Do men get eating disorders too? Long regarded as a disease of girls and women, people sometimes don’t realize that men can also be affected by eating disorders. Aaron and I talked to Andrew Whalen of The Body Image Therapy Center, a treatment center for those with eating disorders, substance abuse issues and self-harm disorders. They also happen to specialize in eating disorders for men, and that’s the subject of this podcast. Andrew shares his personal story of suffering with an eating disorder, body shame and muscle dysmorphia.

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Tired of hating your body? Get my free guide, 6 Quick Strategies to Improve Your Body Image Now.

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Ready to get help with your eating problems? Schedule a chat with me and we’ll figure out exactly what you need.

Have you checked out our latest Dietitians Unplugged episode? Aaron and I — and a lot of people we know — were pretty excited to hear fat being portrayed in a reasonably neutral fashion on the radio (considering how it’s usually portrayed in the media) when NPR’s This American Life aired an episode called Tell Me I’m Fat. So we did what we love to do, naturally: we got together and had a conversation  about it. What did you think? Did you like the TAL episode? Think it was lacking? Leave a comment below – I’d love to hear what you thought about both the TAL episode and our episode.

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We’re getting closer to our goal of 20,000 downloads by the end of July! As of this moment, we need 2436

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I’ve noticed lately that I’ve been experiencing an emotion that hasn’t been entirely natural for me for most of my life…I’ve been happy. Happy and completely content, both with my life and myself. I’ve felt happiness before, but it often felt tainted with mild-but-persistent anxiety.

It has only been very recently, when I’ve begun to embrace who and how I really am and the gifts I have to share that life started feeling really good. When I shucked off the expectations I thought the world had for me and just went with my own expectations…my life really started to open up.

And yet, I am as fat as I was before I started my first diet. We are frequently told fat people can’t be happy with themselves, so how is this possible? (Sarcasm meter: 10/10)

Looking back before my first diet, I cannot recall truly disliking my body. I knew that society saw my body as “wrong” but I didn’t have problems looking at myself in photos, and I didn’t look in the mirror and think “yuck.” I went out dancing a lot back then and remember feeling pretty awesome when I rocked an outfit I really liked. However, I went on a diet anyway because as much as I liked myself, I became tired of being the butt of society’s joke. I didn’t want to be seen as “wrong” any longer. When I began to lose weight rapidly and relatively easily, it just reinforced the diet mentality for me. When people around me started to congratulate me on my new body, I was hooked.

So in fact it was after I had lost weight that I learned to hate my former fat body.

When you lose weight and everyone tells you how awesome you suddenly look, that is some seriously addictive mojo. Now you know: before, not so good. Now, good. I decided to blame my former fatness for all that was wrong with my life before: the lack of love, the lack of self-esteem, the choice of bad hairstyles, feeling invisible. Since I had been able to “fix” the fat problem, it did not fully occur to me that this was actually a societal problem and not an individual one — that everyone knows the message that fat bodies are worth less and just maybe that negatively impacts our experience in the world.

I got into a relationship that I was pretty sure would not have happened had I remained fat. On the one hand I was relieved that I was no longer fat and could be in relationships, yet on the other hand, I was angry that my romantic life depended on something so trivial as my weight and appearance (little did I know, it didn’t have to). This, I guess, is what is meant by cognitive dissonance. It was hard to get relaxed enough in my life to fully feel happiness or contentment in any meaningful way.

Many years later, when I started to regain my lost weight after giving up dieting, I was disconcerted to say the least. I had somehow convinced myself that this was not possible or likely, and yet there it was – a straight shot back to my starting weight, pre-dieting. I was unhappy but also determined that I would make peace with my body and even try to like it. I was determined I would not let fat bigotry dictate how I felt about myself.

In the past few years, after a LOT of rumination on how fucked up this societal fatphobia bigotry bullshit is, I’ve come closer than ever before to accepting and liking my body, and feeling right and relaxed in it. Knowing that my body didn’t need to be my part- or even full-time job has freed me up to pursue my career (which, ironically, is about food and nutrition – but not about my body or my nutrition) and magic started happening. I finally garnered the confidence to start this blog and a podcast; I’ve been offered guests spots on other podcasts (check them out here, here, and here), I’ve been published in a magazine, I’m getting offered speaking opportunities, and soon I’ll be starting my own business and helping those who need it to find peace with food – essentially my dream job (more info on that to come in future posts) . I discovered that being loved did not depend on the size and shape of my body. On top of that, I’ve met a whole community of amazing people who also don’t buy the fat=bad thin=good BS we are sold on a daily basis.

