When I was in second grade and a boy teased me because I had round, chubby cheeks, my mom's solution was to put me on a diet. Looking back at photos, I was thin at that age. I just had my dad's round cheeks.

When I was eight and having trouble making friends because I was an introverted bossy know-it-all, my mom jumped to the conclusion that people didn't like me because I was a little chubby. She took me to weight watchers. The people there tried to talk her out of it. She insisted.

When I was 11 and just starting puberty, she started really laying on the guilt about how I was too fat. She made me join a gym and would drop me off there for two hours at a time and then pick me up when she thought I'd exercised enough. The weird thing is that while she was pushing me to exercise and telling me I was fat, she was also giving me enormous adult sized portions at meal times. She cooked really healthy, but even when you're cooking great food you're going to make your eight year old gain weight if you give her a portion large enough for an adult man. I think maybe she thought if she could just fill me up with "healthy" foods I'd stop wanting the snacks and junk foods that all kids want.

By twelve I had an eating disorder and taking diet pills I'd stolen from my aunt. I hated myself. I hated my body. I started self-injuring (an addiction that would last 15 years).

From middle school onward I alternated between crash diets and severely disordered eating. In high school I would only drink a soda at lunch because I felt too fat to be seen eating.

I developed a binge eating disorder as a result. When I wasn't actively starving myself, I was binging. Now I'm an obese adult and it's painful as fuck to realize that I may never have ended up here if I'd never started on those horrible diets in the first place.

My relationship with my mom is really strained as a result. I've managed to set really strict boundaries when it comes to diet/body talk, but it's really all my mom wants to talk about. She's always on a diet and she always wants to tell me about how it's changing her life and if I just tried it, it would change my life too.