“Yes,” I was shouting back at him between jumping jacks. “I love it . . . I love her big, fat ass.”

He laughed knowingly, as if to say, “I knew it! This is what all guys come in here for. To do jumping jacks for some girl named Amanda and her big fat ass.”

And content with discovering my secret, Tim let me stop.

At the end of our session, Tim gave me a pat on the back. “A few more of these sessions, and we’ll have Amanda noticing you in no time.”

I smiled feebly, and when he walked away, I limped as fast as I could to the door, and never went to that place again.

•  •  •

That summer, despite my heterosexual fiasco with Tim, I still lost thirty pounds. I counted calories. I went down two waist sizes. And yet, I felt no different. I went back to college and gained it all back.

Then I moved to New York, where something changed. I still ate too much. I still drank too much. After all, New York is a city where you can easily order a slice of chocolate cake at three in the morning (and I have, and I’ll do it again), where you can have groceries delivered directly to your apartment and nobody has to see you putting five packages of chocolate chip cookies into a shopping cart that’s already full of breads and sugar and fat. Indeed, the entire culture of New York City is built upon meeting people for dinner, for drinks, for appetizers. Bodegas are open all night in case the desire for a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream strikes at midnight.

But New York is also where I learned that being fat does not equal being ashamed. It’s a thin city, that much is true. But it’s also a diverse city that celebrates its differences more than it’s willing to admit. And there I learned that being fat is not a moral judgment. That carrying extra weight does not mean carrying extra baggage. That being fat is not always a choice. That it’s important to acknowledge that men face the pressures of body image just as acutely as women, and that we suffer from the harmful perpetuation of a single stereotype of the perfect, hairless, ab-riddled body with no discernible fat and those V-lines that haunt me in my sleep. It’s where I learned that it’s OK to lust after that stereotype as long as it doesn’t rest in your mind as the only desirable version of manhood. That fat bodies are desirable, too. That chubby Chris Pratt is just as fuckable as ripped Chris Pratt, and probably more so.