One of the greatest lessons that the internet ever taught me was that I was not alone.

As our barriers have been broken down by social media, people have been bolder and bolder about sharing their stories — and their traumas, their stigmas, and their secrets — without shame in a public forum.

As a result, I saw that I was not the only one who was suffering, and that my suffering didn’t make me less of a person. In fact, because I found a “tribe” of people like me, it actually enriched me. It made me both unique and similar. A special snowflake in a snowstorm, if you will.

But over the years, I’ve grown tired of trauma. In order to stay a part of the snowstorm, I have to whip myself into a flurry come back to the trauma over and over again — identify with it, or my specialness will melt away.

And so, I told my story over and over and over, even after the story stopped being part of my present and was firmly in my past.

I believe that we have to tell the stories of our traumas and hurts. To normalize them. Remove stigmas. Prevent future traumas. Show others that it gets better.

Ah — but this last point.

It gets better.

But in order for it to get better all the way, you have to stop identifying with your trauma. Separate yourself from it. Look at it from an objective place of hindsight, and not from a place of current, subjective suffering.*

*This is not a call to start bootstrapping yourself when you’re in the middle of major trauma. I’m writing specifically for those who have done the healing work and are ready to move on.

So how do you continue to tell your story — to normalize it for future seekers — without staying in the story?

Believe it or not, I believe that burlesque can help.

I know that people hear “burlesque” and immediately think: No way. I’m not taking off my clothes.

But hear me out:

Burlesque is more than rhinestones, pasties, and tassels. It has become that, especially in the 20th century and in the current neo-burlesque revival, headlined by Dita von Teese.

But did you know that burlesque is actually…a genre?

Like, a literary genre.

A storytelling genre.

Burlesque is parody and satire, plain and simple. It is a commentary on a serious story, told with humor. It juxtaposes tragedy, drama, and expected outcomes with humor, comedy, and the unexpected.

To quote classiclit.about.com, “The purpose of burlesque literature is to imitate the manner or the subject matter of a “serious” literary genre, author, or work through a comic inversion.”

And that is what burlesque once was — with the addition of ladies in little clothing, because the risqué is what gets butts in seats (although sexuality and general debauchery can also be used as satire and commentary, too).

classiclit.about.com goes on, “…the point of the burlesque is to create an incongruity, a ridiculous disparity, between the manner of the work and the matter of it.”

And this is why I think that burlesque in particular can be a healing way to tell the story of trauma without forcing you to relive or stay in it.

Burlesque allows you to stand outside of the story (the matter) and tell it with the vantage point of someone who has more information than the characters (the manner). You’re not the character you play; you’re the writer and actor.

When you write/choreograph a burlesque dance number, you have the ability to take the subject matter and wink at the audience knowingly. You can say: I understand this enough to play this character and I know that this is a story that must be told. But I also understand that I am not this character and that this story doesn’t have to continue after the final bow.

Yes, burlesque is also amazing for body positivity and sexual empowerment. I found a lot of healing by taking off my clothing and not being afraid of what others might see.

But it is the ability to tell my story without living my story that has continued to make burlesque a beautiful, challenging, liberating form of art for me.

What story are you holding onto? How could you tell it from the vantage point of someone who has healed and can now control the storyline? Where can you find humor? And can you humanize the main character so that others will be able to identify with them without having to embody that character’s pain after you’re done?

That’s why I wrote my one-woman show, How Lovely to Be a Woman. I believe it’s possible to tell this story without reliving it because I’m making it possible.

This year, my goal is to help make it possible for others. I’d love to hear what you’re holding onto that you believe you need to keep reliving in order to tell it with authenticity. What is your story?

Let’s tell it.

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One of the most interesting phenomenons to come from the body positivity and recovery movements online is the urge to move from tribe member to coach.

If I go into the health coaching groups that I and my coaching friends started ages ago, you’ll now see them swollen with links to people who also are becoming or have become coaches. They were a part of this tribe of recovering people (recovering from disordered eating and from eating disorders) and saw its power. They were a part of its power.

And what happens to a lot of people who interact with tribes created by internet marketers is that they see the potential for capital in branching off from that tribe and creating their own. (This happens not just in recovery, but also in just about every online community. If someone can sell the dream, you can too.)

What they don’t realize, however, is that becoming a coach can be a prison for a person in recovery or a person who wants to move past the trauma of a lifetime of poor body image.

Because the blessing and the curse of online body positive coaching is that coaches have to write, by necessity, for beginners.

Even if some of the things we write about are more advanced and require some understanding of concepts like fat activism, the fact that the “you are not fat” statements are actually oppressive, etc., for the most part and in order to bring in new tribe members or potential clients, coaches have to keep writing for the beginner.

It is a blessing that there are coaches (and I know several great ones) who know how to write for the beginner. Who have become solid in their own journeys toward self acceptance while retaining the ability to communicate, over and over and over again, how to be a beginner.

Because it is the beginner who needs coaching. Who needs recovery. Who needs a way in to learn about how to get rid of the scale, stop dieting, and apply/internalize the concepts to their own lives.

But the curse part is that people who have been in process for a long time, who read everything these coaches write, who listen to the podcasts, who participate in the Facebook groups, and even seek to become coaches themselves, continue being inundated with “beginner” material as long as they stay a part of these tribes — long past the point when they should have moved on from being a beginner.

Beginner material, when you are not a beginner is a problem. Because, if you continue to identify as a beginner, you do not move forward. You end up “recovered enough,” constantly holding onto the identity that you’ve created as a beginner so that you don’t lose the community you’ve created with other beginners and people in the tribe.

And what happens is: you end up sitting in your own trauma by refusing to let go of your story.

