All my life I've been a hefty individual. I get it from my great grandmother, Clara. No, seriously. I'll show a picture of her someday and you could plop my head on her body and that would be me.

Here's me at 3. Looking at this picture, I don't think I look at all chubby, but I definitely was bigger than other kids my age.

What difference did it make at 3 anyway? NONE.

At 12, my mother put me on a diet. It was Weight Watchers. Everyone at church was doing it (it was new). Honestly, I didn't know what a "self image" was until I was told by my parents that I needed to lose weight. It killed me to have my sister and brother able to eat anything they wanted, while I had to try and trick myself that bean sprouts were "spaghetti". Or eat 4 oz. of tuna fish on plain dry wheat bread scraped with mayo EVERY DAY for lunch. They didn't mean it, but when they started this diet thing, it said to me "you aren't good enough as you are." Lots of therapy to take care of that.

Here's me as a freshman in high school. We went away to boarding school (it was a parochial school) in Michigan. The first time we were anticipating our parents to come and visit, I was so excited. I think it was an October break. I saw their car driving up, an made a bee-line for their car. The first thing my mother said was, "You've gained weight." This would be THE topic of discussion for years. All I know is that looking back on these as an adult was a completely different experience than seeing yourself as your parents did at such a tender age.

EVERYthing revolved around my weight. That endless, impossible cyclical attempt to get it right. It didn't help that I was born a bigger person. It didn't help that all my friends were itsy bitsy (and their parents were, as well!). And it didn't help that my sister was the popular one and allowed free reign with the fridge.

Over the course of the years, I have tried so many diets it would be impossible to list them all. Here is a non-comprehensive list:

• Weight Watchers
• Ayds (does anyone remember these hateful, nasty "candies"?) I can't tell you what it was like sitting in high school eating Ayds with some boring hot coffee in a thermos while others were eating cafeteria food.
• Fruit diet
• In 1976, I went on a diet getting shots of pregnant women's urine and 500 calories. I had to drive to Waukegan EVERY DAY to get a shot. I couldn't even touch something like hand lotion. I was starving and it was totally unnecessary.
• In 1977, I did ProLinn... you know, that diet of nothing but liquid protein where people died from taking it. I did it under a doctor's care; however, the people that died, did not. I fasted for four months and didn't touch food. I was told later I was lucky I didn't die when I started eating food again. This screwed up my metabolism pretty much for forever.

I did lose weight from time to time. I had great willpower. I always always always wanted to be thin. I would dream about "when I get skinny" all the clothes I would wear and what I would look like. But inevitably, all these diets in the 70s and 80s were not permanent. My weight continued to go up and my success continued to wane.