I definitely don’t want to jinx myself. But in recent days, I’ve been heartened to see people around the world standing up to and voting out bullies. Serbia. Brazil. Israel is still up in the air, but its election saw the highest turnout in a generation, according to The New York Times.

Turnout records are being broken across my home state of Texas, including in the county where I live.

No matter the outcome, higher voter turnout is a good thing.

My feelings will probably change about 50 more times before Nov. 3, but hey, it’s a moment.

I don’t have a crystal ball. I’ve been wrong before. I’ve been through my worried phase, my holding-my-breath phase. Now I’m in my let’s-just-rip-off-the-Band-Aid-and-get-it-over-with-please phase.

One of the most interesting things I read this week was the transcript of an Ezra Klein interview with Sarah Longwell, political consultant and founder of the Bulwark, who has conducted hundreds of focus groups with thousands of voters since the 2016 election. (I’ve gifted y’all the NYT article so you can read it.)

It was a fascinating conversation, focused mostly on how people think about what’s happening with U.S. politics from someone who understands people and voters more than most of us.

There were two key points I took away from the conversation. The first is this: A lot of us “news seekers,” those of us who stay informed and maybe care a little too much, think the enemy sits at the opposite end of our political beliefs. But, as Klein pointed out, we have more in common with our polar opposites than we think:

“The primary divide in politics, I always think, is between interested and uninterested. The hard-core left and the hard-core right, MAGA, the liberals, resistance, whatever it is, they’re all interested. They’re all following some media source constantly. But a lot of voters don’t like politics. And they’re not that interested.”

Having mostly always been overly interested (I began my newspaper journalism career in middle school), I’ve long been fascinated with those who aren’t. Longwell thinks characterizing these people as low-information voters is unfair, instead describing them as people “who are just not sick in the head like us, who are not following everything, who don’t let their nervous systems be hijacked on a daily basis by the vicissitudes of political wrangling.”

I’ll admit, most of my life, I’ve struggled to understand these people, though I know and love plenty of them.

But where do they get their information? How do they decide who to vote for?

This brings me to my second point. Increasingly, the answer to these questions, per Longwell, is … they don’t know.

Many of us used to get our news from a source, maybe even one or two sources. Now, many of the so-called “news receivers” have no idea where their information comes from because it just arrives through the feeds. Longwell says:

“They’re scrolling. They’ve got their favorite cooking influencer, or they’re scrolling on Instagram or TikTok — an algorithm-driven information environment where they mostly want basketball or sports. But then there’s Stephen A. Smith talking about politics.”

She describes the bleed-over from culture to politics as a “vibe” that washes over them.

As a former journalist, this sets off all kinds of alarm bells for me. If we don’t know where our information comes from, how do we know it’s true? Yes, many news organizations have a bias, but that bias is more apparent than the cesspool showing up in our feeds.

But I think it’s important to acknowledge something Longwell didn’t say: even the well-informed can be hijacked by the feed. As much as I consider myself a news seeker and have sources I go to daily, I’m not as immune to the “vibe” as I’d like to think.

So I guess my internal winds have shifted again even as I write this piece.

Again, I don’t have all the answers, but I’d love to hear where you’re at and how you’re feeling.

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Here’s what else I wrote on Almost Sated in October

The power of one. And 23 million.

I wrote about my last-minute, mad scramble to finish 200 postcards to infrequent Texas voters and why I still believe in the power of ordinary people to make a difference.

Read the piece

Oddly I’m feeling okay with my body right now

This is the longest I’ve gone without exercising consistently, thanks to an Achilles injury that’s been plaguing me for far longer than I’d have liked. In the past, this inactivity would have sent me into a spiral of anxiety about gaining weight. This time, I’m giving myself permission to rest without feeling like I need to make up for it.

Read the piece

‘It’s not about being less big’

I talked with Christina Hall, a non-diet nutritionist in Barbados, about how culture shapes our beliefs about food, health and body size. We explored everything from the country’s history of slavery and food scarcity to the growing influence of Western beauty standards and GLP-1 medications. The interview was a reminder that so much of what we consider personal preference or individual choice about body size is shaped by the culture around us.

Read the interview

Looking ahead

It’s hard to think too far beyond November 3 right now. By the time you hear from me again, we’ll have an outcome. Well, maybe we’ll have an outcome. Hopefully, we’ll have an outcome?

Take care of yourself.

Let me know how you’re keeping your nervous system in check.

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A little over a month ago, I signed up to write 200 postcards to inconsistent Democratic voters in states with the most competitive midterm elections. Of course, I picked my home state of Texas.

I got my package of postcards lickety-split. And I opened the package right away (take that, perimenopause brain!), but there were explicit instructions about when the postcards should be mailed, which seemed like a long time in the future.

That future is this week. Yesterday actually.

I started furiously writing Monday night, using one of the pre-written, supposedly proven-effective messages (I’m a marketer, so I assume the folks at Progressive Turnout Project A/B tested them). It was clear, this was going to be a sprint to the finish.

Why can’t I write faster? When did handwriting become so hard? My husband joked the people receiving mine would think they were written by an 8-year-old because of the penmanship. I woke up with a sharp pain on the left side of my upper back the next morning and realized it must have been from how I was holding my body as I cranked out postcards. I need reinforcements. So I called in my mother.

I sent a stack of postcards home with her Tuesday night, after plying her with drinks (okay, one drink), a home-cooked meal, and a trip to the thrift store (her favorite activity). I didn’t need to ply her, though, because she had offered to help me weeks ago, which, if I had had any sense, I would have taken her up on at the time.

My mom and I have already cast our votes.

Early voting in the midterm elections started Monday in Texas, and I probably don’t have to tell you a lot is at stake here.

For months and months now, it’s been on my mind. What will happen in these midterm elections? I believe in the power of people. The collective power. And the power of just one person. I believe we each have a part to play.

I’m still naive in many ways, but I learned about a group called Amnesty International over 35 years ago when I was just 14. Amnesty believed that writing letters—enough letters—could help end human rights violations. The means of communicating have changed, but I’m still writing letters on behalf of Amnesty International to this day.

And now postcards to swing states.

According to an email I received from Progressive Turnout Project yesterday, I was one of many who helped send 23,016,000 postcards to voters in swing states.

I don’t know if my 200 postcards will be the ones to make the difference. I don’t know if the millions written by people like me and my mother will be enough to change the course of this election. And yet, I have to try. I can’t just sit by.

I have to tell you, though, I’m scared.

I’m so scared about what’s happening right now in this country. I’m scared for the world. I’m scared that power has become so concentrated in the hands of a few ultra rich and powerful who appear to be above the law. I have lots of doubts whether our efforts to get out the vote will be enough.

I had a thought yesterday. It goes back to my old college boyfriend, the one who was always hitting on my girlfriends, really anything that moved, but was always accusing me of cheating on him. Later, I found out the truth: he was the one cheating. You might know where I’m going with this. The ones protesting the most about cheating, or I don’t know, say, stealing an election, despite all evidence that it didn’t happen, might just be the ones who end up doing it.

For now, I remain hopeful that democracy and fair elections will prevail.

I’m encouraged by my fellow Americans and especially my fellow Texans who are proudly posting their I Voted Early sticker pics on their favorite platforms.

As for the postcards, I was behind, but I wasn’t too late. And neither are you.

Early voting is underway. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Make a plan. Take your mother. Don’t wait until the last minute.

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You might remember the breakthrough I had back in summer after completing a via ferrata in the remote wilderness along the Saguenay Fjord in Quebec.

My body was hurting in a bad way. It had been over a year of suffering through a nagging Achilles issue that most of the time was a minor nuisance but occasionally, during periods of major activity, became something more.

After weeks of hiking and climbing, mostly through the gorgeous gorges of upstate New York, my Achilles was in the worst shape it had ever been. I’d gotten used to pain during my first few steps in the morning, and maybe again in the evening after an active day. But by this point in the trip, even the first few steps after sitting were painful, as were any steps down. Which was particularly problematic because the last two places we stayed were on the second floor and only accessible by stairs.

After that trip, I made a bit of a declaration, to myself and all of you, that I was done proving myself athletically. I love hiking and nature. I really really do. But somewhere along the way, it had become about more than moving my body or enjoying nature. It had become a way of proving, more like an f* you to the rest of the world, that yes, this fat body could still do all the things non-fat bodies could do.

During that trip, my husband and I did some planning around the next half of our lives, figuring out what we wanted in our next hometown, even rating how important each of those values were, and then asked AI to recommend a list of places that fit that criteria. Doing that exercise brought something else to the forefront, the realization that if I wanted to enjoy this next chapter, I would need to shift from proving to healing.

It was time to really double down on fixing my body.

So I took the next step in the recovery process, an experimental procedure where my own platelets were injected into my ankle. Before I left on the trip, the doc had told me I’d be able to resume full activities after two weeks in a boot, and my plan had been to do just that. I didn’t want to lose any of the cardio endurance I’d built up, especially since summer heat is so brutal in Texas.

I confirmed it again with the doc on the day of the procedure, and this time he was more measured. Go slow. Stay off the ankle as much as possible and give it time to heal. Just don’t skip the stretches! This was the first clue that this procedure might not be quite as easy as I thought it would be.

It was painful. Much more painful than I was expecting, and in the weeks after, I was actually in more pain than I had been the entire year. There was also more tightness in my Achilles than I had been experiencing. I might need to reconsider my two-week timeline.

After carrying that thought around with me a few days, I shared it, and another I’d been having, with my husband. Why do I need to rush back? Why not take all the time I need to get over it? (To be clear, he’s the voice of reason and would have recommended this to begin with, which is why I’d waited until I was more certain to bring it up with him.)

It was a thought that had never occurred to me before, but it made sense: If I was putting my body through this much torture for a procedure, why wouldn’t I give it enough time to actually heal?

So I didn’t.

The old me never missed workouts. Old me trained through flu and strep throat, more than once in my 40s when I was competing in Oly lifting. Even when I took a day off, the guilt was like an extra weight I was carrying around, a mental kettlebell, reminding me how much weight I was going to gain from those missed calorie-burning sessions. I’d tried to make up for it, of course, through reduced eating, but it was just another mental stressor. Now I see it more clearly: I’d give myself physical permission, but not mental.

Prior to the PRP procedure, I wondered how I would handle two weeks of non-activity, especially two weeks off my mountain bike. In the past, I would have been stressed-out and short-tempered, agitating myself and everyone around me.

This time I was actually … totally fine.

I felt bad for my dog, even though my husband was totally taking on his daily walks, but I was strangely okay. It was the heat of summer in Texas, and for the first time, I gave myself permission to not put myself in it. I took on a freelance writing project and focused on my pro bono marketing work for a local nonprofit I’m on the board of. I leaned into more TV time in the evenings.

But more importantly, I didn’t feel fat.

I didn’t count calories. I didn’t worry about what or how much I was eating. I trusted my body would adjust my food intake to my activity level, and it did.

I had a brief thing trying on clothes in a Nordstrom dressing room. There was cellulite on my upper thighs that had previously been rock hard. But it was more like a momentary noticing, followed by reminding myself that this was temporary. The cellulite and softness, yes, but also my response to it. In the past, that would have set off alarm bells, urgently warning: You. Must. Do. Something.

I waited almost five weeks to return to biking. For the last Ride Like a Girl ride of the season, one of my fellow lady shredders asked me to come out, even if just for the post-ride celebrations. I instead decided I’d see how the bike felt. I joined a slower group and took it easy in the back of the pack. I wasn’t pushing it. I wasn’t overdoing it. When I felt like I’d hit my limit, I headed back to the parking lot without a second thought.

Body image check-in time. How’s everyone else feeling right now?

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A quick Almost Sated housekeeping note: My fall subscription sale continues for a few more days. You can get 50% off an annual paid subscription, $30 for the year instead of $60, for as long as you remain a subscriber. If you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, now’s a very good time.

Get 50% off forever

In case you missed it …

I’ve been reading as much as I can, trying to gather enough details to make sense of not just the cruelty and violence that Jane Doe alleges, but also the aftermath: the university’s handling of the case and the decision not to bring criminal charges. And yet, there is no excuse.

Too often, our culture minimizes, excuses or looks away from violence against women. We must keep pushing for change. We must continue to condemn sexual violence against women, in all of its forms. Each of us must call it out, but especially men. We must teach our sons and daughters what consent looks like and to speak up when they see inappropriate behavior, as hard as that might be. We also need to speak out against the laws in New York and 18 other states that make it harder to prosecute sexual assault when a victim becomes incapacitated after voluntarily consuming alcohol or drugs.

If this has been on your mind, if you just need to vent, feel free to let it out here.

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While the context is quite different, the conversation below is also about the cultural beliefs we absorb and how they shape our relationships with ourselves and others. It reminded me a lot of the interview I did with about how weight loss isn’t required for health and even sometimes works against it. You can read all of my Almost Sated interviews here. Thanks for being here. 💙

My conversation with Barbados nutritionist Christina Hall

We tend to think a lot of our beliefs around food and diet are universal, rarely questioning where they come from. More steeped in science or fact, based on free will and individual choice, and less influenced by culture. This interview might change your mind about that.

Christina Hall, a Barbados-based non-diet nutritionist with a master’s in human nutrition and public health, joined me for a conversation about diet culture, size preferences in this Caribbean island, and how Western body ideals influence food culture outside its borders.

Before she started her career, Christina believed nutrition was simple. Eat more fruits and veggies. Drink more water. The deeper she went in her studies, the more complicated it became. “The weil that was over my eyes was lifted,” she says.

We cover a lot of ground here, including:

• How Caribbean body ideals value curves, but only in certain places. There’s stigmatization against larger bodies, increasingly following Western beauty standards.

• How Barbados’ food culture was shaped by slavery, scarcity and status, and why some of those traditional foods are incorrectly labeled unhealthy.

• How Christina found intuitive eating and why she focuses less on weight loss and more on markers like blood sugar, sleep, stress, and overall health.

• What she worries about as GLP-1 medications become more common in her country.

• Why even well-intentioned public health efforts can do harm when anti-fat bias is unchecked.

What I loved about this conversation is how quickly it moves beyond this idea that food choices are about free will and individual choice and shaped more by collective social and cultural norms.

A quick Almost Sated housekeeping note: My fall subscription sale continues for a few more days. You can get 50% off an annual paid subscription, $30 for the year instead of $60, for as long as you remain a subscriber. If you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, now’s a very good time.

Get 50% off forever

Christina Hall is a non-diet, intuitive eating nutritionist in Bridgetown, Barbados. She holds a Master’s degree in Human Nutrition with a focus in Public Health from the London Metropolitan University and is an Associate Registered Nutritionist (ANutr.) through the Association for Nutrition in the UK. You can reach her through her website and blog. She is available for virtual sessions in Barbados and the UK.

Dared to Ditch Interview with Christina Hall

Kristi: When I saw that you were a non-diet nutritionist based in Barbados I thought it would be interesting to talk about the differences from a cultural standpoint between Western American ideals and Barbados.

Christina: I was a teacher for about four years at a secondary school. I was somebody who was interested in food and nutrition. The more I interacted with my kids, the more I realized they need some support in this way.

Over time, I decided that I would leave teaching and study nutrition. I had this worldview that I’m going to save the world with nutrition, because in Barbados, our population, they say that we have high obesity rates. And we have lots of non-communicable diseases. So those would be hypertension, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, which I have learned lots more about in the last four years.

I left teaching in 2018 with all hopes of saving Barbados, one person at a time, using this fantastical idea of what I thought nutrition was. I was doing a master’s, and because it was focused on public health, the veil that was over my eyes was lifted because I thought, oh yeah, it’s just so simple. People should eat more fruit and veg, for example. But it was a lot more nuanced than that by the end of it.

