Do not think about the enormous pink elephant.

I demand that you do not.

If you think about the enormous pink elephant, your entire world will collapse around you. You will be hideously unsuccessful. Your friends will mock you and leave you to be on your own. Your parents will condemn you. You’ll fail the SATs. Your cat will scratch you a new pupil in your sleep. You will get that awful rumple of untouchable toothpaste eternally stuck at the end of that infernal tube of Crest Spearmint, never to be coaxed to the lip of the spout, not even when your teeth are covered in saccharine crystals and your toothbrush is as empty as a Republican’s heart.

Do not think about the enormous pink elephant. It will stop at nothing to obliterate you.

This is the unfortunate reality that myself, accompanied by thousands upon thousands of other little girls and boys out there, men and women, toddlers and geriatrics, face in every living moment of every waking day.

I am not speaking about a literal pink elephant. I am speaking about food.

However, unhealthy obsession can come in all sorts. We have seen it everywhere, right? Middle-class women in their 30s, chugging down Diet Pepsis, often have a disturbing obsession with showing their middle-class, 30-year-old women comrades that their toddler is far superior to any other 3-year-old waddling across the lush earth of the Montesorri playground. Tom Haverford of Parks and Recreation has a disgusting obsession with all things swanky. Our favorite, the Westboro Baptist Church, has a gross obsession with destroying every pair of homosexuals in the name of their distorted image of a God. The Monsanto Company has a quietly sinister obsession with filling up every American with some hash made out of pig and corn genes.

But I digress, for my topic, and the concept that I have noticed to be swallowing up every kid, high schooler, college student, adult, worker, freemason, mother, brother, grandma, and twice-removed uncle is the extremely warped and incorrect relationship that everyone in this country seems to have with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I’m not just talking about eating disorders. Every time I see my good friends tug at the layer of fluff that prevents their abdomens from being xylophones of ribs, I realize a little bit more about how Americans have come to find having a physical body as a transgression. And when I tug at my layer of fluff and try to figure out how many tablespoons of powdered peanut butter to log into MyFitnessPal, I realize that I fell to that same outlook many ages ago.

But when I look back at my history of logs onto that infernal calorie-counting machine, I wonder where all this came from. I didn’t ask to have an obsession with being thin and feminine. Most aspects of my personality are not thin nor feminine. My brain is not thin, nor is it being squashed into a corset for the sake of finding an acceptable mate. So why is it I feel like my body has to be strangled down into Victorian standards? And why is it that every time my friends and I are at a birthday party, we all mention how we went to the gym in the morning, or we haven’t eaten all day, or we’re fat anyway as a custom rite-of-passage before we can bite down on a sliver of devil’s food cake?

Now, all this thinking has messed up my brain recently. I enjoy exercise. I enjoy going to the gym and being able to notice the miniscule knobs of an infant muscle in my arm after days of pumping iron. I like to feel strong. But I do not want to restrict myself.

I used to want to restrict myself. Every day, I subsisted on calories that never touched four digits. I would get bruises because my own ass could not cushion my tailbone from a plastic chair. My hair began to fall out and I was cold all the time, to the point where fuzz started growing all over my body because it couldn’t stand the chill of a spring breeze. I stopped getting the monthlies and wondered how those tiny housewives in TV shows could bear all those children. Eggnog at Christmas was the ultimate sin. Every meal at home was “too much” for a little girl like me. Icecream was “gross”. I didn’t “like” things I thought I didn’t “need”.

I don’t want that anymore, but what I have feels worse. Some days I eat what metabolism counters on the Internet says. Other days I absolutely break down and throw open the refrigerator, take out the Duncan Hines Vanilla Frosting, and try to eat the entire can. Somehow I logic it out that that will help me, that I will learn not to restrict myself if I stuff my stomach with sugars until it hurts to move. Now it is an obsession game. I need to stop thinking about and worrying about food, but again, I cannot stop imagining the enormous pink elephant. I do not like this either.

I try and try to eat like a “normal” person, but no one around me eats “normally”. Everyone else suffers like this in their own sort of fashion. A girl I know eats nothing at school, but drinks Coca-Colas in every single class, a can in her hand permanently. A guy I know talks about getting strong and feeling healthy, but admits to eating everything in the house when he is upset. A girl I know eats only an orange the entire school day. Another girl I know wanders around her house, stuffing chard and kale weeds into her mouth and refuses to touch meat, dairy, sugars, fats, or anything else too dangerous to her self-worth.

This seems to be how it is. Scroll through Tumblr for any amount of time and you will find pictures of bony, emaciated bodies in black-and-white-filters, captioned “thinspiration” and “I am so fat”. It is not just a “girl thing”, either. Our boys and men in this country look at themselves and seek for something strong, something that can prove themselves worthy to their mates, but manage to only find disappointment.

The only cure for this is to accept your body. This something nearly impossible. With the way we have been raised, how generations before us have been raised, how everyone has been raised to believe in Social Darwinism. That thinner is the winner if you want to be successful in your life and career. That looking like a Victoria’s Secret or a Calvin Klein model is something actually viable without screwing on breast and genital enlargements and surviving only on photosynthesis.That looking like a Victoria’s Secret or a Calvin Klein model is something required to become a doctor, or a CEO, or a parent, or a student, or a human being with any form of worth.

The only way to deal with this obsession is to get over the fear of fat. Or the fear of looking weak. Or the fear of anything in your body not looking like a touched-up celebrity on the cover of Us. However, I cannot offer you advice on reaching this point. I have not gotten there yet. I plan on getting there. I could achieve this feeling tomorrow. I could achieve it in ten years. I could die feeling ugly regardless of my shape or size. I’ll let you know.

But for now, I will try to ignore that blasted enormous pink elephant. Try to forget yours.