The Magical Thinking of Weight Loss
On major weight loss and praying at the altar of thinness
I was in middle school when I attended my first Weight Watchers meeting.
At the tender age of 11, I had already attended kids’ weight loss programs and fat day camps, kept food diaries, and counted calories. I had honed my skill at eyeballing portions of food, readily spotting the difference between a third cup and a half cup of blueberries. But, despite my best efforts, my stubborn body clung to its fat. So I was at Weight Watchers.
I descended the steps of a neighborhood community center, entering a shadowy basement with low ceiling tiles and long fluorescent lights. I stood in line while a Success Story individually weighed each attendee, marking our weekly weight in a ledger before ushering us into the meeting room.
I was an outlier — a chubby, pink-cheeked preteen in a room full of fortysomething women. I paid close attention as they spoke, listening not only for their successes and failures, but for how adult women talked about their lives. This was a coming-of-age moment. I was being ushered into the perpetual motion machine of womanhood: the unending, thankless quest to lose weight.
Through sheer force of will, these women intended to break their…
