THIS MORNING UNFOLDED like most weekday mornings do since being back from The Biggest Loser. I pulled on exercise clothes, shoveled apple slices into my mouth and headed to a local park to meet my trainer Margie for a seventy-five-minute workout.
If Jillian Michaels taught me the value of exercise, Margie Marshall now forces me to live out that value on a near-daily basis. I adore Margie, and I also despise her—a paradox that is fully warranted, given the torture chamber her cheery classes always prove to be. Take this morning’s workout, for example.
Amazingly, I arrived at the park on time, and ahead of two other women who are under Margie’s tutelage as well. Eventually there were five of us gathered there, eagerly anticipating the tricks our beloved trainer had up her sleeve for the day. We began with five minutes of running around an adjacent set of soccer fields, followed by multiple one-minute rotations of exercises including push-ups, sprints, plyometric jumps, mountain-climbers, jumping rope and planking ourselves atop a basketball. I was huffing and puffing by the end of that section, but absurdly, I was still having fun.
If a workout is an hour long, I think of it like a TV show. Water breaks become commercial breaks, and I know that after five of them, I’m done.
Camaraderie during workouts is always a good thing, if only to talk about your trainer behind her back. Misery loves company, especially when that misery involves wind sprints.
Toward the end of our time together, Margie asked us to run suicides. She’d dotted dozens of tennis balls along the field, twenty or thirty yards apart, and had us compete with each other to see who could race to the first ball and bring it back to the bucket the fastest, and then race to the second ball and bring that one back too—on and on in this way, until every ball had been retrieved.
It doesn’t take expensive equipment to get a good workout. A water bottle makes a great hand weight. You and a friend can play tug-of-war with a spare T-shirt. Hula hooping, as my son Noah and I discovered, can make for one of the most effective—and most competitive!—workouts around.
The agony finally came to an end, and I knew that if I never again saw another tennis ball in my life, I’d be perfectly content. As that thought made its way through my mind, I glanced sideways to find Margie launching those evil yellow spheres as far as her arm could throw them, one hundred of them in all. “Okay, ladies!” she cheered, with the annoying enthusiasm of someone who wasn’t about to have to run all over creation like a headless chicken. “As soon as you bring me all of the balls you see out there, class is officially dismissed!”
With both hands on my hips, I eyed the giant Easter-egg hunt before me and said through grinding, gritted teeth, “You have got to be kidding.”
In fact, she was not.
I don’t know why it still surprises me when Margie pulls one of her frequent ultracruel and hyperactive stunts. She’d always been a bit crazy, even before I started to train with her. But “crazy” is what I was instructed by Jillian to find. “When you get home,” Jillian had said during my final days at The Biggest Loser campus, “I don’t want you to find some narcissistic diva to train you. I want you to find someone who is passionate about you and who is crazy about working out.”
Margie, of course, fit that bill.
I had known of Margie through a mutual friend before I even auditioned for the show, and word on the street was that she was so serious about physical fitness that she couldn’t find even one friend who would work out with her. “They’d throw up every time they went to the gym with me,” Margie later explained, as if perplexed by their distaste for abuse. “Finally they just refused to go.”
When I returned to Florida from The Biggest Loser campus, Margie contacted me and said that she would love to help me maintain my newfound figure and that perhaps we should work out together. I could tell in one conversation flat that she was the trainer for me.
As horrible as it seems to work out so hard that you throw up, it’s actually your body’s normal way of releasing toxins that are holding it back.
That was a full year ago, I thought, as I forced my legs to race back and forth across the Easter-egg-dotted field. In a flash of insight, it occurred to me how different the previous twelve months had been compared to the thirty-five years leading up to them. Little more than a year ago, I couldn’t have brought in a sack of groceries without enduring severe heart palpitations and stress. Now I was sprinting across a soccer field with a (semi) smile on my face.
Revelations like those are hitting me frequently these days, and they always pack an unexpected punch. They bring to mind the person I used to be, not the woman I am today. In my mind’s eye I see her—the overweight, underwhelming version of me—with the same fine-tuned clarity of a burglary victim who can remember every nuance of her ransacked house. I wore her skin and shame for so much of my life that I find it’s a daily battle to let her die—to let go of her self-doubt and fear—and let the new me be beautifully born.
Even if you never learn to love exercise, you do learn to love how you feel afterward. Pride in your accomplishment, increased strength, additional endurance—what’s not to love about that!