How I got into non-diet nutrition was somewhat based on my learning during my master’s, following other people in the nutrition world globally, talking about what non-diet nutrition looks like and recognizing that was actually what I was thinking about the whole time without knowing it was called that. Intuitive eating fits so well with what I already knew from how my parents had raised me. It fit. I didn’t know it had a name at all.

It has definitely been a bit of a challenge coming back home, trying to be that nutritionist that’s not wagging their finger. There’s this unfortunate perception that when you go to a nutrition professional they’re going to wag their finger at you and say, no, you should never eat X, Y, Z.

The space here is a little small. Marketing-wise, one of the reasons I’m so surprised that people come across me is because the ones that market tend to market weight loss. Then we have another challenge with people who are not qualified nutritionists or qualified dietitians also trying to market weight loss at people constantly. It has been an interesting journey, and I’m still trying to figure out my footing.

Kristi: If you spent your whole life in Barbados, can you tell me what a healthy body meant to you growing up?

Christina: I was very blessed. I have not been bullied or ostracized for what my body looks like. I’m a person who is very much straight-sized, which in the Caribbean can be a double-edged sword, because we are of African descent.

In some ways, having a little bit more curves is seen as beautiful, and yet still having too much weight is seen as you’re not really taking care of yourself. If you’re straight-sized, people might think you don’t eat enough. Some people might think otherwise. So it’s a real mixed bag.

I was lucky that in my family, we didn’t tend to focus too much on that.

But I do know a couple of people who would have been bigger than me who have talked about their experience being told by people, you’ve got to lose weight, you’re too big for your age, that kind of thing. My experience, in comparison to many others, has been very beautiful.

When I was in teaching is where I tended to see it a little bit more, because the children literally mirror their parents’ thoughts, or whoever is around them. There would be a little bit more discussion about what somebody looks like, their body size, or shaming them for things that they do.

When I started to dive into intuitive eating, non-diet nutrition, I realized I might have had the opposite experience because I’ve always been in a straight-size body, but wanted to be an ally for persons living in a bigger body. It was me examining what my relationship was with my own body first and recognizing that I didn’t have it as bad as others. I didn’t have it as bad as some of my closest friends.

I did spend all of my life, except for my studying years and traveling, in Barbados. So it’s quite a mixed bag in terms of body image. We want certain things to be big, like behinds. Guys must have muscles, but if your belly is big, I find that we’ve been having more of that trickle-down effect from the Western world, where we don’t want certain parts of our body to be too big.

Kristi: In America, my understanding from the nutritionists, dietitians and therapists I’ve talked to is that most of them are not taught a non-diet framework as part of their formal education. Was that the same with you? How did you get into the non-diet aspect of it?

Christina: I studied in the U.K. at London Metropolitan University, and I did a master’s in human nutrition with a purpose in public health. It’s not that we were exactly taught about non-diet nutrition, but I came from a pure science background. I did chemistry and biochemistry before, so everything is very strict.

In doing my master’s, I was recognizing that we have our various models of healthy eating guides for countries, we have our public health policies, but one of the things that stood out to me when we were talking about policies was health policies all over the world needed to be all-encompassing of other aspects. Making healthy food affordable or making sure people eat enough fruit and vegetables. It was much more holistic than that.

It led me down the rabbit hole, after I graduated, of finding other people who were working in the nutrition space. I ended up speaking with about 10 dietitians and nutritionists from across the world. This happened to be during COVID times. Some of them were doing intuitive eating, some were calling it non-diet nutrition, some anti-diet nutrition. Some of the continuing professional development opportunities talked about anti-fat bias, talked about sensitivity training.

I went down that rabbit hole, came across the book by Sabrina Strings [Fearing the Black Body]. I came across Evelyn Tribole and Elyse [Resch, co-authors of the book Intuitive Eating]. and did some of that continuing professional development over time. That’s really how I got here.

I think it does take a little bit more to step outside of what I learned at school. This is real context of the world. How do I deliver this information in a way that allows people to keep their cultural foods? Because learning in the U.K., they’re not talking about my cultural foods in Barbados. How do we keep that aspect and still talk about making sure that your body is a healthy body? So I went down that rabbit hole and came out on this side.

Kristi: For someone who has never been to Barbados, what should I understand about the culture to help understand how people think about food and bodies?

Christina: We continue to evolve because we are the kind of people that are very adaptable. Our culture changes very quickly with the rest of the world. If I think about the roots of it coming from enslaved Africans, the way that we ate, the foods that we had, our food started out as the scraps.

We have foods like something called pudding and souse, which is pickled pigtails, cucumbers that are pickled with lime and parsley, garlic, that kind of stuff. You make a steamed pudding. We might have started as, we get the scraps, whatever piece of protein we get, we try to make that into something.

We have been evolving since the abolition of slavery, since our country has become independent. And so we have a lot more Westernized foods right now. Barbadian culture is in the process of changing. Globalization has caused it to change a lot. We have moved away a lot of times from more cultural foods.

I find that sometimes public health messaging can demonize our traditional foods, which actually might be better for us. But because we are in a transitionary phase, we don’t have a lot of research being done in nutrition in Barbados. We do a lot of quantitative research, like these are the number of people with obesity, but the root causes are not addressed.

Our food environment has changed over time with globalization, which has been a difficult thing because our relationships with our typical foods have changed. You might find the drive-thru lines are always packed. I mean drive-thru for places like KFC, fried foods, deep-fried foods. They’re always packed, even though the supermarket will also be packed.

Bajans love meat. We love to have a big piece of meat on our plate because, if we think about the ancestors that we’ve had, we got the scraps. Whatever meat you got is what you had to do with.

So now meat is seen as the status symbol. You buy this expensive thing and put most of that on your plate. Eating something that, as we like to call it, rabbit food, or the greens and the veg, some people would say that’s rabbit food. We don’t want to appear as though we’re poor.

We’re still trying to find our footing. We need to do a lot more research on what’s actually happening in our food environment, what people’s attitudes towards food look like.

Kristi: In terms of the people you work with, why are they typically coming to you? Is it to manage a chronic medical illness?

Christina: A lot of the times they are. I worked with a cardiac rehab program at one point. The person might have had a cardiac event or they might be trying to prevent one. A lot of times they thought they had to lose weight in order to prevent another event from happening.

I used to ask persons about their food intake, but then we would talk about stress. We would talk about sleep. Do you have any hobbies? Do you have things that you do when you want to relieve stress? You recognize that persons don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about that.

In my private practice, I see a lot of people who come with either the chronic condition question, or they are trying to prevent it. The starting point is often, my doctor told me I need to lose weight. So it’s kind of like they’ve been pushed toward weight loss a lot of times to solve a lot of the problems.

Based on my training in my master’s and otherwise, yes, your weight and weight management can be helpful. So are the other aspects. We kind of lack that in-between phase where we also consider, aside from being a particular body size, what else are you doing that might be impacting your health?

Kristi: Along with the types of food people are eating, have body-image ideals shifted?

Christina: It really depends. We’re in a culture that is still transitioning to whatever we are. I am strongly of the belief that we have been very much influenced by outside cultures, especially now that you have more access to seeing what everybody else is doing.

I can’t say that there’s a particular body shape or size that people like. They’ll see I’m a nutritionist and they’re like, oh yeah, I would like to be small like you. I do remember at least one client who was adamant. She wanted me to be really rough and hard on her so that she would be disciplined and do these things to lose weight.

In my private practice, it tends to be people with conditions. A lot of times there are people who want to lose weight. But I have to dig a little bit deeper before I say I’m going to strictly focus on weight loss, because to me, weight loss is not the goal. It can be part of the outcomes, but it’s not the main goal.

For my practice, I would be more focused on things like: Are your blood sugar numbers looking better? Is your HbA1c, which is another test to see how your body is managing blood sugar, looking better? Are you sleeping better? Are you getting in more physical activity? Have you made your fiber goals? Those are things I tend to focus on more than weight loss.

If weight loss comes along by the way, then great for you. But there have been several times where I’ve had to tell people, all right, look, stop. Right now, you do not need to be focused on losing weight. That is not in the best interest for your health. They come with their goals in mind, but we might have to redirect the goals based on what’s going on with you.

Kristi: Here, there’s a large part of the population that sees fatness across the board as unhealthy. People don’t separate out: What is my cholesterol? What is my blood sugar? What is my blood pressure? They’re just thinking, fat is unhealthy. Is that also happening there, or less so?

Christina: It is. I will still say that we’re in the early stages of people really recognizing it. I’ve had to redirect people from thinking, it’s not about being less big. What are your other numbers saying? Are we only looking at this number on the scale? Are we only looking at your BMI? It’s still a very new conversation.

It’s still a very new conversation in terms of people recognizing that body size is not exactly correlated with your health. I know that there are other people who are championing this as well, but we also have so many people who are very heavily focused on showing results. People love to see results.

One of the reasons that I wouldn’t post anything like that on my social media is because you moving from, say, 160 pounds to 120 pounds does not mean that you’re healthier. That’s not what the evidence shows, that’s not what the research shows. I’ve been having those difficult conversations and finding other people who have been having those difficult conversations. I’m trying to continue to build out that community because we have a lot of persons here who are more focused on weight rather than what the overall person’s health looks like.

Kristi: What about GLP-1s? Is that a conversation that’s happening yet?

Christina: Yeah, it’s happening. It’s starting. I went to a conference about that in Barbados about two years ago. We’ve had the older models of weight-loss drugs before. Many people with diabetes tend to be on those, or other people for other reasons might be on those.

It’s still a very much newer conversation because, in Barbados, the culture is that the doctor runs and manages the patient. Sometimes that also means that they manage the nutrition. And sometimes that could be dangerous because, while what they know could be very helpful to patients, they don’t know everything.

I think the GLP-1 conversation in Barbados can lead us down a very dangerous path simply because we’re already in a space where there are limited resources. Let’s say, for example, you have under 20, that’s not a real number, under 20 nutrition professionals who are qualified to give nutrition [advice]. And you start putting people on GLP-1 inhibitors, then you put those patients in a dangerous position where they don’t have the right nutrition advice to go along with that particular therapy.

That can have a long-term effect on what our population looks like, especially if it becomes popular. People lose very essential muscle mass. We have, in Barbados already, an aging population. So many people in Barbados are seniors, they’re over 65, and that has already nutrition implications.

I have not seen any patients or clients on GLP-1 inhibitors on a serious level to say that I could speak about it specifically. But I do think that if we were to do it more widespread, it has its dangers. And I think that for any tool like that people are using specifically for weight loss, there should be a psychological component included, because is it just that the person wants to lose weight? What’s the background of this?

Kristi: How is intuitive eating or the non-diet approach typically received with your clients? Are people excited about it or uncertain?

Christina: In doing discovery calls, you could really garner who wants to be very much focused on weight and who does not. It does mean that sometimes you’re not everybody’s cup of tea because they might be focused on, I want to look this particular way, as opposed to, I want to be healthy.

It can be a mixed bag. For the clients who I currently have and the ones who have stuck around, I think they’ve been more than happy with the approach. There is one in particular that, every single time we meet, they will tell me, this changed my life. Keep doing your thing.

Kristi: What about eating disorders? Is that a thing in Barbados, or is it a very small part of the population?

Christina: That was a question that I had when I finished my studies, too, because going into intuitive eating, learning about disordered eating and eating disorders, it was a question that was niggling at my brain.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of data. I have come across a handful or less than a handful of persons who have diagnosed ones, but I do believe that we have persons who have them and don’t realize that they have them because the behaviors are normalized.

I’m not an expert in eating disorders, but it might be based on how our culture is or has been over time.

There might be a church or religion that decides to do a fast for a particular season. It’s not necessarily a fully religious fast, but they will decide to do that, and the person jumps on that. They do it for a set period of time. Then for some other reason, they decide they’ll need to fast again. There are certain things that we think are just cultural that might actually be related to having an eating disorder.

Not meaning that everybody who does a fast has one, but there are certain behaviors that definitely, for some people, trigger certain other behaviors that can lead them down a very dangerous path. We don’t have enough conversation around that either, just like we don’t have enough data to prove what we actually have going on.

Kristi: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you think is important to share?

Christina: I think that our culture in general, we are very much like, yeah, whatever, it ain’t really affecting me. We kind of brush things over, like it’s not that important. But for somebody who’s trained, we recognize that there are many things, because certain health promotion actually has a lot of anti-fat bias in it.

We, when I say we, I mean the royal we, as in the country, might not recognize that. They tend to say, we have this number of obese persons and this number of people living with obesity, and so we need to save them. That’s unfortunately the type of conversation that continues to be in media.

I think that it’s still a dangerous way to put across that information. We are not the most sensitive culture, to put it as shortly as I can.

For right now, we might not see it as a problem, but I wonder what’s going to happen with future generations where they also have the veil removed from their eyes about the language that we use around being in a bigger body, about health in general. I wonder what that’s going to look like.

Thanks for reading. What came up for you while reading this piece? I’d love to hear what you think!

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Of course, the headline stopped me in my tracks. And then the first few paragraphs were just so juicy and confessional that I couldn’t stop myself from devouring the whole thing. It was like I was being let in on something only the kids talk about among themselves. As the parent of a high schooler who’ll soon be college-bound, I had to know everything.

And as a parent, there’s all kinds of disturbing in this piece. It’s not just the rampant GLP-1 use among girls trying to make themselves skinny enough for the top sorority houses in the SEC, though school outside the conference are mentioned too. There are also multiple references to heavy drug use (ketamine and cocaine) and heavy drinking. One of the girls profiled in the piece used to be able to handle eight shots of Fireball and half a pitcher of beer. Now she gets sick after a few drinks.

Okay, can someone tell me when ketamine and cocaine became standard fare for college students?

I get the GLP-1 use. It makes sense in this hypervigilant body culture we’re in. Layer in the 24/7 social media documentation that goes along with rush life, the intense competition, and the pressure to have the best college experience, and it all makes sense.

Writer Angelina Chapin lays out the stakes in stark detail. At the University of Alabama, for example, 2,500 girls could be vying for just 250 spots in just one top house. Per a source in the story, roughly a fifth of those spots go to the “star girls,” basically those with major connections or money. That leaves the vast majority scrambling to distinguish themselves. Only it’s a weird kind of competition that rewards sameness. Standing out means adhering as closely as possible to a very narrow standard.

Per Chapin, it’s one that’s “almost uniformly white, blonde, and very, very skinny.”

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What quickly becomes clear is that appearance is one of the few variables these girls can control. Of course, they want to be super skinny, and now they have easy access to medications that can help them get there, never mind whether they actually need them. Of course, no one’s openly using GLP-1s. They’re injecting themselves behind closed dorm room doors, with only their closest confidants in the know.

Chapin writes:

“In dorm rooms and sorority houses across the country, women are stashing Wegovy pills under their twin beds and sharing vials of compounded retatrutide they ordered from China with their roommates, hoping if they shrink down enough they will get into the sisterhood of their dreams. Students told me there’s an ‘Ozempidemic’ on campuses in which everyone is taking it but nobody is talking about it. When someone comes back from vacation 20 pounds lighter, rumors start flying that they’re ‘on the Big O.’ But many would rather risk being discovered than stand out in a house full of double zeros.”

It was the moms that got to me.

Of the three girls Chapin follows through rush season, dormmates all trying to get into the top houses, all of them went to their mothers for help getting on the GLP-1s. And it turns out their moms were already on them.

“Now that you know I’m on it, would you feel a little better about doing it as well?” one of the girls remembers her mom saying.

Our relationships with food and weight are often shaped by our mothers, sometimes starting from an early age. There are complicated reasons behind it; they often mean well. They want to protect us. They want us to fit in, not stick out, not be the subject of someone else’s cruelty. They think being thin will make our lives not just easier, but better.

