I knew the jingle for Jenny Craig by the time I was seven years old. It wasn’t because their commercials were aired on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon; it was because older boys regularly sang it at me. One in particular called me Saddle Bags. I had no idea what an actual saddle bag was for years. It threw me when I found out it was a real term for a real thing. The song Pretty Woman had a similar gut-punch effect on me: I was used to the version a third boy would sing at me. His rendition was decidedly not a love song.
This all happened before I entered middle school.
This is hard for me to write about—not just because the memories are painful. I don’t want this to be a maudlin piece where everyone pities me. I’m not writing this to garner sympathy. I know other people have gone through things just as bad, and some have endured worse. I’m writing this because these experiences make up a large part of who I am. If I’m going to move on from it, I have to look it in the face first.
When I try to remember a time during my childhood when I felt good about my body, I can’t. Despite my mother’s best efforts to keep the evil influence of Barbie far away from me, the plastic dolls of the world weren’t the only things telling me I looked wrong. When I took dance class, I couldn’t help comparing myself to the other little girls. I watched television like any other kid, and I never saw any girls my size as the protagonists. I hated sports because I hated running. The days in gym class when we were instructed to run a mile were a personal hell. Middle and high school didn’t get much better. I could count my friends on one hand and have a few fingers to spare. I stayed in dance class but avoided looking directly at my reflection in the wall of mirrors at the dance studio. I woke at five each morning to straighten my hair and I tried my hardest to wear cute clothes but I still couldn’t make myself feel pretty.
The obvious solution would have been to go on a diet then. I don’t fully understand why I didn’t, to be honest. Maybe it was a fear of failure. Maybe my self-esteem had been beaten down so much that I’d given up on feeling happy about myself. Maybe I just kept hoping, like braces, the weight would be lifted away someday. Or maybe I just liked Taco Bell too much to give it up.
College gave me one thing, at least: A chance to leave the bullied girl behind and start fresh at a school where no one knew me yet—at least, that was my theory. It wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped to repair my self-esteem. I approached my freshman year in fear. I assumed they wouldn’t like me. I had the history to back it up. Luckily, by sophomore year I fell into a rhythm with friends that quickly felt like family. And on the sartorial side, I found Torrid: a plus-size clothing company that actually made clothes a college kid would wear. The happiness wasn’t a continuous thing, it never is, but it was far more present in college than in high school and before. I had a crowd. We had fun, we drank, we drove thirty minutes in each direction to get 99 cent wings on Thursday nights. We had pizza at ridiculous hours of the night. I graduated in worse physical shape than I entered in, but I was happy. It didn’t matter as much.
When I came back home after graduation, I was no longer walking every day to class or to my friends’ dorms or to bars. Soon the cute plaid skirts I’d bought during my college years no longer fit. I was struggling to find a job, and then found one that kept me at a desk all day and made me miserable. I missed my friends, most of whom were scattered all along the East Coast, too far for me to wander over and spend some time. I took my comfort in food, then regretted it. I joined a gym, went sporadically, then gave up. I found a job I liked at a bookstore, but being on my feet all day long was a shock to the system. On many nights I’d want to scream from the pain my feet were in. I didn’t want to admit how badly out of shape I was. I had reached an uneasy acceptance: I was the Fat Girl. I wore plus size clothing and I sometimes had aches and pains and that was just my life.
Then came the doctor’s visit that I had always feared in the back of my mind: I was at a real risk for diabetes. My doctor suggested weight loss surgery and I went for a consultation. There they trotted out the methods they could use. This thing that looks like a Star Trek ray gun is how we put the staples in, this plastic ring will close off part of your stomach, there could be complications, this too could fail. I was terrified by the prospect of surgery, especially if it could all be for nothing. The last part of the consultation was the presentation of paperwork to be filled out. Among them was a list of previous attempts at losing weight. The simple truth stared me in the face: I had never actually put forth a genuine, concerted effort to lose weight. It was always a half-hearted plan: I’ll eat more salads and less ice cream and a movie montage of weight loss will magically occur. I felt stupid that at twenty-six I had somehow not grasped the concept that you need to put in work to get results. Or at least I knew it, and was too lazy to apply it. I had finally come to the fork in my road. You are not too lazy. You need to do this. There is no other way around it.
My best friend got married on May ninth of 2015. We celebrated and drank and ate and when the photographs came in, I swore it would be the last time I felt ashamed of my picture. A week later I joined Weight Watchers. I swallowed down the fear of stepping on the scale. I paged through the points guide, gauging how much I’d have to change my diet. I sat through my first Weight Watchers meeting, still wondering if I’d be able to see this through. The leader was a charismatic woman who boasted about turning “sizzling sixty” and had a definite hippie vibe. I was the youngest woman in the group. I don’t remember what our topic was that week, but I left feeling hopeful. I was ready to track what I ate with the app, which could scan barcodes and call up the point values of foods in seconds. I bought a Fitbit tracker in teal to rack up my activity points. And I took to the beach.
When I was a kid, my dad would bring me to Jones Beach and we’d walk the boardwalk, past the old buildings first erected in the 1930s, when it was a full-on recreational resort. Now, I don’t even know if the buildings are still used. The boardwalk itself is kitted with mile-marker signs so you know how far you’ve gone (and how far you have to walk back). I started early in the morning in order to beat the regular beach crowd. I put on my headphones, queued up a long podcast, and walked. I did two miles that first day, and on my days off from work, I did two miles each time for that first week. I diligently tracked my food, coming in under my daily allotted points each time. When I returned to Weight Watchers the next week, I had lost 2.6 pounds. The shocking part is I don’t remember it feeling difficult.
