I grew up without a scale in the house. My mother threw the scale away when I was 8 years old, because she didn’t want me to ever feel a slave to it like she had as a teen. Fat was a feminist issue, and feeling fat meant caving into patriarchal pressures. I also didn’t have any Barbies growing up because my mom didn’t want me to have a distorted body image. Hey, makes sense to me. I got My Little Ponies, instead … they have stumpy legs and plump bubble butts and are probably a much better body model for little girls. As a result, I grew up with a solid, health body and healthy body image. I’m totally average-bodied: thick, but not fat; strong, not skinny.

However, six-plus years of working as a writer/sedentary lump accelerated my metabolism’s natural decline. Despite a daily yoga practice, I’ve never been an especially active person and having a sedentary career is without a doubt my biggest health liability.

I eat healthy foods. My diet is mostly vegetarian (I eat fish a few times a week) and I eat a lot of Dre’s vegan food. I rarely touch fast food, rarely drink alcohol-soda-starbucks-etc, and my main vices have been sweets, nuts, and oily ethnic foods like Thai and Indian. My diet is infinitely healthier than the Standard American Diet of deep fried everything with a bucket-sized side of carbonated sugar.

Despite all that, though, I’d steadily gained weight for the last five years … three or four pounds a year. I wasn’t terribly overweight, but I could already see how my sedentary lifestyle and eating habits had become the most unhealthy part of my life. And, well, my chin was starting to disappear into my neck.

I started wrestling with myself: I felt unhealthy — and then felt guilty for feeling that way. Was I a victim of the patriarchy? So wait, fighting the patriarchy means stuffing myself? Was I buying into some clucky NOT ME style national weight obsession by feeling like I wasn’t eating right? And wait, since when is eating healthier a national obsession? Americans eat terribly!

I knew that I was eating more food than I needed to, but the mere idea of portion control brought up an enormous set of issues for me. As the feminist daughter of a feminist mother, I’ve always sort of felt like it was my duty not to think about food. Not only a duty — it was something I owed to my best friend who’d suffered through anorexia and bulimia in high school, complete with a month of hospitalization. It was my job to be the one who held down the fort of healthy eating, setting a good example for women who were crushed under the thumb of eating disorders and weight issues.

Mimi Smartypants touched on this issue when she wrote:

My friend and I decided that having the body-image blues is dramatically worse for girls like me and her and, presumably, you, because we are all Bitch and Sassy and Janeane Garofolo and Beauty Myth and Kathleen Hanna, and it is so very Not Punk Rock to have the body-image blues, so then besides feeling like we are hideously deformed we also have to have this extra layer of guilt and shame and not-punk-rockness on top of everything. I am not saying that life is necessarily easier for the non-self-aware, not-so-terribly-cursed-with-a-sense-of-irony, vapid shallow fashion girls. Except that I think maybe I am.

In my mind, the only way to fight eating disorders and the all-too-common feminine weight neurosis was not to think about food or weight at all … I ate HEALTHY food, but the thought of “maybe I should eat less” always felt like it was just around the corner from some sort of Karen Carpenter nightmare, where I suddenly became a neurotic starving skeleton with amenorrhea.

I tried various exercise regimes to try to balance out my sedentary lifestyle but because I’m so solidly muscular, the effect was that I just got bigger. I ran stairs for six months and my ass grew (harder, but bigger!). I lifted weights for almost a year and the result was that my t-shirt sleeves stopped fitting.

Then, someone recommended Weight Watchers.

I know, right? Fucking Weight Watchers? A pay-for-play diet program? Now it wasn’t the feminist in me that balked, it was the conscious consumer. Not only was I a victim of the patriarchy, I’d be a victim of consumer fitness culture! You can’t pay someone to fix your bad habits! And fad diets suck. They’re not healthy.

I can’t deal with the “bad food/food bad” issues that many chronic dieters seem to embody. I think too many women spend their days connecting food with negativity, and it’s just not healthy! Food is good, food nourishes us! Now, is there food that’s healthier? Yes. Is there food that you should eat less of? Sure! But is there bad food? No!

Then I talked to a woman I respected and she explained “It’s not really a diet, it’s a training for how to eat and cook for the rest of your life and not hate it.” Oh, you mean it’s not about special foods you can or can’t eat? It’s just about figuring out how much you can eat in balance with your lifestyle? About being more mindful of the foods you eat and the quantities that you eat them, as it compares with your activity level? Huh. That all made perfect sense.

