I’m thinking today about body image. My body image, to be specific, and the way I feel when suddenly confronted with photographs of myself taken by other people, showing my whole body.

The experience is one of immediate shock, often followed by a weird cognitive dissonance. My body doesn’t Look Right. Because apparently there is a Right Way for bodies to look, and whatever I’ve constructed in my head as that Right Way sure as hell has nothing in common with the photographic evidence of my squat, round, rather sticky-outy body.

Bodies, in my head, are supposed to be straight up-and-down, to have clean, spare lines and angles. The head should be a particular size in proportion to the rest of the body — not too large, or, in my case, too small. The feet should not be too long in comparison to the length of the legs; the shape from the front of the thigh to the back of the calf not such a dramatic S-shape.

And, for the love of all that’s holy, the whole thing should not be so damn big.

After the emotional reaction, I have to start thinking rationally again. That’s when I realize: hardly anyone spends much of their time daily considering images of themselves, especially not full-body images. Hardly any of us are constantly taking full-body self-portraits, or are surrounded by full-length mirrors. We don’t spend a few hours here and there watching video of ourselves.

We are too busy being in our bodies daily to spend more than a few minutes confronting how we actually look in them.

Then it occurs to me that all those articles decrying the apparent fat-person curse of Being In Denial of One’s Fatness are actually just restating the obvious: when you’re not spending all day staring at yourself, but do spend a considerable portion of your day observing media depictions of bodies that are not much like yourself, isn’t it natural that the part of your brain dedicated to constructing the Platonic composite of How Bodies Look will be mostly filled with images of sparse, clean lines, slenderness, and a particular head-to-body ratio?

Won’t you go through your day, in your body, almost implicitly assuming that it looks more-or-less like the definition of Body you have mentally constructed, based on the images and people you’re constantly surrounded by?

And won’t you then experience a cognitive dissonance when confronted with an image of a body that breaks all those Platonic rules — especially when you realize that it belongs to you, that it is, in fact, you?

Of course. Of course you will. Not because you are a stupid fat person in denial about your fatness, but because the culture we live in has erased fatness (and other forms of physical variation) from most of its artwork and entertainment.

If you’re like me, and fatter than about 97% of the population, you’re also not going to see a whole lot of other people like yourself in daily life. Most people you see, even the relatively fat ones, are going to be a bit less sticky-outy, have proportionally-larger heads, etc. You will also incorporate those impressions into your little Platonic file cabinet, along with the much thinner media impressions.

And your first reaction on seeing a photograph of your body will be one of shock, possibly horror, and an indefinable sense that Your Body is Wrong.

The secret, of course, is that there is no Right Body, no matter how hard our culture tries to define one. There is no Platonic Body floating in indisputable ether — only real bodies that exist in the real world, available in an extravagant assortment of shapes, colours, sizes, and conformations. None of them wrong or right. All of them just are.

And now I can understand that the experience of cognitive dissonance and disgust with how my body looks is an artifact of my cultural training, not a Real and Inescapable Truth About Me, requiring a dramatic gesture of repentant food restriction and mortification of the flesh through exercise.

If anything, the dissonance is a reminder that, because my body is different and even somewhat rare in this world, I must take special care to fill my Platonic File Cabinet with images that make sense to me, that I can identify with. That my own indisputable body shall now be the starting point for my definition of Body, and that I can spend a few minutes daily filling the file cabinet with pictures of me.

What scandalizes me is how people often interpret this message. Over and over again, this is how people respond:

“I can’t do that because I would eat cake 24/7.”

“But you’d overeat all the time!”

“I’d eat such an unbalanced diet I’d make myself sick.”

And I can only figure that when I say, “Eat food. Stuff you like. As much as you want,” what people actually hear is:

This interpretation says some pretty breathtaking things about our culture’s assumptions about food.

For one thing, it says that we believe tasty food and healthy food are not the same thing. And that, if you were to eat exclusively tasty food from here on out, you’d be eating a nutritionally reprehensible diet for the rest of your life.

To which my internal peanut gallery goes, “Buuuuh?”

Not only does every food, including junk food, contain useful nutrition, but more importantly — nutritious food is often fucking delicious. If this is not your experience of food, then one of a couple of things might be going on:

Maybe you need to reassess what “nutritious” means to you by learning a bit of Nutrition 101 — What’s a carb? What’s fat? What is protein? Where do you find them? (A: anywhere there is something edible.) And what do they do for you? (A: pretty much everything.)

Or perhaps you haven’t ever encountered “healthy” food in anything other than a guilt-ridden context — and thus have always felt resentful toward it and, as a result, your primary nutrition concern is to either be on the wagon, or off it and eating as rebelliously as possible.

Maybe you’ve truly never learned to enjoy more than a very few foods, and your palate needs expanding. Maybe you’re under some kind of therapeutic restriction that you haven’t yet been reconciled with.

Or maybe you only allow yourself to eat when you are desperately hungry — in which situation you are more likely to reach for calorically-dense “bad” foods because you’re at the bottom of the pyramid. And, at that stage, getting enough food = getting enough calories.

Any way you spin it, something is interfering with you and your food.

For a second thing, those assumptions indicate that we believe everyone wants to overeat, all the time. I don’t know if this is an assumption borne of a lifetime of restrained eating and constant hunger, or a misunderstanding of how much food it is actually appropriate to eat (A: however much supports your health and leaves you feeling satisfied, regardless of weight), or a belief that food is addictive, or whether it has a moral underpinning, but either way — it’s an inaccurate and pretty shitty thing to believe about humanity (and food) in general.

If you are like most human beings, you probably seek pleasure and avoid pain, within certain moral constraints — you like to feel good and you dislike feeling bad.

When it comes to food, at least in the immediate term, it’s pretty obvious that people like food that tastes good, and dislike food that tastes bad. But there is more to food than just our immediate experience of it.

Those of you with lactose intolerance, especially, will understand when I say:

If you’ve never, ever stopped to think about how food makes you feel after eating it, maybe you’ve been so caught up in the shame-spiral of restraint and disinhibition that you haven’t had much mental real estate to devote to the idea. Or maybe you’ve been eating according to externally-imposed nutrition rules and guidelines without really pausing to notice how you actually feel when you eat that way. Or you’re in the midst of the great divorce. And you’re not alone.

