The author of the new memoir The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance discusses her winning battle against obesity--and her surgery to get rid of loose skin.
My whole life I’ve had this stupid wish: I wanted to be the pretty girl who danced around her apartment in her underwear. I must’ve picked this up in a movie that I watched as a little girl, and then seen the same scene replayed time and time again, enough times to believe that it was central to the female experience.
In my eyes, the women who got to do this were always thin, which automatically excluded me, a 260 pound girl. I wish now, that I’d thought differently, that at my heaviest I’d had the confidence to twirl around in my undies. But I didn’t. Instead, I hid my body, even from myself.
I was always chubby. Okay, not just chubby, I was clinically obese, but can we skip the semantics? I used to make up friends with birthdays so that I would have an excuse to bring cupcakes to school and then eat them for lunch. I was that kind of chubby, the lying-for-baked-goods kind. And because I was always overweight, I felt powerless when it came trying to change. This is just the way my life is going to be, I thought. Until, at the age of 22, I decided to take a chance: I enrolled in the Philadelphia Life Weight Management program and went on a diet. I read an Adidas ad for moral support: “Impossible is Nothing,” it said. “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” It worked. In five a half months, practically overnight, I lost 80 pounds. It was the equivalent of pooping out a fourth grader.
