After 30 years of dieting I was exhausted. So I started to ask: what if I stopped? | Jason Prokowiew

My childhood bullies instilled in me a hatred of my body. Now I hear the word fat' as a neutral term rather than a label of shame

Two years ago, in a session with my therapist, I suddenly found myself saying, I want to talk about my relationship to my body sometime." Just saying that one sentence out loud was all I could muster that day, and had taken me decades to get to that point.

My first real awareness of my body started when I was around eight years old in the hallways of my grammar school in suburban Boston. As I cycled my bike over mounds of dirt in the woods behind my house, and flew around the corners of a roller rink on a Thursday night as Michael Jackson tunes blared, I was blissfully unaware that my body was being judged and seen as wrong.

Jason Prokowiew is a writer and author of War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir

In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD's eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope

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