It’s frustrating. The diet your coworker shared with you over celery sticks — maybe it worked at first. You followed it perfectly — except for the champagne and cake at your sister’s wedding, and that late night when you ate candy bars from the vending machine for dinner. The scale more or less obediently clicked down in response to your willpower-fueled meals and workouts. But then one or two, or five years later, you find yourself among the nearly 95 percent of Americans who discover that not only did they gain back the weight they worked so hard to take off, but they had to start shopping for pants a size bigger than before they’d started.

At least you know you’re not alone. That 95 percent represents a lot of us, including me. But diet-cycling is a kind of misery that avoids company: we don’t like to share our diet failures. It’s never the diet’s fault, right? It must be the diabolical goodness of dulce de leche ice cream or the dust we let gather on the stationary bike or our own lack of willpower.

Writer Anne Lamott says that when she told her therapist about her latest diet plan, her therapist responded, “Oh, that’s great, honey. How much weight are you hoping to gain?”

So here’s the question: If you knew before you started dieting that there’s a 95 percent chance of going up a dress size after five years instead of down, would you still do it? Most Americans would. Most Americans do.

If you’re still hoping to win the magical jackpot diet in the sky, feel free to stop reading here and resume your search for the next fad weight loss plan. May I suggest the Cold Diet, where you freeze your ass off in a cryogenic container to burn extra calories? Or the Food Babe, where you become so paranoid about chemical contaminants you can hardly eat anything?

If you’ve already tried those diets or their not-so-distant cousins, if you’ve already yo-yo dieted through enough poundage to make a whole new you, then maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ve reached that critical moment my friend, dietician, and nutrition therapist Karen Scheuner calls “Diet Bottom.” And I’m here to say, “Congratulations.”

Diet bottom happens when we’ve tried it all, when we’ve suffered nights of self-induced hunger pangs and injured our knees from too much Stairmaster, and we finally say, “What the hell am I doing to myself? I hate every single freaking minute of dieting and it never lands me anywhere except on my ass.”

To hit diet bottom, you gotta have the moment when you yell, “As God is my witness, I’ll never eat another 200-calorie microwave meal again!”

Savor this moment. It’s the turning point, the event horizon, the instant you reach for the red pill instead of the blue one. You don’t have to diet again. Ever. You can call a truce with your body and with food and never look back.

My moment happened when at 33, I was the mother of a pre-schooler and the survivor of yearly diet crashes — the Grapefruit Diet, the juice cleanse, and multiple variations of low-fat, low-sugar, low-taste diets. One particular day I caught yet another glimpse of myself in the mirror, triggering the usual explosion of self-criticism and low-fat fantasies — an event that happened at least 20 times a day — and I thought, I can’t go on like this.

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This article was originally published in its entirety on the Huffington Post on 3/06/15.

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