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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I’ll admit, somehow I had been sleeping under a rock, and despite her being a fat person who writes about being fat (I’m using fat here and throughout this piece as a neutral descriptor), I had not heard of her until last week, when she was suddenly everywhere. In my group texts. All over my Facebook feed. In Substack posts. On Notes.

People dissecting her marriage, her choices, whether she was cheated on or agreed to something she didn’t actually want, whether her own words are her actual truth or just a fiction she’s told herself, whether she’s somehow single-handedly brought down feminism.

I picked up Adult Braces to see what the fuss was about. What clinched it for me was more simple: a memoir-slash-travelogue written by a fat feminist. Of course, I wanted to read about her polyamorous ultimatum/existential crisis, but what I actually came for was her relationship with her body.

Her body is more of a backdrop in this book than the many landscapes and camps she writes about rolling through in her rental travel van. But what struck me most in reading Adult Braces is how much her body does not fully belong to her.

She writes about realizing, early in childhood, that her body is something separate from her. Open for commentary.

“One by one, the people around me let me know that my body was bad. They were varied in tone but unified in message. I fractured and began to leave my body.”

As she becomes more famous, that ownership shifts from people who judge her to people who see themselves in her and people who feel invested in what she does with her body:

“To fat people, fat women especially, I became theirs—an investment born from love, need, shared trauma, relief, belonging. I was owned by a different segment of the public now. Ones who loved me instead of hated me, but still. I felt, in a strange way, parental: devoted and awed and flooded with love, but also flattened and erased and eaten up. I took this step, I made myself mean something, I offered my relationship with my body as an example and a lifeline. And I profited from that. Why would those fat people, who mean so much to me, who are RIGHT, not wrong, about themselves, not feel some stake in what happens to this body?”

I find it fascinating to compare and contrast because I’m still trying to make sense of living in this larger body, after many years of intentionally trying to shrink myself. I haven’t had Lindy’s experience. And I don’t mean in the public, fame-driven way, but not even in the other public everyday ways I’ve heard people experience fatness.

My body still largely feels like it’s my own. Perhaps that’s an illusion, but I haven’t yet experienced the kind of public shaming that many fat people speak of.

I’ve never had a stranger make a negative judgment about what I’m eating or what I’m putting in my grocery cart because of my weight. I’ve never had a doctor recommend weight loss. I’ve never felt like my body was something the world had full permission to speak on.

This is a phenomenon I’ve wondered about long before Lindy. I don’t seem to get the kind of commentary other people like to dole out to fat people about their bodies, and I spend an ungodly amount of time wondering why.

I think a part of it is this:

I still pass.

Probably not to my size 6 friends (or even to my size 8 and 10 friends). But to the world at large.

Part of me thinks people are too afraid to say anything. I joke it’s because I give off don’t fuck with me vibes (finally, a benefit to everyone thinking I don’t like them). Maybe it’s part of my “low affect.” I had only one stranger touch my belly throughout three pregnancies.

Or maybe it’s how I carry myself that makes them hesitate. I am strong and muscular and fat. Like I could squash you like a bug if I needed to. And I truly believe it. There’s a huge confidence that comes from knowing my strength. Even if I have a sliver of the strength I used to have, it’s still more than most. And I think that confidence shapes how I am seen in this world.

I want to be clear: I am not saying that if you’re getting “should you be eating that?” questions from a stranger, you’re not confident enough.

I think there’s a tipping point with your weight where the world—or at least, the worst of it—feels fully entitled to say those things. I’m fascinated by those people, by the way. The lowest of the low. What makes them think they have the right to say anything at all about someone else and their choices?

But I guess I’m still questioning where I fit in all this.

After I published my piece Going fat in the time of Ozempic a couple of years ago, I was politely asked whether I was throwing the term fat around as it relates to my body and whether I actually consider myself fat or even qualify as fat. (For the record, I was using what I felt was the correct description.) It was from another writer here on Substack, and after reaching out to her privately, she sent me some social media posts she had created that outline her criteria for determining your level of fatness.

I deliberated and then determined I was still fat, though perhaps on the very smallest end of the spectrum. But I still question that now, because I have not experienced the level of discrimination many in larger bodies have.

Plus, let me just say, I’m just as triggered when I see those “midsize” influencers who are maybe a size 10 bemoaning how nothing looks cute on them. I’m like, fucking please. You have probably 50 times the availability of clothing as I do in my size 16-18 body. So I totally get people in bodies larger than mine saying the same thing about me.

For the longest time, what I’ve felt is that I’ve been straddling the line of thin privilege. Some days, I feel like maybe I’m still midsize, which is funny, because that’s what I was before, back in my dieting days, when I weighed much less and felt fat but didn’t actually experience a world that wasn’t optimized for my body. But lately I’ve been thinking I’m in this weird sort of no man’s land, where I don’t really feel like I fit anywhere.

I wrote last week about the trauma of taking your seat on an airplane and holding your breath as you wait to see if the belt is going to fit, and how much your body is going to press against the armrests and the people next to you.

This weekend, I brushed up against it again.

I sat down to brunch with my husband and friends after a three-mile hike in Texas’ Hill Country at a nearby winery. I slid into the chair and immediately felt it. The metal sides pressing into my glutes. It was beyond airplane-seat discomfort.

I tried adjusting without making it obvious. Shifting forward in the seat. Leaning all the way back. I casually raised and lowered myself a few times, hoping I could brute force my butt into a more comfortable position. No luck.

Eventually, I realized the only option was shifting my hips so that one side angled forward while the other remained back, then I twisted my waist so I was still facing straight on. Looking around the table, I concluded I was the only one having this problem. I should have just asked. If it had just been my husband and me, I would have.

The whole time I was thinking: how the fuck did this place pick such uncomfortable chairs? But I said nothing. Score one for not thinking it’s my fault. Zero for not speaking up.

So maybe I’m not as confident in this body as I think. Certainly no poster child for body positivity.

Lindy writes about that burden of expectation in being a famous fat person:

“I had to love my body unequivocally, forever, exactly as it was, or else.”

I’ve never had that illusion.

Certainly, there are moments where I perform. I’ve put on a cheerful face about these deliberate choices I’ve made to no longer restrict, even while struggling internally. Part of it is I’ve learned in this experience of giving up diets, that feelings, especially uncomfortable ones about my body, don’t actually have to be acted upon in realtime. Feelings are fleeting. But I know my reasons for not restricting, and they don’t go away.

I also know that who I am now is not who I will be forever. This relationship to myself will shift with time. I’m not holding myself to permanence. This includes my body, which is meant to change. And if anyone else does, that is disappointing, but also, on them.

As for actual positive feelings about my body, I have occasional moments of them breaking through, but mostly I feel that it’s impossible to feel positive about something half the Western world has been trained to hate about themselves. This phenomenon of women collectively hating their bodies is so prevalent it’s even got a name: normative discontent. My intuitive eating therapist told me early on the goal wasn’t body positivity but body neutrality. That your body, and your feelings about your body, take up less mental space. I still think that’s the goal. It’s certainly the one I most wish for my children.

My progress in healing my relationship with my body depends on my honesty with it. And the honest truth is sometimes I feel like shit in it. Sometimes I’m okay. And sometimes, I not only understand my life would be easier if I were smaller, but I wish for it too.

So I exist somewhere in between.

Between feeling fat and being seen as fat.

Between claiming it and questioning whether I’m allowed to.

Between comfort and discomfort.

Between passing and being seen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts …

Who else is reading Adult Braces? What parts have stuck with you? What else is on your mind?

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For the first few years after I stopped dieting, travel was a trial. It brought questions, uncertainties, insecurities. Not because of the logistics of unfamiliar places, but because I didn’t know, and didn’t trust, my new body. Every trip came with a set of questions I had never had to ask before.

Would the airplane seatbelt fit?

Would I still be able to do the things I used to do?

Would I ever again feel like myself, even in a new place that was unfamiliar?

In those early years in my new body, travel wasn’t just travel. It was a series of tests I wasn’t sure I’d pass.

I was steadily gaining weight and didn’t know when, or if, my body would level off. For the first time in my life, I had to think about whether the plane seatbelt would fit. I was hyper aware of my hips, holding my breath each time I eased myself into the seat and felt them brush against the arm rests. I exhaled in relief each time that seat belt clicked, but then the worries crept in. Would I fit next time? Would I eventually need an extender?

Different planes meant different seat configurations. Different unknowns. My personal expansion coincided with rising aggression for people who lived and dared to travel in larger bodies, and yes, I’ll admit there was and probably still is my own fat phobia here too. I had read about people who traveled with their own seat belt extenders, because they couldn’t rely on the airline to have one. Although I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, I vowed I would do the same if I needed to.

These were thoughts I never had to consider before. Signs, I see now, of the thin privilege I had taken for granted in my previous sizes, even while still feeling “fat.” But fat is not a feeling. Not when you’re actually fat or perhaps just at the upper limit of midsized. (I still struggle with what to call myself, though I use fat here as a neutral descriptor and not a negative.)

Once off the plane and in the destination, it quickly became clear I was also testing the physical limits of my new body. I didn’t know if I could still do the things I had always done on vacation. The hikes with giant step-ups and steep descents, that occasionally ended in swift-water swims. The general strength and physicality that I had always assumed would be there. My girls liked to do horseback rides along cliffsides and beaches, which I had always agreed to, despite my fear of horses, but now I had a new terror: would I be too heavy to ride?

Layered on top of that was the normal body image travel anxiety, the kind that I’ve come to understand most of us Western women feel no matter our size: the fear of being somewhere new, more visible, more aware of ourselves and everyone else.

Body comparison is a real vacation joy kill.

Eventually, I came to expect this body image anxiety. Every trip would bring some form of it.

Strangely, expecting it helped.

The times I struggled most were the ones where I thought I had finally figured it out, where I believed I was in a “good place” and wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. No matter how good I’m feeling in my body, I’m no longer foolish enough to believe it’s forever. It sounds jaded, but it’s protective. It’s how I’ve learned to move through a world that isn’t built for bodies like mine.

Settling into my body during travel

But something has shifted as I’ve settled into this body.

My weight has stabilized. I mostly know what to expect when traveling in this body.

I mostly know the seatbelts will fit—minus having taken an older, six-seater recently and finding myself at the very end of that sucker!

I know I need to pack every piece of clothing I could possibly need, because I’m unlikely to find anything in my size. (And by the way, I don’t view this as my fault anymore. Progress.)

So, I’ve adjusted in ways both practical and mental. And while the body image stuff still comes up, the hard edge around this has softened.

Including my recent trip to Grenada with my husband and our youngest daughters.

What felt different about traveling to Grenada

This place felt different immediately. It’s a little less touristy, a little harder to get to than many Caribbean islands. And perhaps because of that, it was more real. We were there during our spring break, but it felt like we were a world away from the madness.

We did a split stay, first at Spice Island Beach Resort on Grand Anse, and then at Six Senses La Sagesse. Both are firmly within the luxury category, so I’m not going to pretend we had an authentic stay. But what struck me almost immediately had nothing to do with the hotels.

Up and down the glorious Grand Anse, which often lands on those lists of world’s most beautiful beaches, it was uncrowded. It felt unspoiled. People weren’t there to be seen.

There were women of all sizes in every kind of swimwear. Not just among the locals, but the visitors too.

We didn’t encounter many Americans in the first half of the trip. There was no spring break energy. Even better, there was no undercurrent of hyper-controlled bodies that I’ve found in certain resort-heavy destinations (here’s looking at you, Ka‘anapali).

Women of all sizes, but especially the biggest, proudly wore their thong bikinis, in bold colors. At Annandale Waterfalls, no one was shrinking while on full display to everyone waiting their turn to go under the falls and cooling off with a drink at the next door bar. No one was hiding from photos.

Body image, culture, and what we consider ‘normal’

Some of this, I’ve realized, is the body norms of the Caribbean. It reinforced one thing for me: just how much what we consider “normal” about our bodies is shaped by cultural beliefs and environment. We know from research that body ideals shift across cultures, and there’s less singular emphasis on thinness in at least some Caribbean locales than there is in the U.S.

I was hoping to experience more body positivity first-hand when I went to St. Lucia a few years earlier, having read a first-person Lonely Planet article about a woman who found the courage to embrace her curves and proudly wore her bikinis there. I didn’t see it the way I had hoped to in St. Lucia, but it was there in Grenada, which is similar in geography and culture.

Some of it is me, of course. Unlike that writer, I’ve never shied away from bikinis, nor has nudity ever been an issue. Ironically, in my smaller days, I used to shrink away when partners touched my stomach, but I don’t care with my husband. Some of that is comfort with my body. Some of it is comfort with him.

Body ease in Grenada

But in a place like Grenada, where everyone seems to be so at ease in their bodies, it feels like relief. I walked around in my bikini without a care, throwing on a see-through lace or crocheted coverup, on my way to the beach or breakfast.

During my visit, I learned about Spicemas, Grenada’s Carnival held in early August, where over several days masqueraders wear everything from chains to feathers. Playing Jab Jab, or the devil, they cover their bodies in oil or charcoal and wear chains, reclaiming symbols European colonizers once used to dehumanize African slaves.

The celebration culminates in a parade known as Pretty Mas, where people take to the streets in feathered, glittering, often barely-there costumes. It stands as a powerful expression of resistance and freedom, a celebration of resilience.

I don’t pretend to fully understand the cultural and historical context of it, but it felt powerful to be in a place where bodies are part of that kind of bold expression, rather than something to control or minimize.

A moment of body relief in Grenada

I didn’t go to Grenada to have a more liberating experience in my body. I hoped I might, just as I do every time I leave the U.S., and I was pleasantly surprised. There is something about seeing other women embracing their curves that allowed me to do the same. Usually, it feels like I’m the one leading the way. In Grenada, I didn’t have to.

I allowed myself to be just for those moments.

I’m not naive enough to think I’ve had a body image breakthrough that will sustain me. It just doesn’t work that way. But I’ve had enough of these moments now to understand that some places are more supportive than others, and we have to try to hold onto those moments even when vacation is over.

I’d love to hear from you…

Have you ever traveled somewhere that changed how you felt in your body, even just for a moment? I’d love to hear about it.

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More on travel, body, and place

I’m resharing this essay from the early days of Almost Sated because it captures a moment when so many things in my life were changing at once: my body, my relationship with food, and my understanding of what healing really looks like.

Recently I had the chance to talk about these themes more deeply in two conversations that meant a lot to me.

If you’re interested in the ideas behind this essay, these conversations explore them more deeply.

I spoke with dietitian about rebuilding body trust in midlife:

And I joined on her podcast to talk about healing our relationship with food and body:

How To Blow Up Your Life

Ep 14: Healing the Relationship With Your Body - with Kristi Koeter

This episode is for every woman who has ever woken up and let a number, a mirror, a pair of jeans, or a passing thought decide what kind of day she was allowed to have…

Listen now

2 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Kristi Koeter and Sara Stansberry

If you’re newer here, this essay gives some context for why this work matters so much to me. Thanks for being here. —Kristi

Originally published March 2023.

Last Sunday marks three years since the first date with my now-husband. Yes, it was a whirlwind courtship. Some looking in from the outside might even call it a fairytale, although we know better. A lot has changed since then, including the way I look and the way I see my body.