When I was thin, I thought I should have been happy, but I really wasn’t. When I was thin, I longed for a career that I was excited and serious about, but I was too self-conscious to pursue. When I was thin, I wanted my relationships to feel like they were based on more than how well I approximated the cultural beauty ideal. When I was thin, I wanted to feel relaxed and unworried in my body, but I couldn’t. I got all that, but not when I was thin. That all happened when I got fat again.

I can’t guarantee this outcome for anyone else, and I can only speak to my own experience. My fatness is not someone else’s fatness. But I do think it’s important that we challenge the myths that the diet industry and society sells to us which few of us profit from.

We might not be happy with ourselves when we lose weight; we might not be unhappy if we are fat. As much as we are able, let’s try to determine our own levels of happiness for ourselves, and then, hopefully, also change the world.

Dietitians Unplugged Ep 10 – Be Your Own Beloved with Vivienne McMaster:

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The picture I used this week was taken during Vivienne’s Beloved Beginnings class. I hope you’ll join Aaron Flores and I for the Be Your Own Beloved 30 day class starting July 1. I have had so much fun in this class so far. I’ve started to learn to hush my inner critic and see myself with compassion. I can’t recommend it enough – and I don’t even get paid to say that.

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Last week was a bad body week for me. You know the kind I’m talking about. Suddenly the outfit I was totally happy with in the AM felt all wrong by the PM; I had massive bloaty-belly syndrome for most of the week (classic stress response for me); and I felt my body was taking on proportions and shapes that were more alien than human (body dysmorphia learned from years of dieting in full effect). I just wanted to be at home, hiding in my sweats, not thinking about what I looked like, calming my tummy. Yep, even the most ardent of body-acceptance advocates can have a bad body day (or days, in my case).

Hey, it happens. I’ve accepted my body, mentally and physically uncomfortable days and all. I have so much appreciation for the process of learning to accept my body as is and what that acceptance has given me. Thinner-and-afraid former me wouldn’t be doing what I am doing now –  putting myself way the hell out there with this blog, hosting a podcast, and writing for a magazine – because I was so afraid of losing even one ounce of acceptance from others. It’s much harder to take big leaps when you’re in constant fear-mode.

So it’s nice to not care nearly as much about acceptability to others. But I am still my harshest critic. I hide a lot in photos for fear of what my own personal inner critic will say. I sometimes even hide from mirrors in public (I’m completely cool with my home mirror, don’t ask me how that works), or my reflection in windows.  I’m still not entirely familiar with this new, non-dieted body, and I could use some help.

That’s why I’m excited about this week’s Dietitians Unplugged Podcast. Aaron and I interviewed the very cool, very awesome Vivienne McMaster of Be Your Own Beloved. Vivienne helps others learn to love themselves through photography. I love taking photos, so this is something I can totally get behind. We were both so into this idea that we decided to join Vivienne’s July 1 class, and we’re inviting our listeners to join along with us. Let’s go on this awesome body-love journey together.

Enjoy this week’s podcast. It was one of our favorites. And hope to see you in the next Be Your Own Beloved class!

Listen to Dietitians Unplugged Episode 10 – Be Your Own Beloved with Vivienne McMaster here:

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Aaron & I explore the “Beach Body” message and body image issues so many of us struggle with.  We share some of our own experiences with accepting our bodies and why we advocate for “body neutrality” rather than just “body positivity”.  Lastly, they issue very special challenge that involves embarrassing-yet-hilarious consequences for your hosts…will you be up for it?

You can also listen on iTunes and Libsyn! Like our Facebook page to get all the latest news on our podcast and other non-diet podcasts! And if you like our podcast, please give us a rating and review on iTunes – this will help more people find us!

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Do you hate “exercise?” So do we! Sort of…Episode 7 is here, and in it, Aaron and I talk about how, after making peace with food, we’ve also made peace with our relationship to moving our bodies. We also talk about fitness trackers, our different approaches to getting activity in our lives, and why we actually hate the word “exercise!”

Here is The Atlantic magazine infographic we referred to during the podcast.

You can also listen on iTunes and Libsyn! Like our Facebook page to get all the latest news on our podcast and other non-diet podcasts! And if you like our podcast, please give us a rating and review on iTunes – this will help more people find us!