But learning how food makes you feel, both immediately and a little way down the road, is a fundamental part of learning how to care for yourself.

In my mind, food that makes you feel weird or off — no matter how good it tastes right now — isn’t food you can unconditionally love. Amounts of food that make you feel bad aren’t amounts of food you actually want to eat. And if you find yourself continually sacrificing your well-being for the lovely, immediate feel and taste of food, it’s a sign that something has gone wrong.

I eat, without reservation, basically whatever I want. Having a really relaxed attitude toward food, and unconditional permission to eat it, has allowed me to stop thinking so much about what I should or shouldn’t eat, and instead to notice how food tastes, as well as how it makes me feel. Here’s a brief sample of the observations I have accumulated, as a result:

I like the taste of Coca-Cola a lot. But it also makes me feel thirsty and a little weird sometimes, so I drink it occasionally, along with food, and often along with plain water and lots of ice. I feel better if I eat a high-fibre breakfast that contains a good dollop of fat (in the form of butter or cream) — it’s more satisfying, tastes better, and stays with me longer. I feel better, more energetic, less run-down, and more satisfied if I eat vegetables with dinner. I need a good serving of protein with lunch and dinner. If I don’t eat an afternoon snack, I feel sleepy. I feel and function better when I drink at least two big glasses of water each day. I really like strawberries, and I prefer eating them whole, fresh or frozen. Aside from strawberries, I don’t much like eating fruit all by itself because simple sugars alone make me feel funny. Adding cheese or nuts makes it work better. Sugar-sweetened cereals taste really good, but don’t satisfy me and often scratch up my mouth. So I think of them mostly as snacks or desserts, instead of as breakfast. I love chocolate and it leaves me feeling fine, so I eat it when I want it, but I rarely eat enough to make me feel ill or uncomfortable. Light popcorn pops up better and is crunchier than extra-butter flavour popcorn. If I want more butter, I’ll melt some real butter and add it after popping. And I really, really dislike the feeling of being either desperately hungry or uncomfortably full.

These observations allow me to eat what I want, in amounts that I want — which means that I get to eat food that both tastes good and feels good. I get to satisfy my hunger without disrespecting my satiety, and I take care of myself with food instead of hurting myself with it.

To me, “wanting” something means more than just liking how it tastes — it also means considering how it makes me feel. The two variables comes together in a sort of split-second cost-benefit analysis, each time I eat, to answer the eternal question, what do I want?

No matter what I end up choosing in any given situation, the answer is always the same: I want to feel good.

It seems to me that everyone has a little tyrant living inside them. The tyrant, if it cannot be exorcised, must be exercised — much like a two-year old must be worn out (with safe activity, away from uncovered electrical sockets) in order to let you have a moment’s peace.

My tyrant has, in the past, been a touch…overbearing. Especially during The Great Diet of ’00, wherein the Tyrant allowed me to eat a strictly allotted portion of calories spread over a strictly allotted assortment of food groups — preferences and cravings be damned.

I’ve seen other Tyrants playing fast and loose with other people’s diets. The Tyrant who disallows Suspicious Ingredients. The Tyrant who eschews fat in all its forms. The Tyrant who cannot countenance pepperoni, much to his ardently pepperoni-loving host’s despair. The Tyrant who insists you must eat salad, even if you hate it. Especially if you hate it.

In order to live with the Tyrant, I’ve decided to put him to productive use. Namely, I’ve used his seemingly boundless energy and unbreakable rigidity to build structure around my eating. Then, once erected, I’ve barred him from entering the tabernacle, the holy abode of my body’s wishes and wants.

Simply put, I do this by eating meals.

To the beginner, it helps to think of meals not so much as meals, but rather as “eating appointments” — defined times or intervals during the day kept sacred to the act of feeding oneself. No matter what eating may or may not occur outside of these appointments, the appointments must be kept. Sitting must occur, and a single bite or drink of something placed in the mouth.

But whether the plate is balanced, according to the Food Guide, or looking more like Sunday brunch at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory — in this the Tyrant has no say. If I eat one bite or go back for thirds, it is entirely my choice.

If building structure is defining the space within which things can happen, the appropriate use of discipline is to build and maintain that structure — and then let go of what happens within it.

This is my SURPRISED FACE. Especially since, in 1995, the World Health Organization identified poverty as “the biggest single underlying cause of death, disease and suffering worldwide.”

In a hilarious-because-it’s-sadly-true list posted to the Wikipedia article on the social determinants of health, a typical list of “lifestyle” tips for better health is contrasted with a list of socially determined tips for better health:

The traditional 10 Tips for Better Health ^[69]

* 1. Don’t smoke. If you can, stop. If you can’t, cut down.
* 2. Follow a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables.
* 3. Keep physically active.
* 4. Manage stress by, for example, talking things through and making time to relax.
* 5. If you drink alcohol, do so in moderation.
* 6. Cover up in the sun, and protect children from sunburn.
* 7. Practice safer sex.
* 8. Take up cancer-screening opportunities.
* 9. Be safe on the roads: follow the Highway Code.
* 10. Learn the First Aid ABCs: airways, breathing, circulation.

The social determinants 10 Tips for Better Health^[70]

* 1. Don’t be poor. If you can, stop. If you can’t, try not to be poor for long.
* 2. Don’t have poor parents.
* 3. Own a car.
* 4. Don’t work in a stressful, low-paid manual job.
* 5. Don’t live in damp, low-quality housing.
* 6. Be able to afford to go on a foreign holiday and sunbathe.
* 7. Practice not losing your job and don’t become unemployed.
* 8. Take up all benefits you are entitled to, if you are unemployed, retired or sick or disabled.
* 9. Don’t live next to a busy major road or near a polluting factory.
* 10. Learn how to fill in the complex housing benefit/asylum application forms before you become homeless and destitute.

So I guess we can all revise our New Year’s resolutions somewhat.

Now, of course, I’m not trying to be fatalistic, and I wouldn’t ever want to take away someone’s feelings of hope of what they can achieve, nor their sense of bodily autonomy — but the trick here is to remember, whenever you’re making “lifestyle” changes for the sake of improved health, keep the bigger context in mind.

