A birthday party tastes like pop rocks: Sweet, thrilling, brimming with surprises. School tastes like a store-made tuna sandwich: Cold and bland, but you eat it anyway because it has all the nourishment you need. Easter tastes like bun and cheese: Salty and sweet, cloying yet comforting, but if you had it more than once a year you’d feel a little ill. Since I was a child tugging on my mother’s sleeve at the sound of the nearing ice cream truck, eating has been my primary means of knowing the world, of making sense of new experiences through the sensations elicited on my tongue.

But I overdid it. As a deep-feeling child with an insatiable need to sense, to know, I couldn’t figure out how to keep this urge in check. Yuh eye dem big, eee? my mother would say to me during my childhood in Jamaica, meaning I always wanted more, that to me there was no such thing as too much. In fact, in the instances when my life became too much—the pain from my chafing thighs, the mean teasing at school—it was eating that I turned to. It was the thrill of culinary comforts that kept me grounded and safe. Good feeling or bad, I ate and ate, consuming the world around me to the point of bodily disregard. Soon, I was ten years old wearing size twelve jeans.

Sometime in middle school, my mother put me on Herbalife pills to suppress my appetite (didn’t work) while I hid secret snacks in my bedroom to nibble on under the darkness of night. By then we’d packed up and moved from Jamaica to the southern U.S., a monumental shift that inflamed my eating of new foods to taste and experiences to explore. But as I grew from bright-eyed child to cranky teenager, I don’t remember the fleeting joy of the fried plantain hitting my tongue or the dopamine flooding my brain.

I was one of four Black people in my high school in southern Texas; one of two girls struggling with obesity in grades 7-12; the only immigrant and only Anglican across my town’s entire Catholic school system. I felt unprecedented. I was alone.

Some girls turn to sex. Others, to cutting. I turned to food. By the time I was 18, I weighed 301 lbs. And I was ashamed.

***

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity rates among American adults grew from 30.5% in 1999 to 41.9% in 2020—one of the sharpest rises since this data first began being recorded. For the math-enthused among us, 41.9% shakes out to roughly 100.1 million people. As with most things difficult in this country, Blackness is woefully overrepresented. Black adults account for nearly half of this 100.1 million at 49.9%, or 49,949,900 sisters, cousins, wives, and fathers gossiping at the beauty salon and making matching t-shirts for the family reunion.

Within the crucible of race, another faultline appears: 57% of that 49 million are Black women. That’s 28,500,000 mothers and daughters like me, with hearts beating hard against stalling wages and growing waistlines, failing schools and soaring hypertension¹; red blood through a white world, constrictions setting in.

About half of the U.S. population is projected to be considered obese by 2035, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.² That’s 165,950,000 people all across this fraught nation. Your neighbor. Your sister. Your pastor at church.

No longer are we in the days where the major bastions of weight loss are SlimFast and Herbalife and counting points with Weight Watchers. Those tactics seem a little like child’s play. The stakes have gotten too damn high.

Now it’s Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and so many more, each offering salvation for a small price, negligible really: They will lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, if we welcome them into the kingdom of our daily lives, forever and ever, amen. A 2019 analysis of annual medical costs related to obesity valued the industry at just under $173 billion.³ We’re losing our wallets to our waistlines.

Which begs the question: How did we get here? What are we eating for? It certainly isn’t just for joy and celebration. What are we eating ourselves away from? What are we eating to forget?