Earlier this week, I drove the few miles to the park where Margie and I meet. The air was thick and cloudy, and partway through our workout, it started to rain. Margie is unfazed by bad weather, but I for one hate being wet. I considered dashing to my car to grab another layer, but the only available garment would have been the extra-small jacket I keep stashed in the trunk for Noah, who seems to lose everything he touches and seems always to be cold. It would help a little, I supposed, but the sleeves would be way too short. Quickly, I moved to other options, which is when it hit me: I could borrow something of Margie’s.
Holy cow.
I could actually borrow something from Margie—Margie, who has a flawless figure and no visible fat. I could borrow something from that woman. I could fit into something that Margie can wear. The revelation brought tears to my eyes and a distant memory back to mind.
When I was a fresh-faced kindergartener, the other five-year-olds and I spent an hour every day in recess. I remember like it was yesterday playing outside one afternoon when it started to rain. Young, blonde, beautiful-in-every-way Mrs. Robertson raced toward the playground under the protective covering of an umbrella and ushered us kids through the doors that led back into Arlington Heights Elementary School, where we were instructed to select dry alternatives to our school clothes from the lost-and-found box.
If my memory serves me well, and if the few pictures I still possess tell the truth, I wasn’t exactly obese at the tender age of five. But when every other girl your age is twiggy and wispy, somehow you gather that a shapely bottom and tree-trunk legs don’t contribute to a “look” that will work.
I just thought too-small orange shorts would be my life’s worst fashion nightmare. In reality, wearing nothing but a skin-tight tank top and shorts on a giant scale before a national audience would top the list. Please tell me it doesn’t get worse than that!
Grudgingly I tugged at a pair of pumpkin-hued shorts until they broke loose of the weight of the other clothes in that dreaded lost-and-found box, held them up in front of my young face and eyed them with intense suspicion. Would they slip over my already ladylike thighs? Would their snap-closure come together to confine my proudly plump tummy? Or would they be the source of ridicule all the rest of my kindergarten days? I knew then that I wasn’t at all like the person I was supposed to be. It was the start of a laundry list of what “fat” would steal from me.
When I was little there were two options for children’s clothing: “regular” or “slim.” How sad that there is such pervasive childhood obesity today that clothing companies now actually manufacture plus-size clothes for kids.
Childhood years are supposed to be innocent, carefree and fun. And yet these certainly are not the themes that I’d say marked the first decade and a half of my life. Just before I started kindergarten, my par-ents’ wildly flawed marriage dissolved into divorce. I don’t remember them ever being married. I don’t remember them ever living under the same roof. All I remember is the day that my dad left. My father had borrowed his buddy’s green El Camino and had backed up the car to the front door of our house, right onto the grass. I stood there watching as he loaded the car, emerging from the house with arms full of possessions each time. When he had finished reclaiming his belongings, he turned toward me and asked, “Jules, who would you like to go with?” Instinctively, I inched toward my mother, who looked down at my confused countenance and whispered, “Sweetie, if you pick me, I’ll give you a roll of Life Savers.”
My dad, overhearing Mom’s offer, eyed me and said, “Honey, you come with me, and I’ll give you all the Life Savers you want.”
Although Dad moved out that day, things wouldn’t really explode between them until a few years later, when a series of custody battles rocked the first few months of my third-grade year. They played me against each other, and when that didn’t work, they included my grandparents in the fight. I must have been a fairly resilient kid because despite the wobbly world in which I lived, I somehow maintained a fair degree of steadiness and even chose to develop a sense of humor about things. Little did I know how much I would rely on it through the years. “If I can get people to laugh with me,” I thought, “then maybe they won’t laugh at me.”
I realize now that despite the dysfunction always inherent in divorce, at least I was lucky enough to be “wanted” by both my mom and my dad. Mom’s persistent care went deep with me during my growing-up years, and truly, some of my best childhood memories are of the many weeknights spent on “dates” with my dad. McDonald’s for dinner followed by movies like Herbie at the theater—it was a little girl’s dream come true. Sure, I craved an intact family. But I remain grateful for the bits and pieces of bliss I knew.
In addition to handing me the shards of my undeniably broken family, the third grade also provided my first official realization that I was fat. For the entire school year, I obsessed about cresting one hundred pounds. A girl who had been in my class ever since the pumpkin-shorts fiasco three years prior was visibly, morbidly obese, and she, I had found out, weighed just over one hundred pounds. I compared myself to her daily, wondering if I was as fat as that.