I was guilty of this. I made those same kinds of comments to my own kids before I knew better. And knowing better now doesn’t erase what I’ve said in the past, but I’ve had a chance to repair some of that damage. Still, it was especially hard to hear when one of the girls shared that her mom had encouraged her to start losing weight in high school ahead of rush.

“Sororities are going to look at your size. Wouldn’t you rather start now?”

She was a size 8 at the time.

Chapin spends a lot of time talking about size and the unspoken expectations for these girls. One former recruiter told her that no girl above a size 4 made it to the in-person round the year she recruited. Another alum at a different university said that most girls who got in were a size 2, 0 or 00.

There’s an anecdote from a fellow University of Texas at Austin alum who wasn’t allowed to be in any of her sorority’s photos because she was a size 8. “If I was in them, they’d never get posted to the account,” she says matter-of-factly.

If that’s not enough to cause body image issues, I’m not sure what is.

It was hard to read about all this focus on size, something I’ve spent the last few years trying to unlearn in my own life, but, of course, I found it fascinating all the same. It drove home just how narrow the ideal these girls are trying to achieve is.

It also worried me. Because in all this talk about size and shrinking, eating disorders were barely mentioned. I get that this is a culture piece, not one about medical risk-taking, but the first reference didn’t come until almost three-fourths of the way in. There were two brief quotes from experts about how losing 20 pounds in a month is a risk factor for developing one, and how GLP-1 use for casual weight loss might be its own form of disordered eating.

Nowhere in the piece did it acknowledge what I believe is likely true: that many of these girls, in their quest to meet these stringent size standards, are probably secretly suffering with eating disorders. And the only girl mentioned in the piece with a history of anorexia, an online influencer who got on a GLP-1 after failing to get into her top sorority, described the meds as “a better alternative than starving herself.”

Let that sink in. This girl has a history of anorexia, is taking a GLP-1, and somehow doesn’t see it as just another form of restriction.

But there’s a bigger contradiction at the heart of all of this. These girls are doing everything within their power to look the part, and then when they get rejected, they talk about the unfairness of being judged for their appearance.

“Like, really? We’re going to shut somebody out just based on how they look?” one of them says.

I wanted to shake her and say: Ummm, yeah. This is how this works. And you know that. It’s why you’re putting yourself through these crazy extreme measures.

But I’m not sure 18-year-old me understood the contradiction either. As a freshman, I was so self-righteous. So smug. I didn’t need to join a sorority to validate my worth. Meanwhile, I was constantly dieting and exercising, doing everything within my power to drop the “extra” weight.

As much as I wanted to look down on them, when I thought about my own past, I realized I wasn’t so different from the girls in this story. Or their moms. That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t just a piece about sorority culture. It’s about all of us.

As much as we talk about the current regression in body positivity, there’s a hard truth that comes through in the piece: plenty of women never really accepted the idea that bodies should come in all shapes and sizes. They may have understood on some level that diet culture was toxic, but it didn’t stop them from playing the shrinking game. For many of them, it must feel like these meds have finally leveled the playing field.

The desire to be thinner, the social rewards attached to thinness, and now the widespread use of a tool that makes thinness more attainable (for some, though not everyone) are hardly confined to Sorority Row.

The sororities are just more honest about it.

And at least none of these girls are claiming to be doing it for health reasons.

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Okay, it’s been more than a moment. For more than a year, I’ve been kind of obsessed with them.

It’s the polish. The effortless put-togetherness. You put one on, and it doesn’t matter that you’re battling a wicked case of brain fog, forgot where you put your wallet, and have temporarily lost access to basic vocabulary. Never mind the truth. You look like you have it together.

I’ve leaned more bohemian most of my life, but right now, I’m all about the tailoring.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my quest for the perfect button-down dress has arrived during my plus-size phase. I want what I can’t have. Or, rather, what is exceptionally hard to find in this post-Ozempic world, where the designers seem to have forgotten fat people still exist.

I should protest these designers, the ones who refuse to make anything above a size 12, 14, or 16, but dammit, I want pretty things too.

The suckiest part about being fat is not being able to shop like a normal girl.

For the most part, I can no longer just walk into any boutique or department store and find something to wear. Seriously. I went into St. Bernard last week, the first time I’ve ever been in that place in my life, and there wasn’t even one XL on the massive sales racks. L was as high as it went. I found one measly size 14 among the new arrivals, and that was that.

Anytime I want to wear something designer, I have to stalk it across multiple sites, desperately hoping to snag a size 16 or XXL, which, let’s face it, almost never happens. And even if I do find it in my size, that’s no guarantee it will fit. The RealReal has become my new bestie for finding designer duds in my size, though the selection is still pretty limited.

But back to my button-down obsession.

It started with Cara Cara New York. I discovered the brand through Rent the Runway, my body confidence hack when I first transitioned to intuitive eating, and became completely obsessed with the Octana dress. It came in this gorgeous black wisteria print. It was never in stock.

I stalked the dress for a good six months, and by stalked, I mean I set up notifications and then repeatedly failed to act fast enough when it became available to rent. It was always snatched up before I could get it.

Finally, I tried a different tactic and snagged it for a four-day special occasion rental.

I could not have been more excited about a dress.

It didn’t fit.

Not even “suck it in and don’t breathe” didn’t fit. It wasn’t even remotely close.

Cara Cara notoriously runs small in a lot of its pieces, and the 16, the very largest size this dress (or any of its dresses) comes in, was way too small.

I was devastated. Truth be told, I’m still not over it, but my obsession with Cara Cara continues.

This summer, I snagged a Cara Cara Hutton dress on Poshmark in an XL, blessedly with a drawstring waist. It went into heavy rotation on vacation, although it’s currently too hot for it here in Texas. The pattern is amazing, and every time I wear it, I get tons of compliments.

Still, the button-down dress obsession is not over.

I have an event coming up: a gala for a nonprofit whose board I sit on. I want to wear a button-down dress. Preferably silk, but I’ll accept another natural fabric.

I’ve had a few dresses hearted on the RealReal forever, two Alemais dresses and one Camilla.

I love Camilla. I’ve owned two of their short silk dresses, both bought secondhand on Poshmark, and if you’ve been tracking this brand, you know the prices have gone way, way up over the past few years. Some of these dresses are now retailing for more than $1,000. Um, no thanks.

Even on The RealReal, they can still be ridiculously expensive.

So I’ve been obsessively tracking Poshmark, The RealReal and sales for months. Hearting things. Waiting for another markdown. Or a promo code. Telling myself I’ll buy when the price dropped just a little more.

And then I had a weird little detour.

I bought a Camilla dress in a print I’ve loved for years on Poshmark. The price was right, and I negotiated it lower.

But then it arrived, and something was off.

It didn’t feel like my other Camillas. The fit was funky. The print wasn’t as vibrant. I kept looking at it, trying to put my finger on what was wrong. Could it be … counterfeit?

A little Googling later, I learned that it very well could be.

I went back to the listing and inspected the photos more closely. Sure enough: fake.

I am not a dupe girl. I’ve never been interested in buying something pretending to be something else. Even if no one else would know, I would know. And now I had this dress that I didn’t know what to do with. I couldn’t resell it. I didn’t even like the idea of taking it to the thrift store.

Thankfully, I didn’t actually pay for it. The package had been lost in the mail, so I got refunded the full purchase price. And I reported it to Camilla, which apparently is a thing you can do.

But the whole experience reinforced something for me. Maybe I need to stop dillydallying about the things I really want.

Waiting for another five percent off a dress I’ve been stalking for a year isn’t actually saving me from anything, except the heartache of watching someone else snatch it up. Maybe if I’ve been wanting it for this long, that’s a pretty clear sign.

So I pulled the trigger on the RealReal dresses, knowing I could return them.

Here are the dresses.

Oh, apparently I’m also in my green era.

The first to arrive was one of the Alemais dresses, a collarless cotton button-down in a funky atlas print. I loved it instantly. Despite being a size 12 US, it fit. But that’s Alemais apparently. Some of its pieces, especially the button-downs, are intentionally oversized.

The only problem was that it wasn’t quite as dressy as what I’d had in mind for the gala. Maybe, with the right accessories, I could get it there.

Then the other Alemais arrived.

This one was a stiff flax number, and apparently all that generous sizing had left the building. It was so small, I didn’t even attempt to squeeze myself in. Back it went.

And then there was the Camilla.

The one I had been thinking about for months. The ridiculously expensive one. The one I was pretty sure was going to be the one.

And honestly? It was gorgeous.

The print was amazing. It was incredibly flattering. It had exactly the drama I wanted.

But it was also sheer. As in I’d-need-a-bodysuit-under-it sheer.

I know I’m fussy, but I hate having to wear undergarments under a dress. Especially an expensive dress. In Texas. In September, when it’s still hot as blazes. And at that price, I just couldn’t justify buying something that required me to purchase an entire second outfit underneath it.

So I sent it back.

Which left the cotton Alemais.

I do love it. And though it’s not as dressy as the others, I know I’ll get way more wear out of it.

While I’m still planning to wear it to the gala, I couldn’t resist taking it out for a spin for my mom’s birthday dinner.

Now I just need to work on the accessories.

Okay, let’s hear them. Give me all your shopping woes, especially your nothing-fits woes. I know I’m not alone here.

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I’ve been pondering this question the last few weeks, and really most of August, in light of the many conversations around the rise of celeb extreme thinness and its larger impact within society.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece that essentially outlined why I think we’re seeing this shift to the extreme, and how it’s driven, at least in part, by our need to preserve the existing social order. I wrote:

“French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that status depends not simply in possessing something valuable, but in possessing something that remains difficult to obtain. As thinness became more attainable, it no longer held the same value. It wasn’t enough to just be thin. We had to be even thinner than we were before.”

Society’s status symbols are deliberately chosen by how rare they are. We see it with the latest “it” bag. We see it with bodies. With the proliferation of GLP-1s, society collectively perceives weight loss as more accessible than it once was, and so it naturally it had to become harder.

To be sure, much of this “pressure” (for lack of a better word because some of us don’t experience it as such) is subtle, subconscious, ingrained through the hundreds of thousands of messages we absorb through media and social media. The relentless critique of bodies and speculation of “is she or isn’t she on the drugs” amps up the sense that all our bodies are under scrutiny. It’s not just those in larger bodies who feel the pressure, but all of us, and women especially.

And there’s another rub: the perception that weight loss, this thing that so many of us have struggled with our entire lives, is now more easily attainable has strengthened the moral imperative to pursue it. If there’s an effective medication that can make you thinner, then remaining fat starts to look like a choice. A reckless choice. And, increasingly, one we feel entitled to judge, even in ourselves.

A few extra pounds is something we need to fix. The belly fat many women gain in menopause is a perfect example.

This isn’t because midlife bodies have suddenly changed. While the term “meno belly” is new, the biological propensity for women’s bodies and fat distribution to change during this phase of life is not. What has changed is the reference point.

It was clear from some of the comments in my previous piece that some readers missed my point, so I tried again. This time in Notes:

Most of the responses were supportive, but one stuck with me.

This woman wrote about how her identity had always been tied to being slim. Until perimenopause and chronic illness, she could quickly lose any weight she had gained.

She ended by saying:

“I know there are 4 inches that need to come off my waist.”

My first thought was: why need?

I’m not advocating that this woman shouldn’t lose weight or even shouldn’t want to lose weight. And she may very well have a legitimate medical need to lose weight. She should make whatever decision she feels is right for her body. I’m not arguing with that. I’m questioning need.

Because the reason the vast majority of us feel we need to lose weight is simply because society has conditioned us to believe fat is bad. So much so that we don’t even question it. Yes, there is enormous societal pressure to conform to beauty standards. And, no, it’s not vanity. There are legitimate, well-researched and documented downsides to living in a fat body, starting with how people in higher-weight bodies are treated. I understand anyone wanting to avoid that.

What I’m asking is that we take a step back and examine our own biases about fatness and where they come from. We aren’t born believing that a larger body is inherently worse than a smaller one. That’s a learned belief. It’s a reaction to the societal views and assumptions people make of higher-weight people. And these views have gotten worse over the last few years because of our heightened preoccupation with bodies and size.

I’m not asking people not to make the choice to lose weight. I’m asking them to pause long enough to consider where this individual choice comes from. Because that choice can still be ours while also being shaped by the culture around us.

These are some of the thoughts I’ve been coming back to this month. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Here’s what else I wrote on Almost Sated in August

I shouldn’t have to prove what my body can do

This was the via ferrata story I promised last month. Hanging off a cliff in Quebec made me realize that since gaining weight, I’ve spent years collecting evidence that my fat body is still strong and capable. At some point, proving that to myself became needing to prove it to everyone else. Maybe I’ve finally proven enough.

The place that made us rethink our next chapter

I wrote about how our time in Ithaca this summer shifted the conversation my husband and I have been having about where we want to live after our daughter graduates. We came home with a much clearer sense of what we want from the next chapter and a new list of places to explore.

One thing I’m loving this month

I’m reading ’s Don’t Buy What I’m Selling (thanks to for the recommendation), and it’s exactly what I needed. Funny and heartbreaking and revelatory at the same time. It’s not a body image memoir so much as a memoir in which the body shapes how one woman experiences ambition, grief, love, lust, success … basically every aspect of her life.

Through the book, Lu explores her overwhelmingly successful career in advertising, complete with scintillating behind-the-scenes tales from her work with big names in Hollywood and even bigger brands. Woven through all of it is the loss of her mother. Lu’s relationship with food and her own body is ever-present, but remains almost a shadow figure until nearly the very end.

I’ve got a couple more chapters to go, but this was the line I felt in my core:

“Maybe I didn’t have to become a whisper of a woman to be an ‘after.’ Maybe I could become a roar.”

The rest of August

It’s still hot in Texas. In fact, we’re in the height of the hotness, but I’m past the worst of my summer affective disorder because I can finally see the finish line. Cooler days are coming. You know … after Halloween.

I’ve also been confined to a boot for the last two weeks as I work through a procedure I had done on my Achilles, so my exposure to the outdoors has been pretty limited.

I’m looking forward to getting back on my mountain bike soon, but I have to admit, it’s been kind of nice to have a legitimate reason to stay inside, slow down, and write. If there were ever a good time to be stuck in a boot, it’s Texas in August!

Looking ahead

September feels like a continuation of several conversations that started this month.

I’m still thinking about extreme thinness, how much GLP-1s have changed the cultural landscape around weight, and all the ways our increasingly intense focus on bodies is making us more aware of our own.

I also keep coming back to menopause and the assumption that every physical change that comes with aging needs to be resisted.

I think this is the theme I’m carrying into September: getting more curious about the things we’ve been taught to accept as obvious.

A question for you

When is the last time you stopped to question something you thought you “needed” to change about your body?

Maybe you still decided to change it.

Maybe you didn’t.

I’m less interested in the decision than in what happened when you stopped to ask where the desire came from.

I’d love to hear what you think.

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This summer, in the middle of hanging off a cliff face high above the inky waters of a Quebec fjord, I decided I was done trying to prove my body could do hard things.

My husband and I were in the final stretch of our three-week escape from Texas. We had spent days hiking gorgeous gorges throughout the Finger Lakes region of New York and would soon be zipping across the St. Lawrence in a tiny Zodiac in search of whales.

But at that moment we were in the Parc national du Fjord-du-Saguenay, tackling something called via ferrata.

We had come for the whales, but my husband thought we should tack on a few days so we could explore the surrounding wilderness. I envisioned hiking, but quickly learned kayaking was the quintessential way to take in these towering, glacier-carved cliffs. I wasn’t sure he’d go for it with his bad back, so I started looking for alternatives. That’s when the words via ferrata hit the screen.

