I Ate Freely on July 4th. Until I Learned I Shouldn't.

With the Fourth of July upon us, I’ve been reflecting on what Independence Day was like for me as a kid.

Naturally, the fireworks were the highlight of the holiday. However, I also have very fond memories of the food.

I recall kicking off the festivities with a pancake breakfast at our local pool. I happily gobbled up syrup-soaked flapjacks topped with strawberries, blueberries and whipped cream in honor of the occasion.

After hours of swimming and playing with my neighborhood friends, the day would end with a big block party. What a thrill it was to be able to ride my banana-seat bike down the middle of our street!

Picnic tables were hauled from backyards and covered with an array of homemade summer dishes, while a couple of grills smoked away on the sidelines.

Food-Fueled Fun
My nighttime fun was fueled by ketchup-covered hot dogs, honey baked beans, buttery corn-on-the-cob, juicy watermelon wedges, salty chips and dip, and very patriotic Jell-O salads. All of this was washed down with thirst-quenching cups of lemonade.

No matter what I ate, I always had room for a fudgy brownie or strawberry shortcake topped with rapidly melting vanilla ice cream.

I ate what looked good, tasted good and felt good in my body. Sometimes I ate it all, and sometimes I left some behind.

I ate freely and intuitively. 

Not Yet Tainted
My young mind hadn’t been tainted yet by diet culture—an oppressive system built on anti-fat bias and unrealistic body ideals, one that’s full of food rules, good/bad food lists, meticulous tracking, (e.g., calories, points, macros, etc.), intentional deprivation, punishing exercise and false promises.

I hadn’t been taught yet that I should be hyper-vigilant with food and micro-manage every morsel.

No one had told me yet that my body couldn’t be trusted and that I needed to rely on a plan or program to tell me how to eat.

I hadn’t learned to abhor my belly, demonize certain foods, feel ashamed about my eating and compensate for my food sins. 

I didn't worry about others judging my choices nor did I sneak food to protect myself from scrutiny.

Do I Want It?
While I loved all that food, I had more exciting and important things to focus on, like water-balloon tosses, sparklers and bottle rockets.

As an Intuitive Eater, I just ate and moved on.

Eating was simply a matter of: I can have it. Do I want it?

Diet Mentality Takes Over
Unfortunately, all of this changed as I entered my teenage years and began adopting a diet mentality powered by salads, rice cakes, diet sodas (hello, Tab!) and Jane Fonda workouts.

My desire to achieve the “thin ideal” led to decades of disordered eating and exercise.

Thankfully, with help from some very wise guides, I eventually broke free from diet culture and made peace with food and my body.

The healing process wasn’t easy or fast. Some days, I feel like I'm still a work-in-progress. But, it’s all been worth it.

Ending the war I was waging against myself enabled me to return to the food freedom and body liberation I experienced as a young girl.   

It’s Still Within You
I’m sharing this story as a reminder that, for the most part, we all came into this world as Intuitive Eaters—that is, we ate based on our instincts, inner cues and desires. As long as our needs were met, we were able to eat without worry, guilt, fear or shame.

Sadly, we’re losing touch with our ability to eat intuitively at a younger and younger age. Shockingly, an estimated 80 percent of 10-year-old girls have been on a diet.

I’m also sharing my experience to assure you that if you’ve become disconnected from the Intuitive Eater within you, you can reconnect with it.

It hasn’t gone away. It’s just buried under layers of diet-culture gunk, which today, is often packaged under the guise of “wellness.”

Magical Powers Not Required
I don’t have any magical powers. My clients don’t either. If we can relearn how to listen to and trust our bodies, it’s quite likely you can, too.

“I’m no longer searching for the ‘answer’ to the perfect way to eat. I don’t stress about how I eat because it isn’t that big of a deal anymore. I no longer believe those food guilt thoughts and that is F-R-E-E-D-O-M!” 
–Client Molly

I Treated My Body Like Crap. My Values Were All Screwed Up.