I signed up for Weight Watchers Online at the beginning of December. I opted not to do the meetings — I was told by a friend of a friend that she found the meetings not especially helpful for people who eat foods like quinoa and tempeh. Plus, doing it online was cheaper.

I started eating less. There weren’t any bad food/food bad issues. Part of why WW has worked for me is that there’s no “bad food.” There’s just food that you can eat more of, and food that you should eat less of. Does that mean I can’t have a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner sometimes? Fuck no! But I learned quickly that having a huge plate of oily Thai food for lunch every day eventually added up. I started learning about how, as a vegetarian, I need to get my protein from things like beans instead of things like, say, cheese.

I refused to buy a scale for the first three months, eschewing WW’s weekly weigh-ins as unhealthy for me. I didn’t want to fixate on a number. I just wanted to appreciate on how I felt, and how my clothes fit. And what do you know! I felt better and my clothes got looser. (I did eventually buy a scale, but it lives in the basement where I’m not tempted to weigh myself. Once a week I go dig it out. Never more often than that.)

I’d talked to Andreas a lot before starting Weight Watchers, just as a sanity check to verbalize my intentions. “I want to learn about how to eat in better balance with my life,” I said. He had to remind me that I’d said this a couple months in, when I started freaking out about how much I was thinking about food.

“You wanted to be more conscious about food, remember?” he said. Ah, that’s right. I did. And being more conscious is healthy. I have this feminist knee-jerk that thinking about food AT ALL equals Victim of Evil Forces. This is, of course, not true.

So I’ve been eating less. And started taking aerobic dance classes instead of yoga classes (although I still have my home yoga practice). And I’ve lost weight. It feels so simple: I’ve been eating less and more consciously, although I’m certainly not deprived. Y’all have seen what I eat for lunch. I eat a lot of good, rich, healthy foods. Less oily noodles and nuts and cheese, sure. But WW encourages eating lots of vegetables and whole grains and high fiber foods — foods I already enjoyed and already knew were good for me.

I do have a couple quibbles with WW. I don’t like how it unintentionally encourages eating “fake” foods like Splenda instead of honey. For me, it seems obvious that it’s better to have a natural, whole food than some sort of chemically fake blech. But whatever: I stick with honey and work around it. The flexibility lets me do that. God knows there are some people on Weight Watchers who, rather than eat a huge bowl full of vegetables opt for three chicken nuggets because that’s what they want. And that’s their choice. It’s cool like that.

With this weight loss has come the realization that part of the issues that were coming up for me with my slow weight gain wasn’t just the increased size and pounds — it was that I felt like I was powerless to do anything about it. When you buy into the logic of thinking about food = victim of patriarchy, there’s a certain loss of control.

Despite the fact that I avoided dieting for years because I thought it would make me a powerless victim of the patriarchy, losing this bit of weight has actually made me get back in touch with my body and its needs and given me a better sense of understanding myself. If I find myself in a state of physical health that I’m not comfortable with again, I know what I need to do. Once I’ve got the tools that work, it’s not that hard. Weight Watchers is nothing compared to those month-long cleanses Dre and I used to do.

The only downside? Some of my favorite clothes have stopped fitting. I had to sacrifice the size 14 lime green pants that were always a little big but reached the point of falling off. This morning I put on my favorite pirate skirt and found that it hung so low on my hips that it was almost obscene. I guess that’s the sad part of slowly losing the 20 pounds extra I’ve slowly accumulated.

Regardless, I’m pretty close now to the weight that my body is healthy at. I’m not meant to be a stick, and my curves are back to the ratios that look good with my build. It’s a nice place to be, and the process of getting here has been pretty enjoyable. I can be an overly cerebral person at times (gee, ya think?), and it’s been nice to focus some attention on my physical vessel, as it were.

Clearly, the fact that I’ve written so many words about this subject points to the fact that regardless of which way you’re coming from, women and food are big issues in this culture. I’ve tried to tip-toe through the mine-field as carefully as possible, and I’ve had some great help from my mother and the women around me who’ve done everything to help me love my body … and it’s been my goal to deal with the process of losing weight in a positive, self-affirming, self-loving way. No deprivation or punishment but a pro-active approach toward my own health. It’s been good.

And the vanity pay-offs are great.