And no, this is not to blame you for oppressing yourself when there are oppressive forces out there that are doing a good enough job of keeping you locked in self-hatred, nor is this to tell people who are still very much engaged with their traumas and are not recovered yet that they need to bootstrap themselves out of it — this is to enlighten you to the fact that after you’ve done the work, there’s a point where holding onto the work so you can be a part of a community becomes detrimental.

The problem with creating your own tribe or staying in a tribe, when you’ve already surpassed the beginning stages, is that you have to come back to the beginner’s mind in order to understand your potential customer and fellow tribe member. You have to know how to communicate with them — tap into their trauma in order to market the solution or stay relevant to their interests. You have to “meet them where they are,” because they are not at the stage where you can speak to them like they have moved beyond their traumas.

So if you’re not already solid in your recovery/body positivity, coming back to the beginner’s mind can reopen or perpetuate your own identification with trauma. This is how relapse happens.

Or, if you are solid, the constant identity with trauma still keeps you from growing. And the need to keep your trauma around — to be constantly referring to it as a way to identify with others in your tribe or the tribes to which you belong — stops you from Discovery, which means you don’t develop the rest of your life.

Making your personal brand about your trauma can be a great way to amass followers or potentially make money, but even if you reach your “freedom number,” you won’t be making yourself free.

Money and tribe — and the personal brand that grows both — can be a prison.

One of the reasons I quit coaching was because I was exhausted by constantly returning to my traumas in order to remain “authentic” to the beginner who was looking for a guide. Instead of helping forward the people who had been reading and listening for years, I was keeping them stuck by asking them to continue to come back to me, as the authentic expert, for proclamations on how to be a beginner.

I wasn’t my anorexia, but I needed to be in order to keep people on my list.

I saw this happening, and it depleted me. I wasn’t a beginner anymore, and the more I wrote for beginners, the more trapped I felt. And the more I noticed people on my list and in my groups who clung to every scrap and shred of trauma in order to stay relevant with the rest of the group. Every “bad food day” and even every “non scale victory” had to be noticed and dissected. For beginners, that’s important. Because, as a beginner, you have to notice so that you can learn how to do the work.

But once you’re not a beginner anymore, noticing and celebrating and dissecting and constantly talking about your body actually holds you back. Because, eventually, you have to stop noticing so you can make room in your brain for moving on with your life.

Clinging to a community that’s built around the beginner’s first steps away from trauma of any kind can be detrimental the further out from the healing you get. The more you hang around, the more likely you’ll be to accidentally-on-purpose open up some scars.

Which is to say: We need coaches for the beginners, but we don’t need all beginners to seek to become coaches. If you notice in yourself that you’re becoming attached to the idea of building a brand around, making money from, and dedicating your very own community to a trauma, consider whether or not you actually need to do this.

I quit coaching because I wanted to make money and have a personal brand, but I did not want to have to be authentically in my trauma to attract customers to me. I could not read about beginners’ struggles every minute of every day if I wanted to not stay a beginner myself. I needed to step away because, even though I am good at what I did, I did not want to be only good at trauma.

So this is my message to you, tribe members, community seekers, and future coaches: If you truly want to inspire others in your community beyond beginners (because we already have coaches for that), step out of the community and model Discovery. Be the expert on recovering by recovering fully and completely. Move on, move on, move on.

You are more than our trauma. You are not recovery. You have the potential to be and live Discovery. And that is far more important than a health coaching certificate or 1000 friends in a Facebook group will ever be.

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Posting a meme is NOT doing the work.

It’s a performance of doing the work, but it is not the work itself.

Sometimes the work requires accountability. I know that.

Sometimes it requires performance in order to feel like you’re making progress. I know that too.

Sometimes it requires feedback and encouragement from others to feel like it’s worthwhile. I have needed that in my own journey.

Sometimes it needs community to maintain, and performing the work visibly helps build and attract that community around you. I’ve done that.

But do not confuse the performance with the work.

What I mean:

There are recovery accounts filled with pictures of food, journaling every morsel, celebrating the act of making food (with the assumption that you are also eating it).

There are body positive accounts that share nothing but feel good quotes about loving yourself (with the assumption that the person posting is taking those words to heart).

There are Beachbody and other weight loss/exercise/diet accounts with before and afters and inspirational words about loving yourself once you reach your goals (with the assumption that the people posting actually love themselves now).*

*Note: if you think that you will love yourself when you’re different in any way, you’ll never love yourself. Once you get there, you’ll realize that you’ve been there all along. So if you don’t love you unconditionally, adding conditions is just a distraction from the work.

I made it a point to start every episode of the Finding Our Hunger podcast with a quote, because quotes are often applicable and inspirational. I made images with those quotes on them to share on Twitter. They’re re-shared over and over, because people feel inspired when they read them, and they feel like they’re doing the work when they share those quotes to their own accounts. I’ve done the same thing: Look at me! Because this image represents the work, and people who do the work share quotes, I am, by the very fact of sharing this quote, doing the work.

What happens, though, is that we get so caught up in the act of presenting ourselves as doing the work that we stop doing the work itself.

Just because I listened to your podcast and felt inspired, I am already there.

Just because I attended this conference and felt inspired, it feels like I already did the work,

Just because I shared this blog post, I showed people what I stand for, even if I’m not actually there yet.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t be sharing posts and memes, but rather to say: stop confusing *just* sharing with finishing the work.

One of my biggest frustrations when I was a coach was getting communication from my listeners and readers and followers who were stuck in the same places for years on end. I’d get an email from someone telling me how much my words hit home or be tagged in an Instagram post about how *this* quote or that made a difference…but then they’d be back, week after week, still struggling. Still unwilling to try a fear food, stop harmful overexercise (even with injuries), or let go of weight checking behaviors.

Posting about how fat is beautiful while fearing fat in their own bodies.

Promising to be a good ally to others while actively hurting themselves.

Because as long as they posted, they were doing the work.

