I muffled my sobs with a pillow so my family couldn’t hear me from the adjacent room. I was 19 years old and we were in Paris, staying on the top floor of an old six-story walkup where every step echoed through the thin walls. I was trying, and failing, to hide the emotional war I had decided to wage on my body.
Who does that on a family vacation? Pulling tear-soaked strands of hair off my cheeks, I stood in front of a full-length mirror and grabbed the fat of my thighs. If only I could just – I pictured ripping off fistfuls of my body and flinging them out the windows, where they would land on some unknowing French person six stories below.
I had this vision often: pulling bits of myself off and casting them somewhere far away from me. For years, spanning my teens and 20s, eating was either an indulgence to regret or a strategy to overplan. In high school, I chugged 32 ounces of cold green tea every morning, hoping it would burn belly fat like Instagram told me it would.
While working at a deli one summer, I ate two bagel sandwiches each shift until my friend mentioned I was eating the carbohydrate equivalent of 10 slices of bread. My daily bagel intake promptly plummeted to zero. I forced myself to choke down a can of tuna in my college dorm before predawn weightlifting sessions.
In my early 20s, I started experimenting with intermittent fasting: no food from 8pm until noon the next day. Then I killed my own dinner, and everything changed. Five years after the family trip to Paris, I sat down at my dinner table in Belgrade, Montana, to eat a piece of meat from the first white-tailed deer I had hunted myself.
My first taste of this venison took a lit stick of dynamite to every complicated emotion I would ever felt about eating. Regret was the least appropriate response to this meal, as it would reduce the animal’s death to waste. Gluttony wasn’t an option, either.
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