Fat Chance Page 17

  Frustrated, Focker turns around and scans the utterly vacant gate area, finding only a custodian with a vacuum cleaner a hundred feet away who’s mowing long rows into the muted gray carpet. He turns back around and gawks at the airline representative with a look that says, “Surely you’re kidding.”

  “Please step aside, Sir,” she says again, pasted-on smile still firmly in place.

  And so Greg Focker reaches for his suitcase, takes four steps backward and waits while the empty room stays empty and not a single soul boards the plane.

  Five seconds later, the gate agent picks up the intercom phone, tilts her perky head back and forth in cadence with her words and says to her audience of one, “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for waiting. We are now boarding all rows. All rows, you may board now.”

  A totally dispirited Focker picks up his bag, takes four steps forward and hands over his ticket once again.

  Back in Jacksonville, I was having a surreal airport experience of my own. “Then when do you think I can actually get out of here?” I asked with as much grace as I could muster.

  “Well,” said Ms. Agent, while still staring at her screen, “there’s one at ten-fourteen. Oh, but whoops, it would be illegal to book you on that one because you wouldn’t have enough time to make your connection in Atlanta …”

  “Listen, lady, have you seen my biceps? If you don’t start coming up with some viable options for getting me out of here, on a plane and to the state of Louisiana THIS afternoon, believe me, things are going to get ugly.”

  Actually, I didn’t say that. I’m pretty sure I just stared at her, dumbfounded and deflated and ready to call it quits.

  THREE MYTHS I BOUGHT

  Somewhere along the way I picked up the assumption that after my stint on The Biggest Loser, I’d exist in a permanent state of euphoria, kind of like Maria twirling down the flower-dotted Austrian mountainside in The Sound of Music—thin, carefree and with a lovely song on my lips. I’d waltz my way through daily life, inspiring others to lose weight just as I had and I’d sleep restfully each night, content with the course of my life.

  Travel hassles didn’t exactly fit the picture of what I thought life would look like.

  But it’s been this way ever since I returned home from the show. Daily life still proves to be a struggle. Inspiring others to lose weight sometimes requires eating three meals in a row in stuffy airports and sleeping on starchy budget-hotel sheets. And restfulness doesn’t really come by way of starch.

  This is the problem with buying into myths—they never prove themselves true. As I look at my life today, I see three clear myths I swallowed—hook, line and sinker. The first was that, despite the fact that physical, mental and spiritual transformation had been ridiculously difficult from day one, after I was done with the show, surely things would get easier.

  Yeah, right.

  MYTH #1: IT WILL GET EASIER

  Making my reentry into home-life was uncomfortable and complex and weird. Clearly, this was still my home: I recognized the furniture, the appliances and the pictures on the wall. But I had changed so much that I felt like a stranger in my own skin, not to mention in my house. Sure, there were some perks. I had gotten used to sleeping in a twin bed in an un-air-conditioned dorm room, but now I found myself in a cushy king-size bed … and with a man by my side. What’s more, I didn’t have to wait in line to take a shower. I could use the telephone whenever my little heart desired. And there weren’t cameras rolling, waiting to record my every move.

  When I came home, my house smelled like someone else’s house. Every house has its own smell, right? Somehow our “smell” had changed. Moreover, because I hadn’t unpacked yet, the bathroom counter boasted none of my things; drawings of Noah’s that I’d never before seen were stuck to the refrigerator door; and life as I’d known it had obviously moved on.

  But the downs seemed to outweigh the ups.

  On The Biggest Loser campus the only thing I had to focus on was working out—frequently, passionately and with as few tears shed as possible. Now I was back home, where my list of responsibilities was long. Given the new skills and perspectives I had learned the past many months, I had no idea how to prioritize all those to-dos.

  In addition to reacclimating to the daily routines of life, there was a relational chasm that had to be bridged.