***

My favorite foods to binge on during my teenage years, in no particular order: Ice cream cake (the Jamaican kind, hard ice cream rolled up in a pinwheel with a thick slab of actual cake); beef patty with coco bread, the hotter the better; movie theater nachos, specifically the ones with Rico’s cheese sauce and triangled tortilla chips; delivery pizza, especially Domino’s (any topping except pineapple—I am not a heathen); chicken chimichangas, the aphrodisiac of southern Tex-Mex cooking; anything from Chick-Fil-A, though it’s true you can taste their hate for the gays in every succulent bite; fruit paletas, especially mango and strawberry cream; Frito pie with extra chili; chocolate bars, particularly ones with peanuts (but not nougat, anything but nougat); honey-roasted almonds; round Easter bun with a thick slice of Tastee cheese, warmed in the microwave for exactly eighteen seconds; Girl Scout cookies I was supposed to be selling but instead hid in the closet as I devoured them sleeve after sleeve until my stomach couldn’t handle it, until my tongue shriveled from all that sugar and my teeth rattled with ache.

***

An incomplete list of my most traumatic tween and teenage experiences, listed in their order of remembrance: Hurrying across the parking lot in the 7th grade toward my father’s car and feeling sharp pings all over my backside and legs as the white boys in my class threw rocks at my ass in a competition to see how high they could get the rocks to bounce; constantly looking over my shoulder while walking down the hallway in high school to protect against predatory touches because “her ass is so big that she barely feels it”; calling my parents in the 8th grade and saying I needed to go home because my period pains were too awful when really, under the skirt of my school uniform, the skin between my thighs had chafed to the point of swelling, then blisters, then skin oozing and blood (it would be a few years before I figured out the deodorant trick); having someone’s dad slap me on the back as he said, “Hey big fella!” when I went trick-or-treating because my boobs were small and my stomach so very large so it was just assumed that under my costume I had lil fat boy boobs; defiantly announcing that I wasn’t going to prom partly because the hetero-gendered pageantry appalled me (I’d later realize that I’m queer) but also because I knew no boys would ask me to be their date. 

I ate and ate to tamp it all down, to smother the anger and pain with plates of pasta and bowls of orange sorbet until I was not crying, I was not writhing with rage. On the inside I would feel cleansed, scrubbed clean with sugar, calm and present, bright and new.

***

When it comes to obesity among children and teenagers, the statistics are bad but not nearly as damning. In 1999, the obesity rate was 16% according to the CDC. In 2020, it was 19.7%. The largest jump had happened the decade prior, when it rose five percentage points between 1988 and 1999. The reasons? Increased reliance on fast food amid socioeconomic burdens as well as the newfound phenomenon of marketing nutrient-deficient foods directly to children.

But here, as before, Black femininity takes centerstage: The largest demographic of adolescents living with obesity are Black girls at 42%. Within that pool, 95% maintain their elevated weight well into adulthood.⁴ That’s 6,040,020 Black girls playing hopscotch or double dutch or having their hair braided tight. Six million, forty thousand, and twenty little girls already carrying the stress of being Black in America in the soft pooches of their young stomachs.

It is true that children will eat what they have access to⁵ and their caretakers will provide what they can afford. Hamburger Helper. Honeybuns. The two-for-$5 deal from the downtown Burger King. On average, Black women earn 65 cents—and Black men, 87 cents—for every dollar earned by their white counterparts.⁶ That’s millions of mothers and brothers spying the organic label at the supermarket then muttering, “That’s some white people shit.”

Or perhaps, for middle class Black kids like me, they’ll spend their allowance on all the foods their caretakers don’t provide; a means of rebellion, a pathway to freedom and fun. At home, my mother cooked traditional Jamaican dinners to sustain our sense of culture amid that hostile Texas town. Hearty meals filled with nutrients and spices like curry chicken with jasmine rice and steamed cabbage, or boiled dumpling with mackerel run-down served with mounds of shredded carrot. So, after school, I bought Popeyes, Dr. Pepper, bags of Funyuns and spicy Cheetos. That’s what my classmates ate, with their long hair and fair skin and small waists, so I thought: Me too.

