Act Two, It's a Small World After All.

So when we were all talking about what wanted to put on this week's show, we come to the subject of fat suits. And one of our staffers, Elna Baker, blurted out, if she put one of those on today, she'd feel like herself again.

Elna is one of those rare people who has lost a lot of weight. She lost 110 pounds, and she's kept it off for years and years. Says she grew up being told the same thing that lots of fat girls are told-- that she'd never have a husband or a family if she stayed fat.

She'd never got the job she wanted if she stayed fat. The job she wanted in her case was she wanted to be an actress. Her grandfather would tell her flat out, nobody wants to see a fat girl on TV.

But she didn't believe it. She thought it was an exaggeration. She's a hard worker, good attitude. She just figured she'd just make it work. Then it didn't work. Here's Elna.

Elna Baker
A year out of college, I took stock of my life. It was not going as planned. I was unemployed, and I had never been in a relationship. I tried for the life I wanted, hard. I got a scholarship to NYU. I was a huge flirt with lots of guy friends. But it felt like there was an invisible force blocking me from achieving my dreams.

Sure, I'd think, is it because I'm fat? But then I'd think, don't be paranoid. I refused to believe that people were that shallow. It had to be more complicated. I tried to put my finger on it, but I just couldn't figure it out. Once I lost weight, I realized, it was all because I was fat.

It felt like that famous Eddie Murphy sketch on Saturday Night Live, where he goes undercover in whiteface and gets treated way better. He rides the city bus. And when the last black rider gets off, music starts. A cocktail waitress in a sequined dress hands out martinis. That's what I felt like-- like this whole other world for thin people had existed alongside mine, a world they've been keeping a secret from me.

When I was fat and I walked down the street, people would stare. I'd hear comments that I would ignore. Occasionally someone would shout something out at me. In this new world, when I walked down the street, attractive men and women would do something to me they'd never done before. They would look me up and down, and then they would nod their heads. Thin people nod at each other?

One day, I went to pay for my groceries at a deli and realized I was short, off by a full $10. I looked at my pile and began debating what would stay and what would go. The deli guy waved his hand. "Just take it," he said. Take it? I walked out cautiously, not sure what had just happened.

So I tried the same thing at a different deli, this time on purpose. I picked out more items than I had money for. Then I faked debating which ones to choose. "Just take it," the man behind the counter said. Soon it was a scam I ran all over the city. It wasn't about saving money. I wanted to know, is this is a thing? It's a thing.

Of course, I'd lost the weight to fix two specific problems. I wanted to get a job and find love. Old Elna looked for a job for a year and a half. New Elna was offered work a month after she hit her goal weight, an entry-level position on an actual TV show.

I was hired to be a page at the Letterman show. My job was to walk down the line of people waiting to go into the theater and divide them into three groups-- dots, generals, and CBS twos. The dots were the beautiful people. They got seated in the first three rows. Usually those were the only rows you saw on television.

Generals were average people. They sat in the order they arrived. CBS two was for fat people, elderly people with a visible illness, people who looked like they might be disruptive, and goths. I'd scribble CBS two on their ticket. And that was code for, seat them in the back three rows at the balcony-- the nosebleed seats. I'd seen Letterman a few years earlier. I was near the front of the line and somehow ended up in the nosebleeds. I remember being confused by it. The day I was trained, I put it together.

I lost weight so fast-- close to 100 pounds in 5 and 1/2 months-- that it was like going from one human to another. Here's how I did it. I enrolled in a weight loss clinic. The doctor gave me a list of foods I could eat and told me I had to exercise daily. Your diet will be aided by medicine, he told me-- potassium, serotonin, dopamine, a multi-vitamin, and then phentermine, which would help suppress my appetite.

I look down at the little colored tablets. Skittles, I thought, only the opposite. I began my diet with a prayer for grace. I was Mormon then. I asked God to give me the same willpower Jesus had when he fasted in the wilderness for 40 days. I prayed for his self-control.

Then I took the first pill, phentermine, which is similar to amphetamines-- speed. I'd never done drugs before. Remember, I was Mormon. I'd never even tried coffee. I didn't know how a substance could alter your state of being. And so when I became so focused, so driven, so able not to eat, and so into cleaning, I was certain my prayer had been answered. I was sure it was God. I kept a journal during that time and recently read from it on stage.

Elna Baker
This is from my journal. So I'm doing it. I'm taking control over my body. In the last month and 10 days, I have lost 30 pounds. I cannot deny Heavenly Father's role in this whole process.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

I am receiving divine help. I basically feel like I am possessed by an alien.

[LAUGHTER]

Now I just have to keep going. And this is after-- so after I'd lost, like, 60 pounds, it was like the racial breakdown. I would walk down the street. Black dudes noticed me. 10 more pounds, Hispanic guys noticed me. 20 more pounds, white guys noticed me. And Asian guys have never noticed me!

