We are all in this together
"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers."
~ L.M. Montgomery, Anne of green Gables
Photo by Kiel James Patrick
Happy October!
How are you guys? Life in my little corner of the world is good. We are having a kick-ass, warmer than usual fall, work is going well, and we are in one of those beautiful honeymoon phases of marriage. Marriage, like everything else in life, has its ups and downs, and right now we are living in an up. It won't last forever, so I'm enjoying the hell out of it!
If you've read my latest blog post then you know that I gained some weight during Covid-15. Around ten pounds, on top of the 10 pounds I added on over the last 2 years. My face is rounder, my chin gained a buddy, and my butt is large and in charge. I had to go up a size up in jeans, my form-fitting clothes are really form-fitting now (meaning uncomfortably tight), and my boobs are pieces of art. Full and round like I haven't seen since my 20s. Booyah!
The old me would have been freaking out. Feeling ashamed, panicking, exchanging my 2% milk for skim (even though it tastes like water), making a list of forbidden foods and promptly starting to obsess about those foods.
The new me is relaxed. Life is so good right now, and I'm so happy, that my first emotion every morning upon waking up is gratitude. Am I happy about the weight gain? Not really. I do feel better when I'm a bit lighter: my breathing is easier, I'm more flexible, and my clothes fit different.
But fluctuations are the most normal thing in the world. Nothing stays the same: everything in life is an ebb and flow, up and down, high and low.
What I'm focusing on this time is what brought me to this point. I didn't move my body consistently, I abandoned my yoga practice, and I was stress-eating because I was working too much and living too little. These are all things that I can change. My body is trying to tell me to look after it better.
So that's what I have been doing: I picked up my yoga practice again. (My body is singing with joy!)
I'm walking every day.
I'm more mindful with my eating.
I get 8-10 hours of sleep every night.
I'm working less.
Maybe I will lose some weight, if that's what my body needs. Maybe I won't. It doesn't matter. I will never, ever diet again, and I will never, ever obsess about my weight again.
I wrote an entire chapter about that very subject in my book Quit the Hustle. And I decided to share it with you guys right here!
I know that I'm not alone in my weight gain during this stressful time, and I want to reassure you that it's not a big deal. It really isn't.
Cut yourself some slack! 2020 is crazy.
Without further ado - here it is! Enjoy!
Quit the diet hustle
“A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”
– Naomi Wolf
Eating is one of life’s great pleasures. Food nourishes us, sure, but it is so much more than just sustenance. We connect with food. The dinner table is where many families unwind and relax after a long day. We share our day’s adventures, mishaps, problems and triumphs over plates of spaghetti, roast chicken, stir fry or breakfast for dinner, commiserating, talking, and laughing together. We meet for meals with friends to catch up, we have cake and champagne to celebrate, and when we visit our grandparents we get fed homemade cookies and tea. First dates should always include food, be it dinner, coffee or ice cream, and no holiday is complete without copious amounts of special dishes. An ordinary day can turn into a special one with the magic of a good meal, and nothing feels more uplifting than a slice of warm pie with a healthy scoop of slowly melting vanilla ice cream on top.
Food is an important, glorious, life-affirming part of our lives, and it should give us nothing but joy and nourishment. Living in times where we have plenty to eat is a great privilege. Some of us still have grandparents who experienced hunger during wartime, and hunger is one of the cruelest conditions in existence.
The scientist Ancel Keys from the University of Minnesota conducted a starvation experiment with 36 men that started in November 1944 and lasted for a year, to find out how to best help people who experience starvation. The study became one of the most important studies ever conducted on the mental, physical, and social effects of food restriction. While aimed at providing help for people who experience hunger due to hardship, it’s also a valuable tool for people who diet. Or, in other words: it’s a study that’s important to all of us.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was divided into different parts: a three-month control period where the men were given 3,200 calories a day; the six-month “semi-starvation” period that consisted of 1,600 calories a day divided between two meals; a restricted rehabilitation period of three months where they were eating between 2,000 to 3,200 calories; and finally an eight-week unrestricted rehabilitation period with no calorie-limit. They had to walk 22 miles a week, do some basic work in the lab and keep a diary, but had no other restrictions aside from the caloric ones.
