She did yoga, jogged, took ballet classes, did Pilates, swam lengths, and had regular acupuncture. --Leanne Shapton, Was she pretty?

I'm clumsy, but capable of grace, I wrote on my Facebook page. About me: I trip over my own feet sometimes, but I can hold your gaze.

I learned clumsiness as a girl whose mother did not abide her "elephantine" footsteps. I learned to creep through our house with my feet pivoted from the ankle, on tiptoe, to make the least noise possible. My goal, then, as a girl, was to provoke no sound: screaming especially.

My goal, now, as an adult, is to learn poise, to make exultant (thud!) noise on sprung hardwood: to take ballet. Admittedly, I'm not yet ready to stand in first position, at the barre in supple leather slippers (like those penciled by Andy Warhol, those illustrating this post): I've much more weight to lose, much more than the twenty-three pounds I've lost, before I'll be light-enough on my feet to enroll in recreational adult classes at the National Ballet School. But my intention to take ballet classes is akin sincere promises sent long-distance in a love letter, an earnest assurance to a fitter self.

My goal, now, this instant, is to embrace fitness as I embrace food: with joy, playfulness, experimentation--taking pleasure in the body's capacity for change. That means exercise without the extremism to which so many North Americans are thought to ascribe. (At least, according to the French woman not fat, Mireille Guiliano.) Without the exercise extremism to which I ascribed before, last year when I sought to lose weight by urging myself to the gym six days a week, urging myself harder, faster, tracking my time, my speed, my incline, my resistance in an Excel spreadsheet. Gentler exercise, to walk through the city or to do Sadie Nardini’s Weight Loss Yoga For Overweight Yogis on YouTube, is thought to prompt weight loss without stimulating the appetite, as vigorous exercise is said to do, and without exhausting either the body, causing plateaus, or the will to persist in making lifestyle changes. Gentler efforts, too, most allow for joy, play, experimentation: yoga, ballet, jump rope (Punk Rope, if ever in New York City)...

Still, will walking, yoga, ballet be exercise enough to sustain the changes I'm intent to make? This, the clumsiness in my psyche: the girl's fear of screaming taking the form of adult perfectionism, measurable exercise extremism. ("You must be perfectly quiet" internalised as "You must be perfect--and you must be able to quantify your perfect efforts.") My mother, as fond of riddles as of silence, phrased the only answer as a question: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. One step. One pose. One position. First position.