Fiber, vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, protein — they were all sacrificed at the altar of calories in, calories out. The focus was never on enjoying healthy foods, just on deprivation, will, and lack. It was an orthodoxy of hunger, a never-ending fast. It was self-flagellation, a forced performance to display my commitment to changing an unacceptable body.  What a load of shit  Because those foods were quarantined, any occasion to eat them became a rare opportunity to indulge, the way I was told I had always wanted to. Birthday parties at school called for two slices of cake; potato chips required three helpings. Every encounter with forbidden foods became a time to load up.  This is why you are fat.  As I got older, this meant eating contraband in secret, hiding foods to eat when I was alone.  Secret eaters candidate  I was stuck in an untenable binary. In our cultural imagination, since I wasn’t already lithe and athletic, I must be sitting at home, eating junk food every day.   It really is black and white, all food or no food with them, isn't it? What an unhealthy mindset.  The orthodoxy of calories in, calories out dictated that one French fry off a friend’s plate, one publicly ordered ice cream cone, even a plate of pasta was cause for intervention or judgment.  WTF you plan for what you are eating and doing and adjust accordingly it's not rocket surgery. I'm just skimming at this point. The writing is too flowery and over-dramatic.   I visited urgent care for an ear infection. After receiving the prescribed drops and antibiotics, I asked the doctor about after care. He sighed, looking sternly at me. “You should lose weight,” he responded. “Immediately.” Fat hadn’t caused an ear infection, but it was always an urgent failure. The noblesse oblige of thin people obligated them to remind and educate me.  Sounds like he was trying to help you. Doctors generally are supposed to help improve the health of their patients, you know.  Even when I lost weight, my health failed. Bloodwork showed that I had become anemic, dangerously short on iron, and low on essential vitamins. Despite being a middle class, college educated woman, I was undernourished.  Holy crap take a multivitamin if you are dieting to lose weight! All that processed crap is nutritionally void.  At its core, weight loss is aesthetic. My weight doesn’t tell you what I eat, how much I exercise, how strong I am.   Wrong. I know that someone with guns definitely lifts and someone with noodle arms doesn't. I can generally pick out the thin vegans visually, and I can tell that the greasy no-neck has been bathing in pizza for the past ten years.  There is more than enough at work to reduce us, to make us feel hurt and hardened. Instead, let us do the hard, vulnerable work of unburdening one another, and release our cumbersome shame. Let us abandon the manifest destiny of weight loss, abandon the quest to conquer bodies and the people in them.  Let's be mediocre and have no ambition! Let's accept a short, miserable life and an early death! Let's never try.