A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to a continuing education course (gotta get those CEUs!) called “The Science and Practice of Mindful Eating.” I was initially disappointed by the description that focused heavily on mindful eating as a treatment for obesity and stated, “Research shows that mindfulness practices can lead to altered gene expression and neuroplasticity. These and other changes can positively influence resilience, self-regulation, and well-being, which in turn improve weight management efforts [emphasis mine].” You had me until the incredible logic leap to “improve weight management efforts,” but I wanted to hear what kind of evidence they were using to show that mindful eating would lead to long-lasting weight loss anyway, just to ensure that I continue to be as fully informed on the subject as I can be.

There were things I loved about the class. I loved what I learned about meditation and all the wonderful benefits it can provide. I loved the mindfulness exercises which instantly cleared my head and instilled in me a sense of calm, at least for a few minutes (not at all my natural state). I enjoyed the mindful eating exercises, which I have done before, because they are always instructive (yep, still don’t like raisins).

What I didn’t love: the scant evidence they were using to show that mindfulness could produce long-lasting weight loss. The studies were few, the results were minimal, the sample size small, and the duration of the studies were always less than three years – about the time people start to regain weight after any sort of intentional weight loss efforts. And the stigmatizing of obesity throughout the class was bad. I couldn’t help wonder how this stigmatizing affected some of my “obese” classmates who hadn’t ever heard of Health at Every Size®. Would they try mindful eating in the hopes of fixing their “wrong” fat bodies? And when it failed to make them thin, which seems at this point to be the most likely outcome, would they abandon mindful eating for the next diet to come along that promised weight loss?

And then recently I came across this article  about this study, which concluded, “Mindful people are less likely to be obese and are more likely to believe they can change many of the important things in their life.” While the article is careful to initially point out that mindful eating hasn’t been shown to be a “cure” for obesity or even necessarily help people lose weight, they then go on to talk about how mindful eating might help with willpower to make better food choices and stick to an exercise plan which might help one to not become obese. Even though that’s pretty much impossible to determine from this study (the study found that people who scored higher on a mindfulness scale had a lower prevalence of diabetes and obesity, and a higher sense of control over their lives. Period. They didn’t find that fat people were turned into thin ones by meditation).

Although I am no expert on mindfulness, from what I have learned, I think there are wonderful things there. I think mindful eating probably has the potential to help people reconnect with their bodies, improve their relationship to food, practice self-care and maybe even improve health. But I can’t help but think, if you come at mindful eating with the idea the particular outcome must be weight loss, you’ll never even come close to eating nirvana. Mindfulness involves non-judgment, and I can’t think of anything more judgmental than feeling the need to change your weight or shape. I’m imagining second guessing, frustration with the scale, a distraction from the true joy that can be found in eating. A focus on weight loss – an external thing – doesn’t seem mindful at all.

I think this mindful-eating-as-obesity-cure is the tip of the iceberg. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of progress; as the non-diet, Health at Every Size® message spreads, there will be those who want to co-opt the language and the ideas but subvert it into another weight-loss industry money maker. Don’t be fooled. Be a mindful consumer (see what I did there?). If someone is offering weight loss, ask to see their evidence, especially the long-term results.

Check out this great summary of what mindful eating is all about from AmIHungry.com. Stigmatizing messages of weight loss are wonderfully absent.

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Recently a new study was published on something most of us have known for quite some time: the BMI is not an accurate or reliable predictor of health.

But here’s what the latest evidence reviewing the effectiveness of BMI in diagnosing ill health found: it grossly overestimates the number of “unhealthy” people whose BMIs are in the overweight and obese categories.

Just to recap, the BMI is your weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters squared. It was developed as a way to compare weights in large populations, not a medical diagnostic tool. People in the 18-24 range are considered “normal weight” while people in the 25-29 range are considered “overweight” and over 30 are “obese.” To give you an idea of how arbitrary these ranges are, they were all adjusted downward in 1998, upon recommendation by the NIH Obesity Task force, despite all the available scientific evidence that actually pointed toward raising the ranges. According to one Task Force member, “We were pressured to make the standards conform to those already accepted by the World Health Organization” (Health at Every Size, Lindo Bacon). And the International Obesity Task Force who recommended to the WHO the cut-off of 25 for the normal weight category received funding from pharmaceutical companies who made diet drugs. So the ranges are, you know, totally scientific.