The changes that happened to the men during the “semi-starvation” period were dramatic. They each lost about 25% of their body weight. Their hair fell out, their hearts shrank in size and their pulse rates dropped.
Their strength and stamina decreased drastically, as did their body temperature, heart rate and sex drive. The hunger pains became so bad for some that they couldn’t finish their work and had to go home. For three men the experiment proved to be too tough and they broke the diet, resulting in them being excluded from the experiment.
But the most significant – and unexpected to Ancel Keys – changes occurred to the men’s psyche. They all became obsessed with food.
One man wrote: “The time between meals has now become a burden. This time is no longer thought of as an opportunity to get those things done which I have to do or want to do. Instead, it’s time to be killed until the next meal, which never comes fast enough.”
Another one “stayed up until 5:00 am last night studying cookbooks. So absorbing I can’t stay away from them.
They developed bizarre rituals around food, “coddle it like a baby or handle it and look over it as they would some gold. They played with it like kids making mud pies.” Many licked their plates to make sure they got every last morsel of food, and they frequently turned on each other during mealtimes because they became increasingly irritable and short-tempered. They were so envious of the staff that could eat whatever they wanted that one man wrote to a friend, “I’m so hungry I could eat anything, but I’d start on the fat staff first.” Torn between the desire to gulp down the food as fast as possible or to savour every precious bite, they sometimes took two hours eating one meal, toying with it and “making weird and seemingly distasteful concoctions.”
Some men started smoking to dull their hunger; others drank tons of water to create a feeling of fullness. A few men chewed up to 30 packs of gum a day until the laboratory banned it.
The starvation period drove the men to “the threshold of insanity.” Every aspect of life lost its importance in the presence of their overwhelming fixation with food. “Budding romances collapsed” as their sex drive vanished. Parties seemed pointless and the participants preferred going to the movies alone to socializing with others.
When the starvation period finally ended and the 20-week rehabilitation period began, Keys had another unexpected finding: the suffering intensified. "What was unexpected about the rehab phase was it ended up being psychologically the hardest phase for most of the men." The very gradual increase of calories drove them nuts. They still felt hungry all the time, and they hadn’t been prepared for that. It brought them close to despair.
One of the participants, Sam Legg, chopped off three fingers during the third week of rehabilitation. “I admit to being crazy mixed up at the time,” he said. “As of 50 years later, I am not ready to say I did it on purpose. I am not ready to say I didn’t.”
Starvation makes us crazy. The men of the Starvation Experiment did it as part of the war effort, wanting to do their part in finding the best way to help the starving population in Europe. Asked years later if they’d regretted participating in the study none of them did, despite the difficulties. They felt it had been for an important cause.
But what’s really crazy is that so many of us voluntarily starve ourselves. The reason? To get a better body.
We are obsessed with our bodies. We live in a world where we are taught early on that our bodies are not good enough the way they are. According to a study from Common Sense Media in 2015, more than half of girls and one-third of boys aged six to eight want to have thinner bodies, and 80% of ten-year-old girls have been on a diet. No wonder that Weight Watchers allows children as young as ten into their program, it makes good business sense.
Many of the popular diets are even more restrictive than the starvation experiment was. Dr. Bernstein’s diet is extremely low on calories: only 900-1,400 per day. Jenny Craig’s meal plans start as low as 1,200 calories a day; L A Weight Loss and the Mayo Clinic offer plans with 1,400 calories; and Herbal Magic’s meal plans are between 1,100 and 1,500 calories.
