerfully tells me every time I do the body test, "that's obese!" Optimistically speaking, I need to lose about 50 pounds. That's a lot.

That's not to say that 193 is the heaviest I've ever been, though; for a good portion of the last 12-18 months, I've been between 195 and 198. To most, the difference between 193 and 198 may not seem like much. But 193 is basically 190, and 198 is basically 200. Remember the episode of Sex & the City where they talked about their scary ages? Well aging doesn't scare me. I'm comfortable being 27, and I'm fine with the looming spectre of 30. Treating time like an enemy doesn't go well for people. But 200 pounds is my scary weight. For whatever reason, if I hit 200 pounds, the world fucking ends. So when I got on a scale after a long estrangement and saw the unforgiving digital read-out pop up 198.2lbs, something happened. The high E string broke. Twwwiiiing!

If I had started consistently exercising and eating better at that point, well, I certainly wouldn't be writing this post, would I? "But Amber," you say to your computer screen, "if you freaked out when you saw your weight and you're not functionally retarded, why didn't you just do what you needed to do and get down to a healthier weight? You know what to do and you have the means with which to do it, so what gives?"

That's the question, dear friends. For anyone who's never been a fat kid, it probably doesn't make sense. This must be especially perplexing for you left-brain people out there. And trust me, I know. Objectively, anyone who is medically capable of losing weight and is able to exercise should be able to trim down. This is especially true if the person has the means to afford fresh food, the desire to be skinnier, and an unparalleled passion for raw cucumber. Why the hell wouldn't this person already be at a healthy weight, much less be actively remaining fat?

Remember what I said before about the Mountain Dew and Doritos? Well, that goes for a lot of other things too. The things that make you fat are FUCKING AWESOME. Sitting on the couch all day is awesome. Chinese food is awesome. Those little Dove squares with the "indulgent"-type sayings printed on the inside of the wrapper are awesome. I had one after lunch today. It was fucking delicious. It is genuinely difficult for me not to go get another one (or 8) right now, knowing that they are freely available in the kitchen. I'm not hungry, I just want one.

And this is the real crux of the problem, at least for me. All the positive visualization, Excel spreadsheets, and determination in the world don't make me not want chocolate. Or soda. Or chicken fingers, god I fucking love chicken fingers. I actually have a date to go eat chicken fingers tomorrow. At like 3 in the afternoon. I don't even know what meal that is. But I'm already pretty excited.

I digress. The point is, I still want all the bad food and the bad habits. I enjoy them, on a very basic and fundamental level. Fried foods = happiness. Sedentary lifestyle = happiness. Chocolate = happiness. Like many children in the 80s, I was rewarded for accomplishments with a trip to McDonalds. The kids' meals are appropriately named. Those meals did genuinely make me happy. But, like some children of the 80s, I continued to equate food with happiness, and not often the healthiest food either. Sure, veggies make me happy too, but they're not exactly filling or readily available on the go (that's a whole 'nother topic for a whole 'nother day).

So now that I've got 20+ years of emotional dependence on food under my belt (har har), I find it a bit difficult to decide to stop eating fried foods, for example. I can decide to keep less of it in the house, which does work in some short term situations, but I'm a grown-ass woman now. I can just go to the store. And shit, the walk back from the CVS is uphill, so I can even justify whatever shitty candy I purchase there with the 50 calories I burn on the walk to and fro'.

In order to be healthier and lose any substantial amount of weight in the long term, I have to want to do the things that I often don't want to do, and I have to not want to do the things I so completely DO want to do. I know, a lot of auxiliary verbs, not the clearest sentence. But I think you get my point. I have to invert all the current ratios of food and activity. Ordering delivery or going out to eat three times a week has to become a once-a-week-or-less thing. Making plain chicken breasts in a skillet has to become a more-than-once-a-week thing. The amounts of time that I spend on the couch versus on my feet need to be reversed. And, in a very basic sense, I don't wanna.

That isn't to say that I can't, or even that I am not currently trying to do that. I have exercised more in the last two weeks than I did in the 6 months preceding that period. Of course, that sudden increase in activity also practically paralyzed me, so then I had to go back to the couch to rest up, so that back-fired a little bit. I have DVDs of Turbo Jam, 10-Minute Solutions: Pilates, 10-Minute Solutions: Blast Off the Belly Fat, and Jillian Michaels - 30 Day Shred. I have Wii Fit, Wii Fit Plus, and even a Zumba Fitness game for the Wii (I've never done Zumba before and this game is fucking impossible to play if you can't already do the moves). I have some horrible contraption called 3D Abs, and another called Leg Magic. I have a twist board that I think I've used once. To top it all off, I have a $600 elliptical machine. I'm one week into a month membership at The Ring Boxing Club (hence the fucked up muscles and rest time) and in August, I have 5 90-minute Zumba classes with Jackie, both of which I got through Groupon. Considering the arsenal of machines, workouts, and classes at my immediate disposal, I should be basically jacked, or at least "beach-ready," right? Yeah, right.