It’s totally shocking, then, that this simple math equation, whose ranges were defined more by politics than by science, doesn’t totally tell us everything we need to know about a person’s health, right? That was sarcasm, by the way.

I’ve written before about how problematic it is to rely so heavily on mathematical equations in relation to our bodies, especially when it comes to weight. There’s a ton of stuff we still don’t know about weight regulation (witness the continued insistence on weight loss for health when it’s been shown over and over to not work long term for most people) and while we mostly have the same parts and general bodily functions needed to live, there can be a lot of variability from person to person.

So what this study found was that using BMI alone, “an estimated 74,936,678 US adults are misclassified as cardiometabolically unhealthy or cardiometabolically healthy.”

Oops!

This is not surprising, but now we’ve got yet more evidence to back it up. Yes, it’s one paper. Let’s get some more research behind this so we can finally put the BMI as a health measure to death. In fact, want to help? I just found out about the ongoing study called Health Registry of Obesity (HERO) by the same study authors of the above-mentioned BMI paper.

By the way, I don’t believe that good health is a measure of worthiness or an obligation, so if you are fat and unhealthy or thin and unhealthy, you have the exact same rights to medical care and everything else that healthy people do, without being penalized. I am interested, however, in stopping the lie often perpetuated that fat=unhealthy and thin=healthy. People are being denied important, life-changing operations (kidney transplants, knee surgeries) simply because they are in the wrong BMI category, despite otherwise good health. (Ironically, no one hesitates to perform bariatric surgery on fat patients. Hm….). This needs to stop.

I know many doctors; most of them want to do the right thing (at least the ones that I know), but usually they are under pressure to move fast and work cheaply. The BMI represented a cheap, quick shortcut to preventative health care for them. But now we know it’s bunk. And we have real, useful tools at our disposal: blood pressure, blood sugars, lipid panels, insulin resistance, c-reactive protein (a measure of inflammation in the body). These are the indicators that the study authors used, and they are what our health professionals should be looking at before they declare us sick or not sick. Because this is not only a huge problem for fat people who are over-diagnosed and prescribed an intervention that fails 95% of the time, it’s a huge problem for the normal-weight people who are not being diagnosed at all.

My guess is, this paper won’t be the end of the BMI in medical care. It’s probably going to take a lot more scientific study (much of which already exists), head banging, fist wringing, and just plain shouting to get through a resistant medical establishment. But it’s a good step in the right direction.

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The 2016 Dietary Guidelines for Americans came out earlier this year and Aaron and I let you know what we think. Are they words to live by…or just another prescriptive diet? Do we even need the Guidelines?  What drives the rational for how Guidelines are formed? Listen to us discuss these questions and more from a Health at Every Size® and Intuitive Eating perspective.

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“I’m so hungry…there must me something wrong with me.”

“I’m so hungry…it makes me want things I shouldn’t eat.”

“I’m so hungry…it’s really sabotaging my weight loss.”

I have heard all of these statements, and variations of them, A LOT. The only one I rarely hear among the general population these days is, “I’m so hungry…I really must eat now.”

We’ve attached an enormous amount of guilt to eating and worse yet, to hunger. We think our hunger is to be distrusted, that there is something wrong with our bodies when we experience hunger, and that we must do everything to thwart our hunger: ignore it, fill it with unsatisfying air food, quench it with copious amounts of water or coffee or tea or zero calorie soda (or worse yet an ungodly “master cleanse” concoction of water, maple syrup, lemon and cayenne pepper. Cocktail of champions.). We see our hunger as a symptom of a broken internal system…and that we would only be thinner if this hunger thing would just go away.

Back in the day, when I started dieting, I thought it was just us fat people ruing our hunger in secret. It probably was people of all sizes but everyone had somehow decided to keep it to themselves. Now that everyone, simply everyone, must share the intimate details of their latest weight loss regimen so they can be deemed good and worthy citizens, we know all about it. And because we know all about it…we think it’s the right thing to do. Everyone is suspicious of their hunger…why aren’t you?

I’ve heard it from fat people trying to lose weight and thin people who are secretly terrified to put on weight…I’m so hungry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Well, as a very smart person once said on the internet, hunger doesn’t lie (Was it you that said this? Please take credit for it in the comments if so!). If you’re hungry, that’s your body telling you one thing: FEED ME!