I had to unfriend some bloggers who were posting about how fitspo is bad and recovery is good, but who were using their blogs and inspirational posts as a front to tell others how to be without doing the work themselves. They were actively engaged in eating disorders and exercise addictions, but as long as they posted, they were “doing the work.”

Inspiration is not action.

Just because the quote looks good on your Facebook wall doesn’t mean that you’re done.

Do the work. All the way. Try the fear food. Take off the FitBit. Throw out the scale. Buy the pants in a size larger. Stop fit shaming and food policing others. Get off the unnecessary elimination diet.** Do more than show other people that you mean it. MEAN IT.

**Obviously, this message is not for anyone who actually has a food allergy or medical condition and requires such a diet. I’m not a doctor or nutritionist, so don’t mistake anything I say for professional medical advice, etc.

At the beginning, it might help to show the world what you mean. But mean it. Do it. If the quote inspires you, don’t just be inspired. DO IT.
If you want to recover, I don’t care how pretty the calligraphy on your quote is. I care about whether or not you ate more than your nutrition bar or Paleo-perfect, calorie controlled AIP breakfast.

If you want to be body positive, I don’t care about how inclusive your quote is. I care about whether or not you’re still holding onto the food scale or the tape measure just in case you “need” them for accountability.

If you want to do the work, I don’t care if you’re part of my “tribe.” I care about whether or not you actually started building a life for yourself — discovery — that’s going to give you something to continue living for after recovery.

Don’t let the internet fool you into thinking that you’re already there in real life. A meme is only virtual reality until you start living it.

Be the meme.

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In our increasingly branded and visual online world, we need to talk about how capital — both social and financial — affects the ways in which we hold onto beliefs about our body image, fitness, and nutrition.

The Your Body, Your Brand podcast brings experts in sales, marketing, branding, feminism, and coaching (like Daniel Pink, Andi Zeisler, Alan Levinovitz, Kelly Diels, Scott Stratten and Alison Kramer, and more) into conversation. Like NPR’s Hidden Brain, but for body image, I’ll make marketing psychology and behavioral economics tangible for the layperson and tell the story of how we gave up our sense of embodiment and empowerment in exchange for a few “likes” and the veneer of a “healthy” personal brand.

Interested? Give it a listen.

Then get on the mailing list for updates or follow the Facebook page.

This trailer features: Kelly Diels, Andi Zeisler, Victoria Ferriz, Summer Innanen, Sarah Khan, Brenda Swann, Melissa Toler, Daniel Pink, and Alan Levinovitz, as well as me, your host, Kaila Tova.

Photo by Tristan Crane.

Food can be medicine, but it’s not the only medicine.

In fact, the idea that food is the only medicine we need is bullshit.

Food is a necessary part of our lives, and certain foods make us feel better than others. We all react differently to different foods because our bodies are all composed of infinitesimally small differences that can create exponentially large effects.

If food were medicine, I would not have to be on thyroid drugs.

If food were medicine, my periorifical dermatitis flare ups wouldn’t have to be treated with antibiotics.

If food were medicine, then we’d never have needed to invent vaccines (however you feel about them) because we would have been able to eat our way out of polio.

We’re living in an age of magical thinking when it comes to food.

People like the Food Babe are able to go from having a pretty sane idea about food quality (we should eat as close to the natural state of things we can if possible) to food-fear mongering guru with a series of endorsements from and affiliate links for slightly less processed “organic” versions of our favorite “unhealthy foods” because of this magical thinking.

Food can be medicine in many cases. It can be good preventative medicine sometimes. The actual nutrients in things that don’t come wrapped in plastic can be neuro-supportive and health-boosting. But it’s not the only answer.

Because here’s the thing: we don’t live in Eden or in the pre-agricultural era. We’ve long since passed the Middle Ages, but we’re still trapped in a medieval way of thinking when it comes to our food quality.

In fact, maybe it’s exactly the problem — because what we mean when we say “food quality” has gotten pretty gosh darn warped.

We’ve got this weird belief that food can have a moral quality, and that the moral quality we consume affects our health.

Like medieval worshippers we read lists of “good” foods and “bad” foods, and we believe that the kind of people who eat “bad” food are the only ones who can ever get sick. Heck, that’s why we’ll willingly buy anything that’s labelled a “superfood” — because superfoods have extra special powers to keep our humours in balance and to keep us morally intact.

But here’s the thing: food is not a moral issue. Food quality is important for a number of reasons, but it will not make you live forever, and it will not save your soul.

Butter is not a superfood. It is full of fat soluble vitamins, but it will not make you live forever, and it will not save your soul.

Liver is not a superfood. It is a great source of B12 and will help you if you’re deficient, but it will not make you live forever, and it will not save your soul.

Bone broth is not a superfood. It will help you get more collagen into your diet, but it will not make you live forever, and it will not save your soul.

Acai berries taste good and they’re a good source of antioxidants, but they will not make you live forever, and it will not save your soul.

Kale is not a superfood. It’s a great way to get more greens into your diet, but it will not make you live forever, and it will not save your soul.

Etc.

Conversely, no food is inherently evil. Some foods are allergens and cause more pain than others, but the vast majority of them are not instantly going to give you cancer or diabetes. Food can be a powerful intervention, but it is not magic, it won’t help you live forever, and it will not save your soul.

And if we ever really want to heal our relationship with our refrigerators, with our thighs, and with our thyroids, then we have to be willing to accept that being a member of the Church of the Healthy can’t heal us any more than a faith healer can.

Understand that everyone dies eventually. And you want to live your best and fullest life possible until that point — and while no one can escape pain or sadness or suffering every day of their existence, you can live a good, full, and happy life if you give yourself permission. If you allow yourself to be skeptical. If you give yourself grace. If you stop praying at the Church of the Healthy and start allowing yourself to experience true health by going out and experiencing your life instead.

