When Elna Baker shed 80 pounds, she gained love, the promise of sex, and a new set of problems. So she cut herself in half and became whole again.

If you ask any Mormon the question, “Why are we here on Earth?” she will give the answer she’s been taught since childhood: “To get a body.”

“You have been given a body so you can exalt yourself to a nobler condition,” wrote Melvin J. Ballard, a church apostle, in words that sum up what we were all taught. “The intelligence that is in man…give it a physical body, and you have enlarged its powers immeasurably.”

In other words, the primary purpose of our life on earth was to get a body, any body; to appreciate it, make choices with it, use it for good works; and then, when we were done with it, to leave this mortal coil and return to God. (It’s this philosophy that motivates Mormons not to drink, smoke, or have sex before marriage.) Thus by the age of four I had learned the meaning of life. There was only one problem: I got the wrong body.Books By Elna Baker

I’ll start this story at the end. My friends and family thought I was crazy when I told them I was going to have major plastic surgery. I was 24, healthy, with no visible flaws, and plastic surgery would seem at odds with my religion. But I had a good reason. Three years earlier, I’d lost 80 pounds in five months and my rapid weight loss had left me with a layer of excess skin that hung on my body like an oversize sweatshirt. I used skin-firming lotions, I exercised, but no matter what I did, I still looked like a melting candle. Surgery-a tummy tuck plus breast implants was my only option, and even though it seemed like cheating, I decided to go for it. In fact, I was excited about it.

It was only on the day before the procedure, when my teenage sister asked, “So, shat time do you go under the knife?” that it occurred to me: I am about to be cut in half. In a total panic, I called the number in the back of a self-help book, Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster..

Miraculously, Peggy Huddleston, Harvard Divinity School graduate, expert in mind-body medicine, and the book’s author, answered the phone. I explained my situation, and (for a fee of $150) she said she could walk me through a meditation to prepare me. She counted backward from 10, her voice calm and breathy, and then asked me to talk to my body. I was willing to try anything.

“Okay,” I said. “Body, how do you feel?”

“Scared,” was the answer.

“What emotion can you send your body to make it feel better?” Huddleston asked.

I listened to my body: “Gratitude.” I would have picked courage, superhuman strength…but my body chose gratitude?

“When does your body want gratitude?”

“Every time I see my scar, I need to send my body gratitude, and then it will be willing to go through this surgery.”

“Can you agree to do that?”

It seemed like a fair trade. “Yes,” I replied.

“All right,” Huddleston said. “Now say goodbye to the skin that will be leaving you.”

I thought about everything my skin and I had been through. “Goodbye,” I said.

I was never grateful for my body, even though I grew up with two church posters on my wall, one of which said YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE and the other BE YOUR OWN KIND OF BEAUTIFUL. But I never wanted to be a temple, and I didn’t want to be my own kind of beautiful. I wanted to be hot. Instead, I was chubby. It did not help that my big sister Tina was gorgeous.

When I was 12, we took a family trip to Morocco. We were walking through and open market when a carpet salesman saw Tina and stopped my parents. “Your daughter is the most beautiful creature on this earth,” he swooned. “I will give you 1,000 camels for her.” When my parents declined, the man looked me up and down: “I’ll give you 100 camels for her.” I remember thinking, There is a 900 camel difference between my sister and me. The rest of my life can be described as a pursuit to be worth more camels. Melvin J. Ballard’s noble teachings were being beaten down by another life lesson: that because of the way I looked, I was worth less.

Tina was two years older than I. At the end of her sixth-grade year, the two most popular boys in my grade signed her yearbook. One wrote: How come you’re so pretty and Elna isn’t? The other wrote: “I wish your sister looked like you.” I was devastated, not because I thought they were wrong, but because I believed them. My mother consoled me, “Don’t get mad, get even” (a truly Christian philosophy). The next day I signed their yearbooks: “You will regret your comment in my sister’s yearbook next year when you beg to go out with me. Eventually I became resigned to the idea that I was just a “big girl.” So I focused on my talents. I started writing, performing, and trying my hand at comedy. I was for the most part a happy, outgoing person. But when I didn’t get cast in a role or asked out on a date, I’d blame it on the way I looked. I told myself, “All my problems would be solved if I could just lose weight.”

I was the first person in my family not to go to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; instead, I went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Fine Arts for acting. As part of my training, I enrolled in an African dance class and then a break-dancing class; and just living in New York, I walked everywhere. As a consequence, I lost 30 pounds-a drop in the bucket, but still, it was something. At the end of my junior year, my teachers gave me a glowing evaluation. Some of them, however, expressed concern abut my weight. The way I looked would hinder my career, they said. No matter what I do, I thought, I will never be good enough.

Then at the end of my senior year, something happened that changed my life, I went on a writing retreat where I was given an assignment to write a story beginning with the line: “My body finally speaks.” At the time, I weighed 232 pounds. The last thing I wanted to do was to let my body speak.