Finally I made it to the fourth grade, but unfortunately my inner anguish made it there too. In the evenings before bedtime, the nine-year-old version of me would squat over the too-hot water of my bath and, having nothing better to do while I waited for the water to cool, I would fixate on my chubby thighs and puffy, peaking breasts that were developing well in advance of my peers’.
My hunch that I was already fat at age eight was validated by my mom’s enrolling me in a Weight Watchers program partway through my third-grade year. Not fond memories, to say the least.
A healthy sense of self—self-worth, self-confidence, self-esteem—had been taken from me in a flash. Another victory I had unwittingly handed to that terrible thief who answered to the name “Fat.”
Later, junior high brought with it a torment all its own. By that time I had ballooned to the point that I remember being afraid of not fitting into the yellow phys ed uniforms that were issued at the start of each grade. If the school did make one my size, I just knew it would come only by special order, and with an “XXXL” sneeringly printed on the tag. Still, that had to be better than the alternative: outsizing even their special-order offerings and being forced to drag my rail-thin mother to the local large-person clothing store to buy a plain yellow tee-shirt that we’d pay to have embroidered with the school’s name. The obvious distinction of that attire would clearly have been the end of me.
It was during those same days that a boy in my eighth-grade class—I’ll call him Jimmy, because his name was Jimmy—bestowed upon me my latest nickname. Chicago Bears defensive lineman William “The Refrigerator” Perry was receiving a lot of press as a fan favorite at the time, and Jimmy thought it would be funny to dub me “The Freezer.” Sort of The Fridge’s equally enormous sidekick, I guess. Every single day I entered the class I shared with Jimmy, I heard him mockingly shout, “Hey, Freezer!”
Ironically, Jimmy would wind up asking me out during my somewhat-thinner college years. In reply, I think my exact words were: “As if!”
There was no comeback swift enough, no rebuttal fitting enough to match the depth of his crushing words. And so the funny fat girl would slip into her seat, silenced and rebuffed once more.
I didn’t deal with Jimmy much after that, but I have bumped into a few other schoolmates over the past several years. When we were kids, I was the devastated recipient of their disdain. “Why are you so fat?” one had asked me. “What gives?” another probed. “Your parents aren’t that fat.” And then there was the girl who shooed me from her lunchroom table with four words that made her position abundantly clear: “Fat girls not allowed.”
Interestingly, after my experience on The Biggest Loser, several of them tried to befriend me. I have a feeling they’d stand by their story that we were great friends in school, that of course they’d never done anything to harm me. But something in me simply stayed away, probably that same something that felt scraped out all those years ago, when cutting comments etched their way onto my soul.
For many kids, high school days are the glory days, the last great hoorah, the lovely, melodic tune that sings them right into adulthood. But for me, those days were just the constant refrain of an all-too depressing dirge.
To make matters worse, I spent that time living in a humid, ocean-side community in Florida, which meant that every birthday party was yet one more reason to convene at the pool or the beach. If only granny-style skirted one-piece bathing suits and oversize men’s T-shirts had been in vogue for a sixteen-year-old! Not only did I not own a bikini, but had I ever chosen to show up in one, I felt sure everyone in the immediate vicinity would have cleared out in a heartbeat as my pasty-white lumps of flesh and I rolled and strolled our way by. Why hand over more ammunition, I figured, when I’d already been shot down so many times?
It was for that same reason that I never, ever ate lunch at school. Instead, I would use my buck-forty’s worth of lunch money to purchase a doughnut or two before class started, and use the remaining thirty-five cents on a midday milkshake I’d sip all alone. Of course, I’d return home from school and devour everything in sight, but at least in my mind I hadn’t given people an obvious explanation as to why I was “that unbelievably fat.”
I wanted to be thinner. I really did. Actually, I wanted to be “skinny”—that one word summed up my complete definition of all that it meant to be likeable, healthy and cool. But I was handed that goal from others in my life. “You could get any boy you want,” well-meaning family members would say, “if you’d just lose that weight.” (Translation: You’ll mean a lot more to this world when there’s a whole lot less of you.)
I saw a survey that the TV show 20/20 did one time, where they asked kids to look at photographs of two people and select the more attractive person. In every instance they chose the thinner one, even when the heavier person was drop-dead gorgeous.