[LAUGHTER]

I have never been thin enough for Asian men.

I'd only been kissed a handful of times when I was fat. Each ended with the guys saying the same exact thing-- "don't tell anyone about this." I was hoping that losing weight might change all that. And it did. New Elna kissed 16 guys in eight weeks. I know this, because I drew a map in my journal of the city and marked the location of each kiss with an X, geolocating it.

Nine months in, I started seeing a guy from my building-- a kindergarten teacher who left love notes on my door. And we started to really fall for each other. One night, he told me, "I liked you from the first moment I saw you." He was referring to the building barbecue we'd hung out at a few weeks earlier.

But we'd met long before that barbecue. We'd lived in the same small building for four years. One day, when I was still fat, I'd knocked on his door and asked to borrow a hammer. When I brought it back, we talked for 20 minutes.

After that, I knew him. He was Andy in 3C. We nodded when we saw each other in the hallway. Now he had no idea that girl was me.

We dated for another two months, but I couldn't let it go. It just spoiled everything. I thought we were falling in love. I thought it was real. But it was based on the way I looked. He couldn't even see me when I was fat. I didn't matter until I was this size.

The attention I got from men, I wrote in my journal, I wish I could just enjoy it. Instead it made me sad. It was the unfairness that got to me. Old Elna longed for someone like Andy and never got him. She tried so hard for everything that I now got so easily.

New Elna didn't have to be a good person. I just had to be thin. It made the world seem so bleak, like this is the system? Really? It made me less hopeful about people. When guys came on to me, it didn't feel like it was about me. I could be anyone. It made it hard to trust people.

Can I just say another word about this? It's just such an unbalanced reward system. It took so much more kindness, hard work, and ingenuity to be a person in the world when I was fat. All this took was not eating.

Here's something that surprised me. It wasn't enough to take diet pills. It wasn't enough to lose the weight of an entire adult woman from my own body. Once I did all that, I realized I still wasn't actually thin. Not really. After dropping the weight, I had so much extra skin that I could lay on my side and pull it a half foot in either direction.

For a long time, I tried to get the skin to go away with lotions and exercise. Eventually, I resorted to surgery-- in fact, four different surgeries. They included something called a circumferential body lift. They made an incision around my entire waist, cut out a 6-inch belt of skin, and then sewed me back together.

I also got a thigh lift. They cut up my legs from my knees to my groin and took out as much skin as they could. Now I have a scar that runs completely around my waist, as if a magician cut me in half. I also have two scars running up my legs like inseams.

In order for my legs to heal, I had to sit alone in a room for a month without any underwear and my legs spread eagle. It's OK. I made it through every season of The Wire. But it was a painful month. One night, I went to pee, and the incision along my crotch split open two inches, not unlike splitting the crotch of your jeans, except it was my actual crotch.

I called the doctor in a panic. He told me he couldn't sew it back up together without a risk of infection. So I had to pack the wound with gauze and keep packing it. I tried to pack it myself, but I was too hurt to move. As I bent forward, I heard it split even more.

I called my friend Andrea sobbing. She was at my apartment within five minutes. She came in holding a bottle of white wine and two Valiums-- one for her, one for me. She had me lay back and pushed wads of gauze in my leg crease like she was putting the stuffing back in a teddy bear. But even surgery couldn't remove the extra skin entirely. When I hold my arms and legs out, I still look like a flying squirrel.

Here's a journal entry from when I was 22. Quote, "I was happy when I was overweight. I had no idea I should be sad. I was free before. I had trained myself not to care what people thought, and I'd done a good job of it. I learned how to do the worm, and I would do it in dance circles. Only I wasn't actually physically capable of it. I just thought it was funny, and it made everyone laugh.

I would never do that now. What if I look stupid? I wore the most ridiculously bold things-- vintage neon green and pink Hawaiian print dresses. I didn't constantly take the temperature of the room. It just was. That's the person I sold out to become this person.

As new Elna, I threw out all my pictures of old Elna and all the pictures in my parents' photo albums too, because I didn't want people to see them. And when I looked at those photos, they made me feel bad, because in the pictures, I looked happy. And I'd look at them and think, you're so stupid to think that you're happy. That's crazy, of course. And now I don't have any pictures of myself from ages 12 to 22.

As new Elna, I once went on a date with a cute guy who said to me, I know this is going to sound mean, but I just can't tolerate fat people, and then took my hand for the very first time. And I held his hand. I said nothing. I didn't tell him about old Elna. We went for a walk. I went out with him again. It's sad that new Elna gets everything old Elna wanted, because I think old Elna was a better person than new Elna.

Recently I read Lindy West's book. She's my same age. We both grew up in Seattle. We're the same height and used to be the same weight. And she stayed fat and decided she was happy with it. She got everything I thought I had to lose over 100 pounds to get.

