Part of my “philosophy” is, that under normal and not-crazy eating habits, the body knows what to do: how to crave food, how to eat food, and how to metabolize food. And for many people, the body also knows “how to not be fat”, without the use of any extra manipulation.

Then there is Health at Every Size, which I also subscribe to, where it’s said that because of various factors, your body is your body and your body size if your body size. And dieting won’t do anything but stress it out and make you insane and unhappy. So no matter what your weight set point is, you have access to all the health and happiness you could ever want and need, regardless of size.

I agree with both of these philosophies and they have the potential to go hand in hand. Especially if, when I say: the body knowing “how to not be fat” it means “how to be a reasonable, healthy body size”, and not skewed with a disordered ulterior motive for extreme tininess, if that tininess is not your body’s reality. So Health at Every Size literally means Health at Every Size, whatever that inherently means for your body: Skinny, Thin, Curvy, Big, Fat, or WhatHaveYou.

And if this was as easily done as it is for me to type, then there would be no issue. “Great! I can be happy and healthy no matter what size I am? Fabulous! Awesome!!!”

But it IS true. It is.

But socially it is not so simple…

Why do we feel, as a culture, that being fat is the worst thing ever.

Because, generally, we do. Worse than being cruel or sick or poor or depressed- underneath it all, we culturally villainize and try to avoid fatness most of all. More than just an aesthetic issue, it is seen as a moral failing, and something to apologize for. It is now a scapegoat for all our other problems. And we do it to ourselves, and we do it to other people, and the cycle continues.

So much so, that it is practically common knowledge that being fat is bad. Even though it is a false simplification, it is common knowledge, like the sky being blue. Why?

(By the way, the sky being blue is an illusion, so…. yea)

Sure, there are some big and “simple” reasons:

The Diet Industry, the studies they have paid for and cling to that support the idea that body fat is the death of us all, and the way they use media and advertising to twist into your  fragile mind by showing you how much better your life could be if you were thin like you want to be. And tied to that is Big Pharma making diet pills for the diet industry, and all the other drugs to combat obesity and all obesity’s horrors. And then connected closely to that is the Medical Community Dogma that is funded by big pharma and the diet industry, and if doctors say being fat is bad, then being fat must be bad. So let’s look to the diet industry for the answers, and let’s take some pills.

How Hollywood and the Fashion Industry factor into this is a whole other issue. Because the fact that you can “know” that body fat is not our biggest health or moral flaw, doesn’t change the fact that there is still a deep seated, mean little part of us that sees thin as beautiful and glamorous and good- and fat as bad.

As if being fat is the worst thing.

It’s not.

But as long as we buy into it, and believe it, we are perpetuating it.

Look, I don’t think that being overweight is the natural state for everybody. I think that with normal eating, people will eventually settle at a good and healthy size for them. I’m not telling everyone to gain weight to stick it to the man. Or that if you don’t have any extra fat you must be disordered or living in fear. I am also not saying that skinny is bad and fat is good- or fat is bad and somewhere in between is good. The thing is that there should be no good or bad.

What is my point? My point is, that the cultural idea that being fat is the worst thing that could happen to us is flawed, body-fearing, and having us focus on the wrong things. It is pushing us towards diets that either focus on calorie restriction and fake foods, or diets that are absurdly obsessed with real foods and purity, and lead us into restrictive mindsets that ruin our ability to listen to our bodies and honor our bodies. It keeps our worth set on how we look instead of how we act and how we feel, which screws us up metabolically, it screws us up psychologically, and misses the point.

So? Live like being fat is not the worst thing.

Because it absolutely is not.

It is very important that you eat a diet based in whole grains and plant food. “Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants”. Michael Pollan said that.

Lots of Fruits and Vegetables. Also, you need calcium, so drink Milk.

Well, it is also very important not to eat too many grains, because a diet high in carbohydrates can cause insulin resistance and diabetes and like, ugliness. So yea, don’t eat a lot of carbs, you can maybe have some sugar-free jello. Actually, don’t. Cancer.

Don’t eat a lot of eggs. Saturated. Fat. Don’t eat a lot of saturated fat. Or, maybe just don’t eat trans-fat.

Fish is a good idea. Good fats.

No salt. Salt causes some kind of popped veins and water retention.

And actually, wait, apparently everyone is also gluten-sensitive, so just don’t eat grains at all.

But also don’t drink milk or eat dairy either because it is mucus-forming and like, are you a nursing baby? NO. You are not, so don’t be gross and drink pus. Just eat Kale. Kale smoothies are so delicious.