It’s so basic, so obvious, you’d think we’d understand this. Even if, on an intellectual level, you didn’t know that hunger means “eat,” it kind of tells your body exactly what to do. If you were raised by wolves in the wilderness and never spoke a word of human, and you got hungry, your body would figure out what to do – it would directly you to eat. It would make even the most unappealing foods – raw badger, or whatever wolves eat – totally appealing. And then you’d eat and your life would be go on.

But back in the “civilized” world (where we are generally not being raised by wolves), not only do we instinctively know we should eat, we have all the science at our fingertips to know that hunger means EAT…and yet we resolve to not eat. Yay, civilized world.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that, at least in part, all this started from a collective sense of body dissatisfaction, the idea that our bodies are innately wrong and must be solved (brought to us by the people who have benefited in one way or another from the body insecurity of others). Then came the misinformation that we can not only solve our bodies, but that we should and we must! So if we think our bodies are a problem to be solved, and the solution is possible, and the solution is to eat less, and this means less than we are hungry for, then yes, of course you would learn to see your hunger as the enemy.

And I get it: if you are in one body but feel you should be in another body, you may indeed feel betrayed every time you feel that pang of hunger that tells you to eat just when your diet tells you not to.

But guess what we’ve finally figured out? Our bodies are not something to be solved, and the solution doesn’t even work for very long anyway. Upon starving to lose weight (because simple “lifestyle changes” didn’t accomplish the task), our bodies learn how to use energy more efficiently and store more as fat. They learn how to gain weight on the little we feed them while we are actively ignoring our hunger. You might be able to outrun your hunger indefinitely, but your body will take its revenge down the road, either in the form of weight gain or more intense hunger – take your pick.

To all of those who lament their hunger…your hunger is most likely not malfunctioning*. Your body is not broken. Consider honoring that hunger pang with some food that you love, or that makes you feel good. See what happens. Will you eat until you literally explode? Unlikely. Only the guy in Monty Python’s “Meaning of Life” ever did that but that was just mean, fat-shaming fiction.

It’s time to admit that the body has wisdom. The body decides its own weight, not the wishful-thinking part of the brain that is coerced daily by messages that profit from your body dissatisfaction. Make friends with your hunger, learn how to truly honor it, and it won’t lead you astray.

*Yes, there are some diseases and conditions that can cause excessive hunger. Most of us don’t have those diseases, and that’s not who I’m talking about.

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I spend a lot of time focusing on the 95% failure rate of dieting just so people can be aware of what they are getting themselves into when they decide they want to lose weight. And inevitably, every few months someone on Twitter will say, “Of course long term weight loss is possible. People do it all the time.” Yes, many things are possible, even long-term weight loss. So I’m going to talk about them today, because I have some first-hand insight into the subject: I was one of those 5% that kept weight off longer than 5 years (16 years total).

But first, to recap: all of the available scientific literature on intentional weight loss efforts (and I’m going to avoid using the word “dieting” here just to save someone from piping up with, “Of course diets don’t work weight loss is about lifestyle changes…”) shows that somewhere in the very near vicinity of 95% of people who engage in them end up gaining most, all, or more of their weight back by five years. The best compilation of this science that I’ve read is Secrets from the Eating Lab by Dr. Traci Mann, so go ahead and check that out from your local library if you’re interested. There are many other books that reference the science of this failure listed here.

By contrast, there is compelling science in favor of the Health at Every Size® philosophy and weight neutral eating models such as Intuitive Eating, the Satter Eating Competence Model (check out the books Health at Every Size by Lindo Bacon, Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch and any book by Ellyn Satter for the many studies regarding the efficacy of weight-neutral health interventions. You will be astounded).

But for now, let’s say you’re still not convinced, and you want to lose weight, and while you know that you have about a 95% chance of regaining all the weight you lose and maybe more, you still want to give it a chance and see if you can become one of these “lucky” few. Anything’s possible, right?! So let’s explore that slim possibility to see what your life will be like if you do grab manage to grab that brass ring.

When I originally started on my weight loss journey, my goal was not to live a miserable life of deprivation; in fact, I decided that if I couldn’t go and enjoy a McDonald’s meal at least once a week, I wasn’t going to continue on with it. And at that time in my young, never-dieted, frequently overeating body, I did lose weight quickly and easily without extreme deprivation. There are probably a lot of people out there with a similar, seductive experience.

