Have you been working out an annoying acquaintance asked after a head to toe glance. Because you look in here she paused better. The problem was I had been working out I had lost weight. And I hated everything about that. Like just about every woman in America, plus plenty of men and people across the gender spectrum. I've got issues with body image, weight, food and exercise. In my teens and 20s I struggled on and off with anorexia, and it warped my relationship to my body and its appetite. When I starved myself, I thought it was just another way I was weird. Now I know our culture has a massive collective eating disorder. The adults around me had been taught to hate their bodies and through constant dieting, worrying aloud about calories, the messages came through loud and clear. Even though I've worked through a lot of that over the past few decades, some of the sickness remains lifelong Body Dysmorphia makes me an unreliable narrator about the state of my figure. But to the best of my understanding, I am not nor have I ever been overweight. I'm petite. A hair under five feet, a size four or six depending on the brand and curvy, soft bodied with a full bosom 34 D. I was in kindergarten the first time I thought I was fat. My body size and shape were well within a healthy range according to my doctor's and photographs bear this out. But I was convinced I was fat. I vividly recall my mom showing me professional photos of me. I wear a red cotton summer outfit with a white floral pattern. My cheeks and arms seemed to fool and I begged my mom not to show the pictures to anyone else. I look at those photos now and I can't see what I saw then. I had no extra padding. A year later at six I cried about moving up to Bigger underwear size. My parents and grandparents were always trying to fit into smaller sizes, and now I was moving in the wrong direction. Our cupboards were filled with tab and Sweet and Low. The freezer with ice milk. I was surrounded by grown up women who made excuses if they allowed themselves a cookie or a pad of butter on a baked potato. At seven, an adult commented on my ample but the part of my body I've struggled to make peace with ever since. Shortly after that, when I got a stomach virus, I experienced a weird sense of empowerment. From my ability to go without eating. I was vomiting. But I saw the whole ordeal as a stroke of luck. Maybe if I stopped eating for long enough, I could lose my big butt. In fourth grade, my friends and I began comparing our bodies. I had one friend Lucy with juvenile diabetes, who went through periods where she was rail thin. Lucy and other girls bragged about their doctors declaring them underweight. The girls reported this like it was an unfortunate situation beyond their control. Woe is me underweight again, I just can't keep the meat on my bones. At 14, my body started to develop and suddenly my clothes fit tighter. I was still very much not fat, but I was a few pounds heavier. And I wasn't the only one who noticed. You don't eat the cakes in the candies. Do you my step grandma asked. We were at a family gathering. And I desperately wanted something sweet, but it couldn't stand the way my body was massing out as I'd heard a friend's mother refer to the phenomenon in the middle of 10th grade in the winter of 1981. When I was 15, I decided that I needed to take some action to control this body. First I did the stewardess diet breakfast was black coffee, something I didn't drink yet, and a half grapefruit, lunch and dinner were different kinds of meat with plain undressed vegetables. After four days of that boring regimen. I didn't feel nearly thin enough. I went to the library and there instead of diet books, I was drawn to a young adult novel called The best little girl in the world by Steven Levin Kron it was the story of a teen girl who develops anorexia and bulimia. Clearly it was meant to caution young readers against starving themselves. But for me it became a blueprint. I learned all the tricks from Francesca, the main character, how to move food around on your plate, how to fool tired parents how to leave evidence of having eaten breakfast without taking a bite, put cereal crumbs in a bowl and leave it in the sink. The book destroyed my relationship to food and my body forever. I'd skip lunch and walk the school grounds to burn fat. At dinner I would put a small amount of meat into a large portion of salad, but only eat the vegetables and at the end of the meal quickly toss the meat into the garbage. Initially, I filled up with water tab, diluted orange juice and tea and it helped distract me from my hunger. Each time I peed. I imagined fat pouring out of me. A couple of days in I felt the equivalent of a runner's high from not eating. It was exhilarating to feel so in control to feel empty in light. I had so much energy. I expended it in the evenings dancing vigorously to the more upbeat songs on Springsteen's the river album, I say dancing, but it looked more like awkward aerobics, kicking and punching the air twisting and turning with the objective of working all the fat off of all my parts every evening or ritual. In a short time, I had gotten myself down to 90 pounds from 112. A healthy weight was more like 120 I was very thin. My parents became alarmed, I became alarmed because even though I knew definitively that I was thinner than was considered healthy, I only wanted to keep losing weight. I confessed to my parents that I had been starving myself and that I wanted help. They found a therapist who specialized in childhood eating disorders, and I started going once a week. My therapist Evelyn was a nice woman about my mother's age in her early 40s. The problem was Evelyn was skinny. What if she had chosen eating disorders as her specialty because she had one? Conversely, if she was bony by nature, how could she possibly understand what it meant to be afraid to gain weight? She had me keep a running list of everything I ate, which put me at odds with myself. The part of me interested in getting well wanted to let this exercise helped me the part of me interested in staying sick I use it to obsess and fret over everything I put in my mouth. I felt split about wanting to get better. I didn't want to die like some of the anorexic kids I'd been told about. But I also didn't want to wait any more than I currently did. I wanted to wait even less. In 11th grade I got my first real boyfriend Jason. It seemed only once I gotten super thin my jaw and cheekbones becoming more prominent that he and other boys noticed me. In college, my metabolism slowed, apparently a homeostasis response to starving. I put on weight while consuming under 1000 calories per day. So I bought a rusty exercise bike at a yard sale and wrote it in my dorm room, sometimes two or three times daily. I didn't get my first full period until 18 and it was a doozy. I was diagnosed with severe endometriosis, which led to hormone treatments that made me develop acne and gain weight. I hated myself. But there was something useful about having a whole other condition to deal with, which made it impossible for me to be impossibly thin. Now, I had no choice but to let go at least somewhat of the need to be super skinny. It was the beginning of becoming less vigilant about my weight, which was a relief. I wasn't all better by any stretch. But endometriosis put me on a path toward a little better. And then a little bit better than that. Then a slip, followed by a bit better than before, then a slip and so on, mostly moving me in a healthy direction.