Thursday, August 23, 2018

"I Weigh" Movement

Earlier this year, 32-year-old, British television and radio star Jameela Jamil, on Instagram as @jameelajamilofficial, published a post about her weight:
"I weigh: Lovely relationship. Great friends. I laugh every day. I love my job. I make an honest living. I'm financially independent. I speak out for women's rights. I like my bingo wings. I like myself in spite of EVERYTHING I've been taught by the media to hate myself about."
Included with this post was a call to action inviting others to send her their "weight," tabulated by interests and roles and life experiences, hashtag f*cking kg (kilograms). Jamil suffered from an eating disorder as a teenager and knows how negative some of the media messages we receive about our bodies can be. Instead, she invited people to rewrite these messages, claiming identities beyond size or shape.

Jamil, who noted in the comments of her original post, being “f*cking tired of seeing women just ignore what’s amazing about them and their lives and their achievements, just because they don’t have a bloody thigh gap" has become famously associated with body positivity since her creation of the "I weigh" movement. As of this writing, Jamil's new @i_weigh Instagram account has over 100,000 followers and 1,500 posts, a remarkable collection of women who forwarded their photos and "weight" to Jamil to share.

What's so inspiring about the "I weigh" movement is how quickly and confidently women have been moved to define themselves beyond their weight. Women have posted about their loves and talents, their trauma and heartbreaks. They are so much more multi-dimensional than, because of our cultural fixation with thinness, we typically believe ourselves - and others - to be.

Poet Nikita Gill posted the following image on her Instagram account in response to the "I weigh" movement, a particularly poignant response to Jamil's original post:




Using Jamil's prompt, what do you weigh? I bet it's so much more beautiful, layered, and complicated than any number on a scale.


You can find Does Every Woman Have an Eating Disorder? Challenging Our Nation's Fixation with Food and Weight on Amazon (as a paperback and Kindle) and at BarnesandNoble.com





Tuesday, June 26, 2018

All the Right Places

While at the gym one day, I overheard a woman tell her trainer, "The problem is that all my weight goes here," pointing to her belly.

I feel it's important to note that, of course, this conversation caught my attention, and as I glanced over, I saw a woman with what appeared to be a flat abdomen.

That aside, I immediately began wondering, somewhat facetiously, where she - or any of us, really - might prefer our weight land. Our earlobes? Our heels? How challenging would that make shoe shopping?

Humans' weight naturally fluctuates and women, in particular, will tend to store weight, when they do gain, between their stomachs and thighs. There's good (reproductive) reason for that. Is it possible to re-frame this "problem" as biology at play?

Some bodies will store weight in other places, and that's okay, too. There's a cultural narrative that suggests that there's a right way and a wrong way to have a body, when really, all of our bodies are unique. Prioritizing one body type - or way of gaining weight - over another does us all an injustice.

Meghan Trainer sings in "All About the Bass": 'Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase | And all the right junk in all the right places." The right places imply the wrong places, and the right bodies imply the wrong ones. We need to work on this. Because when it comes to body liberation, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "No one is free until we are all free."

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Boot Camp for Kids

Recently, I stumbled upon an advertisement for a boot camp class for kids. They're marketing it as designed to get kids moving (for health), but still. . .  Kids don't belong in a gym. While physical activity is important among our youth, no matter how many ways you spin it, kids need not be exercising or cooped up in a gym class to get their bodies moving.

Kids should be outside playing tag and climbing monkey bars. They should be cannon balling into swimming pools and running through sprinklers in the hot, summer sun. They can be playing sports or dancing, riding bikes or flying kites. They don't need to be in a gym class with a trainer working them out. I'm not saying those classes aren't fun for some kids or don't provide physical or mental health benefits for others. I'm sure they do. And  having worked in the fitness industry on and off for 20 years, much of that time in gyms, I can attest to the many advantages that exercise classes can offer. But for our younger set, gyms aren't the right place. Signing our children up for boot camp reeks of diet and fitness culture shoved down the throats of our most impressionable folks. 

If you want your children to move their bodies, find a way to accomplish this that highlights the joy and freedom inherent to unadulterated movement. Take them hiking or toss around a Frisbee. Swim and climb and skate. Play hallway soccer (what better goal than a door frame?), a favorite game in our house.

But just please, keep them out of the gym while you can.


You can find Does Every Woman Have an Eating Disorder? Challenging Our Nation's Fixation with Food and Weight on Amazon (as a paperback and Kindle) and at BarnesandNoble.com


Sunday, March 04, 2018

Intuitive Eating – Breaking Free from Diets*

Do You Struggle with Food?