Here’s what it said: “I live inside of skin, under muscles, behind fat, pumping blood, and I have a foundation of bones that are as vulnerable as paper because they too can become ash. But I balance and I work, I move, I jump, I feel, and I want. I can do all of these incredible things, but you don’t love me. When are you going to realize: This is your only chance?”

When the body speaks, it certainly isn’t subtle. I read those words over and over again and I knew I had to learn to love myself just as I was. I borrowed a mantra from Popeye: “I am what I am.”

A few months later, I was waiting on the subway platform when I sensed a man staring-checking me out, I thought, until he said, in his loudest voice: “Damn girl, you better lose some weight!”

“I am what I am, I am what I am, I am what I am,” I repeated while the other people on the platform avoided making eye contact with me. On the ride home, I thought deeply about what I was trying to do. My entire life, I had defined myself by how others perceived me. I decided to pray about it. I didn’t pray to be skinny (I’d done that a million times). I prayed to be able to see myself through God’s eyes so that I could realize my potential. I did this every day for a year.

I did not anticipate the outcome of this prayer. I thought it would help me accept my size. But something just clicked, and for the first time I began to think about the food I was putting into my body. My college roommate Kim told me about the Philadelphia Life Management Program, through which she had lost 40 pounds. She took me to Philadelphia and introduced me to Harvey Levin, MD. I remember being impressed by the walls of his clinic, which were covered in before-and-after pictures of people my size or larger who had lost weight under a regimen of exercise, a strict diet high in protein and low in carbs, and most importantly, behavior-changing therapy designed to help you associate feelings of control with eating. Discount High Protein Low Carb Nutrition and Discount Mind Weight Loss Control Books

With Levin’s help, between January and June 2004 I lost 80 pounds. Books By Harvey Levin, MD. I accomplished what I had thought was impossible. It seemed that I finally had the “right” body, aside from my now sagging skin, which I hid under a girdle. I was beautiful in an objective way. For the first time, men noticed me; I got my first real kiss at T-minus-60 pounds. I remember thinking how soft the guy’s tongue was and how amazing it was that my tongue could make my body feel so many different things just based on the rhythm and pressure with which I moved it. It made me curious.

When I was 12 and first thought about sex, I was determined not to have it. I was taught that saving yourself for marriage was the greatest gift you could give your partner. In college I’d had a few encounters with guys before I lost weight, but they all followed the same trajectory: It would be late at night at a party or a bar, the guy would be drinking, and his “beer goggles” state he’d try to grope or kiss me. It always ended in the same way, with him saying, “Don’t tell anyone about this.” It was only when I began to have real dates that I realized the implications of my decision not to have sex. It’s hard not to have sex. I was young and I wanted to experience romance, but because I didn’t have sex, the longest relationship I was able to sustain lasted four weeks…and that was only because the guy was out of town for two of them.

I asked myself, “Who does my body belong to?” When no one had wanted it all those years, it was just mine. Now that I was desirable, did it belong to other people? I was presented with choice, and so I decided to wait.

And yet, there was this part of me, the part that had always been overweight, that wanted to be perceived as sexy. One day at a vintage boutique in the East Village I came across a navy blue slip from the 1940s. It was silk with a lacy bodice. I tried it on and looked in the mirror. I should have had this experience at 13 or 14, like most women, but at that moment, at age 22, I finally realized, “Oh my, I am sexy!”

I bought the slip, though over the next couple years of week-long romances, it sat in the back of a drawer. Occasionally, late at night, I’d try it on just to remind myself, “I’m still sexy!”

Then I met Nick, I was working as a page at the Late Show With David Letterman, and he was waiting in line. When he entered the theater, a voice in my head said, “That is who you are supposed to be with.” I’d never had an experience like that. It scared me. I didn’t know how to respond-so I ran after him and gave him my number.

Our first date was literally something out of a movie. We were on our way to dinner when we passed a film set and I turned to him and said, “We should pretend that we’re extras.” Without missing a beat he pulled me onto the set and we crashed the movie, blending in with the real extras in the scenes. We ended up in the makeup trailer, where they asked us what we had come there for. At the same time we said, “Black eyes.” We spent the rest of the evening running around New York City with our shiners.

Except that he was an atheist and I was a Mormon, it was the perfect relationship-until the day Nick asked, “So even if you fall in love, you still won’t have sex?”

“No,” I said. “I won’t have sex before marriage, even if I’m in Love.”

“Cool,” was his response, and he actually gave me a thumbs-up, which I thought was a good sign. It turned out it wasn’t so cool. Nick started to phase me out.

I thought about the voice in my head when I’d met Nick. I worried, What if he is the love of my life, but I end up marrying some Mormon guy I like fine and spend the rest of my life regretting that I chose religion over love? What is Nick’s right and God doesn’t exist, and I’m making a sacrifice for no reason? Yet if it weren’t for my faith, I would never have said the prayer that helped me lose weight and find Nick.