Do a sound cost-benefit analysis before embarking on something you don’t enjoy, solely “for the sake of your health.” Keep in mind that certain changes represent only a drop in the bucket of your overall health, and that if something isn’t worth doing for its own sake (intrinsic motivation, remember?), then maybe it’s not worth doing at all.

That said, I’ve made a few…let’s call them “atypical” resolutions of my own — to work hard in therapy, to get better at understanding my limits and boundaries, to speak up when I need help, to work hard on the business-thing, to deliberately build pleasure into my daily life, and to remember that doing all of the drudgy housework-things is part of taking care of myself.

If I had the money and time, I’d add “take a ballet class” to that list, but since that’s not possible for me right now (don’t be poor!), I’ll work on figuring out some alternative. I know it sounds weird for a fat (and fat-accepting) person — particularly one who says “fuck” as often as I do — to be interested in ballet, but I’ve always been a study in contrasts and ballet has always appealed to me.

The idea that it might also be subversive for me now, given my fattitude, only enhances the appeal.

a fat ballet dancer from The Big Ballet

Any atypical resolutions to share?

Magazines are giving out advice on HOW NOT TO BE A TOTAL DISGUSTING PIG, YOU FUCKING SLOB.

Yessss.

Seriously, I wait for this all year. Like Christmas morning.

First up, from my lovely reader Maggie (thank you, Maggie, and wake up, please, I think Rod Stewart’s got something to say to you, and if you think that’s bad, try living with “Michelle, mah belle” for 30 years), comes Cosmo’s “How to Pig Out on Thanksgiving (But Without the Guilt.)”

And they pretty much give you a basic, average, low-fat kinda smallish meal on which you can totally PIG OUT, girlfriend!

Nary a mention of pie, mashed potatoes, gravy, or anything else that makes life worth living when you’re across the table from that beloved relative with the unfortunate spitting habit.

Because you should totally, totally feel guilty about food. Especially tasty food, and most especially on holidays where you’re supposed to be thanking your lucky fucking stars for even HAVING food in the first place.

Right-o, then.

Next up, we’ve got CBC’s “Go Healthy, Not Hungry for Holiday Eating.”

Which, you know, sounds like it’s going to be about moderation, and eating tasty-but-good-for-you food, and not trying to diet your way through two months’ worth of homemade cookies and seven-course meals…

…except it’s pretty much just a list of ways to avoid eating anything remotely holidayish. Plus some musty old behaviourist weight loss tricks.

Cause God forbid you should break out the real cream once a year! Or eat a meal that’s in any way different from your normal, weeknight meals during the motherfucking holidays.

And Holiday Eating Without the Guilt – or the Pounds brings the whole guilt aspect back into play. Because, really, what’s a holiday without the festive sprinkling of demoralizing shame?

The American Dietetic Association gets in on the act, too, with last year’s Health Tips for Holiday Eating, which is a litany of ways to avoid eating tasty food (including VERY SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS on how to dip your crudités in sauce), capped off with this inadvertent punchline: “Be realistic. Don’t try to lose weight during the holidays.”

All these various pieces of seasonal advice — and pretty much all nutrition advice, in general — seems to come down to one thing.

Which is:

Do I have a problem with that? Yes.

The problem I have with it is this little thing I’ve kinda-sorta hinted at in the past: intrinsic motivation.

Okay, story time.

A number of years ago, when I was a young housewife trying to figure out 1) how to lose weight, and 2) what the “right” way to eat was, I went to the library book sale and bought a well-used textbook on behaviour modification.

I read that thing cover to cover. Twice.

It was a revelation. It was the fulfillment of a long hoped-for dream, my original reason for taking psychology in 7th grade — to learn how to manipulate and control people.

(Yes, I was kind of a weird 12-year old. Shut up.)

And, in the same way Darwin believed that watching his baby son grow up was like watching a time-lapsed version of human evolution, I believe my experience there reflects something of the history of psychology. Because when psychology shifted from the primarily Freudian, psychodynamic approach into behaviourism — something with objectively observable phenomena, and ways to measurably change behaviour — I’m sure many a psychologist jumped in the air and clicked his heels at the prospect of actually being able to predictably influence another person’s actions. Of actually being able to, in effect, manipulate and control people.

So that’s what I set out to do, with my fat body.

Likewise, that’s what psychologists, nutritionists and doctors set out to do with their fat patients.

The only problem? By the late 1970s, even premier obesity researcher Albert Stunkard had to admit that it kind of wasn’t really working. I mean, the techniques all worked to some extent — everyone say this with me in unison — they all worked in the short-term.

But as we now know, over the long-term, homeostatic mechanisms, like weight, are pretty damn good at regulating themselves.

So good, in fact, that if you take the long view of things, measely attempts to control a homeostatic mechanism through behaviour modification seem…kind of ridiculous.

It’s like trying to keep a balloon submerged in a swimming pool — it’ll stay under for a little while, giving you the illusion of control. But if you lose focus for even a moment, or tire of the game even a little, that damn thing bobs right back up to where it started. Human efforts can’t override natural laws, not for long.

And the cost of eternal vigilance is, well, never again having a very good time at the pool.

But the seduction of control, no matter how short-lived, proved too much, and behaviour modification techniques didn’t stay limited to a few clinical applications. They sifted through the culture, into primary-school education, into smoking cessation programs, into diet tips and parenting advice and self-help books of every stripe…and, as you can easily see above, into diet tips.

Diet tips like “EAT FROM A SMALLER PLATE!!!” and “PUT YOUR FORK DOWN BETWEEN BITES!!!” and “REWARD YOURSELF FOR NOT EATING WITH A NICE HOT BATH!!!”

And, granted, some of these strategies might actually be useful for other applications (like, say, teaching someone to eat mindfully, or even dealing with binge eating), or else they can be used, as Ellyn Satter uses them, subversively as a way to teach people how to organize their eating.

But as a means to control people? To get us to eat less forever, ergo, to lose weight in the long term?

Nope. Doesn’t work.

If it did, none of us would be fat today. “Obesity” probably would have been “cured” by New Year’s Eve, 1969, and we’d all be living in some sort of fabulous, utopian, skinny future with perfect lives reflecting our perfect figures, and having no other problems whatsoever.