We were both divorced, had dated extensively, and knew what we wanted, so although it’s been such a short time, I feel like I’ve been with him forever. In a good way. We are highly compatible, sometimes so in sync it baffles me. I love him fiercely. There is no one I’d rather live my life with. On the occasion of our anniversary, I’ve spent the week thinking about the changes I’ve put him through and how he still shows up for me. 

A lot has changed since I met him. I have changed since I met him…mentally, emotionally, physically. Positive changes, mostly. And he’s had a direct role in a lot of them. His kindness and openness and willingness to question me…and his support have led me to do things that were previously unthinkable. And most of the time, I’m good with the changes. But I spent much of this last week in a negative headspace, dwelling on my physical changes, mostly because it’s much less likely I would have landed him—or any man—in the physical state I’m currently in.

About a year before we got married, I told him I was going to let myself go gray after the wedding. I was touching up roots every two weeks, and had been for at least a decade, and was tired of it. But one morning, shortly after Thanksgiving, looking into the mirror and inspecting the flecks of silver along my hairline staring back at me, I made a snap decision and declared myself done with dying, wedding hair be damned. I’m not sure we had even set a date.

“It’ll be like I’m dating a brand-new woman!” my husband joked, but his enthusiasm was genuine. I kept on rolling. I joined a gray group on Facebook, and they became my tribe through the process.

For many women, myself included, our hair is our identity, one way in which we define our beauty. My long, dark hair was one of my signature features, what made me me. “A raven-haired beauty” is how one of Hub’s colleagues had once described me. Even after we decide to go gray, it may take much longer to accept and embrace the decision. 

And then there is a lot of waiting, and many stages of transition. Some women question their decision throughout the process; some question it every step of the way. I haven’t doubted my decision. Occasionally, I see an old photo of myself and marvel at that woman and how she had no idea how striking she was. I’ve loved my silvers so far; I’ve mostly just obsessed over how to get there faster. 

Going gray is not for the patient, and I am most certainly not patient. Given the length of my hair, a full transition would likely have taken me three years. Luckily, I didn’t know that; I naively thought the worst of it would be about a year. Going cold turkey was never an option. I know myself well enough to know that looking in the mirror every day and seeing that harsh demarcation line was not a test I wanted to face. For some women, it’s a badge of honor. 

Instead, I looked to the experts for help. I had told Hubs about this genius Los Angeles colorist who matches his clients’ transitioning pattern and turns them gray in a day, even if it means eight hours in a chair. Hubs reached out to Jack Martin’s salon, but he was not accepting new clients, so he did the next best thing and Googled gray in a day in Austin and found a master colorist who did similar work. Hubs booked me a consultation as my birthday present. 

Kris is a master with color and people, and her salon is a refuge from a chaotic world. I don’t know what it is, but you walk in the door and can immediately feel the shift in energy. It’s a bright, modern space with concrete floors and a wall of windows that lets in ample light for the many plants throughout the place. Once my therapist asked me to picture a safe space I could go to as we worked back through traumatic memories, and I pictured myself lying in a hair washing chair at Keith Kristopher Salon, calmly looking up at the ivies and other greens that cascade over one of the ceiling’s exposed wooden beams. It’s a safe space. I shed tears of relief and gratitude when I stepped out of the salon after that first visit and had a plan to come back and keep my length but blend my gray for the wedding, just a few weeks away. 

Going gray is not easy, no matter which path you choose. My silver sisters know this. Even with my transformation, there is upkeep and maintenance. I ended up doing several progressively shorter chops to get rid of the “yellow bits.” I’m 16 months in, my hair is chin length, and I have perhaps an inch of dyed hair still on my head. And every time I look in the mirror, those dyed bits taunt me. I’ve taken scissors to them more than once. I long for my long hair and look forward to its return. But I love my silvers. And my hair now is super soft and healthier than it’s ever been. 

Going gray was a hard transition, but it always had a defined outcome. 

Giving up dieting does not. I decided to stop fighting my body and embrace intuitive eating about a month after my wedding and two weeks after I quit my job. While the intuitive eating experts will tell you they can’t say what’s going to happen to your body after you stop restricting and following food rules, for most of us, it means weight gain, at least temporarily. And temporarily might be a year or two. It might be forever. No one can say, so it’s the ultimate trust-the-process decision. And it isn’t easy. Gaining weight isn’t easy either, even if you’re gaining freedom for obsessive thoughts and constant negative self-talk. And body acceptance doesn’t come overnight, if it comes at all. 

I have gained a significant amount of weight. There are days when I think I can live with myself in this state, and then there are days where I’m ready to go back to my life of restriction. There are things that keep from doing that. The first one is the one that brought me here, which is having children who have suffered from anorexia. Thanks to successful treatment that includes extensive eating disorder education, they know (and I know) that dieting and restriction is not the answer. It can never be the answer for them again. Having experienced starvation once, their bodies will always be more susceptible to backsliding, whether or not they are conscious of it. There is no place for restriction in a home when someone is suffering from or recovering from an eating disorder. For their sake and my sake, I can’t go back to my own disordered eating. So I live with this new me, and keep working to heal my relationship with food by following the process. And learning to accept my body for what it is. 

I am incredibly blessed to have a husband who not only supports me, but has also wholeheartedly supported my children—now our children. Our lives were turned upside down when the eating disorder took over my youngest. Despite us navigating a relatively new relationship, planning a wedding, and both working full time, we focused on my child. Getting her into a treatment program was a blessing, but for most of her time there, she was resistant to adding weight. Her motivation wasn’t ending her eating disorder so much as it was getting out of the program. It wasn’t until after I decided to stop dieting, after I quit my job, and committed to focusing full time on her healing and my healing, that she started healing. That’s not to say it was because of me—her brain and body were simply starving. And when the brain is starving, it’s not fully functioning. 

Many experts encourage caregivers to view the eating disorder as a separate entity that attaches to their loved one. It makes it easier to not blame the person suffering and rightly place it on the illness. Many eating disorder sufferers also describe their eating disorder as a separate voice within them that takes over and makes decisions, and they often feel powerless to stop it. That’s why it can be so powerful when loved ones take charge of all meals, preparation, plating, and eating. The sufferer can then justify eating to the eating disorder. My daughter was weight restored in mid-fall, and almost overnight, the major battles over food ended. It would take many more months for full recovery, but there were baby steps along the way. We started seeing glimpses of the laughing, smiling person we used to know. With time and weight restoration, my daughter returned to herself, a wiser version of herself.

Now that she's in a good place, we have gotten back to our lives, but there have been shifts. New stresses, struggles, opportunities, joys. 

I am still in the midst of my recovery with my food and body image issues. I am much larger than I was when I met my husband. A different man might have left me for my physical changes alone (not to mention all the other challenges we’ve faced). My husband is an extraordinary man, and while my physical attributes were part of the initial attraction, I know what drew him to me is much deeper. Still, it’s not lost on me that I couldn’t have made this transition sooner and I probably wouldn’t have landed a partner. We can say they don’t matter, but physical appearances do influence attraction. If I had met my husband as I am now, I don’t know where we’d be. With all of my physical changes so fast, I am hyper aware of what people must think. 

“She landed the man, now she’s let herself go” is the one that plays in my head the most. And that’s all on me. He’s never shared a moment of doubt. 

Three years ago, when I met my husband, I looked very different. I see pictures of myself and it’s impossible for me not to compare myself now to myself then. The transition is long, and the outcome is unknown. Some days I’m at peace. Other days I question, although the decision is still the same. I trust the process.

“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” He asks me this pretty much every other day. Most of the time, I don’t.

I’m still learning what body trust looks like in midlife. If this essay resonates, you might also enjoy my recent conversation with dietitian Deb Benfield about rebuilding body trust in midlife.

I’d love to hear from you…

Have you experienced changes in your body or identity in midlife that shifted how you see yourself? I’d love to hear about your experience.

Leave a comment

Registered dietitian has spent decades working with people trying to untangle themselves from those pressures. Her new book, “Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship with Your Body,” asks what it might look like to approach midlife without turning the body into a problem to solve.

I spoke with Benfield in January about why aging can be such a flashpoint for diet culture, why so many women feel pressure to regain control of their bodies in midlife, and what it means to reconnect with the body instead of trying to manage it.

If you enjoy conversations like this one, consider subscribing to Almost Sated.

Subscribers get new essays and interviews exploring food, body trust, and life beyond diet culture.

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Deb Benfield, RD, LDN, RYT is a Registered Dietitian, Nutrition Therapist, and Body Image Coach with 40 years of experience helping people heal their relationships with food, movement, and their bodies. Her work sits at the intersection of body liberation, anti-ageism, and trauma-informed care, supporting people in untangling from diet culture and ageism so they can age unapologetically.

She is the author of "Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship with Your Body (Hachette, 2025) and writes the Substack , where she explores the cultural forces shaping our relationships with our bodies in midlife and beyond. Benfield and I spoke in late January, she from her home in North Carolina during a winter storm and me from just outside Austin, Texas.

“When you’re in [diet] recovery, you leave treatment and walk into a world that is inundating you with dysfunction. It’s like coming out of rehab and living in a frat party where everybody’s partying.” — Deb Benfield

Why aging needed a non-diet conversation

Transcript (edited for clarity and length)

Kristi Koeter

I’m interested in why you wanted to delve into the subject of aging from a non-diet perspective. There are a few books on intuitive eating, but almost none of them touch on the aging process, or what you’re calling midlife plus.

Deb Benfield

My experience with talking to people that are reading the book is that this is a much younger conversation than I ever expected it to be. So many women in their 30s are contacting me, and 20s, about how much pressure is felt about fighting aging, and so much fear around perimenopause now, that it already feels like it’s a shifting conversation.

When I turned 60, I got curious about just what was out there, what was being said about making choices to support our bodies in this stage in life. And I was just so upset. I was so angry and so sad.

And I don’t know why I was surprised. I should have expected this. But I was just so upset that the presence of diet culture and the centering of managing weight was just all I saw.

And I felt like I had to, for myself, find something different and then create something different for others who were in this stage of life and, of course, younger and approaching perimenopause and menopause.

It feels to me like that’s when the body starts to change. And it is helpful to pay attention to your choices without centering what’s on the scales.

I know that a lot of women relapse in their eating disorders because they feel like what they have been doing doesn’t work anymore, which that sentence reflects the white knuckling around controlling and managing our bodies as kind of our norm.

So as we intensify restriction and effort when it comes to exercise, it creates this very disordered relationship with our bodies that I think is deeply sad.

This is the time that I particularly want to celebrate. I want to embrace what this chapter can be, and I think it’s a very, it’s a beautiful time of life.

And yes, it comes with loss and sadness and hard things too. Yeah. But it has the potential to be incredibly empowering. At least that was my experience.

And it feels like we lose touch, we lose that potential when we get so overly focused on this body management project.

Kristi Koeter

I quit diets before I realized I was in perimenopause. And part of this journey has been going experiencing massive changes, a lot of brain fog and sort of loss of identity. For a while, I didn’t feel like myself. I had the body changes that came with no longer dieting, but I think they probably overlapped that perimenopause state. So I didn’t really have that experience of … I’m in perimenopause and nothing’s working anymore, right? Because I was intentionally not doing this anymore.

So it was a different experience for me, but I had girlfriends going through the frustration of suddenly they have a middle section that wasn’t there before. And so it was interesting to watch other people go through that and also have my own journey that was similar, but not the same.

The rise of Ozempic and weight loss drugs

Kristi Koeter

So when you started writing your book, was it before the Ozempic explosion?

Deb Benfield

It was just early days. I feel like it’s now so central to all the conversations all the time.

But it wasn’t like that when I first started writing. It was definitely a quieter phenomenon. It was happening, but not to the degree it’s happening now.

One of my clients just told me she pulled up her MyChart, her electronic health record.

And there was a box. It’s like, do you want to talk to your provider about GLP-1s?

It’s just like part of the system now.

It feels like it’s part of everybody’s conversation with their healthcare provider and otherwise.

Benfield’s path into eating disorder work

Kristi Koeter

Do you mind sharing some of your own origin around diet culture and how it influenced the work that you’re doing now?

Deb Benfield

So my undergrad, I got degrees in psychology and world religions. And then I went to grad school in nutrition. So my underpinnings around how I approach things was not nearly as medical. It was much more about the whole person. And my thought was that I wanted to talk to women about how they felt about their bodies in the 70s.

And there were some people in my family that had complicated relationships with their body. And I could see that they’re eating, I could see that there was something unusual about what was happening there. And that there was eating to regulate emotion, for example.

I could see that. But I have a lot of privilege in that my genetics are just tall and thin.

So the other privilege that I have, well, many others, I mean, white and able-bodied and all of those, I want to make that very clear, unearned privileges. But also, an interesting privilege that I’ve now identified is that appearance was not a focus on my family.

There was not pressure around how we looked. And I have always been very outdoorsy and natural and kind of an earth mama in the ‘70s. I was just wearing overalls and had long braids. I just did not focus on appearance.

And I was always very active and loved to be outside. So it just naturally happened that body size and what I was eating wasn’t a thing. But I knew it was a thing for a lot of other people, and especially women.

And I was curious about the nutrition piece because I also had an interesting science preference because before, like when I was in high school I wanted to be like a park ranger to start with. So I’ve always had this science interest. So when I happened upon nutrition, it’s like, cha-ching, it just fell into place because it was a way for me to look at human beings and their relationships with themselves and the world through their bodies.

And the science piece was with actual nutrition. So it just worked for me. And when I started actually seeing clients, as a dietician in a clinic, I quickly noticed that telling people what to eat was ridiculous.

It just felt very wrong. And I was referring people to a therapist in town about many other things, about their lives and experiences, along with how they were caring for their bodies, with how they fed themselves.

And we really clicked and she was really excited to find me.

So she invited me to join her practice, and her specialty was eating disorders. So I got a supervisor in my life early, in my career who specialized in eating disorders.

So, of course, I fell in love with the work because it’s so multifactorial. You do the psychological piece, the family piece, the cultural piece, the science, the medicine piece, all of it. It really fascinated me and has kept me interested my entire adult life.

And I’m very much on a mission to now help women that are approaching aging, because I also am a strong activist. All of the systems that are in place make us unhappy with our bodies or distracted by manufacturing this unhappiness in our bodies.

Why diet culture is a systemic problem

Kristi Koeter

Well, let’s get into that. Because I think that is one of the things that differentiates your book from a lot of these other non-diet books written by dietitians. Very few of them get into the deeper systemic issues.

Why did you want to cover that? It feels like it’s a running theme throughout your book.

Deb Benfield

I don’t know if people can actually mend and recover if they don’t recognize how this is not an individual issue, it’s a systemic issue and people are caught in the system.

And I don’t know if you can extricate yourself and if you just identify your individual issues. The metaphor that I have used for many years is that when people go to rehab to deal with other kinds of issues and addiction, they can leave rehab and hopefully be in a world where they make choices, where they’re not exposed to the substance and the community that’s using the substance.

When you’re in [diet] recovery, when you leave treatment, you walk into a world that is inundating you with all of the dysfunction. My analogy is, it’s like coming out of rehab and living in a frat party where everybody’s partying.

Everybody is talking about dieting. And to me, that’s the issue. The through line for me is restriction and drive for thinness. And if you have to be exposed to that all the time, then it’s very difficult to fully recover and to feel comfortable in your body.

So I think it’s necessary to be able to identify that these messages that you’ve internalized about aging and about size and about food and about exercise goes on and on.

