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.
Tilt by Emma Patee
Amazon
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).
Spending the entire lunch obsessing about the decision. Back at work, trying to decide if I should or shouldn’t have a piece of cake for some office birthday, forcing myself to go to the gym after work, both avoiding and being drawn to the mirror while I worked out, were my arms getting smaller? How large were my thighs? Then going home to make dinner and log my calories for the day. Vowing that tomorrow I would do better.
I came up with three hours a day.
“Now tally that,” the dietician said. She told us to imagine we had that time back. What would we do with all that mental energy and focus?
I would write a book.
The words came into my mind immediately. If I had an extra three hours a day, I would write the book I had been wanting to write my whole life.
I stopped dieting that night. If it doesn’t work, I told myself, and the research shows that it doesn’t, then it was a waste of my time. I was better off focusing on my writing. That way, I rationalized, I might never be thin, but at least I’d have a book.
***
The average woman is obsessed with her body, spending 17 years of her life on a diet, and thinking 13 cruel thoughts about her body every single day. Adult women worry more about their appearance than they do about finances, health, relationships, or professional success. Millennial women are reportedly seven times more likely to worry about their weight than their careers.
We talk a lot about whether or not we should want to be skinny, but we don’t talk nearly enough about what wanting to be skinny takes from us—our focus, brain cognition, our time, our energy, our willpower, our bandwidth. Even our outrage. In The Beauty Myth, feminist and cultural critic Naomi Wolf writes, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
I joined a group of writers who met at a bar to write two nights a week (a place I wouldn’t have wanted to find myself when I was dieting because do you know how many calories are in alcohol? Or soda? Do you know how much willpower it takes to sip water while everyone else is having wine and french fries?) and I started writing. I found a few short stories I had written in college and edited them. Sent them out to literary journals. I became friends with the writers at that bar.
And finally, finally, I wrote a book.
The act of writing a book made it clear to me why it would have been impossible for me to both continue dieting and also create. Writing a book requires tremendous levels of discipline. You must carve out small chunks of time over years, without knowing the end goal.
Now that I do it full-time, I joke with people that writing is the only thing I am sure I will do every day. Brush my teeth? I hope so. Get my kids to bed on time? We’ll see. Go running? Maybe. But I spend two hours writing each morning. Life is busy and heavy and complex and all of us have so much on our plates and so little focus and time. The tiny bit of attention and discipline I have, I use it to write.
But the other reason is that dieting was stealing from me something more potent than time, more potent even than attention. It was making me small. My gaze was always turned towards myself, and so there was so much about the world I could not see. I think it’s safe to say that when your biggest and most fantastic life dream is to lose 20 pounds, you aren’t dreaming big. And it turns out the one thing you absolutely must have to write a novel—both in terms of your characters and in terms of your writing career—is the ability to dream big.
The life I wanted so much? I got it: the friends, the parties, the book deal, the joy. I thought I had to lose weight to have it, but it turns out that spending all my energy obsessing over what I ate and being thin was the thing stopping me from having it.
Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and fiction writer. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Tilt, is available now from Marysue Rucci Books/Simon & Schuster.
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