Ahem.

So, to get back to what I was saying about intrinsic motivation — why don’t attempts at behaviour modification work to get people to permanently lose weight?

Well, not only because it’s like trying to hold a balloon underwater for the rest of your life, but also because people are pretty fucking smart. We know when we’re being manipulated by external pressures. And when our behaviours are not rewarding in and of themselves, life kind of sucks.

And that’s not something anyone, short of a masochist, can sustain for very long.

It’s my belief that personal autonomy, agency, freedom, liberty, sovereignty — whatever you like to call it — is one of the strongest, most fundamental desires that drive us as human beings. Because, from a purely animal standpoint, not being in control of your own decisions and choices is potentially dangerous, even fatal. And it robs life of meaning — what’s the point of having your own life if someone, or something, else is calling the shots?

Alfie Kohn, whom I adore, has written a lot of books criticizing the educational system that relies on grades as a dual system of reward and punishment for students, presumably in the service of getting them to learn. He elucidates research which has shown that students’ learning actually suffers in the presence of external rewards and punishments, and that the quality of learning improves when those sticks and carrots are removed, and replaced instead with the students’ own genuine curiosity and desire to learn about the subject.

(Now, replace “Alfie Kohn” with “Linda Bacon” in the preceding paragraph, replace “educational system” with “weight loss industry”, “grades” with “weight”, and “learning” with “health”, and you’ll begin to see what I’m driving at.)

And, to plunge even deeper for a moment, what that comes down to is a basic philosophical choice about human nature: do you trust people to do the best we can for ourselves in our current circumstances, or do you not? Do you have a pessimistic or optimistic assumption about human nature?

This may sound awfully Anne Frankish of me. So be it — the world would be a better place if more of us were like her. And as such, I firmly believe in, and make the daily effort to reinforce to myself, an optimistic assumption about human nature.

I trust that we inherently want to learn, want to improve, want to be better, want to be kind and do good in the world, and want to take care of ourselves. When we fail, because we all do at some point, I believe it’s not due to some character flaw or moral shortcoming, but because there are barriers. Sometimes those barriers are insurmountable and we are never able to get over them, to realize our potential, which can be tragic. But what it’s not is proof that we are bad or inferior.

How does this relate to nutrition, and holiday dieting tips, and eating? Well, I believe that all of us genuinely want to eat well. We want to do good things for our health. We want to take care of our bodies, and, a lot of the time, we even know instinctively how to do these things. But there are a lot of pressures and barriers in this world that get in our way, that confuse us, that distract us and attempt to control us in counterproductive ways.

When it comes to coercion and intrinsic motivation, even the most dedicated person can be swayed from their objective by someone coming along and bombastically demanding that they do the very thing they were about to do anyway.

When I was a little kid, I remember when I’d be psyching myself up to clean my room — and, at that very instant, my mom (hi Mom!) would invariably come along and say, in a very mom-ish tone, “Clean that room!” Thus utterly killing any natural desire I had to clean that room.

I’m sure this experience is damn near universal.

Our need to preserve some scrap of autonomy, even in the form of counterproductive, cutting-off-one’s-nose-to-spite-one’s-face rebellion, is far stronger than the initial impulse to clean our rooms.

So, naturally, after my mom told me to, I didn’t. Not without a lot of whining and struggle, anyway.

When it comes to grades, or eating, or whatever, the bottom line is that telling us what to do doesn’t work — even if we wanted to do it anyway (and most of us do, if you take an optimistic view of human nature.) Telling people what to do doesn’t work because it robs us of our dearest possession — the freedom to make our own choices, and even our own mistakes.

That’s why, when it comes to eating, I’m a bit more like:

And that’s because I believe:

…we acknowledge that food is more than the mere sum of its constituent nutrients. We recognize that human bodies in health and illness are complex and contextual. Moreover, we recognize that the knowledge that enables us to understand health is socially, culturally, historically, and environmentally constructed.

Dietetics and the field of nutrition, being relatively new fields, are only just coming, in some ways, to reflect critically on their own place in the world: the places where we have succeeded as well as the places where we have failed, and our responsibility to social justice via the currency of health promotion.

(And by health promotion I mean the ENTIRETY of health promotion, as laid out in the Ottawa Charter, linked above — not merely rhetorical social marketing campaigns that sometimes consist of little more than ableist, boot-strapping propaganda.)

Aside from certain progressive sub-fields, such as food security and the emerging criticism of food production systems, I feel like nutrition and dietetics have been missing an important intellectual cousin, so to speak, in the form of critical analysis — using the knowledge and techniques available to us through many other fields of inquiry, such as philosophy, humanities, literature, art, and identity studies — of our own practices, beliefs and intentions.

To me, critical dietetics includes questioning definitions of health as they currently stand; questioning top-down approaches that rely on the hierarchy of practitioner and patient; being willing to shine light on where, exactly, dietetics has failed its own practitioners as well as patients; discovering where cultural bias has informed dietetic practice and public health policy, often without being questioned or challenged.

I’m sure you can see how important this is in the light of fat acceptance and Health at Every Size.

First rule of nutrition: eat or die.

Second rule of nutrition: there are no other rules.

This is not something you are likely ever to hear from someone in my field, since we make our living by thinking up rules and then pretending they have been whispered in our ears by God himself, but nevertheless — it’s the truth, and I’m saying it.

Except for those of us who observe religious and/or ethical restrictions on the foods we eat, there really are no rules about what to eat.

I know this is disquieting, perhaps even frightening to you.

But, in fact, there is no stone tablet on which Jenny Craig or Dr. Atkins or Michael Pollan or whoever the fuck has etched any immutable Laws of Diet.

There are no Laws of Diet.

There is only one Law, which is this — eat or die.

That’s it; that’s all.

I could stop there, but I know that would upset people. We will now proceed to the hand-holding and handkerchief-wringing.

The words “rule” and “law” imply a directive that is established by a supreme, governing body (or deity), and which is imposed, sometimes violently, upon a population of lesser subjects.

Or, in the case of physics, a natural inevitability which occurs predictably under a given set of conditions.

And, except for eat or die, nutrition simply doesn’t work that way.

Here’s where I state the obvious: it doesn’t work that way because people are different.