To be clear, I had no idea what a via ferrata was.

From the brief description online, I assumed it was a four-hour intermediate hike with a few sketchy, exposed sections where you’d need to be clipped in before going back to hiking. But it was billed as one of the most unique experiences in Eastern Canada, and that’s all it took. (My husband and I need almost no persuasion to try something novel.)

I did no further research into this via ferrata, nor did I read the helpful checklist included with my booking confirmation, which forced us into a last-minute stop in Montreal for technical pants and fingerless gloves. Even then, we weren’t prepared. I ended up begging/borrowing a pack from a kind ranger after our guide told us we’d need at least two liters of water between us or we wouldn’t be allowed to go. To say we were underprepared was an understatement.

Still, I wasn’t worried about whether I could physically do it.

I should back up and say, I’ve spent the past few years easing into my new, heavier body by putting it through various athletic and adventure tests, most often on vacation. I wanted to know whether I could still do all the things I used to do before I quit diets. A crazy jungle hike and rushing-water swim to a hidden waterfall in a slot canyon in Costa Rica. A steep cliff-side descent to a hidden black-sand beach in Maui. Waterfall rappelling. Mountain biking and hiking on pretty much every trip.

For this activity, the only thing I checked before I booked it was whether there was a weight limit—the one thing that might actually keep me from doing it. I was well under, so I didn’t give the physical demands much thought.

It turns out the via ferrata, or “iron road,” is basically rock climbing along a predetermined route, except you clip into a steel safety cable (or any of the iron rungs or holds) instead of relying on ropes and a belay. For three and a half hours, we were ascending a sheer cliff. Thankfully, I’d rock climbed before, so I knew to let my legs do the work so I wouldn’t burn out my arms and render them useless.

Our guide, a young, blond-haired, blue-eyed slip of a thing called “Ocean” who was just there for the summer, tested our group of eight on a small practice wall near the ranger station (our last chance to bail) and then ordered us into two groups. The faster group would start. Ocean would go next. Then it was me and my husband. Two twenty-something Quebec women brought up the rear.

I had spied them in the ranger station when we were filling out forms and hoped they’d be going with us. Unlike so many of the stereotypical outdoorsy types with lean physiques, these two women were obviously fit, but not skinny-minnies. You know. Like me.

Of course, I immediately did that thing where I try to assess whether my body is bigger or smaller than theirs (I’m still not sure how I actually appear in the world). In my mind, we were all about the same size, but when we tried on our harnesses and were instructed to tuck the excess straps into loops at our waists, I was the only one who didn’t have anything left to tuck. At that point, I hoped my years of athletic training would spare me from being the weakest link.

If these women were worried about any of it, they didn’t show it. They spent the entire four hours cracking jokes and singing loudly, channeling their best Celine Dion with “My Heart Will Go On” and other hits. It was like they were having the time of their lives.

Meanwhile, I was taking this as seriously as a heart attack. Once I realized we were in for hours of actual climbing, not hiking, I was taking no chances. I was locked in, as my 17-year-old would say. Until I knew what I was in for, I would be expending no extra energy, especially not on things like talking or laughing.

The first section turned out to be an hour of climbing with almost no breaks, up, up, up a good chunk of the 650 feet along the cliff overlooking Baie Éternité. I looked down periodically and marveled at how the kayakers below got smaller and smaller until they were tiny little specks. Somehow, every time I looked up, there was more climbing.

I was moving at a turtle’s pace, methodically choosing my next move and making sure both carabiners were safely clipped in, before proceeding. I’d read later, after it was all over, that those clips would probably save me from death but not major injury if I fell. The holds we used to grip and stand on ranged in size, some as wide as a ladder rung, others maybe half the width of my shoe.

It didn’t take long to see why we needed the water. Despite perfect temps in the 60s, I was sweating from every orifice out of fear and sheer exertion.

When we finally stopped for a rest along a large crack in the cliff, my husband made his first crack about how glad he was that this hadn’t been his idea (he’s been using this line every time he tells someone about our adventure). I had gotten us into this, and I would get us—or, well, me at least—out of it. He was on his own, but he seemed to be totally fine. As a much taller person, he could move faster because his extra six inches of reach meant he didn’t have to stop and reposition his carabiners as often. I figured I was working at least a quarter harder than him. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself. He kept checking in every time he caught up to me, which felt like every few minutes, to make sure I was okay. I assured him I was just focused. I was creeping along, methodically choosing my next step with the precision of a brain surgeon.

Not for one second was I allowing myself the thought that I wouldn’t be able to do it. It would be way beyond humiliating to call it, but once we were already so high up, there would be no easy way down anyway. Our guide assured us this first section was the longest stretch, so I figured if I could survive it, I would be okay through the rest of it.

Except the first section ended with the one thing we had (actually, finally) read about: an inverted, 30-foot ladder we had to climb facing out toward the bay. Before I saw it, I’d pictured myself dangling from the cliff by my arms, Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible-style. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was an actual steel ladder that I could climb. It felt far more stable than everything else we’d done.

There were cheers for me throughout several sections of that first big stretch, and it seemed like I was the only one getting them. It’s because I’m fat and everyone is shocked I’ve made it this far was the thought running through my head. I quickly followed it up with, but these people don’t know me. They just see a very large woman doing this incredibly hard thing and have no idea all the things this body has already done. Maybe nobody was thinking that at all. Maybe they just saw how quiet and focused I was and thought I was struggling and needed encouragement.

I’m not sure the real truth would even matter. I wanted everyone on that cliff to see that a fat woman was doing the same thing they were. I needed to see it myself. And I would do whatever it took to accomplish it.

Once we made it through the first section and took a real break, I could relax enough to interact with other people. Our guide commented that people react to fear in different ways. Some get quiet and turn inward. Others get loud and start belting out Celine Dion.

I’d like to tell you it was all downhill from that point, but in fact, we had a couple more hours to go and several more challenges ahead. The first was a cable walk across an exposed gap in the cliff. I flashed back to tightrope walking at Miraval, where I’d learned the key was to try to postpone the leg shaking as long as possible, because once the shaking starts, it’s basically the end. I tried not to think and just kept telling myself, just keep moving, just keep moving, like Dory in Finding Nemo. Later, we had to do the same thing across a narrow wooden plank.

The final pièce de résistance was a 280-foot suspension bridge, one of the most iconic sights in the park. Ocean told us to space ourselves out as we crossed. She warned it would get harder and harder to clip in as we got closer to the middle, where our own movements would cause the bridge to shake more violently. Knowing this was the end, I relaxed enough to capture a panoramic video with one hand while keeping my other firmly on the bridge. It was the thrilling finale to our ferrata, and I could finally savor the views and the moment.

We took a rest break. My body was spent in a way that I could only compare to the two marathons I had completed three decades earlier. I wasn’t sure which was harder. My husband asked me whether I’d do this again, certain the answer would be no.

But it wasn’t actually over yet.

There was still a 30-minute hike down, some of which required clipping in and massive steps that caused my knees to bend way past the point of comfort. No walk in the park, this section was the most dangerous part of the whole adventure, Ocean warned us. Not from actual difficulty, I imagined, but because people assumed the hard part was over and naturally let their guard down. For me, the massive steps presented a bigger problem. They were brutal on my knees and my left Achilles, which had been nagging me for the past year.

I would do the ferrata again, under the right circumstances.

All these years since I quit diets, I’ve been trying to prove to myself and to the rest of the world that I could be fat and still do all the things I enjoyed doing before. And it’s true. I did and I could. My strong, fat body has carried me through one adventure after another. But for the first time, this summer, I asked myself: At what cost?

We’d go on to do the park’s signature hike the next day, a 4-mile, 1,100-foot elevation affair involving what seemed like a gazillion oversized steps to the Our Lady of Notre Dame Statue, one of Quebec’s icons. It was too much. My Achilles was a mess the rest of the trip. I could barely walk down the steps from the room of our second-story B&B. I pulled out the brace I hadn’t worn in nearly a year, determined not to let my ankle stop me from experiencing the whales and the rest of Tadoussac, but a decision was made.

I’ve been aware this whole last year, as my Achilles refused to get well, that something needed to be done. I’d suffered through it for more than a year, including months of PT that showed progress, but never enough once my activity ramped up, almost always when we traveled. I don’t think this injury is the result of living in a fat body. I think it’s the accumulated result of years of pushing through.

All these years, I’ve been trying to prove I’m the same person in this radically different body. Even as the world sees me differently. In the beginning, it was about proving it to myself, because I desperately wanted to keep doing the things I had always done. But somewhere along the way, it became more than that. It was proving to the world. To the haters, to the doubters. See this fat body? Let me show you what it can do. In a way, it had become just another version of what I’d always done. Trying to prove this body. Instead of simply accepting it.

I had proved it plenty throughout the years. Marathons, competitive Oly lifting, CrossFit, mountain biking, and more. But after I quit dieting and gained weight, it was like I had to prove myself all over again. I had begun collecting new evidence that this fat body, my fat body, was still strong. Still capable. Still me. And I was proving it to myself, yes, especially in the early days of this new me, but I was also trying to prove it to everyone else.

And I did it. I’ve unequivocally proven I can live in this body, a strong, fat body, and do more with it than most of the fucking planet. But until I was hanging off a cliff in the remote wilderness of Eastern Quebec, I hadn’t stopped to consider what all this proving might have cost me.

A lot of us do this, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Maybe not by climbing cliffs, but by pushing through pain or ignoring our bodies’ signals. We prove ourselves by “doing the work,” losing the weight, following the protocol, getting the procedure. We do it in the name of beauty, of youth, of fitness, of health. Rarely do we ask ourselves what all this proving, sometimes in the guise of improving, costs us.

In these endless quests and self-improvement projects, we lose sight of something fundamental: our bodies are worthy simply because they exist.

Most of us have done enough proving for one lifetime. We are allowed to live in our bodies just as they are. But there is a difference between understanding this intellectually and embodying it.

In my case, there’s still work to be done. This cliffside realization was just the beginning.

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Alongside this has been a growing number of news articles documenting the rise in eating disorders or relapses among women, particularly those in midlife, with the popularity of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. For those of us who’ve lived with eating disorders ourselves or loved someone who has had one, this isn’t particularly surprising. When an entire culture becomes consumed by the pursuit of thinness, there will be consequences.

It’s easy to blame all of this on the marketing of GLP-1 medications for weight loss, and it certainly played a major role. After decades of telling people weight was simply a matter of willpower, the story became: It’s not your fault. It’s your genetics.

For many who have struggled with weight their whole lives, this was a relief. They finally felt seen. But instead of fostering greater acceptance, the next message was: now it’s time to do something about it.

That still doesn’t fully explain this trend toward extreme thinness.

When GLP-1s arrived, we’d already been taught to see thinness as a proxy for health, and health as something we could optimize for. The lines between beauty, health, and longevity were blurring. Our bodies became improvement projects rather than places to live. Now, every perceived flaw has a treatment. Every stage of life has an optimization strategy.

And there have been genuine breakthroughs that allow us to live better lives, but there’s a dangerous underbelly to this constant optimization. Once we start to believe every body problem has a solution, choosing not to solve it begins to look reckless. Irresponsible. To ourselves and everyone else.

Social media amplified the messages, because appearance is the physical manifestation of health, surrounding us with curated images of what we should look like. Heavily filtered. Often surgically enhanced. Increasingly AI-generated. If the woman we’re comparing ourselves against seems unattainable, it might be because she isn’t actually real.

Not that this will actually stop us from hating ourselves.

GLP-1s were the ultimate promise. If you don’t like your body, here’s how to shrink it. As more people got on board, the pressure to do it grew. The unspoken assumption became: If everyone else is doing it, shouldn’t I be doing it too?

Frankly, a good chunk of the people using these meds aren’t fat to begin with. They’re fit, active, midlife women. They’re the same people who’ve been trying to lose the proverbial last ten pounds. And now, the perception is, they can.

In the beginning of the GLP-1 for weight loss days, many believed these medications would lower the barrier to thinness for everyone. Finally, those of us who felt ostracized for our size would finally fit in. And certainly for some individuals, this probably rings true. But, collectively, the standard simply shifted. That is why we’re seeing this trend toward extreme thinness.

And what about the people who remain in larger bodies, who can’t afford these medications, can’t tolerate them, don’t want to take them, or simply don’t respond to them? As cultural expectations shift, they bear the brunt. The harassment, stigma, and hostility they already faced has intensified because the assumption is that thinness is available to anyone who wants it. If you’re in a larger body, it’s because you’ve chosen to be there.

And the roots of these messed up beliefs aren’t new. Societal systems have always found new ways to distinguish themselves.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that status depends not simply in possessing something valuable, but in possessing something that remains difficult to obtain. As thinness became more attainable, it no longer held the same value. It wasn’t enough to just be thin. We had to be even thinner than we were before.

You don’t have to look far to see this shift. It’s playing out on virtually every red carpet. Celebrities who were considered exceptionally thin just a few years ago are even smaller now. The media coverage and resulting reaction alternates between admiration and alarm, but it all serves the same purpose: keeping our attention fixed on how we appear. And when attention itself is the currency, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s framed as positive or negative. Before long, that trend trickles down to the rest of us, which is what’s already happening.

These days, the online groups I’m in—for active women managing menopause and perimenopause—are rife with desperate pleas from women who have never considered themselves overweight or who have always been able to manage the few pounds that crept up over the years. Now the weight has settled around their middle, the old strategies aren’t working, and they’re wondering whether GLP-1s are the answer.

Writing for Feisty Media, Hit Play Not Pause podcast host Selene Yeager recently shared: “Hands down the number one concern women in our community have is body composition changes—specifically weight gain—despite still training and fueling the same way.”

This isn’t because midlife bodies have suddenly changed. While the term “meno belly” is new, the biological propensity for women to gain weight during this phase of life has been documented throughout history. What’s changed is the reference point. We’ve become more likely to interpret this normal biological shift as yet one more thing that requires intervention.

The problem with the treadmill of endless optimization are the unintended consequences. In the case of weight loss, more of us are crossing this invisible threshold into nutritional deficiencies, disordered eating, or full-blown eating disorders. Last summer, the New York Times reported a rise in eating disorders among women in midlife and beyond, with some of them relapsing years or even decades into recovery.

The problem with the fixation on celebrity thinness is it reinforces the myth that you have to be extremely thin to be sick. Many people with eating disorders, including anorexia, the most deadly mental illness outside opioid addiction, are not underweight. There is no universal warning system because every body responds differently to starvation.

During an event this week celebrating the paperback release of her memoir Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery, shared a sobering thought: it’s entirely possible that many of these celebrities are struggling with eating disorders. Of course, this is not something anyone needs to disclose publicly or otherwise, but we do need more conversations around the topic.

Right now, we’re at the point where it feels like these celebrities are the outliers, extreme examples of what happens when we go too far. Like all trends, the pendulum eventually will swing back, because we can’t just keep losing weight forever. And some of us are pushing back. We already see pockets of resistance in influencers and everyday people alike who are taking a stand, proudly living their lives to the fullest with the bodies they exist in. And I think we’ll see more women prioritizing strength over shrinking as they reclaim their bodies in menopause and look ahead to their older years. But I worry we’re just at the beginning of this trend toward ultra thinness that will ultimately lead to even more eating disorders and more deaths. And for what? Health? Beauty? Because if our standards are built on the most unattainable ideals of distinction, the bar will always keep moving.

I’d love to hear what you think. It feels like we’re not talking enough about the underlying reasons these standards have shifted and more importantly what we can do about it.

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Ithaca was like that. It was magical, but it also wasn’t a fantasy.

