1. I have no idea what my body’s natural size is. This feels silly to type, because as a culture we pretend that body size is a choice — that some of us get “lucky” and others have to “work hard” and others have to starve.
2. My body, particularly my belly, has grown larger since I’ve started eating all the foods that I was consciously and unconsciously restricting. I am trying to reprogram all the narratives that autoplay about how “bad” this is— what my doctors might say, what my “friends” might be thinking on the other side of what platform is hosting this. Honestly, some days, feeling gratitude for my energy and my ability to speak in full sentences is enough. I praise my ability to walk from The Cabin to Trader Joe’s in the 100-degree heat is enough. Other days, I need to surround myself with the voices of other fat folks who are figuring it out — I only want podcasts, books, poems, Instagram photos from people of size. I need a drip line of hope to counter the fear that I’m making some horrible, irreparable decision.
3. But I remember the exact moment diets stopped working for me. I worked out five days a week plus Patrick and I took long bike rides every weekend and I was eating such a pitifully small number of calories but still more than the number I remember from my mom’s Weight Watchers days. According to MyFitnessPal, I should have been losing two pounds a week. Instead, the scale stayed at the same number for 12 weeks, then I passed a kidney stone that was perhaps a result of heredity and the stress of overexercising, though no one was going to say that.
4. I read Intuitive Eating for the first time that same year, and while I was ready to reckon with all the ways diet culture had consciously ruled my life, I didn’t have a way to loosen its unconscious grip.
5. Because Whole 30 isn’t a diet, right?
6. It’s hard not to go back and ask questions. Like, was it controlling my gestational diabetes with diet that triggered all of this? Would it have been less stressful to just take the Metformin? What if I view this latest bout of restrictive eating as a side effect from that? If I have another baby, maybe that baby won’t get stuck if I’m taking Metformin and B12 and generally feeling less freaked out about what I was putting in my body? I can’t know, but this imagination definitely will influence my future thinking.
7. It’s hard not to go back and ask questions. Like, for a long time I thought grad school would have been easier if I was aware of my ADHD, but what about the fact that I measured out the amount of yogurt and dried fruit I could have in the morning, the hummus and veggies I ate for lunch? And then I would run 26 miles per week and sometimes walk 45 minutes from Sarah Lawrence to my apartment and I would always binge in the evening and felt ashamed of this but thought everything else was normal. But maybe if I had been eating it would have been easier to focus on school.
8. Okay, so maybe diets really stopped working when I was still doing all of this when I moved to Boise and gained back all the weight plus some and even though I had read the Fat Studies Reader I really thought my desk job was going to be the end of me.
9. These days, it’s really hard for me to be around people who are trying to lose weight or who moralize about food. I want to get to a place where I can shrug and say “they’re on their own journey” but really I want to shake them and say “I felt like absolute shit for six months and no one, not even me, thought it could be because of what I wasn’t eating. Watch what you don’t eat!” And even as I type this, I question myself: I can’t know that it was JUST that. I also started meditating again, maybe I could have continued my diet at that point and have been just fine. But I’m not sure that my satisfaction is something I want to gamble with. How does this narrative serve me? Is it good to keep it in my back pocket if it means I’ll insist on getting the care I need? If it means liberating this body / all bodies? You don’t have to believe me.
10. I’ve ordered every cheap black stretchy shirt, dress, leggings available on Amazon. I like not having to think about how to dress myself in the morning, about whether the same belt that accentuates my waist will strangle my digestion by noon. I deserve to be comfortable, and to get out of the house in a timely manner. I deserve to write about this in the bath, and write a million blog posts about this until I’ve sorted out how this relates to my overall liberation, or happiness, or simply being a person who takes up space in the world.