In my first four weeks, I noticed myself losing less each time, until I gained four-tenths of a pound on the fifth week. That was the week I decided it wasn’t enough to just do my walks on my days off work, and I started to make a point of getting on that boardwalk every day. The sixth week, I lost four pounds and hit my 5% weight loss target. And I continued that way, pushing myself every time I wasn’t happy on the scale. By August I had lost 25 pounds. That was when I finally felt like I was changing. An old favorite plaid skirt fit me again. So did some shorts that I’d hung onto despite them being uncomfortably tight. It was a strange feeling, succeeding at losing weight. I fought off the urge to beat myself up for not doing it years ago. I was doing it now, and that could be enough. A former coworker came to the store right around that time and congratulated me about fitting in the skirt again. “You’ve always been beautiful, though,” she told me. I thanked her, but at the same time I wanted to correct her. It wasn’t about beauty—at least, not completely.
In October Oprah invested in Weight Watchers. Shortly after the announcement, I found an article online where the reporter cast doubts on the system. It depends on repeat customers. It doesn’t work in the long run. It made me angry. At that point I was inching towards the fifty pound mark. How could this reporter say Weight Watchers didn’t work? Of course, I could see where he was coming from. My Weight Watchers meeting was full of women on their second and third go-around. Diets aren’t infallible because people aren’t infallible. We can all slide back into bad habits. I wasn’t here for a second go-around, though. I had come too far to watch it all slide away. I was not going to be one of those repeat customers.
I used this determination to fight off as much temptation as possible. I had sworn off bagels the day I joined Weight Watchers. As anyone who lives in New York could tell you, this was painful to do. If I lived in any other state in the country, I wouldn’t bat an eye at losing bagels. Here, I literally live a block away from a bagel place. If I walk a few more blocks in the other direction, I’ll hit a second one. If the bagel isn’t already the official state food, it should be. If I think about the length of time since I’ve eaten one, I actually feel homesick. They’re ten points each. Even with my New York upbringing, I can’t rationalize it. Margaritas similarly are more points than they’re worth. Seventeen points, to be exact. If I ever have another margarita, it had better be the single best margarita ever mixed by man. This is a drastic change from how I thought about food before. If it tasted good, I was going to eat it. And drink it. Now, I think more about how I spend my points. When I went to the Cheesecake Factory for my cousin’s birthday, I ordered off the light menu. I had a forkful of my dad’s caramel cheesecake, and when he asked if I wanted more, my response was a definitive, “Nope.” That strong Nope came back when I was offered a cinnamon-and-brown-sugar-dream cromuffin after a long overnight shift at the store. But I’d already indulged in a big slice of pizza and garlic knots. I’d had my treats. I wasn’t hungry. Nope.
It’s a juggling act, though, to not be so stringent that I feel deprived. Not all temptations are resistable. I’ve given in to the siren song of the Frappucino more than once since joining Weight Watchers. I sipped happily at first, then guiltily. I think the trick is remembering that one indulgence won’t immediately put back all the weight I lost. If I have one Chipotle burrito bowl once in a blue moon, it won’t tank my success. As long as I keep it in proportion, I’ll be fine.
Losing weight came with an interesting side effect. I had to mourn my pretty plus-size skirts. The beloved plaid skirt I’d finally fit into again in August was too loose to stay up by January. I’m still hanging onto dresses I bought last year, even though they hang off me like a sack. I’ve read that it’s important to give up your “fat clothes” so you don’t have a backup plan for re-gaining, but what if they’re just really cute? I managed to dress pretty well back then. It’s a strange thing to contend with: I don’t miss the weight, but I miss what I wore when I had it. On the other hand, finding new pieces of clothing has its charms. When I heard Aeropostale was going out of business, I went and bought my new favorite teal polo and a stretchy black skirt. I felt like I was back in high school.
On May tenth of this year, I walked into my Weight Watchers meeting in my new Little Mermaid dress purchased at Hot Topic, not exactly known for its larger sizes. I felt extremely hopeful. If my scale at home could be believed—and sometimes it was doubtful—it was a big day. I got on the scale, and there it was: I had hit 101.6 pounds lost. I was just a week shy of my first Weight Watchers anniversary. There were hugs, they made me do a little speech, I was handed a little 100-pound charm to hang off my Weight Watchers key ring. It was a big deal. On the way home from hanging out with a friend later on, the song “Almost There” from the film The Princess and the Frog came up on my Disney Pandora station. And as embarrassing as it is to say, I got teary. I was almost there. There were only twenty more pounds to go to the goal weight I’d named the year before, forty if I kept going to the weight recommended by the BMI chart. I had done what I had thought was impossible.
You’d think that reaching these goals would affect my self-esteem in a really positive way. And most days I do feel really proud of myself. But I’ve spent too many years seeing my own flaws. It’s one habit I can’t break. My stomach still pooches out when I sit. My arms are a disaster. I lost a hundred pounds and I still can’t get the guy. In those moments I still feel like the girl who was called Saddle Bags.
In those moments I pick up my phone, open up the Weight Watchers app and scroll through the weight table that shows my progress. I look at photos of myself then and photos of myself now. I reach for my newest pair of shorts—a size twelve when they used to be a size twenty-four. I remind myself that I’ve come too far to be defeated by my own low self-esteem. And someday I won’t have to rely on the numbers on the scale or the reflection in the mirror to feel like I’m okay.
I’m almost there.
For The Stories 