It’s nice to be healthy. Healthy lets you live your life.

But living in abject fear for your health (and in thrall of the foods that may or may not affect it) isn’t actually all that healthy.

For more unpopular opinions, visit performingwoman.com or sign up for the newsletter.

When I started this blog, I thought my purpose in life was to help people be healthier.

I was right, but I was practicing this purpose wrong.

Or, perhaps not wrong, per se, but not to its fullest.

You see, when I started my blog, it was all about Paleo. It was about restrictive eating in an attempt to help people stop…restrictively eating.

It was about obsession in an effort to help people stop…obsessing.

I thought that I was doing a service. In many ways I was. Paleo can be a great way to heal from or at least manage certain diseases. It can be a great way to introduce better quality nutrition into your life. It can be a great way to introduce better quality functional movement into your life as well.

But Paleo itself is still an ideology that relies on a lot of false assumptions about ideal body composition, our naturalistic past (and how it applies to our future), and the purpose of our lives.

I used Paleo was a way to justify my pursuit of leanness and my fear of fatness. I used it to avoid taking the thyroid medication that eventually would change my life (because I believed that all manmade medications were unnatural and wrong). And I used it to make my life’s purpose the pursuit of “health” by way of obsessively educating myself and everyone I knew about how I thought they should eat and exercise.

It was the official beginning of my recovery, and the thing that stopped me from pursuing Discovery.

My life’s purpose is still to help people be healthier, but my definition of what healthy is has changed, and the ways I seek to help people be healthier have changed too.

I don’t hold anything against you if you continue to eat following a Paleo diet — as I mentioned before, I do think that there is merit in eating higher quality and more nourishing foods, especially if you’re healing from gastrointestinal distress or autoimmune diseases. But living Paleo and the Paleo ideology itself is what held me back from being truly helpful.

Because I was so busy obsessing about food and nutrition and exercise that I forgot to look up and notice that the ideologies I was sharing were hurtful. That they were damaging. That I was not living as an intersectional feminist. That I was disregarding the possibility of health at every size. That my beliefs were often classist and discriminatory against those who could not afford to eat or exercise the way I did. That I was showing others ways to stay “recovered enough” without having to fully commit to recovery.

Was I helping people be healthier?

I thought so. But as time went on, and I began to ask the difficult questions and do the even more difficult work of answering those questions in ways that made me uncomfortable (but not unsafe!), I realized that I wasn’t living my purpose. It no longer felt right.

And the discomfort became the bad kind of discomfort…the sneaking suspicion that I could no longer go on doing the work that I was doing.

The transition took a long time — several months of trying to redefine myself within the context of my purpose so that it felt rightagain — but it happened. The changes that you saw and heard on my blog and the podcast were all about finding that sweet spot, where my purpose and my methods finally aligned in a way that felt real, tangible, and sustainable.

The thing that happens when you truly find your purpose is that you stop putting up a front. You stop feeling like a complete imposter or like you’re struggling to get your voice heard.

I may have a smaller audience with burlesque and pole dance, but I can be louder and more authentic than when I was trying to yell above the voices of the Paleo crowd.

And I can help people be truly, holistically healthier. I can live my purpose.

Are you living your purpose to its fullest? Or are your methods keeping you from truly sharing your voice?

For more unpopular opinions, visit performingwoman.com or sign up for the newsletter.

Last week, I offered up the hypothesis that disordered eating is, in fact, a thing, that it is, in fact, dangerous to our mental and physical health, and that it is, in fact, something that more of us are falling prey to than we think.

To those of you who don’t want to go back and read the post, here’s the TL;DR:

Rapidly losing weight through restriction — so, basically participating in any of the various forms of diet culture, from cleansing and detoxing to intermittent fasting to overexercise to calorie counting to biohacking — can actually create physiological and mental health problems analogous to those that occur in people with the actual diagnosable mental illness of eating disorder.

The obsession with food and fitness — and the performance of and identification with that obsession in both local and global forums — is making us sick. And it has to stop.

But how?

That’s the rub. I don’t know if we have the tools to get out of our body image hell, and I don’t think that, even if we didhave them, we’d have any idea what to do with them.

Let me give you a little metaphor, since I love metaphors so much:

Imagine that diet culture is a box, and we are all inside of that box. We decide that we’ve had enough of obsessing about our bodies and our food, so we decide it’s time to break out of the box.

But the only tools we have inside the box are diet culture’s tools, and diet culture’s tools can’t open up the box.

Outside of the box, there is either diet culture or no diet culture — but we don’t know until we get the box open (I call this Reverse Shrödinger’s Diet Culture) what it looks like out there. We don’t even know what tools might exist outside of the box, because we have never had a concept of what those tools look like or how they work. All we know is what’s available to us inside of the box.

So we’re stuck in this box, where we try to promote better body image through diet culture —

brands like Lean Cuisine offering a calorie controlled product meant to help you “lose weight” and also creating a commercial meant to empower women to think of themselves beyond their weight

brands like Special K creating a diet product and then an ad campaign meant to help us stop the diet talk

healthy living blogs that promote obsessive health and fitness because they get affiliate money and free products from companies that need you to stay obsessive about health and fitness in order to get you to buy their products

marketing companies that label every product in line with whatever health and fitness fad is most searched for in Google in order to make you feel like you’re making healthy choices while they make a profit

Beachbody and other network marketing coaches sharing body positive memes about feeling good in your body as it is now right next to before and after testimonials meant to make you feel like you’re actually only a not-so-good before

Health coaches promising body freedom while selling you the prison of food fear, weight loss promises, sugar detoxes, and orthorexia…

Etc. Etc.

We’re stuck in the box, because we keep using those tools. These tools give us the artificial feeling of being body positive and empowered around food and fitness, but in reality, what they do is keep us dependent on them…because ultimately, they don’t offer us the ability to break out of the box. And each time we fail to achieve diet freedom, we go seeking new (or worse, the same) tools.

