Is this The Bad Place?

Do you watch The Good Place TV show?

If not, part of the basic premise is that there are multiple heavens (The Good Place) and multiple hells (The Bad Place), each kind of like it's own world, and each with an architect tasked with dreaming up ways of pleasuring or torturing its residents. It's a comedy. It's really entertaining.

I recently kicked off a new Intuitive Eating Mentorship Circle and as everyone introduced themselves I was reminded of how much trauma results from living in a world saturated by diet culture. Much of the work I do with people is helping them shift the anger they have been directing at their body or eating habits towards the real culprit: diet culture. I believe properly directed rage is essential for moving towards body acceptance and sovereignty.

Using the framework from The Good Place show I pointed out that if I were an architect of a bad place and I wanted to torture people I would replicate many parts of the world we live in. I then invited them to join in on designing a hellscape based on their reality. Here's what we collectively came up with:

• Inundate people with unrealistic, manipulated images of often starved bodies and tell them if they just try hard enough they too can achieve this ideal

• Normalize self-imposed food restriction and compulsive exercise

• Shame normal eating

• Make people mistrust their body and it's hunger cues

• Design airplane seats and seatbelts to comfortably accommodate a very small percentage of the population.

• Only offer clothing in brick and mortar stores in sizes that fit a small percentage of the population

• Take an entire food group and tell people to avoid it. Then, once people are on board, switch it up and make a different macronutrient the hero/villain.

• Tell women that after carrying and birthing a child they should return to their pre-pregnancy body, ideally, in a matter of weeks.

• The Kardashians

It was actually fun to popcorn ideas and realize that we're not crazy. It's not us. It's not our bodies. It's diet culture. Diet culture is hell. (as is/related: capitalistic white heteronormative patriarchy)

Yes, it is depressing that our world is a hellscape in many ways, but it's also liberating. Kind of like being on to someone trying to pull the wool over your eyes. If it's just some torturous for-profit scheme to get us to think there is something wrong with our body...or carbs...or emotional eating then maybe we can opt-out more often. Maybe we can de-normalize, disrupt, and divest from this farce.

Buy One, Get One Free

This week I had yet another client tell me that a certain diet (rhymes with Hate Talkers) is the only one that has "worked" for her. My client is telling me that this diet has "worked" but she is seeking my help with overconsumption and general dis-ease around food — two almost certain outcomes of said diet. Never mind the yo-yoing of her weight that she dislikes.

I want to make something very explicit: food restriction (by any name, real or perceived) almost always leads to overconsumption (by any name, real or perceived). Buy one, get one free—like it or not.

Let's take a minute and better define restriction and overconsumption:

RESTRICTION

Generally, in this context, restriction refers to reducing or eliminating food items or food groups from one's diet. This can look as benign as "I'm trying to eat less sugar" all the way up through traditional diets and on to full blown orthorexia and anorexia. The appeal of restriction is how it makes us feel—at first. We feel in control, powerful, safe, virtuous, and even high. However because our brain interprets restriction (including often just the thought of restriction) as "famine is imminent" even the strongest will is often over run in pursuit of being fed. This is just our built in survival instinct. Has this ever happened to you: You think "Today I shouldn't/won't eat X" and before you know it just the thought has sent you into eating twice as much of that food? This is why whether restriction is real or perceived it's equally potent.

OVERCONSUMPTION

We have a stereotype in our head of binge eating: on the floor in front of the refrigerator surrounded by empty packages of food, spoon deep in a carton of ice cream. Yet overconsumption most often appears in subtler ways that have more to do with what's going on in our minds than what is going in our mouth.

When I was anorexic I had an allotted amount of crackers I would eat each day. If I went over that number, I felt like I had binged, even if I was still calorically deficient. I used to say to my therapist that a binge for me was less about the food and more about the fact that while eating I was consumed by thoughts of the next thing I would eat. Again, I might still have been in a normal or deficient caloric range, but the experience in my mind had the fingerprint of overconsumption.

You probably know what overconsumption feels like to you and while it's personal and often private the impact is fairly universal. So what is the mental experience of overconsumption?

At first, coming from restriction-ville, it's release, calm, and a sense of safety as the brain registers that food is here and abundant. Typically this is followed by feeling out of control, ashamed, guilty, and "bad".

