The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir by Elna Baker

boyfriend. But I can control my weight.
    I crossed out the old goals and wrote a new one: I want to lose 80 pounds.
    Every time I’d lost an eyelash or caught a willow floating through the air I’d wish for the same exact thing: I wish that I could lose weight. When you wish for something over and over again and it doesn’t come true, something else happens; not only do you give up, but you resent your wish and you resent wishing.
    I didn’t know how to lose weight. So I did what I always do when I need advice. I flipped open my scriptures and read the first verse I saw:
    “. . . I give unto men weakness,” I began reading, “that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”
    The word grace stuck out. I was only really fa miliar with it because of the song “Amazing Grace.” I didn’t know what it meant exactly, and so I looked it up. According to the Bible, grace is an enabling power given to men to help them accomplish things that, if left to their own devices, they would never be able to do.
    Grace was my answer. I knelt down next to my bed and prayed. I told God I’d given up on me, that there was no way I could do this alone, and that I needed His grace to take over and go on a diet for me.
    When I finished this prayer a vivid memory popped into my head, a wall covered in “Before” and “After” Polaroids. And okay, so I never told anyone about this, but I’d actually considered going on a diet three years earlier. My sophomore year in college, my friend Kim went to a doctor in Philadelphia and he helped her lose forty pounds. I asked her a lot of questions about it: “What do you eat? Are there pills? How much does it cost?” Kim got so sick of answering my questions that she offered to bring me to the clinic so I could see it for myself.
    I wasn’t sure what to expect. We pulled up to a town house in a run-down part of Philadelphia. A small plaque read PHILADELPHIA WEIGHT MANAGEMENT CENTER, HARVEY LEVIN, M.D. Kim opened the door and led the way.
    The walls of the office immediately struck me. Every inch of free space was covered with before-and-after pictures, like a giant messy collage. I stared at all of the people, the women with perms and the men in sweatpants. They didn’t look like the before-and-after people I was used to seeing in subway advertisements: Whale of a woman becomes gorgeous blonde with phenomenal breasts (clearly two different people). Instead, the “Before” Polaroids were of men and women who you’d expect to see working at FedEx or State Farm Insurance—real people—and the “After” Polaroids showed the same exact FedEx and State Farm employees, except they’d lost some weight. It gave me hope. Anyone can do this , I thought.
    Later that night I took the train back to New York, my mind buzzing. I can start immediately. I’ ll enroll, I’ ll commute to Philadelphia, I’ll change! The following morning I woke up to my life and my routine, and laughed at the naïve idea that I’d ever be anyone different than me.
    Three years went by and there I was, New Year’s Day, with the same desire to change. I went into the computer room and looked up the Philadelphia Weight Management Center on the Internet. It was still there. I made an appointment, January 14, 2004.
     
    I remember being incredibly nervous the night before my appointment. I couldn’t decide what to wear for my “Before” Polaroid. I laid my final choice out on the floor in the shape of a body, just as I had done every year on the first day of school: jeans, a polka-dot black-and-white blouse, a red cardigan, and red flats. When I stood up to look at it, I noticed that my clothes looked so much bigger than me, but if you hold your clothes out in front of you, they always look bigger. (Which is why I’ve never bought into those Weight