Most of us know the misery that is dieting. Counting calories is no fun. It changes us from vibrant personalities with a variety of interests into zombies who are obsessed with what they can and cannot eat. Everything else fades into the background and ceases to be important. We develop tunnel vision with the singular goal of needing to lose weight. This obsession with food and weight loss leads to overeating, weight gain, shame, and the need to go on another diet. It’s a vicious cycle most of us have been caught in and that will dominate our lives.
Glamour magazine conducted a study in 2011 that revealed that a shocking 97% of women have at least one “I hate my body” moment every day, with thirteen negative body thoughts daily being the average. That’s thirteen times a day that intelligent, strong, smart women call themselves fat, ugly, worthless, gross, or lazy. We have lost a normal relationship to our bodies.
And is it any wonder?
We constantly receive the message that we don’t look good enough, are slim enough or eat well enough. We are being brainwashed into believing that we are doing everything wrong when it comes to feeding our bodies.
The massive amount of conflicting information about what eating healthy looks like is overwhelming and confusing. Is a high fat or high protein diet better? What about the Keto diet everybody is raving about? Is the Mediterranean diet still considered healthy? Should we all drink celery juice in the morning? Is gluten really that bad? What has bread ever done to you? ***
I was an average-sized kid. A picky eater and more interested in books than food, I didn't think about my body until I became a teenager. Diets were a normal part of our household though since my mom was a regular dieter. She also thought that my sister was too chubby as a kid and they had regular lengthy arguments at mealtimes about her eating.
The relationship to my body changed when I was fifteen. I had developed curves, round hips, a bubble butt and small, high breasts, and I started to get comments about my body. My mom told me that I had a nice figure, and her opinion was more important to me than anybody else’s. An older girl of the youth group I was a part of told me the same thing, complimenting me in front of everybody! My first boyfriend, three years older than me and my first love, adored my body. Suddenly, it was important that I made sure that it stayed the way it was. If it didn't, I was afraid I would lose the affection of my boyfriend and mom, and the admiration of everyone else.
It was the 90s, the time of the low-fat craze, and I determined that fat was the enemy. I eliminated butter from my diet, replacing it with mustard. I stopped eating ice cream and chocolate, my two favorite treats, now labelled weaknesses. I became weary of my grandma’s cooking, suspecting that she didn’t listen to my mom’s strict instructions about low-fat cooking (she didn’t). I used the smallest amount of gravy I could get away with during Sunday dinner, despite loving gravy. I skipped dessert, feeling virtuous. I read every woman’s magazine I could get my hands on for diet tips. I started drinking a bottle of water before breakfast to trick my stomach into thinking it was full already, trying to cut my usual breakfast of two slices of toast with peanut butter and jelly in half. I loved apple juice mixed with sparkling water but forced myself to stop drinking it to avoid the “empty calories”. I started drinking diet soda instead.
And it worked! My weight stayed at 125 pounds, something I checked religiously every morning. But then I read an article about the Spice Girls who had exploded onto the scene, and besides some personal information about their likes and dislikes it also mentioned their height and weight. It was common practice then to make the weight of singers, actresses, and other women in the public eye known, an unnecessary and anxiety-inducing habit that thankfully has fallen by the wayside. I knew every popular actress’ weight during that time. Mel B aka Scary Spice, my favorite Spice Girl, was listed as weighing 115 pounds – and suddenly I thought that I should weigh that too.
Thus began the madness. I went from never thinking much about food to thinking about it constantly. I didn’t announce that I wanted to lose ten pounds because I was worried about failing. But I watched my mom meticulously weigh 30 grams of chicken breast on the kitchen scale and measuring ridiculously tiny portions of food for herself during her diets, and I tried to do the same. However, even though I had never eaten huge portions before, knowing I wasn’t allowed to eat more resulted in me suddenly being ravenous. I couldn’t stop thinking about eating. I read about models who hadn’t eaten chocolate in so long that they forgot what it tastes like and I cursed my parents for ever introducing me to sweets.
