After 30 years of dieting, I was exhausted. So I started asking myself: What if I stopped? | Jason Prokowiew

TTwo years ago, during a session with my therapist, I suddenly said to myself, “I want to talk about my relationship with my body at some point.” Saying that one sentence out loud was all I could muster that day, and it had taken me decades to get to that point.

My first real awareness of my body began when I was about eight years old in the hallways of my grammar school in the Boston suburbs. As I rode my bike over mounds of dirt in the woods behind my house and flew around the corners of a roller rink on Thursday nights to the sound of Michael Jackson, I was completely unaware that my body was being judged and seen as wrong.

That all changed when a boy in my third grade class yelled at me across the crowded hallway, “Your ass is so big!” My fat body, bigger than anyone else in our class, defined me at school for the next eight years. I can still hear my classmates sing-song, “Fat-fat two-by-four, can’t fit through the bathroom door.” I can remember by heart the opening words of an essay another boy wrote about me and read to the entire class: “I know this boy, he’s kind of chubby.” I can still remember the “boom boom” sounds the worst bully made when I crossed the classroom to sharpen my pencil.

At home, being fat meant nothing: I loved the warmth of my fat mother’s hand in mine, the squeal of delight from my fat older sister as she made a hole in one at mini-golf. But by the time I was 15, I was worn down by years of harassment and sexual assault and convinced that my bullies were right—my body was wrong.

I asked my doctor to help me lose weight, which began a 30-year relationship with diet culture. The summer before my 16th birthday, I walked miles every day and stuck to a bland diet of endless cans of dried tuna turned over on beds of lettuce. My body shrank. And by September, I was thin and nearly invisible among the boys who had been gunning for me the year before.

Staying slim required constant vigilance, a daily visit to the scale to monitor my weight, and 190 pounds on my 6-foot-3 frame became the goal. If I slipped, meaning I ate whatever I wanted or didn’t exercise five times a week, I gained it right back. When I told people I was dieting, they’d say, “You? Why?” When my weight occasionally reached 205, 210, people would say, “Oh, what are you doing to lose weight?” This reinforced to me that I had to continue cutting back on sugar, eating meals no bigger than my fist, fasting for 16 hours a day, running to the gym and back, or adhering to whatever diet was being pushed at the time: anything to get back to 190 pounds, to be acceptable.

My efforts were encouraged by the diet culture of the 80s and 90s – an entire industry that supported the message that thin was good and fat was bad. That Mine A slimmer figure was what success looked like, no matter how hungry I was or how disordered my eating had become.

By the time I was 45, I was utterly exhausted from my 30-year quest to stay small. For the first time in my adult life, I began to wonder: What if I was just fat? Shortly after discussing the subject of my body with my therapist, I found a nutritionist who specialized in intuitive eating and the radical idea that my body knows what it needs. Diet culture demands that calories be counted, that the number on the scale be recorded, that success or failure is based on measurable progress. Intuitive eating rejects that and instead asks you to simply listen to what your body is asking for. But when I tried to listen to my body, it was silent, as if to say, “NOW you want my input?”

It’s been almost two years since I started rejecting diet culture, and I’m still teetering on that first step. My body and I are still learning to communicate, but I no longer talk to myself the way my childhood bullies talked to me. I’m not cruel or shaming. I don’t demand that it be silent.

After 30 years, I am fat again, and I can say the word about myself—in therapy and elsewhere—and hear it as a description, not a determinate of value. I stand outside a world I once knew best, unwilling to go back, but listening instead to what else my body has to say.

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