Can you relate? Without seeing the cause and effect of this cycle most people hop right back on the restriction bandwagon. I implore you:

• Do not blame yourself for feeling out of control around food when you've been sold a cycle that all but guaranteed exhaustive circular trips from restriction to overconsumption and back again.

• Do not hop back on the restriction band wagon when you are or have been overconsuming. To so do would certainly cause you to repeat the same patterns over again. Diets by design (as a result of how they interact with the human psyche) include a trip through the land of over eating.

• Do not think that you can buy one (restriction/dieting) without getting the other for free (overconsumption).

• Do not suggest to anyone, ever, that a diet is the answer to their struggles.

I'm posting this image again so it's crystal clear just how one feeds into the other:

GETTING OFF THE NOT-SO-MERRY GO ROUND

If you're tired of going round and round...

If you're tired of feeling like it's your fault when a diet doesn't "work"...

If you're tired of how short lived the "perks" of dieting are...

Take the off ramp: intuitive eating.

It's the only thing I know of that puts an end to the insanity and the off ramp exists at any point, no need to wait for another cycle. Intuitive eating works with the human brain such that you never feel like famine is coming or that you, your body, or food can't be trusted. Intuitive eating is sustainable and doesn't require that you sign back up with a company selling you a guaranteed to fail product. To start, read the book. If you need help bringing intuitive eating to life, as most of us do, work with a coach, counselor, intuitive eating-focused nutritionist, or take a course. May we all find our way to freedom. May we all find our way back to our body.

How You Know You're Done Dieting

You see now that a diet by any other name is still a diet.

Whether it’s the traditional Weight-Watchers or Jenny Craig or the nouveau Paleo or Whole30 you know that if it asks you to follow rules, if it tells you that your body’s cravings can’t be trusted, if it makes someone else the expert, if it demonizes certain foods or entire macronutrients that it’s a diet. Plus you’re not going to be fooled by misappropriated buzzwords and phrases like “wellness” and “body love” and “make peace with food.” A spade is a spade and you know it.

You see that yo-yoing in weight is not and has not been a fault of yours but an inherent side-effect of dieting.

When a human being is threatened with starvation over and over again as they are when dieting the body acts in the interest of self-preservation and decreases metabolism. This is the brilliance of our bodies, they want us to live. This the problem with restriction. This is the "planned obsolescence" or built in expiration date of diets. It's diets that don't work but people blame themselves for not sticking to it. They blame themselves for not having the willpower, for eating sugar or bread, when all all along it was the diet itself that was set up to cause weight-gain. You see this now. You're not playing a rigged game anymore.

You see now that you’d rather be happy than weigh any specific amount.

Most often when we’re chasing weight-loss we’re really chasing what we think weight loss will give us: happiness, love, desirability, etc. Most often when we’re restricting our food we’re chasing order in our life, a sense of control, or a decrease in our anxiety. But now, you realize that people have all the things we’re promised weight-loss will give us without the pursuit of a different body. Now you realize you can have those things too. Now you know that diets aren’t the most effective anxiety management approach. Now you just want to be free and happy.

You’re not holding out hope anymore for a miracle, quick-fix, lose-weight pill, plan, or program.

You’ve tried enough to know that the next diet will not have different results from the last one, or the last ten. You also know that the path from chronic dieter to normal eater won’t happen overnight or in six weeks. That speedy pace is only ever sold by industries that care more about profits that results or your well being. You now know that being the tortoise is a better bet than being the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

You see now that weighing less, if it means you have to starve and torture yourself, isn’t worth it.

Priorities change. As we live, we learn. It can take a while but eventually, if we’re lucky, where we find meaning and fulfillment becomes clear and it turns out that’s it’s never found in how we look or what we weigh or how "perfect" of an eater we are. Meaning is found in relationships, in creative expression, in service, in play, in nature, in enjoying our bodies, and in loving one another. It’s not found in a pants size. The cost is just too high for you to continue to inflict harm on yourself in the name of calories or points or carbs or pounds or inches. 

You have just enough faith that you can relearn how to be a “normal” eater even if that scares you.

You may not know how. You might crave support. But you have faith, however faint, that you can be free. Others that you respect and trust have gone before you. Somewhere inside is a voice whispering "We're done. So done. Never again. So what's next?"

Participation Optional

Even though we in the developed world are relatively free, we’re still socialized to go along with the crowd. Today’s reminder is that participation is optional. Today I invite you to opt out when you don’t want to do something.

