What if you never learned to compare your body to other people’s bodies? What if you never looked down at your plate and wondered how many things you were doing wrong? What if you didn’t look in the mirror and see something perpetually inadequate? What if you weren’t taught that your worth is determined by your…
Tag: dieting
Just a friendly reminder that bathroom scales have nothing to do with health
And everything to do with marketing. I’ve rounded up a few old ads for bathroom scales, and they are doozies. From the late 19th century and into the Depression era, scale manufacturers successfully parlayed their machinery into a smaller moneymaker for humans: a novelty item where people could pay a penny to find out their weight at department…
You do not have to be on a diet to earn your place on this planet
You do not have to feel guilty about every diet trend you don’t try, or every food you do or don’t eat. That’s diet culture nonsense, and you don’t have to buy into it anymore. As a young girl obsessed with all the things that were wrong with my body, I internalized every single message…
Just because it doesn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen
Months ago, when the New York Times published a piece about the former Biggest Loser contestants, I noticed a reader comment that has stuck with me ever since. As a rule, I aggressively avoid comment sections of…pretty much anything. But there it was, highlighted in the sidebar, in all its judge-y, preach-y glory: “Sorry. But cravings are…
Flexible dieting is dieting
I see athletes and bodybuilders and impossibly fit-looking people on the interwebs extolling the virtues of macros, and it alllllmost sounds kind of science-y, so I just want to put this out there: if you are counting macros, you are on a diet. It’s right there in the name. Macronutrients are the hallmark of an…
Enough with the cheat days
Cheating on…what exactly? Cheat days seem to imply that food is a game, or a test, or a relationship. It is none of those things. Food is just food. Just an inanimate object, chillin’ on a plate. It doesn’t have moral goodness or badness. It doesn’t make rules, or punish you for breaking them. It is…
six months to sanity 