Do we have ideas about what type of food is good for people with certain conditions?

Yes.

Do we have ideas about what type of food is good for the general population without said conditions?

Yes.

Do we know that over- or under-consumption of dietary components (vitamins, minerals, water, carb, fats, and proteins) can cause certain health problems?

Yes.

Can we treat or ameliorate some physical conditions through the application or restriction of dietary components?

Yes.

Do we have certain social norms and cultural preferences about what types of food to eat and how?

Yes.

Do any of these constitute authoritative, immutable, unchangeable, and inarguable rules governing what each individual must eat, think, and do, forever and ever, amen?

No.

No, they don’t — especially not among people for whom eat or die never enters once into daily thought. (I’m referring to you there, person in front of your computer wearing your favourite sweater, with a nice warm mug of preferred beverage at your elbow, and at least a vague plan of what’s for dinner? that doesn’t involve begging, a food bank, or hunting and gathering.)

If you choose not to abide by any of these rather rough and exception-pockmarked guidelines of how might be a good idea to eat if you’re a certain person in a certain situation, do the Food Police arrive at your door to arrest you?

No. (Not yet, anyway.)

Do you die instantly? Highly unlikely, severe food allergies excepted.

Because? There are no rules. Sing it with me now:

there are no rules

there are no rules

there are no rules

there are no rules

there are no rules

Now then.

Are there ways to eat which will (potentially) optimize your functioning while minimizing (your immediate and long-term risks of) certain diseases?

Probably.

Are there ways to eat which will (possibly) undermine your functioning while increasing (your risk of) disease?

Probably.

And why do I say probably instead of striking out with a sexy, definitive Yes?

Because, while these are likely results, they are not inevitabilities. They are not laws. This is not a² + b² = c².

It’s more like a² + b² = c ^{probably, maybe, if x, y, and z are also present}.

Because — let’s go back to being obvious again — people are different.

If you’re shopping for laws, try here. Take a good look. Notice there’s not one piece of dietary advice among them.

Why am I telling you all this? So you’ll have absolutely no idea now what to do with your eating, and throw your hands up in despair and head for the nearest Cinnabon, because, fuck it, there are no rules?

No.

(Though if you’re tempted to do just that, I’ll totally understand.)

I’m telling you this because it is crucial that you be the one to decide.

I’m telling you this because you are in charge of this particular voyage, cap’n.

I’m telling you this because it is critical that humans operate on the basis of autonomy.

And I’m telling you this because you make the rules.

That Ultimate Authority? That guru, or nutritionist, or Oprah-certified megalomaniac you’ve been searching for all this time? Because you’re that desperate for someone to tell you what to do?

I’ll just let that sink in for a minute.

You’re either bouncing with delight, or sweatily clutching the sides of your chair right about now.

And here’s why: either you’ve accepted the idea that both your desires and your ability to appropriately respond to those desires are inherent, internal fixtures of yourself…

…or else you’re convinced that, deep down inside, you’re all id, and that you absolutely rely on some form of external superego to rein you in.

Because you believe you are bound, fated, to go too far if left to your own devices.

Because you believe you are absolutely, inherently, unreservedly, out of control.

And I’m here to tell you that you’re not.

I’m here to tell you that, as an adult person of the human persuasion, you’re inherently responsible, reasonable, and (basically) rational. If you’re alive, breathing, reading and processing this information, your body is (basically) functional.

You are not broken.

You are capable of this. You are capable of choosing what and how to eat.

You can do it on your own (or, if you have a history of disordered eating or certain health conditions, you can do it with just a little guidance that will teach you how to do it on your own.)

And if, right now, you feel like you just can’t, that is not your fault. You live steeped in a culture that tells you, over and over again, that you’re out of control and cannot be trusted. That your desires are bad, bad, bad, that your tastes are suspect. That you require rules, which, of course, often come oh-so-conveniently attached to someone selling you something.

You have become confused, which is only natural.

In fact, it’s entirely reasonable. Because you, and I, and all of us, have been targeted.

There are entire industries profiting from our belief that we are out of control and must be led by the nose. These industries collect massive amounts of money by making up rules that don’t exist and selling them to people who don’t need them.

Obviously, the propaganda works. And if it works on you, you needn’t feel alone — it works on all of us, myself included. A sustained, positive effort is necessary to work against it.

This is where normal, dare-I-say-it, healthy eating starts. Not with rules. Not with food guides.

But with media literacy.

With skeptical inquiry and critical thinking.

And, lastly, with this whole self-determination thing.

These are the fundamentals of navigating nutrition in a world where people (sadly, not of the charitably disinterested variety) are telling you what to do with your body 24/7.

Because when it comes to nutrition, there are as many rules as there are people, which is to say: there are no rules, only exceptions; there are no laws, only choices — all of which we are condemned to make for ourselves.

And I know that’s fucking scary.

But it’s also kind of awesome.

I recognize this is a pretty radical way to talk about nutrition, and likely to spark a lot of discussion, disagreement, and possibly confusion. There are caveats and important distinctions to be made — and, as always, I’m totally willing to hash all that out in comments.

I will now take the remainder of this post to qualify that statement.

Here’s what I mean: only in certain, limited contexts does WHAT a person eats play a direct role in their health. We’re talking deficiencies and diseases where the body’s storage and handling of nutrients changes radically.

In these situations, diet or nutrient supplementation needs to be controlled with varying degrees of precision, or, as we so often like to express it in this lovely fucked-up culture of ours, strictness.

I’m talking kidney disease. I’m talking diabetes. I’m talking recovery from cancer. I’m talking scurvy and beriberi and pernicious anemia — and plain old iron-deficiency anemia, too, for that matter. I’m talking inflammatory bowel disease, I’m talking recovery from trauma like surgery or burns or bad wounds or anything which renders you incapable of feeding yourself, thus requiring a tube and/or IV. I’m talking celiac disease and food allergies. I’m talking liver disease. I’m talking certain medications (like monoamine oxidase inhibitors) that don’t play well with certain foods.

And, as far as I’m concerned, these are the only types of situations in which WHAT a person eats takes primacy over HOW they eat it. And even then, in many cases, the WHAT is only just barely more important than the HOW.

Personally, though I’ve completed basic training in the WHAT at university, my interest has always been much stronger in the HOW.

