Wide Load

WIDE ***********LOAD



She pictured everybody wearing their bathing suits showing off their tight abs and toned legs. Then she looked down and saw the rolls of fat hanging over the waist band of her two-piece and groaned.
“I can’t go to Sandy’s beach party looking like this!” Disgusted, she tore off the bathing suit and threw it on the floor. Grabbing her old, ratty yellow bathrobe off the back of the door, she slipped it on and looked into the full length mirror again. Maybe she could wear it to the party; at least it covered up all of the bumps and bulges.
She’d been chubby all through school. She remembered gym class and how the kids made fun of her clumsiness and called her Lardass. Always picked last for team sports, she could never run fast enough, never get a basket, never do anything right. Thank God those days were gone for good.
During her four years of university, she lost thirty pounds. The stress of working nights and carrying a full course load had helped; she didn’t have time to eat. But she gained twenty of it back after she graduated. Her weight went up and down like a frickin’ yoyo. She was never going to be skinny.
Oh wouldn’t she love to go to that party!
Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she picked up the latest issues of Vogue, Glamour and Elle from her nightstand. She thumbed through the pages eyeing the pictures, wishing she could look like any one of them just for a day.

She had two weeks. If she limited herself to 500 calories a day, spent an extra hour a day on the treadmill, drank eight glasses of water, and tossed in half an hour of Tai Bo, she could probably shed fifteen pounds, maybe even twenty. She wouldn’t be model thin, but at least she wouldn’t have to hide behind a beach towel.
Picking out the best full body shots, she started clipping out pictures. Once she was done, she made a collage and stuck it on her fridge. Then she taped a picture on every cupboard door, one on her bathroom mirror, and put another in a picture frame by her alarm clock.
Hanging her bathrobe on the back of the door, she changed into shorts, a tee shirt and dug her sneakers from under the bed. She picked up her iPod, slung it around her neck, adjusted the ear plugs and jumped onto her treadmill.
For the first forty minutes she walked, then increased her pace to a jog. Twenty minutes before the two hours were up, she got a pain in her side and her legs started to wobble, but she kept at it.
You can do it. You can do it. Bring it on! Show ‘em what you got!
For the next fourteen days, she biked to work instead of taking the bus, saving twenty minutes commute time each way. She jogged up seven flights of stairs to her office instead of taking the elevator. During her lunch, she took a brisk walk down to the waterfront and back, taking her banana and yogurt with her. With the extra time on her hands, she did ten minutes of stomach crunches and ten minutes of deep knee bends the minute she got home. Before supper, she spent an hour on her treadmill. After eating her garden salad with dressing on the side, half a melon and half a cup of wheat germ, she did her stomach crunches and deep knee bends again before spending another hour on the treadmill. After that, she did half an hour of Tai Bo and had a long soak in the tub. She went to bed early every night because she was too exhausted to do anything else.
The early morning sun streamed through her bedroom window the day of the party, waking her from a sound sleep. Her radio kicked in, with the dj yammering on about the high temperatures promised for later on in the day. Wasn’t it was a perfect day for a beach party?
Eagerly, she threw off the covers and dashed into the bathroom. She pulled the scales out from under the sink. She’d weighed herself yesterday, and only needed to lose one more pound to achieve her ideal weight.
As she stepped on the scales, she closed her eyes and said a prayer. Please God, please God…
Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes and looked down.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” She punched the air with both fists and ran out into the livingroom. Hysterical laughter echoed off the beige walls as she danced around the room. This was better than winning the lottery.
98 pounds…
She was going to a beach party.