What are your core values?

Your core values guide your beliefs and behaviors. They define what matters the most to you, what sort of person you want to be, and how you want to live your life.

If you’re unsure what your core values are, there are numerous resources online to help you figure them out.

Some of my core values are kindness, respect, integrity, trust and freedom.

Conditioned to Value Thinness
There was a long period in my life when my relationship with my body was not informed by my personal core values but rather by what our culture values, especially the thin ideal.

Like so many of us, I had been conditioned to value my appearance, especially my weight, above almost everything else and never stopped to question if this was what I truly valued.

When I was trying to shrink my body, my beliefs and behaviors were not grounded in kindness, respect, trust, integrity or freedom. 

I wasn’t treating my body with kindness or respect when I spoke harshly about it, when I underate and overexercised, when I denied it what it needed and wanted.

I wasn't acting with kindness or respect when I beat myself up for eating something "bad" and then punished my body by restricting and exercising more to make up for it.

Instead of trusting myself and my body, I put my trust in a toxic system that profits greatly off of body shame and lies about the results it claims to deliver.

Oppressing Myself and Others
I wasn’t prioritizing freedom when I gave my autonomy away to our oppressive diet culture and appearance ideals.

Although my desire was, understandably, to be accepted, by submitting to diet culture’s rules and trying to take up less space, I was contributing to my own oppression.

Regrettably, I was also contributing to the oppression of others as my fatphobic beliefs and behaviors were helping to uphold our weight-stigmatizing culture that discriminates against bodies that don't conform to a very narrow ideal instead of accepting, respecting and celebrating our natural diversity.

As I became imprisoned in a harmful system that operates with zero integrity, I felt my own integrity slipping away. Filled with shame, I began withdrawing, lying, sneaking and hiding.

Obsessed with my weight and what I ate, I lost connection with my true self and what truly mattered to me. I became someone else—someone I and those around me no longer recognized and frankly, didn’t really like. 

Realigning with My Values
A big part of my healing journey was realigning my relationship with my body with my values.

Focusing on my values helped me walk away from diet culture, reclaim my power and free myself from the body shame prison so many of us find ourselves in.

When I struggled with my body, I practiced responding according to my values.

Instead of trying to “fix” and manipulate my body, I stopped seeing it as a problem to solve and started trusting its wisdom and treating it with kindness and respect. 

Rather than fight or ignore it, I began honoring its needs and desires whether it was for food, rest, gentle movement or something else. 

Aligning with my values also helped me uproot my anti-fat bias, ultimately enabling me to change not only how I viewed my body, but all bodies.

I didn't do any of this without some fumbles and stumbles. I am human after all!

Nor have I reached a final destination; I don't think there is one. Values-based living is an ongoing, evolving practice, one I'm deeply committed to.

Compassion is Essential
One of my core values is also compassion, which is essential for the healing process. 

If your relationship with your body is out of sync with your core values, I encourage you to treat yourself with compassion.

From a very young age, most of us were programmed to put bodies on a hierarchy—​​​​​​​and to value bodies over beings.

It's never too late, however, to challenge these oppressive, dehumanizing social constructs and return to what truly matters the most to you. 

I Was Fixated on Food. I Thought I Was Just a Foodie.

Are you old enough to remember Gourmet magazine?
 
I was devastated when it shut down. 

I still recall where I was when I heard the magazine was closing. I was trekking in Nepal and met another traveler from the United States. As we were ambling along the trail, she shared the crushing news. 

I didn’t believe her at first. I thought it was a terrible rumor. 

I was shocked that such a beloved cultural icon with a rich 68-year-old history could shutter so abruptly.

My Entire World
I was devastated because I relished the magazine. It was such a special thrill to find it in my mailbox once a month nestled among the utility bills and grocery store ads.

It was also a bigger deal to me than one might expect, as food, including food media, was pretty much my entire world back then.