But as time passed, the body remembered and frequently the number on the scale would start to creep upward. Food and calorie restriction had to happen more and more often in order to keep my weight in check. Eventually the maintenance tactics with how I ate when I first dieted (with my young, never-dieted, frequently overeating body) were no longer sufficient to maintain my older, thinner, always-dieting body. My solution to fix my upward-bobbing weight was to lose more weight, of course. I beat the odds, though, and was one of those magical 5% that had lost and maintained a significant amount of weight for more than 5 years. I WAS A UNICORN! Just kidding, unicorns don’t exist and I did. But seriously, I didn’t even know at the time how rare I was.

How did my reality match up to my original desire to be a thinner, normal eater who was relaxed around food? It never did. There was never a moment, even in the early “easy” days, that I did not worry about what or how much I was eating, even if I wasn’t having to eat restrictively at that moment. While my naturally thinner friends seemed to instinctively know when they had eaten enough and could stop when they were full and didn’t obsess over food all day long, I lived with the feeling that I would never be able to stop eating given half the chance and a full bag of Oreos. Instead of forever-after appreciating my thinner body, my dissatisfaction with it grew and grew until I was ready and willing to starve myself in the vain hope of perfection (which I could never reach because IT DOESN’T EXIST). During my most extreme restriction, I constantly denied my hunger, and then when the floodgates would inevitably burst, I blew well past full usually to the point of sickness. But I was not fat! So somehow that made me a winner.

Maybe I’m just a weirdo who couldn’t hold my 5 percenter* shit together. What of the rest of this segment of the population? Maybe they’re having a grand ol’ time. We could ask the National Weight Control Registry which is “the largest [10,000 members, so actually 0.003% of the US population] prospective investigation of long-term successful weight loss maintenance.” They study people who have managed to maintain their weight loss for at least one year. Let’s look past the fact that they define “long-term weight loss” as 1 year, and have a look at what they’ve found.

While the NWCR tell us that these people “maintain a low calorie, low fat diet” (around 1700 kcal for men and 1300 kcal for women), while doing “high levels of activity” (at least an hour a day, and we’re probably not talking brisk strolls in the park) and weigh themselves every day, they unfortunately don’t mention how people particularly enjoy their lifestyle, how relaxed and confident they feel around food, or if they spend the majority of their time thinking about their diets and weight. I know they don’t report on this information, because for a while, I was a participant in the NWCR, and in their surveys about what I ate and did to maintain my weight loss, they never once asked me about how happy I was about the whole damn thing (they may have asked me if I was happy being a not-fat person, but that’s not the same thing, is it?). Maybe they didn’t care; maybe they thought the means justified the skinny end and I shouldn’t have been so selfishly concerned with my happiness.

When the mental and physical toll of maintaining my weight loss eventually became too much to bear, and the unhappiness with myself no longer made any sense, I quit dieting cold turkey, regained every ounce of my lost weight and eventually quit the registry (and got happy with food, exercise, my body). As far as I can tell, they aren’t accounting for people like me – the dropouts, the weight-gainers – anywhere in their research. They didn’t bother to tell the rest of my story, where I decided that life sucked as a not-naturally-thin person, decided to start eating in a nourishing way, and gained weight.

If there are any 5 percenters out there living a free and easy life around food, I haven’t met or heard of them yet. I think most of them end up like Jillian Michaels, having to make a job – sometimes unpaid – out of maintaining their weight loss.

So if you are thinking about becoming one of the magical 5 percenters, know that your interests are pretty much only going to be food and exercise from here on out, and that there’s no guarantee you’re going to stay thin anyway. Want to be a foodie? Forget about it. Want to be like your naturally thin friends who seem to eat and not think all that much about it? Nuh-uh. Your new job will be that of a full-time former fatty, maintaining that weight loss with every ounce of mental and physical energy that you have. But you were looking for another full-time job anyway, right?

On the flip side, you can decide to make peace with food and your body, and develop some hobbies, which of course can be food and exercise, but can also include other things too. The choice is yours; just don’t say you haven’t been warned.

 *Can we have a call for #OCCUPYDIETSTREET or something? Wouldn’t that be totally fun?

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In Episode 4 of the Dietitians Unplugged podcast, Aaron and I discuss the common confusion around Intuitive Eating and the expectation of weight loss.

BONUS: a brief update on Oprah and her partnership with Weight Watchers that we discussed in Episode 3.