And like clothing, it just goes on and on, are all like learned and not yours. And so once you can identify that, I think it gives you the capacity to talk to yourself in a different way.

Kristi Koeter

I totally, a hundred percent agree. I think a lot of us probably start the process thinking it’s an individual problem, and we’re the problem.

I know I began from that perspective. I spent my whole life believing that.

And then having that larger understanding, that to me is the grounding for the recovery work.

When I started this, I kind of thought, yeah, one day I’ll have a day where I can put my flag in the ground and say I’m healed. I know now that is, or I view that, as an unrealistic unattainable goal, not because of me, but because of the society we’re in.

Deb Benfield

Correct. Absolutely. Because it’s getting worse. That’s no question. It’s getting much harder.

Why calling yourself ‘non-diet’ scares people

Kristi Koeter

Since we’re on this topic, I saw your note on Substack … you wrote a post about why you think of yourself or call yourself a non-diet dietitian and you talked about losing subscribers. And I wanted to dig in a little bit about why you think that is.

Deb Benfield

I think people are frightened by stepping away from several different things as we age. The first is, and we talked before, well, we interacted before about the body hierarchy that we’re all living in.

And there is an element, however, I don’t know how real it is, but I think there’s a feeling that if you remain thin, you will be more perceived as worthy.

And have a sense of belonging and have more social collateral and relevance as we age. So I think it’s scary to step away from this normalized diet culture that we all live in.

And I think that based on my experience with many clients, that there are increases in diagnosis as we age. There are increases in health anxiety. Our culture is full of fear-mongering around belly fat, for example. There’s a lot of fear-mongering and health anxiety around accepting the changes that happen as we age.

So I think people are very threatened and uncomfortable with, if not frightened by, a proposed questioning of that as necessary and helpful.

That perhaps our bodies change in midlife to protect us and prepare us for the challenge of aging. That’s what I really believe.

I have a belly now that I’ve not had before, and I do perceive it as a protective part of my body.

That I will fare with whatever happens next a little bit more because I’ve got a little extra in the warehouse.

I’ve got a little suitcase that I’m carrying with me, and you’ve probably heard me say or read my quoting Margot Maine, who calls it the little life raft. I feel like I’m not saying that correctly, but she was told that by actually one of her clients.

Kristi Koeter

How much of it do you think is influenced by the idea that not restricting is unhealthful.

I think there are a lot of people that really equate thinness as a sign that you are a healthy person. And then to say you’re non-diet. [I wonder] whether some of the backlash you’re getting is the perception that you’re anti-health somehow.

“The first book talk that I did, I said, ‘weight is not an indicator of health,’ and I could almost hear them gasp across the room. I didn’t think about the fact that people really have not been exposed to that line of thought. That’s a very radical statement for a lot of people. But I really believe the data supports that. I believe that there are many other indicators of your health.” — Deb Benfield

Deb Benfield

The first book talk that I did, I said, weight is not an indicator of health, and I could almost hear them gasp across the room. I didn’t think about the fact that people really have not been exposed to that line of thought. That’s a very radical statement for a lot of people. But I really believe the data supports that.

I believe that there are many other indicators of your health.

Kristi Koeter

And I can just tell you how you had some small snippets in your book talking about a trainer who had said one of his biggest clients was the fittest person he’d ever met, and I really related to that because I’ve been a lifelong athlete in one form or another, but it always felt like something was still wrong with me because of my size. And so it was this constant quest to prove myself, in many ways through athletic pursuits, and I really leaned into, for most of my 40s actually, Olympic lifting.

I kind of leaned into this idea that if I couldn’t be skinny, I could be strong,

Deb Benfield

I would imagine it was very empowering to see your body have the capacity for all of that strength.

Kristi Koeter

And being able to lean into it now, because for years, the narrative was you’ve got all this strength, but you’ve got this other problem that needs to be fixed.

I may never completely be healed of body trauma, but I know that my worth is not determined by my size.

And it took me 40 something years to get to that place. So, but I have to keep reinforcing it, because of the society we’re living in.

Supporting women through group coaching

Kristi Koeter

So I wanted to switch gears. You do group therapy, group coaching for women.

It’s not explicitly positioned, at least on your website, as break free of diets. It’s more like heal your relationship with your body, your relationship with food. I’m just curious how many women come into it not knowing that they may be giving up diets as part of the process, or is everybody coming into it with some understanding that that’s why they’re there?

Deb Benfield

Yeah, I screen heavily to make sure that people have already stepped away, and it’s always interesting, I have had to ask some folks to not be in the group, because they’re deeply caught up in wellness culture, and that’s a whole other conversation, but there are many, many food rules and fears and belief systems that are rooted in some of the wellness culture influencers that contaminate their relationship and keep them, in my opinion, stuck.

So I need to work harder on my screening. But to begin this process, that’s why I laid out the book the way I did, you have to extricate yourself from all the rules and the fight within you to be good. To be able to do the healing, and I do, my group is laid out like the book, we spend some time on understanding internalized ageism and internalized anti-fat bias and belief systems that are not in your best interest, that are, they’re keeping you stuck and disempowering and then moving to the healing.

It’s, as you said, it’s a long process. That’s why I have a membership for people to continue to have support because it’s not quick. It’s not an eight-week fix. It’s just nice to have a group. That’s what people tell me is that they feel so isolated.

They feel like they’re the only one because they usually are the only one.

So that’s why I have a group.

The cost of staying in a diet mindset as we age

Kristi Koeter

I was so lucky that I had, by virtue of my loved ones having eating disorders, I had access to people that were very strongly non-diet and on board with this way of thinking. And so in a way I was very conscious of having more support than most people going through this process.

So in terms of the aging process, what would you say is the greatest risk to women getting older and still being in this diet mindset? Is there one particular thing that you would say is the biggest harm?

Deb Benfield

To me, the biggest loss is to be fractured from your connection with your body, because you can’t really manage your body, approach how you nourish your body, how you move, how you dress, the connections that you have with your body, you can’t really have healthy connections, if you’re looking at your body with a lot of criticism and shoulds about your choices.

It keeps you very fractured from the potential connection. That saddens me for people because there’s a loss of access to pleasure, access to actual wisdom.

You really need to be able to pick up on messages from your body that let you know things have changed.

And I mean, it can let you know that you are becoming ill, that something is off, that you need to rest, that you’ve had enough and you can stop eating or all sorts of messages that you receive from your body.

But pleasure and presence, like being able to experience your present moment, it’s very hard to do if you’re caught up in narratives about what you should, and guilty about what you did, and all the anxiety, all that you get caught up in with diet culture.

So to me, that’s a big loss is the connection.

“Many women that I’ve talked to are just so full of disgust about their bodies, so full of harsh, harsh criticism about the fact that their bodies are showing signs that they’ve been on the planet for a longer period of time. I just feel like that’s a celebration that you’ve survived and thrived for a longer period of time.” — Deb Benfield

Kristi Koeter

And what do you think about that makes it worse as you age?

Deb Benfield

Well, if you’ve added ageism, if you’ve added fear and anxiety about what is happening over time, I think that increases your vulnerability to all the food rules and all the movement exercise rules.

Many women that I’ve talked to are just so full of disgust about their bodies, so full of harsh, harsh criticism about the fact that their bodies are showing signs that they’ve been on the planet for a longer period of time. I just feel like that’s a celebration that you’ve survived and thrived for a longer period of time.

Aging, values, and what actually matters

Kristi Koeter

I think we have these kind of dueling narratives right now. One of them is to never age. We have people who are trying to reverse their aging effectively. And then this idea of embracing aging.

How do we navigate that process with all of these messages that we’re getting?

Deb Benfield

And this is, again, a place where if you do this work, it actually does give you access to your internal value system.

In a lot of ways, it comes down to your values. Like, I want to have a sense of intimacy in the present life.

I want to be able to feel the air on my skin. I want to be able to taste my food.

I want to be able to actually rest when I need to rest. I want to have space in my life where I can be connected to my body and my senses.

That’s a value to me. If that, if being connected to your body isn’t something that you value, I can understand that you might be more interested in committing to an aggressive plan for longevity. My values don’t. I don’t feel strongly about that. I don’t feel like I need to live to be a certain age.

So I think values clarification is really important work.

Where people start when they’re afraid to let go

Kristi Koeter

I want to ask one last question, and that is just what you would say to someone who intellectually understands the harm of diet culture, but just isn’t ready to make that change.

Deb Benfield

I mean, some people believe in fake it till you make it, but I don’t know about that for this.

I almost feel like you can’t push the river. The people that I work with that are brand new with this, I start with self-compassion, like to try to create a practice of not being so harsh and critical, and this is a very complex answer at the end where we don’t have that much time, but I feel like understanding that you’re wanting to control your body size is understandable, it’s also protective in a lot of ways, and to try to give yourself some grace grace when you have these diet thoughts, when you have these like urgent need to damage control or whatever it might be about getting your body back into a certain place and contained.

Like to just allow yourself to be kinder and not reactive, just leaning into curiosity and kindness feels like the starting place.

When people tell me that they’re not beating themselves up as much, I know we’re getting somewhere. That’s a big, big first noticing.

Thanks for joining our conversation!

I’m curious what this brought up for you. Have you noticed the pressure to control or fix your body as it changes with age? Have you noticed midlife (or beyond) as the place where you have found more compassion for yourself or do you feel the pressure is growing? Share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to continue the discussion.

Leave a comment

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I asked this question a few weeks ago during my interview with registered dietitian (which I promise is coming soon), and she was decidedly less optimistic:

“One of my clients just told me she pulled up her MyChart, her electronic health record. And there was a box. It’s like, do you want to talk to your provider about GLP-1s? It’s just like part of the system now.”

While nearly one in five Americans have tried a GLP-1, I was surprised to read in the latest piece from UK-based eating disorder therapist that it’s one in 46 in the UK. It’s inevitable that we’ll see more people trying these medications as the prices come down and now that they are available in pill form. The next iterations of these medications are already being tested.

It’s safe to say we have entered a new era for weight loss, and these medications are not going away.

But what is changing is the conversation around them.

And it’s not just in the doctor’s office. While it’s still whispered in certain social circles, in others it’s almost become as common as sharing what your children have been up to lately. The tone is still confessional, but also one of relief: I no longer feel like my body is the problem.

But in the media, where the first few years felt like all hype and upside, with cautious mentions of side effects, what I’m seeing now is a growing number of warning calls from experts sounding the alarm about the one side effect that should have been part of the conversation all along:

Eating disorders. Both the rise in first-time diagnoses and relapses.

I think most eating disorder experts, along with those of us who have first-hand experience with them, saw the potential dangers from the beginning. And yes, in some cases, GLP-1s are being used successfully in the treatment of bulimia.

But the concern about developing an eating disorder, or relapsing into one, is real and needs to be made more clear. Dr. Zoe Ross-Nash, a licensed clinical psychologist, got right to the point a January article in the New York Post:

“No one says, ‘Here’s your GLP-1. By the way — you might get an eating disorder. People get blindsided by it, and that’s where informed consent needs to be much stronger.”

This is the side effect that isn’t on the box and rarely makes it into conversation.

When you’ve lived with a lifetime of body shame, it can be easy to convince yourself the risk feels acceptable. But most people simply do not understand how devastating and deadly eating disorders can be. Anorexia nervosa continues to have one of the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric illness.

It’s easy to glaze over statistics, but if you’ve had a loved one with this illness, or two like me, you understand the stakes.

Eating disorders, anorexia in particular, are complex, often misunderstood illnesses that cause physical, mental, and physiological changes in the body and brain. They can be triggered or intensified by nutritional deficiencies, even in a person who is still considered overweight or at a normal weight.

Complicating this is the ease with which these medications can be obtained, and the lack of general mental health and eating disorder screening for those who wish to go on them. This was the focus of a piece from NPR in January that centered primarily around one patient who was struggling with an anorexia diagnosis and taking a GLP-1 for weight loss.

Unfortunately, it’s not an isolated story.

Amanda Banks, a physician and biotech executive who has a daughter in recovery from anorexia, writes:

“A growing proportion of people using GLP-1s are healthy people with normal weight, or even are underweight. And perhaps most disturbingly, while GLP-1 drugs show anecdotal evidence in the treatment of binge eating disorder, these drugs are also widely recognized to exacerbate eating disorders characterized by restriction, most notably anorexia nervosa.”

A major concern is for those with atypical anorexia, which accounts for between 25 and 40 percent of all anorexia cases. These are individuals who meet the diagnostic criteria for anorexia but are not underweight.

With increased access, cheaper prices, and growing off-label use, it’s inevitable we will see more people with eating disorders. And it is not just personal GLP-1 use contributing to this moment.

We saw a massive spike in anorexia and other eating disorders during the pandemic, spurred by physical isolation, loneliness, and communication through cameras that distorted our view of ourselves. Now we are in another period of intense collective preoccupation with body size.

This is especially true for women in midlife, whose bodies naturally change during this time. Weight gain attributed to hormonal transition is framed as something to fix. For women who were already struggling quietly with disordered eating, this cultural pressure can intensify everything. The New York Times outlined these tensions in a piece last summer, noting how midlife women are navigating both hormonal change and heightened pressure to shrink. Oddly, GLP-1s were absent from that conversation.

Also missing from the conversation until very recently is another trigger for eating disorders: what happens when people come off these medications. Though they are intended to be taken long term, most people stop within a year or two, often because of the cost or side effects.

Couple weight gain with the return of food noise once the medications wear off and a culture that feels less body positive than it did even two years ago, and the intensity is next level. It can fuel even more intense body shame and restrictive measures.

Eating disorder therapist Frew writes:

“In the therapy room, I am seeing increasing numbers of clients who were taking Mounjaro, Ozempic, Saxenda or Wegovy but have now stepped away for these reasons. They are understandably struggling in the aftermath, as their bodies readjust and normal physiology returns. Food noise returns and it’s challenging to sustain the significant weight loss.”

Frew believes we need psychological support alongside the meds, a recommendation that feels like a necessary counterbalance to the cultural pressuring surrounding them.

We are not at the end of the GLP-1 era. If anything, we are still at the beginning. What we may be seeing now is the first wave of eating disorders in this era. At this scale of use, even a small percentage translates into a significant number of people, and without better safeguards, it’s sure to increase.

It’s time that risk becomes a more visible part of the conversation.

Now it’s your turn …

If you’re comfortable sharing, how has this cultural moment around weight affected you? I’d love to hear what you’re seeing and feeling.

Leave a comment

Further reading this Eating Disorders Awareness Week

- What happens after the GLP-1 meds?

- Creating a mindset shift regarding GLP-1 medication

- How much do you know about eating disorders?

- February - the triad

- 12 tips for writing about eating disorders with nuance and care

- It’s Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and I have a few thoughts

More related reading

Singing.

Dancing.

Emoting.

In front of an audience.

Those of you who know me well (which is not most of you but a few of you) know this is way, way outside of my comfort zone.

Whatever compelled me to do this?

At the end of October, I attended a women’s writing retreat in Maine. Magical is the only word for it. I met the most amazing women. Bold, passionate women making meaning of their lives through writing.

Somehow, we all left our facades at the door. The bonds were fast and strong.

In a small-world twist, it turns out two of the dozen-ish women live near me in Austin. One of them is a playwright.

On our final day at the retreat, just three of us gathered around the long conference table in the inn that had served as our primary gathering space, one of the women suggested I find a creative outlet that had absolutely nothing to do with my writing. Something to get me out of my head.