The HOW we eat applies to all of us — disease or no disease, allergy or no allergy, nutritionist or pastry chef.

By way of explicit example: yesterday, I ate two cups of ice cream and a bunch of rainbow Twizzlers for lunch.

I wanted it, I had it, and I felt pretty good about it.

I functioned well physically for the rest of the day.

Later on, I had a bowl of bran cereal for dinner.

Was this balanced? Absolutely not. Was this “healthy” by popular standards? Not at all. Do I eat this way every day? Nope. Was it totally fine for me? Without reservation — yes.

Here’s what I believe: human diets (meaning in this case not “weight loss diets” but “everything one eats”) in their natural, un-fucked-up state are pretty chaotic. We eat a little one day, and a whole shit-ton another day. Using examples from my own life: we might eat a quart of strawberries per week in June, and then drink a quart of homemade Irish Cream in December.

The bottom line? If you’re not messed up around food in some way, it balances out over time.

This is part of the reason that dietetics is such an imprecise science. When you get a three-day food diary from a client and then analyze it for the nutritional breakdown, you’re only getting a snapshot of their entire diet.

Diets change seasonally and regionally by what’s available, they change by what’s on sale, by what you can afford, by what looks good to you on any given day. They change by your mood, since all human beings (since the beginning of time, probably) use food to comfort themselves or to celebrate.

And, lastly, yes — your diet also changes based on your changing physical requirements.

For the most part, a lot of our nutrition — which is to say, the molecules our cells use to work, and to produce the raw materials that comprise our bodies — is stored. And some of those stores last for decades. Or a lifetime.

For example, your skeleton? Yeah, it’s not just the handy-dandy coat rack that your organs hang from, and those chompers you use for donut-munching — it’s also your travelling calcium pantry for whenever your motor neurons need a bunch of calcium ions to work the chemical/electrical ju-ju that triggers a muscle contraction.

You know, so you can walk and talk and scratch your butt and stuff.

These uses for calcium are so effing important that your body is willing to raid that pantry — even weakening it to the point of physical collapse — so you can continue breathing at all costs, even if all your ribs crumble in the process. And that’s part of the reason we have such a GIANT FRIGGIN’ STORE OF CALCIUM in our bodies, enough that it would take years to use up entirely, even if you never ate another milligram of calcium again.

Now. I’m not suggesting that you should stop eating calcium and watch what happens, cause I can tell you right now — your bones are going to weaken as your body raids the pantry, and that’s not good for you. But I am saying that our bodies are pretty well set up to survive, even without food, for quite a while. (And, luckily, calcium is present in so many foods that it can be difficult to avoid.)

We’ve got failsafe upon failsafe upon idiot-proof failsafe working in our favour. And these’ve developed the hard way, by trial and error over hundreds of thousands of years.

So, if you’re like me and, I’m going to guess, like 99% of the people who:

• Have access to the computers and the internet and the basic literacy skills required to read this blog,
• AND if you have adequate access to clean drinking water and enough food so that you’re not constantly hungry,
• AND your food’s safety is regulated by an imperfect but basically functioning agency intended to prevent a huge and lucrative population of tax-payers and stuff-consumers from keeling over dead by the swath,
• AND you don’t have some disease or injury requiring direct and aggressive therapeutic nutrition intervention, then

YOU’RE GOING TO BE FINE.

You can stop obsessing about WHAT to eat now. You’re welcome.

Okay, so I know it isn’t that easy. Sure would be nice if it were, though, eh?

We’ll talk about the HOW next time.

Until then, please bitch me out or correct my horrendously simplified depictions of complex human physiology in comments.

So, I’m working on this thing I like to call my Unified Theory of Kicking Ass. What that means is, I’m reading and learning stuff about normal eating and nutrition and how people change their behaviour.

I have a pretty decent understanding of this stuff already, since I’ve almost finished my nutrition degree, but I’m looking for something more.

Something that will really help people. Something that will totally kick ass.

The thing is, there are a lot of useful theories around. There’s intuitive eating, and eating competence, and demand feeding, and health at every size, and various non-diet approaches to good nutrition. And we’re going to discuss them all on this blog.

They’re based on solid evidence. They work. And a lot of people really, really like the idea of putting them to work in their own lives.

But that can be really, really hard to do.

I know because I went through it myself.

I had a serious Dieting Incident that really messed me up. It took me five years to relearn to eat, and move, and feel normal with my body again.

I’m not perfect by any means, but I’ve reached a place that is, apparently, enviable: I feel comfortable around food.

I don’t think of food as “good” or “bad.” I don’t see my weight as a reflection of my character. I combine what tastes good and what feels good without a lot of thought. I mostly get hungry at regular times, and I mostly eat until I feel just right. My weight is stable, finally.

I’m cool with food. And I’m pretty cool with my body, too.

Five years ago, I literally thought I would never get to this place. I cried just thinking about it. (Yeah, I’m emotional like that.)

But I’m here, and it’s every bit as awesome as I’d hoped. And the reason I’m writing about it is because, after being involved in the Fatosphere, and reading so many discussions about food and intuitive eating and whatnot, I know there are tons of people out there who feel like I did — that normal eating will never happen for them.

Well, I think it can. And I’m here to help.

Normal eating is what we’re born to do — and I truly believe we can relearn how to do it, if it’s necessary. (And it is.)

So, you’re here. I’m over the moon you’re here, because I really need your help with this.

I’ll tell you what I figure out along the way. I’ll bounce ideas off you. In return, I hope you’ll give me your suggestions, your thoughts, your stories and your support.

Help me develop this thing, this Unified Theory, and I’ll be your biggest fan. Seriously. How could I not?

These are the fat acceptance zealots — using fat acceptance and ‘in your face’ fat imagery and messages in order to shock the world into accepting their fat as meaning they are valid, worthy and ultimately just as healthy as the next person.

“And really fat people are valid and worthy, but as healthy as the would be if their hearts weren’t beating much harder in order to accommodate an extra 100lbs?

“No — this simply cannot be.”

–Weighted Long Enough

This is the writing of a woman who was once passionately involved in fat acceptance. Presumably, she still believes in basic tenets like, you know, appearance-based discrimination is wrong. But she got to a point where she felt her fat was detrimental to her health.