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I’m not the first (this was the first I saw and my inspiration for this post. And it’s awesome!), or anywhere near the last, person to be ticked off at Oprah Winfrey for her Weight Watchers ad in which she says, “Inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be.” As though literally everything Oprah has already done in her life – hosted a long-running talk show, launched careers, empowered girls in Africa to go to school, become a media mogul with her own network all while probably dealing with racism, sexism and sizeism along the way – somehow isn’t totally awesome because she wasn’t thin while she was doing all those things.

But it’s Oprah’s choice. She can feel however she wants about herself, her career, her body. She can go ahead and diet for the millionth time, as though Weight Watchers were some well-kept secret that she just hadn’t caught wind of while she was busy failing at weight loss with her personal trainer and chef.

What I must completely object to, however, is Oprah’s insistence on speaking on behalf of “every” overweight woman. As an overweight – actually, obese, according to my BMI! – woman, I simply disagree that what is in me is a thinner woman whose life is better than my current fat one. I know because I already tried that.

When I discovered my thinner woman inside, I found she came with a deep insecurity about measuring up to others’ standards. I found a thinner woman who probably could have earned a PhD for all the time she spent adding up points and obsessing over food and weight. This woman may have had other interests outside of food, but she couldn’t fully cultivate them because there simply was no room left after food, exercise and worrying about how she looked.

Despite what Oprah said about looking in the mirror and not recognizing your own self because you’re buried under all that fat, this thinner woman, at her thinnest and hungriest, frequently looked into the mirror and didn’t recognize herself at all. She felt a strong sense of disconnection from herself, as though this was not in fact her own body but some borrowed, alien body with which she was not entirely familiar or comfortable. As though she knew the ephemeral quality of it already.

Oprah could not possibly know what is inside every fat woman. She only knows what’s inside herself and if she chooses to view all her amazing accomplishments as less than amazing simply because she was not thin, that’s her choice.

Because inside this fat woman is someone whose worth is not determined by her appearance, and knowing that, is just fine with the way she looks, and even more excited by the things she is. This fat woman dared to not diet, dares to take care of herself in a nourishing, not punishing, way, and dares to have her voice heard. She had the guts to start a blog and a podcast – things the thin woman never would have dared to do –  and to reject the anti-woman, anti-fat culture that is ever-present.

Oprah’s weight journey has been so public and I feel for her. She doesn’t know that her size really doesn’t matter to the amazing person she is. But, Oprah, please speak for yourself only. Because didn’t you hear? It’s okay for us to feel fine about ourselves without having to turn into something we’re really not. It’s okay for each of us to reach inside and see that the woman there is already the woman we want to be.

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It’s the new year and we’re in the midst of a shit storm of diet ads and articles about which celebrity lost XX amount of pounds and how. Oh, and how YOU can do it too!

Googling the word “diet” feels, in the words of one of my friends, like having my soul pelted with bean bags. But I did it for you, my beloved readers, to save you the trouble of having to do it yourself. This is what I found:

There are diets that will make Dr. Oz rich, that will line the pockets of Nutrisystem and Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig CEOs and shareholders (I’m looking at you, Oprah). There are diets that will help you to “magically” shed pounds with mystery injections (while you simultaneously reduce your intake to less than 1000 calories a day and exercise two hours daily for 8 days a week). There are diets in which you can give up actual food and replace it with powdered “food” that you eat twice a day along with a “sensible” dinner (because everything else you do on this diet is “sensible,” right?). Diets that use the magic of ketones, either in raspberries or…in your body…or maybe both?…to make you lose weight because ketones, y’know?!

Diets that will have you tracking every single calorie, or Point, or fat/carb/protein gram that you put in your mouth, because somehow tracking food will make you less hungry (it won’t). There are diets that advise you to give up major macronutrients, like carbohydrates, in order to “shed” pounds, and which means you’ll never enjoy movie popcorn ever again, or a baguette with brie if you go to Paris. Diets that teach you how to ignore your hunger signals by tricking you into eating tasteless cardboard foods or drinking massive amounts of no-calorie liquid to fill the void.

There are diets that will convince you that you aren’t your truest, most awesome self until you more closely approximate the cultural “ideal” of beauty (you again, Oprah). Diets that tell you that you aren’t worthy of love or attention because you aren’t the thinnest possible version of yourself. Diets insisting that weight is a good barometer for health, even though you could lose weight just eating candy or dirt or styrofoam all day which wouldn’t be very healthy at all (I know at least one person who supplemented her eating disorder with a lot of candy and not much else). Diets that claim they “work” and then, because they are required by law to do so, add in the small print that, really, they don’t (results not typical translated at last).

