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  I couldn’t agree with her more. God always finds a way.

  MY BEST ADVICE

  Set Small, Achievable Goals, and When You Reach Them, Celebrate!

  It may seem like a small accomplishment to you, but the first time I was able to walk into church, sit down and cross my legs, I thought I might have to stand right back up and do a happy dance. Prior to my The Biggest Loser experience, I was barely able to cross my ankles while seated, let alone try to cross my legs.

  Similarly, the first time that my son Noah was able to sit on my lap without being pushed off by the enormous roll of fat surrounding my midsection, grateful tears sprang instantly to my eyes.

  Then there was the time I walked into a clothing store and was approached by a saleslady who was anxious to help me find a new outfit. She eyed my frame so that she’d know which clothes to pull and before spinning around to retrieve them said, “Hmm … looks like you’re a size six.” I could have kissed her, I was so elated. “Say that again,” I said with a smile. But sadly, she’d already walked off.

  When you’re working toward a monumental goal, progress can seem hard to come by. No matter how hard you try and how faithful you are to your exercise and diet routine, you can’t seem to get to the crossed-legs, child-on-lap, surreal-size-six stage. I get that. I lived that for many, many months. And what I noticed on those will-I-ever-be-thinner-than-this? days was that the only way I could keep my sanity was to set small, achievable goals for myself—and then to celebrate like crazy once I reached them.

  Those smaller goals were all over the map in terms of importance, but as I look back now I see that each one played a role in my overall success.

  When I had already met my calorie limit for the day and turned down a piece of chocolate cake, that was a real goal achieved.

  When I finally didn’t have to wear plus-size clothes, that was a real goal achieved.

  When I saw an old friend and didn’t duck out of sight, that was a real goal achieved.

  When I weighed in lighter than my wedding-night weight, that was a real goal achieved.

  When I could actually do a cartwheel, that was a real goal achieved.

  And with each goal I achieved, I had fresh reason to celebrate.

  Part of my celebration strategy from the start was to make sure my rewards did not revolve around food. Although the previous Julie would scoff at these words, there is much more to life than food. It’s even possible to socialize with friends without the event being consumed by food. Who would have thought?

  My advice if you’re stuck in a progress-less state is to try rewarding your small achievements with other senses than taste. Call a friend and share your success. Do your next workout in freshly cut grass—it’s the scent of celebration you won’t soon forget. Write your spouse or another family member a note of thanks for supporting you along the way. Look at yourself in the mirror and simply experience self-appreciation for once. Now that’s a way to celebrate!

  Right now my “small, achievable goal” is to complete “The River Run” next month, a race that winds through the heart of Jacksonville, Florida—complete with challenging hills and long, flat stretches alike. It’s the largest 15K in the United States, and trust me, seeing my feet cross that finish line will be all the reward that I need. For thirty-five years I have watched tens of thousands of people finish that race, never once thinking I could ever keep up with them. Live bands perform at ten different locations along the race course, and I have a feeling I’ll be singing my heart out every long-awaited step of the way.

  Break up your goal into small goals, and reward yourself as you greet each success. Before you know it you’ll be smooching your sales staff and lacing up your running shoes too.

  Part Three

  At Home in My Own Skin:

  Returning to the Old Life

  I’d Somehow Never Lived

  CHAPTER 7

  Eight Pounds I’m Glad I Gained

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN a fan of crime fiction, and in my view there’s none better than Patricia Cornwell’s book From Potter’s Field. It’s part of the series that stars Detective Kay Scarpetta, a former medical examiner who retired and then became a private forensic consultant who was still utterly consumed by her work … and Italian cooking, which is why I always get hungry when I read about her life. Anyway, what’s so amazing about Cornwell’s writing is that just when she has you totally enthralled in one part of the plot, the chapter ends, a new one begins and that new one is about a completely different subject. “Wait,” you think as you flip the page, “weren’t we just in Central Park, staring at the poor girl who was killed by a mysterious murderer and left in the freezing cold wearing nothing but a trench coat and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap? And now it’s Christmas Day and we’re sitting in a hotel lobby? What did I miss?”

  I can’t remember exactly when I picked up my first Patricia Cornwell book, but it was probably when I worked late-night shifts at CSX Transportation years ago. I handled paperwork for train orders coming out of various big cities. I loved that job! I loved the people, the setting and the fact that I got to read good crime-fiction when things were slow.

  The story lines always wind up being related in the end, but all along the way you’re desperate to understand how. Interestingly, I would discover after my The Biggest Loser experience that I only loved being kept in the dark and guessing at every turn when those things were happening to a fictional protagonist instead of happening to me.

  Throughout my entire reality TV stint, God was orchestrating such a magnificent series of captivating twists and turns that now as I look back on those days my breath is all but taken away. What’s more, the masterly story lines he was writing would build to a climax that was far more exciting than Scarpetta solving a crime. They would lead to a little boy named Jaxon, Mike’s and my adorable, adopted son.

