Free Secrets of a Former Fat Girl by Lisa Delaney Page A

sneaking food every chance I got.
    The worst thing was that every time I failed to keep my vow to lose weight, I disappointed not only myself but my parents. To me, people-pleasing middle child me, that made my failure all the more devastating. I had gotten everyone’s hopes up, not just mine, and then shot them right back down. Why put all of us through it again?

    That was my thinking when, years later, I finally started my journey to becoming a Former Fat Girl. I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone—neither my family nor my friends—about going to Jazzercise. After all, I would have to describe to them exactly what Jazzercise was, and I could imagine the visions they would conjure up. The fact that I was exercising at all would seem strange enough, let alone frolicking around in tights with my legs looking like bratwurst bulging out of its casings.
    The only one who knew was Tracey, who got me hooked on the class in the first place. Tracey understood the whole Fat Girl thing because she was one, too. She knew what it was like to feel that someone was constantly monitoring you, just waiting for you to screw up. It was an unwritten, unspoken vow between us: I won’t play that game if you won’t.
    I was living in Austin, and my parents were two and a half hours away by car in Houston, so it wasn’t as if I had to sneak around for fear of being caught or anything. Even so, it was a struggle for me not to say anything, especially after I became a regular at Jazzercise. For one thing, I was excited about this new development in my life. I was discovering a part of myself, a seed of confidence, that I never knew was there. I wanted to gush about it to someone and even brag a bit. I yearned to see my parents’ faces light up with that hope, that pride, that approval I knew they would feel at the idea that I was again trying to wrench myself out of that unhappy, unhealthy place I had been in for so long.
    But I held back from them, from my brothers, and from my other friends. It was hard to hide for too long, of course. As I started to lose weight, it became obvious that I was doing something differently. Even so, I said very little. If anyone asked, I responded in the most nonchalant, off-the-cuff kind of way: “Oh, I’ve been going to some exercise class,” as if it were the most normal thing in the world when it was anything but. It was like saying you were “just going shopping” when you were really jetting off to Paris for the fall fashion shows.
    I simply didn’t trust myself to stick with it, to follow through. After all, I had never followed through in the past. Then when I started running, I became even more secretive. Running seemed so much more athletic and out of reach for a Fat Girl like me. I was no Olympian; who was I to think I could run? Not only did I go to the track under the cover of dark (note: not recommended for safety reasons; I never said I was smart about it), but I ran alone. For a very long time—long after I had started running every day, five miles a day, on the trail around Lake Austin that “real” runners frequent—I refused to run with anyone else. Frankly, I was afraid I’d be too slow or look too stupid. I was afraid of being judged and not measuring up. That sounds crazy, right? After all, other runners who happened to be on the trail at the time could see how fast or slow I was going, how goofy I looked in my shorts and tights. (Yes, I wore tights under my running shorts for years, afraid to let loose my thighs.)
    It’s funny, though. The strangers I could deal with. Somehow I talked myself into the idea that if I didn’t make eye contact with the other runners passing me on the trail, I would be invisible to them. Looking them in the eye let them into my world, into my head, where they could pull up a chair, sit down, and proceed to destroy my budding confidence by ticking off all the reasons I didn’t