Older, Wiser, Richer, Wider.

Recently, I was going through old pictures of myself and pining for the body I used to have. I wrote Memories of a Body about the experience of going through those pictures, the feelings they evoked, and the memories I had tried to ignore. I saw a thinner body in pictures of myself in my 20s and projected so much onto it that I forgot the reality.

Today is my birthday. I am now 35.

On the left, I am 25 years old. It is 2008.

I live with my grandmother, in a tiny room with all of my possessions shoved into drawers that won’t close. I make $8.25 at an animal shelter. I work part time (on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays) because we’re in the middle of a recession and full-time work is simply not available to people like me, who are looking to build experience. I have no health insurance, so an upper respiratory infection could send me spiraling into financial ruin. I have a few bills, and I can never pay them on time. Sometimes I have to choose between paying my phone bill and buying groceries to get me through the week. I borrow a lot of money from my mother and grandmother. $20 here and there, just to get me through. I am also fresh off my first big heartbreak and convinced that I am unlovable and will be alone forever. (At 25! Good grief.)

But I have one thing: I diet. I scrape together the cash each week to attend Weight Watchers meetings, and delight at the number on the scale going down week after week. The lady weighing me in always gives me a gold star and sometimes stickers that say “Good job!” when I lose weight. It doesn’t occur to me to find this infantilizing and offensive. I hoard my gold stars like they are actual gold. I stick to my Points each and every day, cataloguing them in my little Weight Watchers notebook, and sometimes eat under my allotted Points because I have run out of food. I eat a lot of Smart Ones meals and Lean Cuisines. I don’t enjoy them, but they are cheap and I can’t afford much fresh food. I fast before each weigh-in so I will get my gold star for the week, and then binge afterward with friends, one of the few indulgences I allow myself. (We all go to meetings together on Saturday mornings. We call our post-weigh-in binge “Faturday.”)

I throw myself into Weight Watchers full-force because it is the only thing in my life I feel I can control. When I successfully lose a pound, I feel like a winner, only for a moment. I convince myself that if I just keep losing, if I get to my goal weight, I will break my losing streak. If I am thin, I will be able to get a better job, I will be able to buy nicer clothes to wear to work and to interviews. It’s an investment in my future, I think, to justify the expense of Weight Watchers, which I frankly cannot afford. And, most of all, I am lonely. If I am thin, men will be able to see me for who I am and not just see me as a fat girl. Losing weight is paramount to finding love, I think. And though my ex-boyfriend said he had no issue with my weight, I am certain, absolutely certain, that my weight had something to do with our break-up.

I really just wanted to be seen, and it’s funny how often we resort to shrinking ourselves in an effort to be seen.

Looking back at these photos, it’s easy for me to forget all of this. I scrupulously maintained an online presence that rarely alluded to my troubles. And I took picture after picture after picture until I got the right shot, the one that was flattering and cute and made me look like a MySpace princess. It took forever, and flipping through the photos, taken with a clunky digital point-and-shoot at impossible angles, I was filled with self-loathing. I’d cry over the pictures that showed my double-chin, round cheeks. I rarely ever took a photo of my full body, and all photos were intensively curated.

Now I’m 35. And I don’t give nearly as many fucks.

Sometimes I don’t realize how far I’ve come until I sit back and really think about that time in my life. I’ve bought a house, established a career, caught a husband, bought my dream car, assembled a menagerie of awesome pets I can spoil with the fancy food from the holistic pet store, and my husband and I regularly eat out at nice, upscale restaurants with our fat paychecks. If you had told 25 year old me that any of this would happen one day, and that none of these things was contingent on losing weight, I would have laughed at you. If you had told me that all of these things would happen and I would actually be fatter than ever (somewhat due to all the good times dining out with my husband), I would have flat-out not believed you.

Here’s to being older, wiser, richer and wider. Now, at 35, when I see people jumping on the latest diet trend or rejoining Weight Watchers for the fourth or fifth time, I want to shout: You don’t have to lose weight! Losing weight won’t actually make you better, or happier, or more successful, or more loved! You can have all of those things without counting Points! You can literally have your cake and eat it too!

This doesn’t mean fatphobia does not exist, or fat people don’t have challenges because of their weight, like getting hired, getting promoted, getting appropriate medical treatment and care, and getting raises. They absolutely do. But I feel like each person like me, who achieves their Optimal Level of Success™, without losing weight, can chip away at the things that hold us back. And we can fight the fight for other people by calling out fatphobia when we encounter it. We can fight for the people who aren’t strong enough to fight yet. And I have felt it happen, felt a shift in my interactions with people, when I push back on fatphobia, when I talk about size diversity and fat acceptance, when I talk about Health at Every Size. Slowly, we can shift things, and perhaps one day, people can get to the point I am at, at long last, at 35, without wandering through the desert of endless Weight Watchers meetings and books about dieting and self-loathing and false hope of being able to better your life through dieting.

That’s my hope, anyway. All I know is that I’m so thankful I got here.