The table next to my waiting room chair was littered with pamphlets—Botox, chemical peels, implants, liposuction, procedures that would either suck matter out or pump matter in. I picked up one entitled “The New You” and flipped through glossy pages detailing breast implants. I dropped it, face down on the table, disgusted with myself.

I was called back by a nurse named Linda, a middle-aged woman whose facelift had left her eyes pulled into an expression of wonderment, as though she held permanent interest in nearly everything I said. She asked me a few questions and then popped in a DVD.

“Just watch this, jot down any questions, and the doctor will be in shortly.”

Buxom blondes rode bicycles with—by the looks on their faces—orgasmic delight. Women played tennis in short skirts and bulging sweater-vest tops. They all confided how happy they were, how confident they felt, now that they were “fixed.”

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I've tried to ignore it. I've tried not to say anything. Not just to you, today, but to lots of female celebrities, for years. I want to believe that if you were to go out and get a tattoo that said "I LOVE CHEESE" across your forehead, I would support your right to do whatever makes you happy. And as someone who keeps a stock of hair color in her closet in case there's ever a Feriapocalypse, and who doesn't own an item of makeup or moisturizer that doesn't boldly feature the word "youth" on the packaging, I'm not one to espouse growing older gracefully. I'd never sell anybody on the nobility of looking like you just stepped out of a Dorothea Lange photograph.

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I’ve been hearing comments like this for much all my life. Maybe someone else would have yelled at them, or shrunk inside. But I don’t get upset when this happens.

I pulled out my camera, and set up a shoot.

For about a year, I’d been taking pictures of strangers’ reactions to me in public for a series I called “Wait Watchers.” I was interested in capturing something I already knew firsthand: If the large women in historical art pieces were walking around today, they would be scorned and ridiculed.

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That's the question that has set British gym shorts in a proverbial twist in recent weeks, after a man decided to sue London's Kentish Town Sports Centre for offering 442 hours a year for women-only hours.

Writing last week in the Daily Mail, patron Peter Lloyd explained his beef with the gym, noting that "they still charge them the same full-price membership fee as women, but refuse to offer the equivalent option of male-only sessions." Jezebel promptly labeled Lloyd a "jerk," who should "give us our 442 hours a year and stop crying." Wonkette, meanwhile, less charitably referred to him as a "Limey nutsack."

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I flew across the country and found her in what had once been called the music room, where she started sleeping once it became too difficult to climb the stairs. The cocktail bar was filled with her clothes and other necessities — diapers, a walker, a bedpan. The bed was where the piano used to be. I went over and took her hand. The skin on her face was sunken down around the bones and the skin on her arms fell off her in loose folds. “You look so thin,” I said.

“I know, darling,” she said, breathing raggedly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

* * *

I was 19 when I started associating my worth with weight. It was summer, and I was living in my grandparents’ rickety beach house in Cape Cod.

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My reason was different, and possibly absurd. I wanted to try water fasting because I have a lifelong fear of being stranded on a desert island – or in an apocalyptic wasteland -- and starving. Admittedly, I’m afraid of practically everything, but this thought seemed to have at least a shred of rationality. If starving is not something you currently fear, read “Survivor Type,” the Stephen King story about what happens if you are stranded on a desert island without food, and get back to me.

Accordingly, if you pose that “What three things would you take to a desert island with you” question, my mind immediately goes to objects that would help me make a fire, and purify water and spear fish. By all means, you should take your beloved copy of Proust with you. I hope it’s delicious. I will be taking skinning knives.

I imagine I wouldn’t last long on my desert island. But how long? Would I die in the first day or could I possibly survive a week? Up until the end of the 19thcentury it was believed that people died after 10 days without food. They don’t. Today it’s believed to be somewhere between 28 and 73 days, depending on the level of hydration. Surely I could make it a few days.

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This is all my mother’s fault. She comes from a long line of dark, wiry-haired people and suffers from the same furry burden — although, now that I think about it, my father could also be to blame. He’s had some form of facial hair since the early 70s; he’s been married to my mom for more than three decades now, and there are whole swaths of his face she’s never seen. Maybe after a while that shit just morphs your DNA. Maybe I was doomed from the start. Who knows what kind of sumptuous beards the world could’ve been blessed with had my parents produced a son. But they didn’t. And so here here I am, a lady with a mustache.