I had also discovered that I wanted to have sex-that when I felt like I was in love, sex no longer felt wrong, but like a natural progression. As Nick was pulling away, I began to think: “Maybe I could have sex…”

Not long after he popped that question, we had a date. We got caught in a rain storm, so we took refuge in my apartment, making grilled-cheese sandwiches and watching a movie. Still wet, I went into my room to change into a dry T-shirt, and when I opened my drawer I saw the blue slip. “What if,” I mused, “I put that on?”

Everything around me stopped. “You can’t put that on!” the shocked part of me panicked. “It’s the middle of the afternoon! It’s a Tuesday!”

Another part of me shot back: “I own that, and I’ve never worn it. I can do that, I can have sex.”

I walked into the living room wearing the slip. Nick looked surprised, and we began to kiss. We lay down on the couch, the moment started to build…and I couldn’t go through with it. Not because I believed I would go to hell if I had sex or that God would stop loving me. It was something else. When I listened to my body, I recognized that I was not ready.

Two years passed. I thought a lot about Nick and my decision. And when I fell in love with Travis, the first Mormon guy I’d ever dated. I’m glad I waited. After a few months of dating, Travis brought up marriage, and that’s when it struck me: “I might be naked in front of someone.” It wasn’t until the possibility of marriage, and therefore sex, entered my life that I realized someone besides me would see my skin; that I would share my body with another person. That my body is not just mine. Books By Elna Baker

With a weight loss of 100 pounds of more, the average person is left with 10 to 15 pounds of sagging skin, draping from stomach and breasts, legs and arms, back and butt. It had been three and a half years since I’d become thin, and there was no getting around it-the skin wasn’t going away.

I decided to confide in my close friend Alison (at this point I had shown only my mother the suit of skin I carried under the tight girdle I wore every day). Alison, looked at me and said, “Go get plastic surgery. You’ve worked too hard; you don’t deserve this.” She showed me a picture on the internet of a tummy tuck. I’d had no idea I could be fixed.

I set up a consultation. Ironically, the first man to see me naked was not my husband, but a plastic surgeon. With great anxiety I took off my clothes for him. He looked at my body, took a step back, studied it from all angles, lifted my breasts and dropped them. Then he told me all the things I could do to change my appearance. Once I made the decision, everything fell into place. My parents agreed to give me the money they had set aside for my wedding. I found an excellent doctor near their home in Seattle who charged me half what a New York surgeon would and scheduled my procedures for December 22, four months away.

Now I had to tell Travis what I was going to do. He knew I’d lost a lot of weight, but he didn’t know about the skin. First I brought up the fact that I had to get implants to fill the loose skin on my chest. He was surprised and said, “Boobs or no Boobs, it doesn’t matter to me. I looked at it like an ice cream sundae. Boobs are the cherry on top. If I don’t have the cherry, who cares? I have a whole sundae.” He asked to see my stomach, and at first I said no. But one night, as we were lounging on my bed, I hesitantly lifted up my shirt, thinking how grotesque my torso must look to him. His eyes lit up in what could be described only as sheer wonderment. He cupped the soft skin in his hands, stretched it out inches away from my body and played with it like a kid with a new toy. When it became clear he could have gone on like this for hours, I pulled my shirt back down.

“Elna, everyone is self-conscious about their bodies,” Travis said, and, taking my feet in his hands-I was wearing red Maryjane’s-he kissed the top of each foot and told me I was beautiful. A few days later, I flew to Seattle.

It’s funny; I look in the mirror now, two months later, and in my mind I’ve always looked this way. Then I see pictures of me with my loose skin or of me when I was heavy, and it is shocking how much has changed. Some of it is amusing: I work part-time as a hostess at a sleek downtown restaurant, where male customers I’ve been seating for a year have been introducing themselves to me: “Are you new?” I want to reply, “The part you’re staring at is.”

Some of the changes are not so funny. Three months after my surgery, Travis and I broke up. The reasons were complicated, and it may be that my body and its baggage were too overwhelming for us in the end. I went through this experience in part for Travis, but I’m not angry. I can say that with composure now, though when we broke up I wanted to break down his door and scream: “These fabulous D-cups I now have, you will never see!” The fact is I couldn’t have done it without him, and I am happy with the results. Travis was the catalyst, but it was my body that carried me through.

I have been thinking a lot about my father’s words as I continue to recover and about what my body has asked for over the years: “When are you going to realize, this is your only chance?” I can finally say I feel gratitude. Not because I got plastic surgery and look better, but because this is the only body I’ll ever have. Maybe I am alive so that I can have a body. I didn’t get it when I was a child, but I’m getting it now. I am back at the beginning, but this time I understand why.

Resources:

Elna Baker’s Website

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