I don't think I can possibly explain coherently why I'm still fat. Except maybe to say that I still really like doing and eating all the things that made me fat in the first place. I'm in love with the idea of being skinnier, healthier, and all-around happier. It does motivate me to make some smarter choices. It's motivating me to go into school tomorrow to help move furniture around and do other physical labor that I'm not being paid to do; it may seem altruistic on the surface, but really it's just a workout that has some real purpose. I think maybe if my job were to dig ditches or help people move then I'd be in much better shape because the exercise would be built in and have an actual goal associated with it. One of the most jacked Ninja Warrior All-Stars delivered water to office buildings; if I could even lift a single Poland Spring jug, that'd be something, and this guy just skips up multiple flights of stairs with the things.

But for now, my exercise is fragmented, unconnected, and unincorporated into my reality matrix. Getting on the elliptical for a half hour might give me a sense of accomplishment and boost my energy for the day, but it's completely separate from everything else that day. It need not come before or after anything else, no one else cares whether I do it or not, and there's no immediate consequence if I don't bother. During the school year, it's much much harder. Do I really want to wake up at 5:30am to work out before I have to go try to shove knowledge into 50 unwilling brains? I'm tired just writing that. Do I really want to come home, drop my bags at the door, and change into work-out clothes so I can use my last remaining minutes of energy to run in place (or kickbox in place or whatever else)? I even take multivitamins with caffeine in them to help get my ass in gear, but I don't think anyone told my body that the caffeine was for exercise and not obsessive internet gaming.

The fact that I find it so difficult to get into good habits over the summer is pretty depressing. My whole idea was that I would have the summer, about 9 weeks in all, to get going with this whole exercise-and-better-eating thing (I don't like to use the word "diet" because that implies a finite starvation plan), so that by the time September rolled around I would just have to make some adjustments and keep it going. The fact that my time would be limited would be less of an issue because the workouts would be integrated into my lifestyle. I'd already have momentum and I'd be used to the healthier habits, so it wouldn't seem like such an impossible chore to exercise after work or to eat leftover chicken and rice for lunch. IT WAS A GOOD PLAN, GODDAMMIT.

Of course, I am just now entering my 20th day of vacation. It's still the first chunk of summer, so using the past tense might be jumping the gun a wee bit. But it's hard not to get dismayed. In the past, I've been used to a quick loss of 5 or even 10 pounds because of all the water weight I'm carrying around in case I get lost in the desert, I guess. But according to that damned Wii Fit, I'm down about a pound in the last 3 weeks. I know that there are so many factors in play and that my body could be healthier without being lighter, but it's disconcerting. Healthy weight loss is like 2 pounds a week, and I'm not even close. Part of it, I'm sure, is that I'm still sitting on my ass too much and much of my better-eating work is undone by all of the dining out we've been doing recently. Everyone is available and wants to hang out, and for whatever reason, this always means going out to eat. I guess I should be happy in one sense, since we're all in such comfortable financial places that we can afford dinner out more than weekly, but it's really not helping me. Trust me, it's delicious, but at like 1500 calories per meal, I should be fasting for a day after that shit.

I feel like I'm at a crossroads, and it's one I've been at before. I can choose to keep doing what I've always done, maintain these unhealthy habits, but also be tortured by the desire for a thinner body and a healthier life. I know there are a lot of people out there who are happy-fat; these people don't care how many calories are in a milkshake because it tastes good and they are going to have one. With the incredible depth and breadth of knowledge the internet has given me, I can no longer be blissfully ignorant; happy-fat is out for me. My other choice is to actually try, all the time and really hard, to do what I know I should do. There are no good reasons not to do the latter, but I can think of lots and lots of weak, shitty reasons not to. It's hard. I don't have time. I'm too tired. I don't wanna.

Perhaps my underlying fear is that I really can't do it. That all the effort in the world won't amount to jack shit, and I'm going to be fat no matter what I do. I have enough biology and chemistry working against me where I worry that it's a real possibility. Perhaps even scarier is the idea that I could actually get to a healthy weight and be in a much better place, but that the work required to get and stay there is more than I am actually willing to do. I'm not in the mindset right now where I would literally do anything to be thinner. It should be clear by now that I wouldn't do anything...I didn't put down that Dove chocolate after lunch, did I? I didn't get my ass on the elliptical today, even though my muscles are finally starting to calm the fuck down, did I? Maybe instead of asking myself Can I? I should be asking myself Will I?

That's a good fucking question.