Pregnancy actually provided a unique relief: For the first time, my belly represented something other than failure to me. At least in my first two trimesters, when wearing anything I already owned was remotely possible, I wore shirts long ignored for their middle-clinginess, contentedly convex. Even though I was uncomfortable — swollen ankles, epic heartburn, relentless nausea, general unwieldiness — I felt newly powerful. I burgeoned with life.

The task of hosting life also demanded that I treat my body well. I delighted in plenty of desserts, and also learned that I had to eat fruits and vegetables, or I couldn’t poop. I learned that I had to take walks and do yoga, if I didn’t want to risk the wrath of my aching muscles and raging hormones. I ate breakfast every day for the first time since junior high. The need to nap was frequent, urgent, and undeniable. I was sober as a nun. Gwyneth Paltrow I was decidedly not, but pregnancy forced me to admit, for the first time in my adult life, that there was something to be said for healthy living. What’s more, this was a kind of healthy living that had nothing to do with weight loss — in fact, it was all in service of gaining weight.

In retrospective terms of body image, pregnancy was the easier part of those two years of waxing and waning: The real confrontation with myself came after birth. For the first few months, I felt like a Halloween pumpkin left out too long: soft, misshapen, and deflated. I waited dumbly, impatiently for the weight to come off, completely unschooled in the practice of losing weight without extremity: no starving, no purging. As panicky as it sometimes made me to gain weight, week by week, for the 10 months of pregnancy, it was actually the process of trying to lose baby weight in a non-self-abusing way that felt most like sleeping next to a loaded syringe. Without those old, bad strategies, I had no idea where to begin.

Seeking solace from this postpartum emotional dumpster, I read Kelsey Osgood’s How To Disappear Completely. In this brilliant, iconoclastic anorexia memoir-meets-critique of anorexia memoirs, Osgood writes explicitly against Wasted’s obsessive cataloging of calorie counts, exercise regimens, and lowest weights. In fact, she eschews any quantitative recounting of eating disorder war stories:

Even when someone eating disordered has recovered, he or she still retains an attachment to the anorexic value system. The lowest weight one reached remains a point of pride, not of shame, and it’s rarely a selfless act to lay out the nitty-gritty of one’s diet.

How To Disappear Completely fell into my hands at a crossroads moment: I was trapped in self-shaming for being anything other than dangerously thin, even though my body had just pulled off the most amazing feat of my life. Unlike Wasted, it was the right book at the right time. It was the book that finally convinced me, after years of struggling against them, that neither scales nor seductive narratives of thinness as redemption — the ones I read, or the ones I told myself — were of any service to me. “As an anorexic, I could never really possess my lowest weight,” Osgood writes, exposing the ephemeral void at the heart of the disorder. Obsessing over the numbers of an always losing game was dangerous, contagious, and far from the point.

Not long after I read Osgood's book, it became eminently clear to me that my plan of lying in humiliating wait for things to change, with no effort on my part, was a bad one. I wanted to be able to wear prepartum clothes again, but I also just wanted relief from my own whirling, anxious mind, from the ways it had always lied to me about my body. One day I was so frustrated that some other impulse took over: the impulse to move. I threw my son in a stroller, dug out a sports bra, pumped the prophet Beyoncé in my headphones, and took off on a vehement walk to nowhere.

This was where the real work began: the fourth fork in the road.

To my vast, inept surprise, I found that moving and sweating made me feel better. Isn’t that the most inane revelation you’ve ever heard? All the years I’d spent avoiding exercise suddenly made me feel like an idiot: Exercise not only helps you manage weight in a healthy way, it also just makes you feel good. Staring in the mirror, comparing yourself to other people, or despairing at the scale does not make you feel good. I had to choose something else.

So I walked and walked, ever grateful to my precious son for his calm, wide-eyed attention to the sights and sounds of our neighborhood, as I panted and heaved around them. I screwed up my courage, walked into my first hot yoga class, and discovered I liked it. I finally faced the incontrovertible truth I should have accepted years ago: that you don’t have to be good at exercise to benefit from it, that in fact, moving, breathing, and sweating are in themselves good, so one’s skill or grace or natural talent matters not at all in activating them. They are, like all hard work, their own reward.