This article originally appeared in the May 2016 issue of ELLE.

The first time I went to Tucson, it was to lose weight at Canyon Ranch. The second time it's for something very different. "Change your world. Love your body!" reads the movie theater–size screen looming over a standing-room-only crowd in the auditorium of Pima Community College, site of the second annual Body Love conference. Three hundred people spent $25 each to attend, mostly women: suburban-mom types, pierced-septum alt-college students, and what appears to be a handful of walk-of-shamers decked out in sparkles and miniskirts at 9 A.M. It's approaching 100 degrees outside, so no one is wearing much. There are a lot of sundresses; and there is a lot of skin. Most of the people attending are fat, or at least chubby, including me. I imagine that many of the other attendees wouldn't mind being called chubby. I can't count myself among them.

Jes Baker in Liora K Phtography

Jes Baker, the 29-year-old founder of the conference, stands to begin her keynote speech on "the social impact of body love." She has numerous tattoos and, today, dyed black hair (she has since cycled through lavender and blond). When we meet later, I'm tempted to ask how much she weighs. She'd probably tell—Body Love is the kind of place where radical transparency thrives—but I don't. According to a CNN story about "Attractive & Fat," a plus-size riff on the scantily clad models in Abercrombie & Fitch ad campaigns, in which Baker starred in 2013, she's a size 22. Baker is a blogger, activist, and, as of this past November, an author, with a manifesto-cum–self-help book called Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living. To the crowd, she proclaims: "I'm the reason people obsessively count calories, go to the gym, create thinspiration…. But I chose to love my body. How many of you feel comfortable looking me in the eye and calling yourself beautiful?"

The crowd claps and hoots in agreement, but I stay silent. Baker has hit on exactly what I'm here to find out: Can "body love" be taught?

The idea of accepting one's shape as is has percolated in feminist circles for decades, but lately flaws-and-all—if we're even allowed to call stomach rolls and thighs that rub together "flaws" at this point—self-acceptance has gone fully mainstream. Witness the inarguably gorgeous size-16 Ashley Graham on the cover of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue, or model Tess Holliday on the cover of People last June with the line "The World's First Size 22 Supermodel!" printed across her chest. Outspoken singer Beth Ditto is making swishy goddess dresses that go up to a size 28, and staid plus-size retailer Lane Bryant has dipped its toe into body politics with viral billboards of gloriously Rubenesque women posing in pretty lingerie with the tagline #ImNoAngel—cleverly upending the trademark Victoria's Secret supersylphs. Now that Oprah has bought into Weight Watchers, even that company's brand message is one of abundance. "I don't deny myself bread; I have bread every day," she says in the ads, with all the ecstasy of a fat-camp escapee.

Body love has also become a thriving memoir genre. In the past year, at least three women who blog about their weight have released books—Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting & Got a Life, by Kelsey Miller, who writes Refinery29's popular Anti-Diet Project column; Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It, by Brittany Gibbons; and It Was Me All Along: A Memoir, by Andie Mitchell. Each follows a familiar narrative: Girl hates herself; girl tries everything to stop being fat; girl finds peace (and a book contract) in self-acceptance.

Beth Ditto Ezra Petronia

Except for that last part, I'm just like them. My relationship with my body has been fraught since my parents put me on my first diet at age five. Two years ago, after decades of yo-yoing, I lost 75 pounds from my 5'7" frame, then gained some 30 back, and then, just before the Body Love conference, lost 10 on a Draconian plan involving meal-replacement shakes. I constantly compare myself to friends, to women in yoga class, to plus-size models on Instagram. More than once, I've found myself jealous of my bulldog, who is frequently praised for being cute because she's so chubby. On my phone, I have a secret file of screenshots of stomachs I'd prefer to have, including Kris Jenner's in a bikini on St. Barts. I will admit to having Googled "cost of liposuction nyc."

My relationship with my body has been fraught since my parents put me on my first diet at age five.