  Noah and Mike had become so close while I was gone that interacting with them upon my return felt odd. The women in my life—my mother, my mother-in-law, my sister, my grandmother—served as Noah’s surrogate moms while I was away, but Mike was the one who bore the most significant burden. And God blessed his efforts in unique ways. Mike would tell you that my being gone for months on end was the best thing that could have happened to Noah’s and his relationship, and in my view, he would be right.

  Before I left for the show, Noah was a momma’s boy through and through, mostly due to the fact that I lived for the child. As an obese person it was far easier to shift the focus to my son than to risk drawing attention to myself: Noah was the air that I breathed, and he knew it. How grateful I am that The Biggest Loser interrupted a pattern that was destined for destruction. A boy needs his dad, and I unwittingly was robbing Noah of that relationship by trying to be all things to him, all the time.

  When I returned, he and Mike were both still crazy about me, and I about them, but it didn’t alter the fact that I was like a junior-high kid who switched schools and then came back two years later to discover that her best friend found a new best friend while she was gone. It was the same husband, the same son and the same setting, but somehow everything now was different. There were shared experiences that I hadn’t known, inside jokes that I didn’t get and a continuation of the life I’d left that I no longer wanted to live.

  That last realization hit me most profoundly when I opened the door to our pantry the first afternoon I was home. I absolutely flipped out. I mean, there was Crisco in there! To my knowledge, Crisco is only used for two things: baking unhealthy cakes, and coating a cast-iron skillet. And nothing healthy has ever been cooked in a cast-iron skillet. Ask me how I know.

  I stood there staring at boxes and boxes of fake-fruit snacks, bags of white flour, a giant jar of candy that I used to sneak on a near-daily basis, can after can of overly preserved vegetables. “I forgot they even made canned vegetables,” I said to myself. How I missed the fresh, organic LA life I’d known.

  I’ve seen interviews on TV with recovering alcoholics who talk about how devastating it is for them when they go back to the street corner where they used to sleep and are reminded of the poor choices they once made. They see in that slab of asphalt the laziness, ignorance, complacency and indulgence that formerly characterized their lives, and the reminders are almost too much to bear. Those pantry shelves were my own personal slab of asphalt, and as I took them in, a wave of fear washed over me like none I’d ever known. “Dear God, don’t let me again become the me who lived this way.”

  It would prove a challenging goal to pursue, the goal of moving not backward but ahead.

  One of the things that Noah and I used to do prior to my being on the show was to bake cookies together. Before you get any wild ideas about how much of a Suzy Homemaker I was or am, I should add that they were, and still are, of the slice-and-bake variety.

  We’d make them for breakfast (I know, I know) or for a snack while we watched movies on Friday night. Or Tuesday night. Or any night, if I’m being honest.

  Once I was back home, and during the same week that I had my pantry meltdown, Noah looked at me pleadingly and said, “Mommy, can we make cookies?”

  I felt badly for having been gone for so long that I would have obliged almost any request from that child. “Well, of course, sweetheart,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

  We dashed to the store, pulled a sugary log of bliss from the refrigerated case, rushed back home and began to slice away. I decided that I’d make only four cookies, so that I wouldn’t be tempted to eat any myse
lf. Noah could eat however many he wanted—which would probably be two or three—and then Mike would eat the rest. Perfect plan, right? Except for the fact that the rest of that little pleasure-log was still taunting me from inside the fridge.

  You can learn so much from watching how kids treat food. For example, Noah only eats when he’s hungry. Imagine that! I’ll say, “Noah, why aren’t you hungry? It’s dinner time.” He’ll say, “Oh, we had a surprise snack at school late this afternoon, Mom.” What a logical response, not to eat when you’re already full.

  Within two days’ time I had eaten in its entirety what remained of the unbaked cookie dough. Had I not learned anything on the show? Jillian would have died.

  Undoubtedly, things were not getting any easier for me, now that I was home.

