In 2004, The Biggest Loser premiered on NBC. I was twenty-six years old. 

I was invested from the very first episode. It was my first experience with a “reality” show, and I found it profound and entertaining. One of the initial reactions I had, though, was of disbelief. I distinctly remember watching a woman break down into tears in the middle of a workout. While gasping for air she cried, “I just don’t know how I got here.” Her statement struck me and I thought, “How do you not know that you are a hundred pounds or more overweight?” 

Ten years later, I was more than a hundred pounds overweight, and I had no idea how I had gotten there.

I had subtly but gradually gained ten pounds a year. Every year I told myself that I would lose those ten pounds and more. In the meantime, let me just go ahead and buy a few new things for my wardrobe so that I don’t look like a busted can of biscuits when I leave the house. 

I put the things that no longer fit me into clear bins and slid them under my bed. “See you again soon,” I promised those favorite torn jeans. But the next time those jeans saw the light of day, it was to make room for the even larger size of clothing I could no longer squeeze into.

Every time that I got a new wardrobe, I temporarily felt a little better about my appearance. At least I no longer felt like I was wearing a corset. A year later when the new wardrobe began to squeeze uncomfortably, my frustration would bubble to a head and I would declare that I had had enough. It was time for a fucking change! 

I’ll start on Monday. 

I would spend the days leading up to Monday perfecting my plan, charting out every move in a new fitness journal. The journal was almost as exciting as the plate of loaded nachos and draft beer sitting in front of me. Hey, I had to get a couple splurges in before the deadline! Because when Monday came around, honey, look out! I would be a changed woman! 

I would fantasize about forty Mondays from then, when I would be in need of a new wardrobe… a much smaller wardrobe. I would have a nearly completed journal that the trainers on The Biggest Loser would be proud of. 

I could see into my future where I sat in a local restaurant, sipping water and waiting on my tofu appetizer. I would take time to proudly peruse my stats. But something would trigger my nose and my eyes would follow the scent to the server delivering the plate of loaded nachos to the poor fat woman in the corner booth. I would pitifully look across the room in her direction and think, “Oh sweetheart, I was there too. Bless your heart, aren’t you miserable?” 

But forty Mondays in the future always found me as the fat woman sitting in the booth, splurging, before the next big gear-up to a full-proof plan for weight loss. Bless my heart. Was I miserable? Yes. Yes I was. I was very miserable. 

What I wasn’t prepared for was, the heavier I got, the harder it was to take the weight off. It seemed counterintuitive. Losing ten pounds should be easier when you’re fifty, sixty, seventy pounds overweight. Even little changes should make losing ten pounds like child’s play. I hadn’t braced for the fact that my increasing weight… would make losing weight seemingly impossible. 

I tried almost every latest fad. I did Adkins, which morphed into Keto. I adopted the Mediterranean diet. I fasted and tried portion control. I counted calories, then carbs. I exercised and relied on trackers to tell me how much I could eat that day. But nothing I did took the weight off. So my final alternative was… to love the skin I was in. 

I came of age in the 1990s, a time when Playboy was the beacon of class and a woman’s natural curves were far from celebrated. When I was twenty-one, I was 5’8” and 130 pounds. I constantly felt pressure to lose weight so that I could fit into a size two or less. Every magazine, geared toward males or females, had an impossibly thin female on the cover, her ribs criticized as bulky. I didn’t grow up with Lizzo. I grew up with Kate Moss.

I tried to love the skin I inhabited, I really did. But I struggled horribly to embrace the size of my body. And I wore my insecurity like a neon-lined fuckin’ billboard. I no longer carried myself with confidence, and a fat joke told in a crowded room could render me crying in the bathroom.

Still, there were rare moments when I had temporary relief from the constant pain and pressure my fat migraine manufactured. 

In 2015, Lane Bryant rocked the fashion world with #ImNoAngel, and I was fleetingly thrilled. Lane Bryant had long been known as a clothier that catered to the “larger” women in society, and I had been shopping at Lane Bryant for years before their marketing blitz. But it was still a store that I went into with my head down. 

After the hashtag launched, I walked into Lane Bryant proudly. The huge photos gracing the store’s front showed full-bodied women in the latest fashions… and lingerie. Lingerie! Prior to that, lingerie was only shown on Victoria’s Secret models… the same Victoria’s Secret models who later admitted to being prescribed and taking “bath water meth” to stay impossibly skinny so that they didn’t lose their jobs. 

Yet I continued to dreadfully struggle with self-image. No matter how many women I saw brazenly showing off their curves, I couldn’t muster that moxie. In my head, it didn’t matter that the world was changing and beginning to adopt a new way of thinking of beauty standards. I tried, but I simply couldn’t change what my brain told me when my eyes saw my reflection in the mirror. 

Things finally… FINALLY began to change for me in March of 2021. But I had to go through hell first.