By the time my husband and I pulled up to Mark and Renita’s house, we were already enchanted by the rolling hills and deep green forests surrounding Cayuga Lake. My husband had met them at fitness camp in Utah a few months earlier (yes, that camp), and they invited us to spend a couple of days with them when we came to the Finger Lakes, promising hiking at nearby Taughannock Falls State Park, a trip to a cider house, dinner, and maybe even a trip out on the boat.

House isn’t the right word. It felt like we’d rolled up to a retreat overlooking Cayuga Lake. I was ready to pull out my bags and start unpacking. Their gloriously wooded property, set back from the road and bordered by two ravines, included its own pond flanked by geese (the bane of Mark and Renita’s existence, but in our minds, they only added to the charm).

Perched several stories above the lake, their airy home felt like a treehouse. It opened onto a massive wall of windows and two levels of decking that spanned the length of the house. Everywhere there was a view, there was a chair, and there were a lot of them. It was like you were being dared not to sit. One evening, as the sun went down, two bald eagles soared right past us at eye level. It was the closest I’d ever been to these majestic creatures.

We ended up spending a couple of days with them, wining, dining, hiking, and boating. We spent a few more exploring Ithaca and the surrounding area, hiking the incredible gorges, including Watkins Glen, walking Cornell’s campus, my husband’s alma mater, and visiting the home where he grew up on the outskirts of a tiny town surrounded by rolling green hills. It was in a word, heaven.

We’ve been talking for years about moving when my daughter graduates high school, but this part of the trip challenged some of our previous beliefs and solidified some others.

It made us seriously consider what we want in a place for this next chapter of our lives. My husband had written off Ithaca because of the winters, but after visiting our friends and seeing how they are surrounded by nature every single day of their lives and listening to how they make winters work (travel to warmer climates), we started reconsidering it.

They mentioned a friend further down the lake was about to put his house on the market, so that very first day they took us out in their boat so we could get a look at it. A few days later, we toured the house before it officially hit the market. The real estate agent, a local writer, told us stories about the town as she showed us around, and we fell even harder with the idea of living there.

It wasn’t the right house, but if it had been, we would have made an offer.

After that visit, we finally did the exercise we’ve been talking about for months. We made a list of all the qualities we wanted in our next hometown. Then we ranked those qualities in terms of categories of importance and fed said list into AI to generate a list of destinations. Some of them were places we’d never heard of, most of them we’d never visited: Charlottesville, Virginia; Frederick, Maryland; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Saratoga Springs, New York. Even Ithaca. Now, we’ve got a whole new set of destinations to check out!

Of course, we’re still considering options, including the possibility of living abroad, but it was helpful to really narrow what we’re looking for in a place: size, feel, beauty, and more personal considerations like how easy it would be to find community and people with shared interests.

The rest of July

After Ithaca, we headed to Raleigh for a family event before making our way to Montreal and deep into Quebec.

We went whale watching in the Saguenay Fjord, which turned out to be the most peaceful, grounding experience of my life. If you missed that piece, you can read it here.

We also climbed a via ferrata (“iron road”) inside Saguenay Fjord National Park. I’m going to write more about that soon.

We came home, and well, all I can say about that is: going back is hard, even harder when it’s Texas in the hellscape of summer.

July on Almost Sated

July was a quieter publishing month than usual, mostly because I was out in the world having experiences instead of writing about them. But if you missed anything, here’s what went out:

Why I never know how I’m going to feel in my body until I get there

The whales don’t care how fat you are

June in the rearview

Looking ahead

While August is officially the end of summer for most of the world, it’s when things really get cooking in Texas. We kind of have to suffer through it, but there’s now an end in sight. I’m thinking back to cooler days.

August is already shaping up to be a month of processing everything that came up in July. There’s the via ferrata story to tell, and Ithaca is still on my mind.

Have you ever visited a place that completely changed what you thought you wanted? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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That thought arrived somewhere in the middle of the St. Lawrence Estuary as seaspray hit my face. Every inhabitant of our tiny Zodiac was laser-focused on the horizon.

In this Canadian marine park along the St. Lawrence, freshwater from the glacier-carved depths of the nearby Saguenay Fjord mixes with the ice-cold, briny sea. The landscape is extraordinary, but what’s happening under the surface is even more so. A shallow underwater shelf where the two waters meet creates a massive collision during its twice-daily tides, churning the waters and stirring up krill and other nutrient-dense organisms below. It’s what makes this place such a rich feeding ground for over 13 species of whales.

This is what brought my husband and me to Tadoussac, a tiny town (population: 814) where the fjord meets the estuary. July is peak whale watching season here. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances, so I booked two different cruises on consecutive days. It couldn’t have worked out better. The second cruise was more comfortable, aboard a glass-enclosed boat with windows we could open and close ourselves, but it didn’t come close to what we experienced that first morning.

We were told to dress in layers because the water temperature would be 15 degrees colder than on land. I had been dutifully packing and repacking a hat, gloves, a long-sleeved shirt, and pants over the past two weeks of our travels through upstate New York and Quebec just for this experience, but even that wasn’t enough. We were provided waterproof jackets and these enormous yellow pants held up by suspenders that, until that moment, I had only seen on fishermen in movies.

It was an exceptionally clear day. The sky was a crisp blue with clouds so low, they looked like you could reach out and touch them. The cobalt waves bobbed like dancing glass. Seaspray shot up from the front of the boat, covering us in an icy mist.

Not five minutes after we left the shore, the captain had already spotted a pair of fin whales, the second-largest animal on earth. We saw their spouts first, then just a sliver of their streamlined bodies before they slunk back into the water as if they didn’t want to be seen. Then there were the white, blubbery belugas, the only year-round residents of these waters, and the much harder to spot minke.

The humpbacks were the real show-stoppers, though, fully capturing our attention by sending up a series of dramatic spouts before showing off their barreled bodies. They arched and dove, waving their massive tails in the air behind them. Every arch sent the boat into oohs and aahs, and then silence as we waited to see whether we’d be treated to another sighting.

It was the most peaceful I’ve ever felt, watching the line of the horizon rise and fall with the waves as we waited for those humpbacks to resurface. There was no roar of engines; water lapped the sides of our vessel. That was it. All that was in front of us was water and sky, the shoreline hazy in the distance.

Real life, and the pressures that come with it, disappeared. My usual preoccupations just didn’t seem to matter. It was as though the whales had put us under a spell. Slow down. Savor this.

After our first croisière, we headed back toward town. But first we had to stop at the famed Dunes de Tadoussac, another one of the area’s marvels. After climbing down the towering drifts to explore the receding estuary (and then back up!), we made our way to town, parked the car, and let curiosity be our guide.

We found ourselves at the Marine Mammal Interpretation Center, where we walked among the skeletons of these magnificent creatures, contemplating their enormity and the fragility of life. Standing beside and even beneath them gave us a much greater appreciation for their size; they look so much smaller in the water. It’s almost impossible to believe the sliver of fin whale we saw was probably three times the size of our Zodiac! I stretched my left arm alongside the skeleton of a North Atlantic right whale assembled on the floor, taking in the similarities between her hand bones and my own. Above us hung the skeleton of another female whale with the curved remains of her unborn calf still positioned beneath her rib cage.

Standing among those skeletons, I better understood what I had felt on the water. Awe. One of the few things powerful enough to break self-preoccupation.

It wasn’t that I grew some kind of newfound body confidence in watching the whales. It was that I found a new way of thinking about myself. Not in comparison to people, but in comparison to these giants. I thought of myself as one tiny speck in a vast universe. One tiny speck compared to these giant creatures, with hand and pelvis bones just like mine.

This is not where I tell you, “If the whales are fat, you can be too.” But place has more bearing on how we feel in our bodies than we often realize. As we ambled through Tadoussac, poking into its shops, circling the boardwalk of its picturesque Pointe-de-l’Islet, and settling into the Adirondack chairs nestled on the great lawn of Hotel Tadoussac, I couldn’t help but think about how different I felt there.

The regular preoccupations with things like how I look or whether I feel fat seemed so insignificant.

For most people, there’s only one reason to visit Tadoussac. It isn’t fancy; it’s littered with charming but no-frill B&Bs and inns. We were crammed in a room with barely enough room for us and our two carry-on bags; we were just grateful for the private bathroom. There was only a smattering of restaurants to choose from, but we had the freshest lobster and seafood every night.

As I wandered through this town, walking everywhere because Tadoussac really is that tiny, it hit me: I had spent days not worrying about how I looked. I saw bodies of all shapes, sizes, and ages. No one was dressed for posting later. No one was there to impress anyone else. Everyone was there for the same thing, and it wasn’t to be seen. It was to see the whales.

The whales don’t care how fat you are.

Neither, it seemed, did anyone else.

When was the last time you experienced awe? I’d love to hear about a moment that made your own worries feel a little smaller.

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Related reading

It’s not that I suddenly become unhappy with my body, it’s that uncertainty creeps in. A kind of anticipatory anxiety. What’s going to come up for me this time? Am I going to spend the week surrounded by impossibly thin people, comparing myself? Will I feel at home in my body, or like I don’t belong in it?

Travel has a way of stirring up the body image stuff.

I’ve come to expect it now, and in a weird way, expecting it helps me deal with it. Sometimes I feel completely at home in my body (hello, Grenada). Sometimes I’m filled with fears that turn out to be unfounded (Paris). Sometimes a trip starts badly but works itself out in the end (Maui).

One thing has become clear: not all places are created equal when it comes to body image.

Of course, we bring our own baggage. Some of us start worrying before we’ve even started packing the suitcase. That’s often what triggers the urge to diet in the first place. We imagine ourselves in swimsuits, sundresses, and vacation snaps, and the worrying begins.

My first few vacations after giving up diets, I had a whole new set of fears. There were the practical ones. Will the ski pants, the ones I haven’t worn in a couple of years, still fit? What about the bikini? (Yes, no matter my size, I’m still wearing one.)

Then there were the fears I hadn’t anticipated: airplane seats that felt snugger than I remembered, seatbelts that came a little too close to the end, and an irrational fear that I would never stop growing now that I was giving my body permission to eat.

I also wasn’t sure what I was capable of in this new body. My husband and I are active travelers, the kind of people who come home from vacation exhausted. One of our first trips in my post-diet body was a steep, slippery jungle hike in Costa Rica that ended with us pulling ourselves against a current along a rope through a narrow slot canyon. I was in my head the whole time, worrying over whether I’d be able to tackle the terrain like everyone else.

It all worked out fine. Gradually with time and new territory, I got to know this new old body and learned to trust what it was capable of, which turned out to be pretty much everything the old one was.

I stopped wondering whether I could do the hike or make the climb. Yes, I still have days when I get in my head, when I’m breathing extra hard or it’s taking me longer than I’m expecting it to, and I start going into negative self-talk—if you were just thinner, you wouldn’t be struggling as much—but I can usually work my way out of it.

What still surprises me is how much where I’m at influences how I feel about myself.

I still have scars from Kaanapali.

I arrived on Maui with almost a year of intuitive eating under my belt. I honestly thought I’d made it through the worst of the body image stuff (ha!). Then I found myself on a postcard-perfect stretch of sand lined with beautiful resorts and what felt like an endless parade of impossibly fit vacationers. Young families everywhere. Moms and dads chasing toddlers through the surf with the kind of bodies that looked like they’d been cast for a resort commercial.

For days, I trudged that beach feeling terrible in my body. It didn’t help that I’d packed a swimsuit that was too big and a swim shirt I didn’t feel like myself in. I searched for better options, but practically everything in the shops was made for bodies much smaller than mine. Every time I caught a glimpse of myself, I became more aware of what I was wearing than what I was there to see.

Then, on our last day before heading to Hana, my daughter and I were walking back along the beach when she admitted she’d been struggling with body image all week too.

“It’s like we’re surrounded by the most perfect people on the planet.”

My daughter has lived her entire life in a teeny body. And yet there she was, playing the very same comparison game. On the one hand it was comforting to hear I wasn’t totally out of my mind, we were in some kind of Twilight Zone for beautiful people, but it was also heartbreaking. I hated to hear my daughter was struggling because of it. It also just made no sense. How is it that we can fit the thin ideal and still feel like complete shit about ourselves?

That’s when it clicked. Sometimes it has nothing to do with our actual bodies. My guess is it has nothing to do with our actual bodies most of the time. Certainly not in this instance.

It wasn’t like our bodies had changed as soon as we landed in Kaanapali. But somehow that shift in scenery had the power to summon our inner body demons.

Here’s what I know now: Body image is fluid. Relational. It’s less about how our bodies actually are and more about how we feel in them. And those feelings are shaped by the people around us and the places we inhabit. At home, we’re largely in our routines, but when we travel, it’s like taking a magnifying glass to ourselves and everyone we encounter. Sometimes we feel welcomed; sometimes we feel more exposed.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern. I feel most at home in my body in places where there’s more diversity—not just in body size, but in age, race, ability. Places where Western beauty standards don’t seem quite so entrenched.

Even in places where I’m often the largest woman around me, if the culture feels less preoccupied with appearance and more grounded in everyday living, I feel more at ease than I do in destinations where everyone seems to be there to see and be seen. I’m not knocking every pool deck in the latest “it” destination, but these are often the places where I expect to be triggered.

National parks. Small towns. Hiking trails. Places where everyone is moving their bodies instead of looking at them. These are the places I feel most at home in my body.

I still have moments when I can get in my head. A wrong day, an ill-fitting outfit, feeling fat or playing too much of the comparison game, and I can still get down on myself. But nature has a way of pulling me out of my head and back into my senses. I take in all the shades of green, hear the leaves shimmering in the breeze and feel the temperature of the air on my skin. My body stops being something to critique and instead something that helps me experience.

Movement is also healing. Hiking through a forest, climbing to a gorgeous waterfall, or swimming through swift water reminds me what my body is for. When I’m moving, I’m rarely thinking about how I look and instead focusing on what my body is allowing me to do.

These days, when body image flares up on a trip, I don’t immediately assume I’ve failed recovery. I get curious instead. What is it about this place that’s making comparison feel so loud? What would help me reconnect with myself instead of spinning out?

I’ve lived through enough of these moments now to know there’s nothing wrong with me when they show up. In a culture that’s constantly pressuring us to improve our bodies, they’re an understandable response. And they don’t last.

Now it’s your turn.

Have you noticed certain places make you feel more at home in your body than others? Maybe it’s a city. A beach. A hiking trail. Or maybe there’s a place that always seems to stir up comparison, no matter how good you’ve been feeling before you arrived.

What kinds of places help you breathe easier in your body, and which ones make body image feel louder?

I’d love to hear your take.

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It was too hot for long dresses, though I tried. It was too hot for coverups, even the coverup that was perfect in Grenada. Thankfully, the water was perfect. Just the right temp and exceptionally clear, which meant I spent as much time in it as I actually could.

In a few days, I’ll be packing my suitcase again, this time for nearly a month.

My husband and I are loosely following my youngest to upstate New York for a pre-college program. While she’s dorming it, we’ll spend the month hiking our way through the Northeast and eastern Canada, visiting family, whale watching along the St. Lawrence, trying something called via ferrata (which sounds equal parts exhilarating and terrifying), and eventually making our way back to collect her.

This is the kind of trip I’ve dreamed about for years, a big escape from Texas in summer. And yet, as it gets closer, I find myself getting more nervous. I’ve never lived out of a suitcase for a month. And this particular trip involves a lot of logistics.

But there’s more to it.

Travel has a way of making us feel less rooted … more exposed … more vulnerable. It strips away the guardrails that help us regulate ourselves. It doesn’t create the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, but it sometimes amplifies them. One ill-fitting hotel robe, and we’re suddenly questioning our entire existence. Do we lean into that discomfort and grow, or do we shrink? Do we let those old stories dictate the trip, or do we keep on living? Maybe that’s why I’ve found myself thinking so much about what it means to be fully present, to fully inhabit our lives, wherever we are.

