I made them for a session with a client, where we ate kale chips together. I am such a curmudgeon sometimes about trying new things, and I’m grateful to my clients for pushing me out of my comfort zone. Last month it was green smoothies, now kale chips. Both times, I experienced the heady rush of diving headfirst into the Virtuous Internet Foods zeitgeist.

I have been aware of the existence of kale chips for a long time. If you spend any time on the internet at all, how could you miss them? They are posted on Facebook pretty regularly, seem popular on recipe sites, and I’m sure there has been plenty of Instagram kale chip documentation.

But for those who have missed it, kale chips are pieces of kale leaf that have been covered in oil and salt and baked until crispy, rather like potato chips. They are to potato chips what raisins are to Halloween candy; they are the carob to Hershey’s milk chocolate — good in their own right, possessing similar qualities…and still somehow not quite the same. They are the kind of snack Dawn Schafer would bring to a Babysitters Club sleepover.

I’ve been aware of what I will refer to as the Greater Internet Kale Phenomenon for a lot longer. I made a passing reference to it last year, and soon after that, I happened to read a brilliantly funny blog post that riffed on the kale phenomenon.

So what is the deal with kale? Why are we (well, I’m projecting here, this is really all about me, sorry) hearing so much about it, and why does it seem to have taken the place at the top of the Virtuous Foods Pyramid – ousting former favourites like orange juice, spinach, and whole grains, along the way?

The straight answer would seem to be: micronutrients. Kale is one of the much-cherished dark, leafy greens that people love to tell each other to eat as often as possible. A quick perusal of my internet girlfriend, the USDA National Nutrient Database, demonstrates that raw kale contains a whack-ton of vitamin A, and doesn’t show up too poorly on calcium, potassium and vitamin K, either. There’s even some vitamin C in there, and the usual smattering of B vitamins (which seem to appear in every food I look up, everywhere, since forever.)

However, I’m unconvinced that micronutrients are the whole reason behind kale’s ongoing debutante ball. At least one sketchy-looking website informs me that the phytochemicals in kale will prevent cancer, and will also shrink existing tumours, but PEN is silent on the matter, other than saying that eating plenty of fruits and vegetables in accordance with Canada’s Food Guide may help to reduce one’s risk of cancer.

(Which is another way of saying, there is not enough experimental or other evidence on this topic to form a solid, official recommendation for various phytochemicals, so hedge your bets by eating enough of everything. And beware of scammy cancer advice on the internet.)

So, micronutrients and phytochemicals aside, what else is so great about kale? Here’s a thought experiment:

Would eating kale chips feel somehow different than eating a calorically equivalent amount of potato chips with a phytochemical-micronutrient chaser in pill form?

Now, some people would balk at the supplement pill, claiming it couldn’t possibly contain all the goodness of real, live kale, but for the sake of argument let’s just pretend that, in this particular fantasy scenario, it does. Magic has been performed, and all the goodness of kale has been reduced to pill form, minus the calories. For an added bonus, pretend the supplement was created in an organic, environmentally sustainable and fair-trade manner, sourced from local ingredients by workers earning a living wage.

All that remains is to eat your potato chips and take your pill and feel equally virtuous to your kale chip-eating alternate self. Would you?

Some would, I know, because people vary. Some people’s food concerns really do begin and end with the issues I’ve neatly dispatched with my magical imaginary wonderpill.

But a good many of us (myself included, I suspect) would not. We might still feel vaguely more virtuous while eating the actual, honest-to-goodness kale, and vaguely more dirty eating the potato chip-wonderpill combo – especially if there were anyone around to watch us.

This tells me that there may be more going on than the mere nutrition, or even the production ethics, of kale. There may be a potent symbolic meaning attached to kale, among certain people, at this time.

Well, what is it?

What does it mean to eat kale? And, more to the point, what kind of person are you when you do?

Happy new year.

Like many of you, I’ve spent the last few weeks eating differently than I do most of the year. There were more cookies, more pastry, more mashed potatoes and stuffing, more candy, more cream, and more liquor than usual. There were probably fewer salads, and certainly not my usual measure of frozen berries.

Outside of my plate, there were other differences: more decorations. More jubilant music. More lights. More television specials. More wrapping paper. More shopping. More travel. More more more more of many, many things. And now as I sit at my desk, on the second day of the new year, there has been a sudden ceasing of it all. Things are quiet. Decorations are put into plain brown boxes. Even the landscape is different, transformed on Boxing Day from muddy green and brown, to a white, rather bare scene, a clean slate.