My journey into getting healthier began with discomfort… then turned into horrible pain. 

It began with a twinge under my left shoulder. It graduated to a subtle pain… more of an ache than anything. Then it became a constant pinch, and suddenly, almost overnight, the pain turned to a throb. Finally I felt like an ice pick was being repeatedly shoved into my back. I was terrified that I was having a heart attack or a stroke. After all, I was at my heaviest and I had gotten there in part to some routine binge-drinking. 

My husband took me to Urgent Care, where the doctor on duty told me that a cortisone shot should do the trick to end the inflammation and pain. I remember the nurse coming into the room saying, “Drop your pants, honey, you’re about to be out of pain.” At that point I had so much discomfort, I would have stripped naked. She gave me the shot and my husband drove me home. I melted into the couch waiting for the pain to subside… 

But it didn’t. 

Two days later I went to my doctor. I was in so much pain that I cried every time I tried to lift my head. He said, “I think you have slipped discs in your neck. I want you to begin physical therapy, but get an MRI to be sure.”  

I began physical therapy and scheduled my MRI as soon as I returned home from the doctor’s office. The MRI confirmed what my doctor suspected. Discs in my neck had slipped and had come to rest on a nerve in my back. 

I began to feel better with physical therapy, but it took a long time to get that nerve to stop sending pain signals to my brain. I still needed pain medication and I was dangerously close to being out, so I scheduled another appointment with my doctor. 

My doctor is not subtle… which is precisely why I like him so much. 

I went through the usual motions prior to his entering the room. I had my temperature and blood pressure taken, and I had to get on the scale. I told the nurse that we could skip that part. She said, “Would if I could, love, hop on up.” The number shocked me.

I waited for the doc to come into the room while I said truly heinous things to myself. He greeted me, then sat down in front of me and asked, “How’s the pain?” 

“Better,” I said, “but far from gone.”

“Been going to therapy?”

“Three times a week. I won’t miss it for anything.” 

“Good. Because I can’t give you any more pain pills yet.” 

I think I stopped breathing for a moment.

“Doc, I can’t. I… I…” 

He held his hand up to stop me. 

“In two days I can prescribe more, but it has to be two days from now. Pain meds are a different monster. I can’t make any exceptions anymore.”

I wanted to argue, but I knew better.

“You can take up to 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. That will have to tide you over until your prescription is ready for pickup.” 

I acquiesced, but I told him, “Doc, emotionally and mentally… I’m the strongest bitch you’ll ever meet. But I may be the weakest when it comes to physical pain.”

“I can’t—” 

“Doc, listen to me. I CANNOT take physical pain. A hangnail will ruin my day.” 

He nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but paused. I could tell that he was mulling over his next statement. He was being uncharacteristically thoughtful with his words.

Finally he said, “Well then, Audrey, I have bad news for you. If you keep gaining weight, pain is all you are going to know moving forward. You’re getting older. You need to be getting thinner and stronger, not the opposite.” 

Ouch. 

But if I minded his bluntness I wouldn’t have returned to him after our first meeting. 

I went home and thought very seriously about what he’d said to me. Yes, it hurt—a lot. Almost as much as the raw nerve still throbbing. The truth was very tough to hear. But my core knew that it was the truth, and it was time for a change. 

It was then that I began to embark upon a true weight loss journey. 

And let me be as brutally honest as my doctor…

I have survived enough in life to fill a five-hundred-page autobiography. I have had to bid farewell to friends, lovers, pets, and parents. I have existentially battled with everything from career to spirituality. But weight loss is one of the hardest things I have ever done. 

I began very slowly, and I continue to move very slowly. Every month I feel as though I take two steps forward… and one and three-fourths backward. But I am committed to ending the self-injury. Getting older is hard enough without making it even harder on myself. 

I knew I had to get serious and stop with the fad bullshit. I was drawn to an exercise spot called “CycleBar.” Imagine my disappointment when I found out that the “Bar” in CycleBar didn’t offer shots after your ride, but rather referred to a weighted bar that instructors use to incorporate a killer upper body workout into the class. 

I did my first class in August of 2021. I was the oldest and fattest one in the room, and halfway through the warmup I was breathing so heavily I’m sure the gorgeous, petite athletes on either side of me wondered if they would even be able to lift me when I went over. 

I too had been an athlete… in high school. Twenty-five years removed from high school found me getting winded going up a single flight of stairs. 

Trust me, I wanted a quick fix. I wanted a miracle drug. But I had gone down all those routes. It was time to practice what I preached to my young daughters. They tend to get overwhelmed, and I always remind them of my favorite quote from the beloved Desmond Tutu. “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

CycleBar is a forty-five-minute trip from my house. Every time I left the house, I would come up with no less than fifty reasons as to why I should turn around and go back home. Sometimes I would even sit in CycleBar’s parking lot and talk myself out of the class. The devil on my shoulder dangled a bottle of wine and a charcuterie board. But the angel on the other shoulder almost always yelled louder, and I begrudgingly got my ass on the bike.