I want my body to look good to me first, and to the rest of the world second. I want to be, in short, someone whom I'd aspire to be, or whom I would desire if I were a man. At this point, I know that ideal is a distant, shimmering spot on the horizon I'll never reach. But loving my own body, just as it is, feels equally elusive. And no matter how unattainable perfection may be, working toward it—as opposed to working toward self-acceptance—is satisfying in its own way. There's action involved: counting calories, working out, weighing in. At least you're aiming for something tangible.

Not that most of us ever get there. Statistically speaking, weight-loss diets don't work very well, especially in the long run. In a 2007 meta-analysis of 31 long-term diet studies, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that one- to two-thirds of dieters gain more weight within four or five years than they'd initially lost. Syracuse University journalism professor Harriet Brown, author of last year's , believes success is even rarer than that: "Dieting doesn't make people thinner or healthier unless you're one of the 3 to 5 percent whom it can work for in the long term," Brown says, using an estimate she based on the hundreds of men and women she interviewed for her book, only a handful of whom had lost more than 20 pounds and kept the weight off.

Those numbers exhaust me. As I close in on my 39th birthday, there's something I now want even more than the svelter form I've tried for so long to achieve, and that is a way out of this constant struggle. I want to reach some level of acceptance of the body I have now, today, regardless of my weight. Otherwise I risk being the kind of person who—50-odd years from now, I hope—leaves instructions to bury me in a dress that has sleeves because I still hate my upper arms. Someone whose body issues dogged her and depleted her happiness. That fate is beginning to seem plausible.

As I close in on my 39th birthday, there's something I now want even more than the svelter form I've tried for so long to achieve, and that is a way out of this constant struggle.

On her website Stop Fighting Food, Isabel Foxen Duke, a former dieter-turned-nutrition-coach, proclaims, "I help women stop feeling crazy about food…. No yo-yo dieting, no drastic swings; just me, having a life, and not letting food ruin it." Last year, I enrolled in her 16-week online course, the program agreement for which specifies that Duke is not a doctor, dietitian, therapist, nutritionist, or psychologist—that she is not, in fact, any kind of licensed professional at all. I read this, and then I plunked down $1,275—because when I called Duke to discuss signing up, she said, "I think my program can help you." That's all it took for me to tune out my analytical mind and any natural skepticism in hopes of finding some peace with my body.

Phase one of the class involved a few online lectures a week; three conference calls in which Duke, my 20-some classmates, and I could discuss roadblocks; and a Facebook group I was encouraged to join about Intuitive Eating—more or less the idea that when you remove "good" or "bad" stigmas around specific foods and give yourself permission to eat anything you want, cravings and bingeing fade away. After three months of that, I learned that I'll never not want to eat Chubby Hubby, that I will unfailingly choose fried chicken or pizza over salad, and that, given a green light to eat what I want when I want it, I will gain 15 pounds and won't feel any better about myself.

On a holiday trip to Paris, two different strangers called me fat.... Changing my self-image felt difficult enough, but changing it while getting external feedback that confirmed the worst things I believe about myself felt impossible.

The second phase of the class was about body acceptance, which, naturally, involved Instagram. I was instructed to follow attractive women who were larger than me, in order to reset my eye to a different standard of beauty. I was also asked to give my body a name and to treat "her" well. I tried for 10 minutes to think of a name I could deal with. Iris? Chantilly? Jane? I couldn't do it. I grew up in Northern California—positive affirmations are not new to me—but even when I made a halfhearted attempt to look in the mirror and praise, say, my well-shaped lips, I kept thinking that people who are truly beautiful don't need to do remedial exercises to know they're beautiful. My greatest disappointment was that—if the class Facebook page was any indication—my classmates seemed to be undergoing a paradigm shift en masse. One woman reported she was shopping for a bikini to bring on vacation for the first time; another triumphantly got rid of jeans that were too small. I felt more frustrated than when I'd begun.

Then, on a holiday trip to Paris, two different strangers called me fat. Both times I was walking down the street in an oversize motorcycle jacket and skinny jeans when I was called out for being "a beeg girl." Changing my self-image felt difficult enough, but changing it while getting external feedback that confirmed the worst things I believe about myself—that I was so fat as to be remarkable—felt impossible. I may be my own worst critic, but my critical view is shaped by a society I am very much a part of. Following perfectly proportioned plus-size models on Instagram was a token effort, but not the answer. Body love seemed a long way off.

