1 post tagged “anti-diet revolution”

Meet my body issues.  Oh, and talk about the anti-diet revolution.

First, I'm going to treat you to a short account of my dark dieting past.  

The trauma of a 25-year old dieter?  Wow.  That's a story that will shake the world to its very core, you imagine!  Your eyes widen as you picture the trials and drama that will unfold...  Keeping to a strict 1200 calories while on a gastronomical tour of Europe, perhaps, or avoiding carbs with a deadly allergy to any food besides donuts?  OK, that's a little silly, but maybe being bereft of sight and sound, smell and touch, with taste as her only sensory pleasure, she still had the discipline to maintain a perfect size 4?

Well, hopefully you weren't too attached to any of those, because as amazing as I am, I haven't met any of those challenges, although 1200 calories was my Holy Grail of a goal for years, and I did dabble in anti-carb Atkins.  The truth is that my dark diet past has been fairly typical. 

So why are five or six years of standard dieting that big of a deal?  Because it entrenched me in an obsessive mindset that permeated every day of my life.  How unhealthy, how frustrating, how boring!

And yet, how common.  We are supposed to be a generation of empowered and independent women, yet we’re trapped in expectations for our bodies and obsessions with our diet that rule our thoughts.  We obsess every day to become the thinnest we can.  And I’m not talking about bona fide eating disorders.  I’m talking about you, me, my friends, most of the women we all know.  It’s rare to find a woman who isn’t fixated on what she’s putting in her mouth, and if it’s “good” or “bad.” Over 80% of women dislike the size and shape of their bodies. 1 in 3 women is dieting at any given time and 40% are continually losing and regaining weight. 2 out of 5 women would trade three to five years of their lives to achieve their fitness goals.  And in essence, they already are.  All those little thoughts throughout the day, the moments of guilt- they add up to a lot of wasted energy over a lifetime.   And our generation is on the way to a lifetime of guilt and dissatisfaction with our bodies.  We feel we have to be perfect, and so we strive for perfect diet success.  It’s a sweet situation for the diet industry, who take in over $40 billion a year, but not so sweet for the body obsessed dieters.  It’s a constant struggle that only breeds discontent within ourselves.  Oh, and by the way, it only makes us fatter.

So I’m over it.  A few months ago, I committed to kicking my diet mentality to the curb, and escaping the INSANITY that is body hate and diet culture.

This is me.

In love with my passion, my eyes, my smile.  In love with the beauty I try to see in humanity, in the seasons, in the buildings I love downtown, in art, in words, in stories, in the castles I think everyone should build in the sky. 

I believe in the strength and uniqueness of my spirit.  And I accept that I’m a little corny.  

This is me.  Confident and optimistic.  In touch with who I am and what I have to offer.

But vain.  

In love with the attention paid to me because I'm pretty.  In love with being the whole perfect package, the smart, soulful, hot girl.

In love with pleasure, with food.

In love with nachos, plate after plate.  In love with notions of health, but also with instant gratification.

A constant yo-yo dieter, I now miss my previous fat weight.  Sound familiar, anyone?  I’m oddly still in love with most of myself, but no longer even close to satisfied with my body.  I'd started to hate it, to the point of tears.

A lot of this story is my struggle to climb out of the ridiculous but upsetting pit of body hate I'd fallen into.  How did I even get to this point?

In high school, I didn't really think about my weight.  I knew I wasn't one of the skinny girls.  I ate a lot, didn't exercise, and I was a size 10 the first couple years.

Some boys thought I was cute, well, because I am, but I certainly wasn't the girl who got an abundance of boy attention.  Like I said, I wasn't one of the skinny girls.  My sophomore year, I decided to start working out, and I ran or did my hand-me-down eighties Jane Fonda aerobic video, the recommended 3-5 times a week.  I provided quite a show, learned some adorable moves for the dance floor (ask my friends), and slimmed down a bit.

I didn't weigh myself, and didn't analyze my body much at the time (which as one of the body obsessed, I can't imagine now!), but I think I dropped to a toned size 8, and my thighs were actually smaller than they would ever be again, even when I was skinnier.

I fell out of my exercise routine after maybe five months, and slowly regained the weight back.  Dieting or changing my eating habits didn't yet enter the picture.

The summer before I went up to the University of Idaho, I decided to go on the Atkins diet, but only lasted a couple of days.  

My spring semester of that freshman year at college, I estimate now that I weighed 150-155 pounds.  I still didn't weigh myself though, so I can't be sure.  I decided one day to research online how to methodically lose about two pounds a week, and entered the new and exciting world of calorie counting!  I found that if I ate 1200 calories a day, I should lose two pounds a week, and still not enter starvation mode and be “unhealthy.”

What's amazing to me now, after so many failed or abandoned diets since, is that I decided to do it, and I just did it.  I kept a food journal, just lined paper stapled together, nothing fancy, and wrote down everything I ate with its calorie value, and my water intake, which was always the equivalent of eight glasses.  I didn't eat anything that wasn't packaged.  I ended virtually every day in the 1200s.  A bad day would hit 1300 or even 1400, but not higher.  What a naughty glutton, right?  And what seems so alien to the quick fix junkie I became is my daily adherence to a process that didn't yield any noticeable results for a while.  In the mess of my dieting past, I see this one attitude as the only smart moment.  Treating the process as the goal.  And it probably enabled my first real diet “success.”

