It’s no secret—or it shouldn’t be—that therapists, despite a great deal of training, are still human beings who, at the end of the day, get into bed and grapple with the same kinds of issues that everyone does. This is a good thing and a bad thing.

Good, because that allows us to understand our clients not academically, but with our whole hearts. We are all on this weird journey of life together, after all. And unless your therapist is Chat GPT (please don’t let your therapist be Chat GPT), the person that you trust with all your secrets probably has some secrets of her own.

This only works against you when your therapist’s issues are so unresolved that they take precedence over yours, which happens, and which is a terrible, possibly damaging situation. How will you know if this is the case? For the most part, your gut will tell you, and you’ll have the sense that your therapist’s agenda is not quite what it seems to be, or is not in service to your stated goals and priorities. If you feel that way, run!

But back to the universal humanity of healthy, effective, and caring clinicians. The phrase “wounded healer” is not just a cute colloquialism. Most therapists come to their work because they have suffered deeply, and their wish is to turn the negative things that have happened to them into something positive for somebody else. Knowing that we have the chance to do this is one of the greatest perks of the job!

Anyway, in light of the re-emerging focus on thinness thanks to the advent of weight-loss drugs—which, it is important to note, I believe have a valuable place in the treatment of many medical issues, but which also have highlighted our cultural obsession with keeping women small and self-obsessed, aka less powerful—I thought I would share an old parody of mine, which touches on my own struggles with weight and body image.

I have done a LOT of work in therapy myself since I wrote this piece in 2013, which I am grateful to have had the chance to do. I am in a thoughtful, rather than a punishing, conversation with my body now, and I try to sustain a curious and respectful relationship to it. I mostly succeed. But I would be lying if I said the world of Ozempic hasn’t made me once again dig deep. For the first time in a long time I thought about the following piece, and I wondered if it might be helpful to hear the ramblings of a professional woman in midlife who is trying mightily to get through the day just like you, and to do it without being mean to herself.

With love, Erica

Making Salad With God

After I die, will bells ring in acknowledgement of the insane amount of time I spend thinking about my weight? I can see my obituary now:
In loving memory of Erica Leibrandt; wife, mother, sister, friend—whose greatest joy was that she maintained a normal weight throughout her adult life. Erica, despite her many other accomplishments, will always be best known for saying “no” to that third bite of dessert, fitting into a certain pair of jeans, and working out every single day. She is survived by her children and her loving husband, who candidly remarked, “Erica was nothing if not a healthy weight.”

Erica Leibrandt’s mother is quoted as saying,”I am so proud to have had a daughter whose weight was always under control. I imagine she is in heaven making salad with God.” In my eulogy, mourners will stand and tearfully recount the times I ordered gluten-free pizza with no cheese while everyone else was having deep dish. They would also add, with a little wink, that everyone knew my secret—a post-dinner pizza raid where I shoved as much cold deep dish in my mouth as was humanly possible before anyone discovered me, standing in the dark in my bathrobe with marinara dripping down my chin. A foundation would be created in my honor, intended to pass along my obsession with weight to countless young women across America. It would be called “Nothing Is More Important Than Being Thin” or NIMITBT, and my daughters would sit on the board, endlessly discussing juicing, and whether a paleo or a vegan diet is more conducive to getting themselves to the absolute lowest BMI conceivable.

That old joke I used to tell would be bandied about with great sentimentality—“I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight,”—and committees would be formed concerning the education of children on how to avoid candy on national holidays—especially the insidious “fun-size,” because everyone knows you can mindlessly toss back a dozen of those before anyone says “boo”.

Congress would take note, and a petition to form a new law in my name would be circulated around Washington. This law would establish tax exemptions for appropriately sized people and offer incentives for each and every American to become pathologically preoccupied with the number on their bathroom scale to the exclusion of all other pursuits and concerns.

Eventually, I would be canonized, and affectionately declared the “Saint of Salad”. All the church officials would gather to honor me, and decide unanimously that they really should wear more fitted vestments, because their long flowing gowns make it far too easy to have a few extra communion wafers, and—they would gently remind one another—every calorie counts.

All the while, those who knew and loved me best will have their sadness eased by the knowledge that I am in a better place—that place being the ground, where with each passing moment I am getting thinner and thinner until one day I finally become the skeleton I always dreamed of being.

Yep, it’s a good feeling to believe that my legacy will have such far reaching repercussions. I know I will never regret the endless hours I spend thinking about the size of my ass, because at the end of the day, what could possibly be more important?