At the conference, Jes Baker ends her speech by saying, "This body is significantly larger than I was before, but I have a superhot boyfriend, I am successful, I am happier than I have been in my entire life." We break for our choice of hour-long sessions with titles such as "Belly Dancing: A Powerful Tool for Self-Discovery" and "Eating Disorders and Body Image: The Real Deal." I corner Baker at lunch (gluten-free, vegan; not that I ate any of it—I had a protein shake in a bathroom stall, as furtively as if I'd been ducking in to do a line of coke) and ask how she achieved her blissful, body-loving state. She tells me she's a big fan of Tumblr accounts such as Stop Hating Your Body, where selfies proudly display stomach rolls and stretch marks—though at first, just looking at these unairbrushed and unashamed women required some adjustment. "My brain did not know how to process these bodies," she says, but she kept going back to look, kept trying to find beauty in their flesh and her own. Eventually, "they became less weird and my body became normal." Her advice to me: Concentrate on positive thinking, even just "I'm okay," and, yes, try affirmations, which she admits are "very uncomfortable."

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Indeed, most conference attendees I spoke with seemed to rely on some variety of positive-thinking mind trick. Carly Herriges, a 21-year-old spoken-word performer from Arizona who has a human heart tattooed on her ring finger, told me, "When I'm having a bad body-image day, I have a mantra I invented. It's basically, 'I am wonderfully and beautifully made. I have the universe in my body and the ocean at my fingertips.'" I smile and nod, but I know that there's no way I will ever be able to chant something like that out loud. Krystal Thompson, 38, who had come all the way from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of subarctic Canada, says she found self-acceptance by challenging herself to wear a bikini for 30 days. "First I wore it in bed, then to dinner, then in the yard. The end goal was to wear one to do stand-up paddleboard yoga. I did it on day six," Thompson says. She even wore the bikini out around town. "A guy in a bar said, 'I really believe in what you're doing, and it's important.'" Yes, it was a stunt worthy of reality TV, but she swears it worked. "I walk around telling myself, 'I am beautiful and everyone loves me,' and have noticed that the world has responded to me completely differently." I like Thompson instantly. She has platinum hair and a sexy gap in her teeth, and I believe what she's saying—that her experiment boosted her confidence. But I don't even own a bikini, nor do I have the kind of exhibitionist tendencies that would make me consider walking around my apartment, much less New York City, in one.

At a breakout session called "No More 'Weighting,'" a dietitian and a therapist advise the audience to "focus on health and self-care, and let your body sort it out." "Worthiness," they say, "does not come from behavioral changes." The first person who raises her hand comments about how traumatic she finds it to go to the gym. She's sitting right behind me, so I can't see her, but I can hear her begin to cry before she finishes talking. Someone calls out to her, "You're so brave." Another girl asks, "I want a plan for not making a plan." It's the question I was intending to ask: If you give up dieting and all its attendant actions, what do you do next? How do you make it through the period that comes between quitting dieting and, well, loving yourself? The answer is deeply unsatisfying: "That's the work," says the nutritionist. "Say, 'I'm taking a pause from this dieting paradigm; I'm going to focus more on healing than changing.' Focus on radical self-care."

"You can't just decide to love anything. The process before you can get to that is to let go of self-loathing."

Back at my hotel, I collapse for a two-hour nap and wake up angry at myself, or at least disappointed: I could see the other women's excitement, their synapses firing, the friendship and support connections being made. But in the midst of all that feel-good, I felt…unmoved. Ideologically, I believe that the very act of loving oneself is political. But a daylong conference, or even a four-month online course, wasn't enough to change how I feel about my own body.