I didn't have a scale or a full length mirror in my dorm room.  My friends didn't really see a change.  And I kept doing it all anyway, until the back of my pants started bagging (I always lose my ass first), and after having to pull them up for a while, decided to finally buy new pants, which ended up being in a size 6.  That was the summer of halters and hotness, and my thinnest times.

I ditched the food journal, which seemed a bother without the structure of my school routine and dorm life, but kept a rough estimate running in my head, aiming for 1200.  I still didn't weigh myself.  How weird is that, my dieting brethren?  It baffles me, really.  I estimate I was around 125 pounds, and I wanted to lose a little more.  I was in that perfect in clothes but not quite perfect naked place.  I wouldn't wear a swim suit without hiding behind a towel or some such device, and I certainly found fault naked in front of a mirror.  I guess near perfect wasn't good enough- it was sadly, still embarrassing.  

I went back up to U of I, joined a sorority (family style dinners... no bueno for the dedicated calorie counter), and had a serious boy interest that I was stripping clothes off for.  He lived in Boise, and would drive up to visit.  I started journaling at this point, and my journals were consumed either by my boy drama or dieting and body critiques (not the journals to be published posthumously as evidence of my depth and insight, please).  And here's where scales finally enter the picture.  I'd gained a couple pounds from eating the devilish non-packaged food at the sorority, and my journal despairs that I weighed 132 pounds, and oh no, he was coming up and would see me in this ballooning state!  What a joke.

So I was always aiming for my 1200, but no longer had the absolute dedication of before.  I stayed in the 130s, then low 140s.  Over the next couple years, I fluctuated between 140 and 155, sometimes dropping down to 135 again.  I upgraded at some point to a comfortable size 8, to banish the over the pants bulge I'd been modeling for too long, while too stubborn to believe I wouldn't drop that weight in a couple weeks.  Those size 8s of course, in time, had their own bulge develop over the top of them, which went away with a short lived diet, and then came back.  Repeat as many times as you can stand.  I would count calories, Slim-fast, make up weird rules to follow.  I had one successful low carb phase right before I became a vegetarian.  Then some borderline bad things that I luckily cut off before they got out of hand, like throwing up if I started ruining a great diet streak.  My roommates and I could talk about tomorrow's new diet intentions for hours.  Is this normal?  We thought so then.  This is an all too prevalent obsession for most girls and women.  It shouldn’t be.  

About a year and a half ago, I returned to my daily dedication of calorie counting, and trying not to fixate on losing it quickly, but just trusting that in time, my modest (1200-1400 k this time) measures would yield results.  I lost 15 pounds.

I broke up with our aforementioned boy around this time, and started slowly gaining weight back.  I reached my 155 pound high again about six months later, then, to my disgusted amazement, surpassed it, and hit a number I hadn't imagined possible, no matter how often I binged.  Not a happy place for my waist or my vanity.

I had a new boyfriend who told me I was beautiful, but taking my clothes off and feeling sexy was, for the first time truly, becoming hard for me.

I thought I must be pregnant.  The twenty tests I've taken thought otherwise.

Today I feel lighter, but I'm not weighing myself to find out.

I am finished with diets, diets that have led me to ruin my metabolism and box myself into a very limited perception of what body I can live in without shame.  I am finished with the need to fit in a certain body standard.  I am finished allowing myself to hate my body, and feel uncomfortable in my own skin.  I am finished flirting with eating disorders, and that obsessive mentality.

I bought Intuitive Eating after reading about how the book and program helped Katherine McPhee overcome bulimia and compulsive eating and in turn, lose 30 pounds.  It opened my eyes to the sane and healthy way to view eating and my relationship with food and my body.  It instilled in me that dieting is not the answer.  Period.  This voice helped me realize my need to abandon diets in their entirety, instead of simply hoping to follow them more strictly.  It’s led me to a much healthier place, and will in time, stabilize my weight.  Because since I’ve let go of my food obsessions and quick fix mentality, I naturally gravitate toward healthier food (most of the time), in just the right amount.  And get this- when you’re ready and have successfully ditched the diet mentality, your body naturally starts toying with the idea of working out.  Because you want to, and it feels good- not because you’re supposed to be losing 1-2 pounds a week.  This is the motivation that will last a lifetime.  And I’m hooked.  The I-Must-Have-Results-and-Lose-10-Pounds-NOW-Girl now believes in slow and sustained momentum toward a goal instead of quick fixes.  I believe, most days at least, that I don’t need perfection ASAP, or screw it all. 