Now, I wouldn’t presume to argue with a person about their own experience, except to say that I believe directly addressing comorbidities associated with fatness is probably more effective than addressing the fatness itself, given that there are precious few (read: NO) permanent, safe methods of fat reduction.

But still, a person is allowed to be the expert on their own experience. If she feels that fat was causing her health problems, who the hell am I to contradict her?

This is where I believe Health At Every Size connects with the fat movement. The fat movement, as I see it, is primarily about politics and human rights, and well it should be. These are the critical, the most important, factors determining our experiences as fat people. But because fat is inextricably bound up in matters of health, at least from the perspective of our oppressors, the HAES component is a critical tangent of our movement.

See, the thing is, people who are involved in fat acceptance don’t always seem to fully understand HAES, and this concerns me. It concerns me because it is a useful tool that many of us seem content to toss by the wayside. This woman is a prime example of not understanding the basic structure of the HAES philosophy…the first being that “Health At Every Size” means health at every size for the population, not necessarily the individual.

If you accept the theory of set-point, as many fat acceptance advocates do, then you realize that an individual body has a preferred level of adiposity, for which a handy (though imperfect) proxy is body weight. This not only means that maintaining a weight lower than set-point is not good for you, but also that maintaining a weight much higher than your body’s natural set-point range is also not good for you.

The thing is, despite what the BMI dorks seem to think, set-points, or body weights, or body compositions, naturally come in a wide variety. I like to think of this as one way our species protects itself against extinction by one poorly-timed famine, epidemic, or ice-age. If all our bodies operated identically, the human race could easily be wiped out in one fell swoop, because we’d all react in exactly the same way to dramatic environmental changes.

So there is variety in size. There is variety in nutrient requirements as well…not only for kcalories, and macronutrients like fat, protein, and carbohydrates, but also for vitamins and minerals. Now I know those RDAs and the popular multivitamin supplements and the Food Guide Pyramid and everything seem to suggest that we all have the same requirements, dependent on things like age and sex, but it’s not so. Those things are basically educated guesses on how we can catch most of the population, within its wide range of requirements, so that nutrient deficiencies are no longer widespread. There was a time when things like scurvy and rickets were near-epidemic, so the usefulness of these tools can’t be overstated. But they do not represent some magical, unequivocal number that super-smart scientists have determined to be the perfect amount of X nutrient for everyone in the whole world.

If you doubt this, I would like to turn your attention to the development of the DRIs, which are, basically, a more complex and comprehensive form of the RDAs. There were huge debates, for example, over the recommended intake of calcium. Calcium! A nutrient we all take for granted as being a set-in-stone, God-given prescription for strong teeth and bones! Well, the goddamn scientists argued so much over the RDA for calcium that they never came to consensus. So, yes, you read that right, there is no RDA for calcium at this time. Instead, they came up with a rough guesstimate (the AI), from which specific recommendations cannot be extrapolated.

Okay. Phew. Sorry for the Nutrition 101 lecture. I just wanted to illustrate my point that, if we can’t even come up with solid numbers for the entire population on something as basic as calcium, why do we assume that ideal weight can be so easily established?

It can’t. Just as it is not logistically feasible to thoroughly test and document the nutrient requirements of each individual across the entire population, it is logistically infeasible, and as yet IMPOSSIBLE (since we are nowhere near understanding all of the complex mechanisms that influence body weight), to determine every single person’s healthiest weight. For practitioners of the HAES model, the definition of ideal weight is this: the weight you maintain when you are eating nutritiously and getting adequate physical activity. Not some arbitrary, shame-inducing number on a goddamn table picked out by a bigot like Walter Willett. Sorry, but for all you BMI-lovers out there — them’s the fucking breaks.

So, back to this woman. Is it possible that she maintained a weight that was above her own healthiest weight? YES. Does this mean that anyone else maintaining the same weight and body composition at similar height, age, and gender is also above their healthiest weight? NO.

Health at every size, as I have said approximately 7,386 times on this journal, does not mean that one individual can be healthy at every size. Cause you can’t. You’ve got a basic range, and the range may shift a bit during different stages of life, but you cannot run up and down the huge spectrum of possible body weights, like a pianist running his hands over the keys from lowest to highest, and expect to be perfectly healthy at each step.

It is perfectly possible that, by an individual definition, this woman was ‘overweight.’ The problem, though, with focusing on weight, even if it does prove to be causing health problems for a person (and this is rarely, if ever, proven), is that not only is there no way of predetermining an individual’s ideal weight, there ain’t much we can do about the weight anyway. Weight-loss treatments, from drugs to diets, are dismal failures. GI surgeries are risky and do not have a lot of long-term research to back them up (I won’t even mention the anal incontinence, or possible vitamin deficiences that can cause irreversible neurological damage. Oh wait, I just did. Sorry.) Even people trying to gain weight have some difficulty.

So it’s a bit of a bind, isn’t it? And even if someone buys fully into the political aspects of fat liberation (there, I said it, fat liberation), the health argument is just sitting there, waiting for them to have a bad day, or to get tired of being fat (which is a very real possibility in this culture), or to get sick in a way that a doctor would readily attribute to ‘obesity.’ Under these circumstances, it is very easy to see why even an ardent supporter of the politics of fat liberation might go and do a thing like have weight-loss surgery, or start a reducing diet, or take the newest FDA-approved fat-person extermination pill — I mean, ‘obesity treatment’ — and maybe start to side, just a little, with the attendant propaganda. Because cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

This is the where Health At Every Size becomes not only a useful tangent to fat liberation, but an essential component.

Listen: there is an alternative. We need not be extremists on either end of the spectrum of fattitude — one being the end that says “I am healthy no matter what” and the other being the end that says “I’ll take the Roux-en-Y with a side order of Meridia” — because, all-too-often in my experience, two extreme ends of any spectrum eventually meet in the same, frighteningly psychotic person. Like radio shock-jocks who go from an ultra-liberal upbringing to ultra-conservative vitriol in the brief time it takes to experience one adolescent disillusionment. Like the woman who writes about being “involved in the fat acceptance movement as a way to stay in an illusion that one can be extremely fat and healthy.”