When Kate Moss delivered her now infamous words: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” I fully believed her and tried hard to live by them. A string of German movies from the sixties about a mischievous group of High School students, my favorite movies at the time, became a source of hot envy, because I wanted so badly to look like Uschi Glas, a German actress with a waif-like body and pixie-haircut who resembled Audrey Hepburn. I would sit there mesmerized, unshed tears burning behind my eyes, vowing to myself that I would do anything in my power to get a tiny body like Uschi’s.
It was insane: I was healthy, I had never had body insecurities before, but now I created them by trying to look like random celebrities. But it didn’t feel insane. It felt normal. After all, didn’t everybody do it? I had a girlfriend who wouldn’t eat two and three days in a row, a feat I admired greatly. She would live off coffee and cigarettes and a sassy attitude. I thought she was amazing. I knew girls who used laxatives or ate so much sugar-free gum that it acted like a laxative. I tried the gum-trick myself, but it didn’t work for me.
Other girls would share how they had spit out food they already had in their mouths, proud for not swallowing it. I myself would often go to the cupboard with the sweets in it, open it and stare at the cookies or chocolate, a war raging inside me. One part of me wanted a taste badly, but the other part warned me that if I wasn’t careful, I would gain weight and lose the people I loved. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” I would whisper to myself and close the cupboard again, feeling virtuous.
One time during dinner at a restaurant, the waitress accidentally gave my friend normal coke instead of diet coke, apologizing profusely when she realized her mistake. My friend freaked out because she’d had two glasses already. To her, the night was ruined; two glasses of soda had that much power over her.
But the real bad times hadn’t even started yet. That happened when I broke up with my first boyfriend after two-and-a-half years of dating and started to date my second boyfriend. He was lovely. He was sweet, supportive, and so in love with me that I knew he would still love me even if I gained some weight. After three years of watching my weight like a hawk, the relief was exquisite. I ate and drank whatever I felt like and loved every second of it.
What I didn’t love was the weight I gained. It accumulated quickly after having been so strict for several years before that. At first I was in complete denial and came up with all sorts of excuses. The dryer had shrunk my clothes; I had grown and thus was heavier (I stopped growing at age fourteen, but denial is a powerful force); I miraculously gained more muscle (I didn’t). Then I stopped weighing myself. When favorite boyfriend dropped some weight I was wild with envy. I had to get rid of those pounds! The calorie counting resumed, and I started exercising more.
Unfortunately, a heavy bout of then-undiagnosed depression resulted in emotional eating, a habit I wouldn’t be able to shake for four years. Still convinced that fat was what made you fat, I would mostly binge on carbs: entire loafs of still-warm bread, whole baguettes, giant soft pretzels and boxes of cereal with low-calorie juice. I also ate big bags of sweet popcorn and so much sour candy that my tongue would start to bleed. Sometimes when I started binging I would continue to stuff myself even when I had enough, as punishment and misguided motivation to be done with it once and for all and “be better” from now on.
I didn’t think I had an eating disorder. In fact, I often wished I had a touch of anorexia or bulimia, just enough to lose the weight. But I couldn’t make myself throw up, and the few attempts I made at starving myself ended in binging. The only other option I had was to exercise more. As I described in the previous chapter, the focus on weight loss completely destroyed my enjoyment of exercise. It became a punishment for my lack of self-control and the means to an end – the end being skinny.
I had completely lost any sense of what normal eating was. I didn’t even know what listening to your body meant. I didn't trust my body when it told me that it was hungry (I was a glutton and ate more than the diets told me was enough for me) and I was too out of touch with my body to sense when I was full.
I was consumed with self-loathing, with wanting to lose weight, with labelling food as good and bad. Good food for me was food that made you lose weight, like salads, low-calorie foods, fruit and vegetables. Bad food was food that made you gain weight, which was everything else. While my definition of good and bad food was limited, the dividing of food into good and bad categories is extremely popular.
