My name is Kylie Chase and I used to be fat.

I also used to be a nerd, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Now, when I say I was fat, I don’t mean I needed to lose five pounds so I could look hot in a bikini. It was actually more like seventy-five pounds. And I needed to lose it so I could see my feet again, so my thighs wouldn’t squish together when I walked, so I could buy my clothes from the “skinny stores” instead of the plus-sized rack – you know, all those things you take for granted.
Because I’m here to tell you: Being fat sucks.

I’m not trying to be mean, or make anyone feel bad about themselves.

I have nothing against fat girls (that would be awfully hypocritical if I did). I just didn’t want to be one. I had been there, done that, for roughly ten years. I knew what being fat was like inside and out, backwards and forwards. I wanted to lose weight so I could find out how the other half lived.

Plus, I thought life would be immeasurably better if I looked a little bit less like me, and a lot more like Charlize Theron. 

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that you can be beautiful at any size. My best friend, Ruby Gallagher, is a plus-sized model and she’s one of the most gorgeous girls I’ve ever met.  The thing about Ruby is, she makes her size work for her. She knows how to stand, how to walk, how to hold her body so her curves look sexy and appealing, instead of lumpy and misplaced, the way mine always did. Ruby loves herself and it shows.

When I was fat I was just one big ball of self-hate.  

Which is why, at twenty-two years old, I decided to take the plunge, to stop talking about losing weight and finally do it.

I had some damn good motivation.

I wanted to slim down in my early twenties, while I was still young enough for it to matter. My “good years” were slipping away at an alarming pace. I was terrified I’d wake up tomorrow and be fifty, with my dream of being young and hot gone forever. I wanted to get thin before I was too old to wear cute, skimpy clothes. Too old to go skinny-dipping. Too old to pick up guys in bars (bars that I would also be dancing on top of, Coyote Ugly-style, because that’s the kind of stuff you do when you’re skinny, right?)

But most of all, I wanted to find out what life was like for the girls with the perfect bodies. Of course, now that I’m thin I don’t have a perfect body. That’s the thing they don’t tell you about losing weight – the stretch marks, the loose skin, the cellulite patches that won’t go away no matter how many times you slather them with $200 skin-smoothing lotion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let me tell you how I lost the weight. Then we can discuss what happened after.

As you might have guessed, shedding seventy-five pounds doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not the kind of thing that can be accomplished by a quick-fix diet. In my former life – you know, before I got thin – I used to laugh at all the weight-loss headlines splashed across the covers of glossy magazines. I needed those articles more than anybody, yet none of them applied to me:

Have rock hard abs in time for summer!

The Your-Butt-Will-Knock-‘Em-Dead Diet!

The miracle plan that will slim you down in 10 days or less!
Six weeks to thinner thighs!

Every month I browsed through the magazine racks, waiting to see a cover story that was actually geared towards people like me, people with real weight problems:

Go from size 20 to size 2! 
The Your-Butt-Will-Fit-in-an-Airplane-Seat-Diet!
The miracle plan for people who need to lose more than 10 pounds!
Six weeks till you can see your feet again!

During the ten years I was fat, not a day went by that I didn’t fantasize about losing weight (or, more specifically, I fantasized about the way my life would be once the scale registered a number below 140).

Yet, despite my preoccupation with slimming down, year after year I stayed fat.

When you’re overweight, it often feels like the world is made up of two parallel universes: the world of the skinny and the world of the large. Everyone in the Fat World has the same goal – to break free and unleash the thin version of themselves that’s waiting underneath.

But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t reach the Promised Land. I knew it was out there waiting for me. If only I could find my way….

T.S. Eliot may have measured out his days with coffee spoons, but for a long time my days were measured out with forks and plates and bowls. And with McDonald’s wrappers and pizza boxes and “Grab Bag” packets of Lays potato chips.

It was almost like falling on and off the wagon. I was either on a diet or I wasn’t. I was eating nothing, or I was eating everything in sight. If it was a “good day” then I was counting all of it – the calories in a piece of gum, the carbs in a glass of orange juice, the handful of sunflower seeds I’d grabbed from the break room at work. If it was a “bad day,” then I was counting nothing. On bad days, there was no balance, no order, no rules. I could have a slice of lemon meringue pie for breakfast, or a plate of garlic bread for dinner, or two desserts, or five cappuccinos. It didn’t matter.



There was no middle ground for me. I was either on or I was off. And I was off, it seemed, most of the time.   

So how did I finally break the cycle and reinvent myself as a thin girl?

The chain of events that lead to my weight loss was disappointingly simple. Disappointing, because I had wasted an awful lot of time trying to figure out what was staring me right in the face. It’s difficult to explain, but I’ll try.

There was a (somewhat evil) guy involved – but you probably already guessed there would be. Although, despite what you might suspect, he wasn’t the biggest part. (Noel Klimkowski – remember his name. We’re coming back to him later.)

The biggest part was me (and, no, that’s not a pun). The biggest part took place inside my brain.

It was a few days before graduation and I was sitting in my dorm room at the University of Chicago, alone and depressed and searching for a job that I feared would never materialize. I had stepped on the scale that morning, for the first time in over a year. I’d been avoiding it because I knew the number was going to be bad. But I couldn’t have predicted how bad. Let’s just say it started with a two and ended with a five. I’ll leave the middle number up to your imagination. 

So there I was, scrolling through Monster.com, bemoaning the fact that I was single and broke and fat. And that, in a matter of days, I would be just another unemployed college graduate, all degreed up with no place to go.

Then it happened.

I had, what I guess you would call, an epiphany.

This was it.

This was the life I had been dealt. I wasn’t going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly find my world reversed. I wasn’t going to miraculously grow a superfast metabolism or teleport into Jessica Alba’s body. Carrot sticks weren’t going to start tasting good; chocolate wasn’t going to start tasting bad. And I wasn’t going to get thin. It wasn’t going to happen for me. This was how I was going to spend my entire life: always wishing I could lose weight, but never actually losing it.

And if I didn’t wake up right this instant, then one day my life would be over and I’d realize that I had spent all of it, every blasted year, as a fat person. If I was ever going to do something about it, I had to do it now. It couldn’t be next summer, or next Monday, or next January 1st.

It had to be today.

Since I was a person of extremes, it only made sense that my diet had to be extreme, too.

So I made a deal with myself. I would work out six days a week, and I would eat “the things I was supposed to” and avoid the things I knew had made me fat.

I had the whole rest of my life to indulge in what I wanted; but for now I would abstain. Certain foods – macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, brownies – I didn’t trust myself around. So they were out. Period. Not so much as a morsel of these forbidden treats would pass my lips until I’d reached old age.

It was as simple as that. I would suffer for the next decade or two, avoiding all the foods I loved. And then I could eat how I wanted again. Once it all clicked, losing weight was amazingly simple – and my life was simply amazing.

Now here I am, twenty-nine years old with a successful business and size eight (size ten on a bad day) physique.

I have everything I’ve ever wanted – body-wise, at least – and no one can take that way from me. I’ve successfully left my fat life far, far behind.

At least I think I have….