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One of the most common reactions to what I write about learning to accept our bodies at the weight they are and taking a Health at Every Size® approach is, “But I’m not at the weight I’m supposed to be…I should be XXX pounds because that’s what I was [when I was my healthiest weight; when I was an athlete in college; before I had three kids; before I developed this knee condition; when I ran marathons all the time].” I totally get it. Lots of us have that utopian time in our lives when our weight was perfect (or so we think in hindsight), our health was optimal, and we were going to live forever…and we so desperately want to get back to it.

Even when, intellectually, we know that dieting doesn’t work, that weight loss is typically short-term (<3 years) at best, that even when our own personal experiences tell us that previous weights were not sustainable, we resist in accepting this. I recently read a great term for this: data resistance, meaning no matter how clear the science is on this topic, people still want to believe that long-term weight loss is possible for more than a tiny fraction of people. The propensity for magical thinking is strong in us humans, and weight is no exception.

Let’s roll with it, then. Maybe you aren’t at your optimal weight. Do you want to diet to try to get there? Is that something that has been sustainable for you in the past? If not, why do you think things would be different this time? What happens if, despite all your efforts, you never get anywhere close to your desired weight? How do you live your life then? What happens if the weight you are now is your weight for the rest of your life? I think it’s worth it to have this conversation with yourself, so you at least have some options.

There are also important things to know before you decide what to do next. First of all, despite what we have been told ad nauseam by the diet industry, your weight is not really within your control, at least in the long term. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you are well aware by now that intentional weight loss has a 90-95% failure rate over the long haul (>5 years). If you’re new to this blog, head on over to my Scientific Lit page and have a look for yourself.

Your weight is really determined by a combination of your genetics, your metabolism, and your environment (past and present) – and not so much by the weight you actually want to be. Do you have fat parents or family members (genetics)? Have you spent any part of your life restricting calories or foods (environment)? And if so, did you know that your metabolism is probably running slower than if you hadn’t (metabolism, obviously)? Possibly most significantly, if you have made multiple weight loss attempts throughout your life or were put on diets as a child, your natural set point will be higher than what it might have been had this never happened. Unfortunately, we’ve all been fed the calories in/calories out bullshit, and have been taught that calories out are totally within our control, when in reality our sneaky metabolism comes along and adjusts everything to make sure we aren’t spending too much energy, because Lord knows the body loves homeostasis.

So now you’re well-armed with information about the spectacular failure of long-term weight manipulation. That’s all well and dandy, you think, but maybe I’ll be one of the 5% who keep the weight off. Maybe you will be! I was for a long while – before The Diet Monster took over my life and made me more miserable than I had ever been as a fat person. It’s a dicey gamble to make – you might be one of the 5% who manages to maintain long-term weight loss by making it your life’s work, OR you might be one of the 95% who gains some, all, or even more of your weight back, leaving you even fatter than you started. In the words of Dirty Harry, “You gotta ask yourself, ‘Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya??

“But I’m simply not healthy at this weight.” Hey, you might not be. I don’t know your particular health habits or your lab values. Just remember, though, that weight is not a health behavior; it’s a size. Health at Every Size® does not purport to say that everyone is healthy at whatever weight they’re at; it simply means that whatever weight you are right now, you can start to work toward better health. So maybe your health isn’t great right now – is losing weight truly the only way you can improve your health? What about improving your eating habits or activity level? If you consider yourself too large to exercise, check out The Fat Chick’s webpage for activity for people of all sizes. Plenty of studies show that fitness is a better determinant of health than fatness and recently even more are showing that weight loss in some populations is associated with greater mortality rates.

“Well, I’m just not comfortable at this size.” I understand; moving in a thin body is different than moving in a fat body. While I personally don’t notice all that much difference (I’m lazy at both ends of the weight spectrum!), I also recognize that my weight difference might not be as great as someone else’s and that my experience is not universal (I also developed osteoarthritis in my feet at my thinnest, so even that wasn’t a guard against joint problems). Whether your discomfort is physical or psychological, how much do you think our culture’s prevailing attitudes about weight are influencing your discomfort with your weight?

I used to feel like I had to suck in my stomach, no matter what weight I was. As I regained weight, my stomach was beyond sucking in – I could tighten those ab muscles all I wanted, but that layer of fat wasn’t going anywhere. Sucking in made me feel physically uncomfortable. Not sucking in made me feel psychologically uncomfortable. I felt out of proportion, and I felt like I was being outed by my tummy as a fat person. When I finally acknowledged that how I felt about my stomach had more to do with how the world views fat people and less to do with how I actually felt, I eased up on my expectations of my body. If your feelings of discomfort are 100% physical, consider non-diet approach in which you could find activities that you are comfortable doing right now, and work your way up from there. Bodies are amazingly adaptable, especially when we are being kind to them.