Sarai Walker's book Dietland hit me just as hard. I related more to those books than any I've ever read. In each of them, a fat woman grappled with the same things I did and made the opposite choice. They stayed fat. And reading these two books was the first time I was able to imagine a parallel universe where I could have stayed fat.

For the first time, I wondered if I had done the right thing by killing off old Elna. I've been honestly in a bit of a crisis. I started recording a conversation with my husband a few weeks ago about some of this to help think through the ideas of this story. I do that a lot. He and I have only been married a month. He never met old Elna. And we were talking about fat and beauty and how important beauty is for men. And it got really emotional really fast.

Elna Baker
--to be that. You would never have been attracted to me before. You know that makes me really sad? Oh, my god.

Mark Sikes
I mean, you married someone that wouldn't have been attracted to you?

Elna Baker
Who wouldn't have loved me. You would never have talked-- I mean, you would have talked to me. We would have been friends. But you wouldn't have ever dated me, ever.

Mark Sikes
Yeah, but you know what's funny? There's something about you--

Elna Baker
He changes the subject to disillusionment in general, says what I'm realizing is the same thing every teenager realizes in every John Hughes movie-- that the world is unfair. I'm not having it.

Elna Baker
Can I go back a second?

Mark Sikes
Yeah, how far back?

Elna Baker
I actually have never said it. But I said to you that you wouldn't have been attracted to me.

Mark Sikes
Mm-hmm.

Elna Baker
That's true, right?

Mark Sikes
What do you mean?

Elna Baker
It's true.

Mark Sikes
That would I have dated fat Elna?

Elna Baker
Uh-huh.

Mark Sikes
I don't know. Probably not.

Elna Baker
Yeah. OK.

This makes us both pause.

Mark Sikes
So we're a newlywed couple.

Elna Baker
Married for two weeks.

Mark Sikes
Married for two weeks.

Elna Baker
Not even. How long have we been married? 10 days?

Mark Sikes
10 days.

Elna Baker
[CHUCKLE]

Mark Sikes
And we're realizing that our marriage is based on a lie.

Elna Baker
Uh-huh.

It was a joke, of course, our marriage based on a lie. Ha, ha, ha. But then there's this.

Mark Sikes
I've always said I think the real you is the skinny you.

Elna Baker
That's stupid.

Mark Sikes
Not the skinny you, but the real--

Elna Baker
No, that's not even true. I think the real--

This argument over which is the real me, old Elna or new Elna, goes on for days.

Mark Sikes
Well, then that's you.

Elna Baker
No, it's just--

Here we are in a car. Mark explains that he doesn't think I became comfortable with myself until I was thin.

Mark Sikes
If this isn't-- no, no, no. No, no, no. Listen to me.

Elna Baker
I didn't feel like I'm comfortable in my body or my own skin before. It was just me.

Mark Sikes
I know, but if--

Elna Baker
It wasn't like I was--

Mark Sikes
If you feel like--

Elna Baker
It wasn't like me in a fat suit. It was me. That's what I was. So I wasn't like, oh, this feels really big and uncomfortable. It just was me as a human. I was just a human. It was me.

Mark Sikes
I know, but you--

Elna Baker
What Mark doesn't understand is that my old body doesn't feel that far away. What he's rejecting is me. I could gain weight so easily. I mean, what if we have kids? But we're working on it. He told me recently he knows he hasn't been listening.

And for my part, I see how so much of love is physical attraction, especially at the beginning. It's not the story we're told. It's not the one I wanted to believe. But it's a story I can live with.

Here's something I never tell people. I still take phentermine. I take it for a few months at a time a year, or sometimes it feels like half of the year. I can't get it prescribed anymore, so I buy it in Mexico or online, though the online stuff is fake and doesn't work as well.

I have a shirt that says, "I'm allergic to mornings." Everyone who knows me knows I have problems sleeping at night. I am usually up until 4:00 AM. I say I have insomnia. Really, I am awake because I am on speed. And I am on speed, because I need to stay thin. I need to stay thin so I can get what I want.

I know how this sounds. I know exactly how messed up it is. But I also feel like I can't be honest with you, like we won't really get anywhere unless I admit it. I'm taking it right now, by the way. I took it at 11:00 AM this morning. I will take another one at 4:00. I was on it to lose weight for my wedding. And now I'm still on it because I'm about to pitch a TV show in LA, and I need to lose even more weight.

Phentermine turns off the part of my brain that thinks about food. When I'm on it, I can legitimately say, I forgot to eat. I've thought before that it may be affecting my health. It feels that way. I've intentionally never googled the side effects.

I know that all of this is wrong. I don't like what I am. But I've accepted it as part of the deal.

                                       >> CONTINUE >>