Before I lost weight I was fat. But I wasn’t just fat on the outside, I was on the inside, too.
“Mom, will you go to Weight Watchers with me?” Molly asked the May before she was graduating from high school. Since stopping her two hour volleyball practices and games, she’d gained twenty pounds. She ate to calm her nerves about going off to Sacramento State.
“You’re kidding,” I said, stuffing a handful of pretzels and raisins into my mouth. “You want your card-carrying registered dietitian mom to go to Weight Watchers? Pah-leez.”
“Come on, Mom.”
Since Molly’s ruptured appendix at age seven, and with her departure off to college within three months, my protests were never extended. I gave in easily to Molly.
Once at the Weight Watchers’ meeting, I slunked down in a chair and left on my dark glasses. What if someone recognized me? Hey, isn’t that that registered dietitian, Michelle Zive? What’s she doing here?
“The key to weight loss is to eat smarter and move more,” the leader said. REALLY? This is the song and dance us nutrition professionals had been selling for years. Even Mad TV knew the secret and spoofed the simplicity of this message.
What was I doing here?
I looked over at Molly. Oh, yeah…
The minute the meeting was over I joined Weight Watchers. Wait, if I knew the secret to weight loss, if I was a practicing registered dietitian, then why would I join Weight Watchers?
Because before that moment I’d been in denial about my weight. Like Molly I was eating my emotions along with too many calories. What I blew off as “baby fat” from my pregnancy with Jack (he was no baby, he was three at the time)was really an unwillingness to let go. I kept a layer of fat on my body to protect my heart, to protect myself from time speeding by and taking my baby girl with it as Molly was on the cusp of adulthood.
After I lost thirty pounds, these things became even clearer. Without my cushion of fat, I felt raw, exposed. But that’s the gain: I felt. Before my weight loss I moved as if I walked in a sea of marshmallow goo (YUMMY!!). After losing thirty pounds on Weight Watchers and CrossFit, I zipped through my days filled with energy and happiness and sadness and joy and…
When I tell this story to people, even people who were around back then, they say, “Michelle, you never looked fat to me.” And maybe I didn’t. But I felt it.
Not long after I’d lost the weight, I remember passing the mirror in our dining room, the one I pass a hundred times a day. But this day, I looked up and studied the woman in the mirror. “Oh, there you are. Where have been?”
Indeed…