Eventually, I did lose a few pounds. Needing a way to look acceptable for the prom I would never attend, I fad-dieted and deprived my way to a “me” two dress sizes down. Sadly, though, my also-fat friends and I would always fall back into the trap of using food as our comforter. Which is how I know that even at the bargain price of four boxes for a dollar, mac-and-cheese can’t satiate a starving soul.
These days, I look back and realize that my upbringing wasn’t all bad. There were youth-group trips and dances and Christmas parties. But when I catch sight of photos of those “fond memories” and see a big, fat cow in the frame, the fondness somehow fades a bit. What’s more, now that I have hindsight on my side, I see more clearly the reason I became fat in the first place. I’m sure that psychotherapists would have a heyday analyzing my background and linking every major event to the cause of my obesity, but in my heart of hearts, the only theme I know to be true throughout my childhood and beyond is this: I was fat because I did not believe that I was worth the effort it would take to be fit.
I’d learn the hard way throughout my life that “event dieting” never works. As soon as the event has come and gone, so has your motivation for losing weight.
Sadly, it would take me until age thirty-five to adjust my views on that.
When I was in my early twenties, I got my five-foot-two frame all the way down to one hundred and forty pounds and tried my hand at pageants. Admittedly, it was a lark. I had thick legs, as you’ll recall. And by this point, I also had quite a robust bust—some of which was natural and some of which was due to the extra padding I added in an effort to bring my wide hips into proportion. In fact, on the heels of one especially disappointing swimsuit competition, the strongest “affirmation” I received came from a female judge who said, “I see how those breasts balance out that backside, Hon, but my word …” This was uttered mere moments before I learned that while everyone else had received eights and nines in that part of the competition, I had been granted a three. Lovely.
These days I’m learning not to allow myself to be defined by a number that shows up on the scale. If I were to go by the standard height/weight charts, I should weigh between 105 and 110 pounds. Yeah, right.
The evening-gown portion was no better, really. I couldn’t fit into traditional, beaded gowns, and so I opted instead to debut the A-line dress. This was before anyone knew about A-line dresses, so I got points for trendsetting. But that was about it.
“You could be Miss America! If only you’d lose some weight.” “You have such a pretty face! It’s just that you’ve got all that weight.” “What a lovely dress! It covers your flaws nicely.” I’d heard a version of the judges’ comments throughout my entire life. Would “fat” be my reality forever?
It will come as no surprise to you that I never wore a crown. (Although I did do quite well in the “interview” portion, thank you very much.) But I took home a prize of another kind from those odd, odd pageant days: my wonderful husband Mike.
Mike was perhaps the only person in that pageant audience who saw more in me than what meets the eye. We were friends for five years, and although I had a terrific crush on him, my self-defeating ways caused me to keep that under wraps. Instead, when he confided in me as his friend that he was interested in one of the other “pageant girls” we knew, I’d enthusiastically prod him to ask her out. “Oh, she’s gorgeous!” I’d rave. “You should date her!”
At my recommendation, he usually did. And as each girl came into his life and then left, I died another death. When would it be my turn?
When longing finally turned into reality and reality eventually produced a stunning engagement ring, I experienced a euphoria I had never previously known. At our engagement party, a mutual friend nodded toward me and said to her date, “She looks like a Mike Hadden wife.” I soared on her words for hours. I knew the incredible women Mike had dated. And I was elated to be the last one among them.
Although I wasn’t thin when Mike and I got engaged, I was the thinnest I’d ever been. Still, something in me said I was fat. As soon as we got married, I allowed the self-fulfilling prophecy to run its course, gaining pounds, it seemed, by the hour.
Just as quickly as I put back on the weight, Mike put on the role of my enabler. I didn’t weigh myself very often, but I always knew when I had gained a lot of weight because my clothes no longer would fit. My dismay over my returning obesity became a constant topic of conversation between Mike and me, and when he just couldn’t take my moaning and groaning any longer, he would come home from work with a treat. Mike’s treats were always the best, because he knew exactly what I liked. Nachos, southwestern eggrolls from Chili’s, a blooming onion from Outback, gooey chocolate cake—these always did the trick.
Mike proposed marriage to me during the decorating of my Christmas tree. He handed me one particular ornament—a beautiful gold ball—to hang, but only after I’d opened it up to find a princess-cut diamond ring inside.
That is, until I gained even more weight and grew even more despondent about the situation I was in.
Eventually the cycle would veer into such dark places that I’d refuse to go out with Mike.
