This month, readers, Body Image will be different. I write with my own voice to your ear. I write from personal experience. I do this for two reasons. First, because I am exhausted and haven’t the energy to edit on the fly. Second, because I want to tell you about a personal experience and this is best done in first person, I think. So this is me. Nice to see you. You look good.

I, in fact, have been hearing that phrase constantly over the past three or four months. “You look great” or “god, you look terrific,” or even “hon, you look fantastic.” This would be marvelous except that it’s simply not true. I don’t look great, terrific, or remotely fantastic. I actually look like hell. But I look thinner than I have in ages.

Aha. See, you knew there was a catch. Me, too.

In December I was diagnosed with some minor skin cancers, but there were several and they were a bit serious in nature. In early March it was discovered that I had lung cancer. I also have a condition called bronchiectasis, so this was not good news. I was put on an aggressive drug therapy program. I stopped eating.

No, for real, stopped eating. Honest. I would perhaps eat one small item a day. I might go a day or two, later three without eating or eating only an orange. I slept a lot (still do) and I lost lots of weight. And in spite of the fact that my very-fine hair was thinning from the drugs I was on, and my eyes had bags beneath them, and my skin was dry, flaking, and blotchy, in spite of all this people would bump into me at the supermarket and exclaim with great glee “you look great!” Close friends, loved ones, physicians overseeing my care: none of these people have told me I looked “great.” In fact, most of them have expressed concern. Have I been sleeping better at all? Can’t I eat a little something?

I think you can see where I am going with this. How warped is our society? How messed up have our priorities and perceptions become that a haggard, sickly, blotchy woman is better by far than an energetic, smiling, smooth-skinned woman who also happens to be fat? How skewed has our collective standard for beauty become that the frowning, baggy-eyed, weary, scraggly-haired creature in my mirror is preferable to her fuller-figured former self?

Perhaps this is the new diet craze. Indeed, it will surely grace the cover of every woman’s magazine soon. LOSE WEIGHT NOW! No Cravings! No pre-packaged foods! Simply expose yourself to harmful UV rays, smoke, eat all the wrong foods, breath in asbestos, visit your local power plant and request brief exposure to radiation until you, too, are seeing the pounds melt away. You may not survive the diet. Surely you noted the Surgeon General’s warning. But one thing is for sure: even if it kills you they’ll all say the same thing over the casket. “God, she looks great, doesn’t she?”