I wish I could tell you that our brains controlled our weight. That it’s just a matter of trying really hard and you’ll have some satisfying weight loss that lasts forever without totally ruining the quality of your life. My own personal experience, the experiences of all the other people I’ve met in the fatosphere, and the bulk of available science on the subject does not permit me to do so. I can only recommend a kinder approach in which you let your body decide what it will weigh – it will do that eventually anyway – while you find your own way of living as healthfully as you want and can. That will give you a stable weight that is right for you. Because, with this one life you have, how long do you really want to struggle against your body?

Dietitians Unplugged episode coming this week!

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Dear People Who Want to Shrink Fat Bodies:

I think all bodies are awesome – thin, fat, disabled, buff, hourglass, angular, apples, pears, carrots, celery (what, thin people can’t have food body-descriptors?). To my mind, there is no body out there that is not simply wonderful. So it dismays me that there are people who do think that there is a hierarchy of goodness when it comes to bods – with fat bodies on the bottom. They are so distressed by fat bodies that they’ve committed, either personally or professionally, to help make us thinner. To those folks: I know you think you’re doing good, but you’re not, and so…we gotta talk.

I understand that for the most part, you are acting out of the goodness of your heart (even if you are making money from this endeavor). You see how fat people suffer at the hands of a cruel world who has decided that having at least one (but often many more) oppressed segment of society is beneficial in so many ways, especially the money-making way, and you don’t want us to suffer anymore. So you think the best way to end that suffering is to end our fatness. You’ve heard about how fat is killing us all (even though it really isn’t) and you want to save us from death (even though we all die. No matter what.). Because you know (just as we once all knew the world was flat) that it’s just a matter of changing our diets, getting off the couch a bit more, right? Even though if that were truly the case, there would probably hardly be any fat people, since that sounds pretty simple, and lots of us already do it.

You don’t understand that maybe some bodies are just naturally fat, or eventually become fat, that the bell curve of bodies tends naturally toward diversity of size and shape and ability (because from an evolution standpoint, that’s a totally helpful thing) and therefore you simply don’t understand why all us fatties are just choosing to be needlessly fat. Perhaps we are just like willful children who need your thinner, wiser guidance. (Also, you might make some money! A LOT of money!)

But here’s the deal – I know almost no fat person who hasn’t tried to turn herself or himself into a thin(ner) person at least once in their lives (fat people who have never dieted aren’t quite unicorns…but they are exceedingly rare in my personal, non-scientific, anecdotal experience). We’ve tried the sensible diets (supposedly Weight Watchers and healthy lifestyle changes) and when those didn’t work (or worked to turn us into crazy people), other diets were tried – some of them more and more extreme as time went by (you go, breatharians!). In reality, if just plain sensible nutrition and exercise (which isn’t all that difficult) worked consistently and reliably to turn fat people into thin people, there wouldn’t be any fad diets at all. But there are. Lots of them. So yeah, we’ve tried them all…and most of us are still fat.

But for the love of all that is kale-infused, if you’re going to make fat people your charity project, at least do the research. (better yet, get a different project). You will find out that most intentional weight loss efforts – like 95% – fail after more than 5 years (and usually by year 3). It is not due to lack of willpower, and the science shows this reliably. In a country that sent people to the moon (conspiracy theorists, stop right there) and invented the iPhone, and where people regularly don’t take vacation, you’re trying to say that we’re simply not trying hard enough? Hogwash. I’m not buying it. People try hard at things all the time, even fat people. If long-weight loss could be maintained by more than a tiny fraction of people, we would have maintained it by now. So you’re not going to make our lives better by making us thin, because there is no real way to make the majority of us thin for the long-term.

How could you help? Lay off the fat phobia, first of all. Consider that there are a lot of ways for people to be happy and get healthy without focusing on weight. Anyone can benefit from eating better – and I don’t mean more restrictively – or being more active, but unless someone has asked for your help, please don’t launch in on a reform mission. No one wants to feel like they need to be fixed, especially by someone who has never walked a mile in their shoes.

Please stop assuming you can tell how or what someone eats just by looking at them. You can’t. And you can’t tell their health status either. Good doctors don’t diagnose by looking at someone by five seconds and making assumptions. You shouldn’t either.