So, start thinking about eliminating cooked food from your diet. Do you want to be Dead and Cooked?! NO. Stupid American! You want to be glowy and beautiful and enlightened like a raw vegan. There are toxins in everything imaginable. So eat lots of organic fruits, vegetables, coconut oil, and expensive dehydrated-at-less-that-118-degrees-treats made out of nuts.

So, wait, yes eat fat…

Actually, cut out those dehydrated treats, you are getting fat and poor.

Do lots of juice cleanses. Get those toxins out. Don’t be alarmed if your health gets worse and worse. This is just because the toxins are on their way out. Your health has been bad for months? Toxins! Be Patient! Be STRONG!

Consider staring at the sun. Sungazing is a way to soak in energy from the earth without eating toxins. (This is a real thing)

Actually, ugh wait, scratch all of that. We are supposed to be Hunter Gatherers. Duh, History + Science. Eat meat. Wild meat, if possible. Meat and avocados and vegetables and fruit and coconut oil by the spoonful. Potatoes… ugh I don’t know. Do you want to be fat and have diabetes? This is your choice.

And while we are at it, like, fruit actually has a lot of fructose which is terrible for your ….liver. Yes, your liver. So just eat vegetables and meat, mostly. We were right about the carbs thing the first time.

Cut out all those nuts and nut-based baked goods that you now eat to feed your sad, malnourished soul. Polyunsaturated fats are terrible for you in high quantities! Do you realize how hard it would be to just eat a handful of nuts in the wild, willy-nilly? It would take you like a whole day to collect those nuts from the tree and crack them open. Saturated fat is way more natural.

Ok, eat salt, though! You definitely need salt.

Ah, well if you have digestive issues by this point, maybe don’t eat a lot of vegetables, because they are really hard to digest. And you definitely don’t have enough good bacteria in your diet, so take a probiotic and eat some fermented cabbage. Did I tell you not to eat a lot of vegetables? I know this is confusing, but you are really close to being really, really healthy.

Stop eating so much FISH, you have mercury poisoning now.

Eat Eggs.

Eat lots of soup, soup is good for you.

Not out of a CAN!!!? My god. Cans have BPA-plastics in them. They cause all sorts of fertility issues and boobs on men. DON’T.

Have you been using the microwave all this time? Oh GOD. The Nazis invented the microwave! It changes the molecules and causes cancer. CANCER. Oh Godddd don’t use the microwave.

Don’t bring soup in a thermos made out of plastic! Plastic leaches hormone disruptors. And don’t bring it in a thermos made out of metal because then I am going to have to take you to a chelator to get all of the heavy metals out of your cells. Do you want your children to have autism?

Drink cold, homemade soup. You can warm it up in a very expensive pot on the stove.

Are you now tired and cold all the time now? Well, you probably screwed up your metabolism. Add some carbs back in. ADD ‘EM BACK IN!

Your body thought it was starving… whoops.

Oh God, my GODDD, just eat whatever the hell you want. You are crazy now. Why did you ever listen to me!

Just put down your cell phone. Do you want to get cancer of the hand and ear?!

It has been a while since my last post. And while I intend to write more often than this, hopefully once a week, I think I needed time to let everything I was preaching, and trying to practice, sink in for myself before I started writing again.

Looking Back:

I started this whole Fuck It journey last January. It was my 24th birthday, I had been Paleo/part-GAPS for 4 months (that is ALL the time I did it for, feels like longer because it was an extension of a decade of disordered and dogmatic dieting), and I felt crazier than ever with food. I had just binged on disgusting squash pancakes for my birthday breakfast, and had a whole counter full of dry almond flour cupcakes with no icing that nobody  wanted to eat, not even me, (even though I had eaten 6 already and would finish them all before the day was over). Because, It was my birthday, damn it! Yum! I couldn’t feel my hunger anymore, I wasn’t getting healthier, all I did was crave food, and I was starting to gain weight again.

And it just hit me like a ton of bricks: “WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING!?!?…. AGAIN!?!?”.

So I began reading and eating. I began reading Matt Stone and re-reading Geneen Roth, and I began eating everything (slowly, I was very scared). (Both of them are not FULLY anti-diet to me, which is why I write about this, but they were a part of my journey).

I began writing about it on here in May, and have been consistently practicing it all until now.

So?

