Crybaby

Well, another week and another incident of me sitting on the couch watching The Biggest Loser and crying like a baby. This show gets to me in a way that nothing else can. I turn into the biggest freakin baby when I watch that show! I cry for the entire thing, every week, no matter what.

I think a lot of the reason for my extreme emotional reaction to this show is because I see so much of myself in the contestants. No, not the buff, confident, sexy people they have become, but the fatties that they started out as.

For those of you who have never had a weight problem, you don't realize that there is this whole psychological component to being fat. It's not just that we love food, and therefore want to put as much of it into our mouths as humanly possible. Being overweight is a symptom of some other underlying illness. Be it depression, compulsive overeating or denial, most fat people have something lurking beneath the surface that has led them down this destructive path and kept them down it.

I look at myself and my own emotional reactions to my size, and I can't deny that my feelings about being fat are helping to keep me fat. You would believe that it would be the opposite, but it's not true.

I am embarrassed about my size. I don't want to go to the gym, because I don't want all the other fit people in the gym to point to the fatty and make jokes. And it doesn't matter to me how many thin people say, "Oh we would NEVER do that!" I've heard the comments. I've been the topic of such conversation. I've heard people say, "Hope she doesn't break the recumbent bike" and "How much you wanna bet she has an asthma attack before she spends 5 minutes on that treadmill?" Going to the gym is extremely scary for us fat people. We're there because we need to be working out, but we're being judged for doing it. And while everyone in the gym may not be doing it, the ones who are WAY overshadow the ones who aren't. And I suppose we should adopt a thicker skin and just suck it up and take the negativity, but that's another thing that thin people don't understand. All of those voiced jokes and put-downs merely echo the negativity going on in our own heads. It feeds into the notion that we are so far gone that we don't even deserve to try to change our situation.

I can't even begin to tell you the lengths that I have gone to in an effort to hide my embarrassment and being fat and an overeater. I've hidden food. I've eaten where no one could see me so that they couldn't see how much I was eating and judge accordingly. I hide under layers of clothing and avoid wearing the things I really want to, because I don't want someone to see me and point and laugh. It's a tightrope walk, this whole act of balancing the person I want to be and the fat person that I actually am. And I have no idea how to reconcile the two.

So I watch The Biggest Loser and I see how these contestants were when they started their journey. I see them getting out of breath climbing a flight of stairs in their own home. I see them struggling to fit into a booth in a restaurant, or hanging over both sides of a chair. I see them standing with their shoulders hunched and their heads down, as if they are trying to crawl inside their own bodies so that not only does no one have to see them, but they don't have to admit that they really look this way. I see it, and I know it, because I'm living it.

One of the best things about The Biggest Loser is that it shows that raw emotion. It shows Daris peeling the skin off his elbows on the gym floor to make it through that human tunnel because he's tired of being a quitter. It shows Michael having an anger explosion because he's lost 200 pounds and STILL has to shop in a fat man's store. It shows Ashley crying and saying that she wants to fall in love and get married and have babies, yet she's afraid that she won't be able to do that. After all, who's gonna love us the way we are when we hate ourselves?

Maybe it's the fact that their raw emotion is my raw emotion that makes me cry week after week. Maybe it's the fact that I'm so sick of accomplishing weight loss, only to gain it back. Maybe I'm tired of having the goal of being able to fit in the biggest size made in the regular clothing section, only to realize this goal means I would still be fat, but just less fat than I am now. Maybe it's because I realize that I put myself into dangerous situatios with guys I could barely stand for a long, long time because I wanted to prove to myself and everyone else that at least SOMEONE saw me as sexy, even if it was only for a few minutes.

But I think that the biggest reason I get so emotional is that I see their triumphs on the show and I think to myself how it would feel if it were my triumphs. I can't even remember the last time I was under 200 pounds. How would it feel to get there again? How would it feel to run a marathon and actually finish? How would it feel to have the people I love to tell me that they are so proud of me for facing my fears and changing my life? How would it feel to be the person I feel like is suffocating under all this fat?

