That weakness, the inability I have to say no, is what got me talked into this. Of course, now I’m glad. But, at first, I felt that I’d been taken. With no money saved, I agreed to spend cash I didn’t have on a personal trainer. And all because I could no longer stand to look at myself in the mirror.
I’m no stranger to exercise or hard work to lose weight. But I’ve always avoided the type of gym in which I suddenly find myself spending hours of every week. These cavernous rooms filled with shiny aluminum and steel and large black plates and bars, I’ve always seen as places reserved for guys.
My trainer turned out to be a guy, muscled and tattooed, young, with black, spiky hair. Our sessions began with Adam measuring the circumference of my waist and bust, and pinching the layers of fat, a shocking humiliation that jolted me out of denial like a bolt of electric current short through my veins. We’ve been working together now for several months. At some point during every session, I glance over at Adam, my eyes wide, and say, “What?” This is after he tells me to pick up weights I know I can’t possibly lift or step up on a platform with a metal bar across my back. But like a well brought up child, I obey, and before I know it I’m pushing ninety pounds of weight with my feet or stepping up onto a platform with one foot, raising the other knee, as I hang onto nearly fifty pounds of iron in my hands.
My pants got longer first and then tight jackets became easier to button. In a short time, fat that had hung tenaciously on started to melt away. Every few weeks when Adam measured, pinched and weighed, I saw the proof in the numbers of how much I’d changed.
But that look in the mirror on a drizzly Saturday afternoon in the café was the first time I saw what I’d become. I saw that after years of being smothered in fat, I’d come back home.
Something struck me that day and I’ve been pondering it ever since. The woman I’d grown into – pudgy and soft, motherly and weak – had been shoved out the door by a sassy lady who dresses in fitted pants and jackets and her body looks sleek. But it’s more than the extra weight leaving that’s got me wondering where I’ve been. As I stand in front of the mirror doing curls or pushing dumbbells above my head, I notice the strings of muscles that run along the outer edges of my arms and the bones that shyly peek out below my neck. When I squat down and pull up weights, then send them flying behind and slowly ease them forward once again, I see that my mother is nowhere in sight.
In every session, Adam pushes me further than I think I can go. He is young enough to be my son, so his belief in me and optimism makes sense. Each session, I go along, and find the weight that was at first too heavy has quickly become something I can easily move. Adam teaches me what my mother never knew – that when you take a step, it becomes so much easier to take another one.