When I first read about Kurbo by WW , the new weight loss app designed for teens and children as young as eight, I was suddenly 11 years old again, sitting on the steps of a community center basement, summoned by the failure of my too-fat body. I was somehow both too much and too little.

Growing up as a fat kid meant hearing judgments, derision and outright revulsion of fat bodies at every turn: from family, friends, doctors, media, teachers. And at the center of it all were bodies like mine: the bodies of fat kids. I was a sixth grader, bare in a spotlight, defined by her insufficiency. So I was sent to Weight Watchers.

In those meetings, I heard adult women, one after the next, describe their fear of food, and their fear that they weren’t afraid enough. I heard them talk about the ways they saw their bodies as barriers to the things they wanted most: love, desire, success, money, happiness. I learned to blame my body for every failure. I learned to long for thinness as a pathway to another life, the technicolor world of happiness and success that those women described so longingly, which was just out of reach. I learned to chastise myself like they did. I learned to fear food, over time, coming to resent needing to eat at all.

All of that stands in such stark contrast to my life in adulthood. Today, at 35 years old, I am so proud of who I have become: the professional and academic successes I’ve garnered, the family I cherish, the relationships I’ve built, the ways in which I’ve failed, and the ways in which I’ve grown. Most days, I carry that pride and full heart with me, an awareness of the charmed and ever-evolving life I am privileged to lead. I’ve come a long way from the child that spent so many weeknights in Weight Watchers meetings.

WW—then known as Weight Watchers—was not my first diet, nor would it be my last. Growing up as a fat kid meant memorizing the rules of one diet after another: low fat, low carb, low calorie. Weight Watchers was just one stop on my odyssey through the diet industry, along with other notable stops like the diet pill stop and the meal replacement stop. I would go on to spend another 15 years desperately chasing weight loss that never came, like some cruel absurdist punchline, a preteen Waiting for Godot. But I learned so much from my time there; after all, I was the youngest in a room full of women who also seemed to understand—and repeat—the message that their lives wouldn't be complete until they weighed less.

At 11 years old, week after week, I sat in a room with older women and from them I learned the contours of my failures, and the failures of anyone with a body that’s “too big.” Despite the stark difference in our ages, experiences, needs and wants, these adult women were to be my peers, even as I was in the sixth grade. I worried about how to handle snacks at a sleepover; they worried about reigniting their dwindling sex lives with distant husbands. Their words became the scripts of self loathing I would faithfully recite for years to come. My future and my fortune, I learned, would forever be determined by my size.

I learned as a child in Weight Watchers that the joy of eating was reserved for those who were forever thin. The rest of us, I learned, needed to spend our lives weighing and cataloguing our food intake, pushing our bodies past exhaustion to “earn” foods with higher points values . I learned to expect the public humiliation of being weighed and assessed each week, my weight catalogued in a ledger by our group’s leader. In time, that shame lived within me, long after I stopped attending meetings.

I learned how many calories were in a half-cup of blueberries, a slice of cheese, a piece of toast. I learned to keep a food journal, a skill that I kept as an eating disorder flourished in me later in life. I learned that eating a piece of cake at a friend's birthday party was something I couldn’t do freely or joyfully, as thinner people could. Instead, I had to log it, account for it, explain it, remember it for weeks to come for the points that it added to my weekly quota. And I learned from the older women in the meeting that the appropriate response to such an indiscretion was to publicly bemoan my failure: of willpower, strength, character, and the penitence they so firmly believed was required to become thin. Just barely out of grade school, I had already learned the fundamentals of diet culture and disordered eating alike.

But more than that, I learned that all of my actions, accomplishments and failures would forever be broken, their light refracted through the prism of my body. The personal stories of group members and our group leader alike made it clear that their happiness, relationships, and very sense of self hinged on their ability to become thin. As a child in a room full of adults, these weren’t just individual stories. They were object lessons, frightening foreshadowing of my future life if I stayed fat. Any future relationship that failed would be squarely my own fault, a natural result of living in a body that was categorically undesirable. Social failures, too, would be understood as a direct result of the size of my body. Every aspect of my life, character and relationships would be measured against the yardstick of my soft and growing body.