So the season finale is next week, and in two weeks, a new show is starting with Jillian Michaels called Losing It, which I'm sure will also make me cry every week. I've heard a lot of people talk about how The Biggest Loser is "beating that horse to death" because they end one season and start another up as soon as the can. Those people are usually the ones who've never struggled. To those of us who are struggling or have struggled, we know why they do it. It's so that there's no downtime for us to get away from the realization that these are people just like us who are changing their lives. They're fatties who hated themselves and what they had become. They're people who were so embarrassed that they went to great lengths to escape from those emotions. They're people who were ready to give up that gave it one final shot and are succeeding in changing their lives. It's so inspirational.

Even though I know that much of The Biggest Loser doesn't really translate into the real world, the emotional aspect does. We've seen couples form on the show as people realize that not only do they deserve love, but they find it with someone else who never thought that they were worthy of love either. We see confidence bloom where none grew before as people realize that they are becoming the person they always knew they could be. And we see the failures. We saw Erik gain all the weight back, and we know that pain. We see the former contestants who looked so good at the finale struggling to maintain some semblance of that warrior who stood on the podium so proud of who they were.

This last episode of Biggest Loser really struck a chord with me too when Daris gained 2 pounds while at home. The denial he immediately slipped into, about how hard it is to lose weight while training for a marathon was so familiar. I can't tell you how many times I've gained weight and known the reason for the gain, but tried to pass the blame onto something a little more socially acceptable. And though many think that Jillian was being a bitch for calling him out on it, it's what Daris needed to hear. The ones who slip into the blame game when they gain weight are the ones who end up gaining it all back. I know. I am one. I had almost lost 20% of my body weight when I started slipping. I blamed it on anything I could point my finger at that was acceptable. And I kept gaining. And gaining. And gaining. Until here I am now, heavier than I started way back then. And I'm still blaming. I was depressed. I was stress-eating. Times got bad financially and I had to eat what I could afford. But the one thing that I don't admit (but am going to now) is that I was binging like there was no tomorrow.

Like Daris, the night time was the danger zone for me. It didn't matter what I had done during the day, at night, while everyone else slept and there was no one to bear witness, I binged. I ate, even if I wasn't hungry. I would bake a dozen cookies with every intention of eating every single crumb by myself. I would even go so far as to slip out of the house and drive to the nearest 24 hour grocery store, and buy insane amounts of junk food to devour. After all, if no one ever knew it was in the house, then no one knows that you ate it all, right?

And, like Daris, I couldn't deny the end result. Calories squandered when no one is watching don't just disappear because no one witnesses you putting them into your body. They pack on, and eventually, everyone around you knows that you're doing something that's leading to a weight gain. You can run 20 miles a day while everyone's watching, then eat until you feel like puking while everyone's sleeping. But in the end, that food's going somewhere, and your dirty little secret comes to light.

So here I sit, with a tear stained face from watching the latest Biggest Loser and a mind racing with thoughts of the parallels between the struggles of the contestants and my own struggles. More than that, I sit here with a desire to have one ounce of the courage that these brave men and women possess. They stood up and said, "Enough!" and made motions to change all the things they hated about themselves. And they're doing it. Sure, there are bumps in the roads and issues to deal with, but such is life, and those things are always going to be there. But they're looking forward, and they're struggling every single day to move closer to the person they want to be and further away from the person they can't believe they ended up as.

Tomorrow is Thursday, May 20th. For some reason, that strikes me as a great day to stand up and make my stand. Tomorrow, I start moving forward. Tomorrow night, I weigh myself, and receive that "starting weight" number that I've been trying to avoid for months now. And tomorrow, I start moving away from that number and toward the person I know I can be. Tomorrow, I start living my life for me, for the REAL me, the one who is screaming out, but is being muffled by all this fat and denied emotions. Tomorrow is Day 1. Tomorrow, I start my journey to become my best. Tomorrow, I stop being just "The Fat Chick" and start being The Strong Chick, The Determined Chick, and most importantly, The Happy Chick.

I'll report back with the damage from the scale, and I'll say that number with my head held high, knowing that it's not an admission of defeat, but a unit of measure for how far I'm going to go.