And for many of us, we don’t actually even want to know the tools that will get us out of the box, because inside of the box is safety, comfort…the known.

When you have invested all of your time and money and identity into successfully performing the act of “being healthy” — if you’re a healthy living blogger or a thin/lean/strong person who is mostly thin/lean/strong because you work for it, you think about it all day long, you just “do” health instead of anything else in your life, giving up diet culture’s tools is a direct threat to your identity.

In the box, you’re a success. You’re performing healthy right, and that makes you better than everyone else. Maybe you lost 50, 100, 150 pounds and became the after picture you’re now putting on your Beachbody Facebook posts. Maybe you’re one of the people who Oprah invested in with Weight Watchers, and you’ve been counting your points faithfully for 15 years. Maybe you recovered from your eating disorder and became a personal trainer who is empowering other people to “get healthy” by focusing on making their body strong and lean. Maybe you’re a healthy living blogger who gets a thrill every time someone sends you a glowing comment on your hashtag healthy recipes made with protein powder flour from an affiliate company. Maybe you’re Paleo or vegan and you’re now selling a sugar detox or a juice cleanse that you yourself used to break your supposed food addictions.

Whatever you are, however you identify with performing healthy, you’re using diet culture’s tools and while having a bad relationship with your body hurts sometimes, it’s not as important as holding onto your identity…the identity that you have invested time, money, and energy into.

Because you’ve seen just enough of a return on that investment that you don’t want to fully leave the box.

Here’s the thing: if you leave the box, if you lose your identity as the “healthy one,” if you (gasp!) gain weight or lose muscle mass, if you lose your sponsorship, if you PR, if, if, if any of the things that threaten your identity happen, you’ll officially be society’s definition of shameful, and shame is one of the most powerful threats that a culture can use to keep its people in line.

Just so you know the definition: guilt is the feeling bad about something you did, shame is feeling bad about something you are.

You may eat, say, a brownie and feel like you’ve cheated on your diet, or whatever, but that guilt can be overcome by dieting harder the next day and re-proving that your healthy identity is still intact.

To fully slough off the identity of “healthy one” is to risk finding out that others think your actions are shameful. And when you are someone who has been invested in shaming others for their eating and exercise habits or body size, you know exactly how horrible it is to be on the other side, because you know how bad you’ve tried to make those “shameful” people feel. You know how much you want them to hate themselves into something that you can love. So when you make the conscious choice to potentially become one of those people, it’s scary. It takes courage. It takes a willingness to recognize that you were wrong about the things you thought were shameful, and a willingness to invite potential shame from others without accepting it.

Because I have been outside of the box of diet culture, and I’ve seen the tools, and the most powerful tool that I have found yet is the one labeled “No Fucks Given.”

That’s the tool that says, I am doing the thing you think is shameful, but I do not accept that it is shameful. I am refusing to invest in your shame-based culture. I am refusing to let your definition of my body be my definition of myself. No fucks given, dear sir. No fucks given.

And when you start to buck the system, people are going to try to shame you harder. Because when you give no fucks, other people feel like they have to question their own identities. If you give no fucks, are they wrong for giving a fuck? No, they can’t be…because if they’re wrong, then they’ve wasted a lot of time and money and energy. And time and money and energy are things you can’t get back once you’ve spent them. No refunds on fucks given.

Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to finally accept that I needed to stop dieting completely? Do you have any idea how much it still hurts when I see coworkers and friends “successfully” (for however long that “success” lasts) going on diets or training for ridiculous exercise events or participating in their diet culture lifestyle? Do you know how much it hurts, because it’s a reminder of how much I invested, and how ultimately unsuccessful my investment was, and how 15 years of my life are now sunk cost and I still don’t get to have a six pack?

Do you know how hard it is to see people post shame-based messages that they think are body positive, messages that remind me that I’m only ever going to be a before picture in their eyes until I buy their network marketing cleanse, that I’m never going to be a famous Paleo/vegan/clean recipe star, that I’m not good/lean enough to be considered a serious athlete, that my body is, and never will be, considered acceptable in any context except the beginning stages of eating disorder recovery — and that even in eating disorder recovery, the weight stigma and diet culture remains a guiding principle?

Yeah, it’s hard to let this go. It’s hard to know I’m not going to be able to make money off of this blog by selling you affiliate products or modeling sports clothes. It’s hard to know that I can never make a quick buck by just slapping the word “weight loss” on my brand for SEO. That even as a health coach, I have to hold myself to the no-shame, no-fucks-given standards that I practice myself, and therefore don’t have to work with anyone who isn’t ready to give up diet culture 100% completely.

But that’s hard too. Because most people don’t even see the tools to get out of diet culture’s box even as you hand those tools to them. Because those tools will remain invisible until they decide to accept that they exist, and that those tools — like health at every size, like true body positivity, like not investing or making money/praise from performing “healthy” — are more important than any “healthy” identity that they’ve cultivated.

Not starving yourself, not being a part of a nationwide, worldwide part II of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, not becoming disordered by trying to cling desperately to a false definition of healthy…it’s hard. Because the box you and I live in will shame us for trying to leave.

True body positivity is a radical act. It’s a political act. It involves saying “fuck your identity” to the people you love sometimes. Not “fuck you” to the person, but to the identity they will try to force you into. You can still love and care for people who would push you to hurt yourself under the guise of caring for you too. But you sometimes will lose friends and followers for living your truth. I’ll make that clear — body positivity, true body positivity, is not easy, and it’s not going to make you popular among the people who haven’t accepted it.