“You could be in my play,” the playwright offered. I couldn’t tell if she was serious.

Either way, I was in, knowing nothing more about it than it was political satire and would be performed during a longstanding Austin festival around Valentine’s.

Now, I am a creature of habit. The last time I asked my husband to charge my phone before bed, he knew my OS would get upgraded overnight, and he knew, he knew, I’d have a fit about the changes (he had already upgraded). Predictably, when I woke up to a new OS, I was a simmering pot of rage. (How dare he, I fumed silently, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of ranting about the thing he knew I was ranting about.)

But I also love pushing beyond my comfort zone, especially with things that feel like growth opportunities. I also don’t commit lightly. When I give my word, it’s solid. So when my now-friend suggested the play, I fully committed.

It was later, much later.

After our first cast meeting and read-through.

After I had already suggested the parts I wanted to play.

Even after our first few rehearsals.

Only then did I start piecing together what would actually be required of me on that stage.

My little autistic brain, the nickname for my late-adult diagnosis, had been thinking so literally, like it likes to do. I’m just reciting lines, it had assured me.

Turns out, it’s a little more than that.

It’s also emoting. And not just when I’m speaking but the entire time I’m onstage. Gulp. I had not actually considered this.

Also, no one told me this was a musical, that I’d be singing and dancing and learning choreography and having to be coordinated in time with other people. There is a reason I do things like lift weights and ride bikes for fun.

The whole first month of rehearsals was spent on choreography, mostly the opening number, which required me to move in sync with two experienced theater women. We were playing USA Girls, a flirtatious, ‘50s-era trio who smile and look pretty while blindly following a racist, sexist leader who might or might not resemble our current one.

The hardest part wasn’t moving my arms and legs in time with other people. It wasn’t even the singing, although I was the only one without formal training and the only one who hadn’t acted since elementary school.

No, no. The real problem was my face.

I was going to have to convey emotion. Smiling, specifically.

I knew I was in trouble. Because if there was one message I’d absorbed from my 40s, it was: you’re hard to read. I’m hard to read because I have trouble verbalizing and displaying emotion.

Low affect. That’s how one boss phrased it.

Spock. That’s what the leadership trainer called me when he saw I was a 10 out of 10 on the logic scale. In a room full of my peers, he went around the conference table and asked: “How many of you have trouble reading her?” All hands shot up.

“Do you want to know what she’s thinking?” he asked, and again all hands went up. “It’s really very simple,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect. “All you have to do is ask her.”

Duh. So simple. Why had I never thought of this? I’m such a straight-shooter. If you really want to know what’s going on inside my head, just ask.

Except that wasn’t going to work in this instance.

I was going to have to emote. And not just emote. But smile. And react. And actually look like I was react to what was happening on stage, rather than simply regurgitating words. This is how naive I was. I hadn’t even considered I would still need to be “in character” when I wasn’t speaking.

My mind immediately went back to all the interviews I had watched with famous actors who talked about losing themselves in a character. Or becoming the character. There’s no way this was going to be my Jeremy Strong moment. Something else would need to be done. Maybe I could pretend to be someone else and act out their thoughts and feelings? Even that would be a stretch.

Since my diagnosis, I’ve gotten better at performing in spaces that don’t quite make sense to me. Good enough that most people don’t notice the effort. When I tell them I’m autistic, they feign surprise and tell me no, as if I’ve confessed to something tragic.

But on stage, it’s different. Everyone knows it’s performance. The rules are clear.

We’re all playing parts. Just trying to make it look real.

About a month into rehearsals, still two months from show time, I decided I needed to learn how to smile for this character. My husband helpfully suggested I study cheerleaders (who knows how he came up with this, but it was smart thinking). I watched a few videos and realized that a cheerleader smile wasn’t quite right for this performance, so I moved onto pageant videos and found this how-to. Then I went to the mirror to practice.

At first, I couldn’t seem to make the curves of my mouth turn up on command.

This is so weird, I told myself, I know how to smile.

I do completely let my guard down and smile sometimes, I assured myself.

Mostly with my husband. But somehow in this new and strange environment, the idea of needing to put a smile on my face and hold it for an extended period of time, in front of strangers, was like throwing myself into the deep end of the swimming pool for the first time. I tried curling my mouth up with my mind. It refused to play along.

I remembered hearing that if you couldn’t read someone’s expressions, you should try mirroring them to figure out the emotion. So I put both of my index fingers into the corners of my mouth and pushed my smile into a U-shape and then attempted to hold that position all the way to rehearsal.

I figured I would learn one smile and then plaster that on for the entirety of my performance, but, no, I quickly learned from the YouTube video that is a one-way ticket to creepy town. You have to vary your smile. And don’t just paste it on when you walk onto the stage. No, no, you need to start it before you get out there.

Here are a few more tips I learned from the pageant lady:

Relax your jaw. Smile, but not too wide. You don’t want your mouth to be so big that people can see down your throat. Your teeth should be slightly or almost touching. And don’t push your tongue through your teeth (as if this is possible). You also don’t want to smile so hard your eyes close. Somehow you’re supposed to find the perfect balance between smiling naturally without shutting your eyes.

“Enlarge your eyes just a little bit, but not to the point where you look like a deer in headlights,” the pageant lady exclaimed brightly.

She had one bit of advice that cracked me up: don’t cheese so hard. What? I had never heard anyone use the phrase cheesing. Wouldn’t cheesing be a good thing?

She went on to sum it all up by saying you want a natural smile, a natural eye, and a natural face, all working together. It seemed impossible, but I had to try.

It was all so overwhelming at first. I felt so incredibly awkward (okay, it’s still awkward), but I mirrored one of my fellow USA girls, who is so good at turning it on. Eventually, I got used to cheesing in front of my fellow castmates in rehearsal, mostly because they were all doing it and making it look so easy.

Somehow, somehow, I learned to smile, say my lines, move my body, hit my steps, change my costume, and do all the things onstage without screwing it up. It was time to do it in front of an audience, a proposition that filled me with mild fear. A low-grade hum of anxiety permeated the days leading up to our performance. I wondered how it would compare to the full-on somersaults I used to get in the pit of my stomach ahead of big weightlifting meets, but they never came.

Part of me knew from years of competing that “performance adrenaline” could be too much of a good thing and was best tempered, so I did what I could to keep it from rising up inside me, repeating my lines and deliberately not peeking behind the curtain separating the performers from the crowd as we waited the excruciating hour backstage for the show to begin.

My fellow performers made it easy.

We huddled in a circle outside the theater ahead of our first performance, running through the songs like we’d been doing them forever. The words, which at first were foreign, now came as naturally as breathing.

I sang from the heart, smiling without feeling self-conscious.

It felt good to be part of something.

Now that I’ve put it all out there …

I’d love to hear what this piece stirs up in you.

Leave a comment

More suggested reading …

I’ve never asked why it’s framed or why it’s sitting on a shelf in the bathroom, probably because asking would mean drawing unnecessary attention to myself, or rather to the little girl, who I see so clearly now needed protection.

I pause on that picture every time I pass it.

I passed it a lot in January, when I flew out to help my sister recover from shoulder surgery. Every time I look at myself in that photo, I go back to that time and place, and sit in that little girl’s shoes for a moment.

By the time it was taken, I had already absorbed the idea that something was wrong with my body. I felt so different from all the other girls, so much larger.

I hated having my picture made, especially the team photos, because there was no hiding. With us standing shoulder to shoulder, everyone looking at the photo would see how wrong my body was.

The roots of athletics

My sister and I have had a lifetime of athletic pursuits since then. She was the real athlete, that’s what I told myself for years. Even at the rec sports stage, she excelled in every sport she played: softball, basketball, soccer. She was also thinner than me. Narrower. Leaner.

Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12, my dad caught the golf bug and went “all in” on the idea that one or both of us should become professional golfers (my sister and I both share his trait of going all in on things). He built a real putting green in the backyard of our otherwise blue-collar house, complete with a sand trap that our cat promptly used as a litter box.

My dad made us putt to see who did the dishes after dinner. Almost every night, he’d haul us to the high school we’d later attend with a shag bag and have us hit balls over and over, interrupting us every few shots. “Now, y’all lookie here…” or “Are y’all lookin’ here?” he’d say mid-swing, demonstrating what we should have been doing, his East Texas drawl in full effect.

We started playing tournaments in middle school and continued through high school. My sister went on to become a pro, working at the famed Wailea Golf Club in Maui, before giving golf up entirely after my father died. She took up surfing, and went all in on that, creating a foundation that gave away surfboards to impoverished children around the world, which allowed her to surf wherever she went. Then she discovered mountain biking, which she introduced me to on a trip to Austin in 2019. We’ve been riding ever since.

Finding strength my own way

I had my own path with sports and athletics. I wasn’t nearly as gifted at golf as my sister, but with expectations so high, it felt like anything less than greatness was failure. Now I see I was pretty good. Many would argue I had the better swing, but my focus was always on academics, so I focused on college and went on to become the first in my family to get a degree.

With my sister’s star so bright, I thought I wasn’t athletic, but I found my place. A strength training class in college with the renowned powerlifter Dr. Jan Todd, featured by the New York Times back in May, introduced me to my natural gifts in strength.

I leaned into it, picking up a personal training certification in my early 20s along with my journalism degree. For years, I worked part-time as a trainer alongside my full-time newspaper job. I dabbled in plenty of athletic pursuits alongside lifting: running (including my first marathon in college), then spin, CrossFit, and Olympic lifting, which carried through most of my 40s until my sister introduced me to mountain biking.

My athletic pursuits were always about pushing myself, testing mental fortitude.

They were also about training, and taming, my body.

Undoing the damage

I stopped intentionally trying to shrink myself in August 2022, taking up intuitive eating, and beginning the process of undoing the damage I’d absorbed over a lifetime of trying to shrink myself. Realizing this wouldn’t be fast or easy, I found an intuitive eating-certified therapist who helped me uncover my wounds and heal.

I’ve come a long way.

These days, when I stare intently at the picture of that little girl, I see her through different eyes. It’s true, I wasn’t slight or lithe. I was broad but somehow compact. A powerhouse! If I had only seen my body for what it was.

Curiously, the thing that jumps out at me is that this wasn’t a sea of tiny bodies. There were taller girls and bigger girls than me. We were all different, but also not all that different, so why did I feel so intently I was the problem?

I almost faltered in December

I’ll admit, I almost faltered this holiday season. After a string of hard days, I made the decision to talk to my doctor about GLP-1s at my upcoming checkup in a few months. She’s HAES-aligned (Health at Every Size), one of the few doctors who doesn’t prescribe weight loss or weigh people unless medically necessary. She also knows my history of disordered eating. I found her through a friend of a friend, and it just so happened that her office was 10 minutes from my house, which was truly amazing given how few HAES doctors there are. Then I waited almost a year to get in to see her.

In my weak moment, I wasn’t thinking I want to be skinny. It was more like, I just want to lose enough weight that I can move my body with more ease, enough that I can walk into most stores and feel confident something will fit me. I wasn’t asking a lot. I wasn’t chasing my size 12 days when I felt fat but really wasn’t, I just wanted to lose enough that all 16s would fit.

I had gotten it in my head that my husband noticed me more at the beginning of our relationship, when I was smaller. Never mind that my husband has always loved curves and always made it clear he’s found me sexy at all my sizes.

In all this rumination, there was one thing I was sure about: I wouldn’t go back to dieting. At least not without help. This time I’d do it differently. This time I’d do it without obsessing over numbers, laying awake at night calculating and recalculating what I’d need to cap my calories at for the foreseeable future to see meaningful results by a certain day. This time I wanted to lose the weight as slowly and with as little anxiety as possible. And I believed it was possible because I finally understood: it wasn’t really my body that was the problem. It was this damn society we live in that’s obsessed with thinness.

My doctor would be able to tell me which medication would be the safest to take for the rest of my life, with the least amount of side effects, and the most gradual results. Basically, I was just looking to take the edge off. Just get me back to a societally acceptable-ish range, which would still be larger than most of my friends and definitely still too big for Paris. But enough to be okay.

What diet recovery really looks like

During the first few months of quitting diets, I worked through the stages of grief. I grieved over what my body was now, and what it would never be. I raged over the years I’d wasted on restrictive behaviors and calorie counting. I lamented the many periods when I prioritized exercise over my actual health, training through flu, injuries, and obvious signs my body needed a break. I raged over the years I’d believed my worth was tied directly to my size.

But I spent most of that time in the bargaining stage. Could I still restrict a little, just enough to see results but not enough to obsess? To lose just enough to have more clothing options? I always came to the same conclusion. The answer was no, I could never go back.

But this time was different.

While I wasn’t taking action, no “last supper” feasting, no “diets starts tomorrow” thinking, I believed a decision had been made. I just wasn’t taking immediate action. It’s like I needed the idea to simmer. Just to be sure.

Aging, health, and the messages we inherit

From the time we’re born to the time we die, women are inundated with messages about our body size and worth. As we get older, the body messages become about health and longevity. We want to live as long as we can and as well as we can, but navigating how to do that in a world of unrelenting products and solutions and shoulds becomes a minefield.

During my stay with my sister, I started reading ’s “Unapologetic Aging” as a preview for an upcoming interview (which we did last week). The book offers a nuanced take on diet culture through the lens of female aging. We’re not just combatting the messages to be thin, we’re combatting the messages that we should never show signs of aging in the first place.

You could say the book came at the right time. It reminded me why I quit diets in the first place.

I recognized myself in her anecdotes, one in particular, where she explained why you can’t judge someone’s health by appearances:

“I once worked with a client who could not buy clothing in most stores and whose personal trainer told me she was the most fit client he had ever worked with.”

Somehow just seeing myself in her words had a calming effect. I told her so in our interview and explained the narrative I used to have about myself.

Even as a lifelong athlete, it always felt like something was wrong with me because of my bigger body, so I spent years trying to prove myself. I lived by the motto, If I can’t be small, let me be strong. But even still, until I quit dieting, I couldn’t shake the belief that my body still needed fixing.

Today, on my worst days, I see very clearly the problem is not my body, but a society fixated on thinness.

Benfield agreed:

“When you’re in recovery [from diets], when you leave treatment, you walk into a world that is inundating you with all of the dysfunction. My analogy is, it’s like coming out of rehab and living in a frat party where everybody’s partying.

Everybody is talking about dieting. And to me, that’s the issue. The through line for me is restriction and drive for thinness. And if you have to be exposed to that all the time, then it’s very difficult to fully recover and to feel comfortable in your body.”

If I could talk to that little girl now

Healing body trauma is a long road. I’ve come to accept I may never be fully healed—not because there’s something wrong with me, but because of the culture we live in, the messages that say we’re never young enough, never thin enough. What I know now, deep in my core, is that my worth has nothing to do with my size. It took me over 40 years to get here. And I have to keep reminding myself, because the world keeps trying to make me forget.

I wish I could go back and tell that little girl that she didn’t need fixing. That there was nothing wrong with her or her body. She was just fine the way she was.

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In case you missed it…

Despite the somber circumstances, it was warm, uplifting, and life‑affirming.

Red Wine & Blue, founded by Katie Paris after the 2018 midterms, has grown into a political force, half a million women strong, organizing for justice, community care, and systemic change. Its influence continues to grow.

More than 12,000 people signed up for the call, with thousands of women (and at least one man) tuning in to learn how to fight systemic racism and oppression, and to hear former FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s reaction to the shooting (his take: it “appears to be an absolutely pointless killing”).

