The easiest way to get your dream body ft advice from Beyoncé

I used to have this vision of myself at some point in my 20s where I would finally get that "cover girl body." I'd finally get food and fitness in perfect equilibrium and I would be tiny and ripped like a Barbie GI Joe doll. 

Whenever it seemed like my schedule would allow it, I'd start planning for my dream body makeover lifestyle. Planning my dream body dinners and my super intense 5-6 days per week workout plan all seemed like fun parts of my "goal-setting" fantasy.

If I was a REALLLY good bear, I would stick to my grueling "dream body" workout "lifestyle change" for about 2 weeks. Then one day, I would eat a hamburger, have a social life, and skip a workout. 

Just like that, dream body Noel evaporated into thin air.

As you might guess, I was generally pretty good at "slipping up." In reality, my dream body was impossible to achieve. 

At face value, that sounds pretty awesome: achieving the unachievable. After all, one of my favorite childhood movies, Thumbelina, taught me that "you're sure to do impossible things if you follow your heart."

Cheesy as it may be, I want to "trust the swallow" on this one. There's a lot of impossible things that I want: a fulfilling career, a family, a life I love, a beach house that doesn't get destroyed by hurricanes.   

How much of my heart really cares about dream girl body makeover lifestyle change? Is that really following my heart? 

Instead of continuing to attempt the impossible, what if you changed your dream body by changing your dream? 

What if instead of your dream body looking a certain way, it does certain things, thinks certain things, takes care of certain things, or changes the world? #changeyourdreambody

To be clear I'm not talking about giving up on your dreams. I'm talking about questioning why you have this cover girl dream body ideal in the first place. For a lot of women, this goal is part and parcel of what "success" means. 

This is where the feminism comes in and honestly I think Beyoncé and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie say it best:

We teach girls to shrink themselves
To make themselves smaller
We say to girls,
'You can have ambition
But not too much
You should aim to be successful
But not too successful
Otherwise you will threaten the man.'

Sometimes being smaller or being beautiful becomes a goal that excludes the possibility of being something else besides a wife. Being successful in business, sports, science, art, music or being a good person are not usually the images we see promoted to women. 

Because I am female
I am expected to aspire to marriage
I am expected to make my life choices
Always keeping in mind that
Marriage is the most important
Now marriage can be a source of
Joy and love and mutual support
But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage
And we don't teach boys the same?

Most women's magazines are not about how to expand the reach of your non-profit business that helps feed blind orphans.

It's usually about looking hot, pleasing a man, or how long is too long to wait until he pops the question. Not only is this a little heteronormative (what about women who don't want to get married to men), but it also shifts our focus away from who we are as whole people. Marriage and long-term relationships are pretty nice but they are not the only thing to aspire to.  It's certainly not what we teach men to achieve. 

We raise girls to see each other as competitors
Not for jobs or for accomplishments
Which I think can be a good thing
But for the attention of men

Women tend to focus on being better looking than other women instead of working harder than each other. Not as many women's magazines talk about how to lean in harder. They're about attracting male attention. The cover girl dream body can sometimes steal women's focus away from being effective and accomplished people. Women tend to want to tear each other down instead of build each other up. Where is the #shinetheory, ladies?

Does hating on each other's bodies help us achieve anything really?

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings
In the way that boys are
Feminist: the person who believes in the social
Political, and economic equality of the sexes

Girls are taught early on to keep their virginity like it's some sort of jewel while boys are encouraged to experiment and play the field. Sometimes the goal of the cover girl dream body is really just about wanting to get laid but one must be "desirable" in order to fulfill that. Being a feminist just means wanting to have the same political rights, the same economic opportunities and the same level of social respect that men have. I'm sure some men aspire to the cover boy dream body but my gut is telling me it's probably not as many men as women. 

Let's listen to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Beyoncé. Let's be more than "just his little wife." I want you look at the reason you want to be smaller. What DRIVES this goal? 

Is it for health? 

Then focus on eating vegetables and moving your body regularly. Quit smoking. 

Is it for sex? 

Download a dating app or sign up for a online dating company. The stigma is gone now. Everyone is getting laid, guys. At least that's what it looks like from my perspective as someone who has been in a relationship for a long time. 

Is it for a relationship? or marriage? 

Do you really want your life partner to judge you based off your looks? Because age is going to happen and looks will likely fade for both of you. It'd be nice if your future partner was really turned on by your intellect, your sense of humor, your ball handling skillz, or your passion for making the world a better place. 

