It's not necessarily weight gain

BLARGH. OOF. 

You know when you've just eaten something and you feel like you've transformed from a human being into a manatee. And not a calming manatee.

It seems like you have a little food baby inside you that is quickly taking over your cells a la Prometheus. And here's the sentence that comes out of your mouth:

"Ugh. I'm fat."

Being uncomfortably full does not mean you've ruined your life, that you're having an alien baby or that you are slowly turning into a large sea mammal. Although that might be pretty cute. Before I found intuitive eating, this uncomfortable feeling of being really, really, really full was synonymous with guilt. But it doesn't have to be.

Here's what it could be instead: 

1. Feeling too full doesn't necessarily mean that you ate "too many" calories. 

Sometimes, you eat rice, drink too much water and the rice expands in your stomach. Sometimes, you're digging into a large helping of Brussels Sprouts and the fiber makes you bloated and gassy. Sometimes, you eat something spicy and the water you drink to wash it down fills you up.Sometimes, if you're voraciously hungry for Grandma's famous holiday recipe and you eat it all without chewing, your stomach reacts badly because it has to do the extra digestion that your mouth and saliva were supposed to do. 

This is why many ayurvedics  recommend that you drink water prior to eating or drink small sips instead of gulping it down. Rice expands in water, fiber fills you up and gulping down a drink instead of chewing your food can cause a back-up in your stomach. According to webMD, soluble fiber increases digestive flora in your intestines which creates more gas in your tummy, too.

If you've filled up on water or fiber, chances are you didn't eat "too many" calories as most fibrous foods and water actually don't have a lot of calories.

2.  Your body likes homeostasis AKA staying the same. 

The main reason people say diets don't work is due to set point theory. This is the idea that your body has a genetic blueprint for what is a healthy weight range for you. That means if you start to fall below that number, you body slows down its metabolism and works really hard to maintain the weight that your DNA is telling it to maintain. Ergo, you keep eating less but you "hit a plateau" in terms of weight loss. 

Really, restriction is what sets you up for weight gain because it slows down your metabolism thinking your body believes it's caught in a famine. So, as long as you're eating regularly leading up to a big meal, your body will likely do the same set-point thing it does to protect you from weight loss and speed up metabolism to accommodate that extra food. 

3. Maybe you needed more food. 

The Ancel-Keys study showed how restricting food can actually lead to a binge. If all you ate in a day was an egg and lite salad, you might be starving by 6 PM. If you go to dinner hungry, you will probably leave super full. 

Eating more at night is really just your body getting its daily calorie intake. Holiday shopping or house cleaning or just being in the hustle and bustle of living your life can distract you from your body's natural hunger signals so you might have some extra calories to make up for when it's time to hit the feast.

4. Overeating once may not lead to permanent weight gain.

I'll admit that the perfectionist inside of me really struggled with writing that last sentence. I was totally there with you, dear reader. I think the question that used to pop into my head was, "What if it does, though?" I have been scare-mongered for years by women's magazines about how the 1-2 pounds that I gain during Christmas will slowly add up over the years.

In fact, your weight fluctuates for lots of reasons on a daily, weekly, monthly and even quarterly basis that may not be even related to the quantity of food you consumed. Your body might simply be doing the work of surviving, adding and subtracting water and other fluids and particles. 

In the past few years, I've practiced intuitive eating and my weight has felt more stable than ever. I can't say for certain because I don't weigh myself much any more. When I do, I find it hasn't changed much. It definitely helps that I don't check very often. ; )

So enjoy the bacon-wrapped dates and jump into the pool of holiday feasts without worrying about turning into a manatee. 

What if we just didn't worry so much about "being healthy" (part 2)

What if we just didn't worry so much about "being healthy"? 

So, let's say you've been reading this blog for a while and you're just NOT convinced. 

You think diets work. You can always run more. You shouldn't listen to your body because it will betray you. Your shame helps you eat better now. This blog post is for you. 

Let's say a highly regimented diet and exercise routine is what it takes to be healthy and live a long life, but everything else about life still held true. For today, I'm setting aside facts and figures because I want to appeal to you on a human level. 

People always say, "life is what happens while you're busy making plans." Well life is what happens when you're busy meal planning, reading ingredient lists, counting calories, binging on "bad foods" anyway, and spending time feeling guilty and paying penance at the gym. 

I want you to think about how much of your life you spend thinking about, planning and working on your "body project." Now think about all the other crap you have to do in your life that you're not particularly thrilled about but have to do anyway. For example, you might work 40+ hours a week. You might have to buy groceries, clean out your car, do your taxes, get stuck in traffic, or track down your package at some ridiculously far away pickup location because most postal services don't understand geography.

Now, I want you to think about all the things in your life that you wish you had more time for. For me, it's my family, sunshine, yoga, writing more and creating more for this business. 

And the simple question is: what do you want to be doing with your life? 

There are already so many things that can take you away from enjoying your precious time on this planet. My guess is that you won't be on your deathbed wishing you just hit the gym one more time every week.

It's more likely that you'll wish you skipped your run to spend the morning talking with your grandfather. You might wish you weren't trying out being "gluten-free" when your Italian aunt finally gave her secret recipe for her famous spaghetti bolognese. You'll probably wish you stayed out late on New Year's Eve with your friends in your 20s instead of heading in early to do 2,015 crossfit push-up jumping jack snatches upside down. 