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of diets out there. And they all claim that they work. But, sort of like that scene in The Social Network where Jessie Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg tells the Winklevii, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook,” if diets really worked, they would have worked. We’d all be thin because a significant number of people diet each year, and so at least a significant portion of that significant number would have lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off for a significant time. But they haven’t, as the science reliably shows again and again. And yet the diet companies continue to NOT have to prove they work, simply because we don’t demand real evidence. Yes, most people can lose at least some weight on any diet. And yes, most people gain that weight back within 3 to 5 years. And yes, the purveyors of diets will blame that failure on their clients.

So I implore you – at least know that you can choose something different this year because you don’t deserve to be tortured. Different how, you ask? Here are my suggestions:

Choose actual health, by deciding to honor your hunger and fullness cues and by choosing foods that feel nourishing to you.

Choose picking foods not for how thin or fit or healthy it makes you but for how much you enjoy it. Choose to expand your palette rather than restrict the kinds of foods you allow yourself to eat.

Choose learning to like and respect your body by rejecting the current cultural beauty ideal and deciding for yourself what you will find beautiful (hint: it should include your own badass* self).

Choose to understand that people come in all shapes and sizes, that body diversity is not only awesome but necessary to the survival of our species and that you will honor whatever size and shape your body decides to be when you’re treating it well.

Choose to move for the sheer joy of it. Not because someone told you to exercise to be healthy or thin because that’s not really any fun.

Choose to reject the dieting mentality that has put so many people on a weight roller coaster and left them hungry and unhealthier – both physically and mentally – than they started out.

Choose life over a fantasy that never seems to come true, because life is what you’ve got right now, and you don’t have forever.

If you need some inspiration for building your non-diet, body lovin’ 2016, check out my Resources  and Blogs I Love pages for some Health at Every Size goodness!

*Young people tell me this is a good thing!

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A year ago I started this blog with the idea that I had something to say about a better way to live our lives, at least when it came to food and our weight. I wanted to be one of the voices that spoke out against the diet industry that profits from the insecurity they help manufacture and sells us lies and sham products and then blames us for their lack of success.

Meanwhile, I had some insecurities of my own. I wasn’t sure if I could produce weekly content that people would want to read. I wasn’t sure how much of myself to expose to the internet, which can be a scary place. I didn’t know if I could make one iota of difference in supporting people to get off the diet treadmill. I actually thought if 100 people read this blog by the end of the next year, I’d be thrilled.

Well, I am beyond thrilled. This year, I had 18,351 visitors. For the last 6 months, I averaged 2,379 visitors a month. That’s probably not a lot compared to many blogs, but considering I started out with 300 visitors last January…well, I’m incredibly grateful for every single one of you. I ended up with 172 subscribers and I thank every single one of them for signing up to hear me rant against the diet industry and for Health at Every Size® weekly.

I got to hear from people who are recovering from eating disorders and people who are learning to love their bodies and heal their relationship to food and who told me they found this blog a source of support — they are some pretty cool people. I made some great online allies. Because people were reading and seemed to want more, I felt encouraged enough to start a podcast with my friend Aaron Flores, RDN, which has been so much fun for me. I got to be on Christy Harrison’s Food Psych podcast to talk about my history with food and dieting which was so very super cool. I guest blogged on NEDIC. I was asked to participate in some more projects for the coming year which I’ll reveal as they come to fruition!

Beyond my blog, I saw the body positive movement go mainstream this year. Sometimes, living in my little bubble, tailoring my social media feeds to non-diet bliss, I’m not sure what’s going on outside in the real world. But I asked around and looked around and sure enough, there it was – body positivity everywhere. Let’s not let the diet industry co-opt this movement for nefarious profit. Let’s continue to make this movement of nourishing ourselves and loving ourselves just the way we are something that lasts and doesn’t disappear from our collective memory as fast as the Ice Bucket Challenge did.

And let’s keep the ball rolling. Let’s keep talking about how diets don’t work, how we can be healthy without going hungry, and how we can respect our wonderful bodies right now. Let’s someday make the diet industry a thing of the past.

So, Happy 1st Blogiversary to my blog and thank you to everyone who visited and subscribed and shared…the message of this blog is nothing without all of you. I wish I could share this cake with you. Keep fighting the good fight and here’s to a New Year of daring to not diet!

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