Opt out of being weighed at the doctor’s office. Did you know it’s optional? You can simply say “I pass” and if they pressure you, and you don’t feel you have a choice, you can step on the scale backwards and say “I don’t want to know the number, it’s not useful to me.”

Opt out of allowing your child to have their BMI measured at school. Seriously. Let’s stop this early weight stigmatization and use of this most meaningless measurement.

Opt of out the pervasive “I’m so bad, I ate a piece of bread” conversations. If the people around you are gib gabbing about their latest diet, weight loss success or failure you can: change the topic, explain that you don’t partake in ‘diet culture’, or even say “You know how some people don’t talk about religion or politics because it causes conflict, well, I don’t talk dieting.” And leave it at that. You do not have to participate in or respond to every conversation you’re invited to.

Opt out of "Operation Get Bikini Body Ready". You already have a bikini body, whether you want to wear one or not. This summer is not something to dread. The beach is not something to starve or slave for. Opt out.

Opt out of the hysteria over eating clean and of the diet fad (aka “lifestyle change”) of the moment. Just because “all the cool kinds are doing it” doesn’t mean it’s good for you (or them) and you have every right to opt out without any guilt.

Opt out of any yoga or exercise class that doesn’t feel welcoming to you and your body. As a wise friend of mine once said about bad yoga classes: “Treat them like a bad movie and walk out.”

On that note, opt out of the "free" body fat scan that comes with your new gym membership. When it comes to movement, you and your body deserve to feel welcomed, accepted, and met. Anything less is a great opportunity to opt out.

Opt out of seeing any medical practitioner who brings weight stigma into their practice. Increasingly you have choice and more and more there are medical professionals who understand the harm of weight-stigma and scientific validity of the Health at Every Size paradigm. Don’t like your doctor? Afraid to go see them because of the weight shaming comments they've made? Opt out.

Opt out of television shows (I’m looking at you Biggest Loser), magazines (I’m looking at you Shape Magazine), and other media that leave you feeling less than. Turn them off, unsubscribe, and go enjoy entertainment that respect you and everyone.

Bottom line: you are free. You can say “No” and “No Thank You” and “No Fucking Way.”

Even if you feel like the odd one out, no one ever regrets doing what feels right and true to them.

Participation is truly optional.

Dieting is a Violent Act

I believe dieting is a violent act.

I don’t feel neutral, or calm, or indifferent about dieting. I feel quite clearly that dieting is a violent act that (predominantly) women are encouraged to perform against themselves.

I find diets to be physically violent, often leading to exhaustive cycles of weight loss and gain and sometimes insufficient calories (i.e. energy) and nutrition.

I find diets to be psychologically violent, often leading to mental obsession, increased stressed, shame, disempowerment, disembodiment, and a general sense of failure when the diet inevitably results not in weight loss, but weight gain.

I find diets spiritually violent, often severing the most sacred of ties between ourselves and the wisdom of our body. I can think of few things as holy as the act of feeding ourselves and this is exactly where diets wreak their havoc.

I have come to believe this about diets after my own stint on Weight Watchers (which fueled the start of my anorexia) at age 20 and a range of other diets in the years to follow. I have come to believe this about diets after a decade of thoroughly researching and formally studying the science and ineffectiveness of diets. Most of all though I have come to believe this after spending years on the frontline of healing women who arrive at my doorstep deeply wounded from years, often decades, spent dieting.

Dieting isn’t all that different than other forms of temporary soothing. Like eating, drinking, or shopping in order to numb out, for the person doing it, at first, it feels relaxing. It’s a bandaid solution that almost always leaves us feeling worse off.

Violence means destruction and that is what I know diets do. They destroy our natural ease with food. They destroy, albeit temporarily, our ability to listen to and honor our unique physical cues about what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat. They destroy our sense that we are capable of feeding ourselves without external controls.

The majority of people in the western world, including most of our medical establishment, believe that diets are an obvious and even healthy response to overconsumption of food and possessing a body size above what is deemed acceptable.

It’s just not true though. In fact it’s bullshit. Diets don’t improve our health and they don’t result in weight loss (never mind that there is nothing inherently unhealthy or wrong with weighing more or having a larger body).