“I can’t fit into anything I own!” I’d whine. The next day I’d walk into our bedroom to find eight new pairs of pants on the bed.
Mike’s enabling behavior was not helpful, but it was clearly motivated by love. He craved a normal, happy wife and a normal, happy home. It devastates me now to know that because of me, he had neither. In his eternal defense, Mike never once told me that I looked fat, that I was fat or that I needed to lose weight. But he is a man. To have thought that my obesity had no effect on him would be lunacy. Throughout the course of our early married life, and out of respect for the highly visual part of a man’s needs and wants, I would try to diet my way back into clothes that had once fit. But as soon as I made it to my goal weight and people acknowledged my progress, I’d congratulate myself with my good old friend: food. Soon enough, those pounds I had lost would find their way right back to me.
Being fat caused dysfunction in other areas of our marriage too. Like most newlywed couples, Mike and I enjoyed a great vitality—and frequency!—in our sex life. Day or night, tired or not, we looked forward to sharing intimacy with each other. In our first apartment, the closet doors of our master bedroom boasted full-length mirrors. And although this didn’t bother me at first, as I grew in size, I also grew increasingly uncomfortable with catching glimpses of myself in those mirrors. The puckers on my large thighs, the rolls of flesh around my belly, the droopy skin along the back of my arms—I couldn’t bear to see these things, and I insisted that Mike not see them either.
Eventually I swapped the freedom I’d enjoyed for a finicky list of demands. First, there would be no sex during daylight hours. Second, when there was sex at night, all lights must be turned off. Third, since I could no longer fit into my lingerie, all expectations for sexy attire must be squelched at once. Fourth, Mike must initiate all sexual encounters. After all, what if one day I gained the pound that finally thrust Mike over the edge and he was no longer interested in me in “that” way? I refused to risk rejection on that level.
Given the heightened insanity I catalyzed during that season of life, it’s something of a miracle that Noah was conceived. But six months before my twenty-ninth birthday, Mike and I welcomed our first baby into the world.
Looking back, I’m stung by the reality of how my food addiction would affect Noah in his early childhood. Any reasonable person would be shocked to see a drug addict taking her child into the crack house with her. You and I would both look down on an alcoholic who loaded her child into the car just before taking a spin fully drunk. But somehow it was lost on me that I was doing the very same thing. I was enveloping Noah in my addiction, without any regard for his life. What I ate is what he ate. My sedentary life was his sedentary life. All of my bad choices were his bad choices, simply because he was my son. My six fast-food meals a week became his fast-food habit too. My couch-potato ways became his lethargy as well.
What kind of mother would do this? It’s not the mom I wanted to be.
The last chapter of the book of Proverbs paints a beautiful portrait of what a wife and mother ought to look like. “A good woman is hard to find, and worth far more than diamonds,” The Message paraphrase says. “Her husband trusts her without reserve, and never has reason to regret it. Never spiteful, she treats him generously all her life long. She shops around for the best yarns and cottons, and enjoys knitting and sewing. She’s like a trading ship that sails to faraway places and brings back exotic surprises. She’s up before dawn, preparing breakfast for her family and organizing her day. She looks over a field and buys it, then, with money she’s put aside, plants a garden. First thing in the morning, she dresses for work, rolls up her sleeves, eager to get started. She senses the worth of her work, is in no hurry to call it quits for the day.
“She’s skilled in the crafts of home and hearth, diligent in homemaking. She’s quick to assist anyone in need, reaches out to help the poor. She doesn’t worry about her family when it snows; their winter clothes are all mended and ready to wear.
“She makes her own clothing, and dresses in colorful linens and silks. Her husband is greatly respected when he deliberates with the city fathers. She designs gowns and sells them, brings the sweaters she knits to the dress shops. Her clothes are well-made and elegant, and she always faces tomorrow with a smile. When she speaks she has something worthwhile to say, and she always says it kindly. She keeps an eye on everyone in her household, and keeps them all busy and productive.
I find it interesting that the Proverbs 31 woman dresses not only her family well; she also dresses herself well. She is on her own priority list, and not in the very last spot.