I’m learning to respect the body I have now.  In my yo-yo heyday, when my body was in the heavier side of my range, and my pants were really tight, I'd resort to hooded sweatshirts or I don't know, what else did I wear?  Nothing breathtaking, that’s for sure.  And I love clothes, but fat hanging over the side of my too small jeans wasn't an accessory that went with any of my tops at the time... so this was the sad state of affairs.  Attempting to get dressed each morning was, needless to say, disheartening.  I knew it would be until I lost enough weight to allow my pants to once again easily encircle my waist.  So of course, I had that sense of urgency- sometimes extreme and sometimes moderate by most people's standards.  I would list what weight I could be at each week if I shed x pounds a week for x weeks.  And I might have hope, for a minute.  But I either always missed the goal, or didn't stay there long, and the daily chore of dressing was still depressing.  And if I couldn't feel good about how I looked, food could still feel good in my mouth.

So when I recently accepted that dieting held no place in my life, I knew I finally needed to accept and make peace with my current body.  Because permanent body change comes slowly.

So I'm not going to have a body I'd ideally like to dress very soon.  And to really ditch the diets, I have to accept the body I have right now.  Make peace with it, try not to despise it, and do what I can to actually enjoy it!  Yes, it can be done!  Take pleasure from it.  That means buying clothes that fit me well and work with that something extra I have right now.  I am so over caring about the number on the tag.  Did I think they couldn't tell that I was expanding just because my pants were still the same size?  The two inches hanging over each side was probably a give away, but that's just a guess.  I went from size 8 to a comfortable 12.  That'll tell you how long I wore the size 8s when I shouldn't!  So invest in the process.  Buy a bigger size if you have to.  It's so nice to finally be able to feel satisfied again after getting dressed in the morning.  Feeling better about how I look daily has been monumental in slowly changing my food relationship.  I realize now that this body, today, can look pretty decent.  Most of our bodies can.

I’ve become quite the anti-diet crusader.  I hate seeing my friends loathe their quite decent bodies, and live the diet life- constantly or off and on.  But I'm not gonna lie, some days taking my own advice is hard.  I see a fat roll I'd forgotten about, and descend into an abyss of self-doubt and before I know it, I've married off my loving boyfriend to his not as pretty but skinny co-worker because I can't keep my power or compete unless I lose at least 20 pounds, and soon!!  The quick fix allure of diet culture is ingrained and it’s strong.  That’s why I kept a daily journal of my process to ditch that quick fix mentality.  I included the tiny goals I’ve slowly turned into habits, and the most important goal I checked off every day is NO DIET, NO SCALE.  A daily commitment to not diet is the cornerstone of achieving permanent body change and a healthier body image.  No matter what I felt any given day, I wouldn’t let myself try and fix it with a diet.  Call me an under-achiever, but I checked that box off with pride!  And now I know I’ll never diet again.  

And I have to send out into the cosmic void my hope and suggestion for the huge chunk of chunky (or only self-perceived chunky) ladies out there vanity dieting their lives away-- that you all make a similar commitment.  To stop the mild or severe body hate any dieter feels for the same body that allows you to move, to feel, to experience life.  To accept that body and appreciate it's good.  To use food as it should be used.  

Abandon diet culture, I say to the world!   

It is as evil and ugly as I am dramatic!

Who needs a roller-coaster of emotions, brief periods of near-contentedness with your body (but never quite, unless you're 10-15 pounds underweight, then you might be set), followed by the depressing fall-out of weight regain?  And we all should know that the more you yo-yo diet, the worse your metabolism gets each time.  So eventually, you gain more than you've lost, and you have a new fat weight- not an accomplishment most of us are striving for.  Except that as dieters, we unknowingly are.  But even though I've heard 837 times (again, just an estimate- I wasn't using my scale at this point either) that dieting slows your metabolism so that you eventually get fatter, it was hard for me to comprehend what was happening to my body.  How could I possibly get bigger than 155 pounds?  I never had before.  My body just didn't do that.  It had a sense of what was expected of us, didn't it?  Didn't it know the rules?  Well, it didn't, and it added 10 more pounds.  It bewildered me and repulsed me.  Long obsessed and dissatisfied with my body, I was now crying about it.

Diet culture is evil and ugly.  Now I'm rejecting it instead of my body.  I'm finally taking the time to let permanent and real change manifest.  And as my body minutely changes for the better, I'm focusing my energy on all the other wonder in my life, instead of what I ate or plan on eating.  

And I’m not alone.  The anti-diet movement is growing.  More and more voices are starting to reject the idea that we women should spend great quantities of our lives fighting against our body.  It isn’t an idea that’s going to sell any new diet food or initially appeal at first to most dieters.  We are by nature a quick fix breed.  I know this first hand.  But really solving my body issues has a time frame a lot longer than three or four months.  And I don’t need to ever be perfect.  None of us do.  Read my new bible, Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.  Read Courtney E. Martin’s spot on study of our generation’s cult of perfectionism, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.  Challenge your need to be perfect.  Question your belief in diet culture.  The more we all start looking at it critically, the sooner it’ll fade from its prime place in our consciousness, and allow more exciting things to emerge.  (Even including, perhaps, a nice and stable, normal weight- did I mention my pants are starting to bag again?)