“And what does it say about me that being told I can’t have sugar makes me feel like this, like I’m losing my mind — why am I so OBSESSED with sugar? What’s WRONG WITH ME?”
By the time I turned 30, though, I’d mostly accepted that my body just didn’t want to be smaller than a size 16. Dieting made me insufferably boring, so I tried to avoid it, and I’d recently discovered that yoga made me feel great, even when it didn’t make me smaller. But I was also already the smallest I’d ever been, as the result of nine months of deep depression following the end of my engagement to the aforementioned boyfriend.
Years of work to dismantle the binary of good versus bad foods and here was an easy loophole! I could assign moral value to foods if it pertained to my condition.The noose only tightened when we got to the blood glucose testing stage of the pregnancy and found that, counter to the reactive hypoglycemia I’ve lived with since the gastric bypass, I was in fact teetering on the edge of gestational diabetes.
My husband kept reminding me that this burning hot medical spotlight on my diet was temporary, but I knew something much older and more enduring had been kicked loose in my brain. But it doesn’t last. The minute it’s time to eat again, I’m thrown into turmoil. It’s actually worse than my past experiences with dieting, because the rules are less rigid: I’mto eat carbs, but they have to be the right kind of carbs, in the right amounts, alongside the right balance of protein and fat and fiber. It’s enough to make me long for my fat camp days, when some skinny adult would portion everything out for me and I could just eat mindlessly .