“Her children respect and bless her; her husband joins in with words of praise: ‘Many women have done wonderful things, but you’ve outclassed them all!’ Charm can mislead and beauty soon fades. The woman to be admired and praised is the woman who lives in the Fear-of-God. Give her everything she deserves! Festoon her life with praises!”1
Now, I don’t know what you take away from those verses, but I’m thinking that any woman lauded in Scripture for making breakfast for her family was probably making more than a Krispy Kreme stop. Any woman who planted a vegetable garden probably had kids who actually knew what fresh broccoli tasted like. Any woman who was eager to roll up her sleeves and work in the morning … well, the old version of me wouldn’t know what to make of that. Any woman who mended clothes obviously wasn’t outgrowing her pants every six weeks. And any woman who always said “worthwhile” things clearly didn’t bemoan her big butt.
Even as I read that passage again now, the stark contrast between the wife and mom I chose to be for so many years and the woman portrayed in these verses is almost too much to take in. How completely I craved the ambition, the motivation, the diligence of that woman!
I knew I had my husband’s and son’s unwavering love. How desperately I desired to gain their respect. Thankfully, God knew those deep, deep desires of my heart. And as I’d learn soon enough, he had paved the path to my becoming a woman just like the one I admired.
The loss—on so many levels—of my childhood and then of my womanhood carried with them a common thread. Weaving its way through all of those years was the devastating loss of my peace.
Most obese people I know are people-pleasers at heart. Truly, it is enough of a daily challenge to bear up under the weight of your own insecurity, shame and self-condemnation. The last thing you want to attach to all of that is the disappointment of others.
I practiced my people-pleasing ways early on in my life. When I was still a preteen, and in deference to my mother’s health-fanatic ways, I would eat modest portions at dinner. What she didn’t know, of course, was that her people-pleasing daughter would clear the table and then stuff herself silly with every morsel that remained, in between scrubbing glasses and plates.
Later, during my pageant stint, I would attempt to work out four or five hours a day with fellow contestants so that they would be pleased with my efforts toward weight loss. But upon leaving, I’d sabotage every ounce of progress made by stopping and purchasing a box of Little Debbie cakes that would be devoured well before I got home.
These days I have friends who tell me they make their kids join the Clean Plate Club before they can be excused from the dinner table, and my reaction is always the same: “Quit that!”
Throughout my entire existence, it seems, I had two lives going. There was the me that others saw, and the me that was truly me. The end-result of my duplicity was inner turmoil that is tough to explain. What is not tough to explain is how God intended for life to be lived.
In Genesis, God says that he thought so highly of us that he created us in his own, perfect image. In the book of John, we learn that he has equipped us for lives lived to the fullest. Five chapters later, we are told that we’re capable of a level of contentedness that can actually cause us to leap.2
Acceptance, abundance, joy—this was hardly the life I’d been living.
I’d be shopping at Target with Mike and would catch sight of a friend I hadn’t seen in years, but instead of approaching to say hi, I’d hide behind the clothing rack until I was sure she was gone so that she wouldn’t see how terrible I looked.
I’m an adventure-seeker by nature, but when a friend invited me to skydive with her, I shrunk back and declined for fear that the jumpsuit simply would not fit.
When Mike and I attended Noah’s soccer games, I’d refuse to stand up and cheer because I knew that my arms and my midsection would keep jiggling long after the rest of me had stood still. Worse than that, I denied him the delight of swimming with his buddies because I couldn’t bring myself to go to the neighborhood pool during “normal” hours. I’d wait until late afternoon and watch him swim all alone, while nobody was around to watch big, fat me.
Acceptance, abundance, and joy—knowing who you are in God’s eyes, living out of the fullness of your relationship with him and enjoying the journey every step of the way. To me, these things add up to a life lived from that coveted place called peace. I’m grateful to say that after hundreds of prayers, a year of tears, and buckets of sweat, it’s the place I call home these days.
When I got back from The Biggest Loser campus in August 2007, I felt that in so many ways I had neglected my child. It hadn’t been on purpose, of course, but something about the string of experiences on the show helped me see what a truncated existence I had asked Noah to live. My sedentary lifestyle and my fear of socializing had taken a terrible toll, and I wanted to do something to make it up to him. So I took him to Disney World, just the two of us.
The day I took Noah to Disney World was the first day that I wore a sleeveless shirt in public in years. It was a day of celebration on so many levels.
At the end of an unbelievably fun day of riding on roller coaster seats I hadn’t fit on for decades, Noah and I stood in line for the monorail that would take us back to the parking lot. He was standing behind me in line and didn’t notice much of what unfolded ahead of us, but I surely did. Twenty inches away from me stood a young girl—probably ten or eleven years old—and two adults who appeared to be her parents. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t misbehaving. But she must have said something that didn’t sit right with her father, because the next thing I knew, he cocked his right hand into the air and in one swift whoosh slapped the young girl across the face. My jaw dropped just as the mother—with swaddled infant in her arms—stepped quickly between her husband and her daughter. She obviously didn’t want to cause even more of a scene, but the instantaneousness with which she reacted made me wonder if abuse was a pattern for this family.
