If we want to curb weight gain individually we need to start thinking collectively.

Let’s start with the obvious. All bodies regardless of size deserve dignity. That’s not pandering, it’s basic fairness. Being fat is not a personal or moral failure, it’s an outcome. One poorly understood by most people.

What I have to say below isn’t a missive on thin being ideal, and everything else isn’t good enough. A healthy weight looks different on everyone and I say ‘vive la différence’.

It’s equally true that the health risks of excess weight are real. Chronic, inflammatory diseases fueled by sugar and packaged foods are on the rise. These diseases cause incredible damage to people’s…

Clean slates are a fun idea. Start fresh, throw out the bad.

Who doesn’t love that glittery horizon?

Here’s another way to think about it: that’s nurturing a fantasy.

Lasting change evolves. It’s a simultaneous process of growing good thinking, doing the emotional work to allow honesty in, and keeping your commitments to yourself.

It’s one step at a time. It’s gentleness. It’s respect for the self.

Diets can only ever end one way, with you no longer dieting.

Then what?

Have you created boundaries, worked on self-talk, employed good tools, deepened your understanding of behavior, created rules, pursued joyful movement, and focused on your nourishment practice?

One way or another you…

Is this how you speak to yourself?

• observing body parts and finding them gross
• catching yourself in the mirror and wishing you weren’t unattractive
• inspecting other people and judging yourself as lacking
• repeating word for word unkind things said to you

It seems obvious that if you said these things to someone else, the effect would be hugely wounding. Yet, somehow, it’s perfectly acceptable inside the confines of our own minds.

Well, it isn’t.

Here’s the thing, losing weight doesn’t fix detrimental self-talk, and it’s very difficult to lose the weight for good while employing it.

Sit with that for…

The short answer is that we’ve allowed diet companies to define the problem for us. That’s great for selling you a narrow (read: incomplete and potentially harmful) product, but does little to help you understand the complexities so you can address them.

What are the complexities, you ask?

Your incoming self-regard. The assumption is losing weight will fix self-esteem, but that just isn’t the case. High self-regard is needed to persist towards a healthy weight. Diets can’t help with that.

Your lack of time. Weight loss for life requires time and space to practice self-care. …

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self-care is creating calm in the body

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Is Your Eating Disordered?

I’m well into teaching my first group of ‘not another diet’ members, and it’s a fascinating experience. It’s of course, incredibly rewarding to be of genuine help to people as they work on changing their lives.

A benefit to me is the thinking teaching sparks. It’s a real feedback loop. I have to work hard to connect things that seem unrelated but are critical to achieving and keeping a healthy weight.

One is the widely misunderstood idea of self-care.

It’s been sold to us as an indulgence, something to buy, a treat outside the confines of your obligations. …

First of all, you are the product of evolution, not your own wishes.

Secondly, these foods you have a love/hate relationship with are designed to short-circuit your hunger. They create the kind of internal chaos evolution has no defense for.

There isn’t a way, short of a lobotomy to create a scenario where this food is in your line of sight and you won’t want it. I’m not saying there is zero agency in a decision to eat a donut, but nowhere as much as you think. …

Most popularly marketed ‘health’ products are disordered eating you have the privilege of paying for.

I don’t diet. Not ever. But, I do speak to people who do or are always trying to get their eating under control. More than the particulars of any one situation, what I invariably notice is a disordered approach to food.

Broadly, it’s toggling between cycles of eating too little and eating too much. It can show up like this:

• long periods in the day without eating, extreme hunger later
• taking on strict diets while simultaneously overindulging elsewhere
• speaking about food in the current jargon…