It’s understandable that a person would go on a diet, given the amount of money spent each year across various industries to sell us on the idea that we can’t be trusted around food and that we aren’t desirable unless we’re thinner. I understand this. I bought into it too long ago. Yet given what I know, I believe firmly that diets are a violent act.

A word, or two, on the experience of holding a radical point of view: it’s scary.

For women, historically, our very survival has depended on being likable. To feel disliked, judged, and rejected, to women…to me…can induce panic. It is for this reason many women default to silence when their voice, however necessary, might run against the status quo.

So I share this most radical of beliefs knowing that you might not only disagree, but that you might criticize, unfollow, and reject me as a valued voice in your life. I know that my beliefs about dieting are radical. I also know that a lot of normal ideas were at one time radical. I also know that it’s the truthful but less popular ideas that need champions.

As long as it takes I will tell my story, stand for the truth, and call for peace — the peace that diets rob us of. I’m happy to put in the time, however long, until we see a cultural sea change happen.

If you share my view on dieting but feel alone this is me reaching my hand out to join yours. We may be a minority but from what I can tell that is quickly changing and a new paradigm is emerging.

That said while there is a growing awakening happening, there remains a lot of work to do. Case in point: Oprah Winfrey and her investment in WW International (formerly Weight Watchers)

*deep sigh*

Have you heard the term “The Oprah Effect”?

This phrase was coined to describe the success that resulted for a person, product (especially books), or business from a single appearance on her television show. And even without her television show, it’s a common belief that Oprah remains the single most powerful woman in the world. And her success is deserving. Oprah, without question, has improved the lives of millions of people.

As a woman, a fellow human, I have a tremendous amount of compassion for her long struggle with food and body loathing. But as a public figure, I believe her endorsement of Weight Watchers, while being a prudent business move (netting her tens of millions on paper), is unethical. Simply put she has invested in and endorsed a product proven to fail in the long run.

If Oprah had come out endorsing the Volkswagon cars with faulty emissions readers we’d be up in arms. We’d be cross-eyed and confused.

“Why would anyone endorse a product that doesn’t deliver on its promises?!” we’d say.

“Why would anyone support a company that lies to it’s consumers?!” we’d exclaim.

When I learned that Oprah was coming out with a rousing endorsement of Weight Watchers I felt outraged, but more than that I felt and still feel utterly heartbroken by the incredible missed opportunity that Oprah represents. I’m pained by the incredible number of people who will, I believe, thanks to Oprah, feel a green light to diet.

If you feel drawn to dieting because you feel out of control with food and unhappy with your body please know there is another way. A more effective way. It’s entirely possible to make peace with food and your flesh without the “help” of rigid rules.

Dieting might be the only way you’ve ever known to relate to food and your body, but it’s a violent way and peace is available, this much I know.

Defining What Works

Client: Well [insert diet du jour] is what’s worked for me in the past.

Me: Define ‘worked’?

Client: I was able to keep the weight off longer than any other diet.

Me: And how long was that?

Client: About a year.

Me: And that’s what it means to ‘work’?

If you bought a car and it only drove for a year, would you consider that a good purchase? What if there was a wrinkle cream that made you look ten years younger, but all your wrinkles came back after a year, plus lots more. Did that cream work? Would you recommend it to a friend?

Let’s get real about how we define working.

If it’s giving you a metaphorical fish each night for a while then abandoning you to starvation it doesn’t work. If it gives you the physical changes you want but they are short lived and cost you mental well-being it doesn’t work. If it seems to work in the short term (and a year is short term, unless you plan to have a very short life), but is designed, in it’s DNA, to malfunction then it doesn’t work. What works is what is sustainable and supportive.

What works is what allows you to be you.

What works is what supports yourwhole well-being— mind, body, and spirit. Please don’t fool yourself into thinking this diet or that diet or the next diet or the diet of the moment or that ‘way of eating’ that’s popular right now and ‘has lots of community support’ is going to work.

Diets can’t work long term because you are not a robot.

You are a living, breathing, feeling, sensitive, and food-requiring human. Diets can’t work because they trigger very primal physical warning reactions that starvation is imminent. They deliver this warning to every system of your body and well, that sense of impending threat doesn’t make a body or heart or spirit happy. The good news is that diets are totally optional. You don’t have to go on one and you don’t have to go on another one ever again. You get to, instead, choose what works. Works as in the dictionary definition of functioning effectively.

What’s that?