Are you constantly thinking about food? Wondering what or when you'll next eat, afraid you'll go overboard for the day? Do you frequency try to ignore a nagging hunger? Do you find yourself reviewing your intake and planning ahead based on what you've already consumed? Do you think there's a "right way" and a "wrong way" to eat? Have you tried most diets out there, only to give up, defeated after days or weeks or months? Has your weight yo-yo'ed with each new diet attempt? Are you caught up in a cycle of monitoring your intake carefully and then emotional- or binge-eating when you're not? Is food a constant struggle?

It doesn't have to be.

The fact is, if you're thinking or worrying about food a large part of your day, you're likely not eating enough. You're probably restricting your overall intake - or certain types of food - toward the goal of weight loss or weight control. This leaves you perpetually underfed and likely anxious and irritable at times.

Diet Culture and Disordered Eating

Most of us are heavily schooled in diet culture. We're aware of what kinds of foods we "should" and "shouldn't" eat and we've likely internalized a number of food rules that impact when and how much we eat. Some of us might just dabble in diets from time to time. For others, the behaviors become more extreme, devolving into disordered eating and, in some cases, clinical eating disorders.

Diet culture is what separates you from your innate preferences and rhythms around food. It tells you that you shouldn't eat after a certain time at night and that you should limit your amount of certain types of foods. It tells you that your plate should be small and that you should stop eating at the first sign of hunger fading, never experiencing the physical and psychological sensation of being full. It values "honorable" food choices over comfort and satisfaction.

But these rules are not for you.

What Is Intuitive Eating?

What if there was another way? There is.
Intuitive eating, as developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch (in their publications of the same name) encourages us to return to our innate ability to trust ourselves and our bodies with food. The 10 Principles of intuitive eating include (quoted directly from their site):

1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.

3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.

4. Challenge the Food Police Scream a loud “NO” to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

5. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?

6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence–the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you’ve had “enough."

7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort , nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

8. Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.

9. Exercise–Feel the Difference Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it’s usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.

10. Honor Your HealthGentle Nutrition Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.

Incorporating Intuitive Eating into Your Life

Despite how "intuitive" intuitive eating might sound, learning to practice these principles can present a significant challenge for many. Eating intuitively might create anxiety as you forsake your food rules in lieu of trusting your body, from which you've disconnected following years of dieting. Rejecting the diet mentality, and eating according to hunger and fullness cues, can feel like free-falling without a parachute. . . at first. You probably will struggle with making food choices and knowing how to trust when you're actually hungry and when you've eaten to satisfaction. You might try to turn intuitive eating into a diet, berating yourself for eating emotionally or eating past fullness on occasion.

If you experiment with intuitive eating, you might worry that your eating will be chaotic, that you'll never settle in to a balance of food preferences guided by "gentle nutrition," or that you'll gain a large (or for some, even a small) amount of weight. You might worry that if you loosen the reins on exercise, you'll never move your body again. You might fear that without food to cope, you won't be able to handle emotions like sadness, anxiety, anger, guilt, or states like boredom, loneliness, or uncertainty.

These are all typical concerns when someone begins to eat intuitively.

But, with time and consistent commitment to these principles, something will start to shift. You might notice that you're not thinking about food all day, every day. Sure, you might wonder what you'll eat later, check out the menu of a restaurant you hope to try, or indulge in a specific craving, but the food reel that once occupied your mind isn't playing front-and-center all the time. You might notice that you're more relaxed around food, especially when presented with large spreads, like buffets. You might notice your preferences starting to shift. You might realize that you're not constantly low-grade hungry and that your fullness and satisfaction last you a while. When you're full, you might be able to stop eating, even if there's still food on your plate, knowing that another eating opportunity is right around the corner and available as soon as you want it. You might realize, likely after the fact, that you were able to tolerate a difficult emotion or experience without turning to food. You might begin to think about food as an enjoyable part of your life, not the enemy.

These shifts will occur gradually, and you might not notice them at first, but you will notice them. You might even start to live more intuitively, honoring your preferences regarding how you spend your time and with whom and trusting your mind and body to guide you with wisdom and clarity. "No, that just doesn't feel right for me," you'll say.

Diet culture will try harder to reclaim you.