Coincidentally, my essay from two years ago about being plus size in Paris is trending again, which feels fitting at the height of travel season. Judging by the comments, the story resonates for reasons that go well beyond body size. It’s about that unsettling feeling of arriving somewhere beautiful and suddenly wondering whether you belong there at all. I suspect that’s why so many people continue to see themselves in it.

As I looked back over everything I wrote in June (and late May), I realize I’ve been hitting on variations of the same theme.

What are we waiting on to start fully embodying our lives?

Wearing the bikini.

Getting in the picture.

Taking the trip.

In a way, every piece this month circled that same question. How much of our lives do we postpone while we’re waiting to become someone (or some body) we think is more worthy? And what’s holding us back?

Here’s what we explored on Almost Sated in June

The Sephora employee who tried to save me

Sometimes the smallest interactions reveal just how deeply we’ve all internalized the idea that we should always be improving ourselves. This piece became less about skincare and more about the messages we absorb without even realizing it.

Too fat. Too thin. Too old. Too sexy.

No matter where women show up, someone seems ready to tell them why they shouldn’t. As I watched the reaction to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Runway, I realized our judgments of other women’s bodies often reveal more about our own beliefs than theirs.

The divine pleasure of not waiting

This essay grew out of a Note. It started with a simple observation on a hiking trail and became something much bigger: the realization that life isn’t waiting for us to become a different version of ourselves.

One reader shared something that stayed with me:

“Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Don’t wait to be alive.”

Another wrote about realizing she didn’t want to spend the next 30 years postponing her life until she reached some imagined version of herself.

“Life is happening anyway.”

Maybe that’s real freedom. Not finally becoming perfect, but realizing you never needed to be in order to fully inhabit your life.

Things I’m thinking about

As I leave soon for this month of travel, I’m curious what I’m going to take from it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why travel sometimes quiets body image, and other times seems to amplify it. I have some theories and expect to share more soon. If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

I’m looking forward to spending long days hiking, whale watching, and remembering that my body is far more interesting as a vehicle for living than as a project to constantly improve.

One thing I’m loving (liking?) this month

It was a whopper of a read, but I started and finished Maggie O’Farrell’s Land in the Caymans. I literally Googled the reading level midway, because each page felt like it was taking ages to get through. O’Farrell’s writing is so lush and exquisitely descriptive that it demands full attention.

With Land, I was captivated by the mysticism, the relationship between the mapmaker and his son, and the mystery surrounding the father’s vision at the well. A flashback describing his starvation during Ireland’s Great Famine was one of the most gripping depictions of hunger I’ve ever read. But after all that careful, deliberate storytelling, I was longing for a satisfying ending that tied all the threads together, and it never came. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think!

One thing I’m packing this month

After noticing over and over again that hotel bedside lighting just isn’t what it used to be (or maybe my eyesight has gotten so bad I need brighter lighting), I’ve taken matters into my own hands and bought this personal book reading light, a Wirecutter recommendation. I’ll report back.

A question for you

What’s one thing you’ve stopped waiting to do?

Maybe it’s wearing the thing.

Taking the trip.

Getting in the photo.

Starting the hobby.

Ordering dessert.

Speaking up.

Or maybe it’s something completely different.

I’d love to hear your answer.

Leave a comment

Over the next month as I’ll be writing from the road, there will certainly be stories about travel, but more than that, I suspect we’ll be talking about identity, aging, taking up space, and what happens when we step outside our routines. I have a feeling this trip is going to give me plenty to think about, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.

Thanks for being here. If Almost Sated has become a place where you feel a little less alone or a little more at home in your own body, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support this work.

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My husband (not a native) has largely suspended all outdoor activity until October, maybe November. When I do occasionally get him out on the mountain bike, he spends the entire ride complaining about the heat (and humidity).

I, however, remain committed to mountain biking, hiking, and generally spending enough time outside to warrant heavy SPF.

Which brings me to today’s topic.

No, you do not need a summer body.

But what about a summer tinted sunscreen?

I recently became far more invested in this question than I ever expected to be.

It started with an accidental Amazon purchase. Who knows how many months ago. Probably years actually.

At some point in my past, I accidentally bought Elta MD tinted sunscreen. Not just one bottle, either. No, I bulk ordered the tinted version and didn’t immediately snap to my mistake. I’ve been a fan of the regular Elta MD face sunscreen for years and use it daily before I go out into the world, so while this oops wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t the end of the world.

I should have sent it back the moment I knew I got it wrong, but I decided I could wear it on the days when I didn’t need full makeup. It would be my un-makeup option for bike riding and hiking days. Something for those days when I don’t need to be super polished but want to at least look like I’m trying.

But I was dubious. How can one tinted product work on all skin colors?

By the first pump, I was even more concerned. What would this orange-beige glob look against my much-lighter skin tone?

Still willing it to work, I slathered it on my face, where it seemed to just sit until I blended it out with a sponge. The result was a weird orange cast with almost no coverage.

Strangely, this wasn’t enough to make me give up.

No, that came later, when I was sweating in the sun and discovered said sunscreen burns when it gets in your eyes. Not a little. A lot. I’d half to apply it so carefully, more carefully than I’ve ever applied moisturizer before, and then on top of that, I couldn’t use it for summer mountain bike rides because the runoff from my forehead would set my eyeballs on fire.

For years now, I’ve been dutifully working through these endless containers of tinted sunscreen in my quest not to be wasteful, even though they bring me to tears. Then one day an ad for tinted moisturizer popped up in my Facebook feed.

My curiosity was piqued.

With my bad experience fresh in mind, I immediately went to ChatGPT to tell me the good and the bad of the product that had landed in my feed. After learning it wasn’t so great, I shared my long history with Elta MD, what I was looking for in a tinted sunscreen, why I needed it … basically my entire life story, and it spit out some recommendations.

At the top of the list was ILIA. I’d used their foundation before and remembered it having good coverage and a good color match, so I made a mental note to look it up the next time I found myself in Sephora, which I generally try to avoid.

A few weeks later, in between appointments with time to kill, I suggested Sephora to my oldest daughter, a beauty and skincare junkie, knowing there are few things she enjoys more.

This was my first mistake.

Now, she knows both how clueless and stubborn I am in my refusal to get on board with a skincare routine. It horrified her to learn that I use drugstore shampoo as both my face and everywhere-else wash. She’s tried for years to get me to change (and maybe add a retinol) but has finally given up, which I am really grateful for.

Here’s the way I look at this. I already have too many things I’m supposed to be worried about as it concerns my body: black plastic kitchen utensils, BPA on grocery store receipts, whether I’m getting enough vitamin D, microplastics, forever chemicals, the continued availability of HRT, what exactly is inside Cheetos that makes them so good, my Coke Zero addiction.

I don’t want to be worrying about whether I need salicylic acid or retinol. I’m doing the most important thing, which is using sunscreen. I’m out in the sun a lot.

My second mistake was talking to one of the salespeople.

She immediately wanted me to stay away from the ILIA tinted moisturizer.

“It’s very light coverage,” she started with.

I replied that it didn’t matter, this was basically the makeup I was going to wear mountain biking.

She said I wouldn’t even be able to see it on my face.

To which I replied, then why are there so many different shades?

She immediately steered me to another product. A tinted moisturizer. The problem was it didn’t have sunscreen. She said I would need to wear sunscreen underneath it (or maybe it was over it, I can’t remember.)

To which I replied: I know myself. I will not do it.

My daughter tried to politely interject at this point, but the lovely salesperson wouldn’t take the hint.

She proceeded to tell me that as an aesthetician, hearing that I didn’t use moisturizer was like a knife in the heart. And she said it, something came over her. Even I could sense the shift. Her new mission in life was to convert me, as if I could somehow be reasoned with about skincare.

To be clear, I didn’t know my Elta MD sunscreen wasn’t a moisturizer. To think all these years before I stepped into Sephora, I hadn’t been moisturizing.

The horror.

Finally, when she could not convince me to double up on tinted moisturizer and sunscreen, she pointed me toward Saie, which has a lightweight tinted moisturizer with a mineral zinc SPF 35 sunscreen and (bonus!) hyaluronic acid. (I have no idea what hyaluronic acid is.)

She asked if she could color match my skin, which I reluctantly agreed to. The last time Sephora color-matched me I ended up buying an overpriced foundation supposedly in my perfect shade that somehow never looked right on me. I spent months trying to finish that bottle.

She then put a little dab of the Saie stuff on a Q-tip, which she then dabbed on my jawline, and directed me to a mirror. It actually looked … good. The coverage was good. The color was good. It just felt a little weird on my face. Petroleum jelly-like. Almost sticky. These are some of my sensory triggers.

I asked to try it on myself and then did some internal debating. Could I deal with this or would this be one of those sensory nightmares that would be too much to overcome?

I wished this woman would just scamper off to her next victim so I could go back to ILIA, but she wasn’t budging.

I finally asked if we could just try the ILIA, and she relented.

Lo and behold: barely any coverage.

The sales person was triumphant. I went back to the SAIE and put it in my basket. She had won.

I’ve been using it for a month now, and it’s mostly terrific.

Yes, it’s still got that slight sticky feeling. Occasionally I have to use a sponge to blend it out. But overall the results are exactly what I wanted, and the color is perfect.

So there’s my summer tinted moisturizer.

I still have no intention of developing a skincare routine.

Now it’s your turn …

What’s your hot summer must-have?

Leave a comment

That was my overwhelming feeling reading through the reactions to this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Runway Show.

But first, the good. It feels like SI is moving toward greater inclusivity at a time when the broader culture seems to be moving backward.

While our social media feeds are littered with hyper-thinness, cosmetic procedures, and increasingly narrow beauty standards, the SI runway featured more body diversity than we’ve seen in decades. It felt like true size inclusivity from fat to thin, broad to narrow. It even included a woman who was six months pregnant.

But I think what’s even more interesting is the larger conversation the event generated. It’s like a giant cultural Rorschach test for our beliefs around bodies and beauty. We aren’t just looking at the women on the runway, we are looking at our own beliefs about women’s bodies. And it isn’t always pretty.

Some people saw Lizzo and thought, “too fat.”

Some people saw Bethenny Frankel and thought, “too old.”

Some people saw the traditional swimsuit models and thought, “too thin.”

Some people saw confidence and thought, “too much.”

For every person who saw a woman owning her space, there was another person wondering why she was there at all. And honestly that’s where these conversations get complicated.

For a brief period, it felt like we were genuinely broadening our definition of beauty. Then came Ozempic, the return of extreme thinness, and this algorithm-driven feeding frenzy around appearance that fuels an endless quest for optimization. Now it’s like we don’t know when to stop. And it isn’t just that we expanded beauty standards and then pulled back. We never went far enough.

We’ve regressed, not just in our acceptance of women’s bodies, but in our acceptance of women, period. When the standards are this narrow, women spend far too much time chasing impossible ideals, achievable only by a sliver of the population, even with the explosion of GLP-1 use. Why do you think our celebrities are thinner than they were just two years ago? The goal posts moved again to preserve the narrow ideal.

But the real kicker is this: We’ve never been quicker to judge one another.

And I’m going to be the first to admit I was guilty of this watching the SI runway clips.

Because I follow Olympian Ilona Maher, who regularly talks about loving the body you’re in, I’ve been seeing her prep and promotion of the event for weeks. She regularly rocks a bikini and talks about normalizing bodies that don’t fit the traditional mold. Having spent most of my life with a broader, muscular shape, I relate to her body more than most.

It made me so happy to see a body like hers on that catwalk and then almost equally as disappointed by the white and blue-striped one-piece she wore. And I wasn’t the only one. So many people took issue with that suit that she ended up addressing it.

“In terms of ‘it’s not very flattering,’ okay, I hear ya. I don’t think it was my best look I’ve ever worn, or the best suit I’ve ever worn, for sure,” Maher said.

But then she got to the real truth of the matter.

“Is it unflattering, or is it just like a bigger body existing in a suit?”

It took me a while to untangle my own reaction, and it most definitely wasn’t about the swimsuit. It was about years of conditioning around what bodies are supposed to look like. And it was fed by the complicated relationship I’ve had with my own body.

To be clear, I want people to love Maher’s body. To see it and celebrate it as much as they would the so-called norm, and the reason is simple and selfish: her body looks closer to mine than the bodies I’ve spent most of my life aspiring to. I want acceptance for her body, because I want acceptance for my body and for all the other bodies out there that have never fit. My knee-jerk reaction came from fear, that bodies like ours are only acceptable in their most flattering states.

I didn’t arrive at that conclusion right away, but it feels most aligned with my truth.

And I think if more of us turned inward, we’d see that our reactions to the SI runway say more about us and how we feel about our own bodies than they do about those on display. Viewed through this lens, the event becomes an opportunity to examine our own beliefs around size, beauty, and expectations for women, and to identify where there’s still work to be done.

Take the reaction to Frankel.

From my corner of the internet, it looked like her presence on the runway was the most polarizing, with most of the criticism centered on her being too old to be on that stage, as if it wasn’t okay for her to be wearing a bikini.

What fascinated me was how quickly the conversation became a referendum on what women aren’t allowed to do after a certain age.

Like we’re supposed to stop focusing on looks.

Like we’re supposed to stop wanting to feel attractive.

Like we’re supposed to stop trying altogether, because there’s a point where effort becomes desperation.

The headline that stopped me in my tracks was from Allure: So, when exactly can we stop being hot? It was paired with a pic of Frankel’s mid-catwalk strut in her crochet string bikini, complete with bored pout.

The headline hinges on you thinking you were once hot. Which, for the record, I did not. Or, if I did, it was in some alternate universe where unconventional was acceptable.

At 51, I’m not really concerned with being hot. Yes, I’d like to be considered attractive, but I’m more concerned with how I keep this blessed body functioning through the remaining days of my life. Maybe my bar is too low.

Here’s the question I keep coming back to:

Is there a way to care for myself without treating my aging body as something that needs to be fixed?

These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about this. I still want to look good. I just don’t want to kill myself or drive myself insane doing it. More importantly, I want to feel good doing all the things I enjoy doing.

I’m not actively pursuing thinness, but I am pursuing fitness, because I’m looking at what’s going to sustain me for the long haul. It’s a more balanced, whole-body approach to health and fitness. But I’m also not ready to completely stop caring about appearance. While I stopped dyeing my hair five years ago, I’m still getting Botox, a habit I picked up during my divorce days. When I told my aesthetician on my last visit that I might not be back again, she looked at me like I had lost my mind.

But I’m not here to pretend that I’m not 51, that I’m not aging, that I’m not going to die. I want to be beautiful in my own skin, in my own body, and I want to take care of myself. I’m just still trying to figure out what that looks like.

Seeing those runway pics also forced me to confront how much we continue to conflate thinness with health.

Maher, who is easily one of the strongest and fittest people to walk that catwalk, doesn’t display many of the markers we’ve been trained to associate with fitness. She doesn’t have the most visible abs. She doesn’t have the lowest body fat.

Most of us are more likely to associate fitness with women like Frankel or fellow Bravo star Stassi Schroeder, who had an entire Daily Mail story devoted to the traditional 600-calorie-a-day diet she followed to get runway-ready. (I’m throwing up in my mouth writing this.)

There’s little question that Maher is more physically capable than almost anyone standing beside her, yet we’ve become so conditioned to equate thinness with fitness that many of us no longer recognize the difference. Which makes this conversation all the more important.

We’re at a point in time, where our standards appear to be narrowing in real-time, which is what makes SI’s parade of diversity so much more important. Let’s face it, many of us aren’t gonna do the work the moment asks of us. Many of us are simply making a snap judgment and then moving on to the next thing in our feed, without stopping to question why a certain body might make us feel a certain way.

