I don’t go in the first-floor bathroom in Ingraham any more. See, I automatically head for the last stall — an ingrained habit from elementary school, when it was always the cleanest (I don’t know why) — and when I get inside, there’s the graffiti: “Anorexic Nation.” “Let my bones define my beauty.” And my favorite, the female equivalent of a pointy-toed kick to the balls: “Hey fatty, show me your bones.”

A minor metabolic miracle occurs in that bathroom. I enter mildly overweight, and I leave as Jabba the Hutt.

Thanks, anonymous bathroom sadist. I would show you my bones if I could, but I would have to begin by finding out what they look like. I have spent the last 11 or so years on that mission.

What a stupid waste of time.

I am sick to the point of dry heaves of everything having to do with weight control, with food and eating, clothing sizes and self-image and calorie restriction and the right fucking carbs and exactly how many ab muscles ought to be visible. If Dr. Atkins were still alive I would tie him up and shoot bagels at him out of a specially constructed cannon.

Everyone is sick of skinny models. Skinny models are sick of themselves. But I am also sick of magazine articles that focus on “actual-sized” and “curvy” women, especially when those women are, say, Beyonce, who looks like the “after” picture every dieter dreams about, and who probably goes home and cries every time one of those articles is printed. I’m sick of the condescension (“Wow! Women who wear sizes 8 and above DON’T spend all their time sobbing into a tub of ice cream! Sometimes they even excel at their work and have boyfriends!”) — and the calculation (“OK, if 65 percent of Americans are overweight, that’s a large segment of the market. Pitch me some fat-girl stories!”).

Yes, it is good to see women whose collarbones don’t jut out far enough to double as a laundry rack. But why not just classify them as, you know, women? Why does weight have to be the filter placed over every lens?

Dieting has spawned entire genres. The New York Times bestseller list has a separate category for advice books, no doubt because they were blowing away the rest of the nonfiction category. Diet books have the top two slots for paperback advice books, the first and third slots for hardcover.

Then there’s TV. The Discovery Health Channel — there’s a Discovery Health Channel — airs a show called “I Lost It,” devoted solely to melodramatically edited stories of people who have lost a lot of weight. That’s it. That’s the premise of the show. OK-looking person is interviewed in a dim room from a variety of pensive angles. Unflattering photos of person are shown while sad music plays. Person works out. Now person fits into smaller clothes and cooks egg-white omelets in a nice white kitchen. It’s the Cinderella story of our time, repeated on daytime talk shows and in magazine articles, radio testimonials, chapters of diet books. Overheard on the street. Dreamed about. Handed around by word of mouth like a cherished family legend.

I’m sick of that too. Can’t we move on to another narrative? I’m as sick of that plotline, with its underlying moral of “You’re only worthwhile when you’re thin,” as I am of being the fattest person in the SERF cardio room every time I go. It’s not even that fact so much as my constant awareness of it, of all the jiggling that occurs as I work out.

First of all: why should I have to care whether I’m fatter than anyone else? Second: Why, once the fact is established, can’t I forget about it, the way you stop noticing the texture of your clothes against your skin? If you couldn’t forget like that, sensory overload would drive you mad.

This isn’t just my problem. I would bet my last bottle of Xenadrine that at least 80 percent of women my age, and probably a fair amount of men, feel the same way — constantly aware, constantly judging. And we just wish the world would shut up about the whole matter — let us eat or not eat, be cuddly or cut or spindly or brawny or however the hell we happen to end up. Certainly the anonymous bathroom sadist is having some difficulties in that line. She’s probably more food-fixated and miserable than I could ever imagine.

Obesity isn’t healthy. Everyone knows that. But you know what? Neither is obsession. And given the choice between a healthy mind and a healthy body, I believe I’d pick the mind.

Anyway, the mind governs the body, and I imagine it’s much easier to govern wisely without society like a parrot on your shoulder: “Braak! Show me your bones. Braak! Show me your bones.”

Jackie May ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English.