FOUR MONTHS AFTER moving to Dallas, I went on a diet. It was one of those old-fashioned diets with frozen fish sticks in geometric shapes, a serious throwback in the day of lemon-juice fasts and lap bands. I walked out of the strip-mall store where I had weekly weigh-ins with all the shame of a pastor emerging from an adult video store at 1 pm.
Why was I so embarrassed? Because I felt like a failure to both sides of the body wars. To women for whom appearance was everything, I was a source of pity. To women for whom diets were evil, I was a sellout.
When I was coming into my teen years, diets were nearly a developmental stage. Adolescence, motherhood, diet, death. But by the time I walked into that fluorescent office, covered in pictures of women in smart suits with their arms raised overhead, the word “diet” had become radioactive—thanks in part to female writers I knew and admired, who fought against the false notion that thin was synonymous with health. The past ten years had seen the media embrace more curves and cushioning, all of which signaled progress—but none of which meant I needed 50 extra pounds.
Still, I worried I was letting my anti-diet friends down—as though my intensely personal body choices needed to be their choices, too. The whole point of feminism was that we deserved the agency of our own choices—pro-choice, in the truest sense of the term—and yet I feared my friends would judge me as frivolous, or vain. But fearing another person’s opinion never stops them from having one. And my focus on external judgment kept me from noticing the endless ways I’d judged myself.
For the past decade, I did that horrible thing, resolving not to think about my weight and yet thinking about it constantly. Every time I awoke. Every time I passed reflective glass. Every time I saw an old friend and I watched their eyes go up and down me. At some point, no one complimented me on anything but my hair and my handbags. I was certainly vain then; I just didn’t happen to look like someone who should have been.
Mine was a recipe for unhappiness. I was fixated on my weight but unwilling to do anything about it. And I couldn’t do anything about it while I was drinking, because booze left me roughly 1,200 calories in the hole four times a week. There’s not a miracle diet in the world that can pull you out of that quicksand. In fact, when I did try to diet, I made a mess. Cutting out carbs and swapping beer for liquor is a trusty formula for blacking out.
So I went the old-school route. Calorie restriction. Reasonable portions. Water, not diet soda. Half the steak, not the whole steak consumed and instantly regretted with a sigh and one hand on my belly. After a lifetime of “all or nothing,” I needed to learn “some.”
The weight fell off me. Fifty pounds in six months, as if it never wanted to be there. I was astonished by the lack of trauma this entailed, after all those years of bad-mouthing diets as a form of punishment and deprivation. And the scale couldn’t tell the whole story of my change. I woke up, and I felt happy. I stopped avoiding cameras and old friends. My underwire bra no longer dug into my belly, which was a constant source of grump. When I passed a mirror, I was startled by the person I’d become. Although perhaps it was more accurate to say: I was startled by the person I could’ve been all along. The person I had buried.
Self-destruction is a taste I’ve savored much of my life. The scratch in my throat left by too much smoking, the jitteriness of a third cup of coffee, the perverse thrill of knowing a thing is bad and choosing it anyway—these are all familiar kinks, and one feeds the other. But was it possible to change my palate—to crave something good for me, to create an inspiration spiral instead of a shame spiral?
I started making my bed each morning, even though I was going to climb in it later at night. I started washing the dishes in the evenings, because I liked waking up in a clean house. I started going to yoga, which is an entire practice of learning to support your own body.
“You’re stronger than you realize,” my pink-haired yoga instructor told me one day, as I wobbled my way through a handstand, and I started thinking she might be right.
I turned on physical exercise a long time ago. I was a kid who loved the slap of dirt on her hands, but middle school gym was a reminder of my early puberty and late-round draft pick status. I withdrew indoors, into films and books and fizzy bottles. I hissed at organized sports and hid from any activity that broke a sweat, and what I mostly thought about my body is that I wished I didn’t have one. I preferred virtual realms. Email, phone, Internet. To this day, I love writing in bed, covered in blankets. Like I’m nothing but a head and typing fingers.