Is it for your career? 

Might not be so good for your career if every time you are supposed to be typing up a report, you're really daydreaming about carbs. Is there a way to focus more on your performance or your education? 

These are just some ideas. Imagine the brain space you would have if your focus shifted away from becoming the love child of Barbie and GI Joe and moved toward what REALLY makes you happy in your life, whatever that may be. 

Magazines shouldn't be telling you what your dreams should be.

Go get it, girl. You FLAWLESS!

Changing your Body

I need to start off this post with an apology. I'm sorry. I wrote a sentence a little flippantly that really needs A LOT of context, caveats, and 'splainin'.

"So really changing your body is not attainable," wrote myself last week. 

A friend I respect pointed out how this sentence by itself could be off-putting. I'm sorry because I often say inflammatory things that are really designed to mean something else. I call it Kanye syndrome.  

So, what's wrong with this sentence? 

1. It's factually inaccurate. 

Our bodies change constantly over time. If bodies didn't change we'd all be a bunch of squiggly babies walking around. Also, surgery exists. 

2. It dismisses the impact that other healthy habits can have in changing your body beyond weight loss. 

You can temporarily lose weight by restricting your calories no matter the content. In other words, you can just eat Snickers all day but as long as you eat fewer Snickers than calories required to keep your body at its current weight, you will lose weight, at least temporarily. 

Food is just one component of our health. And calorie restriction is just one way to lose weight. Environmental, social, emotional, intellectual, spiritual factors all play into our health.  Generally, eating lots of fruits and veggies, whole grains, limiting alcohol, not smoking, and getting regular exercise and sleep all help to increase longevity. These things do not even include mental, social, emotional, and spiritual health that might be impacting your body's ability to fight disease. 

As Linda Bacon has referenced in her book (and Isabel Foxen Duke has quote her many times), curing heart disease by treating weight loss is like curing lung cancer by treating yellow teeth.  Health issues are often correlated with having a higher weight but weight only "weakly predicts longevity." Again, skinny does not necessarily mean healthy. Skinny people can eat crappy foods, take bad care of themselves and get sick too. 

Changing your diet might change your biochemistry and physiology but it may not change your weight. 

3. I'm not accounting for the people who have changed their body weight.

I know people who have lost significant amounts of weight and have been able to keep it off. To you, kudos. If you dieted to get there, you're especially rare because about 3-5 people of 100 are able to pull that off. 

This, as my homegirl Isabel (have I mentioned she's got a really amazing FREE video series out?) puts it in her latest podcast with Kaila Prins, is a bad bet. If somebody told you to make an investment of $10,000 and there's a 3% chance you'll get paid $200,000 but if you lose, you could actually end up in debt, would you take that wager? Call me Mr. Wonderful, but I don't like those odds. 

So, now that I've clarified a few inaccuracies, here's what I meant to say: 

1. Even if you are able to permanently lose weight, you might not lose so much weight that you finally look like a Greek statue or the cover of a magazine.

If you are truly doing it in a sustainable way, it probably consists of slow and steady changes that happen gradually over time. You might lose 10 pounds permanently but never the 30 you were hoping for to get back to your high school karate fighting weight. 

2. You might be able to lose so much weight that you look like a Greek statue but it requires more than what diet companies advertise. 

Changing your body permanently is not as easy as diet companies would like you to believe. It's not just eat just eat these weird kale cookies for 30 days and look like Halle Berry.

Look at, say, an Olympic athlete. Having swum for many years, I knew even at age 11 that I did not have what it took to get to the Olympic level of swimming. I straight up didn't have the dedication. Getting to the Olympic level would have required 5-6+hours of training per day ALL YEAR LONG. This would have meant relinquishing academics, piano lessons, snowboarding on the weekends, having friends and even just watching old episodes of Wings on USA. 

For me, this was too much to give up. I had to know what was happening in that Nantucket airport. What would you have to give up in your life to get your body to this "level?"

It's just a lot of time and you have to do it FOREVER. FOR-EV-ER! 

3. You might be able to lose so much weight that you look like a Greek statue but it makes you crazy and obsessive around food and exercise. Your whole life, including your career and relationships, might be consumed by it. If it gets really bad, you can develop an eating disorder that requires years of expensive treatment and causes long-term health problems.