I spent hours devouring food magazines, websites, blogs, newsletters, books and TV shows. I read restaurant menus online and crawled into bed at night with cookbooks.

My work breaks and evenings were spent immersed in a clunky online message board reading fervent posts by food fanatics about who had the best burrito, brownie or bread in the Bay Area.

If Instagram existed back then, I’m sure many hours would have melted away as I scrolled through every food-related account.

I was infatuated with food. It was my primary focus. I thought it was because I was a foodie.

Understanding My Fixation
It wasn’t until years later that I came to fully understand my fixation. 

It was because I was hungry.

My thoughts were consumed by food because I wasn’t consuming enough food.

I was constantly thinking about food because my very wise body was trying to get me to eat more food. Low on energy due to dieting, it was attempting to get the fuel it desperately needed to survive.

Learning about the Ancel Key’s Minnesota Starvation Experiment (CW: calorie counts, disordered eating, photos) helped me see how my undereating drove many of my behaviors during this time, including my food fixation.

The experiment's objective was to study the physical and mental effects of starvation during World War II and postwar refeeding practices. Thirty-six young healthy men, all conscientious objectors, volunteered to be subjected to a calorie-restricted diet for six months.

One of the outcomes was the men became preoccupied with food, including constantly talking about it, dreaming about it, reading cookbooks and collecting recipes. 

By the time the study was completed in 1945, one participant owned more than 100 cookbooks.

Describing his fixation with food, another participant shared that “…it made food the most important thing in one's life…food became the one central and only thing really in one's life. And life is pretty dull if that's the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren't particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.”

Related to Their Experience
While my weight-loss intention was quite different (to look good*) than those of the men who participated in the study (to do good), we experienced many of the same food deprivation symptoms.

Not only had I become hyper-focused on food, like many of the study subjects I also found myself guarding my food, sneaking food, engaging in hunger-suppressing strategies, bingeing on food, feeling irritable, anxious, depressed and fatigued, becoming socially isolated and more.

And, like a few of the men in the study, I even got a job in the food industry. I became the marketing manager for a food website with a slick test kitchen. Sadly, I never ate a bite of any of the delicious food prepared in it as it wasn’t allowed on my diet.

Although in no way was my intentional deprivation from dieting comparable to the heartbreaking chronic hunger, starvation and malnourishment experienced by millions of people around the world, I can relate to so many of the things the food-deprived men in the study experienced. Maybe you can, too.

More Calories Than a Diet
It’s important to understand that the daily number of calories the men were fed during the study's “starvation” phase was similar to what most diet programs prescribe today.

While they were considered semistarved, the participants were likely eating more calories than many of us have been instructed to eat on some diets. 

It seems beyond unethical that diet companies have known for more than 75 years about the numerous physical and psychological harms their programs can cause yet they continue to offer them while intentionally neglecting to warn their customers of their potential adverse side effects. 

If they truly valued people’s wellbeing over their bottom line (ha!), this information would be made available so folks could make fully informed decisions.

Stopped the Fixation
As I started divesting from diet culture, giving myself unconditional permission to eat and fully nourishing my body, I stopped fixating on food. 

While the foodie in me still enjoys exploring different food cultures, reading an occasional food article, tuning into some food podcasts and shows, and experimenting with a new recipe now and then, my interest is nowhere near the level of obsession it was when I was dieting, which frees up a ton of time and energy for a variety of other pursuits.

Of course, not everyone who is obsessed with food and everything related to it is dieting, undereating or engaging in other disordered eating behaviors. People are passionate about food and really into food-related content for all sorts of reasons. 

Thankfully, my personal interest in food these days is because I find it fun, pleasurable, comforting, compelling, connecting and nourishing.

And if Gourmet magazine happens to be resurrected someday, I’d likely be quick to renew my subscription.

*I deeply regret that I had a lot of unexamined anti-fat bias at the time due to decades of social conditioning that taught me there was only one right way to have a body (i.e., the thin ideal) and warped my idea of what it meant to “look good.”