*** 

In terms of treating adult obesity, research has mostly reached a consensus on how to proceed. Eradicate food deserts and increase hourly wages.⁷ Better regulate the food industry, particularly the addictive chemicals added to many affordable foods. Increase equal access to early obesity prevention through regular physicals, food literacy, holistic mental health supports, and routine examinations.⁸ Decrease gender-based bias. Decrease mental health stigmas. Decrease racialized sources of untenable agony, such as shooting Asian people at spas and Black people in the streets. Increase childcare support. Walk more. Laugh more. Don’t be afraid to phone a friend. Swap the Doritos for kale chips and consider taking the stairs.⁹

But for teenagers? The conclusions are murky at best. According to research published in the National Library of Medicine, recent policy changes have garnered practically no change—same with increasing family involvement as well as out-of-school playtime. Removing soda and snack machines from schools? Barely made a dent, especially among Black girls, the demographic affected the most. “The authors suggest that to design more effective approaches aimed at closing this significant health disparity, a comprehensive evaluation of the multidimensional factors contributing to obesity for Black adolescent females is an essential first step.”¹⁰ To the American psyche, the Black female remains mysterious and unknowable. Like a unicorn. Except more shadowy, less sparkle, and not nearly as revered.

***

What finally prompted my decision to lose weight was my annual checkup shortly after my eighteenth birthday. As part of my evaluation, I had to be weighed—a fact I’d been dreading since my mother called months before to make the appointment. That morning, she dropped me off outside the three-story office complex, already plotting her way back to work.

“It’s just a checkup,” she said, an annual procedure as common as Christmas.

So I walked through the office doors and, when they called my name, into the back room. I stared straight ahead. I got on the scale. The numbers blinked gray across the small digital screen. The nurse scribbled in her notepad and said nothing. I got off the scale. I got back on. I stared at the number thinking it must be broken, that there’s no way it could be that high. Blink. Blink. 301.2.

The doctor came in. My blood pressure shot up as my face turned cold and flat. It was my first time meeting this doctor; my usual physician was out of town. She flipped through my chart as I steeled myself for yet another lecture about how I was far too big for a girl my age while she pointed to a chart showing my BMI as out of range, stabbing with her pen the little red brick on the square black chart laid out like a road headed nowhere good. And all that stress, she would say just like my usual doctor, all that stress you’re putting on your poor young heart—and don’t you want a boyfriend? Don’t you want to feel good laying out by the pool in a fun new bikini?

This new doctor pulled a granola bar from her coat pocket and took a huge bite. “Listen,” she said, “you’re free to live your life however makes you happy. But as your doctor, it is my responsibility to inform you when any of those decisions begin to impact your medical wellbeing.”

She took another bite as I took her in. She was pudgy but not fat, stern but not mean. She looked like the kind of lady who’d run a 5K then celebrate with a hunk of cake. “You’ve gained almost sixty pounds since your last physical,” she said. “With the weight gain trajectory you’re on, my fear is that you’ll be diabetic within the year.” She sighed. “Is that okay?”

Blindsided, my steeled face cracked. “What?”

“What do you want?” she said. “What kind of life do you want to lead?”

A loaded question to ask a teenager—but still, it gave me pause. It was the first time someone had spoken the reality of my situation with this kind of matter-of-factness, without the usual judgment or derision or barefaced scorn.

But I gathered myself and steeled my face again. Thanks to the Internet, I knew enough at that age to understand that BMI was bullshit, that it was based on metrics that didn’t consider the genealogical evolution that could result in a body-shape like mine. She finished her granola bar as I looked around her office, fishing for damning evidence. There was no BMI chart to be found.

“Sorry,” she said with a wink, “lunch on the go. You know this brand of bars? You should try it. It’s delicious. All these people want to poo-poo on granola bars because of the sugar but I say, listen, if it tastes good to you and it keeps you going till you can steam your chicken and vegetables, then go for it. And hey, if you wanna be a superstar and snack on tree bark instead, more power to you.”