It’s like wanting to sit at the cool girls’ table in high school. Instead of going Mean Girls on that table, dyeing your hair and hiking up your skirt and writing in the burn book, you choose to sit at the table with the other “unpopular rejects…” who, I bet you’ll find, are actually a lot happier being rejected from the cool girls’ table.

The body positivity community, the health at every size community, the people who have 100% (or mostly 100%) broken out of the box and have rejected diet culture’s tools, is incredible. We may have a harder battle to fight, but I can guarantee that we have a lot more free time to love ourselves and actually be healthy since we’re not wasting it on trying to perform our “wellness” for everyone else.

So…are you ready to accept the tools and give up performing wellness? Are you ready to break out of the box? Are you ready to stop being a disordered eater or a chronic dieter?

If yes, then we have work to do.

Let’s get started, shall we? You can come sit at my table.

For more unpopular opinions, visit performingwoman.com or sign up for the newsletter.

We’re in the middle of one of the most inhumane experiments in the history of humanity.1

We’re willing participants, and yet, at the same time, we don’t even realize that we’re allowing this experiment to happen.

I’m not talking about vaccines or antibiotic-fed meat or GMOs, and if you thought that was what I might be referencing, then it’s very possible that you’re an unwilling subject in this experiment yourself.

I’m talking about disordered eating — not just eating disorders, but the habits, beliefs, politics affecting and distorting the relationships we all have with our bodies.

In the next two posts (so keep an eye out for next week’s post too!), I want to talk about the reasons, implications, and solutions so that we can consciously begin to end disordered eating and poor body image once and for all.

The Premise

In 1944–1945, scientists began an experiment on the effects of starvation using human subjects.

In order to better understand starvation and refeeding — to help in the war effort — researchers at the University of Minnesota gathered a group of 36 conscientious objectors to World War II, all able-bodied cis-men without a history of mental illness.

The men spent 12 weeks in observation to obtain a baseline, and then 26 weeks fed below 1600 calories, considered a starvation diet for male-bodied people, in an effort to have them lose 25% of their body weight. Then they would go through a refeeding period.

The men did not enter the study with anorexia, but they began to display many of the physiological and psychological behaviors of anorexics during the starvation period.

According the to APA.org:

“Beyond the gaunt appearance of the men, there were significant decreases in their strength and stamina, body temperature, heart rate and sex drive. The psychological effects were significant as well. Hunger made the men obsessed with food. They would dream and fantasize about food, read and talk about food and savor the two meals a day they were given. They reported fatigue, irritability, depression and apathy. Interestingly, the men also reported decreases in mental ability, although mental testing of the men did not support this belief.”

Some of the men would go on, even after the refeeding period, to pursue careers in culinary so that they could be around food.

The study could never be repeated today, for legal reasons — deliberately starving a person and then studying their reaction most likely would not ever make it off the ground, let alone receive a peer-reviewed status.

But isn’t that, in a way, what diet culture is putting us through right now? If the popular media is to be believed, weight loss — especially rapid weight loss — is a goal. The (quick) shedding of 25, 40, 50% of our weight is something lauded and held up as the example of willpower and dedication…and the way to get there is to eat a “healthy” diet that keeps you above the starvation line, but only just. Don’t believe me? Ask Joy Bauer on the Today Show: apparently men are supposed to eat 1600 calories if they want to lose weight “the right way” — the men in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment were eating just 30 calories less than today’s men are often encouraged to eat.

In addition, you don’t need to starve yourself for 26 weeks to start feeling the effects of starvation — in fact, even if you’re intermittent fasting for a couple of hours, your body is already beginning to feel the physiological effects of starvation. Do it long enough, and you too may put your body — and metabolism and mental health — into starvation mode as well.

Look, I know that only a tiny percentage of a percent of the population actually has a diagnosable eating disorder like anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder. But the reason why I have this blog is not really to talk to them (although that tends to be the kind of person who finds the blog and wants my help); it’s to uncover the ways in which we’re all encountering and practicing disordered eating — and what we can do to make it stop.

The Problem:

Disordered eating is different from, say anorexia, because it’s not a genetic mental health issue. i.e. you’re not necessarily predisposed to restriction and starvation. Recovery from disordered eating might have less recidivism. It might not be as fraught with co-morbid disorders, like OCD or anxiety. But it also might. And it’s still incredibly hard to recover from disordered eating and chronic dieting — and the concurrent body image issues and often even mental health issues that surface, as we saw in the case of the men from the Minnesota study.

Disordered eating comes about when you put your brain and body into starvation mode and begin acting like an anorexic or bulimic or binge eater. When your depression and anxiety, especially around food, exercise and body image, become untenable. When you start to experience a lot of the same physiological responses as eating disorder patients — and while you might think it’s just adrenal fatigue (which of course needs to be “cured” by further restriction, right?), it might just be the fact that you’re starving. Amber Rogers has a great article on that here.

Disordered eating is chronic dieting not prompted by underlying mental illness. It’s doing cleanses, it’s restricting food groups for non-medical reasons, it’s weight-cycling, it’s overexercising to compensate for a “bad eating day” (i.e. purge). It’s “emotional eating” for self-punishment. It’s feeling out of control out of food and not trusting yourself without a meal plan. It’s all of the reasons why we keep participating in diets, cleanses, exercise programs and “lifestyles” all geared toward “optimizing” the bodies that we’ve been told will be sick without the intervention of a diet.

Disordered eating looks just like, or very much like, an actual eating disorder. It behaves the same way. It has many of the same thoughts. It destroys peoples’ emotional and physical health in many of the same ways. The depressed metabolism and the depressed mind.

And yet it’s both sanctioned and encouraged by our doctors, therapists, nutritionists, and TV/magazine/internet personalities and celebrities.

The fine line has been crossed. And it’s getting harder and harder to recover because Diet Culture is so entrenched and ingrained in our cultural consciousness.