  INFERTILE MONTHS, UGLY MONTHS

  Part of why I auditioned for The Biggest Loser in the first place is because I was at my wit’s end. I knew that I had a medical condition—polycystic ovary syndrome—and I knew that obesity only exacerbated the problem. If I could get on a show like The Biggest Loser, then I might be able to lose weight once and for all. And if I could lose weight, then maybe I would be able to overcome my medical condition, get pregnant again, deliver a brand-new baby and live happily ever after. That was my plan—bing, bang, boom. Little did I know that God had a very different plan in mind.

  Mike and I had loved Noah’s infancy and early childhood so much that we decided we’d wait until he was three years old before trying with any intention to conceive again. We wanted to be just as present and enthralled with our second child as we’d had the luxury of being with Noah. What we didn’t know at the time, of course, was that pregnancy the second time around just wasn’t meant to be.

  Those infertile months were ugly months. Around the time that my period was supposed to start, I would wait on pins and needles, wondering if this was the month we’d conceived. I would drop fifty bucks on pregnancy-detection sticks, and another fifty on ovulation kits once I realized that our efforts, yet again, had been in vain. The good stuff of intimacy quickly was replaced with clinical calculations of temperatures and fluids and calendar counts, and before long my husband and I both were sad and spent and heartsick to our cores.

  In the same way that you never ask a woman her age or her weight, never, ever ask her when she’s going to have another child, or a first child, for that matter. Who knows what raw nerves you might hit.

  Just a little friendly advice, free of charge from me to you.

  As each menstrual cycle showed up, so did Mike’s overly emotional and spiritually exhausted wife. The everyday bits and pieces of life just did me in. We’d make a quick trip to the mall, for instance, and as soon as I’d catch sight of an apathetic teenager with a disheveled toddler hanging off her hip, I’d dissolve into tears. “Seriously, God? I’ve actually been trying to get pregnant, and yet she’s the one with a child? W
hy would you choose her over me?” I had love to offer, care to extend and a heart that truly desired another child. Would the Giver of that desire really refuse to fulfill it?

  It’s interesting to me now that I would be ridiculously grateful for one of those “unplanned pregnancies” in just a few short months’ time.

  After a string of babyless months, Mike and I agreed to begin fertility treatments. If you ever need a totally demoralizing experience, just pay a visit to your local infertility clinic. The staff is nice enough, but as you stare at the hopelessly blank faces of the people sitting in the waiting room, you get the distinct sense that both you and they must have done something terribly wrong. Women and men are supposed to be able to conceive babies, and they both feel a little less human when they cannot.

  In her memoir, Inconceivable, author Julia Indichova describes what it was like to be told by her doctor that although she had delivered a perfectly healthy daughter years prior, she could no longer become pregnant. (Could I ever relate.) It would have been fine for Indichova, except for the fact that she and her husband Ed so deeply wanted to be pregnant again. She was in and out of fertility clinics for months on end, desperate to crack the code on conceiving another child, and the end result of all those visits was, in her words, a certain “narrowing” of herself.

  “I feel a narrowness in my chest,” Indichova writes, “a constriction that keeps me from taking a deep breath. I think of the impersonal narrow corridors, leading to examining rooms. I think of narrow lovemaking zeroed in on the one thing that’s unattainable. I realize how afraid I am to open up to the sadness, afraid to let Ed see … I must keep moving. I can’t just sit around agonizing over my options while my childbearing days gallop away from me. I must fight against all the grave faces that say it’s useless—all these appointments, all this flapping of my wings.”13

  I could have written those very same words because for me, the fight was equally tough. But for all the agony infertility elicits from women, it levels an equal blow to men. Men, for example, were not made to point semen into a plastic cup with a whole waiting-room’s worth of people hovering outside. Their egos aren’t meant to bear the walk of shame from that waiting room out the office door, down the hall and to the parking lot, where the car is waiting that will encase what is always a painfully silent drive home.

  Time and again Mike and I would cradle nothing more than a God-given desire, fearing only a worst-case scenario would be born. There were no answers to our questions about whether the treatments would work. There were no answers to Noah’s questions about why the sibling he so diligently prayed for just wasn’t showing up. There was nothing but more and more questions. And a lot of waiting around.

  WHEN BABIES AND FAITH GET FORMED

  Unbeknownst to me, in the same month that I discovered I’d been cast on Season 4 of the show, a single mom in Jacksonville discovered that she was pregnant. It would be many months later that she and I would cross paths and string together the timeline of our mutual journey. But now with those pieces intact, I see God’s perfect hand of provision at work.

  In those early days after being cast, I remember crying out to God. “Please heal my body!” I’d plead. “Please help me finish what I’ve started so that Mike and I can conceive.” Who could have known that at the very same time another woman who was roughly my age was crying out to God too.

  “You hear about these circumstances happening to other women,” she would later write, “but as a thirty-two-year-old single woman, this was new territory for me.”14 Like so many women who find themselves single, pregnant and deathly afraid, she immediately sought out easy answers. “I knew I needed to make a decision,” she says; “I just didn’t know what decision to make.”15

  As God worked in her mind and body, he was working in my mind and body too. Hour by hour, day by day, I noticed that as I made drastic changes to my diet and forced my arms, my legs and my abdomen to endure endless hours of exercise, the symptoms of my condition disappeared. No longer was I losing my hair. No longer was my body refusing to lose weight. I was becoming stronger, both physically and mentally, and with strength came the rising of my hope—hope that with healing would come pregnancy and with pregnancy would come the contentment so desperately sought.