I laughed. I didn’t want to, but I let myself exhale. I don’t remember the rest of the appointment. I can’t recall if I ever even saw her again. She was a pediatric doctor, so I technically shouldn’t have seen her at all given that I’d just passed the age threshold. But I’ll never forget that moment. Without having to bear the burden of the doctor’s moralizing, I finally had space to feel something other than disregarded and defensive. And what I felt was despair.

I didn’t want to resign myself to a life of blood sugar monitoring and counting carbs and maybe even taking daily shots. At eighteen, the prospect of doing anything responsible on a regular basis seemed hideously frightening. But more than that, what I realized is that I had never made a conscious decision to be fat. There are many girls and women who are proud of their voluptuous bodies—I’d seen them at school and in music videos on TV, girls who displayed their thick curves and wide asses with gleeful defiance and deserved pride. I hid mine in loose t-shirts and beat-up jeans. What I later realized is that the intensity of my weight gain was a subconscious response to the difficulties of my migration, a somatic reaction to my crosshatch of psychical wounds. 

I wasn’t happy, not in the slightest. But I wanted to be. I needed to believe that I could be. Did I think I could do it? Haha, no. Overeating was all I knew. But I had to try. I didn’t want to know the weight of living with that regret. So I gave up Whataburger and coconut gizzadas in order to find out. 

***

When evaluating proven weight loss protocols for Black female adolescents, the available research is so slight, so scant, it hardly registers as worth considering.

In 1990, researchers at Rutgers University studied the efficacy of a Eurocentric weight loss program that involved Black mothers working alongside their daughters toward the shared goal of lifelong health.¹¹  The outcome? The greater the mother’s involvement, the higher the results of the child’s weight loss efforts.¹²

Another study in 2019 sought to assess the feasibility and salience of culturally tailored weight loss tactics among Black girls who were tackling their obesity without familial support. Fifty-seven girls enrolled in the study; fifty-seven remained at the close of the six months. The study reported no statistically significant weight loss by the end of the program, but it did observe a marked increase in overall nutrition knowledge as well as low-fat practices amongst the program’s high attenders. The key takeaways? Yes, it is feasible to implement culturally appropriate weight loss programs among Black girls and yes, the instruction given will be considered salient by the subjects present.¹³

Both of these studies have gotten us nowhere significant as immense time and effort have been devoted to essentially proving a series of ground-floor facts. Daughters need their mothers.¹⁴ If you create opportunities for positive change, a great number of people will take it. Both conclusions feel very much like being told, “every person is born with ten toes.” What’s still outstanding here is the how.

How can Black girls more effectively lose weight? What practices have proved more efficient than others? Why are we, as Black teenagers, so prone to retaining our elevated weight into adulthood? What supports can be deployed to help us in not only losing weight, but in keeping it off?

Thankfully, a 2023 study endeavors to tackle these very questions. The observations and key takeaways are…well, we don’t know yet. As of this writing, the study has only just started recruiting participants. Peer-reviewed results are not expected until mid-2025.¹⁵

Till then? Pressure mounting. Future murky. The unicorn prances in the field.

***

Let me be clear here: I am not a medical researcher. I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor or a dietician or anyone holding any sort of PhD. All I have is what I’ve lived. And what I’ve lived tells me that whereas addressing adult obesity primarily requires undoing systemic inequities, addressing childhood obesity necessitates caring for the entirety of the child by undoing the knotted histories that complicate the formation of not just their bodies but their sense of self.

It’s no surprise that the trajectory of my weight loss journey directly coincides with me embracing my queerness as well as reckoning with the reality that the Jamaica I call home is now frozen in time, existing only in the memories in my head. It’s taken me decades to fully realize and proudly declare: I am a Black queer immigrant woman. I am a Black queer immigrant woman who lost half her body weight over the course of two years.

I realize here that I could lean into my authorial control and claim that I was a wonder to be around during my weight loss journey—that I was a phoenix rising from the ashes, a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, a bounded body breaking free. But I wasn’t. I was absolutely insufferable. 