If you’re uncomfortable, if you’re having a strong reaction, it might be worth asking why. It might be worth digging a little deeper.

I’m a full-on believer in just wearing the swimsuit, of just getting in the photo, of being a full participant in this thing called life, and not letting how I look—or rather how I feel about myself—dictate what I do. For me, this is the only way to face this never-ending barrage of images and messages about how I’m supposed to be.

This year’s SI Swimsuit Runway reminded me that there are many ways to inhabit a body, many ways to age, many ways to be beautiful.

All of those women knew their bodies would be dissected online.

They showed up anyway.

Maybe that’s the message.

Now it’s your turn …

If you had complicated thoughts watching the SI Runway clips, I’d love to hear about them. What body, beauty, or age beliefs did the runway challenge for you?

Leave a comment

I jotted these words down in my phone earlier this week as a potential topic for a full post. It was spurred by my surprise at how many people resonated with a Note I posted last week alongside an action shot my husband took of me mid-stride on our recent hike in the Catskills.

Here’s the pic and the Note:

The Note was inspired by last week’s piece, which was moodier and more frustrated than my Note. I wrote about fat-shaming hotel bathrobes and how they’re one of those seemingly insignificant reminders that bigger women can do all the things, but still aren’t always made to fit. Even with the mood, the piece was overwhelmingly positive. (Plus, it had pretty pics of the Catskills!)

I wrote:

“Despite the external madness, I’ve never been so zen about my fitness.
It’s not good or bad. All or nothing. Fit or not fit. I’ve finally gotten to a place of understanding that fitness exists on a spectrum, and I’m not deficient or failing at life when I’m ‘less fit.’ I’m also not in some desperately mad scramble to get back to some crazy ideal.”

It’s true, I’m happier with my body now than I’ve ever been. But when I thought about it more, I realized that even in those moments when I’m not happy with my body now, it’s no longer stopping me from living in it.

What I think the piece reflects is a place of acceptance.

I’m not chasing the crazy anymore as it pertains to fitness, thinness, or physical appearance.

That past version of me was so focused on what I should be, that it kept me disconnected from myself and the larger world around me. It kept me from being present.

Every great moment came with an asterisk. Nothing was good enough, because I wasn’t good enough, or rather, my body wasn’t good enough just as it was.

We all know people like this. People who are postponing their lives, putting off the good stuff until _____________, whatever that may be. And, for some of us, it’s not about reaching the perfect size. It’s a certain amount of money, a job title, or some other magical milestone we’re supposed to achieve before we can really start living. It’s often accompanied by the idea that once I achieve ______________, happiness will arrive too.

We can become so future-focused, so perfect-scenario-obsessed, that we put off what’s most important.

And I think we rarely acknowledge the cost of that mindset. We delay the trips. We dodge the photos. We postpone joy. And even when we do the things, if we’re still waiting on perfect, we become spectators in our own lives instead of fully inhabiting them.

I know a lot of y’all get it, even if this kind of self-reflection is new territory. You’re doing the work here in midlife too, loosening the grip on the perfectionism and the people-pleasing, bit by bit, even when it feels uncomfortable. For those of you who aren’t sure how to begin, maybe it starts with a question: What would it feel like to enjoy this moment without judgment?

Maybe this can serve as a tiny bit of encouragement. Thanks to my Note, I heard from others who’ve had similar realizations and wanted to share a few.

I think that last line is the crux of it all. Life is happening anyway.

Maybe that’s the real freedom. Not waiting for perfect, but realizing you’re fully worthy of living it right now.

Now it’s your turn …

Have you moved past perfect? If so, was there a catalyst that got you there? Are there still parts of your life you’re waiting to fully step into?

Leave a comment

I’m coming off of a long weekend in the Catskills, which was everything I would want in a springtime escape—brisk, at times, downright chilly breezes, showers and sunshine, and absolutely green everywhere, mosses and ferns and rolling hills and trees. And not Central Texas green, which is mostly a drab brownish-green, colored by our scrubby Cedar trees. In the Catskills, and really all the way from the mountains to NYC, everything was a bright crisp green. The kind of green that seems unreal no matter the backdrop.

We stayed at Piaule, which bills itself as a modern “landscape hotel.” It is landscape forward, though the hotel bit seems like a stretch. It’s 24 tiny cabins, each with a glass wall that allows in these spectacular forest views and the aforementioned magnificent green. I can’t imagine anything more magical, except the same view in fall, with the changing leaves, or in winter, covered in snow. I guess it’s pretty perfect all the time.

Minus the whole reason for going, a concert in Brooklyn, our stay was centered on nature. We spent most of our days hiking. We walked the grounds of Opus 40, a one-man marvel made of layers upon layers of carefully stacked bluestones, tromped through muddy forest trails to rocky outcrops, and stumbled onto a lush boardwalk leading to a hidden lighthouse at sunset in Saugerties. Even the drives along the country roads through the tiny villages were spectacular. It all felt magical.

But Kaaterskill Falls was the real show stopper.

Of course, we were going to see the tallest waterfall in New York. We approached it first from the observation deck at the top, and then made our way down to the middle, then the bottom and back up all 260 feet. It reminded me a lot of our trek up Multnomah Falls in Oregon, a hike early in my diet recovery days, when I was still actively warring with my new body and used that hike as a game of comparison, where I was the big failure.

This time, there was none of that.

We hiked down first, so I had a good idea of what awaited me on the trek back up. Unlike Multnomah, which was a series of tight, steep switchbacks all the way to the top, this one was made mostly of winding steps. My right hip was angry by the time I made it back to the top, but no part of me was at war with my body or my fitness.

And hell yes, I was winded from the climb and had to stop periodically. But I’m in a different state with myself these days. There is so much less judgment. The old, ironically smaller, me would have blamed my fatness for all the huffing and puffing. I’m so much gentler with myself now.

We live in a culture that praises extreme thinness as “fitness,” to a level we’ve never seen before. Just look at the way media outlets have fawned over Demi Moore’s visibly gaunt arms these last few weeks, touting them as “toned.” It’s absolutely bonkers. With so much glorification on this level of thinness, it’s hard not to absorb these as the “new ideals.” It’s a game of active resistance.

Despite the external madness, I’ve never been so zen about my fitness.

It’s not good or bad. All or nothing. Fit or not fit. I’ve finally gotten to a place of understanding, that fitness exists on a spectrum, and I’m not deficient or somehow failing at life when I’m “less fit.” I’m also not in some desperately mad scramble to get back to some crazy ideal, which let’s be real, was never and will never be, attainable for someone who’s basically a linebacker in a woman’s body.

Now, I look back at my life and see that I’ve had periods when I was incredibly fit, and especially strong, and times when I was less so. Fitness ebbs and flows, according to the demands and priorities of life. There’s no mad scramble to get back to “that place.” Midlife me has her priorities straight.

Like at home, where I’m rebuilding my cardio base for mountain biking so I can keep up with my favorite “fasties” by the time our summer Ride Like a Girl series begins. This requires a solid three rides a week, at least one of which is in the afternoon heat. Some weeks, it’s hard to achieve. And that’s it. No judgment.

I was feeling pretty good with myself on our hikes, because my fat fit ass (I use fat here as a neutral descriptor) was mostly keeping up with my husband, who’s got six inches on me and spent the last two weeks in Utah at “fitness camp,” where every morning starts with a three-hour hike.

We chase waterfalls a lot, mostly because my husband’s really into them. If there’s a waterfall, this pisces man wants to be near them, behind them, underneath them. Really, I’ve never seen someone who gets more excited about being pounded by crushing water. He was absolutely delighted by the middle section of the falls, which you could carefully scramble your way around so you could stare at the world from behind the waterfall.

There is something perspective-shifting about reaching a vantage point few people will ever see. Most people choose the easiest path to the payoff. With a little more effort, and sometimes more risk, you get a view that stays with you.

And there’s power in knowing your body allowed you to experience it. I’ve always been in awe of not just what the human body could accomplish, but what my body could accomplish. It’s just that, for most of my life, that awe came with an asterisk.

“If only you were thinner …”

I have so much more respect for my body now than I ever did when I was smaller and constantly attempting to shrink myself. And as an older person, currently plagued by an Achilles injury and staring down the prospect of surgery, there’s an understanding that this body is precious in a way that I didn’t feel before.

And I have real anger about how much of my life I wasted in these silly battles and mind games and futile quests to make my body into something it was never meant to be. And if all I had to do was live with and love and accept my body, with no external interference, I would be healed.

But I’m still living in a world not made for my body. No matter how at peace I am with myself, I’m still reminded of all the ways my body doesn’t fit.

Like the stupid hotel robe.

I forgot my swimsuit on this trip. I normally never leave packing until right before we head out the door, but we attended a dinner party the night before with lovely friends who go all out on hosting, so we spent the evening being wined and dined in their backyard dining nook and caught a super early flight that required waking up in the 4 o’clock hour to pack.

I wasn’t surprised that the hotel didn’t have a swimsuit that fit me. I expected it. Especially in a place like Piaule. What it called “the gift shop” was a few T-shirts and the soap used in the cabins for sale at the check-in desk. They did have swimsuits, tucked in a drawer, all the same black, athletic one-pieces, organized in tiny plastic bins by size. I give them credit for just having an XL bin. Sadly, there were no bathing suits in it though. Que sera. I made do with a sports bra and a pair of my husband’s swim trunks.

But for some reason, this time, the robe situation really set me off.

Our cabin came with two, one for each of us. I didn’t bother looking at the sizes, because robe sizing exists in its own dimension, completely untethered from standard sizing. Of course, it looked too small, but I slipped it on and could immediately tell by how high the arm holes hit that it was a no-go. But I kept going, because I like a laugh at my own expense, and actually got it on. It would not close. I tried the whole just pull it tighter, as if my body could be packed down like a mattress in a vacuum bag, but there was no give. I didn’t bother checking the other robe right away, because it was going to piss me off if the other was bigger, and this was the “woman’s robe.”

After my husband and I got out of the heated pool one night and faced the prospect of walking back to our cabin cold and wet, I asked one of the workers (the same guy who helped me with the swimsuit) if there was a larger robe. Like an XL or something. He came back with a waffle robe that looked slightly bigger than the ones in the room, but still nowhere near big enough.

Thankfully, this one had stretch! It wasn’t remotely robe-size roomy, but it was just enough to cover my major bits.

I shuffled back to my cabin chafed that this was the best they could do, but when I got back to the room, I looked at the size tag and it said XXL.

In another life this would have been the trigger that sent me spiraling into a new wave of self-loathing and active restriction if I wasn’t already in full-on diet mode. It never would have occurred to me that something was wrong with the robe. That it was horribly mis-sized or cheaply made or just defective. I would have just immediately blamed myself as the problem.

And this time, I was also like, what the fuck, I’m not that fucking big. I’m on the edge of plus-size. What about people who are larger than me? What are the men at this place wearing? Not the robes! For a hot minute, I envisioned a new purpose in life: crusading for size-inclusive hotel robes.

I made my husband try on the robe. It fit him better than me, but still not robe cozy. I finally worked up the nerve to check the other robe in the room. It was also a S-M.

I felt vindicated.

Most men would say what’s the big deal? So the robe doesn’t fit? I’ve said it myself a million times. But it’s this kind of shit that eats away at women. These seemingly little size slights that no one would say actually make any kind of meaningful difference.

But they do.

Collectively, they add up to one message: you do not fit in this space.

You can do all the things. You can hike the mountain, climb the stairs, keep pace all weekend long, but if your body doesn’t fit, it really doesn’t matter.

A few years ago, I might have let that feeling define the entire trip. To be fair, sometimes I still have trouble shaking it.

But that wasn’t the feeling that permeated this one.

It was mostly one of gratitude, to be grounded by this level of nature and beauty.

But it was also one of longing, of a different kind.

We travel to these beautiful places, and it all feels so fleeting, like I’m trying to absorb as much of it as I can before returning to a world that feels increasingly hostile: to bodies like mine, to aging, to softness, to anyone who don’t neatly conform.

And maybe that’s why the moments stay with me. Not because they are beautiful, but because there’s more appreciation for the thing that allowed me to do it.

For so long, I thought my body existed primarily as something to shrink. Now, more and more, I see it as the thing that allows me to experience the beauty in this world.

I’d love to hear what you think. Has your appreciation for your body gotten better as you age? Are you feeling more pressure? Less? How do you escape it?

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After my recent spring break trip to Grenada, the most body-positive place I have ever visited, I had a few writing topics I was noodling. One was a “what I wore” recap that would include all the cute outfits. Except: I basically wore a few items over and over. In a good way. So why not talk about that? With summer coming up, it feels like the perfect time to talk about my most-worn item: the beach cover-up.

Now, the trip was blissful. We spent most of our time by, or in, the water. On the way to breakfast one morning, I joked to my husband, “My only real problem in life right now is deciding which cover-up to wear,” which was kind of true. This is when you know vacation is going right.

We did a split stay between the Spice Island Beach Resort, with walkout access to the famed Grand Anse Beach (I know, it’s a rough life), and Six Senses La Sagesse, which is on a much quieter beach on the other side of the island. Our villa there was nestled up on a hill and required a longer walk (or golf cart ride) to the pools and beaches.

I say all this because it basically meant that you had to wear something from your room to the pool or your room to breakfast. And if you’re already planning to wear a swimsuit most of the day, there’s no real reason for another full outfit.

The problem with cover-ups

Now, as a Taurus, I’m a practical girlie. (A finer-things-in-life-loving girlie, but practical nonetheless.) In my past life, I would not have typically worn something as frivolous as a beach cover-up when shorts or a light dress would do.

Part of that is living in Texas, where a cover-up is rarely just for the pool. It has to provide enough coverage for a last-minute stop at the gas station for drinks or a run into the grocery store or a Mexican martini at Chuy’s afterwards. My Austin people here know what I’m talking about. Most cover-ups just don’t pass that test.

And at least in Austin, the liquid payoff isn’t always a pool; it’s a lake or a river or a creek or a spring, and often requires sturdier shoes, which just doesn’t always mix with full-on glamazon cover-up vibes.

But the biggest problem with cover-ups in Texas is many of them just aren’t light enough for our heat. For some ungodly reason, most cover-ups seem to be super heavy or made of material that doesn’t breathe. Here’s the thing: No one wants to be sweating in their cover-up.

Getting out of my clothing comfort zone

Until this trip, I had never really found one that worked. But since we were resort hopping and so close to the beach, I decided I would test wearing them and see how it went. And since I was renting them (more on that later), I could splurge on two without an ounce of guilt.

I rented two pieces from Rent the Runway, both lightweight, black, and the perfect amount of see-through—still polished enough for breakfast, but sexy too. I felt like a queen in them. One was from Ramy Brook, the Kristen (retail $295); the other was Ronny Kobo x RTR (retail $355). Quick aside: Never would I ever pay those retail prices for a cover-up. It just seems beyond reason. But since I wasn’t, there was no need to fuss. They were perfect for transitioning to and from the water, walking along Grand Anse, and breakfasting at the resort.

What surprised me most was how wearable, flattering, and versatile they actually were.

I paired them with a couple of new swimsuits from Dillards, my first in over two years, both in black and white/cream, but they could easily have worked with brighter colors. One was more sporty, which I wore for snorkeling, and the other had a ruffled top that felt a bit more polished for pool days and drinks.

I also finally found a full-coverage UPF sun shirt that I absolutely love. This has been another one of those tricky items for me, because while I love the idea of full UPF coverage when I’m out in the sun all day, most of these types of shirts are heavy, unbreathable, and unflattering. Again: I have no interest in sweating through my clothing. (Really, we get enough of this in Texas.)