Thing is, there are extremely fat and healthy people out there. That’s how the fucking bell curve works. No, you cannot be healthy at every size. But we can. Here’s how:

You eat well. This is not a moralistic determination, nor is it the same from person to person. There are general suggestions that most people can safely follow, but the most important is to learn to listen to your gut. Try to resuscitate the cues that a lifetime of dieting and an eating-disordered culture have probably killed. If you can’t do it on your own — and many can’t; it’s hard — get someone to help you. Size-friendly therapists and dietitians exist, and many of them believe in an empowering philosophy of health promotion, which in English means: you get to make your own choices. You get to figure out what is best for you. Because even scientists can’t tell you how much goddamn calcium you need.

You move well. This is also hard to figure out, and I’m currently doing battle with it myself. Kell has some good ideas. Like we all have an appetite for food, I think we all have an appetite for movement. Think back to the way you might’ve played as a kid, the times you got restless from sitting still for too long. Try to remember a time when being sweaty and out of breath meant you were having a fucking awesome time (if you’re lucky enough to have such memories.) Think back on those times, and try to come up with creative ways to have fun now. REAL fun, like the kind of fun you had when all you needed was a hot day and a sprinkler in the yard, or a jump-rope, or a piece of chalk and a stretch of concrete. When did adult movement become so boring and medicinal? Who says you need to have ‘proper footwear’ or a gym membership or all sorts of ugly spandex clothing in order to get a little hot and sweaty? If you’re into that kind of thing, cool; you have that many more options than the rest of us who hate all that shit. And if you hate it, take heart: so do I. But I won’t be disingenuous and pretend that physical activity has no bearing on our well-being. Neither will I deny that it’s more than possible to go out and find ourselves a bit of fun.

Third, you learn to deal with your body. Whatever size it’s at, whatever health conditions you might be facing, whatever colour it is, however big your butt is, or small your tits are, or anything. You take what God fucking gave you, and you make the best of it. You do the treatment for any health problems by focusing directly on the problem itself, not by buying into the cultural fantasy that, if you lose weight, you’ll magically lose any physical and/or mental illnesses along with it.

By doing this, your body is going to change in whatever way is best for it to change. You don’t get to control that. It might mean gaining weight, in the form of fat or muscle, and feeling self-conscious. But we have tools to deal with that, because that is what this whole movement is about: creating a society where people of all sizes can feel reasonably welcome.

It might mean losing weight, and you might feel guilty, like you’re betraying your fat liberation buddies. But you’re not betraying anyone. A real betrayal would be to go and swallow shit like “I wanted to believe I could be as healthy as a person whose weight didn’t literally drag them down. This was my greatest lie – a lie that allowed me to get more and more fat, until I’ve now reach the point of do or die.” Betrayal would be to believe that, in order to be healthy, you must first focus on changing your body to a socially-enforced ideal…in order, presumably, to become ‘deserving’ of proper health- and self-care. Betrayal would also be to totally deny the fact that eating and moving well will have a positive impact on your health, and that, if you want to, you deserve those things as much as anyone else.

Most likely, no matter how your weight changes, your basic health indicators are going to improve. Your blood pressure is probably going to improve, as well as your blood cholesterol, and your ability to use insulin and regulate your own blood sugar. These are much more accurate proxies for health than body size could ever be. And if things get worse, it’s a sure sign that something else is going on and you need to see a doctor. But for most people, you can bank on the fact that eating and moving well and treating your body with respect is only going to make things better, whether or not you get bigger or smaller in the process.

Listen: as surely as we are oppressed by systematic external discrimination, we collude in our own oppression by not demanding the care we deserve from health professionals, and by not caring for ourselves in the way we deserve. And don’t you believe for a MINUTE that you have to submit to ‘their’ idea of health and self-care, or the health meritocracy. First and foremost, all of this is a choice. It is optional. But in order for that choice to even exist, we have to have access to good information, and we have to really believe that we deserve to be cared for. I have a sneaking suspicion that an internalized sense of inferiority drives a lot of our rebellion against ideas of self-care and health at every size. And I totally understand. I get panicky, too, when I entertain ideas of ‘making healthy choices’ and what-not because, more often than not in our deranged, pathological society, ‘making healthy choices’ is code for ‘submitting to coercion.’ I know. I know. But we can’t let the difficulty of the fight let us stop fighting it.

There are size-friendly health professionals out there. There are dietitians and therapists and doctors in a number of specialties who are on our side. We definitely need more of them, and that’s another thing we’re working on, but we should be taking advantage of the ones we’ve got. (Check out Stef’s Fat Friendly Health Professionals page.) We also need better resources for general information on health and nutrition — in print, on the internet, on TV — stuff that comes from a size-positive perspective (hell, even a size-neutral perspective would be an improvement over what we’ve got now.)

Pattie pointed out that a lot of the HAES terminology is being co-opted by forces that are anything but size-friendly. This scares me, and I think one of the reasons they’ve been able to do this is that HAES has not yet come into its own. One of the things we’ve got to fight for is to make HAES work, and work in the way we want it to. We can’t let it revert into yet another health-fascist approach that’ll only find creative new ways to blame and marginalize people in the name of health.

Pattie also talked about how “the personal is political.” With the way things currently are, what could be more political than for people to stand up, demand quality health-care, and to make truly free and informed choices about their health, regardless of what size they are? In a true HAES framework, this would never result in dividing us into ‘good people’ and ‘bad people.’ It would simply give people of all sizes the information and support they need to make real choices — something we don’t currently have, since most of our resources are hopelessly tainted by their association with “Brand Thin” — and its mandate would be to then respect those choices, whether they might be classified by the majority as ‘healthy’ or not.

If we’re fighting a war here (I’ll indulge in some militaristic language, since everyone else seems so eager to compare fat people to terrorists and to declare ‘war on obesity’), we need our troops to be as strong as possible. And that doesn’t mean conforming to some arbitrarily defined, absolutist notion of what ‘health’ is. To me, health is a matter of making autonomous choices, and having the resources necessary to inform those choices. Though we may all disagree on which behaviours are healthy or not, I think we can all agree that losing once-fervent supporters to the health meritocracy does not strengthen our numbers. Having an alternative that emphasizes good information, respectful practitioners, and a culture of individual sovereignty will.