There is a lot of symbolism attached to the new year, and a lot of pressure building to transubstantiate that symbolism into action.

I have always loved this time of the year, because I, like most people, love a clean slate. It is a yearly renewing of hope, even in times that are deeply screwed-up. I crave hope, I love it, and I absolutely need it. Without hope, life may well end. And the hope of a new start brings with it a sort of pleasing purity, as though the past can be obliterated with a fresh coat of paint, or covered over with the blank paper of a turned leaf. I suddenly want to whiten my sheets, mop the floors, scrub the bathtub. I want to wash my face with something that promises me a new one. And, like a lot of people, I want my nice, crisp, clean salad back on my plate.

Humans being what they are, omnivorous seekers after variety, I think it is natural for us to crave, after a period of sensory indulgence, a sort of purifying restraint. I don’t necessarily think this is a negative thing, though it can, like anything, be taken to destructive extremes.

This impulse, I believe, is so common that marketers and product makers seized on it long ago, and have used it to drive sales of various purifying foods, devices, and ideas. You can (allegedly) scrub out your intestines with a cleanse or a fast, you can purchase a cool, precise bathroom scale to measure your progress toward a purer existence, unencumbered by the smelly inconvenient demands of heavy corporeality, you can buy a diet book that encourages your to purge your cupboards of toxic, processed, messy, fattening foods and replace them with clean, wholesome, unprocessed, sanctified super-foods, and you can take the aspirational grocery shopping trip that will achieve this (and deal with the inevitable fridge full of rotting produce that results when the lustre of purity has been dulled by the messy demands of daily life.)

In turn, these products promising a fresh start have reinforced the impulse toward restraint in the new year, and ingratiated themselves into that natural impulse to become almost official rites. The popular custom of new year’s dieting is an example of the impulse capitalized upon and expanded into a collective tradition, heavy on religious and moral symbolism, but expressed in reassuringly crisp scientific prose, complete with numerical, damn near economic, accounting mechanisms.

They allow you to reimagine yourself not as an animal who lives and dies, eats and shits, who is lustful and afraid, full of inconveniently dark and unknowable recesses, both physical and psychological, but rather as a modern biochemical machine, a neatly-labeled schematic on white paper whose mysteries are laid bare, housing a ghost of pure spirit and light who condescends to eat only as an impatient concession to physical necessity, and who therefore dines on distilled biochemistry garnished with the most forward-thinking evolutionary rationalizations.

By March, it will all be over.

All I’m saying is, be careful out there. Enjoy your sense of new beginnings, follow your cravings for foods that provide a bracing contrast to what you’ve recently been glutted with, but be reluctant to deny your humanness in the process.

It is, after all, what you will come home to in the end.

1) That the food industry is AWESOME.

In one sense, industrialized food production is an amazing thing that allows an unprecedented human population to eat and survive, and we do have regulations in place that largely prevent acute disaster, though there are plenty of reforms that could and should take place. On the other hand, I believe the food industry does try to manipulate humanity’s natural desire for food to get us to eat more than we may actually want or need.

Some of this is normal and to be expected – most good cooks at home as well as in the industry know that adding fat and salt and sugar to things makes them tasty, and of course you want people, especially when you’re cooking for company, to think your food is tasty. The big issue is that pre-prepared food used to be more of an exception than a rule, but with changing lifestyles, people rely on this food more and more as a staple, and hence may be eating richer, saltier, sweeter things in greater quantities than in the past.

However, if this is true, I think the answer is not to clamp down with food restriction, but to build our eating competence skills by being responsible and structured, and also allowing ourselves to seek pleasure, with food. The impulse to restrict seems very intuitive and makes sense on the surface, but if that worked, I wouldn’t have a job because people would be restricting themselves however they like with no problems. But there is a problem – attempted restriction usually backfires because it sets off internal survival mechanisms that drive us to seek food even more intensely, and can even lead to binge eating, making restriction directly counterproductive.