After a couple of months of showing up, I could feel myself getting stronger. I could also tell a huge difference in my emotions when I finished a class. I was singing while driving again. I was less inclined to drown my depression at a local bar. I had a clearer head, I was happier… but I still wasn’t losing any weight. 

As 2022 approached, I decided to start tracking four things every day: my weight, my exercise, my food intake, and my alcohol intake. I had used different weight loss trackers in the past but after seeing a commercial for Weight Watchers, I thought, “What the hell. It can’t hurt anything.” I downloaded the app, answered several questions, entered my weight, and was given a daily allowance in the form of “points.” 

I was given twenty-five points, but vegetables were “free,” as were potatoes and avocados. Potatoes were free! Granted, everything I liked to load onto a potato could use up all the day’s points in a single sitting, but I would just back off of all that shit! I could stay well within twenty-five points! 

The last fad I had tried before this was intermittent fasting. For sixteen hours a day, I would only consume black coffee or water. But during the other eight hours, I could eat whatever I wanted! It doesn’t get much more simple than that! So why didn’t the weight come off? Especially now that I was a regular at CycleBar?

Well, let’s just scan my favorite “healthy snack” and see… 

I’ve never met an olive I didn’t like, and an absolute favorite olive of mine was the Cerignola olive. I could sit down to watch an episode of Yellowstone and polish off an entire jar of Cerignola olives before Beth pissed someone off. But hey, avocados were free, and they’re known as a “good fat.” I’ve always heard that olives are in that “good fat” camp too. How bad could a harmless little olive be? 

When I used my Weight Watchers app to scan the bar code on the back of the jar, I found out. I almost choked on the pit of the fruit I had just stripped of its flesh. 

My beloved Cerignola olives were two points… per olive. The jar from which I was fishing my next treat showed that there were thirty olives in total. I had just consumed almost three days’ worth of points on a snack! Jesus Christ! What else had I been consuming, thinking that I was being healthy in the process? 

I went to the cupboard and began to scan every bar code I could find. By the time I was finished, I was practically in tears. I had purchased low-carb dried shiitake mushrooms from Costco to replace my favorite salt and vinegar potato chips. With one eye closed with fear, I scanned the bar code on the back of the bag. One ounce (about four mushrooms) was four points. They’re fucking mushrooms! What the actual fuck?

Intermittent fasting mattered not if I was consuming days’ worth of points in a single snack sitting. And then it really hit me. Dear sweet baby Jesus, what would a bottle of wine be in points? 

But hey, I was not only keeping up in CycleBar, I was beginning to give those skinny bitches a run for their money! In a CycleBar class, every now and then, they will show the leaderboard to the group. My name is uncommon—these days I encounter people named “Aubrey” far more than “Audrey.” So when I noticed that another Audrey was often in the same class, I took note. I saw which bike she was on, identified her—and shrank a bit in my skin. She looked like she played basketball or volleyball for the university. She was at least six feet tall and belonged on a runway in Milan. There was no way she couldn’t smoke me in every class… 

… but she wasn’t. I was keeping up with her, toe to toe. On a rare occasion I would even beat her in the stats. 

All of that hard work had to give me hella points, right? 

Wrong. 

Whether I beat Audrey or not, a 45-minute spin class, resulting in fifteen hard miles spun, would only credit me four points on Weight Watchers (or two olives).

And so there it was. I couldn’t spin the weight off. I couldn’t fast the weight off. I couldn’t fad diet the weight off or take a miracle pill. If I was going to lose weight, I would have to do it through being brutally honest about what I was putting into my body. 

I joined Weight Watchers in March of 2022, and as of December of 2022, I have lost thirty pounds. I feel incredible about the weight loss, but I still have seventy pounds to go and it hasn’t gotten any easier with time. 

What has gotten easier is convincing myself to get on the bike. Getting stronger has made me feel like a Marvel superhero. Being able to go up a flight of stairs without pain or lack of air makes me feel incredible. The other day I sat down in a theater and crossed my right leg over my left knee… because I could! I had gotten so bulky, the only thing I could cross while sitting were my ankles. I could have cried with joy. I never thought that crossing my legs was a little thing that would make fireworks go off in my mind, but there I was celebrating as though I had gained a hard-fought independence. Well… hadn’t I?  

CycleBar (which has now turned into Peloton at home as well) and Weight Watchers are the two things that FINALLY worked for me… but this is by no means an endorsement for either one. Instead, this writing is an endorsement for getting brutally honest about those repetitive, impending Mondays and disgraceful bins under the bed. We always hear “Life is too short.” But it gets a hell of a lot longer, dragging on and on, when you are unhappy in your skin.

I still have a very long way to go, but at least now I have momentum… and a fitness journal I am proud to show off.