Author: Michelle

  • Diet culture and immortality.

    I know it’s been quiet (TOO quiet) around here lately. What can I say? I’ve been working my face off. I did write something for The Atlantic, though, after a good long period of grumpy hermiting. Here’s a good chunk, in case you want a sample before committing to a click: The act of ingestion…

  • You don’t have to figure out the universal truth of nutrition.

    When I speak with clients, a theme that often comes up is the question of what is true and what is false in nutrition. Yesterday, an article about the demonization of fat made headlines, and along with it, whipped up that familiar confusion about nutrition and people asking a very familiar question: what is actually…

  • Good food, bad food, and subversive food combining.

    The idea that there are universally “good” foods and “bad” foods is an old one, ancient even. There are traces of it in Leviticus, though the way the concept was used then is perhaps different from how we use it now.* Given what we know about clinical nutrition, that sometimes a startling mix of foods…

  • I ate frozen food for four months so I could do trauma therapy.

    A while ago, I embarked on the difficult and strangely exhausting project of closing a gaping internal wound, the type many of us walk around with our entire lives, in constant pain and in constant denial that the wound exists: I went through trauma therapy. Along with it, I spent four months or so eating…

  • Basic mammal maintenance, or How to be nice to yourself.

    Continuing on the theme of childhood neglect, my nonscientific gut-check tells me that if people were mean or indifferent or unable to care for you while you were a kid, you might lack the skills to care for yourself as an adult. This can lead to a place of acute suffering. It can also make…