I’ve always been overweight. Looking back, certainly as a child and a teen I wasn’t nearly as overweight as I thought at the time, but it was enough.  In second grade, there was a spat of particularly hurtful things that were said to me—sometimes by some of the older students, sometimes by my peers.  At times it felt relentless.

That summer, I decided that I needed to do something about it; that I didn’t want to be fat any more and didn’t want anyone to make fun of me.  I figured out that if I just ate less, I would be able to lose weight. So I did.  A lot less.  Anytime my family offered me something, I would tell them I wasn’t hungry.  I would wait until I was absolutely starving, and only then would I try anything.  I vividly remember going to the New York State Fair at the end of summer and the day being consumed by my parents insisting every time we walked by a food stand that I have something to eat, that they were really worried about me.  It was a long struggle of a day for all of us