I lived at the gym. I counted every single calorie, no matter how slight. I made my friend change the restaurant for her birthday bash to somewhere that better suited my diet then made her feel bad for not supporting me. I forced my sister to listen to me doing burpees in my parents’ house during a Christmas visit as I banged on the floor above her head for an hour straight. I didn’t care that she—like me, like my mother—was also overweight (she was away at college by the time we moved to Texas). I didn’t let myself think about how her hearing the sounds of my fitness might make her feel. I made my weight loss journey everyone else’s problem. I was uptight as fuck.

At my smallest, I was 9% body fat and 153 lbs—which, to be clear, does not suit me. I am heavy-set and big-boned. For that first year, I looked like a saggy-skinned scarecrow. But if I’m honest, the two years of my weight loss was the most exhilarating period of my life. I decided what I ate and what I didn’t. Through weightlifting, I decided what parts of me would be big (shoulders) and which parts wouldn’t (hips and butt). All my clothes were tight because, for the first time ever, I’d decided that they would be; that instead of showcasing how far my body pushed out, they would highlight how much it had come in. For two years, I binged on bodily control. I thought I was powerful. Now I realize I’d actually just transmuted my dysregulation onto something new.

At various points after hitting 153, I binged on exercise, social media, alcohol, travel, sex, writing, friendships, books, exercise, lovers, academia, self-exploration, dogs, cooking—did I mention exercise? What I’ve learned is that whereas before I binged to be obliterated, now I do it to be heightened, activated—to give myself over to an effervescent fugue state to the point that I forget I have a body, that I am a discrete and separate person, and instead feel like I’m floating in an abyss of sweet transcendence, a self-induced high.

I would spend hours in the gym lifting and lifting until geysers of dopamine burst across my brain, drowning my obsessions beneath a sea of subsummation until I was not anxious, I was not self-aware. I grunted and sweated until I found myself floating in an easy nothingness, in what I can only describe as an exercise-induced euphoria.

How beautiful. How fleeting. How deeply out of control.

Despite how it’s lauded in the media, losing weight isn’t a fix-all cure. It doesn’t make you a better, more evolved person. It won’t make the tics and trauma and obsessions that caused you to overeat in the first place to magically go away. It feels very much that I’ve crossed over to the other side of the same coin when it comes to binging. Before, it was unthinking. Now, all I do is think. I continually consider whether I’m saying or doing or eating something because I want or need to, or if I’m just giving into a lower urge that means to do me harm. Which, sometimes, is okay. I am a person, after all. I am allowed to indulge. So good to bad, teetering and tottering, I walk the daily tightrope of managing desire.

For instance, in the fifteen years since I lost the weight, I stopped moving house every few years. For the past seven years, I’ve been rooted in New York. I’m content with my two Master’s (though I haven’t ruled out a PhD). I channeled my obsessive self-exploration into writing a novel titled Broughtupsy that debuted this past January. Instead of continually burning myself out on hard-and-fast friendships, insisting that we bare the wholeness of our souls within the first three days, I’ve gotten better at exchanging casual texts in the weeks after meeting kicked off with a simple, What’s up? I’ve gotten married, finally attaching myself to someone in a real and lasting connection. And after fostering dogs for years, I finally took the plunge and adopted one of my own.

I’ve found ways to channel my binging into things that make my days feel a little brighter, just a smidge fuller—transcendence, but not quite. Only about 1% of people living with obesity eventually find their way back to a healthy weight, according to Healthline. This is probably the only time I’ll be able to claim that I am part of the one percent.

Now, I’m 13% body fat at 185 lbs (which, for those not as obsessed with fitness, makes me a bit of an amateur bodybuilder). There are many days when I still eat too much or exercise for too long, but overall I did it, and I keep doing it every day.