One can look at other women in my field, like Maddy Moon, to see how what seems like a healthy pursuit of a goal can spiral into obsession. Eating disorders are really hard on people's lives. I saw that and heard about it during the time that I worked for an eating disorder treatment center. Bad eating disorders can cause bone issues like osteoporosis. Purging behaviors can cause digestive distress and tooth decay. And, having worked in the billing department, I know it is EXPENSIVE. 

One final disclaimer: I'm not trying to dismiss anyone who was ever interested in weight loss as frivolous or foolish. 

I'm saying this because there's a lot of misinformation out there that has real consequences for people in their lives. I care about giving people accurate information so we can make informed decisions about how we want to spend our lives. 

Thanks for reading this super long post. I hope it was useful.

Do you think this clarifies things? Does this resonate with you? Anything problematic? In the comments or via email, let me know!

Proof of skinny

When I was in high school, I remember the day I looked around the room and started comparing my body to the other girls' bodies. 

Instead of seeing myself as a unique person, I felt like I needed to be thin like these beautiful cheerleaders, runners, lacrosse players, etc. I just wasn't "working hard enough". When I got to college in New York City,  the women were even thinner and even more beautiful. And again, I thought to myself, "What am I doing wrong that I don't have the body that these women have?" 

This is when I really started to get disordered around food because a normal person would see women this thin and think, "not for me." But, I saw these women the way a poor person sees a stock broker livin' large. I just kind of figured "I'm sure it's hard work, but if that woman could do it, I can too."

When you see thin people as something you can attain, every thin person looks like evidence that thinness is attainable. Thin people are not proof that being thin is a goal you can attain. All thin people really prove is that thin people exist.

And that's just it. Research shows that 95% of diets don't work. So, really, changing your body is not attainable. In fact, according to Isabel Foxen Duke and the famous Ancel Keys study, dieting actually physiologically sets you up for a binge. In fact, studies have correlated weight GAIN with dieting. 

In other words, changing your body weight beyond a certain range is physically impossible over the long term. 

So, instead of seeing all the thin people as moral, attractive, hard workers who just had the diligence and persistence to achieve what they had, think of them instead as people with natural blonde hair and brown eyes. They just have what they have. They may not have "worked for it."

You, my friend, are not your weight and neither are the thin people who you think you want to be. 

What Does Weight Loss Mean to You?

 A lot of people just assume that you're healthy if you've lost weight. 

 When you see someone who has lost weight, you don't actually witness a montage featuring some cool glam rock where your friend is doing jump ropes, eating vegetables, and celebrating on top of a mountain (That'd be cool though.)

BUT..... Weight loss also means more than just health to the people who are impressed by it.

Weight loss is a form of cultural capital. This is a fancy sociology term for the phenomenon of  finding somebody cool for traits besides money, like middle schoolers admiring yo-yo tricks or possession of giga-pets.  

In modern society, today, however, being thin or losing weight signifies social power. It's something that my homegirl, Isabel Foxen Duke recently discussed in a podcast with Summer Innanen and it's something I've mentioned before in my blog posts. 

Being skinny often means: 

1) You are more "attractive."

In a Tinder-focused dating world, people are doing a lot of judging books by covers. Usually our standards for beauty are based off what we see over and over again in films, movies, television, and magazines. Unfortunately, what is considered "beautiful" is often being thin.

Being more attractive is a form of social currency and therefore power. It means, especially as a female, that you've got access to better potential mates. According to an article from Business Insider, it means you might even earn more money. 

2) You are "good" because you have "willpower."

In a world where calories in and calories out is the dialogue of diet culture, someone who has successfully lost weight shows great strength of character. If you can exercise more and eat less, you must be "good." I attempted to write a paper about this in college so I think it deserves more than a few sentences in my blog post (in fact, I recommend this piece by Sarah Yahm). Sticking to a diet constitutes being a moral person because you have not "succumbed" to the "gluttony."

3) You are capable of anything. It's the American Dream for the American body. 

Someone being skinny or being able to achieve a new body size is kind of a proof-of-concept (more on this coming soon) for the rest of us that we too can become "skinny."It tells us that we are capable and reinforces the moral imperative to be "good" with food and exercise so we too can achieve the ideal body. 

Unfortunately, the downside of this belief is that it reinforces the idea that fat shaming and discrimination are okay because we have these people who have "overcome" their obesity or overweight-ness. So, people who can't get a handle on it basically deserve the treatment that they get.  

