Here’s the first-person story of a girl who lost 50 pounds in five months, just prior to college. It’s a textbook case of The Trouble with Diets, heartbreaking and familiar. Fortunately, she came out the other end with a very healthy attitude and some words to live by:

“I eat because I am hungry or because it is involved in celebrating or experiencing life.”

This girl lost her weight fast, after a lifetime of overweight — like jumping off a skyscraper into the beyond. She did this just as she went into college, a highly stressful period where all is new and unfamiliar and very unsettling to self-image. So she did what anyone would do: She fled to the security of the self she knew, the overweight one.

Another writer, who’s studying the social history and psychology of food in America, notes that MSNBC originally posted the piece with the headline “The Learning Curve,” and ended up with “Battling the Freshman 15.” In other words, they catered to its readership’s assumed obsession with weight loss, obscuring the real and better point of the piece, self-acceptance. Too true. Then again, they’re both pretty crappy headlines.