I asked the women there, most of whom were repeat joiners as well: Shouldn’t we be moving toward acceptance? Here we all were — smart, accomplished, successful women (and one man) — and we couldn’t maintain what was proved to be the most effective diet you could ever try. If we couldn’t stay on this, could we stay on anything? What if the flaw wasn’t in us but in the system?

They furrowed their brows and shook their heads and gave me funny looks. What was I talking about? How could a fat person not want to be thin? Donna’s sisters were all on diabetes medication, and she wasn’t. Her back had hurt until about 20 pounds ago, and now she could crawl on the floor with her grandson as if it were nothing.

I couldn’t counter very hard. Each time I came to a meeting, I was seduced by the possibility, by the clean, Calvinist logic, that if you ate less you would weigh less, that your body would feed on itself and its fat reserves until you became smaller and smaller and more pleasing to the world and its standards — until you practically disappeared (we are a culture that fetishizes something called Size 0). I looked forward to these meetings, feeling as if these people were the only ones who seemed to truly understand my predicament. But my optimism and motivation didn’t survive my walk out the door. By the time I got to my car, I had no idea what to do. I knew that if this could be done, I would have done it, and yet I didn’t know why I couldn’t do it. Just eat less, right? It’s so simple!

About two years ago, I decided to yield to what every statistic I knew was telling me and stop trying to lose weight at all. I decided to stop dieting, but when I did, I realized I couldn’t. I didn’t know what or how to eat. I couldn’t fathom planning my food without thinking first about its ability to help or hinder a weight-loss effort. I went to a nutritional therapist to help figure this out (dieting, I have found, is its own chronic condition), and I paid her every week so I could tell her that there still had to be a way for me to lose weight. When she reminded me that I was there because I had realized on my own that there was no way to achieve this goal, I reminded this wonderful, patient person that she couldn’t possibly understand my desperation because she was skinny. I had arthritis in my knees, I said. Morality and society aside, they hurt. I have a sister with arthritis in her knees, too, but she’s skinny and her knees don’t hurt.

I went to an intuitive-eating class — intuitive eating is where you learn to feed yourself based only on internal signals and not external ones like mealtimes or diet plans. Meaning it’s just eating what you want when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. There were six of us in there, educated, desperate fat women, doing mindful-eating exercises and discussing their pitfalls and challenges. We were given food. We would smell the food, put the food on our lips, think about the food, taste the food, roll the food around in our mouths, swallow the food. Are you still hungry? Are you sure? The first week it was a raisin. It progressed to cheese and crackers, then to cake, then to Easter candy. We sat there silently, as if we were aliens who had just arrived on Earth and were learning what this thing called food was and why and how you would eat it. Each time we did the eating exercise, I would cry. ‘‘What is going on for you?’’ the leader would ask. But it was the same answer every time: I am 41, I would say. I am 41 and accomplished and a beloved wife and a good mother and a hard worker and a contributor to society and I am learning how to eat a goddamned raisin. How did this all go so wrong for me?

They tried to soothe me. They told me that hatred of fat was a societal construct, but I never understood why that should comfort me. I live in society. I hurt my ankle playing tennis, activating an old injury, and an internist I was seeing for the first time, without taking any medical history or vital signs — my blood pressure is pristine, just so you know — told me he couldn’t do anything for me until I lost weight and gave me a rusty photocopy about food exchanges. (Another doctor prescribed three months of physical therapy, and now my ankle is fine.) I was in Iceland, for a story assignment, and the man who owned my hotel took me fishing and said, ‘‘I’m not going to insist you wear a life jacket, since I think you’d float, if you know what I mean.’’ I ignored him, and then afterward, back on land, after I fished cod like a Viking, he said, ‘‘I call that survival of the fattest.’’ A woman getting into a seat next to me on a plane said, ‘‘Looks like this will be a cozy ride,’’ and a Manhattan taxi driver told me he liked to watch my ‘‘jelly’’ shake, by which I can only presume he meant a part of my body. I have been asked if it was my first time taking Pilates at a studio where I’m on my fifth 10-pack. I have been told at a yoga class that I have ‘‘a really great spirit’’ and it’s important that I ‘‘just keep coming.’’ (I’ve been taking yoga for 12 years.) I was told by a seamstress that she had never seen a bride not lose weight for her wedding until she met me. A crazy man tried to give me candy outside the Met, and when I politely declined he screamed at me that of course I didn’t want it, I was fat enough, and my sister asked me why I was so upset, clearly that guy was crazy, and I said, ‘‘You don’t understand because you’re skinny,’’ and on and on forever. (By the way, I am writing this despite the myriad degradations that I know will appear in my inbox and in the comments section when it is published. I am someone who once wrote a body-image essay for a women’s magazine in which a comment in the margins from an editor read, ‘‘Why doesn’t she stop eating so much?’’)