So-called ‘Losers’ compete to win
It’s July 2005, and Penny Simonson is standing outside a Weight Watchers meeting, feeling pretty good about her goal of losing 100 pounds.
She’s been working on her breast stroke at Sally Jackson’s. Sally is reputed to have the biggest backyard pool in Spokane Valley. And everybody knows it’s the place to learn how to swim and how to be a good Democrat. “We just try to keep everybody’s head above water, hon.” That’s what Sally says.
Anyway, the Weight Watchers meeting is over and Simonson is chatting with Mary Rosner, who has shed 180 pounds, and Luanne Castoldi, who has shed 132. Everyone is feeling pretty empowered and the subject of the Valley Girl Triathlon comes up. The triathlon is an all-woman race that entails three miles of running, 12 miles of biking and one-third mile of swimming.
All Sally’s students learn to swim three quarters of a mile or more, so Simonson volunteers to swim the Liberty Lake portion of the race if Rosner will run the three miles and Castoldi will pedal the 12.
“Deal,” the women say, and set their sights on the July 2006 race. They hook their smallest digits together and “pinkie-swear” on the deal. They become the “Big Ass Losers,” an athletic trio that has collectively lost more than 400 pounds. They print up T-shirts portraying a nimble butterfly of a gal – who kind of looks like Li’l Abner’s girlfriend, Daisy Mae – emerging from the cumbersome cocoon of a 400-pound Dutch maid.
Castoldi, 45, could pass for the woman emerging from that cocoon. Her jaw line is razor sharp. She smiles helplessly from ear to ear and flips her auburn hair away from her collarbone like someone who not long ago had never seen her collarbone. This is how she saw herself from high school on, if she could only lose “the weight.”
“The weight” was an object, not part of who she thought she really was.
Simonson thought of her unwanted girth as “this 100 pounds.” She said it all the time. There was so much she wanted to do if only she could lose “this 100 pounds.”
She didn’t see herself as a 300-pound woman. She was outgoing. She danced. She laughed. She was the life of every social event she and her husband attended. But when the pictures came back from those special occasions, she was embarrassed by her appearance and shocked she saw things so differently at the time the shutter clicked.
Castoldi, Simonson and Rosner all have photos of their former selves, their “fat pictures.”
And as miserable as they say they were when they weighed 300 pounds or more, in the photos they are all smiling.
But there is a difference between smiling and laughing. And there isn’t much to laugh at when you can’t step onto a floating boat dock for fear the water will seep up through the wooden boardwalk and consume you, or when you have to decide which foot to step off the curb with first so your ankle doesn’t collapse.
“You walk into a restaurant and everyone sits down, while you look for a chair that is going to support you,” Rosner said.
And socially, Rosner said. “You’re really kind of invisible.”
People don’t want to look at you. A fat woman can’t get her oil changed at a speedy lube without waiting 20 minutes, say the women, who say things now happen faster.
Castoldi thought she’d shed her 132 pounds and land a handsome man, which still hasn’t happened, but she did get a bank loan for a condominium. She never would have approached a loan officer before she lost her weight.
There are still hurdles to cross. Castoldi is doing the swimming portion of the race so Simonson can ride her bike and avoid a fear of deep water. But life is different when you’re a Big Ass Loser, when life gives you reasons to say yes instead of no, when you can throw back your hair and move to the front of the line.
“If I can flip my hair and get something,” Castoldi said, “I’m going to.”