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. 

What "lifestyle change" really is

Do you think that never eating your favorite food again is going to "change your life?" 

I did. 

I'll never forget study abroad in Argentina. It was a glorious time where I enjoyed dancing, late-night dinners, and eating lots of steak and dulce de leche, the Nutella of South America. I also spent a good amount of time worrying about my weight and "engordar," or getting fat as they say in español. So I restricted food at lunch, ate "too many" snacks and then I ate dinner, too.  All of my sins I confessed guiltily in my food diary each night.  I did, however, live in blissful ignorance of any weight gain because there were no scales in my life at the time.

 And then, I returned to 'Murrica (USA) and I went to the gym and stepped on a scale (scales are stupid). Unfortunately, my first thought was, "Oh no. I have engordandoed!"

And so, I sought to "change my life" or find a "sustainable solution." I wanted to "start healthy habits." 

This meant that I vowed to never really eat pizza or french fries. I would try to eat "lite dinners" that left me feeling hungry for lots of dessert afterward.  And, I would plan lengthy runs that I was never in the mood for. Of course, it didn't work the way I thought it would. I ate pizza and skipped my workouts sometimes and ate "too much." And my primary motivation was weight loss. It was not about whether or not I was healthy. I wanted to maintain a lower weight. 

 Lifestyle change or "being healthy" is a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's code for diet. 

I was recently listening to Katie Daleabout on Summer Innanen's podcast, Fearless Rebelle Radio. She was discussing her eating disorder and the process of recovery. She brings up how her eating disorder was couched in "being healthy" so much that she even convinced herself. She states: 

"The interesting thing is that you know in like the 90s and the 80s, dieting was just as prevalent as it is now but now we call it "being healthy." Back then, dieting wasn't like really necessarily cool. It was just, they called a spade a spade, right? They called it dieting. It was clear that that was for vanity.Whereas now, we a lot of times are dieting but people call it, "oh I'm just trying to be healthy"... It's not necessarily healthy, first of all. And, if you're doing it for weight loss, if you're doing it to manipulate the size and shape of your body, not just to feel really good, then it's dieting. Whether you're doing that through green juice or you're doing that through low-calorie low-fat whatever whatever 90s type of dieting, doesn't really matter, it's still dieting."

Back in the 90s and 80s, working girls were wearing sneakers and shoulders pads and switching to high heels and diets when they got to work.

But in those times, people called diets, "diets" and it was clear that they were doing it to look like Melanie Griffith or Molly Ringwald. It was absolutely about weight loss. It was a time where the fitness industry was really starting to take off. People were trying to get "physical, physical." 

Diet culture often frames diets as "lifestyle changes" when in reality they are diets.

Now diets are far more insidious because we can't even clearly see that a diet is for weight loss or body shaping. It may not necessarily be healthy for you, especially if it's causing you to drop down to a weight that is not within your normal healthy body range. If you're changing what you're eating in order to change your body shape or size, it is a diet. Juice cleanses, no pizza ever, the cookie diet, no-carb, low-carb, no oil, Whole30, paleo, vegan shananahammocks, these are all example of diets if you're doing them to CHANGE YOUR BODY SHAPE OR SIZE.  

My impression is that most people think that if we want "lasting weight loss," we need to make a "lifestyle change." AKA if you just eat enough fruits and vegetables, regularly attend your hot yoga class, and never eat [insert your favorite food here] again, you'll finally be able to lose the 30 pounds and keep it off for the rest of your life. 

 Many believe we're just not "changing our lifestyle" enough to lose the weight.

#Sorrynotsorry to be the angry feminist in the room once again but fat people aren't fat because they haven't "changed their lifestyle" or don't care about health. Most people know they need to exercise and need to eat fruits and vegetables. And most people are trying to do that. Some are even successfully doing that. And guess what?! They might not lose the weight. 

I'm glad that people are stoked about making sustainable changes, especially if they're monitoring their health in ways that don't involve standing on a scale and frowning at their body in the mirror.

After all, I really believe that we need to make moves that we can actually stick to in order to make our lives truly better. My hope is that we can change what we're eating not for vanity if health is our main concern. Because vanity doesn't necessarily make you healthier. 

Deep Economy: why locavores should love the body positive movement

Do you ever go to places just because there's pizza? 

This time last year I had the awesome opportunity to go to a party hosted by Heritage Radio Network in the super hipster super cool backyard of Roberta's Pizza in Bushwick Brooklyn. It was a sunny day and I got to eat pizza and feel good about myself. 

Carlo Petrini, founder of the international Slow Food movement, spoke. I was worried it was going to be a lot of fat-shaming "obesity epidemic" bologna but there it was: the intersection of my passion for the local food movement and my fairly newly discovered interest in the body positive movement said in one perfect sentence. 

"We spend more money getting thin than nourishing ourselves."

Carlo Petrini hit the nail on the head. I honestly can't remember if I heard this in Italian translated to English or if Mr. Petrini was actually so pissed off about it that he knew how to say in English. 

We waste our time, our resources, our thoughts. Many women spend these precious commodities wanting to destroy their bodies and hating their bodies. Instead of learning to love our bodies and actually take care of them, humans have learned how to get six-pack abs in 6 days. 

I have spoken before in my posts about how companies stand to profit from women's low self-esteem. And, if you knew me in college, you would also know that companies are also making big money from making less nutritious food. This less nutritious food isn't even always more pleasurable. I'm looking at you, Dominos. Your pizza doesn't taste good. 

In my own journey toward learning how to eat intuitively, I had to shut off the Michael Pollan documentary in my head.  

In reality, loving and accepting all bodies and making good food available are two sides of the same coin. 

I'm really big fan of the story of stuff and Bill Mckibben's book, Deep Economy. Look I read the book but for simplicity's sake, wikipedia defines deep economy as:

 "one that cares less about quantity than about quality; that takes as its goal the production of human satisfaction as much as surplus material;that is focused on the idea that it might endure and considers durability as least as important as increases in size."

Supporting organic and locally grown foods is all about trying to "vote with your fork." It's about supporting the kind of world you would like to live in economically. Supporting health at every size is similar.

When you support this movement, you are supporting a world where women don't feel like they need to be thin. It supports a world that cares about helping people have quality lives instead of thinner lives.

Locavores see delicious and nutritious food as high priorities for society.  Quality and variety foods are promoted in lieu of corn subsidies for high fructose corn syrup, a well known hamburglar of health. 

The body positive movement similarly cares about creating sustainable healthy lives for people that aren't just quick weight-loss products that don't last in the long term. 

The body positive movement sees happiness and satisfaction as its end goal. Weight-loss products and the diet industry often emphasize short-term solutions that are unsustainable. Even the cookie diet is hard to stick to. 

Sustainability is a priority for the locavore. We can't continue with a monoculture. All the methane that all the cows we're eating are releasing has long-term effects on global warming. 

I'm not just bringing all this up because I want to justify my really expensive college education in which I watched a bunch of food documentaries on Netflix for research papers, but maybe, a little bit. 

Pollanistas, meet the body positive movement. I think we're going to be friends. 

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!

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.