The Recovery:

I talk about recovery on my blog, and I am sure that most people believe that the term does not apply to them, specifically because they do not have an eating disorder. Most people are probably right.

Recovery is a term usually used specifically for talking to eating disordered people, people whose mental illness has the highest mortality rate and often require intervention once, if not multiple times, before they get better.

Most people don’t need that kind of intervention because they’re not anorexic, for example. They’re just acting like anorexics because their brains have been rewired and their bodies recalibrated into starvation mode through chronic dieting. They need recovery too, but don’t know it.

But a different kind of recovery. A different kind of treatment. One that probably doesn’t require inpatient observation, but rather therapy and what I call “Discovery,” which is the recognition of the need for and the pursuit of interests outside of nutrition and exercise.

Recovery from disordered eating should not be as hard as recovery from the actual mental illness underlying the eating disorder because there’s no genetic or intrinsic illness driving the disorder…except:

We live in a world, a culture, that is so invested in disordered eating, that the extrinsic pressure to participate in diet culture makes recovery from disordered eating feel just as impossible.

The pressure to not only “be” healthy, but to “perform” healthy is everywhere. And the ability to profit from the performance of healthy, not just monetarily (such as quitting your job to become an independent Isagenix sales person or taking on personal training clients or supplementing your income with affiliate sales), but also interpersonally (praise from family, friends, and strangers; getting more sexual/romantic attention; even getting better treatment while shopping, at restaurants, at your job, etc.) makes it hard to not want to perform healthy all the time.

When I say “performing healthy,” I mean making sure that others see just how dedicated you are to your health, nutrition, and fitness routines. Being known as “the healthy one” who never orders dressing on their salad, being known as the strong or fast or dedicated one who never misses a workout (and never fails to put their FitBit score for the day on Facebook), etc.

This happens locally, springing up in gym culture and race (5K, marathon, etc.) culture, at your desk during the office fitness challenges, among your friend group every year after January 1 or just before “bikini season.”

This happens globally online in healthy living blogs and the communities they spawn, in the government initiatives and resulting school programs that purport to “inspire” our children to be less obese than we are when they grow up, in the advertisements and marketing campaigns that blare the “be healthy AND thin/strong/lean” message at us from every billboard, internet sales page, television commercial, and magazine ad we consume on a daily basis.

The recommendations that we have been given — and the recommendations that we have swallowed without stopping first to taste test them — are not helping us become healthier. They’re making us more and more obsessive, starved, and metabolically deranged than if we were actually just making “healthy” choices without having to know how many calories were in our gluten free muffin so we could hit our calorie targets for the day.

Those of us who speak with the language of diet culture, and who turn food and exercise into the entire focus of their lifestyle (“not a diet!”), are disordered eaters. Many of us are headed toward the same fates as eating disordered people, including severe metabolic and hormonal dysfunction/disregulation, depression and anxiety, and obsession about food and body size.

Yes, even those of us who don’t have eating disorders.

So what do we do about it?

To be continued next week.

For more unpopular opinions, visit performingwoman.com or sign up for the newsletter.

It’s finally happening.

The cracks in the veneer are starting to show.

They’re small. Almost unnoticeable. But they’re going to keep getting bigger.

We’re living in one of the most grossly consumer-driven times in history, and it’s a huge problem. And finally, finally, some people are starting to speak out.

A few days ago, a young woman named Essena O’Neill, an instagram-famous teenager, came out about her fake instagram life — how it was posed, controlled, unreal — and how she’s shutting down her accounts to make good.*

And I know that there are plenty of you out there who are shocked and upset to hear that an instagram star could be making up her life, and I also know that there are plenty more who are angry, saying that of course it was posed, but so is everything we do these days, why make a big deal out of it? Or that maybe that was her experience, but it’s not sad and empty and fake for everyone…etc.

But I think that we need to talk about Essena and “but they can do it” syndrome, especially when it comes to disordered eating and body image.

One of the reasons why I feel so helpless as an activist, writer, and coach is because I get a lot of push back from people who are in denial about their food/body/exercise issues. And the denial is actually encouraged by the culture in which we live.

The denial goes like this:

“I don’t want to hate my body anymore.

I don’t want to feel out of control.

But I don’t want to stop eating Paleo/running marathons/doing cleanses/figure competitions etc. because:

I see all of these other people, and they’re ‘doing it in a healthy way.’

If they can do it…why can’t I?”

That’s always the pushback: I know that maybe I’m not doing it healthily yet, but I know it’s possible to be healthy about it, because I’ve seen other people do it, and they’re the very image of healthy. Heck, brands are paying them money to wear their workout clothes and drink their protein shakes and sell their yoga accessories and take fabulous trips. If people are paying them money to do it, they must be healthy. And I want to be so healthy that I could someday be one of those paid people too.”

And even if you don’t realize that these internet famous “health” stars are getting actual money for looking and acting the way they do, you still think: well, look at all of the comments on their posts! Look how many likes they have! Look how many people love and adore them and follow their method and leave testimonials and want to be just like them! If other people are paying them compliments to do it, they must be healthy. And I want to be so healthy that I could someday be one of those adored people too.

I’ve realized, over the last several years, how heavily capitalism — physical money, social capital, etc. — plays into the desire and ability not to acknowledge a disorder. This doesn’t just have to do with models and actors; the exchange of value for a person’s behavior or physical appearance absolutely affects people like you and me.

It’s always been this way in our lifetimes, albeit on a smaller scale: going on a diet and successfully losing weight or changing the shape of your body always garners you praise and adoration from your immediate social circle and the people you interact with in the real world. Before the internet owned my life, the compliments that discouraged me from acknowledging that there was something wrong with the way I was eating and exercising came from family and friends.

But now that anyone can get internet famous and build a rabid following of paying fans, it’s much, much worse.