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A week before I left for the Body Love conference in early June, I watched Sports Illustrated phenom Ashley Graham's "Plus-size? More Like My Size" TEDx Talk online, which, as of the time of publication, had more than 600,000 views. Graham stands onstage in a skintight blue dress and nude heels that show off her hourglass curves, looking into a full-length mirror and saying things like, "Thick thighs, you are just so sexy; you can't stop rubbing each other. That's all right. I'm gonna keep you." To back fat and cellulite, she pledges her love. As I watch, I take notes: "Pretty sure she's wearing Spanx. Maybe a size 8?" Graham concludes by asking followers to hashtag their own self-affirmations on social media. "We need to work together to redefine the global vision of beauty," she says. "It starts with becoming your own role model."

I met Tess Holliday the week her People cover came out. She happened to be in Brooklyn, doing a fashion shoot for Monif C., a plus-size line of body-con dresses. When we met, Holliday was having her fire-engine-red hair braided and wound into a high bun. She's only 5'5", and big in comparison to most other working plus-size models, who barely skim double-digit sizes. Turns out Holliday is a veteran of the Body Love conference; in 2014, she gave a talk about her signature hashtag, #EffYourBeautyStandards. "Just being in a room full of women who know what your pain is like, who don't feel strong in their bodies—it's contagious," she says.

Holliday says that modeling was what helped her turn her body image around. She tells me that while she "knows that perfection does not exist," her confidence can be shaken—"there are days when I'm not feeling superhot, like today. Maybe it was the margaritas last night and the French fries." She also asks where I bought the dress I'm wearing, tells me I'm cute. And when I leave, I do feel momentarily uplifted. I wish I could say this was because she helped me get in touch with my own beauty, but the truth is, it's because I felt almost slender next to her. It's because I found myself marveling at the fact that she almost didn't fit into the hairstylist's chair.

Aside from Instagram fame and magazine covers, the real difference between Holliday and me is that she knows she's fat and she fully accepts it. Maybe because hoping no one notices your size—my chief delusion—is harder to achieve at size 22. Or maybe it's because being fat has become her brand while, for me, it's still an insult.

Blogger Brittany Gibbons started calling herself "the Internet's Token Fat Girl" after she stripped down to a bathing suit for an audience twice, once at a TEDx event in 2011 and again for a Good Morning America segment on the bravery of wearing a bikini while fat. In her recent memoir, Fat Girl Walking, Gibbons writes that "feeling good in your skin is 80 percent mental." (The other 20 percent she attributes to shapewear and wine.) When I call her, Gibbons admits it's impossible to "get to this place where we unconditionally love ourselves every second of the day. But it's having a bounce back from those moments. I have a lot of those bad days but remind myself that this is just a moment. I have more great days than bad days."

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I believe that for these women, affirmations and being kind to themselves works. I do. But, for me, the body-acceptance rhetoric just doesn't hold up to any level of intellectual rigor. So is intellect what keeps me from feeling better? If so, that feels like just another way I'm failing myself.

Harriet Brown, the Body of Truth author, is the first person who tells me to ditch the methods that don't feel right. "For me, standing in front of the mirror and saying, 'I love my butt'—there's part of me that says, 'No I don't.' So it's pointless," Brown says. And when I put my quest to her—how am I supposed to love my body?—she's equally blunt. "That's the wrong answer to the wrong question, really. You can't just decide to love anything. The process before you can get to that is to let go of self-loathing. You might end up loving your body, or not." The forward motion, she says, "is doing activities that are going to make you healthier that don't have anything to do with losing weight. For me, it's exercise. Studies back that up: People who exercise and don't lose any weight feel better about their bodies."

I love exercise. Or rather, I love how I feel after exercise. So, three months ago, at Brown's suggestion, I bumped up my two-days-a-week mix of spinning/hot yoga/boxing classes to three to four times a week. And, with the exception of the time I booked a SoulCycle bike right next to a mirror, I began to feel more connected to my body, which feels stronger, more flexible, and also, yes, a bit smaller and more muscular. I know now that being surrounded by large groups of body-loving women isn't what boosts my confidence. But I've started keeping note of what does make me feel simply content in my body: sex, massage, swimming, headstands, drinking tequila, and getting stoned. And in matters of the body, I'm going to try not to let my head get too much in the way.