For kicks and giggles, I recently went on some yoga site to calculate my BMI. I squinted at the small screen on my phone as I pressed the little buttons. 5’2. Female. 185 lbs. Didn’t ask if I lifted weights. Didn’t ask for my ethnicity. The pink-hued calculator spat out a BMI of 34.7. Going solely by this metric, I would still be considered obese. I laughed. My current game of euphoric control is to see how much more muscle I can put on while maintaining my current body fat, to see if I can push the scale up and up to achieve a new high score.

Am I afraid I’ll somehow screw it all up and become too tiny or gain the weight back? Sure. But at this point, that worry has become as commonplace in my life as the daily wonder of what to make for dinner.

***

In 2005, researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Bedford Medical Offices set out to study which dietary approaches would prove successful amongst Black adult women living with chronic obesity. Their 18-month randomized clinical trial included a control group who received the standard methods of weight loss therapy, while the experimental group received something novel for its time: A culturally adapted dietary approach that included social and spiritual components as part of their instruction. 223 women enrolled in the study, 120 in the experimental group, and 103 in the control, all with a BMI of 30 or higher.

Statistically speaking, the trial was a failure. Of the 120 women in the experimental group, only twelve remained at the close of the study—an attrition rate of 90%. The reasons? Caregiver responsibilities. Transportation difficulties. Competing work schedules. The impediments of leading a life with flimsy social supports.

What’s significant about this study, however, is the inverse relationship observed between the initial mindset of the twelve who remained and their resultant success. They all began the program convinced they couldn’t do it. On day one, every one of them self-reported as having low confidence in their ability to regularly eat fruits and vegetables or stick to an exercise schedule, yet they are the ones who dropped weight and made it through. Interestingly, the women who self-reported a high efficacy around attaining and maintaining a healthy lifestyle were among the first to stop showing up.¹⁶

The major finding here? Admitting that you can’t do it is the crucial first step to realizing that you can.

Subsequent studies have placed greater emphasis on increasing self-efficacy amongst program participants, especially among those whose initial overconfidence needs to be kept in check. These newer studies also devised home videos that contained each week’s instruction to alleviate some of the stressors of traveling and competing schedules. Some even used virtual reality, showing each participant a computer-generated rendering of how their bodies would change over time if they stuck to the changes they’d made. All these studies reported attrition and success rates that can be most accurately described as “modest.”¹⁷ Given that the baseline established by the 2005 study was “failure,” however, “modest” seems pretty damn good.

I wish I could talk to these women. I wish I could learn what difficulties underlie their weight gain, what urges they wrangle with in the sanctity of their private selves. Because they, like me, are not superhuman. We are not magical. We are flesh and warm blood who keep on trying.

According to the CDC, about 48% of Black adults attempt to lose weight annually. Of that 48%, over half are women—approximately 11,182,080 folks deciding to make a change.¹⁸  It is my sincere hope that one day, the 1% of folks with obesity who attain and maintain a healthy weight will swell to 2%, and it will be us, it will be Black girls and women, who lead the charge.

***

A brief list of foods that now bring me joy: Ice cream cake (see section three); my wife’s white miso and green pea pasta; NY strip steak cooked medium rare with charred asparagus; peanut butter, the natural kind, smeared on slices of a fresh honeycrisp apple; brown-stew chicken with oven-crisped cauliflower; funky red wine (though I’m shit at choosing it myself, so I usually ask the store clerk to recommend something in that vein then smile and nod as they go on about soil minerality and the age of the vines as if I have any idea what any of that means); oxtail with steamed cabbage and rice and peas; pizza, the bougie kind, thin crust and cooked in a coal oven with toppings like smoked anchovies and fresh arugula and honey garlic drizzle; kettle-cooked popcorn; free samples at Costco; the roast chickens with stuffing and mac n’ cheese that my wife and I made for the Friendsgiving we hosted at our apartment; the ginger molasses and vanilla shortbread cookies I bake for my friends every year at Christmas; the Jamaican fruitcake my mother sends me every November like clockwork, even though I can’t stand the taste of the stuff, even though I never take a single bite.