Who’s afraid of organized women?

No doubt, these are the so-called “organized gangs of wine moms” Fox News columnist David Marcus was targeting in his Jan. 11 piece. These are the women on the front lines in Minnesota and other cities around this country.

Marcus likened these moms to criminals using “Antifa tactics to harass and impede” ICE agents in “bastions of Democratic socialism.”

But as Lyz Lenz pointed out, these moms in Minnesota are doing what moms have always done:

“In this America, these women have always been collecting supplies, always delivering meals, always finding homes for people displaced; always connecting people with lawyers, doctors, cleaning supplies, hot meals, hot showers.”

“These are the women (mostly women) who are working to create a safety net for their friends and neighbors in a city under federal occupation. So many of them have their own jobs, their own kids, and their own families, which they juggle as they’re working for and caring for the families around them.”

What the far right is painting as extremist is just another shade of the community care that women have done since the beginning of our existence.

Undermining through labels

The wine mom label isn’t random, as ridiculous as it sounds. It’s a strategic attempt to ridicule and undermine women. Marcus, and others like him, want you to believe these women are extremists because their organization challenges a certain vision of power, one that is white and male.

“Last year it was cat ladies. This year, it’s us,” joked , founder of Moms First, during the call.

She wrote later about how it was the modern version of calling women hysterical.

Jokes aside, both she and Marcus understand that organized women represent a real threat to entrenched power. What makes them dangerous is that they’re standing up and saying enough. And their place in society and position of influence, whether they recognize it or not, makes them some of the most powerful voices in this fight against fascism.

Othering and the pejorative use of AWFUL

Saujani cautioned those on the call not to underestimate these attacks, calling them century-old tactics used to silence, exhaust, and oppress women:

“I want us in these conversations to really understand and see the con, see the tactics, see the strategies that they’ve been using, and they’ve been using this for 100 plus years, and it is to make us be quiet and feel exhausted and be oppressed.”

It’s no surprise that most of the attention has focused on women protesting, rather than men. Because one of the great tactics of undermining people is by “othering” them. These aren’t just women, sisters, and mothers. They’re gangs of wine moms. They’re Antifa.

They’re AWFUL, or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal, another term that’s been ramping up in the wake of Good’s killing, according to the New York Times. In some circles, it’s just AWFL. I hadn’t seen it used in the wild until my husband sent me a screenshot of a post in his feed this week. It felt like the acronym was being aimed straight at me.

It’s not just about categorizing people in groups and assigning negative meanings. It’s about creating power imbalances, using “us” vs. “them” language to justify discrimination and violence.

A real political force

Dr. Shauna Shames, a political scientist and co-editor of the book “The Right Women: Republican Party Activists, Candidates, and Legislators,” told the New York Times that the description of white, urban women as violent radicals reflects the worries of white, non-college-educated men, who make up the core of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and who perceive their place in society slipping.

And they are right to worry. These women are in a real position to challenge the established order. They also hold real voting power.

According to the Times:

“Seventeen percent of all voters last year were white women with college degrees, nearly matching the 18 percent who were non-college-educated white men.”

Let’s be clear. White women are a serious threat to those who wish to undermine democracy … but only if we wield that influence thoughtfully. Paris acknowledged that “we are most effective when we follow the lead of those most impacted” and “without centering ourselves.”

To be clear, Good’s killing wasn’t just a tragedy. It reveals the volatility and gendered rage that white women can provoke when they challenge authority. But it’s not the only death that’s happened at the hands of ICE. It underscores the larger injustices, the threats to our Constitution, and what we’re really fighting for.

Author Isabel Allende famously said:

“Any hope for peace and prosperity is in the hands of Western women.”

And this has never been more true for us.

But it’s worth asking: what keeps more of us from showing up? The answer isn’t just politics; it’s cultural conditioning. For many women, it comes from a lifetime of being told our worth depends on our physical appearance. And that’s intentional.

What does body and beauty culture have to do with it?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last couple of weeks while reading registered dietitian ’s book “Unapologetic Aging” ahead of an upcoming interview. Your first reaction may be, “What does body image and aging have to do with politics?”

But we know the answer is plenty.

While the book’s core focus is on cultivating more kindness toward our bodies as we age, Benfield also reveals how diet and beauty culture function as systems of oppression, keeping women locked in battle with themselves in order to preserve the existing social order.

What we do with our bodies has always been political, more so now in this deeply polarized version of America.

Our body obsession robs us of collective focus, morale, and the radical self-confidence necessary for taking action against injustice. I’m not saying we have to lay down the lipstick, but we do have to understand that the pressure we feel to look a certain way germinates from systems that are intentionally trying to keep us down.

The ‘default’ body and systemic power

Drawing from the work of Sonya Renee Taylor, Benfield outlines the concept of “the default body,” one that is white, thin, young, male, able-bodied, fit, heterosexual, neuronormative, cis-gendered, and “healthy.”

“We live in a culture that values certain bodies and pushes others to the margins,” Benfield writes.

And this has perhaps never been more true in America than now.

“Those with the default body belong and have power automatically, without earning their places, solely based on body characteristics and appearance. The more identities you carry outside of this default, the more you are pushed to the margins or seen as ‘other.’”

Within this framework, she argues, patriarchy enforces the beauty standards that measure a woman’s worth by how closely she aligns with that default. Diet culture reinforces this by selling conformity, by rewarding women for fitting a mold defined by male ideals of beauty, and punishing those who don’t.

Which is why it’s so dangerous when women start protesting. It shows we’ve stopped conforming. We’re no longer allowing the usual control tactics to influence behavior.

And our awareness of these systems of oppression is something that, once seen, can’t be unseen. They don’t just magically go away. But we must see and understand them.

Staying awake

Naomi Wolf famously wrote in “The Beauty Myth”:

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

When we’re able to see past the distractions, we wake up to the larger harms happening across our communities. Serving them becomes a catalyst to greater purpose.

Many of us are no longer quietly mad (both in the way Wolf meant and the broader meaning of the word). And many more are waking up to the social sedatives that have kept us submissive. But real, sustained change requires more of us to stay awake.

What moved me most about the Moms for Good event was how clearly the speakers understood the tactics being used to undermine women and how they weren’t falling for them.

When asked what civic engagement looks like for women juggling care, work, grief, and daily survival, Holli Holliday of Sisters Lead Sisters Vote answered with conviction: it starts with knowing we are enough.

“In this moment, we are exactly enough. But it is not about us singularly, it’s about us collectively. And when we are at our best, and show up our best, is when we are seeking to do something joyfully, when we are seeking to do something that cares for each other … even in moments of great trauma and travesty and tragedy.”

I’d love to hear from you …

How are you feeling today? How are you taking care of yourself? I’d love to know what’s helping you stay engaged.

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It feels so short-sighted now. So barbaric. So “Biggest Loser” circa 2010. Whether we’re taking them or not, GLP-1s haven’t just shifted how we eat. They’ve changed how we move and how we think about movement.

I’m not saying 2026 is the year cardio dies, but it’s probably the year we stop pretending we were ever doing it for “health” in the first place.

And that might not be such a bad thing.

Enter zone zero fitness

Of all the new year predictions I read over the last few weeks, one stood out: 2026 would be the year of “zone zero” fitness.

I had no idea what the term meant, and I’ll admit, my first reaction was: What new excuse have people come up with for not exercising now?

For those of us who haven’t been living (or dying) by our smart watches, you might remember the cardio zones refer to heart rate ranges. The harder we exercise, the higher our heart rate climbs, with each category delivering a specific benefit:

• Zone 1 (50 to 60 percent of maximum heart rate): warm-ups, cool-downs, and recovery; conversation is easy.

• Zone 2 (60 to 70 percent of MHR): building aerobic base and fat burning; can talk in short sentences.

• Zone 3 (70 to 80 percent of MHR): moderate intensity, improving aerobic fitness; conversation becomes difficult.

• Zone 4 (80 to 90 percent of MHR): significant intensity, improving speed and power; talking is difficult.

• Zone 5 (90 to 100 percent of MHR): max effort, building VO2 max; talking not possible.

Zone zero is below all that.

Think gardening, light stretching, dog walks slow enough for bedroom slippers. It’s a kinder, gentler entry into movement for people who are resetting, recovering from injury, starting out, or just done pretending they enjoy burpees.

“Zone zero training is meant to be so easy it feels almost effortless, and it generally refers to any activity in which your heart rate stays below half of its maximum capacity,” said the New York Times in explaining the trend last fall.

GLP-1s and the death of the weight loss myth

For years, zone 2 training was all the rage. Known for building aerobic fitness and fat burning, it was the place to be. The concept of zone zero didn’t even exist until 2025. But in this new era of prescription weight loss, where “no pain no gain” has fallen out of favor, effortless exercise is having a moment.

Before you dismiss it, consider this: for a lot of us, fitness was never about health. Not real health, anyway. When we said “health,” what we really meant was to be skinny, or at least to not be fat. We might have wanted better health, but that wasn’t the primary reason we were spending hours on the treadmill. We’re past all that now.

Thanks to GLP-1s, many of us, whether we’re on them or not, have had a collective awakening. After years of failed attempts, we’ve finally realized losing weight the “hard way,” and actually keeping it off, was never realistic. Not for most of us, anyway. Yes, there are still protests from the “calories in, calories out” crowd, who say just move more and eat less. But a large portion of the population now knows this doesn’t work for everyone.

And yet, for all this talk about how hard it is to achieve sustained weight loss, what hasn’t changed is our desire to be thin.

You’d think we’d be more inclined to embrace body diversity, but instead it’s the opposite. All this talk about weight loss drugs has made it even less acceptable to live in anything but the narrowest version.

And I’m not saying people can’t improve their health by changing their eating and fitness habits. They can, and there’s plenty of data to back this up. But it’s just not a reliable path to sustainable weight loss for a good chunk of the population.

Most of us who’ve spent our lives battling our bodies have done everything in our power to lose the weight. And, sure, we’ve had successes along the way. But it never lasted. And, of course, we believed it was our fault, a personal failing. Certainly not the system designed to profit off our failure.

Thanks to the GLP-1s, many of us have realized it was never our fault. As Oprah Winfrey put it when she revealed she was on the meds (and later announced she was ending her longtime partnership with WeightWatchers):

“I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself.”

She, like so many of us (both on and off the jabs) not genetically predisposed to be skinny, has realized that the only path to weight loss (though whether it’s sustainable is still up for debate) is through a prescription that suppresses hunger.

From weight loss to muscle preservation

Of course, GLP-1s have changed our relationship with exercise. Our reasons for moving have changed. A good chunk of the population who’ve put themselves through a lifetime of punishing workouts are finally asking: now that we don’t have to exercise to lose weight, why should we keep doing it?

And for those who’ve lost weight on GLP-1s, the biggest fear now isn’t fat. It’s muscle loss.

Health coach Victoria Reba told the Daily Mail that it’s less about burning calories and more about sustainable muscle tone, metabolic health, and recovery. The trend toward zone zero, it wrote, signifies a major philosophical shift from “no pain, no gain” to “manageable movement.” Or what some are calling “effortless exercise.”

In practice, it looks less like cardio and more like what the intuitive eating movement has been talking about for years: movement for joy and pleasure, not punishment.

“Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise.”

There are reported health benefits even at these low intensities, including improved circulation, blood sugar management, and reduced stress. But the bigger question isn’t whether zone zero is beneficial, but why it’s trending.

The Daily Mail argues that the popularity of weight loss medications, taken by roughly 30 million Americans, “is fundamentally altering the fitness industry by creating an entirely new demographic of clients with distinct physiological needs.”

“The objective is no longer just building strength, but actively preserving lean muscle mass, which is often lost rapidly during the dramatic weight loss induced by these medications.”

By this logic, strength training should be all the rage, and in certain circles it is and has been for years. But zone zero is getting all the buzz, probably because it doesn’t come with pain or pressure. It meets people where they are.

Fitness that meets you where you are

To be clear, no one is saying zone zero fitness alone is the answer for most of us. A mix of high and low intensity fitness is still touted as the best approach for overall health. But this new era presents us with an opportunity to examine our relationship with exercise beyond weight loss.

If you’re someone who is used to pounding the pavement (or the treadmill) out of guilt, maybe zone zero isn’t the end of fitness. Maybe it’s a place to start fresh.

When I stopped intentionally pursuing weight loss and took up intuitive eating, I had to redefine my relationship with exercise. It had always been complicated, to say the least. Controlling my body size was always priority one, but it wasn’t the only reason I exercised.

Letting go of weight loss forced me to have a more honest conversation with myself about my true goals. I stepped away from Olympic weightlifting, the sport I had leaned on to keep my weight in check. I cut my premium Strava subscription. I stopped obsessing over numbers.

Instead, I refocused on reasons. Why was I exercising? What did it do for me? Where did it fit in my overall priorities?

Turns out, it was still high on my list because of the physical, mental, and emotional benefits. But by no longer doing it for weight loss, I was able to appreciate it in a way I hadn’t before and find a more balanced approach to it. These days, that looks like easy hikes with my dog and mountain bike group rides with some of my favorite women.

Could this be a new start for you?

Maybe zone zero is just a catchy buzzword, a reflection of a cultural moment rather than a lasting movement. But it could also be an opportunity for something bigger.

Maybe this is the year we begin to build a new relationship with our bodies, one that invites us to explore movement that feels good. We might still run that 5K or climb that mountain, but not to work off the bagel we did (or didn’t) eat. Or we might just take it easy when our bodies aren’t up for more.

Maybe this is the year we stop punishing ourselves in the name of health and start asking what movement can actually do for us.

I’d love to hear from you …

Do you think zone zero is just a trend … or the start of something bigger? What does movement mean to you today, and how has that meaning shifted over the years?

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I heard from so many people about their own fears about visiting the City of Light and measuring themselves against impossible standards … I felt so seen.

While I wouldn’t say there was a clear pattern between the Paris piece and my other most-read (and often most-commented) pieces of 2025, what they share is recognition, a naming of the experiences many of us feel but don’t always have language for.

Almost Sated has always been that kind of place. For pushing back gently (and sometimes not so gently) against the idea that we need to shrink, optimize, or resolve ourselves before we’re allowed to fully live.

For those of you who are newer here, these pieces offer a good sense of what this space is about. If this space feels like something you’d like to return to, you’re welcome to subscribe. And if you’ve been reading along for a while, thank you for being here, for sharing these essays, and for making space for growth while pushing back against the narrative that you’re broken or in need of fixing.

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If you found your way to Almost Sated through one of these essays, I’m so glad you’re here. And if you shared, forwarded, liked, or took the time to leave a comment on any of my pieces this past year, thank you.

Your reading is what sustains this work.

Happy New Year!

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Welcome to the next installment of Gifts to Yourself: A Holiday Season of Letting Go, my series on small gifts to make the season a little saner. So far, we’ve talked about the gift of being unapologetically yourself, opting out of body talk, building a kinder relationship with food and your body, and allowing yourself better sleep.

If you’re new here, welcome! I’d love to have you along. You can subscribe below to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.

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This week’s gift is a quieter one, and, at least for me, harder to accept:

The gift of peace.

What happens when life finally feels easier, but the world still feels heavy? When you’re no longer just surviving, but you can’t seem to accept that it’s okay to be okay?

This essay is about holding the tension between peace and guilt, joy and vulnerability. It’s about learning to feel okay, even when everyone around you isn’t.