  Admittedly, my body was still covered in fat, but sources other than my mirror were telling me that progress was being made.

  Every week on the show, contestants had to visit The Biggest Loser doctor so that he could run a new body-composition scan to determine body-fat percentage, bone strength and muscle mass. It’s called the iDEXA and is something like a CT-scan for your entire body. All I know is that the chart it produces is really pretty. There are bright, vibrant colors like yellow and blue, but the ratio of my colors initially gave the doctor reason for concern.

  Here’s how it breaks down: When you see yellow on the scan, that means there’s fat. When you see blue, there’s muscle. And when you see white, you know that’s a bone. At the beginning of my time on campus, my iDEXA image was a big blob of yellow with a teeny-tiny piece of white in the middle—all fat with a little bone thrown in for good measure.

  The doctor looked at me and said, “Julie, you have no blue. You’re nothing but bone and fat.” As you’d guess, it wasn’t a very enjoyable conversation from that point forward.

  Halfway through the show I was lying on the examination table during one of my weekly appointments and happened to glance over when my iDEXA image popped onto the screen. For the first time I actually saw blue. “Look!” I cheered. “I have muscles!”

  As my body began to find strength and healing, I gained confidence that anything really was possible with God. During those days when my faith was being formed that he really could change something as seemingly fixed as my decades-old body composition, he was forming another miracle too.

  For many months, Jaxon’s biological mother had all but denied the fact that she was carrying a baby, simply because she didn’t know what to do. “I hid my pregnancy and contemplated the issue for months,” she admits, “not knowing how my family would react to the situation. … Finally, after many sleepless nights, I made my decision to place my child for adoption.”16

  As she tells it, there was an ad in a local circular for a Christian adoption service called “Angelic Adoptions” that a friend of hers found and forwarded on to her. Despite her internal confusion, she couldn’t help but be drawn to the name. Several hours of deliberation later, on a cool, crisp December day, she decided to make a call.

  THE REAL REWARD FOR MY HARD WORK

  On Thursday, December 13, 2007, I flew from Florida to California, eagerly anticipating The Biggest Loser Season 4 finale. As I boarded that jet, I remember feeling stronger and more slender than I’d ever felt before. Of course, that feeling had come at a fairly steep price. I don’t know about you, but when a quarter-million dollars is on the line, a girl can sink to some pretty special lows. I had spent the previous week juicing and running my way to a size four, determined to take home the prize, having no clue that the real prize would not be coming to me in currency.

  Once I arrived in LA, I was ushered to a secluded room in a hotel, where I was allowed to put down my things and freshen up before heading off to be fitted for my finale outfit, spray-tanned and weighed-in. I wasn’t allowed to see my trainer, my castmates or the other members of the final four, which was especially devastating to someone like me, who wilts without hourly human interaction.

  Things got so insane on the exercise front that just before my finale I was running a grueling fourteen miles a day. I broke it up into AM and PM chunks, but trust me, it was still a lot!

  I went to my stage-rehearsal, which I had to endure all by myself, with no host, no audience and no other contestants around. I practiced breaking through the paper, I practiced walking in my impossibly high heels, and I practiced smiling the victor’s smile. Had I really made it this far? It was hard to contain the sense of satisfaction that was welling up ins
ide.

  The day of the finale dawned, and by the time I was escorted from my hotel room to my dressing room in the studio, I was ready to burst with excitement and pride. All of my sweat. All of my hard work. It was all about to be paid off, in the form of some cold, hard cash and the “first female Biggest Loser” title. How cool would that be!

  Production assistants knocked on my door to usher me backstage, where the final four were positioned for their grand entrance. They held up sheets and formed giant cotton dividers around us so that we couldn’t see each other as we shuffle-stepped our way in the dark. My three teammates—Hollie, Isabeau and Bill—and I giggled and chatted from inside our sheets like mischievous school children. Surely they shared my sentiment: I couldn’t wait to see what they looked like.

  As we made our way from the back hall to the rear of the stage, I could hear the crowd cheering and Top 40 music blaring through the speakers. Through the cracks of the stage set I could see the audience dancing and singing during what was obviously a commercial break before our big debut.

  I caught sight of Bob and Jillian coming back stage from the other side and watched them like a hawk until Bob finally sensed my stare and looked over. It was the first time he had seen me since I had been on campus, and as he took in the version of me that was forty pounds lighter than he remembered, his jaw dropped to his chest. I laughed out loud from across the stage and motioned for him to get Jillian’s attention. Without breaking his gaze he elbowed his fellow trainer. I could read his lips as he said, “Jill! Look at Julie!” Jillian’s head swiveled my way, and as her eyes fell on my figure, I posed and laughed some more. “You like?” I joked.