You can advocate to end the stigma and rampant discrimination that fat people face (or any people. No one should ever have to suffer from any kind of discrimination). You can decide to do nothing at all and just leave fat people alone – that in itself will be huge. If you do nothing other than to refuse to speak judgmentally about body shapes and sizes (and that includes thin bodies) you help to shut weight stigma down.

To all our thin and “normal” weight allies – thank you. I love you so much, because you have nothing personally to gain (other than living in a harmonious world full of happiness and rainbows, I guess). To all those who truly don’t give a shit one way or the other whether someone is fat or not – thank you to you, too. You at least aren’t making things worse.

And to those who still want to shrink fat bodies– I hope you find another hobby someday. Because this one isn’t working for us.

Dietitians Unplugged podcast – episode 6 available now!

Episode 6 is called “Clean Eating or Toxic Ideas?” and we had so much fun talking about this subject.

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I was having a particularly bad day, the accumulation of a bunch of things starting to weigh on me, and a few fresh annoyances as well. I had just bought a very nice, expensive bed for the first time in my life – and hadn’t had a good sleep for three days…with at least 27 more days of the trial period (and potentially 27 bad sleeps) before I could exchange it. I was feeling the pressure of saying “yes” to too many obligations that I didn’t feel passionate about. And there was just the general malaise I get occasionally where I feel the world isn’t a great place to be. I needed sleep, I needed solace, I needed self-care. So what did I do?

I blamed my body.

After so many years of knowing that it is not my body’s fault when I have a bad day, of knowing intellectually that the body is merely a quick and easy stand-in for dealing with non-body problems and bad feelings, of knowing that just two days ago I had no problems with my body, in fact liked it quite a bit in my cute summer sundress in the middle of a hot SoCal February; even as an advocate for body positivity and self-acceptance…I blamed my body.

I stood in the mirror, second mirror in hand, checking out the back of my hair, which I discovered was in need of a haircut (but not really; sometimes I also blame my hair). The inner running commentary took off as my eyes drifted down to my butt (too big, wrong shape), then the width of my back (too wide, droopy folds); then I turned sideways to attack my chin (weak and disappearing), and then full frontal as I assessed the belly (bigger than it ever used to be). After that mental beating, my problems went away and I felt fantastic about my life. JUST KIDDING! My problems still existed, I didn’t feel better, and in fact I felt a hell of a lot worse!

It happened, as it often does, too quickly. But after a time, I said to myself, “Those things are not the problems. The problems are the problems.” Knowing at least that much, I can at least stop myself from going on a loathsome diet and instead deal with the actual issues.

Why do we do this? Why is our body the punching bag on which we try to resolve problems that have nothing to do with it? It probably doesn’t help that we live in a culture that continues to weigh women’s worth by their appearance. (Need proof of that? A male friend of mine recently saw Caitlyn Jenner at Starbucks and said, “She had no ass.” The same person who was once lauded for being an Olympian is now judged solely for her perceived lack of ass. Welcome to womanhood.)

There are times when my body has presented real problems. I have foot problems that two surgeries have not resolved. I have overly tight calf muscles that seem to be wreaking havoc everywhere else in my legs. My particular reaction to chronic stress and fatigue is acid reflux and to become itchy all over. I have digestion issues that extreme dieting may or may not have caused, and which now prevent my total enjoyment of a lot of meals. These are real body problems, and they sometimes get me down, but unlike with my fake-body-problems, I know the solution is some TLC and R&R (and sometimes an ice pack or Pepto-Bismol) and I give it to myself.

How I used to resolve my fake-body-problems? I would try to make my body disappear by going on a diet.

I wish I had known this body-as-problem-solving-substitute was a thing, and a thing that I was doing. I might not have gone on extreme diets that messed with my metabolism and probably gave me chronic tummy troubles – real body problems. I might have faced relationship problems head-on, or even recognized bad or unsatisfying relationships for what they were. Instead, I insisted that a smaller body would be the remedy for everything – and when it wasn’t, the problems were still there, and I had to fix them while I was hungry. Not the easiest thing to do.

Occasionally my real problems still get me down. I might still walk around feeling unattractive when this happens (I’m working on getting a new mental reflex) but I know that it has nothing to actually do with my body. And that’s a relief. It frees me up to feel my feelings, fix the problems I can fix, make peace with the problems I can’t, and wait to feel a bit better. That’s what real self-care is all about.

What did I eventually do to tend to my tattered psyche? I cooked, because I love to cook and it calms me and grounds me like no other activity. Knowing I can still feed myself and my family reminds me that on the most basic level, I can still take care of myself.

What do you do to care for yourself in tough times? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments!

 

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