Fat Chance Read Free

the kitchen, an addict in search of her fix.
FAT-CAMP DREAMS AND TWINKIE WISHES
    H aving a cinnamon-roll addiction doesn’t exactly contribute to a figure that’s svelte. I’d ballooned to more than two hundred pounds by the time I auditioned for
The Biggest Loser
, but interestingly, at five-feet-two-inches tall I remained the smallest person in the running for the cast that season. The irony wasn’t lost on me, the one who always had been the Large Marge in the room.
    Despite my excitement at the prospect of being on national TV, auditioning wasn’t my idea. In the summer of 2006, my girlfriend Melissa found out that producers from
The Biggest Loser
were hosting an open casting call in our hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. Shortly thereafter, my cell phone rang, and I spotted Melissa’s number on the screen. “Julie!” she exclaimed as soon as I picked up. “You’re
not
going to believe who’s in town!”
    After indulging a few of my unsuccessful guesses, she enthusiastically spat out the answer: “
The Biggest
Loser
! They’re doing an open casting call!”
    “Really?”
I cheered.
    “Yes!” said skinny, never-has-struggled-with-her-weight Melissa. “And … well, I think you’d be …
great
… on that show.”
    “Girl, are you calling me fat?” I accused playfully.
    In a tiny voice that matched her tiny self: “Well …”
      
    I first started watching
The Biggest Loser
during Season 2, and while I could relate to the contestants, I didn’t see myself
or
them as “morbidly obese,” to quote the show’s announcer. I focused so much on what their “after” state would look like that I guess the “before” reality somehow faded away. These people were polished and pretty pursuers of a completely new life, and I couldn’t help but cheer them on.
    That season, I resonated most with Suzy Preston—a wisecracker whose witty remarks and animated expressions had me captivated from the start. She had short, blonde hair like me and at five-feet-four with ninety-five pounds to lose, we seemed to share similar dimensions. I’d watch Suzy and the other contestants compete in challenges, fight through temptations, work out every now and then and think, “That’s something I could actually do!” Much like a high school swimmer watching Michael Phelps go for gold in the Olympics, I saw the people on the screen living my dream and wanted more than anything to join them.
    I loved watching
The Biggest Loser.
I’d stop by the grocery store each week, pick up a new snack, and curl up on the couch to watch every episode. During challenges, I’d look at my husband Mike and say, “I could do
that
.”
    Yeah, right, Miss Big Talker who’s sitting on her big ol’ butt.
    Since childhood, that “dream” had been to go to fat camp. My chubbiest friend at the time, Tammie, and I even made a pact that if either of us ever won the lottery, we’d take the other one to fat camp. Of course, we
also
agreed that we’d probably be the most rebellious campers the camp had ever seen. We’d be the ones plotting ways to break into the snack shack late at night and eat our way through boxes of Snickers and Twinkies, figuring when you’re as rich as we’d be, you could eat whatever you want.
    Tammie had struggled with her weight as long as I had, and both of us knew that the only way we were going to drop a hundred pounds each was if we signed up for a massive kick in the pants. These days, people look to gastric-bypass surgery or a Lap-Band insertion. Back then, assuming you didn’t care to have your jaw wired shut, fat camp was thedo-or-die choice. But honestly, what’s more fun than camp? With that rhetorical question in mind, I gathered up my purse, my courage and my assumptions about life on
The Biggest Loser
, and I headed for the casting call.
MAKING THE CUT
    I asked half a dozen friends and family members to come with me to my
The Biggest Loser
audition, but every one of them declined. They loved the show