As I read about Kurbo, I was reminded of what it felt like, not just to be in that room, but to be a child navigating these complicated lessons of eating and bodies for the first time. In adulthood, it’s easy to forget the rigor of childhood. There is so much work in charting our paths through the wilderness of a world that remains new to us. Eight-year-olds—the beginning of Kurbo’s target demographic —are left to make sense of the world around them, circumlocuting every interaction, mining them for meaning. As children, they are already detectives of social interactions: where do they fit in this world? What matters about who they are? Who has power, and how can they claim some influence of their own? And at precisely that moment, childhood weight loss programs reinforce in children what I learned so long ago: that their place in the world will be determined by the shape of their skin.

Of course, Kurbo isn’t the issue here. It is a symptom, but far from the whole disease. We have known for decades that most weight loss diets ultimately fail . Researchers suspect that dieting that results in dramatic weight loss over a short period of time may slow down your metabolism for years post diet—a cruel twist that, for many of us, essentially guarantees a lifetime as a fat person precisely because we’ve tried to escape that fate. According to a study by the National Eating Disorders Association, teens who diet are between five and 18 times more likely to develop eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and that children and teens are particularly vulnerable to adverse outcomes from dieting. Children can and should access age-appropriate nutrition information, but focusing that education primarily around weight loss can harm more than it helps. And programs like Kurbo teach kids to restrict their eating through labeling some foods “red light” and “yellow light.” No wonder the NEDA published a statement recently airing their concerns about the app.

Despite what countless weight loss maxims and diet advertisements touting “success stories” would have you believe, we simply don’t know how to make fat people thin in the long term through diet and exercise alone. We don’t know what the answer is, but we know it’s not this.

Last year, upon the news of Weight Watcher’s rebrand to WW, I wasn’t angry with the company . They were doing then what they are doing now, and what so much of the diet industry focuses on: creating profit and value for their shareholders. Above all, WW, like the diet industry at large, is charged with the same task as any for-profit business: making money.

On the day in February of 2018 when WW announced they’d be offering free memberships to teens for six weeks during that summer, their stock prices soared, increasing by 16 percent in just one day. And 2018 shares reportedly surged 490 percent over the previous year. Suddenly, a company whose membership and earnings were previously on the decline looked like a promising investment. With their rebrand, WW did what it is designed to do: draw in new customers and new investors alike. I don’t begrudge them that.

But the impacts of these companies don’t begin and end at their corporate bottom line. The diet industry preys on insecurities to lock customers into a model that comes with no guarantees. After all, the diet industry still profits when their products fail us—otherwise the customer base would evaporate, the industry would wither.

I wasn’t angry last year. But today, my emotions are a roiling sea: Sometimes I feel defeated, sometimes angry, sometimes crestfallen, sometimes motivated. The diet industry’s success is predicated on our failure, and it is hard not to be stricken by the cynicism of such blatant hucksterism.

But what hurts more is the painfully ubiquitous narrative that our bodies are to blame for our failures, even in children who are just learning multiplication. Diet advertisements and weight loss shows constantly invoke willpower and work ethic, despite research from sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that about 75 percent of our health is determined by social determinants like where we live, what kinds of discrimination we experience, where we access health care, and our income level. But instead of adapting their approach, the diet industry showcases stories of people whose whole lives seem to have fully transformed following weight loss. Instead, they fall back on the same tired and ineffective narratives: that any incompleteness in fat people’s lives owes to our size. That fat bodies are a necessary failure, even as 70 percent of Americans have BMIs that are higher than recommended . That having a fat child is an inherent failure, a disease in desperate search of a cure. And that children as young as eight years old need to learn the shame and failure of their bodies, to prime them for a lifetime living in a world that reviles their shape.

Our children deserve better than shame. They deserve better than tactics we know only cause harm. And they deserve better than the hurt so many of us have already shouldered. Our children deserve better than the shame the diet industry offers them.

Your Fat Friend writes anonymously about the social realities of life as a very fat person. Her work has been translated into 19 languages and covered around the world. You can find her work on Upworthy, Vox, The Establishment, Everyday Feminism and Medium, among others. Most recently, Your Fat Friend was a contributor to Roxane Gay's Unruly Bodies compilation.

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