  MYTH #2: ONE BAD CHOICE WON’T MATTER

  The second myth I bought was that one little, itty-bitty bad choice wouldn’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

  For the most part—cookie-binge excluded—I tried to eat well. And I continued my exercise trend, although I certainly wasn’t working out three or five or seven hours a day. Still, despite my fairly healthy habits, almost immediately after my return home I began to gain weight again.

  One day when I was strong enough to actually handle introspection, I thought honestly about what could be the culprit. Instantly, I knew the answer. I had quit drinking water, replacing it with diet soda instead. It seemed like a small decision to me. I mean, my eating patterns were mostly “clean.” My exercise was frequent. I was undoubtedly behaving better than I had been before The Biggest Loser. But without intending to, I had let one bad choice sabotage all of my progress to date.

  I confided my misstep to Hollie one day, and from that point forward the harassment was nonstop. My cell phone would ring, and on the other end of the line I’d hear, “Jules, how much water have you had today?”

  “Uh, none,” I’d admit.

  “Go get a glass and fill it up. Right now. While I’m on the phone. [Insert pregnant pause.] Now, Julie. I’m waiting!”

  Ugh. “Fine. I’m going.”

  It’s a fair statement to say that Hollie singlehandedly drove me to drink.

  I made the same mistake with food, believing that cheating a little here or there wouldn’t add up to anything significant. I’d indulge from time to time in a piece of Cheesecake Factory chocolate cake or a large basket of hot wings, which equals a mere 150 percent of my daily caloric-intake goal all by itself. One itty-bitty bad choice, right? Ten pounds in less than a month, I would learn the hard way that choices do matter, each and every one.

  MYTH #3: HARD WORK EQUALS RADICAL RESULTS

  A third theme that I discovered was patently false is that hard work always equals radical results.

  Between my season’s finale and the next season’s finale, which I had planned to attend as a guest, I vowed to myself that I’d get rid of the ten pounds I had so quickly put back on. Really, now, how hard could that be? In The Biggest Loser land, ten pounds was just a normal week’s weight loss. I upped the ante on my workouts with Margie and committed to running on “off” days, and still it took me nearly three months to get those ten pounds to budge. Three months!

  The truth is, it was a heck of a lot more appealing to sit on the couch and devour Reese’s peanut-butter cups while watching American Idol than it was to tug on my Spandex and hit the gym. But even on days when I didn’t feel like it, I had promised myself that I would continue what I started forever—whether I saw dramatic results or not. Every choice I made was a choice that would lead me further down the path of success or cause me to regress. That much I knew. And if it was the last thing that I did, I was bound and determined to succeed.

  FINDING MY WAY BACK HOME

  I’ll never know where I picked up my errant assumptions about what life would be like once I was thin. But whenever expectations and reality collide, the fallout can be rough. It would take me several weeks, a boatload of self-talk and a slew of challenging conversations with family and friends to establish my footing once more, but when that initial semblance of stability entered the scene at last, I knew that all those efforts were paying off.

  One of the earliest “challenging conversations” was with Noah, back on that Crisco-discovery day.

  Kids love anything that resembles a game, so I decided that instead of just tossing out every food item that didn’t pass muster with my new eating plan, I’d instead make the culinary-cleansing fun. I turned over a box of plasticky fruit snacks or some other, equally disgusting excuse for food, and said, “See this word, Noah? That spells fructose, and it means sugar.” I told him to find every single box, bag or can that had “high fructose corn syrup” listed in the first three ingredients and immediately to throw it away.

  Within seconds, I heard him strike pantry-gold. “Look, Mom!” he’d cheer. “This one has it, second word in the list!” He would toss the box into the already bulging garbage bag and head back to the pantry to hunt for more.

  We would eventually add “enriched” to the search, after I explained what it meant in terms he could understand. “Honey, think about how sad it is when we take something good that God made, and we make it bad. That’s exactly what has happened to an ‘enriched’ food item.” I told him that when people strip back all of the wonderful, natural, vitamin-filled fibers in order to make something white and fluffy, the nutritional value of that food goes all the way down to zero. “And the way I tell if the stripping has occurred is to see if the food sticks to the roof of my mouth. If it sticks, it’s been stripped,” I said. “Which means we should make a better food choice next time, deal?”

