Tag Archives: diet

Eating Dessert Makes You Thin

Posted on by
2
<

Many of us walk very thin tight ropes when it comes to pleasure. We avoid falling into our cravings, afraid that if we give ourselves what we deeply desire, we will lose control. We won’t be able to stop.

If you are female you know the pressure is real to be thin. It’s everywhere, but most importantly it sits in our heads.

And it sat in mine for a long time.

But at a certain point I got off the treadmill. I allowed myself to devote only 25-30 minutes at most to work-outs. I told the obsessor to jump in a lake, and cut my workouts down. Additionally (and more dangerously) I also allowed myself to eat what I wanted.

And what I wanted was frozen yogurt.

Every night I had a tradition of making tea and preparing my favorite nighttime snack. This was frozen yogurt (mint chocolate chip or the new Fage 0% blueberry) mixed with ginger cookies that were dipped in tea. This would make the cookies warm and gooey and would create a swirl in the frozen yogurt. This was always enjoyed while watching one of my favorite shows like “Modern Family” or “Girls” or “Happy Ending”….the ultimate double indulgence.

I became lazy about watching my food, and I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted. I told the perfectionist in me to relax, go put her feet up.

Then came the week of my boyfriend’s birthday. I ate cake four days in a row.

What I didn’t realize was that allowing myself to indulge made it less forbidden. The sweets were not as exciting because they were not off limits. The rebel in me became bored. Then at a certain point I no longer needed the desserts every night.

[Some of you might role your eyes..."oh Frozen Yogurt...that's the healthy stuff, she's crazy." The truth is when you are short and curvy and you're trying to lose a few pounds...eating a bunch of sugar (even fro yo)--before bed--will get you.]

After the fro yo indulgence and burnout I decided that was enough dessert and I wanted to be more aware of what I was eating. I wasn’t caving in to the enemy by being aware of my health, but rather going after something that I wanted for a long time–and that was being able to go to bed without dessert (or wine). Tracking what I ate didn’t seem horrible like it once did. And now I track what I eat.


The cookie monster within you will set you free

From tracking I realized I wasn’t eating enough during the day. What I learned from tracking my food is that you shouldn’t deprive yourself all day only to eat too much at night. Don’t let the diet industry manage your thoughts all day until you can’t take it anymore and you eat everything in the fridge.

Now I get to eat what I want during the day. I eat peanut butter. Sometimes I eat it twice a day. I don’t eat the whole jar, but I eat it. And it tastes wonderful. As of very recently I’m not eating chocolate protein bars anymore, but real chocolate…

And I feel a lot better. Neither weight watchers nor the gym nor a low carb, high protein diet were the answers for me. It was actually getting past the mental barriers in my mind about pleasure and deprivation.

There is a weird thing in America around eating. The big lie the diet industry tells us is we can shame and abuse ourselves into getting thin. The truth is you don’t abuse food when you don’t feel deprived of it.

So the psychology lesson is when you don’t deprive yourself, you end up empowered. You get control of your life and your choices. You do that by giving yourself what you need when you need it.

You can see my electronic hoarding of desserts on Pinterest. The hoarding is only happening online now I’m happy to report. Until I feel like eating cake again…and I will eat it, without guilt.

 

From Self-Loathing To Self Loving: 6 Steps to Body Freedom

Posted on by
4

That’s it, I’m going on a diet.

I have experienced periods where I became fed up. I saw a picture or a number on the scale or a family member said something hurtful about my body. Always a sensitive human I cried, then just felt sad and angry for a few days. I never liked being a body first, and a human second. I never liked the once over I felt I got from people before listening to what I had to say. I never appreciated what I felt was other women’s hungry eyes, sizing me up.

At a certain point between the ages of 21and 25 learned I couldn’t trust myself around “real food.” This ultimately led to chaos around food. But of course it was never about the food, and it rarely is.

Periods of eating only pickles, rice crackers, turkey, apples and cottage cheese–sparingly, followed by binges of peanut butter, cereal, chocolate and cheese. I can remember being in college and wanting so badly to be thin (a trend throughout my twenties).

In college I would get so stressed out by what felt like an impossible load of work I didn’t even know how to start. Instead of starting on my paper I would go load up on chocolate peanut butter trail mix. I felt scared and rather than ask for help I ate my anxiety in the form of organic bulk items.

During college food was a comfort for me. What I was really going through was–wow this experience is not preparing me for real life, and I’m scared.

I spent a lot of time in coffee shops avoiding focused study efforts. My favorite was going to the local coffee shop and buying a latte and a vegan peanut butter chocolate cookie (vegan didn’t mean healthy). Saturday mornings included lattes and luxurious banana bread.

Rather than say, I hate college, or I’ve never thought about how I will support myself with a real job, or I have some unresolved pain I can’t name, I would just eat.

After college I went as far away from California as I could. I moved to NYC.