Every diet out there does it. Or I should say every “lifestyle change plan”, the updated term, since diets have been proven to have a high failure rate and have thus acquired a negative reputation. But lifestyle changes are all the rage. And every eating plan has their list of forbidden foods.
The popular Ketogenic diet, a high-fat, low-carb diet doesn't allow sugar and only a very limited amount of carbs. The list of foods to avoid includes natural products like potatoes, beans, lentils, cashews, most fruit, and food that is usually considered healthy such as muesli and oatmeal.
The Paleolithic diet, also known as "Caveman diet", is based on what scientists believe our ancestors in the Stone Age consumed. It is high in protein and low in carbohydrates and allows no dairy, sugar, beans, cereal grains, processed foods, salt-containing foods, or any of the good stuff like cinnamon buns - there were no bakeries in the Stone Age (boo).
Both the Keto and the Paleo diets rely heavily on meat and fish, while just as many people from the other camps – vegetarians and vegans – are convinced that meat is what makes us sick. The Glycemic Index diet recommends avoiding watermelon because it’s a "high-Glycemic Index food" that raises your blood sugar levels too much – but the experts are divided on that, with others saying that it's safe to eat in moderation.
It's confusing, and the frustrating part is that the trends and recommendations change all the time, making it even harder to know how to eat healthy.
The implication of putting food into good and bad categories is dangerous, because we subconsciously extend it to ourselves. If we eat “good” we are good; if we eat “bad” we are bad and feel terrible about ourselves. I remember feeling the need to prepare for special occasions like wedding invitations, vacations or even a party by “eating good” and “not cheating” beforehand to “be ready” (translation: skinny enough) to go. Summer was always a mixed blessing, because even though it's my favorite season, I was also keenly aware of revealing my arms and legs and having to wear the most dreaded item of clothing in the world – a bikini.
Well, you know all that only too well. Ask any group of women if there is anyone who is completely satisfied with their body, and nobody will raise their hand. However, ask the same women about their marriages, kids, jobs, relationship with their mothers, their cooking skills, how they like their make-up today, or anything else you can think of – and the chances that a few will confidently raise their hands are much higher. We are all thoroughly screwed up when it comes to our body image, and food has become the enemy.
I was thoroughly sick of it. I didn't want to think about food and the size of my thighs from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep, often having dreams about it as well. It had taken over my life and made me feel like a hostage. But even worse? It didn't leave room for anything else. Just like the participants of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, all my thoughts were consumed by food, and what I could and couldn’t eat.
You can't enjoy reading a book when you have guilt nagging at you that you should be exercising instead. Besides, every time food is mentioned in the story you start obsessively thinking about it. Being creative? Forget about it. You don't have the mental space to be creative when all your thoughts are occupied with food, counting calories, and how many steps you need to walk today. Your world becomes very small and very boring.
I was bored out of my mind living that way. I was bored of reading fitness magazines that only focused on our physical bodies. I was bored talking and thinking about nothing but my body. I was bored being so concerned about one aspect of me that I neglected everything else. There was so much more to life, and I was missing it!
I didn’t know I had a creative side in me and was missing out on an entire aspect of my personality.
I was missing out on spontaneously going to the beach.
I was missing out on skinny dipping.
I was missing out on trying new foods.
I was missing out on baking, which used to be one of my favorite hobbies but had been abandoned in order to not tempt myself.
I was missing out on long, lazy days curled up with a book (guilt-free!) – my biggest passion in life.
I was missing out on licking an ice cream cone while sitting in the sun, one of the best parts of summer. I was even missing out on watermelon for heaven’s sake!
But what I missed most was waking up in the morning and feeling peaceful. I could barely remember what it had been like to wake up and not immediately start worrying about my body. It had been a long time.
I was missing out on being free.