Brands are willing to pay you to stay in your disorder. Fans are willing to pay you to stay in your disorder. And the dopamine rush of opening up an app and realizing how much you are loved and adored for staying in your disorder is often (read: always) hard to pass up.

I’ve had to stop following some people whom I care very much about because they’re very wrapped up in “but they can do it” syndrome, so much so that they’re willing to lie about their very real, very active eating disorder in order to continue “inspiring” others to be healthy.

Because in showing off this very health-obsessed, health-conscious, health-consciousness lifestyle, people are not only denying their own disorders in order to gain monetary and social capital, they’re also creating a space for people who have actual mental illness to justify not getting help or recovering, while also encouraging people who don’t have eating disorders/exercise addiction to adopt a disordered view of their food, fitness, and nutrition. (And I have a post coming this week on specifically why the latter is a dangerous thing!)

Essena O’Neill matters, because she is not an isolated incident, or incident waiting to happen. Essena O’Neill is representative of what is going on under the hood and behind the scenes in the healthy living blog community and in social media in general. Maybe it’s not as intense. Maybe it’s not as dire or dark. But every one of us who accepts the idea that performing the act of healthy living — performing the act of being thin, of frolicking through the instagrammed country-side, of living this “perfectly” photographed and filtered life, of #greensmoothies and #affiliatelinks — is living a little bit of a lie.

And that lie is eating us alive. It is destroying our ability to connect to our bodies and lives authentically. It’s breeding disordered habits and behaviors, even in people without mental illness. It’s creating opportunities for self-judgement and the shaming of others. It’s shaping our world view in ways that we don’t even realize.

And while people won’t listen to me, because I’m not some beautiful, young, thin, juice-cleansed instagram star, maybe they’ll listen to Essena. She has the privilege, and she wants you to know why she doesn’t want it anymore.

She wants you to know that “but they can do it,” is not a legitimate excuse for holding onto your appearance-based and value-seeking behaviors. They can’t do it either — not for real, anyway — and that is exactly the point.

You don’t have to buy what they’re selling. You don’t have to be bought.

You don’t have to hate your body into some version of what appears to be loved.

You can recover from this — whether it’s your eating disorder or chronic dieting. You do not have to model your behaviors for others. You do not have to perform “healthy.”

You do not owe anyone your body image or your happiness. And you don’t have to buy it from anyone either.

They can’t do it, and you don’t have to — even if they could.

And that is why Essena O’Neill matters.

Keep dancing,

@PerformingWoman

*And, yes, I get it: she’s still using the internet and social media to get publicity for stuff. That’s all she knows. That’s how you reach her audience. There’s lots of problematic stuff that happens when people first go through the act of renouncing a disordered lifestyle of any kind…but at least she’s being honest in the best way she knows how.

For more unpopular opinions, visit performingwoman.com or sign up for the newsletter.

0.0

I thought I was watching my weight, but my weight was watching me.

The little red scale I bought on the day I decided I was going to become a fitness model would peer at me from the bathroom floor, 0.0, a voyeur as I stripped naked every morning–naked at the same time, naked with my teeth brushed, thirsty but no water until after I was weighed, naked at the same place in my routine to keep the variables the same, naked to prove that I was slowly disappearing–and the scale would peer up, eyes at 0.0, waiting.

I’d step on. I’d step off. The scale would stare back at me, wide-eyed at 0.0. Just in case, I’d step on again. Off by .5–too much of me today. I needed to take the average the average. One more time. The scale would wink and blink, and then, after a few moments, nod back off to sleep.

Even though it slept in the cabinet under the sink, I could feel my scale dreaming about me as I made my way to the kitchen. Gotta enter the numbers, keep the dream alive. No food, no drink, nothing until you make sure to enter the numbers online. The calorie counter was hungry.

My weight was watching me.

For two years, I measured my weight every single day. For two years, taking that scale with me on vacations, paying for the extra weight of the baggage to make up for the weight I had lost. For two years, missing only a single day–and on that day, I felt the scale’s eyes on me, burning hole into the parts of my body that were still there…

And then one day, I stopped.

Cold turkey. A turkey sandwich, and I didn’t even know if it had made me heavier. I had no way of knowing. I could feel the scale watching me from underneath the sink, but I knew it couldn’t see. I couldn’t see. The calorie counter online sat there with its mouth agape, at 0.

I had no numbers to feed it, because I was learning to feed me.

The time I’d spent stripping for the scale was time I’d lost learning how to love myself.

The time I’d spent weighing and measuring was time I’d spent ignoring my hunger.

I was living on someone else’s numbers. Arbitrary weights to judge instead of flourish. Imaginary calories to quantify, not nourish.

I stopped because there were other numbers. Scarier numbers. Numbers that the doctor understood better than my scale. Numbers that drove me straight from the physician–gas tank on E, no numbers, no zero, just hunger this time–to the nearest Whole Foods for my first sandwich in years. It wasn’t about the taste, but soon it would be.

I had forgotten how to taste while I was counting.

Calories don’t have a taste. Numbers cannot be felt. And being seen–all day, performing for eyes that don’t matter–is nothing compared to learning how to see the world through my own eyes.

I thought that having a number made me count. The more I counted, the more my days were numbered.

For as long as I live on Earth, I’ll have a weight because I have mass and Earth has gravity. I don’t belong on a scale, I belong on the ground. Weight grounds me, sure, but it’s not what defines me.

I am defined by more than zero. In my eyes, I am a ten. And my eyes are finally open.

The calorie counter still lives online. I have forgotten the password, and I don’t care to remember.

The scale still lives under the sink, but it hasn’t opened its eyes in a long time. Perhaps someday I’ll leave it by the curb on garbage day. For now: I see myself through my eyes, and I am beautiful.

If you live in Silicon Valley, make sure to check out the Eating Disorders Resource Center for resources, information, and support at www.edrcsv.org