I wanted to carry a baby like I wanted to be thin: for longer than I could remember. When my partner, Sarah, and I began exploring the possibility of me carrying our child, the whole project seemed tailor-made for my obsessive need for body control.

I began to track my basal temperature and check my body for other signs of ovulation. As it turned out, other than my period blood, there were none. Something was up. We booked an appointment with a fertility specialist who immediately told me to stop running.

"But I'm not underweight," I protested. "I'm not even close!"

"It doesn't necessarily matter." The doctor shrugged. "Everyone's different."

I knew that athletes and people with anorexia often stopped ovulating. But I was a jogger, not an athlete, and a calorie-counter, not anorexic. I ate all sorts of things (and tallied in my head as I did). I refused to believe that my body needed more fat to contain the estrogen that ovulation required. For God's sake, reed-like Nicole Richie had just announced a pregnancy! The doctor was guessing and probably wrong, I told myself and my partner. And I kept running. I had to. If I gave up my vigilant routine, wouldn't I lose control over everything?

We sought out another kind of expert, a lesbian midwife in San Francisco who claimed expertise in donor conception. When she also told me to quit running, I finally started to take the idea seriously.

I kicked my running shoes to the back of the closet. I was restless and grumpy for a while, but I channeled all that pent-up energy towards the upcoming insemination and learned to lean on yoga classes for some of the same solace that running had provided. I promised myself that after the pregnancy (or if I never became pregnant, as I feared), I could go back to it as long and hard as I wanted. My biggest fear, though, wasn't that I couldn't live without running. It was that, having stopped, I might never be able to start again. Then what would become of me (and of my body)?

At the midwife's request, I forced myself to bypass the calorie count on nutrition labels, instead noting how much protein and fiber different foods contained. I fed myself previously forbidden fattening foods, like nuts and egg yolks and red meat. When I ate something filling, I found that I didn't have to worry about fighting cravings soon after — because when I ate what sounded good, rather that what sounded low-calorie, I stopped being so hungry all the time.

Still, the first, and second, and third inseminations failed. Despite never running and eating whenever I wanted, I wasn't pregnant. Strangely, I also hadn't gained any weight. I looked exactly the same. All those years, I thought, all the running, counting, hand-wringing, and hunger — it didn't make a difference. There were so many valuable things I could have done with my body and mind if I hadn't been trapped in the cycle of weigh, count, eat, chastise, and repeat.

At the time, though, I was too preoccupied with getting pregnant to register this revelation. Many months of fertility treatments followed; I boomeranged between hope and despair, feeling like I was falling in love and then getting dumped with every single cycle. I cried often and without warning. A heavily pregnant woman sat next to me in yoga class one day, and I had to bite my tongue not to scream, "There's a prenatal class! Go to the prenatal class and stay away from me!"

After a year of failures, I would've eaten, or not eaten, or run, or lain perfectly still, if I thought there was a chance it would get me pregnant. During the days leading up to the egg retrieval on our second round of IVF, I did only gentle, restorative yoga. I don't even remember what I ate.