6 years ago I was in living at home with my parents for the Holidays doing a show at a local professional theater, trying to eat like a paleolithic cave woman, cheating and bingeing on bananas and paleo ginger snaps I made out of almond flour, then lying in bed, filled with bananas and cashews, promising that I would actually ‘do what I was supposed to do’ and eat only lamb and kimchi the next day.

Every single night I was furious with myself because of bananas and cashews and almonds and honey.

I told everyone I was sensitive to gluten and all grains. Beans had too much phytic acid, duh. And fruit was like a dangerous treat only for christmas when you could eat like a half a clementine.

And chocolate was ok but only if it was 99% and tasted like charcoal.

This was the last ditch effort after 10 years of extreme dieting trying to cure myself.

I was trying to heal my hormones and it didn’t fucking work because hormones aren’t healed by eating like a starving cave man or like a fruitarian. But who knew! Nobody told me that. Doctors told me to keep my weight down. So like a good little girl, 16 years ago, I fucking trusted them, and I trusted every other magazine and message board that told me to fear body fat. I was a good patient. I was determined to be responsible. Healthy. Beautiful. Successful.

I was fucking insane around food, but I was determined. It wasn’t working. But I kept getting on that diet horse, again and again, even though it was literally killing me and bucking me off and trying to trample me year after year after year.

And 10 years of diets later I was walking by mirrors, totally dysmorphic, wondering how I could cure my weak, weak human hunger and finally become healthy.

Then almost 6 years ago, The Fuck It Diet, like an angel, descended upon me on my 24th birthday and whispered in my ear “fuck this shit and all of this skinny, beauty-obsessed BS. Also, food, and weight, and eating aren’t bad for you. Go buy some bigger pants and eat some potatoes.”

I went on The Fuck It Diet, started this site and movement, have been teaching it ever since, and lived Happily Ever After.

 

I denounce Trump and everything he stands for.

When I became vocal about this on the Fuck It Diet platform last November, it resonated with many, but pissed off lots of people too, and I lost lots of followers.

They told me to keep politics out of it. They just wanted to heal their food issues, why did I have to alienate them by talking about Trump and taking a side?

But see, you can’t keep politics out of it. You must see the connection if you want to heal your food stuff. Your food stuff is not merely about food, it is connected to a big wide web of societal beliefs and structures and prejudices and cruelties, turning you against yourself.

It is about the way you have been taught to see your worth as it stands up against the cultural beauty ideal – thin and white.

We are talking about a man who owned Miss USA, who talked about women as if they are meat, bragged about sexual assault, then said that the women were to ugly to sexually assault. He insults people for being fat, actively incites fear of the other, and has about as much racial sensitivity as Michael Scott from The Office, with none of the charm or willingness to improve.

We have raised up a man who seems to have no genuine empathy and shows absolutely no remorse.

Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with our relationship to bodies (and by proxy, food). This has everything to do with everything. These are all parts of the cultural piece that keep us hating our bodies, and afraid of being ostracized and insulted for what we look like, and who we are.

Social justice and the way women’s bodies and fat bodies are treated, intersects with the way race, class, and gender are treated. Body politics and the fuck it diet are both political. They just are.

And recently Neo-Nazis and the KKK, marched without hoods. One of them killed and injured peaceful counter-protesters.

These are hate groups and terrorists, chanting racial slurs, oblivious of their deep privilege, mad with rage and hatred against the minority groups they fear will replace them. Or whatever makes a nazi a nazi and a KKK member a KKK member. Pure evil maybe. Or deep displaced understanding of how happiness and the world works. I try to understand, and I fail to.

I am not an expert on racism in the USA. Not even close. But I see the connection between body politics and race politics and feminism. They overlap, they affect each other, and they are very real and hold a great deal of weight as we go forward – no fuckin’ pun intended. I never intend puns.

You can’t keep politics out of it. Normalizing your relationship to food is body politics. And the way our president and his buds talk (and act) matters.

And it has everything to do with everything.