And if you’re in a place where peace feels out of reach, dare I say skip it. This piece isn’t meant to be prescriptive or to tell you how to feel. You own that.

It’s the week before Christmas, and all through the house, the creatures are stirring. Well, one of the two cats, anyway.

My youngest child has already left for school. She’s the first one up these days. I set my alarm at 6:30 a.m. just to make sure she’s actually awake, so she will make it to school on time. But my actual school duties are mostly done. I usually go back to sleep after my first alarm until the second one an hour later. This one is to make sure said daughter is now ready and on her way. She also likes for me to set out her sandwich (already prepared) and fill her water bottle. Then she drives herself to school. And I’m off the hook.

It’s all so easy now, and that still surprises me.

A different kind of morning

I remember the hard days, the mornings when I was getting three kids and myself ready for school and work. And then I remember the really hard days, when I was doing that plus dealing with a severely depressed child, one who didn’t want to get out of bed, let alone go to school.

Getting to school was a kicking-and-screaming affair that often ended in tears. Not triggering crying was always the goal, because when you get to crying, it’s game over. For the better part of a year, I would do this emotional tightwire act of trying to get my middle child, who absolutely hated mornings, dressed and in the car, and on the way to school. I’d hold my breath the whole drive, only to find out once we arrived that no matter how much I begged, pleaded, screamed, and occasionally threatened, we’d end up sitting in that car long after the first bell had rung. She should have been in class. I should have been at work.

Some days I’d be fuming, gripping the steering wheel through gritted teeth, other days I’d be resigned, head forward, shoulders slumped, as I drove both of us to my office, where my child would sleep the day away on the break room couch, with me waking her when it was time to eat lunch and then again when it was time to go home. It was a routine I got so used to, I could do it on autopilot.

The gift of slowing down time

I don’t know how I got through those days. Actually, that’s not true. I do know how I got through them.

I slowed down time.

“One day at a time…”

“One foot in front of the other…”

These sayings are nice platitudes, until times of extended crisis, when you realize they’re actually means of survival.

You’re not thinking about tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year because you’re so damn exhausted, so worn to the bone, that you can’t possibly imagine surviving long enough to reach those kinds of milestones. Many of my fellow parents who’ve cared for ill children know exactly what this is like. Time shrinks, because it is necessary for survival. Priorities become clear. When a child is suffering from mental or physical illness, their survival is the only thing that matters. Things like schoolwork and outside activities fall by the wayside, because they aren’t as important as living.

I still don’t know how we got through those days. I’ve blocked out a lot of them. Not because I want to forget, but probably because they’re too heavy to hold onto.

I know we never gave up. None of us. Even when everything felt impossible.

I also know I did everything in my power to assemble the best care team I could. Therapy and psychiatry visits were prioritized over everything else. For a long time, I had no idea if it was working. We just kept showing up. And eventually we got through it. Survival stopped being the priority. Life got back to normal. The scissors and sharp objects could be brought back into the house again.

What peace feels like now

I sit here today and hardly remember the details of those days. Our lives don’t remotely resemble them. My life is easy now, comparatively speaking.

I have it easier than most people I know, easier than probably most people in the world. And that realization doesn’t feel like comfort: it feels like worry and guilt. Because I know, I remember, just how hard life can be.

I wrote about this last week as it relates to sleep. With the recent purchase of a $10 sleep mask, I went from grumpy and groggy to sleeping so well I thought something must be wrong with me. I was sleeping so deeply, I woke up in a state of guilt and anxiety. Because many of us don’t have the luxury of sleep. Yes, I’m setting the alarm to help my youngest child, but I’m more like her human backup alarm.

It’s a kind of survivor’s guilt, the discomfort of having a life that now feels easy.

How do you enjoy peace without feeling like you’re betraying the version of yourself who fought so hard for it?

I think the answer begins with feeling.

Brené Brown and the vulnerability of joy

I listened to a podcast interview with Brené Brown this week, discussing vulnerability. She described her childhood, growing up in a home that was explosive and chaotic, where anger was the only safe emotion. It sounded similar to mine. As she put it:

“Vulnerability was not a thing. Vulnerability was weakness and scary and put you in jeopardy.”

Like many of us, I wasn’t allowed to feel sad or vulnerable.

So I developed armor. We all do, to some extent. Donning our armor is a coping strategy, a survival mechanism. But some of us who’ve experienced serious trauma are never able to fully put it down. And yet, to really feel the richness of this life, we have to. We have to allow vulnerability.

I’ve spent the last few years stripping down the armor, allowing people in slowly. Feelings too. I’m learning to build trust, and, when appropriate, showing vulnerability.

To be vulnerable, you have to feel. To allow emotions, all the emotions, even the ones you spent a lifetime trying to push away. Sadness, fear, grief, longing, uncertainty. These are emotions I’ve felt this last week. But also love, appreciation, gratitude, and hope.

I was puzzled when I heard Brown say the most vulnerable emotion is joy. I was certain it was love, until she explained it:

“Joy is so vulnerable that when some of us get close to it, we dress rehearse tragedy to prepare for disappointment. It’s so vulnerable that we don’t even let ourselves feel joy because we’re so afraid someone’s going to rip it away and we’re going to get sucker punched by disappointment.” —Brené Brown

Though my life feels easy right now, I don’t feel like I’m bracing for emotional doomsday or that sucker punch of disappointment. But maybe I am holding back joy, moderating my feelings out of fear. It’s hard to feel fully okay when the world feels anything but.

And it’s not that I don’t have struggles of my own, but lately it feels like I’m carrying more of the weight of others. So many people are going through it. And every day, I wake up to a new worry about the state of the world, but especially what’s happening here in the U.S. These are dark days. I’m deeply affected by what’s happening around me, but by comparison, my troubles seem small.

What does it mean to feel okay, especially during what is, for many, the most stressful time of year? How do we hold peace, guilt, gratitude, and vulnerability at once?

Living fully means honoring the good times as well as the bad, allowing ourselves to feel joy and gratitude as deeply as we do our pain and sorrow. Anything less isn’t really living.

This season, I wish you peace and joy.

If you feel like sharing, I’d love to know …

How are you feeling these days? How are you taking care of yourself? More importantly, how are you finding—or, ahem, allowing—peace and joy in this increasingly chaotic world?

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I haven’t always prioritized sleep.

In the days when I was actively trying to control the size of my body, exercise was the thing I prioritized over all else. Sleep was way way down on that list. But not anymore.

When I decided to focus on actual health versus “health but really weight loss,” sleep suddenly seemed very important. But it hasn’t been easy to get, especially now that I’m in perimenopause, and even though I no longer have to wake up at the crack of dawn for school dropoffs or to beat the traffic to a traditional 9-to-5.

The husband (and Alexa) problem

I blame my husband.

Yes, I still have a husband and like him, although it’s no longer fashionable to claim you have or like yours. But I have blamed him for most of my sleep woes in the last few years. The reason is easy: the man never sleeps. He’s up all night, playing games, reading books on his Kindle, and, yes, even answering email.

The other thing is we use Alexa to control our reading lights because the wall scones in our bedroom are too far away from the bed to just reach over and flip on (I know, I know, first world problems).

Don’t even get me started with Alexa. She’s always so damn loud in the middle of the night when my husband calls for her, even through my ear plugs (a habit I picked up during my first marriage). And, yes, just like the wife always blaming the mistress, I know Alexa isn’t the real problem. It’s my husband, requesting her help in the middle of the night when he should be sleeping.

For years now, I’ve protested my husband’s sleep habits. I’ve railed against him many, many times in the middle of the night over our six years together. And what does he do? Ignores me. If I awaken to his bright lights or shuffling around for whatever device he’s lost in the sheets and scream at him, he says absolutely nothing! When I asked why, he said it’s because you scream, but three minutes later, you’re back asleep. Rude. But mostly true.

Now, I know some of us are wired differently. My husband easily survives, thrives even, on little sleep. Much less than me. But all those little sleep interruptions in the middle of the night were adding up.

When perimenopause enters the chat

Perimenopause wasn’t making it any better either. For a while, before I realized what the hell was up with my body, I didn’t understand why I was suddenly waking up every night at 3 a.m. drenched in sweat. It was only when I got on HRT and progesterone for brain fog and the wake-ups went away, that I realized these things might be connected.

Needless to say, I prioritize sleep these days. And I’ve been slowly changing my habits to make this known. This summer, when the night sweats started returning, I realized that I couldn’t just crank the AC down to 65 every night (well, I could, but I didn’t want to deal with that bill). I was already on a pretty high dose of HRT and everything else was okay, so I didn’t feel like bumping it up was the answer. Instead, I determined a “summer quilt” was in order. Light and airy, just the barest hint of coverage if I got nippy.

Now, we can’t always buy our way to wellness. Nor do I believe self-care requires a bunch of products. Lots of self-care can be internal kindnesses and shifts in habits. But there are some things that really do help.

I found the perfect embroidered floral quilt at Pottery Barn and splurged (mine is apparently no longer available, but here is a close match). While I was there, I fell for their linen sheets, but couldn’t bring myself to pay PB prices for a set, so I found a higher-quality, French-made dupe on Amazon. Three months later, it’s holding up well and still so soft. (Many of those cheaper linen sheet sets aren’t, which defeats the point of linen in my opinion.)

Somewhere over the summer, I also upped my pillow game, investing in one of those fancy contoured neck pillows. I was waking up with cricks way too often.

The big sleep shift that made all the difference

These small changes definitely added up! But the big game changer came a month or so ago, when I finally (after months of suggestion from my husband) broke down and bought a sleep mask.

You’d think it was because I’d finally had enough of my husband’s antics, but no, what tipped me over the edge was the stupid alarm system in our house somehow turned itself on after three years of dormancy. Night after night, the control panel was blasting a bright blue beam of light across the bed straight into my eyeballs!

We tried deactivating the damn thing ourselves but were unsuccessful and then decided we’d keep it, so we did nothing. Or well, I draped an old tank top over it in an attempt to block the light. It was mostly unsuccessful. My house cleaner would remove it every few weeks when she came in, and then I’d have to do the delicate dance of trying to get it to hang on the keypad without falling off again.

Finally, one morning I decided enough was enough. I went to Wirecutter (my go-to for researching the best products), read through its sleep mask recommendations, and picked the one that seemed most suitable for side sleepers. It arrived the next day, and it’s been mostly blissful ever since.

It fully, completely, 100 percent blocks out all the light. It feels light on my face, and thanks to the molded indentations, it never brushes my eyes.

Women and men and worry and sleep

There was just one problem.

It worked so well that I started worrying I was getting too much sleep. I confided this to my husband one morning over coffee, after stumbling out of bed a couple hours after him. His response? “You obviously need it. I don’t know when you’re going to learn to listen to your body.”

Which I thought was pretty funny, considering the whole theme of this newsletter is learning to listen to your body. But then again, I’ve never said I had it all figured out!

Seriously though, this feels like such a woman thing to worry about. And of course, I also felt guilty for it and then had to play the comparison game. Because this is what we’ve been trained to do. We feel bad about allowing ourselves to rest. Or we compare ourselves to all the other harried women of the world subsisting on a few hours of winks and buckets of caffeine and somehow think we’re falling short because we’re actually getting a full night’s sleep.

Do we need to say it all together? Productivity is overrated. Doing doesn't make you any better. You're good enough just as you are.

Women shouldn’t have to earn their rest. Yet, so many of us feel like we do.

There is no man alive who thinks this way.

If he’s sleeping more, he assumes his body needs it. He doesn’t give it a second thought. And earning his sleep doesn’t even cross his mind, because his mere existence is enough.

It’s simply not culturally hardwired into him the way personal sacrifice is with women. We’ve turned self-sacrifice into an Olympic sport.

Then it hit me. All these years, like so many women, I’ve been white-knuckling my way through sleep, chronically undercutting myself in the name of doing, progressing, earning, justifying my enoughness.

I’m done with all that. Give me all the sleep I can get.

Sleep in perimenopause

Of course, we all know sleep is important, and we tend to skimp on it until it becomes an issue.

Like most side effects of perimenopause, the importance of sleep was another wakeup call. It probably wouldn’t have been as big a deal if brain fog hadn’t hit so hard, but when it did, I started digging. What I found was surprising.

Most of us midlife women know sleep issues exacerbate memory loss and cognition issues, but few of us are aware of the link between sleep and our heart health.

All these years I had been prioritizing weight loss above all else, I was giving up the one thing that could have supported my body and my overall health the most: sleep.

And that’s why this little foam mask feels like a real gift.

Did I mention it’s currently $10???

In this season of giving, I want to gently suggest the idea of giving yourself permission for more sleep. Or at least permission to buy the damn sleep mask.

Now it’s your turn …

When did you start taking sleep more seriously? How have your sleep habits changed in perimenopause? And what’s the one sleep product or habit that has been the biggest game changer for you?

Leave a comment

ICYMI

If you’re finding this series meaningful, consider subscribing so you don’t miss the rest. There’s more to come, and I’d love to have you along. 💙

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Why this season stirs so much up

Navigating food and body image issues is tough this time of year. Even those of us further along in our body liberation journeys can get off course. The holidays have a way of stirring up childhood memories, old wounds, and worn-out narratives we thought we’d left behind. Layer on the usual stressors like family dynamics, social events, what to wear, how to show up, and the pressure ratchets up quickly. Many of us don’t register the pressure consciously, but our bodies do. I carry most of my tension in my shoulders, and this time of year, it feels like they’re inching higher and higher with every new stressor. It’s my call to take care.

Before I found intuitive eating, I thought I had a problem with food. I thought I lacked willpower. I thought something was wrong with me and my body. Why was I always hungry? Why was I constantly thinking about food? Why did my body not look like the others around me? The blame game was in full effect, and it was always aimed at me.

These days, my relationship with food looks different. Kinder, more forgiving. It’s not perfect, but that isn’t the goal anymore. My relationship with my body is better too. It’s still complicated at times, but that feels like a reasonable response to living in a world that’s deeply messed up about bodies and food.

It’s a confusing time to talk about body image

Many of us, especially women in midlife and beyond, came of age during the height of diet culture. We were there sitting in front of our television when Oprah wheeled out her 67 pounds of fat, the first of her many “new body” reveals. We related to the struggle and longed for that same triumph, so we climbed aboard the diet wagon alongside her (again, and again, and again), totally buying into the idea that it was somehow our fault that the weight loss never stuck.

Body positivity as a pop culture moment, aka that Dove campaign and all the hashtags, came later. And if I’m being honest, it often felt like it belonged to a younger generation, women who hadn’t lived through decades of diets, shame, and internalized scrutiny. But it cracked something open for a lot of us, a small window to let some of the baggage go.

Thin is trending again, and everyone feels it

Now, the cultural conversation has shifted again, and not in a good way. Thin is in, and though it never fully left, body acceptance feels further out of reach. And we largely have the marketing and media coverage of GLP-1s to thank for it. Though fewer than 15% of Americans have tried a GLP-1 for weight loss, the discourse around them has taken over a disproportionate share of our collective mental space. I think said it best: Mounjaro has turned the weight loss noise up to 11. (And, no, I’m not against taking a GLP-1 for weight loss or health reasons. We all have to make the right decisions for ourselves.)