Before I counted the cost of my own reaction, I caught the father’s eye and said quietly, in a measured tone, “You sorry son of a gun.” Except “gun” wasn’t exactly the noun I chose.
Even when you feel you aren’t worth the fight that’s involved in changing your life, you find that someone or something else is—like wanting a better life for Noah and wanting to protect that little girl.
My mother raised me never to talk like that, and when the syllables fell out of my face, I just knew Mickey or Minnie or another official character was going to show up and toss my foul mouth right into Disney Jail. But somehow, my anger felt justified. And so I kept going.
“Take one step toward me,” I dared the man. “I wish you would. I wish you’d take one step toward me, because I would see to it that you were sprawled out on the deck long before you ever reached my space.”
I knew he wouldn’t budge, and he didn’t. Beneath their threatening veneer, abusers are cowards. Not to mention awful excuses for fathers. I wanted to put loving arms around that little girl and let her know that she did not deserve to be treated that way. I wanted to assure the mother that there was a better life out there waiting for her, a life beyond cyclical abuse. But I didn’t. I had done all that I could do, and I had to let that be enough.
I have no idea if my words—harsh though they might have been—changed that man. But I know that they changed me. For thirty-five years I had avoided all forms of confrontation and controversy because I was too insecure to draw attention to myself and too weak to take a stand. But that person wasn’t at Disney that day. A new me was there, and as I spoke each syllable that afternoon, I felt long-awaited strength start to rise.
On campus, Jillian had taught my fellow contestants and me how to defend ourselves using our bodies, through kickboxing and Tae Kwon Do techniques, and for the first time in my life, I actually felt like I could defend myself—and even a perfect stranger—if I had to. Something in me knew that if that man had taken two steps toward me he really would have been laid out at my feet, pleading for mercy and repudiating his evil ways.
I’m not a violent person, honest. But for once I was equipped to fight for what was right.
For once, the Julie that God had created stood immovably, wonderfully firm. For once, I felt a sensation rise up that could only be called my soul’s strength. Plus, if things had turned ugly in a jiffy, I could have grabbed Noah and just run for my life. Strength manifests itself in a number of ways, and one of them is knowing when to cut your losses and bail. But even if I fled on foot, I would have thanked God for stamina to sustain me. It’s stamina I did not possess even thirteen months ago.
Jillian Michaels explained to me that she always trains from the outside in. When a person learns how strong she is physically, she begins to feel powerful on the inside.
My mom lives exactly twelve miles away from our house, and the thought has hit me on several occasions that if for some odd reason I needed to grab my children and run to her house (if we were accidentally locked out of our condo, if our car wouldn’t start, if an armed madman was on the loose), I could actually get it done. I’d be pooped at the end of that two-and-a-half hours, sure. But eventually, we’d get there, no sweat. There is something very empowering about that realization. I call it the gift of strength.
In the movie version of John Grisham’s book, The Pelican Brief, Julia Roberts plays the character of Tulane University law student Darby Shaw. Struck by the recent assassinations of two very diverse Supreme Court justices, she decides to nose around and find out why they were killed.
She winds up uncovering an illegal plot between the president of the United States and an evil oil magnate who’s working overtime to bribe him into overturning environmental law, and she puts her findings in a brief that she shows to her law professor, who then hands the paper over to the FBI for examination. Soon afterward, the law professor is found dead.
Darby grows concerned that she’ll be the next target, and so she goes on the run. (But not before she enlists the aid of a newspaper reporter named Gray Grantham, who is played by the premier specimen of humankind himself, Denzel Washington. But I digress.) The greatest scene in the movie unfolds when Darby finds herself cornered in an old deserted barn and can hear the bad guy’s car drive up. She plots her escape and then flees through the fields, gunfire erupting at her heels.
What the bad guy doesn’t know is that day after day after day, Darby had run her little heart out on her living room treadmill—just in case her life was ever in danger. All that training finally paid off, and mine is finally paying off too.
Strength of character. Strength of person. Strength of my physical frame. These are the strengths that I now live out, and fat will never steal them from me.