½ cup orange juice: 56 calories

1 slice dry wheat toast: 79 calories

Lunch

Bowl vegetable soup: 98 calories

3 saltine crackers: 39 calories

¼ cup ice-cream: 90 calories

Dinner

½ chicken breast: 142 calories

½ cup vegetable stir-fry: 65 calories

1 light beer: 104 calories

Total intake: 755 calories

Exercise

½ hour treadmill: 250 calories

½ hour elliptical: 270 calories

Total output: 520 calories

I feel the familiar bile of self-loathing rise. I should have skipped the beer and the toast. Then I’d be closer to even.

Lying there beneath the sheet I feel the knobs of my hipbones, elbows, wrists and knees. They comfort me. They keep me going. If I had taken the time I spent thinking about food and used even half of it productively, I might be a concert pianist or a brain surgeon or have discovered the cure to a rare genetic disease. I could be a lawyer and an astronaut. I think of Ash and his music, his skateboarding, how food occupies such a tiny fraction of his thoughts. How he doesn’t know any different, could never understand.

In treatment they said you cannot be in a relationship until you have learned to love yourself, so for years I avoided boyfriends. Sure, I had one-night stands, but more than one night was too many. Six months into nursing school I went out for sushi with a girlfriend and complained that since moving to LA I hadn’t so much as talked to an interesting guy. The demographics of nursing school are skewed towards female, and the other students were five years younger than me; the few male nursing students were still figuring out how to shave.

Right then and there she pulled out her phone and set up a Tinder profile for me. I could tell she was dying to do it; she was still with her college boyfriend. We giggled at the men’s photos and looked for someone I’d be halfway willing to date. Plenty of the guys were good-looking, it was just that they all seemed to know it, and I couldn’t stand the smug posing beside a list of demands for girls they might want to fuck.

Straightaway I decided what would rule them out:

1. Shirtless selfies.

2. Bad spelling.

3. Any of the following descriptors: hot, casual, sexy, buxom, tight, classy, hook-up, no strings attached, boo, kinky, sugar mama/daddy, MILF, booty.

4. Anyone who specified an age limit for women significantly lower than his own age.

5. Anyone who specified an age limit for women significantly higher than his own age.

6. Anyone wearing sunglasses in their profile pic. How can you trust a guy when you can’t see his eyes?

This narrowed the field considerably. ‘What do you want?’ my friend asked, and that was harder to communicate.

‘I don’t know…Someone who’s going to make a playlist of songs he thinks I’ll like. Who’s sensitive. Sweet.’

‘Oh God,’ she said, typing away with her thumbs. ‘You’re going to end up with such a loser.’

‘Why?’