My son is ten. Last summer he asked me to race him to the fence in our backyard.
I said yes. We ran.
I made it maybe thirty feet before I had to stop. Hands on my knees, breathing in a way I didn't recognize as myself. He was already at the fence, waiting.
He walked back slowly, at my pace, and said "good race, Mom" in a voice so careful and so kind that I had to turn away so he wouldn't see my face.
He was ten years old protecting my feelings.
"I had tried everything. For eleven years. I wasn't angry at myself anymore. I was just confused. I genuinely didn't understand why the effort kept failing."
Keto. Calorie counting. Intermittent fasting. A Peloton I used faithfully until I didn't. I am not someone who gives up. I made time for all of it. And none of it held.
A few weeks later I was at my sister Sarah's birthday dinner. Sarah is 51. Same struggles. But she looked different that night. Not just thinner. The word that came to mind was restored.
I cornered her in the kitchen.
She laughed. "I know. I've been waiting for you to say something."
What she described wasn't a new diet. It was a presentation by a clinical nutritionist explaining something she'd never heard in twenty years of trying: that after your mid-thirties, something changes inside your body's fat-burning process that has nothing to do with willpower or effort.
The rules changed. Nobody told us.
"Watch it before you dismiss it," she said. "It explained eleven years of confusion."