But what’s more damning is how it’s shifted the bounds of decorum and decency when it comes to our bodies. In certain corners of the culture, they no longer feel like our own. And it goes both ways. If you live in a larger body, just boarding a plane can make you a target for public scrutiny. But you can’t be too thin either. Just ask Ariana Grande, who shared her own “loving reminder” about body shaming this week. Our bodies have become part of the public domain, open to judgment, commentary, and scrutiny. Especially for the largest among us.

There’s probably never been a worse time to be a person in a larger body, given all the open hostility. But make no mistake: no body is exempt. And it’s this cultural noise that ends up spiraling into the internal judgments we carry with us. I certainly don’t have all the answers, and it’s a complicated issue when weight intersects with health. Again, we all have to make our own choices about how to best take care of ourselves.

Where I’m finding support right now

A few weeks ago, I attended a Texas Book Festival panel called The Illusion of Better: An Exploration of Sickness and Self-Care, featuring , author of Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery (a must-read for those in recovery or caring for loved ones in recovery—here’s my my review of it), and Amy Larocca, author of How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic.

They spoke about recovery in a culture obsessed with thinness and referenced the concept of normative discontent, a term coined in the 1980s to describe widespread body dissatisfaction among women. Basically, hating our bodies has become such a standard part of the female experience that it’s seen as the norm. Liking or even accepting your body puts you in a small minority.

I don’t share all this to be a downer but rather to say: If it feels like the pressure to conform to body image norms is even higher right now, you’re not imagining it. Not loving our bodies in a culture that promotes (and profits off of) our self-loathing makes perfect sense. And yet, there’s still so much value in giving ourselves the gift of a more compassionate relationship with our bodies … yes, just as they are right now.

One thing that’s helped me lately: revisiting two compassionate books by dietitian and eating disorder specialist . Nourish and Nurture aren’t brand new (the latter published in 2024), but they feel especially relevant.

These books aren’t about hard rules or quick fixes. Think of them as gentle invitations to expand our capacity for building easier relationships with food and body. Nourish helps us rethink how we approach our own relationship with food and body, while Nurture gently guides us in supporting our children so they build a healthier foundation around food and self-esteem. While there is some overlap between the two, there’s value in reading them as a pair if you’re a parent.

As Schauster writes in Nurture:

“Body acceptance is the balm that can bring attention back to what is meaningful in one’s life.”

It’s a powerful statement, one grounded in presence. There’s peace that comes when we stop waging war on our bodies and start reclaiming our time, energy, and mental space for things that truly matter.

3 reasons why Nurture and Nourish feel like gifts

1. They dismantle shame.

Schauster doesn’t preach or pathologize. She normalizes the struggle. You are not broken. The culture is. And yet, healing requires us to show up again and again, to unlearn the harmful narratives we’ve absorbed and replace them with ones that nourish us and the people we care for.

She writes in Step 2 of Nourish (“Respect and Speak Well of Bodies, Including Your Own”):

“Don’t we all wish for our kids to know the truth—that, deep down, you (and they) are the same beautiful people, despite body fluctuations? The only way to communicate this truth is to be more neutral about weight and body size for yourself and others. Treat it like eye color, and don’t attach any morality or virtue to it.”

2. They offer gentle structure for change.

There’s gentle guidance to help parents give up dieting or food restriction (unless medically necessary) and model greater acceptance of all body sizes. And it’s backed by research but not dense. She covers why body size isn’t always determined by how much we eat, why diets don’t work long-term, and how we can unknowingly create a more “charged” eating environment, along with a food scarcity mindset, when we demonize foods.

She doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges, but she does offer a path forward, with best practices around feeding, eating disorder prevention, picky eating, navigating social media, and establishing real self-care, for both kids and the adults raising them.

3. They center compassion.

Schauster acknowledges food’s role as both comfort and care, but makes clear it should not be the only way we cope with life’s challenges. She makes an impassioned plea for learning to recognize and tolerate emotions in order to build resilience.

“If you “numb” out with food or food restriction (or anything else), then you may be missing out on expressing emotions, meeting the needs underneath, and seeking out other ways to meet those needs besides using food. Again, so-called “emotional eating” is not the problem. (If you eat birthday cake to celebrate, you emotionally eat. We all do at times.) The issue is the possibility of feelings that might not be expressed and more completely dealt with if food is always the go-to.”

If you’re looking for a gift to yourself to loosen old food rules, unresolved body image wounds, or just the overwhelm of the season, consider Nourish and Nurture as accessible places to begin.

The most radical gift? A little more ease

For those feeling worn down by the noise, the body talk, the pressure to “fix” something about yourself this season, just know you’re not alone. And you don’t have to buy in.

The most radical gift you can give yourself this holiday season might be a little more ease around food and your body.

Now it’s your turn …

Do you agree that the body pressure is back? How are you feeling about it? What could you use more (or less) of as we head into the holidays?

Leave a comment

More perspectives on body talk, diet noise, and feeling whole

When body image gets tough, I find comfort in the voices of others who are still in the fight. Last week, I reshared my now-annual post on navigating body talk, the kind that tends to surface at parties and family gatherings this time of year. Since then, more voices have joined the conversation, and a few have touched on themes from this week’s post, too. I’ve gathered them here in case you could use a little extra strength and solidarity.

• Best headline ever from - How Mounjaro has turned the weight loss noise up to 11

• wades into what happens to body acceptance when you’re on a GLP-1 for other reasons

• reminds us why rejecting the diet industry is an act of resistance

• An alternative take from about how not everyone wants to dismantle diet culture (there’s way more to this piece, but this part is something we don’t talk about enough)

• Eating disorder therapist offers the 12 Wellbeing Days of Christmas

• provides a therapeutically informed approach to telling Grandma to zip it about food and body talk

As part of my holiday series, Gifts to Yourself: A Holiday Season of Letting Go, I’m exploring small, meaningful ways to bring yourself peace during a season that’s often anything but peaceful. Last week, I wrote about the gift of being unapologetically yourself. Today, it’s the gift of opting out of body talk. In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more about the gift of sleep, the gift of a better relationship with your body, and other ways to let go of what doesn’t serve you.

Since I started writing about body and diet talk, there just isn’t as much of it in my life anymore. After supporting several loved ones through eating disorders, most of us in my household know that body talk is destructive, erodes self-esteem, can re-trigger eating disorders, and generally makes everyone miserable, so we just don’t engage in it. And it is blissful.

I know, I know. You may live in a household where it’s always open season for body talk. One or more of your family members engage in it on the reg, so it feels normal. And you might think it has no impact on you. Body talk. Diet talk. They’re just words, right? I used to feel this way too.

But after I got more educated on the subject, I learned that all body talk, even so-called positive body talk (aka when your Aunt Louise thinks she’s paying you a compliment), might actually be doing harm, and way more harm than you think. Ahead of holiday events and family gatherings, I used to dutifully send out emails to friends and relatives we didn’t see often with a list of dos and don’ts for supporting loved ones with eating disorders. At the top of those lists was not talking about diets or bodies.

It took a while, but finally, everyone got on board, and guess what? I discovered something really interesting. All these years, I thought I was doing a service for my loved ones, but I was the one who really benefited from it. It took me a while to put two and two together, but I finally realized, “Oh, the reason I find it so much more enjoyable to hang out with this person now is she isn’t constantly making comments about her body anymore, or anyone else’s!” It was a big aha. For years, I had been holding my breath before every encounter, waiting for the first body comment to drop. I hadn’t realized how much of an effect the toxicity had on me.

said it best in a recent post on body and food shaming:

“No one, and I mean NO ONE, enjoys being at the receiving end of these remarks. I mean, why would you enjoy it? It’s rude, and the point of spending time with loved ones is to relax and feel joy, so when the opposite feelings are being felt, it’s a letdown.”

Maybe you don’t feel like you have the option to address the antagonizing aunt or the in-laws talking about their latest weight loss scheme or how much success they’ve had on Ozempic. Maybe you’re the one, ahem, who’s doing the talking. I get it. I get it. These are tricky conversations in sometimes tricky, or even toxic, situations. And sometimes people mean well, they just don’t know better. Sometimes the negativity is so baked in, they don’t even know they’re doing it.

But here’s what I’ve learned: You can draw a line, even a quiet one. You can decide what kind of energy you’re bringing to the table and what you’re not willing to sit through, especially if it means protecting your own peace or someone else’s recovery.

Sometimes it’s a change of subject, a kick under the table, or a deep breath and a step outside. Sometimes, it’s sharing a link or having a conversation ahead of time that shifts the tone just enough.

This piece below, originally published in November 2023, is one of those conversation starters. I hope it helps.

I’d love to hear from you. What’s your experience with body or diet talk at the holidays? What’s helped you set boundaries or shift the conversation?

Leave a comment

And if you think this message might help someone else navigate this season with a little more peace, please consider tapping the 💙 or sharing it. These conversations ripple further than you think!

Originally published in November 2023, this piece continues to feel especially relevant as conversations around food and bodies resurface during the holiday season.

It’s the season of reconnecting with friends, family, and acquaintances we haven’t seen in a while. It’s also that time of year when many of our “catching up” conversations center around food and body talk. Like clockwork, it creeps in, often as we’re passing the mashed potatoes, reaching for a slice of pie or grabbing a glass of something yummy.

It’s the friend who grabs a roll (the one around her middle) as she’s grabbing a drink and complains about how much bigger it’s gotten in perimenopause, never mind that it’s half the size of yours.

It’s the aunt who glances at your body and suggests maybe you should skip Thanksgiving dinner this year.

It’s the cousin who’s starting Ozempic tomorrow.

It’s the coworker proudly declaring she “earned” her dessert after a 10-mile run.

For some, the holidays feel like open season for body talk, commenting on their own or others’ appearance. Ironically, these discussions often happen while we’re gathered around holiday meals, reaching for something we tell ourselves should be off-limits.

Diet and body talk can be damaging for those struggling with eating disorders or body image issues, but they’re actually harmful to all of us … for a whole buffet of reasons. It’s important to remember that we don’t always know what people are going through, and outward appearances can be deceiving.

A few years ago, a relative thought they were paying my daughter the ultimate compliment when they said, “You have the tiniest waist and the biggest boobs I’ve ever seen.” They said it in front of a room full of women and young girls, including one actively struggling with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia, and another who had spent years in treatment for one. That single “compliment” had the power to reinforce disordered thinking, fuel unhealthy behaviors and make everyone else who didn’t fit the idealized body type feel bad about themselves.

When we zero in on bodies, food, and health in these limiting ways, even when we think we’re being positive, we reduce people to numbers and appearances rather than appreciating them for who they are. And while we want to have compassion for those who may not realize their words are harmful, even toward themselves, it’s also important to protect our own well-being.

Whether you’re in recovery from an eating disorder, you’re transitioning to intuitive eating, you’re trying to stop measuring your self-worth by your appearance or you’re just trying to be kinder to yourself, this post is about supporting you on your journey.

Read on to get a better understanding of what body and diet talk actually sound like, why they’re more harmful than we might realize, and how we can start shifting the conversation. You’ll also find tips for navigating these situations, and gentle ways to be part of the solution.

What is diet talk?

Diet talk is any conversation that centers around food, weight, health trends, or body size, often with a dose of judgment, comparison, or pressure. It can sound like advice, concern (aren’t you worried about your health?), or even a compliment. It might focus on what we’re eating (or not eating), how we’re moving (or not moving), or how we feel about the shape or size of our bodies. It might be the latest “thing” we’re doing, where the primary goal is to lose weight.

It shows up in lots of places, from family dinners to casual friend chats to social media. It’s so accepted that it often sneaks in without us realizing it. Closely related is body talk: comments about our own or others’ appearances. Even when well-intentioned, these conversations often come with unspoken expectations or assumptions about health, worth, or beauty.

This kind of talk can range from overt weight-loss chatter to subtle (or not at all subtle) food moralizing. It might be someone sharing how much weight they’ve dropped on a GLP-1, suggesting a new wellness trend, or making a comment about your body or theirs. It may seem harmless, or even positive, but it often reinforces damaging beliefs, especially the one that says we’re not okay unless we’re thin.

Non-diet nutritionist did an excellent podcast that delved into the topic of diet talk and why it’s so destructive if you’d like to learn more.

What’s so bad about diet talk?

At first glance, diet talk can feel like small talk. A way to relate, to bond, to fill the silence. But the impact goes deeper. It can affect mental health, body image, and how we relate to ourselves and others.

Even seemingly positive comments, like “You’ve lost weight!” or “You look so healthy!”, can carry unintended consequences. You never know who might look healthy but is managing an invisible illness or how a compliment directed at one person might make someone else feel worse about themselves.

And kids are especially vulnerable to this kind of talk. Even when we’re directing it at ourselves and not them, the message is often one of judgment, discontentment or out-and-out hatred toward ourselves and our own bodies. Whether we’re aware of it or not, this is what we’re modeling. For our own children, there’s another layer. As shares in her excellent book Nurture:

“Please know that when you say negative things about the one body that your kid is most likely to end up looking like (or looks up to most), it’s confusing.”

I’d go one step further and suggest it’s setting them up for a lifetime of body discontent.

For those of us suffering from eating disorders, disordered eating and body dysmorphia, the prevalence of diet and body talk at holiday events, parties with friends and family functions can make the holidays an exceptionally difficult time. We feel like we’re heading into battle as we head to Thanksgiving dinner!

The gift of opting out of body talk

Over the past few years, I’ve invited readers to consider opting out of diet and body talk through the month of December. Not as a hardline challenge, but as a quiet, intentional gift you can give yourself, and those around you. It’s something that’s easy to take on, a gentle nudge to bring more awareness to your own behaviors.

For those of you who gave up body talk long ago, that’s GREAT! But what about the internal commentary? I’d invite you to consider where you might still need to better support yourself. I was never a big body talker, but the negative self-talk used to be deafening, and I still occasionally struggle with this, especially this time of year.

This season, I invite you to gently notice those thoughts, and if you can, begin to let them go. Give yourself a little peace. A little space. A little break from the noise.

If it helps, write it down. Say it out loud. Or use one of these simple reminders:

• “I’m giving myself the gift of no body talk this December.”

• “I’m choosing quiet over criticism, especially toward myself.”

• “I’m opting out of diet and body talk, for myself and others.”

If one of these resonates with you, hold onto it. Or come up with your own version. I’d love to hear what resonates with you. If you feel called, share it in comments.

Leave a comment

What about everyone else?

It’s true you can’t control anyone else around you, but you can take the deliberate step of prioritizing your mental health by not engaging in diet talk.

This isn’t to shame anyone. As my daughter and I were talking through the many examples of diet talk we’ve encountered over the years, she reminded me that I, too, used to engage in diet talk before I knew better. And this is a reminder to us all: We’re here to learn and grow.

It’s also a good reminder that the kids are listening. When we engage in diet talk, we are modeling this behavior to those around us.

Thinking about opting out of diet and body talk this December?

There’s no official sign-up sheet, just an invitation to try something different. Maybe this is the year you skip the body commentary. Maybe it’s the year you hold your tongue, change the subject, or speak up for yourself or someone else. Maybe you just begin noticing the thoughts that show up, and gently question them.

If you’d like to stay connected as we explore more ways to do this together, consider subscribing. I’ll be sharing a few more reflections, strategies, and reminders throughout the month.

Subscribe now

And if you feel like sharing the intention, here’s a message you’re welcome to borrow or adapt:

What are the benefits of opting out of diet talk?