All this to say that weight discrimination is not really fair:

 Attractiveness  shouldn't be based off what a bunch of suits at magazine and television companies think is attractive. Also, why not just have more diverse bodies represented in the media anyway? This would solve a lot of problems. 

If you've been reading this blog, you know that diets don't work. Willpower doesn't work. Your body is too smart to let you starve it without figuring out how to compensate. 

If diets don't work, it's not really fair to believe that any kind of body you might want is achievable. It's especially not fair to treat other people differently if their bodies don't look like the bodies you saw while watching Hulu last night.

 

In the comments, let me know the reasons that weight loss appeals to you or if any of these really resonate with you. 

 

PS — my girl Isabel Foxen Duke just put out an amazing free video training series about emotional eating, binge-eating and generally “feeling crazy around food.” Ya know, like thinking about food and dieting all day long, only to end up with your fingers in a jar of peanut butter that evening. If “feeling crazy around food and weight” is a sentiment you relate to, I highly encourage you to sign up for her free training here. 

Math can be easier than sadness

Math is easier than human emotions sometimes. 

At a point not too long ago, shortly after my conversion to intuitive eating, I was at a crossroads. A few things were shifting in my life and I was feeling a little uncertain about the future. 

Meanwhile, my wonderful partner had just finished a program that would put him and his classmates on the path to lucrative and promising careers. I went to celebrate with them. 

And I was happy for them. The celebration started early on in the day and basically consisted of constant access to delicious food and beverage all day and well into the night. I allowed myself to eat, drink and be merry. Intuitively. 

Or so I thought. As the day went on, I felt a few old fears creeping up. I felt really full. Then, this old mean voice came up in my head again. Amy Poehler might call it, "the demon." 

"Ugh" It said, "You're so fat." 

"Eating all day? You're out of control." It said.

Ever the people-pleaser, I said to that demon, "I'm not 'out of control!' I have a calorie tracking app so I'll just put in what I ate today and I'm sure it'll be fine."

When we got home, I needed to prove myself to that asshole demon, so I started filing away all the data. Half-way through, I stopped. For one thing, the numbers weren't what I wanted to see. They didn't make me feel better. They didn't prove anything to the demon. 

I felt the sadness and anxiety well up in my throat. 

This was the big "a-ha! moment" for me. I realized that I didn't care about "getting fat" really. I didn't feel like I had "it" together. Probably because I spent the day hanging out with a bunch of people who were celebrating feeling like they had "it" together. 

Perhaps you can relate. Life can feel out of control at times. It's why I used to find great solace in tracking and controlling food.

 Adding up the calories of the beers and burritos I consumed was easier than trying to figure out my career trajectory.

The fancy clinical word for this is "coping mechanism." It's something I heard a hundred times while working at the eating disorder treatment center. Many times eating disorder "behaviors," like restricting, binging, purging, or obsessing about food served a purpose for those using them. They provided a way of managing a tough time. 

If you find yourself emotionally eating or thinking about food or feeling fat or feeling like you WANT to control food, here are some things you can do: 

1. Identify the "behavior" as a coping mechanism. 

There's a big difference between eating ice cream mindlessly for hours and eating ice cream because you knew you had a hard day at work. 

If you notice that you're eating weirdly or getting extra anxious around food, it might be a symptom of something else going on in your life. Awareness is so underrated but it's so helpful. Just knowing that what you're doing serves you in some way can help you realize what's going on.

2. There might be a more direct way of managing your distress. 

If you do notice that your "behaviors" crop up more when other things are going on, it's an opportunity to address your issue head on. Instead of compartmentalizing by doing something else, notice what triggers "behaviors" and address the triggers. Treat the cause, not the symptom. This might mean seeking out a therapist or another professional who is trained to help you work it out. 

 In my case, I had to accept my own situation and learn how to be happy with that. I journaled a lot and tried to find ways to get a little more clarity about my next steps. 

3. Trust Yourself and Your Body

Remember that you can't really control your body weight. Increasing research suggests that your body weight is set to to stay within a certain range that is healthy for your body in particular. The fancy science people call this, "set point theory."  While you may temporarily be able to restrict food, ultimately, your body wants you to be healthy and survive. It will take measures to keep you where you are supposed to be. 

Sometimes relaxing into this can help us be present to and mindful of the issues in our lives and the "coping mechanisms" we're using to manage the difficulties in our lives. 

And honestly, it's easier than doing math.