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In the 1970s, my mom and I did the grapefruit diet together; she took me to a fat-farm in upstate New York where we fasted for a week; mornings, in the dark, I jogged with her at a track in Red Hook, Brooklyn, when practically no one else jogged (I’m pretty sure we wore Keds). My early desire to be a dancer didn’t help matters; nor did my summer choreography course at Harvard where I learned how effective vomiting and laxatives can be for weight control. Even now, when my mother comes to visit, she tiptoes into my bathroom each morning and asks: “Is your scale right?” She’s in her 70s; it never ends.
“You’re never trapped. You have the keys to the prison! But sometimes having a choice is scarier than not having a choice. Sometimes the food prison is cozier than the big, wide world where I could bulge or break out or wrinkle at any moment. The question…is this: what is it worth, to you, letting yourself out of the prison? What matters more than that high? What matters more than thin? What do you want people to remember about the life you lived?

Will you gain weight or lose weight? Yes. Will I gain weight or lose weight? Yup. Will we hate our bodies or love them? Sure. I just hope, for both of us, that we are doing things that matter while we’re looking however we look and feeling however we feel.

And then she tells me a story:

“Writing this book was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Because the struggle I wrote about was mine. I wanted to map out this path toward a life free of the struggles of hating our bodies. But I had to walk it first. I wrote my last two books in 15 months. This one took 35…And just about the time I finished it, I had this day where I was doing yoga and I glimpsed my leg. I suddenly became aware that it was holding all of my weight and that the muscle was doing exactly what it should be doing and my shin and my thigh came together at my knee exactly as it has to to work in a way that carries me around my world. And I felt appreciation. Just a moment of appreciation for the strength I have in my left leg. And I sat down and cried.

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/10/finally-thin-food-prison-worth-it