Cancer forced me to ask myself why I was so obsessed with having thin thighs

• Geneen Roth is a New York Times bestselling author of 11 books on food, body image, and healing.
• The following is an adapted excerpt from her memoir "LOVE, FINALLY: Untangling the Knot Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food," available now.
• "LOVE, FINALLY" tells the story of healing mother wounds, body shame, and food obsession to find self-love.

A woman recently wrote to me that "at age 78, I am wondering if I will ever lose this obsession with weight loss. I continue to be 25 or 30 pounds overweight and wake up every day determined to take control some way or another, but by the end of the day, I haven't followed through. Time seems to be running out for me to love myself. . . ."

In The Bright Hour, a memoir of living with metastatic breast cancer (that she eventually died from), Nina Riggs wrote that the last words her dying-of-cancer mother uttered were "I'm so fucking fat." And my friend Sophie tells me that in the last few months of her mother's life, her mother refused to eat mint chocolate chip ice cream, her favorite food, because she didn't want to "die with fat thighs."

I had been conditioned to think about my body a certain way

Not cancer, not aging, not even dying pierces the trance of the cultural imperative to be thin and the self-hatred that accompanies it.

During the precancer years when I was on my eat-only-what-doesn't-taste-good diet, I looked like I was dying of a wasting illness — the medical term is cachexia. I knew that my thinking was distorted; I kept telling myself that I was no longer 15 and that having twigs for legs was not attractive — and that my fondness for twig thighs contradicted everything I'd taught and written about — but the conditioning was so entrenched that I was exultant. I felt a curious mixture of revenge against those long-ago people who told me I was fat — most of whom (I looked it up) are now dead — and elation because I had what I never thought I could have: spaces between my upper thighs and my calves, size two jeans.

The night my left breast was diagnosed with cancer, I heard a voice that said, "This cancer is about love," and since I'd never heard voices (or seen angels), and since I roll my eyes at big sweeping statements about love, I was startled enough to pay attention.

In the pitch-black dark, I said, "What does that mean?" The voice didn't answer, but I already knew it meant that being diagnosed with cancer offered a chance to stop pushing myself. To be easy, tender, kind to myself. I was 68 years old and still driven to achieve, acquire, become, still in thrall to a harsh voice from 40 years back that surfaced when I used to binge: Again. Harder. More.

Cancer changed my body, and the way I thought about it

For a while after the diagnosis, a year perhaps, I didn't want to move with the speed I'd once moved; I lived and walked and talked at half my previous pace, at what the Jungian psychologist Marion Woodman called "soul speed."

Cancer was my get-out-of-jail-free card. Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, said, "I have been the most impossible person my whole life, and now I no longer have to make excuses. Now I'm just like, 'I have cancer.' And people are like, 'By all means, ruin our lives. Wreck the house.' " So, in an odd way, cancer relieved me of the need to be better than I thought I was.

But then my body started to change. The flap, the bobble, the belly. And the lack of kindness that accompanied it. Cancer, I decided, ruined my thighs.

And since it is I whom people call or write for help with minds that are possessed by the culturally induced thin hypnosis, I began to wonder whether the years of writing and teaching about sane relationships with food were a lie.

Having a life-threatening illness and surviving it only to say that it ruined the size of my thighs because I no longer looked like I was dying was appalling. But I was so used to talking to myself that way, I thought it was normal. I also thought it was true.

I started to ask myself a difficult question

Before cancer, I had my dream thighs.

After cancer, my thighs were mushy and waggly.

Before cancer, I had shapely, muscled thighs.

After cancer, my thighs hung loose and flabby.

So, cancer did ruin my thighs.

To which any sane person would say, "So what? Who cares about your thighs? You had cancer, for God's sake."

Cancer. Thin thighs. Cancer. Thin thighs.

The real question, of course, and maybe you are a lot smarter than I am and already know this, should have been: Why did I want thin thighs?

I didn't want thin thighs because they were attractive.

I didn't want thin thighs so I could fit into size two jeans or triumph over the now-dead people who once taunted me. (Well, except for the bully in high school who called me Pregnant-Faced Cow. Him, I wanted to step on.)

I wanted thin thighs because I thought having them would fix what was broken. The self-loathing that was so deep I was ashamed to talk about it even to my husband. The certainty that when it came down to it, when you scratched away the glitter and the top five layers of sheen and brightness and trying to be a good person, you'd find a damaged, selfish waste of a human being.

I wanted thin thighs because I was still transfixed by the belief that something out there could fix what was in here.

I wanted thin thighs for the same reason that I ever wanted anything — a partner, a new car, or a trip to Hawaii — I thought they would dissolve the discontent, the vitriol, with which I talked to myself, and only happiness would remain.

Excerpted from LOVE, FINALLY: Untangling the Knot Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food by Geneen Roth. Copyright 2026 Geneen Roth Published by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York