It's December and I'm eating the chocolate
And the candied nuts and the sugar cookies and the panettone and the wine and the
Happy December friends,
What would this month be without massive amounts of conflicting messages about food? Bake all the things! Spend your blips of free time making these cookies! Indulge! Come up with a strategy so you don’t eat all the things! 5 tips to avoid holiday weight gain! Get on your Peleton!
My relationship to food and eating, like most women, is complicated: I’m a woman in this culture who eats food. I’m a woman in my 40’s who spies menopause on the horizon and whose changing body often seems out of my control. I’m a professional do-er of “food stuff” (waves hands in an indeterminate way) who is often surrounded by food for work. And I’m someone who, while never being thin, has internalized messages for 35 years or more about the social capital and moral authority one accrues by being thin in this world.
And as I explained to my friend Molly Robson, a weight-neutral nutritionist and intuitive eating facilitator, my inner monologue about food and eating is a little like the messages making so much noise at this time of year. Yes I want to eat the crusty bread and the good butter and drink the delicious wine. Yes I want another cookie. No I don’t want to gain more weight. No I don’t like the way my arms look in that picture. Yes I wish my body were smaller.
It’s exhausting.
I imagine many of you have similar conversations, with yourself or with others - and that the volume may be getting turned up as we move through this demanding month of the year where so much of our social time is centered around food. So I wanted to share some of this chat with Molly, who helps her clients heal their relationships with food and eating with the goal of moving away from a fat-phobic mindset and into one of what she calls body liberation - a freedom from worrying about the size of our bodies.
Molly started in nutrition after she resolved some health issues by changing her diet. She felt so empowered by the positive health change that she pursued a nutrition certificate and began seeing clients to help them understand the relationship between food and health. Many clients came to her because they wanted to lose weight, and she helped them by designing meal plans and suggesting elimination diets.
About two years ago, things shifted. Hearing about how restrictive eating plans - like the elimination diets she’d suggested to clients - could do long-term health damage, and starting to understand terms like orthorexia - an obsessive relationship with “clean eating” - led Molly to explore the concept of wellness more critically.
The deep dive changed her focus. She went from passing along a once-clear sense of what it meant to eat healthy - “plant-based diet, eliminating ‘inflammatory’ foods, all those buzzwords,” she says, to seeing how diet culture was informing our approach and understanding of wellness. “What we think of as wellness is just another form of dieting, without that label,” she says.
Diets aren’t all that - diet culture reduces people’s worth to their size and creates unhealthy relationships with food. Plus, they don’t work. Instead of taking external, prescribed cues about what to eat with the goal of being smaller, more of us should be listening to our own bodies about what we want to eat, while interrogating the idea that being smaller should be the goal, she says. AKA intuitive eating - a concept that I get, in theory.
“Intuitive eating is harder work than going on a diet,” she says. “People are scared of intuitive eating, because of the threat of weight gain - and that comes out of our culture, which is inherently fat-phobic.”
Instead of creating an eating strategy for the holiday party circuit or starting an elimination diet in the New Year, she says, we should be exploring the parts of our identity that reject weight gain and fatness. How did we come to believe that thin bodies are better bodies? Where do those messages come from? Where and from whom did I receive those messages? Once you sort that out, she says, “you can start to explore your body’s needs independent of those outer influences.”
In other words, intuitive eating requires you to dig into tough self-work and check your biases against yourself and others. But the outcome, says Molly, is “a freedom from worrying” about whether certain foods are going to make you lose or gain weight. Sounds juicy, right?
In the meantime, there are many feasts and parties and gatherings between us and 2020. Molly’s advice? First, notice where diet culture is embedded in our day-to-day lives, especially during the holidays. “Once you see it, she says, you can’t unsee it.” And then, don’t stress about the food.
“This is a time of year where food is everywhere,” she says. “It’s a part of all the celebrations, all the family gatherings - and that’s ok. It’s one time of year, it’s a special time of year, the food is special - just enjoy it.”
Word. I’ll see you by the cheese ball.
I loved talking with Molly - and I love her Instagram feed, especially the stories, where she shares a steady narrative about diet culture, body positivity, and intuitive eating. Thanks Molly!
Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy holidays!
PS - I almost cried listening to this story of how scientists are using sound to help restore the health of coral reefs.