I went to weight watchers for about a year keeping a diary of all my food and exercise. Rather than admit I wasn’t sure what I would do with my future, or how to manage my finances, or how to get attention from guys who were interested only in the hoards of model-looking women, I obsessed over getting thin. Being thin was the key to the magic land.

I was under a spell of keep yourself thin and pretty and a man will come save you.

Getting Real With Yourself.

Today I hate the word diet. I don’t believe in deprivation. I recognize that diets don’t work. Severe deprivation brings binges and out of control eating. I believe in awareness. It’s interesting being someone who critiques society–a culture critic, but also being part of that system. I’ve learned that I will never get over the women’s issues that I write about, however being self-aware has improved my quality of life by leaps and bounds. It has helped my career, my relationship, my opportunities and my sense of freedom.

The last ten years I have gone from an insecure and anxious young woman who wanted to crawl out of her skin to a woman who can sit with her emotions, and love herself despite her flaws.

Here are my six pieces of advice around positive self-talk.

1. I don’t pretend like life is perfect all the time. It is said that often when women get fat, they are wearing a layer of anger they won’t allow themselves to feel. Part of this is because it’s socially unacceptable to be an angry woman. Because I have learned how to take care of the little girl that lives within me–who at one point felt frightened or scared, I find myself getting less angry. I can let stuff go. And we are now doing fine.
2. I’m aware of other people’s projections. I don’t force myself to do things because other people feel I should be doing them. I draw boundaries, and have learned to draw the line between what other people project on to me. I have hurt people’s feelings before but I’m not responsible for how other people feel and cannot control them.
3. I don’t call myself a fat-ass. If I hear something negative bubbling up in my brain I remind myself that not all my thoughts represent me–a lot of it is the crap in the media or other people’s issues I have absorbed.
4. I eat food that I like. If I want something cold, I find something cold. If I want something creamy, I eat something creamy. If I want chocolate, I take some. I don’t hide food from myself, and sometimes I just keep the goodies around because I feel good knowing they’re there, even if I never touch them. I make an effort to identify the flavors and textures of what I’m eating.
5. What am I really hungry for? When I open the fridge and if what I’m hungry for is nowhere to be found, I go sit with my feelings by writing them down or meditate or do another calming activity.
6. Family matters. Human beings are neurotic. I cannot emphasize boundaries enough. There are studies that show girls who have complicated relationships with their mothers are more prone to have eating disorders. The more you know yourself the better you will be able to create boundaries for yourself and your friends, family and coworkers.

How to Deal With Family and Boundaries

Regarding family, sometimes parents can project their own insecurities onto their children. It is very hard at times to keep a good relationship with parents when they make comments about your weight. If this happens and you haven’t vocalized the boundary with them I would encourage you to do so. You can take them aside and in a calm and level-headed tone tell them you don’t appreciate when they make comments about your weight. If that doesn’t work the great thing about growing up is you can create distance if you need to. During the growth/ healing process it can be very helpful to take a back seat role in your parents lives. You need to rebuild your relationship with your body-and this has to be done alone. In order to grow at times you need to isolate yourself from the people who trigger you.

It’s about the small things you do day to day that contribute to an overall better life. That includes boundaries with the people you love.

Toxic relationships with family can drag us down, but additionally we drag ourselves down with an attitude of “I’ll start my life when I’m thinner.”

Too many women live life in the waiting room.

“I’ll go for that opportunity when I lose ten pounds. I’ll call that guy I like when I finally see that one number on the scale. I’m not going to swim in the ocean until I tone up my butt or my thighs…when my belly looks as flat as the diving board.”

If you are female in America it’s likely you have at least one thing you’d like to change about your body.

When the whole world is telling you to look like Gwenyth Paltrow, and you don’t look like Gwenyth Paltrow, you can easily become a self-loather.

According to a survey 97% of women have nasty things to say about their own bodies.

And if you ask me I believe the media is a major part of the problem.

Women who are not a size zero rarely make it onto the big screens. We don’t see them on commercials, we don’t see them in store windows, we don’t see them on ecommerce websites. As far as mainstream media and advertising, women with thighs don’t exist.
If I were an alien, and I landed on planet earth and only had access to media and advertising, I would assume all women looked like June Cleaver from Leave It To Beaver. June Cleaver after she gained access to phen-phen.

What’s interesting is if you google “diet pills” you will find 42,000,000 results and a slew of advertisements for a myriad of diet pill options.

If you google “women self esteem” you hit 44,200,000 results and no advertisements. So apparently it’s not lucrative to build women’s self esteem, because 51% of the U.S. population wouldn’t benefit from feeling better about themselves…right?

You’re Telling Me Those Earthlings Created An Entire Industry Based On The Fact They Don’t Know How to Feed and Nourish Themselves?

We have created an industry that is so insane that none of us can actually see how ridiculous it is. I’m talking about the diet industry.