That’s taking all the baby steps it takes back to a trusting relationship with your body. That’s treating yourself like you’re on the same team, not at war within. That’s choosing happiness over thinness. That’s reclaiming pleasure as your birthright and an essential part of being well. That’s getting clear about what you’re trying to feed when you eat when you’re not hungry. That’s learning to sooth and experience your anxieties in a different way than numbing through restriction or consumption. There is a way that works. I’m not saying that it’s not totally terrifying to give up the pseudo-comfort and false promises of the next diet. It is. It is scary as all get out. But I choose what’s scary and what truly works over what’s safe and fails every time (despite promising “this one’s different!”).

Here are a few actions that I know to “work”:

1. Practice self-compassion with the same dedication that you brought to dieting.

2. Work with an intuitive eating dietician and/or counselor to help shake off all those crazy food rules.

3. Explore what it might mean to see yourself, in this body, with love.

4. Take up a movement practice that’s rooted in joy instead of obligation, suffering, or fear.

5. Read Intuitive Eating

6. Buy clothing that feels good to wear in the body you inhabit today.

7. Set the intention to talk to yourself as you would a your daughter or good friend.

8. Unfollow on social media anyone or organization that promotes dieting, the ‘thin-ideal’, or just makes you feel crappy.

9. Try to spend at least as much time having fun as you spend thinking about food and your body.

A Weightless Year

Fact: my coaching clients send the nicest cards.

Fact: this card moved me to tears.

Dear Sweet Rachel,

It was exactly one year ago that you and I had a one-on-one. You may or may not remember that you presented me with a challenge. The challenge was to not weigh myself for one year. I remember at the time being overwhelmed with the challenge, especially given that I had purchased a scale several weeks before our chat. But after our call I made the decision to trust the process and stay away from weighing myself. So here we are, a year later, and to date I haven’t stepped on the scale. I just wanted to thank you – this past year has been quite the journey and I’ve just barely begun. I am grateful for you, your dedication to the work that God has designed you for!

xoxo

It’s updates like this that reinvigorate me and rekindle my fire for calling us forth into Well-Fed living.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: what we weigh is useless information. It tells us nothing of value. Just about everything worth knowing comes from inside of us. Knowing our weight is rarely ever about well-being. We step on the scale to measure our worth, to gauge how out of control we are (or feel) in our lives, and to help us make decisions we’re afraid to let our bodies make.

If you didn’t know what you weighed, what would happen? How would you know when to eat and when to stop eating? How would you know when to move your body and when to rest? How would you know if you were enough or too much?

You would listen. Ear to yourself and you’d hear “Feast. Rest. Trust.”

You would listen. Ear to your heart and you’d hear “You are enough, never more, never less.”

The scale takes you away from yourself. Giving it up brings you home.

What I Know About Weight

I've spent the past 10 years immersed in the study of how people relate to our hungers, food, bodies, and yes, weight. I've looked at these topics academically, professionally, personally, spiritually, and just about every which way you can...here is what I know:

1. I know it’s entirely useless to know what you weigh. I know that most people will disagree with me on that point. I know that I'm okay with that.

2. I know that giving up knowing your weight is one the most liberating and radical acts of self-care we can do. (Imagine living the rest of your life not knowing your weight, could you do it?)

3. I know weight fluctuates our whole lives and throughout each day.

4. I know you can find a healthy person at nearly every weight. I know you can find an unhealthy person at nearly every size. I know size is not a predictor of health.

5. I know beauty really does have nothing to do with size. If one doesn’t see beauty when looking at a human body the only thing that needs changing is the eyes of the beholder.

6. I know that too many use weight to measure their enoughness.

7. I know that too many try to control their weight because they can’t control the world around them.

8. I know that the happiest I’ve ever been did not coincide with the thinnest I’ve ever been. Not even close. In fact, my happiness doesn’t depend on my size. Fancy that.

9. I know each of us has a set-point happy-place weight, determined by an unknowable mix of genetics and lifestyle. No amount of exercise and starvation will necessarily change this. Nor do we need it to. I know that for many their body's happy place weight is well-above what our society deems okay.

10. I know sizeism is one of the last forms of socially acceptable prejudice. I know we must change this. I know weight prejudice and stigma are killing people.

11. I know we are living in a world that is crying out for people to shift their energy and attention from weight-loss and weight shame to engaged, compassionate, embodied, and awake living.