My search for the perfect UPF shirt was also a thing, but let me just say, after trying a few, including Wirecutter’s recommendations, and not loving them, I am relieved to have found the one. And will probably get it in different colors.

This one from Carve Designs is lightweight, an amazing color, and unzips from the bottom and top, which provides breathability and adjustable sexy. It was on heavy rotation in Grenada.

But back to the cover-ups. I got so much wear out of them that I decided to keep them.

This is one of the best things about Rent the Runway—when you find something you love, you can often buy it at a deeply discounted rate.

Where Rent the Runway falls short

I wish it was all rainbows and beach vibes with the clothing subscription service, but my experience with them lately has been more mixed.

You might remember I wrote about using Rent the Runway as a newly plus-size person and how positive that experience was. Having beautiful dresses that fit was one of the big ways I embraced this new body.

Well, I paused my membership last fall while trimming expenses, but then my husband gave me RTR credits for Christmas, so I started again. And in that small break, it seems like they have pulled back on their plus-size options. To be fair, they were never the most inclusive of the clothing rental services (they claim to offer 00–22), but they seem less so now.

I am set to search as a size 16, 18, and 20 on their site. But there are very few size 18 and 20 options, and they are almost exclusively in the special occasion rentals. And honestly, it feels like there are fewer 16s than there used to be. wrote about Rent the Runway this week and flat out said it isn’t size-inclusive.

In early 2025, Rent the Runway’s founder and CEO Jenn Hyman announced the company was doubling its inventory (a frequent customer complaint) with more of customers’ most-favorited items, three to four times the inventory of favorite designers, and 90+ new designers.

Nowhere in that announcement was size inclusivity mentioned. Tellingly, among the brands highlighted, very few have offered extended sizing.

Now, that could have been a deliberate decision, but it may also simply reflect broader fashion trends. We saw a real expansion of size inclusivity in the height of body positivity. But now, in this GLP-1 era, many designers have reversed course and tightened sizing.

So while the overall inventory grew, it didn’t necessarily translate into more options for the mid-to-plus-size girlies. If anything, it feels like the opposite. I reached out to Rent the Runway to ask about this and have not heard back, but I will update this post if I do. All I can really speak to is my own experience.

As someone who checks the site regularly, I’m getting a fit score match on fewer and fewer items (despite my size being the same). The fit score, which estimates the likelihood something will fit based on your past rentals and other data points, is quite reliable. But if it doesn’t think something will fit you in any of the available sizes, it shows the message: “We’re still fetching feedback to recommend a size.” And I’m seeing that message more and more now, even on the size 16 and XL pieces.

To be clear, I have always been able to find items to wear on Rent the Runway. But as someone who is straddling the line between midsize and plus, I feel like I’m right at the cutoff. Someone solidly plus size would have a much harder time on the platform right now, which is disappointing.

I’ve written about this before, but one of the most frustrating parts about gaining weight is losing access to clothes that fit. I can’t easily wear most of the options offered by my favorite designers, including many I was initially introduced to via Rent the Runway, such as Cara Cara New York, Ulla Johnson, and Veronica Beard.

The bigger issue with size inclusivity

Having access to clothes that fit, and feel good, should be a basic human right. Instead, it remains a real issue for many women, and it’s not okay that it seems to be getting worse, not better.

That’s the bigger conversation, and one I’ll keep coming back to.

But this trip was a good reminder of something more immediate: how good it feels to have something easy to throw on, that fits, and that lets you just enjoy where you are. These cover-ups completely changed how I felt about tropical vacation dressing.

I’m still a practical girl. I’ve just expanded my options and have a clearer sense of what’s actually worth packing for vacation.

Now it’s your turn …

What’s your favorite go-to vacation piece? And where do you land on cover-ups: essential or unnecessary? Have a favorite cover-up brand? Please drop the name or link here?

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This time, it was crickets. Online at least.

I promoted it in all the usual places. Still, very little engagement. I found myself wondering if the silence meant something deeper. Judgment. Pity. Disgust. My mind can go to some far-out places.

I do know the piece prompted some concern. My sister texted right after I hit publish to check on me. And when I called my mom later that day, she told me, unprompted, that she had read the piece and understood my husband’s position. And then: she wished she had taken better care of her health when she was younger.

For the record, I didn’t stop caring about my health when I quit dieting. That decision, and the many months of therapeutic work I did afterwards (and continue to do) to undo the damage from dieting, have helped me greatly improve my mental health. I just happened to gain weight.

I have heard from my husband, who is at a “weight loss retreat and wellness resort.” On our call last night, he mentioned something in passing that hit me the wrong way.

I got angry. I hate that our default social systems make someone who is strong, capable, and physically active still feel like they need to shrink themselves to be accepted.

Why can’t we just live in.a world where a woman can be fit and fat and not feel like she has to do something about it?

This was the thought I had. My husband followed it up with, you just really can’t tell someone’s fitness by their appearance. As if it was something he’s never thought about. Ummm. Don’t we already know this firsthand? Also: isn’t this exactly what I’ve been writing about for years?

I’ve been thinking a lot about honesty in writing lately.

Over drinks this week, I told two of the friends I made at my Maine writing retreat (thank god, and Lyz Lenz, for these women!) that I was too scared to drop any of my recent writing into our shared Google drive. Even though I post here every week.

Sometimes it’s easier to tell strangers your deepest thoughts than it is to share them with people you’re close to. Even sharing with strangers can be agonizing. And make you question your life choices and what is so wrong with you that you feel the need to share your personal thoughts and feelings with the whole wide world.

I also admitted that every few months, I publish something here on Substack that makes me so uncomfortable that I wake up at 3 a.m. convinced I need to delete it. That’s where I've been with last week’s piece.

Reading Lindy West’s memoir a few weeks ago, along with the debate online about whether she was deluding herself in her decision to embrace polyamory, and therefore not being honest with herself (or us!) in her writing, I found myself thinking this: what happens inside a marriage is always open to interpretation from the outside, often incorrectly. We just don’t really know.

Also, in the case of writers, there can be a wide gap between what we choose to write about and what’s actually happening behind the scenes. Much of the backlash from Adult Braces seemed to come from that gap. West had built a body of empowered, feminist writing, and then revealed a far more complicated personal life that included agreeing to an ultimatum she hoped would never pass, discovering her husband’s “sort of illegal” girlfriend (her words), and eventually joining a throuple. All very sus, as my youngest would say.

From the writing craft perspective, what stuck with me was how sharp the details were. It reminded me that I should be journaling … but honestly. About real things happening in my life. In real time.

I say this because when I read Tara Westover’s Educated, I was working on my own memoir (still working on it, by the way), and I was so impressed that she’d not only kept but included snippets from her childhood journals.

I remember thinking: I really wish I had written journals. I was spending so much time trying to piece together my major life events, especially the bad ones I had blocked out.

But then I had another thought: I actually did write journals … for most high school and college ... in fact, I still have them! Off to the garage I went in search of said journals, convinced they would be my salvation, only to discover they were filled with vague feelings and almost no concrete details.

There were gaps. Big ones. Especially around the years abuse happened. Instead of writing about the bad stuff, I wrote about my big plans and hopes for the future. Escape routes.

Calling it dishonest isn’t fair. I was just writing about what I hoped would happen one day instead of what was actually happening.

I didn’t dare write honestly during my first marriage either. I don’t think I could have handled writing the truth. And I wouldn’t have wanted my then-husband to read it.

It wasn’t just a room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf was advocating for. It was a space safe enough to tell the truth.

I’m still working on that.

After writing the first draft of last week’s piece, I wondered if it was too heavy. If I should have added more levity. And maybe that’s part of the issue. There was levity in the headline, but I had come up with that months before I wrote the piece or even knew this thing was actually going to happen (yes, this is how my former newspaper copy editor brain works).

When I wrote the piece, it was heavy. So I tried to add some lightness. Or at least moments of relief. Then I leaned in with the photo.

But maybe it didn’t translate. Maybe it made it worse. Because maybe it read as me trying to put a bow on something that wasn’t meant to be pretty. Or easy. Or even fully understood.

There is so much complexity to these questions about body autonomy, and so much that resists neat conclusions.

Prioritize your health, but not to the point of obsession. Care about your appearance, but don’t let it define you. Accept your aging body, but do the things that will protect it. Love yourself just as you are, but still try to improve.

It’s no wonder we don’t know what to do with ourselves. And then navigate all of that in relationship with someone else who doesn’t feel exactly the same way you do.

It’s a lot. Especially in these times, when things already feel heavy.

I know some people cope by tuning it all out. I’m not one of those people, and I don’t want to be. But I also understand that people need to take care of themselves … however they see fit.

So maybe this week is just this: a few scattered thoughts, no clear conclusion.

If you’ve ever felt this kind of silence after sharing something hard, or wrestled with these contradictions, I’d be curious to hear from you.

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If you’re in the mood for something lighter, this piece has been finding its way to new readers …

I’ve had the line for this piece in my head for months, years probably, if I’m being honest, as my husband has been grappling over whether to go back to fitness camp, what I have lovingly dubbed fat camp.

He hates it when I call it that, by the way. Also, I’m using fat here as a neutral descriptor.

I’m trying to keep this piece centered on me, not him, out of respect for his privacy. But let’s just say he used to weigh more, and then he went to a fitness camp and lost weight. And he has somehow been among that mythical 5 percent of people who lose weight and keep it off. For seven years.

Until he met me. Or rather, until I deliberately stopped actively, and even quietly, dieting.

Having a loved one with anorexia, we made massive changes in our lives that involved butter and cream and calories and all the things that, at the time, were necessary. Life-or-death necessary. For me, that was the final tipping point for stepping away from dieting.

Thankfully, we haven’t been in that crisis for years, but my husband now faces his own.

His health markers have significantly declined. His mobility has degraded so much that it’s impacting daily activities. He’s gained weight. Enough that he is now seriously considering going back to camp. And he’s recently retired, so he now has the time that always made this problematic before.

Depending on when I publish this, he might already be there.

How do I feel about this?

He asked me this again last night, and I didn’t have an immediate answer. Despite the many conversations we’ve had about this topic, they were always theoretical and not conclusive.

The prospect of him going to said camp fills me with worry.

My first thought: He will go to camp and have a bonding experience with a bunch of women, which is one thing, but then he will come home to me. Still fat me.

That was my first thought. Not my best one, but an honest one.

When I began this journey of writing about quitting diets, my husband, whether he agreed or not with my views on the topic, and let’s be clear, he didn’t on many of them, nevertheless remained my biggest supporter. And it felt like real support. Most days when I hit publish, he was, and still is, the first person to like my post. And as small as this gesture is, it means a lot.

And this is not the first time I’ve confronted worry over my physical appearance as it relates to our relationship. With so much change so fast—letting myself go gray! gaining weight!—it was something that weighed on me early on. And while I feel more beautiful on many days, I am not physically the same woman he signed up for. He isn’t either. None of us are, and it’s ridiculous to think we’re supposed to be. But that is something that lurks in the back of my mind.

And it brings up questions like … if he feels like he has to lose weight, does he feel the same way about me? And mostly that’s a me issue to work through, because he has made it clear this is a health issue, not a physical appearance issue.

Plus, he still thinks I’m beautiful. And sexy. But it’s easy for my brain to do the mental gymnastics and turn this into the old he-doesn’t-love-me-anymore song and dance. By the way, the last time I used that line, and not about this, he came home with a bouquet of flowers and a note that read don’t be silly. And then we had a good laugh about it.

Here’s something he’s said about camp for years.

You should come with me. You would love it.

We’ve had the “you would love it” conversation at least a dozen times over the past few years. Yes, I would love many aspects of it. I love fitness, being outdoors, and challenging myself physically. If I was still trying to shrink myself to oblivion, it would be amazing.

Here’s the other thing he says. It’s an unbelievably supportive environment.

And then. It’s not like you’re thinking.

What he thinks I’m thinking is a Biggest Loser-style competition among campers, with coaches using humiliation as the primary motivator.

I don’t doubt that this camp is not that. Except, the whole point of it is not to help people be fit at any size; it’s to help them lose weight.

This isn’t Miraval, where we went a few years ago, whose slogan is “life in balance.”

When we went to the one in Arizona, we did woo-woo things and fitness-y things, like tightrope walking across a wire suspended several stories in the air until our legs were so wobbly they could no longer hold, and ate dishes made from locally grown foods and drank clean wine, and felt good about our life decisions. If this was Camp Miraval, I’d be all over it.

Instead, the big banner running across the top of the camp site says “STRUCTURED WEIGHT LOSS RETREAT FOR ADULTS.” Not fitness. Not wellness. Not health. I give them points for the honesty. So as much as I would love the outdoorsy adventure part of it, it falls apart for me at the purpose.

I do give them brownie points, though, because this camp has structured pricing so you pay a one-time fee and then you can come back as much as you need to at a much-reduced cost. This really says it all, right? You’re gonna need to come back. At least they’re not promising forever weight loss. My husband is totally okay with this because he sees this as a jump start to regaining his fitness and doing it in a structured, motivating way. I get this, but it leads to my other big concern with him going away.

He will go to a place designed for weight loss. Structured, controlled, restrictive.

And then he will come home to us. To me, and my life that isn’t built that way. A life I deliberately, intentionally moved away from out of mental, physical, and emotional necessity.

And that decision wasn’t made lightly. It wasn’t a whim. It took years of warring with myself, knowing what was best for me, but terrified of the potential consequences. I’ve done years of therapy with an intuitive eating-certified therapist and years of my own work to make peace with food and my body. I’ve also made a deliberate decision to focus on health, not weight. This has been one of those things we’ve, mostly respectfully, agreed to disagree on. But I do absolutely support body autonomy, including his, and I support this choice for him.

It’s not just that he’ll go away and change. It’s that he’ll come home to a life that isn’t built for that change.

He’s told me that when he comes back, he will need to cut cheese and butter and cream and red meat. Since we only eat one meal a day together, I’m totally okay if it’s chicken or beans with olive oil and veggies. This doesn’t feel like deprivation, because it’s maybe a few meals a week, and I like these foods too. I just also like cheese and butter, and I spent most of my life denying myself these things, which I’m not going to do again unless it’s medically necessary. For him, he feels like it is. And I respect that.

But I keep coming back to this thought: it won’t be enough.

What happens when he comes back to a life that doesn’t match what he just committed to? Will there be resentment, on his end or mine? Will we be able to come together? Will one of us feel like we’re giving too much? At its core, this is what happens when one person wants to pursue weight loss and the other has chosen not to.

I honestly don’t have the answers here. I like to think we will find our way through this as we have every other conflict that’s come up between us.

Since this piece involved him, I let him read it early, and he sent back a full response. A lot of it reflects where we do agree: that there are many different body types, that metabolisms vary, that there is an absolute weight bias in mainstream medicine, that diets don’t work for most people. Some of it reflected where we don’t.

He reiterated his concern for my long-term health, but also railed against Western guidelines trying to force “his big strong woman” into a ridiculous size. He told me he was grateful to see me heal.

So we’re entering a new chapter.

We don’t have the answers, but I like to think we do have enough love and respect for each other to work through our biggest challenges. Including this.

*P.S. Of course, we’ve had careful conversations with our kids about this. When I brought it up with my youngest, her first concern was for me: How are you feeling? I tried to sort through for the most appropriate response and then shared that I already had the perfect headline for the piece I was going to write about it, which I rattled off with excitement only to watch her face turn to confusion. Apparently only those of us of a certain generation get the reference.

Now it’s your turn …

Have you been in this situation, where one partner wants to pursue weight loss and the other one doesn’t? Mostly I’d love to hear how you handle conflict with a loved one when you don’t agree.

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