At every turn, diet culture will try to suck you right back in. Your television and computer will beckon you with promises of a thinner you. Your friends and Facebook feed will share how the latest diet trend helped them drop 20% of their body weight. Your colleagues will share with pride how much better they feel now that they're avoiding whatever they're avoiding. You'll start to think, "Maybe just one more time." The "shoulds" will try to lasso you away from yourself. There's something so seductive about a plan.

But, then you'll realize that such seduction is an empty promise. Sure, dieting can result in weight-loss, but the majority of people who diet gain back the weight they lost (and often more). Dieting will follow through on some promises, though. What dieting once again will bring you is a hyperfocus on food. You'll lose time, energy, and bandwidth spent fixating on what you eat. You'll pass up opportunities to socialize with friends and family, afraid of the food they'll serve. You lose trust in your body's signals, alerting you to hunger and fullness as they naturally will. This is the diet guarantee.

How Gatewell Can Help

Our therapists and registered dietitian are trained in intuitive eating. We've helped countless people (including ourselves!) develop healthier relationships with food. We can help you understand how dieting has failed you (that's right, how dieting has failed you, not the other way around) and help you implement the principles of intuitive eating so that eating and food are returned to their rightful places in your life - opportunities for nourishment and pleasure, without all of the obsession, stress, and baggage you've accumulated along the way. At some point in your life, maybe childhood - or even infancy - you knew how to do this eating thing like a natural. That innate way of interacting with food can, with the right set of skills, be relearned. You can learn to respect your mind and body enough to trust them to guide your behavior, not some external, money-hungry source. You can learn to live according to what feels right for you.

If you're ready to get off the diet roller coaster, to say farewell to weight-loss gimmicks and yo-yo attempts at managing your weight, we're here to help. Food is simply food, and we want to help you live the rest of your life more peacefully and intuitively and without a constant struggle. Contact us to find out how.

*This piece was originally focused on the Gatewell Therapy Center blog.


You can find Does Every Woman Have an Eating Disorder? Challenging Our Nation's Fixation with Food and Weight on Amazon (as a paperback and Kindle) and at BarnesandNoble.com


Sunday, January 28, 2018

Yes, You Can Wear Make-Up in Recovery

One of the questions I'm often asked has to do with how "pure" one's recovery must be. Part of eating disorder recovery involves a paradigm shift from attacking one's body to body neutrality or acceptance. For some, perhaps the more black-and-white thinkers of the bunch, this means that anything we might want to do to enhance our appearance isn't aligned with recovery.

Wrong.

There's nothing categorically anti-recovery about focusing on, and enhancing, your appearance. Whether it's wearing make-up, getting your hair styled, or buying new clothes, many appearance-related behaviors don't threaten the spirit of recovery.

Some, on the other hand, do. When trying to decide whether a particular beauty service or process is in line with the values of recovery, you might want to ask yourself these two important questions:

1) Does the behavior cause me harm?
2) Can I do without the behavior?

In general, if the answers are "no" and "yes," this is a behavior that is a choice and has no negative consequences. With that in mind, if it's something you want to do, why not do it?

If a particular appearance-related behavior you're considering does cause harm (physical, emotional, financial, etc.), then you might want to think twice. Cosmetic surgery, for instance, might cause physical pain (and come with certain risks) and can create a dependence on additional procedures over time, though certainly not always. Your morning skincare regimen might not cause any physical harm, but it might drain precious resources (time, money, energy), important factors to consider when making your decision.

The second question helps you establish how important the behavior is to you and how much of a choice engaging in it is, versus a need or compulsion. For those who are graying, for instance, and choose to color their hair, could you imagine yourself going without your regular root touch-ups? If so, it seems the behavior (dyeing your hair) doesn't have much power of you, which might provide support for continuing to do it.

Think about other examples: straightening your hair, using cream to reduce skin discoloration, microblading, shaving your legs, getting regular manicures, using injectable fillers. Ask yourself the two questions above to get more of an understanding of any consequences of this behavior and your relationship to it. Many things we do to improve how we look (or how we feel about how we look) can jibe with eating disorder recovery, while some, you'll see, cannot. But still, it's important not to judge the urge (or even the acting on the urge) - in others or ourselves - to engage in any beauty-enhancing procedure, no matter how harmful or compulsive. We've all been socialized to value the beauty ideal.

And yes, you can wear make-up in recovery.


You can find Does Every Woman Have an Eating Disorder? Challenging Our Nation's Fixation with Food and Weight on Amazon (as a paperback and Kindle) and at BarnesandNoble.com