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even the most elastic stretch of the definition, a thin woman. She was fat in her arms, fat in her thighs, fat in her stomach, and even her fingers were plump.

III
     
    To stand there in your binding, fattifying jeans before the mirror and proceed to accurately and with great specificity observe and truly absorb what is there . . . the truth can take your breath away.
    The truth can also breathe new life into you.
    This woman accepted what she saw. Then she said to herself, “Okay. Given that I’m fat but I still want to be magnificently beautiful, I want to be sexy as hell, what can I do?”
    And she did these things.
    I can’t even remember her face. I’m not actually sure if I even saw it. So I don’t really know if she was pretty .
    She was sexy. She was beautiful. She was insanely ravishing. But she could have also been plain.
    This is a learning curveball because not only was she fat and hot, she was beautiful with or without being beautiful.
    Many clichés are true. “Real beauty comes from the inside” is absolutely one of them. But we hear it and go, “Yeah, so true,” and let it slide right past us, unexamined.
    You manufacture beauty with your mind.
    In exactly the same way certain short people are able to present themselves as tall, fooling everyone. I know somebody who rode on an elevator with Tom Cruise and said, “He was really short but also, he was incredibly tall.” This made perfect sense to me.

H OW TO B E T HIN
     
    C ORNELL UNIVERSITY DID a study and 90 percent of the women they surveyed wanted to be thinner.
    So everybody wants to be thin. But apparently, nobody can get there.
    Which makes me ask, what is thin?
    One of the rarest gemstones—and it may, in fact, be the rarest—is a fancy red diamond. While there are plenty of white, black, grey, brown, fancy yellow, and green diamonds to go around, a true, GIA-certified fancy red diamond would sell for well over a million dollars a carat.
    The gem is so rare and in such huge demand among gem collectors that this pent-up, frustrated desire is like steam, which propels prices of the stones even higher into the stratosphere.
    That’s what thin is.
    The state of being known as “thin” is sort of the fancy red diamond of human desires.
    The desire—and sometimes obsession—to be thin is so elusive that it can support an industry worth over 60 billion dollars in America alone.
    If reaching “thin” were effortless or even attainable with ordinary hard work, there would be no 60 billion dollar industry.
    Thin would be reduced to quartz crystal.
    When something is worth 60 billion dollars, that tells you that almost nobody can have it, whatever it is.
    So what is it, exactly?
    For some, the desire to be thin actually is a desire for a more slender body. And that’s all it is. For these people, getting thin is no more complicated than expending more calories each day than consumed.
    For other people, getting thin is less a desire than a way of life. A journey that leads a person from one diet right into another. Where the number on the scale each morning is more accurate at predicting whether it will be a good day or a bad one than any horoscope could ever be.
    Often, the pursuit of thin lasts a lifetime and the goal is never reached.
    For these people, thin isn’t really about being slender.
    Thin is being more beautiful than you are. Thin is coming from a wealthier family. Thin is a bigger chest. Thin is a smaller nose. Thin is more followers on Twitter. Thin is a more popular channel on YouTube. Thin is more friends on Facebook. Thin is famous. Thin is a perfect score on the SAT. Thin is your first-choice college. Thin is an iPhone, not a rip-off. Thin is having a better singing voice. Thin is being from somewhere better. Thin is being respected. Thin is loving yourself.
    Thin may be one of these things or all of them or something else entirely. The reason it’s impossible for so many people toever get thin is because what they truly