From the time I was a teenager until I turned 40, I made the same New Year’s resolution every year. Not to get healthy or exercise regularly (I still make those) but to lose weight, plain and simple.

My mother had a thing about weight, but by the time you turn 40, it’s a little late to be blaming your mother for everything. So at 40, I just did it. After having two children in three years, never losing the weight from the first before gaining even more with the second, I was, for want of a better term, fat.

It wasn’t a case of not being able to see my body clearly. I saw it clearly. I couldn’t fit into any of the regular sizes. The irony, in retrospect, was that after failing for so many years, it actually wasn’t nearly as hard as I imagined.