A new season of "Biggest Loser" is underway. I confess, I have yet to watch the first episode, but it's ready and waiting on my DVR. I am a little bit of a reality TV junkie. "The Jersey Shore", "Cake Boss", "Hoarders", "Ruby", "Real Housewives", "Toddlers & Tiaras"...I'm especially a fan if watching the show makes my life look like less of a trainwreck (see: most of the aforementioned programs).
"Biggest Loser" does a little of that for me, but it also makes you feel so darn emotional. I can't watch it in front of my husband anymore, as he mocks me mercilessly when I cry as the 400 pound guy gets up on the scale for the first time to find that he's lost 5% of his body weight in one week. It slays me! It's motivational, too. Especially now that, in terms of comparable body mass, I can relate to some of the contestants, it's easy to imagine what I would like in spandex bike shorts and sports bra, bat wings a-flapping off my arms, and every single culinary indescretion I've ever had screaming from my ass, hips and thighs. Ugh. Terrifying. If that doesn't make you want to put down the cupcake, I don't know what will.
Several years ago, I had a friend who was also obese. I always thought of her as much larger than me because of the different ways we carried our weight. The reality was I only weighed about 30 pounds less than her, and it seems like once you pass 270, 30 pounds is just a drop in the bucket. While it's true I look fat, I don't think I look as fat as 324 pounds should. I carry most of my weight in my legs, so I still have a little bit of a defined waist, and my face looks relatively thin. I'm also a little bit muscular (although I think the fat to muscle ratio is swiftly changing). All of this was detrimental as I gained weight - I think I would have snapped to attention faster if I started developing an enormous gut or triple chins. I was able to lie to myself about how I looked as long as the mirror (or the camera) didn't travel too far south. But I digress.
This friend invited me to participate with her in an open casting call for the "Biggest Loser" taking place in our city. My first reaction was, "I'm not fat enough to be on that show!". Then I started to think about it. Oh yes. I was. In fact, I weighed MORE than many of the female contestants. So I agreed. My pride was hurt, but I wasn't about to pass up a chance for $250k and some of the best trainers in the world. I began to gather all of the information that was required and set to work on writing up a witty application sure to impress the casting agents.
The hardest thing to do was to put together pictures. They wanted to see some photographic evidence of your weight history. I started with the recent pictures, snapshots I would never post on Facebook or share with friends because of how unflattering they were. Then I started to go back, and it was painful to see how much I had changed. How I had let myself go from the happy, healthy teenager in the pictures to the dumpy, tired twentysomething I was then. If I had been able to make a flipbook of the photos, you would have seen the body expand, the shoulders begin to drop a bit, the smile fade, the skin go from glowing to sallow with dark undereye circles, the hair begin to go limp and lackluster. I wasn't just overweight, I was unhealthy.
Even so, I was still somewhat in denial about being fat. As we sat down in the audition room, the friendly, charismatic (and naturally thin/gorgeous) casting folks from California began to engage us in a little conversation. It was pretty low-stress, as they were easy to talk to. I continued to think, as the questions came out, that I wouldn't have much to share. But I recall one question about dating - he asked if we were ever sought out by "chubby chasers" at the bar, or if we got hit on because guys thought overweight girls would be easy to score with. Good lord, I had never even considered such a thing. The idea that strangers might look at me and think of me as "the fat friend", well that was just too much. That really stuck with me.
After the auditions, I withdrew just a little bit. I've always been a fairly social person, lots of friends, and have enjoyed going out on the town. Something about that conversation during the audition caused me to start turning down invitations, coming up with excuses to stay home. I became extremely self-conscious about my appearance and prefered to bundle up in sweatshirts and jeans and watch movies at home by myself. I didn't want anyone to think "that fat girl" was trying to put herself out there, or to be the butt of any jokes from that group of ex-frat guys at the bar.
Anyway, we never did hear back from the "Biggest Loser" - and in the end I'm pretty grateful that we were never on the show. I can't imagine having all of America see me at my worst. I probably would have been that girl that ends up flying off the treadmill in the first workout with Jillian, and skinny bitches everywhere would laugh as they watched me from their living rooms, nibbling on fat-free yogurt.
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