I was ready to get back to that. I wanted to break free from the diet hustle, from giving the size and shape of my body most of my brain power. And you know what? Just making that resolution was the first step. The second step was resolving that from now on, nothing was off limits. All food was allowed. I knew that as soon as I put something on the "forbidden"-list, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Not putting anything on that list was a huge help. If you know that you can have something at any time, it loses its attraction. It also prevents you from overeating it. There is no need to overeat it, because you know there is always more if you want more.
I was going through an enormous life change at that time: I had moved from Germany to Canada to be with my boyfriend. I had to learn a new language, get used to a new country, and take care of two young girls, his daughters. I was head over heels in love. I learnt to cook. I was spending more time with children than ever before. Children have a knack to teach us just as much (or more) as we teach them, and my new charges were no different. Kids are so unselfconscious when it comes to their bodies, it was a revelation. It had been a long time since I was surrounded by that, and I soaked it up like a sponge. They didn't think twice about their bodies, they simply used them. Incredible!
We were having pizza nights with the girls. We always had a tub of ice cream in the freezer. I discovered cinnamon buns, unknown in Germany, and my taste buds sang with joy. My boyfriend and I had drinks together. He introduced me to sushi and sushi dates became a favorite. Another favorite of his was thick, creamy clam chowder soup, something the old me would not have touched with a ten-foot pole. It screamed of fat and calories! But I tried it, and loved it, and included it in my ever-growing list of foods I liked.
My binges stopped. My negative self-talk got less. It would be another decade before I managed to silence it, but I was moving in the right direction. Ironically, my weight dropped and settled at a level that felt right. I didn't weigh myself very often to avoid triggering my old behavior.
I stopped thinking about food in terms of calories and fuel and started to think of it as a delicious gift that makes every day more worthwhile. It was a necessity, sure, but also an experience. It helped me celebrate every day.
I still eat whatever I feel like. I avoid diets like the plague. I don't restrict or limit or cut out. I eat gluten and dairy and sugar, and I will for as long as it feels right. So far it feels fantastic.
I eat when I'm hungry, and don't when I'm not. When I feel like fries, I'll have them. I love salads and fruit and pizza and bread. I also love chocolate and watermelon. And coffee! Don't come between me and my coffee in the morning and nobody gets hurt. I never say no to birthday cake. Treat day at work is awesome, and I feel sorry for my coworkers who stop themselves from having a cookie or a piece of cake "because they have been so bad lately".
No honey, you haven't. You are good. You are worthy and talented, and you can eat the cake.
I'm not a nutritionist and I'm not qualified to give advice on healthy eating. But I'm a woman who was caught in the hell that is dieting and restrictive eating. I was a woman who believed the message that her worth was directly related to the shape and size of her body. I, like hundreds of thousands of other women, believed that I had to look a certain way in order to be lovable. I lived my life under the heavy weight of believing that I was inherently wrong, and that I needed to work hard on myself in order to make myself likeable and attractive.
I missed out on so much living in the pursuit of wanting to shrink myself. I shrank my world in the process, not my body, which was exactly the opposite of what all the diets promised me. They promised that my life would start once I was a certain size.
Instead I found that once my life started, my body found its comfortable weight all on its own. My life grew and continues to grow. I discovered creativity. I love seeing other peoples' creative endeavors. I love stories. I love nature. And I love a good meal.
Breaking free from diet culture was the most important thing I ever did in the pursuit of living a full, happy, and free life. It opened up an entire new world that was infinitely more interesting than the one I was trapped in when I believed the lies of the diet industry. Our time on this planet is incredibly short. I want to experience and enjoy it as much as I can. At the end of my life I won't care if I fit into the same dress size all my life. All I will care about is that I lived as joyfully and full-heartedly as possible. And part of a full life is good food and feeling comfortable in your own body. Contrary to what we are being taught, those two are not mutually exclusive, but go together in complete harmony.
Just like apple pie and vanilla ice cream.
End of chapter
Be kind to yourself and do something today that makes your soul sing.
Happy Sunday!
Love, Miriam
If you find this letter useful, feel free to forward it to someone else who might enjoy it.
Vol. 71