We have complicated the most basic of human needs. While we’re not thriving, the diet industry is. The 50 billion dollar diet industry was built on a fabricated truth that we can’t trust our own bodies. If we are given access to whole, real, food we will lose control and blimp up. So now we need to eat food that is laced with chemicals that trick our body. That’s right, we need to trick our own body.

Enough is Enough

There is a point that we, as a community of women must stop and put our glasses on so we can see clearly. It’s time to be loving and gentle with ourselves now, not when we look like Gwenyth. Jump in the ocean now, not tomorrow.

You will feel amazing once you let go because…

you don’t need it.

I would love to know your own perceptions about the diet industry, and how you feel about your own body journey. Please feel free to share in the comments section below.

The Media Simulates A “Not Enough” Experience For Women

Posted on by
2

Our experience here on planet earth is simulated by the environment in which we live.

We experience that environment as a set of cultural norms–slowly conditioning us to live in civil society throughout our childhood and into adulthood.

A few months ago I listened to an NPR story on Fresh Air about an Afghanistan vet named Sam Brown who returned from war with severe burns all over his body. His pain was excruciating and the only treatment that cooled his suffering was not a treatment at all. It was a virtual world called “SnowWorld.”

This simulation created an illusion where he walked with snowy penguins along cool winding rivers. It was the only thing that could soothe his burning body.

I bring this up because recently I saw this video created by Dove called “Onslought” and I was once reminded of how our experience here on earth is a simulated experience thanks to the increasingly intimate media we’re entrenched in. I was reminded those who have the power to influence that experience have become belligerent and ravenous in their appetite for insecure girls and women who are brainwashed by this simulated experience. The experience repeatedly tells females they’re not enough. And there’s a fiscal reason for this powerful and all-consuming messaging. It’s profitable.

If the powers at be are simulating the experience for girls and women here on earth, what is that experience?

While as adults we can choose what to watch and who to listen to, it is almost impossible to unlearn a set cultural norms.

I’m reading a book right now called “Fat is a Feminist Issue.” It’s an old book published in 1978 by Susie Orbach.

I’m reading this book because I’m curious to understand the difference in the women of the 70s who were then in their early 20s and 30s and women today.

“The emphasis on presentation as the central aspect of a woman’s existence makes her extremely self-conscious. It demands that she occupy herself with a self-image that others will find pleasing and attractive–an image that will immediately convey what kind of woman she is. She must observe and evaluate herself, scrutinizing every detail of herself as though she were an outside judge. She attempts to make herself in the image of womanhood presenting by billboards, newspapers, magazines and television.

The media present women either in a sexual context or within the family, reflecting a woman’s two prescribed roles, first as a sex object, then as a mother. She is brought up to marry by ‘catching’ a man with her good looks and pleasing manner. To do this she must look appealing, earthy, sensual, sexual, virginal, innocent, reliable, daring, mysterious, coquettish and thin. In other words she offers her self-image on the marriage marketplace. As a married woman, her sexuality will be sanctioned and her economic needs will be looked after….

Since women are taught to see themselves from the outside as candidates for men, they become prey to the huge fashion and diet industries that first set up the ideal images and then exhort women to meet them. The message is loud and clear–the woman’s body is not her own. The woman’s body is not satisfactory as it is.”

Reading this book has been eye-opening. I believe Orbach’s words are more relevant than ever. The media becomes an increasingly intimate part of our lives. The pressures on girls and women to meet a set of unrealistic expectations set upon us by the media I believe has complicated women’s relationships with their own bodies. Additionally now women are still involved in a marketplace of sorts–however they are taught to compete to be perfect girls while being their own bread winner (until a man comes along to save them from having to not only work hard on her looks but work hard to pay rent). Even I somehow fell victim to this message as a child of the 80s.

Consider this excerpt from the book “Fat Is A Feminist Issue.“

“Failure and success are powerful concepts within our world. Very early on we absorb the idea that a limit has been set on what is available and we learn to compete for what is around. If we are successful we are rewarded and if we are unsuccessful our lot is to suffer…..Competitive feelings get triggered in a situation of scarcity where there is not enough to go around, or where only a certain number of people can be rewarded. In general, men are taught to compete against other men for jobs and status. They gain prestige in the world of work by being better than other men…Women are forced to compete with each other for the man who will help the winner secure her social position”

We continue to climb to the top to be the most sexually attractive, groomed and socially viable option. However we’re also taught we need to be incredibly accomplished in our careers as well. The modern woman needs to be perfect. There is no margin for error. At least that’s what the simulated experience is by the media.

“In this battle for social survival, women are essentially competing on the basis of their sexual appeal while other aspects of their personality are viewed as attributes to be paraded in the attempt to secure a man.”

I am fascinated with the notion that to be a woman is to constantly walk with extremely contradictory ideas in her mind.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog we simulate our reality here on earth, but who is directing this simulation? Is the simulator being responsible? Or are they simulating an experience of “not enough” so we continue to buy products promising “enough.” How long will we stand here drinking it all in?