Through a series of random events, I ended up looking through a box of photos as my dad's house. I found a picture of me at about seventeen or eighteen, and I stared at it for a long time. Then I held it up and said, "I can't believe how skinny I was."

"And you should be again," he answered right away, without even a pause.

"That's not the point," I told him. "I thought I was the ugliest most disgusting thing on two legs. I thought I was a whale."

Again, without a pause: "Then what do you think now?"

Ouch. Lucky for him I've developed some perspective, or he'd have had a very upset daughter on his hands. I stared at him and then rolled my eyes.

"Well, you've let yourself go to the point th--"

I cut him off. "That's not the point. The point is that my body image was so screwed up that I thought I was enormous when I wasn't."

He made a comment about that kind of thing can cause anorexia or bulimia, and I just looked at him and said "Yes, it can." He asked what that meant, so I told him I came near that. He just kept saying sort of sarcastically, "I must have missed that" until I told him it's about behaviors, not appearance, and told him about a couple of the more disturbing thoughts I had in the past. At that point he got uncomfortable and decided it was time to cook dinner.

Later, when we were having dinner, he kept trying to shove more steak on to my plate. I finally got exasperated and said, "How did you go from calling me fat to forcing food on me?"

"I never said that!" he said. So I reminded him of the whale comment, and he sort of looked down at his plate and mumbled, "I shouldn't have said that."

Damn right he shouldn't have.