Raising Fat Kids, Diet Foods and More Top Picks

Here’s another roundup of my top content picks to support you on your journey toward a peaceful relationship with food and your body.

There’s some really good stuff here.

I encourage you to check it out then share it with anyone you know who personally struggles with these things—or struggles to understand those who do.

Embodied Podcast: Resolved—Your Anti-Diet New Year [WUNC.org]
This three-part series does an impressive job with covering everything from diet culture’s racist roots, medical fatphobia and weight-loss science to Intuitive Eating and body neutrality.

Part 1: Deconstructing diet culture: Lessons unlearned from a thin-obsessed society

Part 2: Relearning how to eat: How intuitive eating can heal your relationship with food

Part 3: Becoming body neutral: why it’s OK to not always love your body

The Problem with Poodle Science [YouTube]
As mentioned in the above Embodied podcast, despite what diet culture wants us to believe, a mastiff isn't meant to have a poodle's body. This short, animated video illustrates why.

A Guide to Parenting Fat Kids [Today’s Parent]
“How do you raise a fat, healthy, happy child? I’m not a doctor or a psychologist. I’m just a fat kid who grew into a fat adult, and this is what would have been helpful to me.”

From not restricting and moralizing food to celebrating body diversity and working on your own food and body issues, this is a must-read for parents and caregivers of larger-bodied kids.

Diet Foods of the ’80s Are Out. But Has Anything Really Changed? [Bon Appetit]
“From the moment in 1898 when J.H. Kellogg introduced Toasted Corn Flakes to get our digestion on track, we’ve looked to food to make us healthier, more virtuous, and thinner. Has it worked? Not really. So why do we keep expecting it to?"

This very relatable deep dive into the evolution of diet foods and the diet and wellness industries will likely make you cringe, laugh and curse. It definitely brought back memories of all the “better for you” (yet terribly unsatisfying) foods I consumed when I was entrenched in diet/wellness culture (fat-free cream cheese, anyone?).

As always, I hope you find these recommendations to be informative, helpful, and ultimately, liberating. Huge gratitude to all the folks who are creating this much-needed paradigm-shifting content.

Note: In alliance with the fat-acceptance community, I use fat as a neutral descriptor.

I Wanted to Toss All the Christmas Cookies

Over the holidays, I recalled a Christmas many years ago when I was visiting my parents at my childhood home.

Every year, my mom would attend a cookie exchange and return home with a giant platter full of a variety of holiday cookies.

I vividly remember standing alone over that red platter and quickly eating one cookie after another after another. Even though most of them didn’t taste very good to me, I kept eating them.

It felt like I was in a trance.

When I finally snapped to, I was so mad at myself for eating so many cookies. I felt crappy, out of control and powerless.

I certainly didn’t feel I could trust myself with those cookies.

I wanted to toss the entire platter into the trash to prevent myself from eating more but that wasn’t possible given they were meant to be shared among all my family members. I wasn’t sure how I would explain the missing cookies without a lot of lying, embarrassment and shame.

The only thing that helped was reassuring myself that I would get back on track with my eating as soon as the holidays were over.

The Cookies Weren’t the Problem
I haven’t had an eating episode like this one in years.

As I worked on healing my relationship with food and my body, I came to understand that my cookie experience and hundreds of others like it were not due to a lack of willpower or self-discipline. They were due to dieting.

Once I stopped all the restriction and rule-following and started eating unconditionally with guidance from my body’s cues, like hunger, fullness, desire and satisfaction, food lost its power over me.

Without the threat of future deprivation, I no longer had the urge to eat cookies or anything else as if it was my last supper.

Breaking up with diet culture and making peace with food and my body was one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever given myself.

Resolve to Make Peace Instead
Given the world we live in, the desire to diet is completely understandable.

It’s more tempting than ever this time of year as we’re bombarded by weight-loss company ads promising that their method is better than all the others and guaranteed to result in everlasting thinness, health and happiness—even though they don’t have any substantial, including long-term, research to back up their claims.

If you have a history of dieting (or whatever the food-restriction plan is called), you likely know all too well how this game eventually ends: weight regain, feeling like a failure, an even more messed up relationship with food and your body, and so many other undesired outcomes the diet companies don't warn you about.

What if this year, instead of hopping on the diet train, you resolve to make peace with food and your body?

How would doing so change your life?

The last two years have taught us many things, especially how precious life is.

How would you spend your one precious life if you were no longer wasting so much time, energy and headspace obsessing about what you’re eating and your weight?

What if you signed up for peace instead?

4 Gifts to Give Yourself this Holiday Season

If you’re desiring a more peaceful relationship with food and your body, here are four gifts to consider giving yourself this holiday season.

1/ Silence Your Food Grinch
Silence the Grinch (a.k.a. the Food Police) in your head that says you're being bad for enjoying all the yummy holiday fare.

Unless you stole the food or harmed someone to get it, there is absolutely no reason to feel bad, guilty or ashamed about your food choices.

You also never have to earn the right to eat anything or make up for your eating.

(For more holiday Intuitive Eating tips, click here.)

2/ Ditch Diet Culture Content
To help you move away from diet culture and the diet mentality—and stop spending so much time, energy and headspace thinking about food and your body—ditch any content regarding dieting, food restrictions, good and bad foods, weight loss, the thin ideal, fitspo and so on.

Do an audit of all the content you engage with including social media, videos, TV shows, podcasts, apps, websites, blogs, newsletters, magazines, books, cookbooks, etc.

Consider replacing this content with more supportive resources in areas such as Intuitive Eating, Health at Every Size, body liberation and size diversity.

3/ Toss Your Scale
It’s so easy to let the number on your scale define you, to dictate how you feel about yourself and determine how you go about your day.

By tossing (or donating) your scale, you're reclaiming your power from a piece of junk that’s completely incapable of measuring your innate worth and overall wellbeing.

If you’re not quite ready to get rid of your scale, put it in an inconvenient spot, like the back of your closet or a high shelf in your garage.

4/ Skip the Dieting Bandwagon
Resolve to not jump on the dieting bandwagon come January. And when I say dieting, I mean any eating, lifestyle or wellness plan with a bunch of food rules and eating restrictions.

Diets erode your ability to trust your body and your instincts, and negatively impact your physical and psychological wellbeing. Plus, they suck all the joy out of eating and living. 

If you are tempted to go on a diet, which is completely understandable given the world we live in, I encourage you to learn about the potential negative side effects—everything the diet companies don’t warn you about—so you can make an informed decision. If you have a history of dieting, you’re likely quite familiar with these outcomes.

Beyond the Holidays
If you want help getting off the dieting roller coaster and giving yourself the gift of a more peaceful relationship with food and your body that lasts well beyond the holidays, I'm here for you.