Choosing not to engage in diet talk and adopting a more body-positive and mindful approach to conversations about food and bodies has many benefits. Here are a few of them:

Reduced stress and improved wellbeing

Constant discussions about diets and weight loss can be triggering for many people, and avoiding these conversations creates a more positive environment for everyone.

Reduced comparisons and judgment

Diet talk often leads to comparisons and judgments, which can negatively impact self-esteem. By steering clear of these topics, we are more likely to focus on our own wellbeing rather than comparing ourselves to others and feel less judged based on our appearance.

Creation of a positive social environment

A group that avoids diet talk is likely to be more positive and supportive. We as individuals can share our achievements, joys and challenges without the pressure or judgment associated with diet-focused discussions.

Recognizing diet talk

I’m sure you can think of some examples of diet talk right now. The most overt forms are pretty easy to recognize, but there are more subtle comments we don’t always attribute to diet culture. Here are some I’ve heard over the years. Feel free to share your own in comments.

Please note: Some of these comments sound positive, but remember, you never know what someone else is going through. We sometimes look healthy when we’re not. Your positive comment might be supporting someone else’s eating disorder or be triggering for them.

“You look great! Did you gain or lose weight?”

“You aren’t underweight/overweight.”

“You look healthy.”

“You should try [diet or wellness trend].”

“I am so [fat, bloated, flabby].”

“I can’t get rid of this _________ no matter what I do.”

“I really shouldn’t be eating _________.”

“I’m so hungry. I haven’t eaten all day.”

“Oh, I can’t eat that. I missed my workout today.”

“You have the tiniest waist I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re so skinny. What’s your secret?”

“What are you doing? That is so bad for you.”

“I wish I had your willpower.”

“Maybe you should try cutting out [flour, carbs, sugar].”

“Isn’t that too much food?”

“Do you know how many calories are in that?”

“Should you really be eating all that?”

“Just eat reasonably and you’ll be fine.”

“I can’t keep this type of food in the house.”

“This food is so bad for you.”

“I can’t control myself around _________.”

“You just need a little self-control.”

“You’re not good enough around food.”

“You just need to exercise more.”

“Should you be eating that much?”

“After all this food, I’m gonna have to be extra good tomorrow.”

“After the holidays are over, I’ve got to get back on my diet.”

The big question - do you confront someone else engaging in diet talk?

This is a personal decision. Often, when it happens in front of me without my kids, I ignore it and change the subject. Deflection is a solid strategy, and it often works well, especially in a one-on-one or smaller group setting. There’s less fuel to continue the conversation.

There have also been times when there is a table full of people, including my kids and other people’s kids, and I’ve had to confront it. My kids are pros at this now and can spot diet talk a mile away, and they will often say something before I do. But when my kids, or any kids, are around, I feel it’s my obligation to speak up.

has suggestions for diffusing holiday diet talk, including using humor to diffuse low-key fatphobia. provides more ideas in her comprehensive guide to eating with other people that includes suggestions for having judgment-free holiday meals with kids. offers some oldies but goodies on dealing with the Friends and Family Food Police. And has my favorite piece on the topic this season, where she very clearly calls out the hypocrisy of those food and body shaming others. (Know someone else who has suggestions on this topic? Drop a link to their work in comments and I’ll add them here.)

Here some more suggestions:

You might say, “I’m working on fostering a more positive relationship with food and my body. Can we avoid discussing diets or weight loss?”

I find that statement a little wordy in a stressful situation and prefer shorter statements like:

“I’d prefer not to engage in diet talk.”

“We don’t talk about other people’s bodies.”

“I don’t like to talk about people’s bodies.”

This is just the beginning of the conversation, but I hope you’ve been inspired enough to consider opting out of diet and body talk with me. If you’re in, hit the like button 💙, drop a comment here and say so, or just hit reply on this email.

I’d also love to hear how you deal with diet talk or what you need help with. What’s worked for you in the past? What scenarios are you expecting to come up this holiday season that we may be able to support you on? Do you need to just vent?

Leave a comment

Me.

My mind felt foggy and detached, like I was experiencing my life, only in someone else’s body. I cried at the drop of a hat, mixed up times and appointment dates (even parties I wanted to attend!), forgot the names of words I was searching for, and eventually gave up, because it just took too much energy.

Perimenopause symptoms, it turns out, can begin even before your first missed period.

Layered on top of the biological chaos was a deeper identity loss.

After decades of being the breadwinner through my first marriage and into single motherhood, I’d finally found stability in a new, supportive partnership. That gave me the space to step back from the demands of full-time work and shift into a less-harried, part-time contract life. For the first time, I could be a more present mother, prioritize family, take on a few clients, and still focus on my own writing. But it was messy. I was struggling with this new identity.

Who was I if I wasn’t the successful, career-focused woman?

If I could have slid, easy as pie, into my writing, maybe I could have gotten past it. But in the overwhelm of brain fog, even that wasn’t enough.

The lowest point came when I decided to quit all work that wasn’t in service of my writing, only to find the words had dried up.

I blamed myself, of course.

It had been my default for years.

When things go wrong, socially, emotionally, professionally, I trace the problem straight back to me.

I’m the one who makes it weird. I’m the reason people drift away. I’m too much, or not enough, or both, depending on the day.

By this summer, I was deep in my own misery, feeling lost and rudderless, the closest I’d ever come to depression. What finally pulled me out was another D-word: diagnosis.

The diagnosis was level 1 autism. This wasn’t my first round of neuropsych testing. Last year, I went through a battery of tests and came away with inattentive ADHD, a label that never really fit and was what helped me realize I was actually in perimenopause. My husband kept pushing me to get a second opinion. So I did another round of testing early this summer, and that’s when I got the diagnosis that fit.

I’ve always known I was different.

Honestly, I’ve felt it my whole life. I used to see it as a good thing. I seemed to care more. I said the things other people wouldn’t. I was willing to have the conversations other people couldn’t.

But as I got older, especially in leadership roles where interpersonal dynamics and the ability to communicate are everything, the differences became harder to ignore. I saw those differences as flaws. I assumed I was the problem. The reason for misunderstandings. The awkwardness. The social gaffes. The lack of closeness in certain situations. The loss of friendships. I was the common denominator, so I carried the blame.

Not anymore.

A few days ago, my husband brought up the turnaround he’d seen in me since summer. He asked what had changed. The answer was simple: the diagnosis.

It didn’t change my circumstances, but it shifted my perspective. There was a huge weight lifted off me. I wasn’t just being difficult, tone deaf, or standoffish. (Or maybe I was, but now, at least, I had a reason.)

I wasn’t broken. I was just wired differently. And that felt like relief.

And strangely enough, the diagnosis gave me more room to breathe.

There’s a lightness to my being now. The pressure’s off.

Yes, I’m still me. Still intense, still overthinking, still worrying about how I come across more than I need to, but I don’t carry the same shame. I don’t immediately jump to “I must’ve screwed up” when something feels off in a conversation. Even when I do, and even when I did, I have far more grace for myself.

And let me be clear: this isn’t about absolving myself of accountability. I’m still responsible for how I show up in the world. I still have to own my mistakes and the harm I cause.

But now I understand why I show up the way I do.

What I used to think of as a flaw is just a different kind of wiring. It’s not broken. It’s just different.

It’s changed how I see other people too. I recognize kindred spirits now, people who seem a little out of sync, who move through the world differently. I feel more appreciation for them. I used to assume their discomfort was a reflection of me. Now I know it almost never is.

This permission to just be who I am feels like the greatest gift I’ve given myself.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this shift, and my diagnosis, happened during perimenopause.

It’s not always graceful. Sometimes it’s a mess. But underneath it all is realness: we finally start to feel like we can exist as ourselves.

It wasn’t all the diagnosis.

Yes, some of the perimenopausal symptoms have eased.

Or maybe, the further we move through perimenopause, and it becomes the new normal, the less clearly we remember the person we were before.

Sleep is easier. I haven’t lost anything lately. I haven’t accidentally gotten a date wrong in weeks.

I’m writing again, and I think I’ve turned a corner.

I’ve let go of a lot of the work-related identity hangups, especially now since work as we know it feels increasingly tenuous.

Basically, I’m learning to chill out, to soften, to relax into who I am now.

Diagnosis or not, so many of us are craving this kind of permission.

Especially as we head into the most pressure-filled season of the year, with its endless to-dos, obligations, and emotional landmines.

If you’re feeling the weight of expectation, yours or other people’s, what would it feel like to just lower it?

All of it.

The pressure to perform.

To please.

To host the perfect dinner.

To show up as the most polished and put together version of ourselves.

What if we just let some of it go? Even 10 percent less?

I know sometimes we can’t. Sometimes, in certain situations, with certain people, it’s not safe to let our guards down. But when we can, when it’s safe, when it’s just pushing back against the usual narrative, why not?

Not to be selfish.

But to be honest.

To be more real.

To be more us.

Now it’s your turn. I’d love to hear what you’re learning to let go at this stage in your life.

And if you’re sitting with some of this, here are a few questions to ask:

What identities have you outgrown, even if they once defined you?

What would “permission to be yourself” look like in reality, not just theory?

As we move into the most demanding season of the year, how are you taking a load off?

Let’s talk in the comments.

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Summer, on the other hand, is hot as blazes, and seems to stretch on forever. This year was technically “cooler than normal,” with fewer 100-degree days, which should have felt like relief. It fooled me into thinking the heat would be more bearable. It wasn’t.

The longer I stay here, the more the heat seems to affect me. It’s a constant undercurrent, an oppressive companion. This summer, it amplified a deeper malaise that had been building for months: some of it about politics, watching a country I love slip into something unrecognizable, and some of it about finding my own purpose.

I needed a break, not just from the weather, but from the weight of it all.

So I left. And what I found, in a tiny harbor town on the coast of Maine, was just what I needed.

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My husband and I have been ready to get the hell out of Texas for a while now, and we’ve started the unofficial countdown to when our youngest graduates high school and we can decamp. Where to, exactly, is still unknown.

Part of it is the heat. Part of it is a longing to be closer to nature and live at a slower pace. But it’s also about being somewhere more culturally aligned with our values.

We’ve talked about splitting our time in upstate New York, where my husband is from, and then somewhere else part of the year. Italy, Portugal, and Costa Rica are still on our list.

But the political climate has changed the tune of our talks about leaving. They carry more urgency now, more questions. Europe is having its own alt-right moment, and there are so many unknowns about what the state of the world will be when we’re finally ready to go.

I heard someone say recently that no matter what happens, we’re not going back to what we were; the America we knew before is gone. And there’s an odd sort of comfort in this, because it’s the not knowing what’s coming next that’s the worst part.

I’ve been struggling with this for months, carrying anxiety and uncertainty, at times teetering on depression. For a while, it felt like people were either sleepwalking through it all or so shellshocked by loss that they’d completely tuned out and couldn’t see that our freedoms are under fire. The protections we’ve taken for granted are no longer something we can count on. At last, it feels like most of America is waking up. This week’s victories in a handful of key elections give me hope—America is finding its voice. But it hasn’t shaken my deeper fear: that our next presidential election won’t be legitimate.

I’ve had to find ways to hold onto hope, to escape the unbearable weight of it all, including the heat.

One of those ways is simply to leave Texas during the final weeks of summer, when the rest of the country is beginning to cool. This year, I scheduled back-to-back trips to more forgiving climates. My husband and I caught the turning aspens along the famed Route 67 drive in Divide, Colorado, and took multiple hikes. We spent a long weekend in Massachusetts for my daughter’s first college tours, with side visits to apple orchards and a full day in Salem, as we tried to sell her on the Northeast.

But what stays with me most are my days in Camden, Maine.

On a lark in early August, I jumped on a women’s writing retreat hosted by best-selling author Lyz Lenz (who recently left Substack for Patreon) and the newly formed Midcoast Villager newspaper. This weekly, recently featured in The New York Times, is trying to do what many papers have failed to do over the past 20 years amid shrinking print revenues, which is focus on community.

To that end, the paper started the Villager Café, a bright gathering space in the middle of town, with the newsroom housed above it. They host weekly “office hours” with the editorial staff, inviting townspeople into the process, and plan to do more writing retreats, with this tiny gem of a town as part of the allure.

I’m not surprised I fell so hard for coastal Maine. Visiting Acadia National Park in fall has been high on my bucket list for years. While I didn’t make it there on this trip (I’m saving that for when my husband can join me), I got a taste of it in Camden. The leaves were just starting to change, the daytime highs were in the high 60s, and the town, nestled around a postcard-perfect harbor, was absolutely adorable.

It happened to be the weekend of the Harbor Arts & Books Fairs, held on the exquisite grounds of the Camden Public Library, and the whole scene felt like something out of a cozy rom-com. The Villager organized a sailing retreat for us one afternoon. I ate fresh lobster every day.

I skipped out on yoga and made a solo trek up Mount Battie, a direct, boulder-strewn climb that Villager co-founder Kathleen Capetta tried to warn me about. Having just hiked in Colorado, I didn’t think it would be particularly strenuous, but I wasn’t wearing my usual hiking shoes and lacked the grip I needed. I made it up, breathless, only to realize I was nearly late for the first writing session. I all but ran down the gentler return trail.

Without a car or Uber, I faced the prospect of hiking back to town. The local cab company told me it would be at least 30 minutes. At the trailhead, I asked an older couple exiting at the same time if they could drop me back into town, something I’d never feel safe doing back home, and they did.

This was my first writing retreat. Not really knowing what to expect, I went in with an open mind. I had two goals: to jumpstart my memoir writing, which had been blocked for months, and to make writer friends. If I’m honest, I wanted more than that. I was hoping to make deeper connections with people who get it.

Yes, I know lots of writers. I’ve worked with many over the years as a newspaper journalist, then as a content marketer, and I’ve collaborated with women who became writers through a multi-author book project. But I haven’t had a circle of women I could turn to who are actively working on their craft. Until now.

What I came away with was a renewed vigor and purpose, and a group of soul sisters. Women who’ve been through some shit and are writing their way through it. These women are not sleepwalking through what’s happening in this country right now, and it made me feel less alone.

For the last few years, I’ve written to make meaning of my experiences. To help others. To steady myself. But I left Maine with the understanding that my writing, and others like it, is a form of activism. When we use our voices, especially those of us with any measure of power or privilege, we speak for those who can’t.

We say the hard things. The things that run counter to the norm. We labor to make change. We fight and cry and endure pain and suffering and loss. And sometimes we carry that weight far too long, because the people around us, even those we love, don’t always understand.

It warmed my heart to find kindred souls, women who, in their own ways, are trying to make the world a better place.

We railed. We cried. We read. We unburdened ourselves with weights we’ve carried with no one to tell. There was no veil. No pretense. No bullshit.

Texas was still too damn hot when I returned. And Maine is still calling. But I came back with something that matters more: clarity, connection, and a reason to keep writing.

We’ve got our next unofficial retreat planned for February.

Now it’s your turn

Is there a place or ritual that helps when you need a reset, creative or otherwise? What’s been weighing on you lately, and what’s helped you carry it? I’d love to hear in the comments.

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Retreat voices here on Substack

A few of the women I met in Camden are also writing here on Substack, and I’d love to share them with you:

Sharp Skirts

Find your voice. Have your say. Harnessing the power of storytelling to rewrite narratives for the American woman.

Witch in the Yurt

Musings on modern spirituality, mortality, motherhood and media from a yurt in the Maine woods.

By Kat Capetta

A. Treat

Stories about life, travel, memories, and culture.