I am happy to report that my fear of any specific food has pretty much vanished. My weight has been pretty consistent no matter how much I eat, and my health has improved since adding any and all amounts of macronutrients. So naturally, over time, my fears of having too much or too little of this and that, have dwindled. And thank God.

I still observe and believe in lots of “real food” principles: probiotics, saturated fat, try to avoid crap food and fake ingredients and industrial seed oils, but my view now is that they are simply guidelines. And my relationship to those guidelines is healthy and easy -instead of stressed and dogmatic.

So for almost a year I have been doing this, and it has been working. I wouldn’t go back for the world. And I still believe in every single “In Defense Of…” post that I wrote- and every other thing I wrote on here about trusting, and listening, and not exercising too much, and on and on. And I would urge anyone to face their food demons and try to do the same thing I did, which is why I write about all of this in the first place.

What About Body Image?

Well, that remains the trickier part. I think I have gotten better. I have definitely become more accepting. My stable weight is still 10 lbs over what I would have previously considered “slim” and “MAX WEIGHT ALLOWED” . I even caved in and ordered a new, 32-G-sized Bra seeing as nothing was shrinking or changing. And I have come to accept that it is “fine”. Life has gone on. I have had boys take me on dates. I have bought new clothes from Old Navy that are fun and nice, and not even always worrying about what is the most “flattering”, (which was always incredibly important before). And everything has been fine. Nobody has died. I haven’t died. Nobody has de-friended me, or wrinkled their nose in disgust at my humungous chest and my untoned arms.

It has been fine. Liberating, even.

This is all partly due to taking my break from theater. Nobody at the office cares how much I weigh. But it is also partly due to waking up, taking some responsibility for my happiness, realizing that I can choose to be stuck and miserable and needing to be whatever version of me I deem acceptable, or instead just accept whatever version of me there is at the moment. It is clear which one is actually more joyful.

But Then…

A few weeks ago I tried on a beautiful, embroidered, cap sleeve, peplum shirt. I fell in LOVE with it on the hanger, it was structured enough that I figured it would look ok on me, and thought “this will be GREAT for my Thanksgiving High School Reunion party thing!” I had an open mind, I didn’t need to be skinny. I didn’t think I was skinny anyway. I walked into the dressing room, tried it on and…..

UGH.

I looked awful. Really bad. Sorta bummed out the rest of my day.

So what did I do? I thought, calmy and rationally, “Well, I AM eating nearly a pint of ice cream every day or two. Maybe I am unnecessarily eating more than I need? Maybe I could become a teeny tiny bit slimmer, and more comfortable in beautiful clothing, in an easy healthy way, if I starting doing more actual intuitive and… slow eating. I should re-read French Women Don’t Get Fat.”

I had gotten to a point where I was just EATING to prove that EATING wasn’t going to ruin my life, and proving that I could eat without fear consistently. And I could! I just apparently couldn’t then look in the dressing room mirror without getting bummed out.

So I reread French Women Don’t Get Fat, because I loved that book when I read it a few years ago. It is not about dieting, it is not about weighing yourself, and it is not about villainizing food. It is not about anything other than looking at Food as Pleasure, and eating and revering it accordingly, with a sensible, long-term approach to “weight management” (I hate that term. What is a better term?). Logically, if I were to merge Matt Stone’s “Eat the Food” and Mireille Guiliano’s “Eat for Pleasure”- they both are probably quite good for the soul and for the metabolism. I read the book with all the new, sensible things I now believe about food and eating…. and it reminded me of a few food “reverence” tactics I had forgotten.

But I don’t want to talk about that right now. This is what I want to talk about:

Where do we draw the line between caring too much and caring enough, where body image is concerned? Where are we supposed to fall between wanting to look “amazing”, and accepting ourselves as we are?

It is hard. Because principally I am a supporter of Health at Every Size. I really am! I think that we should love and accept ourselves and each other unconditionally, and look for the beauty in all of our “imperfections”. I think we should be aware that all images that we are bombarded with by the media are extreme, and accept ourselves in all shapes and sizes and colors instead.

So, why am I still wanting to refine my eating habits, and look slimmer? And is that ok?

I haven’t written for a while because I was so sure about Food Fear being a problem. I knew it, and I knew how to explain to others why it doesn’t work. It was clear to me.

I was waiting for a similar clarity on Body Image, and I don’t have it yet.

So, instead it is going to be a learning journey. And I want your feedback. Because we can learn from each other.

I will write what I learn as I go- and I hope you do the same 🙂

But still…. Fuck It!