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If you look at the Oscars before the 1990s, you won't find too many of them handed out for massive physical change. Current nominee Robert DeNiro's 1980 win for his metamorphosis from fighting-weight Jake LaMotta to fat, late-era, has-been Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull" was all but unprecedented in its day. And though the actor trained hard for his boxing scenes, it's the weight gain that's remembered -- and it sounds like the easiest part of the performance. To achieve his gone-to-seed look, he spent four months on "an eating binge in Europe" to gain 66 pounds.

Not all Oscar-baiting work comes that pleasurably though. Herewith are our picks for the Oscar's most dramatic physical evolutions of recent years and their relative degree of difficulty.

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Alleman was a devoted patron of the restaurant, whose motto is "Taste Worth Dying For!" Restaurant owner Jon Basso, who opened the restaurant in October 2011, told the Las Vegas Sun this week that Alleman "never missed a day, even on Christmas … He lived, ate and breathed the Heart Attack Grill." And, as he spoke fondly of the 180-pound Alleman, he noted, "Heart attacks aren't a laughing matter. You don't have to be tremendously old or fat. You can be in your 30s and 40s and die of a heart attack." Yet Basso's entire establishment is built around the laughing matter notion that artery-clogging fare is just what the doctor ordered.

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A new study from the University of California-San Diego reveals that "Emergency room visits due to pubic hair grooming mishaps," including oh my God no no noooo "lacerations," increased fivefold between 2002 and 2010, sending an impressive 11,704 pube-scapers to the E.R. The culprits? Scissors and hot wax did some of the damage, but plain-old non-electric-razors accounted for the lion's share, at 83 percent. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be under my desk, rocking slowly back and forth and crying as I think about this.

The study also revealed that below-the-belt grooming isn't just for adult ladies anymore – men accounted for 43.3 percent of the injuries, and almost 30 percent of them were girls under the age of 18. To avoid becoming yet another harrowing grooming gone bad statistic, the researchers advise hair removal aficionados to "Pay attention to where you're placing that razor. Invest in a non-slip bath mat. And don't shave while under the influence of drugs or alcohol." Yeah, don't do that. For the love of God don't do that.

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In anticipation of her new tell-all memoir, "Drinking and Tweeting: And Other Brandi Blunders," the perennially outspoken Brandi Glanville is opening up about her very public and messy divorce from actor Eddie Cibrian. In her book, the 40-year-old mother of two reveals that after Cibrian left her for singer LeAnn Rimes in 2009, "I decided that since Eddie ruined my vagina for me, he could pay for a new one ... A week after the vaginal rejuvenation surgery, he was on the phone screaming, 'What the f--k cost you $12,000? Did you get a nose job?'" She also bought herself a new set of breasts. Ah, I still remember when a big breakup just meant gluing crystals onto your vajayjay till it "shined like a disco ball." Simpler times.

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I am the “after” side of surgery, having lost more than 250 pounds. No one gets this, at least not without an explanation, because I still weigh over 200 pounds, and the weight loss fable is supposed to end when you're thin, not when you're merely “an average fat American.” I still wonder if I should get more surgery. I have so many pieces of clothing that fit, but that I reject because they cling in one place wrong. That particular place is my right thigh and calf, which are obviously larger than the left. (I call it my freak leg.) Doctors have no real explanation, but the general theory is that a fall I suffered when I weighed 600 pounds actually broke off a chunk of fat in my calf. That place just above my knee seems swollen, and is the reason I can't wear skirts anywhere close to above the knee. If jeans stick to the freak leg, I toss them into the back of the closet and try another pair.

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On the floor of the club, a small-boned brunette with flawless golden skin and a ponytail sat on a guy’s lap, and then led him to the VIP lap dancing area. I wondered if my candy heart tattoos were too edgy for Vegas. So far, the three fanciest strip clubs hired Trixie while I fumed on a bar stool, wondering how I’d become so unemployable. After all, I was blonde. I had big boobs. I was tan.

When Trixie appeared again, she lit a Menthol and tossed her lighter into a glass ashtray. She looked at me like she had a horrible secret to tell.

“My hair too short?” I unclipped a rhinestone barrette and shook my stiff curls loose.

“Nope.”

“Tattoos?”

“Nuh-uh.” She exhaled a minty cloud above my head. “There’s something puffy going on.” She pointed at my legs.

