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My name is Jes Baker and I am a 300-pound person who is not trying to lose weight.
Getty / Print Collector / Contributor; Design / Morgan Johnson
Yep, you read that right.
Im also a vintage apron collector and former mental health professional.
Yes, I have indeed tried dieting and exercise.
And yes, if you were wondering, I was the lone child.
Yes, dear reader, I have tried.
I began to realize that diet culture was not going to give me the peace and happiness it promised.
I had been robbed of my self-esteem.
Robbed of thousands of dollars spent in the pursuit of unattainable perfection.
Robbed of the critical communication between my brain and my body.
Robbed of peace of mind.
Robbed of the ability to trust myself.
Robbed of genuine autonomy.
Robbed of internal and external liberation.
But as it turned out, leaving that behind was the easy part.
I was looking for liberation and I ended up lost.
This confusion was bound to happen.
At one time you might have had the ability to clearly hear your bodily intuition.
It took years of haphazardly bumping into hurdles to realize I couldnt just throw away diet culture…
I also had to learn how to connect internal channels of communication.
I had to re-learn how to trust myself.
I started with tiny nudges around things like sleep and drinking.
I started to hear a Hey, you havent taken your medication!
reminder after a few days of forgetting, instead of after a few weeks.
They healed in tandem.
I started working with a non-diet dietitian to explore what flexible eating and movement looked like for me.
I learned how healing looks different for different people and found the beauty in that.
My life is now the opposite of a meal plan on a page, written by a stranger.
Listening to the yeses and listening to the nos.
Gently collecting this data for myself and knowing full well that it could all shift at any given time.
I find myself today in what feels like very uncharted territory and without a map.
But the real journey is anything but fast and would be impossible to write as a BuzzFeed listicle.
I am not trying to be fat and I am not trying to be thin.
That is a beautiful step towards healing in and of itself.