Maybe it's because A Christmas Carol was such a big part of my childhood, but I feel like Scrooge took some time during the holidays to assess how he wanted to live his life. And, this holiday season, I'm recommending the same for you

Sometimes eating doesn't have to be about being healthy. Sometimes it's just about pleasure and being present with your loved ones. Drinking wine, eating stuffing, roasting ham, baking cookies are not about health. But maybe that's not the most important thing all the time. 

Be present this year for the holidays. Choose what YOU want to do in your life instead of dieting. 

(sarah jenks thinks so too... )

One Way to Get Rid of Holiday Stress (part 1)

It's December. 

You're probably worried about a lot of things like what gifts you're going to get your in-laws or how you're going to sneak out of work early on Christmas Eve (Sure, at first taking the job at Marley and Scrooge Inc sounded like a good idea but you didn't think they'd be this curmudgeonly #christmascaroljoke). 

But...it's also a time when the diet industry is trying to convince you to maintain or lose weight during the holidays. So, today, I'm going to remind you of something that I've mentioned again and again.  

Worrying about food is not worth THE STRESS. 

When I decided to quit trying to pursue being vegan what I realized is that trying so hard to be perfect around food was creating a lot of stress for me.

I had a tough time menu-planning. I felt guilty for imposing when I was a guest. I was eyeing the melted cheese the whole time. I felt watched at the grocery store like somebody would see me buying something with a non-vegan ingredient like whey enzymes. I beat myself up trying to cook from scratch, berating myself for not buying groceries or for eating ice cream. I was trying sooooo hard to be perfect but I never could do it. 

That's A LOT of STRESS! 

And while I cared for fluffy animals, the primary reason I was trying to be vegan was health.

Here's the research: stress is bad for you.

According the to Mayo Clinic, "stress that's left unchecked can contribute to health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart disease... and diabetes." So while the jury is still out on whether or not eating coconut oil is good for you, worrying is definitely bad for you. 

My advice for this holiday season: whether or not you decide to go for the cookies or the cheese plate, please skip the worry. 

If you still don't believe me, stay tuned for next week. Enter your email below to receive an update when the post loads. 

The voice you should be listening to

I get the best advice from the rebel in my head.

She's pretty badass. To paint a picture, this lady thinks dieting is ridiculous. She actually had the ovaries to shave her whole head instead of just a patch. She has no fear of looking ugly and she is FEMINIST AS F****.

Recovering from a more "disordered" mindset has really been about tuning into the woman in my head who thinks that dieting is a mass conspiracy to make women complacent. She is the cool punk rock angel sitting on my shoulders when the perfectionist and polite diet devil is looming over my food choices. 

Most women have this voice in their head. We've grown up with the Spice Girls, No Doubt and riot grrrrl music. We've heard TLC's "Unpretty." We know intellectually and intuitively that the beauty ideals we're holding ourselves to are BOLOGNA. 

But, somehow, we're still being held to this beauty standard. This blog post is designed to make you ANGRY enough that you have the COURAGE to stop caring about how we SHOULD look: 

Here are some feminist reasons to get angry about dieting: 

1.   Diets don't really work and they cost a lot of money. 

If you read the blog regularly, you know that 95% of diets do not work.  

This BAFFLES me. How do we live in a world where something that doesn't work at all grosses $20 billion?!!! And that report is from 2012. A report from 2015 suggests that number is up to $60 billion. This likely doesn't include the inordinate amount of money we spend on green juice, shopping at Whole Foods,  sessions at SoulCycle, or beauty products.  

According to that 2012 ABC News report, 108 million people diet each year and 82 percent of weight-loss product consumers are women. Last I checked, women didn't make up 82 percent of the population so why are we spending billions of dollars on a product that doesn't even work?  #fixthewagegap #fixthespendinggap 

2. It's not about health. It's about how you look. 

Every other blog post that I write is about dispelling the myth that being healthy involves being skinny* because I want to get the heart of the matter:we are doing all this to our bodies because we want to look a certain way. 

Oooof! Looking a certain way is complicated, right? The way we look transmits our status to the world in a lot of ways. Presenting as white, straight, cis, and thin affords you all sorts of institutional privileges not afforded to people who don't present that way.  I mean, c'mon, this is basically the whole gist of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream Speech.  It's about the content of our character, not the color or elasticity of our skin. 

3. Our body projects are preventing us from doing our work, loving our families, loving ourselves, and changing the world. 

As Naomi Wolf said in her brilliant book,  A Beauty Myth: 

"A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one." 

If we are spending all of our time and money counting calories, then what time and money goes toward closing the gender wage gap, advocating for reproductive rights, or just generally changing the world for the better in whatever way that means to you?

Even if we like our gender roles, we can't even be good mothers or good wives spending our time and money on products that don't work. Eating gluten-free pizza is not going to fix your marriage or make your kids feel more loved (unless celiac disease is source of tension in your family unit). 

Here's the deal: They're not going to give us permission to quit dieting and stop caring about our bodies. Status quo will not change. As I've said before, we have to start feeling good about ourselves first. 

And, that my friends, is feminist as f***. That's the whole point. We need equality and we're the only ones who can give it to ourselves. 

*If you still don't believe me, I strongly encourage you to read this book.