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My acne had taken over any joy in my life at that point and I was having opiate withdrawal, so I’d go to the nail salon in the middle of the day when it was quiet and I could avoid seeing humans. I liked eating the candy from the candy bowl. I took handfuls of Dum Dum pops, peppermints, butterscotch and those strawberry candies with the gooey middle that grandmothers always have. I sat in the massage chair, crunched down on my candies and watched Lifetime movies with subtitles. I pushed buttons on the remote to control the strength of the massage, and I drifted off. I hated myself. I actually hated myself. I never got manicures. They would be too much work, sitting upright and making small talk. Plus, I bite my fingernails down too low for them to be manicured. A disgusting addiction, but in comparison to my other addictions, I let it slide. I have too many battles to fight with myself, so I choose them carefully.

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Per the established metrics of weight-to-height ratio and body mass index, I’m not what a medical professional would call exceedingly overweight — though Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the average “thinspiration” Pinterest page would post dissenting opinion. Essentially, I’m your garden-variety mesomorph who doesn’t eat to live but, rather, who lives to eat her feelings.

What consumes me, urging me to mindlessly consume? Usually nothing special — like so many other people, I nosh my way through shame and regret about the past and anxiety about the future. But 2011 and 2012 were exceptional — annus horribilis, times two: I got dragged off by a riptide of depression that I feared might kill me; one of my sisters learned she had lupus; one of my in-laws was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer; my mother’s COPD landed her in the hospital, and my beloved bachelor uncle fell ill under conditions too horrible to describe and died eight months later. It was not a good couple of years for illusions of familial immortality. No.

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I also had the added pressure that comes with being black. That all black men have huge penises is the one stereotype we don’t riot in the streets over. I couldn’t be responsible for bringing shame to the race by walking around with a sub-nine-inch penis. What would my ancestors think? I could only hope that Marcus Garvey wasn’t looking down from the heavens shaking his head in disgust at my lack of girth.

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Where I grew up, in mid-coast Maine, the primary industry is lobster fishing. Although I can now recognize my hometown as an oasis of beauty and tradition, as a kid I was terrified of the lobstermen and their stories and slang. They smelled of bait and had thick Maine accents I couldn’t understand.

One day a grizzled lobsterman, still in hip waders, came toward me down the stone steps of King Ro Market, our village’s general store, which kept an enormous block of hard cheese on the counter, to be sold by the slice, as well as motor oil, Wonder Bread, and my objective whenever I escaped the carob and kale of my childhood home: Swedish fish and other penny candy.

“Jesus Christ,” the lobsterman said, laughing with genuine amusement as I tried to sneak by. “What’d a seagull shit on your face?”

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At 13, I had no idea what my thick hips had to do with birth, but I was terrified by the prospect of having to care for (another) someone else. I was the loud one who drew my father’s ire — and his fists — away from my brother. I was my mother’s “little hero”: the one who powdered her black eyes and told her she was still pretty, the one who swallowed her secrets so she could shimmer in the eyes of her fellow PTA members. She taught me to draw and to drive, to bake lasagna that would make men lick their plates and to fill up with Crystal Light and water so I wouldn’t be too hungry, wouldn’t eat too much of my own food.

She’d been, in her words, “flat as a board” until plumping up while carrying me; then, she said, she “looked like a spark plug.” Her body was as soft as her will; she yielded to buttered biscuits and apologies whispered in the dark. When I was a teenager, both of our bodies embarrassed me equally. I remember the sight of us in one fitting room mirror: Her hips, narrow; her belly puckered by a Caesarean scar. My hips mocked hers with their abundance.

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For the past two weeks, we had been corresponding on Grindr, the gay hook-up app, and, for whatever reason, he really, really wanted to meet up. Day after day, he would send me photos of himself flexing in different parts of his living room and ask me to come over to his place after work. As a skinny 25-year-old, this surprised me, not only because I was incompetent at using Grindr, but because guys who looked like Ariel rarely went for guys who looked like me.

When I finally showed up at his Brooklyn apartment, located on a still-gentrifying block above the flashing lights of a liquor store, I half-expected a candid camera prank or a violent beating. But when he let me into his apartment, he was already half naked, showing off perfectly shaped pecs, giant biceps and a six-pack that tapered cartoonishly down to his waist. I felt like I had just wandered into a porn film.

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