The pressure to be thin, which causes guilt and obsessiveness around food, is terrible and starts so early. For me, it started at sixteen when I left home and gained weight for the first time and was told by a slightly older boy, out of the blue, that I was too plump. The shock of that lasted a good long time.

To taste fully is to live fully. And to live fully is to be awake and responsive to complexities and truths - good and terrible, overwhelming and miniscule. To eat passionately is to allow the world in there can be no hiding or sublimation when you're chewing a mouthful of food so good it makes you swoon.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

I was also writing in a tradition and trying to do something different with it, something that hadn't necessarily been done before, which was a risk, but it made it interesting. My relationship with food has been complicated and rocky and not always wonderful, and it's a lens through which my entire life and identity are refracted.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

Blogging is different from both journal-writing and writing for print. It's more fun than either of those. The freedom to write whatever I want and the unmediated connection with readers are the payoff.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

As an adult I generally feel this pressure to be thin, not from men, but from other women. As a silent or not-so-silent competition, a constant monitoring of who's thinner, comments about it - either compliments or veiled insults doesn't matter - it always drives me nuts.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.