A size-16 shadow: you can lose 50 pounds. but you can never really lose the image of your old, overweight self - Timeout

Shape, Dec, 2003 by Rene L. Todd

I had a brand-new size-6 Little Black Dress and a new boyfriend to go with it. "You look ravishing," he said when he picked me up, and I felt a satisfying ping of perfection. So what if it was just my law firm's Christmas party? Or that we were seated at a table of curmudgeonly partners who were barely aware of my existence as a 26-year-old junior associate? Size 6. New boyfriend. Ravishing.

"Would you like some dessert tonight?" the waiter asked.

A partner--let's call him Mr. Tact--leaned toward my boyfriend. "I know Rene won't be having any dessert," he said. "Not after all that weight she lost."

I understand, logically, that the entire room did not actually stop and stare, but my boyfriend did look at me with surprise. I was sure that, in his eyes, I was blowing up like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, zipper popping, cheeks and belly growing round and fat. Now he knew. I wasn't really a size 6. This wasn't really my body. I was a size 16 who had somehow, miraculously (after a year of eating healthfully and exercising regularly) made good.

"I lost a whole person," I knew a woman to exclaim after losing 100 pounds. But you never really lose her, I wanted to say. She's still there: in old photographs, in the minds of people who shoved you in the pigeonhole labeled "overweight." The new you stands in the (larger) shadow of the woman you used to be.

Even now--more than 10 years after that Christmas party--a friend still remarks, "You lost a ton of weight" when we talk about law school or come across an old photograph of us together. He means to be nice. But each time he says it, I wince. For starters, there is the "ton." I lost 50 pounds--still 1,950 pounds shy of the full load.

Worse, I know that she can hear him--that "shadow" woman I used to be. His compliment is at her expense, implicitly saying to her--the younger, heavier version of me--"You needed to lose a ton of weight." It makes me aware how much I was judged when I was overweight, and how vulnerable I had been.

In many ways, I was better off not knowing. I believed that people saw past my size, that I could still look attractive and wear beautiful clothes. That people saw me, rather than someone who was "overweight."

And to some degree that was true. One friend didn't even notice I'd lost weight. I had to tell her. "Really?" she asked, amazed. "I thought you always looked nice." Perversely, my feelings were hurt, until I realized that, to her, I was a pleasant face over a coffee cup, a chatting voice on the telephone. My body was just the thing that carried me around.

As for my then-new boyfriend? As we walked home after the party, Christmas lights bright above us, I asked whether he felt any different about me, knowing that I had once been overweight. He took my hand.

"It makes me feel a little better, actually," he said. "You're smart, you have a great job, a nice life. And a great body. It's reassuring to know that you have to work at it like the rest of us."

Reader, I married him.

Rene L. Todd, a freelance writer in Bethesda, Md., still owns the Little Black Dress.