WW Journey by AP reporter (Part II)

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That first week was easy. It was something new.

The weeks following became much more challenging as I balanced my diet with the demands of a job involving long hours and last-minute, far-flung assignments.

Based in Orange County, Calif., I have helped cover just about anything happening in the area. In October 2002, the Anaheim Angels were making their improbable streak toward the World Series.

For more than a month, I had managed to stay away from fast food. Suddenly I was faced with the overwhelming smell of hot dogs, pizza, nachos, popcorn. A giant cinnamon pretzel almost got me. I carried a bag of baby carrots to the stadium like a lifeline.

The problem was the Angels kept winning. So I found routes through the ballpark that bypassed food stands – the emergency exit staircases.

By the time the Angels won the World Series, I had lost 23.4 pounds – two bags of potatoes.

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During a vacation that fall, my mother, who is a medical transcriptionist, confessed: “I’ve been worried about you for years. Every time I transcribe these doctors’ notes about their morbidly obese patients and all their problems, I think about you.”

I asked her why she didn’t say something sooner.

“Chelsea, do you know how you would have reacted?” she asked.

Yes, I knew. My defensiveness came from enduring years of fingerpointing and teasing.

That vacation also taught me new lessons about the challenge of losing weight.

While traveling, it was impossible to pack meals, tough to get to a gym. I had to pick restaurants wisely. I bought day passes to gyms, power-walked and used the hotel pool.

By the end of my trip, my clothes were falling off.

It was mid-November, and I had lost 35 pounds. I was no longer carrying around a 4-year-old child, I told friends.

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As my weight dropped, my physical activity began to increase. I went from 20 minutes a day, three times a week, to at least 90 minutes, five to six times a week. I geared my days around getting to the gym.

Often, Martha and I met at a small workout room at my apartment complex. I felt safe there. There were no women with perfect bodies, no men to feel inadequate around and no waiting for the equipment.

Eventually, I joined a women’s gym and took Martha as a guest. She surveyed the room.

“Do you realize,” she said in a low voice, “we’re not the fattest people in the room anymore?”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

It’s hard to explain: I could feel the weight loss in my clothing, but couldn’t really see it.

Then, one day, I turned to get something out of a bathroom cabinet and caught a glimpse of my back in the mirror. Something was pushing up the skin. It took me a moment to realize it was my shoulder blade.

Suddenly, I could see the weight loss. I had knee caps, quadriceps, biceps, a collar bone.

By the end of February, I had lost 71.3 pounds – a fourth-grader.

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Part of what I cover sometimes is Hollywood.

Once, interviewing C.C. DeVille, the guitarist for Poison who’s known for his over-the-top antics, I was asking about his comeback from rock ‘n’ roll excesses: Drugs, alcohol and weight gain.

“You can be the biggest drug addict in the world, and they will still like you in this town. But if you’re fat, they treat you like a leper,” he said to me. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

I just nodded.

The problem is, I wanted to tell him, it wasn’t just Hollywood. It was everywhere: At work, where editors wondered if I was up to an assignment; among friends, who stepped around discussions of appearance; even at the grocery store, where the checkout clerk never looked me in the eye.

Every year, at Academy Awards time, I cover the post-Oscar parties, collecting celebrity tidbits. Everybody dresses up, something I dreaded.

This year, for the first time, I looked forward to it. I’d be able to pick a gown from the racks and racks of rentals available to thin women rather than the one rack for overweight women.

I never made it to the Oscar parties. Breaking news sent me elsewhere. But it didn’t matter.

I was wearing a size 12. By the first week of April, I had lost 80.1 pounds – a fifth-grader.

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I can’t pinpoint exactly when people started to treat me differently. But I remember moments.

One was meeting a longtime friend whom I hadn’t seen in a year. His one-word comment I’ll never forget.

“Wow!”

Another: I arranged to meet my mother at a coffee shop, and she craned to find me on the patio. I was sitting right in front of her.

I waved. After a smile, she started to cry.

Later, I was near tears when I finally saw my dad and he said, after hugging me, “I can put my arms all the way around you.”

On July 1, I broke the 100-pound mark. I lost a Hollywood actress, I joked.

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How? I’ve been asked that a lot.

It began with a fear of dying and then became a fear of failing. It began with a desire to change my life, and a realization that it is a lifetime journey.

Aboard the USS Lincoln, I climbed stair after stair, about six flights, to the deck, where my job was to get the crew’s perspective on President Bush’s visit.

Finally at the top, I noticed I wasn’t winded or sweating, wasn’t desperate to sit down. It took me a minute to realize: I was feeling normal.

And it has taken me awhile to understand that what I found along the way with my weight loss wasn’t just my health, it was my life.

I haven’t lost a former self, but I’ve shed some of her life. I sleep through the night, sit next to people on planes. I can work through the day and still have energy at night to go to the gym, or go on a date.

Today, I wear a size 8. And like the average American woman, I have a few more pounds I’d like to lose.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031115/D7UR5T701.html