  I was careful to walk Noah through the fact that all of these new habits weren’t necessarily about him. He’s so skinny that he could eat an entire chocolate cake every day for a year and not gain a single pound. But because we’re a family, and because one member of our family (that would be me) tends to struggle with overindulging in things that are white and fluffy and endlessly yummy, we all have to agree to certain parameters so that all of us can succeed. In a beautiful display of selflessness, my then-six-year-old son trotted off to his room and returned with a metal canister of candy that he kept in his closet, loot that had been collected from several birthday parties, church carnivals and trick-or-treat outings over the years. “This probably should go away too,” he said with a grin, “because you know where I keep it!”

  I had never been so delighted to be accused of being a thief.

  When I returned home I realized that in my absence Noah had be-come a self-made The Biggest Loser version of Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man. He learned every stat from my season of the show, memorizing every contestant’s starting weight, finale weight and the reason why he or she got kicked off. “Phil was too big of a threat,” Noah would say with authority. Or, “I bet they got rid of Jez because they thought he could lose weight on his own at home.”

  Noah was so obsessed with the nuances of the show that my first few months home were spent with him grilling me about every last detail he couldn’t quite figure out on his own. We dished like teenage girls, guessing people’s motivations and gossiping about the actions they took. But it was that string of ongoing conversations between Noah and me that led to more serious discussions about how to live a strong and healthy life. And now, almost two years later, I think he’s actually getting it. Just last week I overheard him talking to his buddy Luke during lunch, which they were enjoying outside. “Hey Luke,” Noah said with a huge bite of sandwich stuffed inside his cheek, “you know your juice should always have a ‘100’ on it, right?”

  Noah loved the show so much that he asked for The Biggest Loser action figures for Christmas. Somebody ought to start making those. Well, as long as the one representing me is the thin version of Julie Hadden.

  Luke was perplexed. “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” Noah continued in his most scholarly, eight-year-old voice, “a
one hundred is the very best grade. If it has, like, a 10, then that means there’s only, like, ten … fruit … in it, and the rest of it is just sugar. And that’s a really bad deal. So, whenever you buy juice, you tell your mom to make sure it has a 100 on the label, ’kay?”

  You go, Noah. Pure fruit juice rocks.

  In the same breath that I affirm Noah when he gets it right on the fruit-juice front, I encourage him to appreciate the balance I’m learning to strike. Granted, if I were a single woman, my pantry would like look a miniature Whole Foods store. I’d be able to afford all-organic produce, and I’d love feeling like I was standing in The Biggest Loser’s kitchen every day of the week. But I’m not single. I have a husband and two sons who need a normal wife and mom who can deal with the normal stuff of life. They need to have boys’ nights when they can watch The Munsters and eat Taco Bell followed by a giant bowl of buttery popcorn without wondering whether or not I’ll freak out. Noah needs me to show up at his school’s Christmas party with cupcakes to pass out to his buddies instead of toothbrushes. Mike needs me to make a juicy hamburger for him every once in a while. It’s called life. And I for one intend to live it. With that said, I still had some work to do if I wanted to fully embrace the post-show version of me.

  Some people who have been on The Biggest Loser wind up changing their entire lives as a result of their experience on the show. They get done with their time on campus, they go back home and they ditch everything that used to define who they were—their spouses, their homes, their professions and more. Really. It’s remarkable, and sad, to see.

  Thankfully, that just wasn’t my experience.

  Before the show I was extremely unhappy with me, but on other fronts my happiness-meter soared. I loved my marriage, my son, my home and my friends. I loved all of my life, it seemed. I just thought that a thinner version of me should be living it. Much like tolerating the absolute wrong actor being cast in your favorite sitcom, I relished the story line God had given me to experience, even when the character was altogether off the mark.