At what point did my obsession with food and exercise begin? Perhaps it was the

magnet on my aunt’s refrigerator door warning me against snacking. It was a well-

meaning reminder not to mindlessly graze, but for a chubby fourteen-year-old, the

message was loud and clear: watch yourself. Hip size matters.

This little seed planted its way into my subconscious and began to bloom when I

was nineteen. I was still finding my footing in San Francisco after being

unceremoniously dumped. One day I was in love, the next there was a woman

named June and I no longer had a boyfriend or a place to live.

This was how I wound up with Linda, a 52-year-old meth addict and her teenage

daughter Tami. It seemed that Linda needed cash, so she sublet her bedroom and

moved to the couch. I was not in a place to discriminate, so I dragged my suitcase

across town and declared this home.

It was a new low for me: late nights smoking pot and eating pizza in a dingy

apartment, with wood paneled walls and lingering cigarette smoke. It was one of

these late nights when the guy on the TV seemed to be talking right at me. It was

Billy Blanks, the inventor of Tae Bo, a combination of kickboxing and martial arts

that he guaranteed would change my life. For just three easy payments, I too could

be shaped into a warrior with his exercise program. I was young, broke, and

depressed, but I wiped the pizza grease off my hands and picked up the phone.

I plugged the first VHS tape into the machine and on the brown shag carpet I

punched and kicked and envisioned my new body, one invincible to break-ups.

Tae Bo was my gateway drug. Since that moment, I have done it all in the pursuit of

body “perfection”. Juice cleanses, fasts, protein-only diets, fitness plans,

weightlifting, Pilates, and what amounts to two decades spent obsessing about my

body. Two decades of calorie counting, journaling, snapping hopeful “before”

pictures and no matter how thin, never fully realizing an “after” picture worth

sharing.

At 42 I Finally feel the grip of obsession loosening. Maybe it is a reaction to midlife;

the gratitude that I am still alive and happy that my body can still move me up a

mountain. Maybe it is the stunning realization that if I had spent those two decades

obsessing over, say, medicine, I could be a doctor now. Or maybe it is the shocking

thing I heard my Peloton instructor say the other day. She declared that we exercise

“because we love our bodies, not because we hate them.” Yes, I think. YES. How can

I approach my now addiction to exercise from a place of love instead of hate?

I spina little faster and think, “I should write this in my fitness journal.”