When I was in my mid-twenties, I found myself in a group for women who were obsessed with being thin and who loved to diet. There wasn’t an official name for the affliction we had. We were women who spent much of our days thinking about what we’d eaten, how much we’d eaten, and what we would—or would not—eat in the future.

I found dieting—something I’d been doing since I was 15 years old—thrilling and consuming. I loved the challenge. When I could restrict my eating, I felt powerful.

The problem? It was hard. My body, equipped with the primordial fear of starvation, was a formidable foe. I would say no to cake at a child’s birthday party and my brain would spend the rest of the day obsessing about it—that thick frosting, the way it gives resistance to the knife. My mouth would be wet with saliva.

The other problem: dieting didn’t really work for me. I’d spent a decade counting calories, focused on the snack table while conversations flowed around me, spending half of my attention at all times resisting the urge to break my diet. And yet, my weight never shifted more than a few pounds.

And so, more than a decade after my first teenaged Weight Watchers meeting, I’d had enough. I was tired. I avoided vacations, pools, photographs, anything that would remind me that I was stuck in the wrong body living the wrong life—both in my physical presentation and my livelihood.

I didn’t always feel this way. I’d been a child full of potential, starting college at 15 and winning various awards for writing. My professors told me that I had a true chance at a writing career. Then I graduated into the recession. Terrified of becoming the starving artist I so longed to be, I took the first desk job I was offered. At first, I would get up early to write before work, and then on my lunch break. Then sometimes on the weekend. Then rarely.

When Boston, where I lived, became unaffordable, I moved back home to Oregon, got a job in marketing, and stopped writing altogether. There I was, living in my hometown, struggling to make friends, working a job I hated, and still obsessed with losing weight. The life I was supposed to be living—a lithe and stylish novelist surrounded by artsy friends at some Brooklyn party—felt so out of reach. But I was sure that if I could just lose the weight, the other pieces—book, friends, New York—would fall into place. Tomorrow, I’d tell myself, I’ll do better tomorrow. I’ll stay within my calorie goal tomorrow. But even when I did, even when I did drop five or even ten pounds, nothing seemed to change. I was just as unhappy.

So I signed up for this group, the one full of women who were obsessed with dieting and being thin. A week later, I was sitting in a generic conference room in a generic office building processing my deepest feelings about bagels.

This was 2016, long before body positivity became mainstream, before Lizzo, before Ozempic, before Oprah publicly apologizing for her role in toxic diet culture. We did many exercises in that group. Strange exercises. We wrote down the meanest thing we’d ever said to ourselves and then read it aloud. We were told to go home and buy our most forbidden food and then eat it every day for a week. I still remember that night, driving home from the grocery store with a bag of bagels and a tub of cream cheese, food I hadn’t allowed into my kitchen since I’d moved out of my parent’s house.

During a meeting a few months in, the dietician handed us each a piece of paper.

“I want you to think about a typical day, and write down how much time you spend thinking about your body, thinking about what you’re going to eat, and tracking calories.”

In my head, I went through a typical day—agonizing in the morning, carefully portioning out my nonfat yogurt (70 calories), banana (90 calories), and hard-boiled egg (70 calories). The time I spent resisting the snack table at work, then giving in and allowing myself two Dorito chips (24 calories). researching the menus for the lunch place my coworkers picked, spending the entire walk there preparing to order the salad (350 calories) and then hearing myself say the mac and cheese instead (1050 calories).