Two years ago, in a session with my therapist, I suddenly found myself saying, “I want to talk about my relationship to my body sometime.” Just saying that one sentence out loud was all I could muster that day, and had taken me decades to get to that point.

My first real awareness of my body started when I was around eight years old in the hallways of my grammar school in suburban Boston. As I cycled my bike over mounds of dirt in the woods behind my house, and flew around the corners of a roller rink on a Thursday night as Michael Jackson tunes blared, I was blissfully unaware that my body was being judged and seen as wrong.

That all changed when a boy in my third-grade class shouted down the crowded corridor at me, “Your ass is so fat!” My fat body, bigger than any others in our grade, defined me at school for the next eight years. I can still hear my peers’ singsong chant of “Fatty-fatty two by four, can’t fit through the bathroom door”. I know by heart the opening words of an essay another boy wrote about me and read to the whole class: “I know a boy, he’s kind of chubby”. I easily recall the “boom boom” noises the worst........

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