I think the food industry, or at least some decision-makers in the food industry, probably know this – and as such, the food industry is often tied to the diet industry, sometimes by directly owning or funding weight loss centers, and most often by producing “Lite” or “Diet” (or “Natural” or “Healthy”) foods. Which allows them to profit from every part of the cycle: abundant, rich, tempting, cheap food everywhere –> relying more on these foods and perhaps overeating –> guilt and the urge to restrict –> using diet services or diet foods to restrict –> feeling unsatisfied and wanting the abundant, rich, tempting, cheap food EVEN MORE –> finally breaking down and eating a ton of “bad” food, which starts the cycle up all over again, and puts twice the amount of money into the pockets of people who have their fingers both in the food industry and the diet industry.

The answer to all of this is to opt out of the cycle – to learn to eat well, not to try to eat less. The industry at large profits from people eating in black-and-white, all-or-nothing ways: eating a ton of calorie-rich food, then clamping down and restricting and using products to help them eat as little as possible. Learning to eat well results in people eating moderately – by which I mean eating tasty, nourishing foods in comfortable quantities – which isn’t very exciting and doesn’t provide a good platform to sell products and diet books from. And when people opt out of the cycle and eat moderately, you don’t get the self-renewing influx of repeat customers driving your 60 billion dollar industry. You just get a population of people who are basically okay with eating and spend their time obsessing about other things instead, and who wants that?

2) That there are no health risks associated with being fat.

Obviously, there are, or, once again, my blog and the entire “obesity epidemic” concept would not exist. However, even though research shows that there are health risks with being fat, especially extremely fat, the research also seems to indicate that 1) we don’t know for certain whether all those risks are caused by a direct physiological mechanism of adipose tissue, 2) that trying to lose weight does not work permanently for most people, 3) even if it did work permanently, we still do not know whether a formerly-fat person would enjoy the same lowered risk as a naturally-thin person, and 4) that “obese” people with good health habits have less risk, even though they are still fat.

Also, having a condition that means you have more health risks doesn’t make you a bad person or an intolerable burden on society. Lots of different categories of people have elevated health risks (like men), but we don’t stigmatize them in the same devastating ways we do fat people.

3) That people should and must eat junk food.

No. What I believe is that people must make their own choices about food, and probably shouldn’t generalize those choices to other people, because people vary. Some people don’t eat any junk food and seem to be perfectly happy with their decision, both physically and psychologically. Yay for those people. If everyone were like that, this blog would not have to exist and I would not have to do the work I do with clients.

The fact is, most of us live in a world where junk food exists and it is part of our lives. Rather than try to deny that reality, I think it is more productive to learn to navigate and manage it. Most people are going to eat ice cream, drink soda, and have french fries sometimes. There is nothing inherently wrong with this.

I believe that overall variety in the long-term is the most important principle of good nutrition; I believe arbitrarily denying yourself something that is important and meaningful to you and that you take great pleasure in is unhealthy; and I believe that people need to learn to make choices about food that take into account both how food tastes and how it makes them feel, and their bodies will mostly lead them in the right direction.

Some people will decide that certain foods do not belong in their diet, and they will avoid those foods in most situations, and they will have very good reasons for doing so. However, if you try to do this before you have good eating competence skills, you will be putting the cart before the horse, and very likely you will increase your anxiety around food and binge eat the exact food you’re trying to avoid. If this happens, you need to start over from square one and re-learn to eat.

4) That weight loss is always bad, and never happens anyway.

Actually, people’s weights do seem to fluctuate somewhat, both long-term and short-term, though most people do also seem to have a general range that their body likes to stick to. Sometimes people find themselves at a weight that is not their body’s usual, naturally-defended weight, because of various circumstances (environmental stuff, medical stuff, etc.) and when the circumstances go back to normal, so does their weight. And sometimes people lose weight (or gain weight) as a side-effect of eating better and moving more – that’s why we refer to the Health at Every Size approach as a weight-neutral approach. Because sometimes you will lose or gain weight, but the first priority is on how you take care of yourself regardless of those changes.

What I think is “bad,” as in unhealthy and counterproductive, is a focus on weight in the place of health and well-being. (But even though I disagree with it, choosing to do this does not make you a bad person, and I don’t think any less of you for it. It’s your body, which means it is not my business to judge.) There is research that shows this – that people who put their primary focus on weight loss usually don’t maintain it for the long term, and the healthy behaviours (like exercising or eating vegetables or whatever) they were doing to try and promote the weight loss fall by the wayside when they stop losing, or start regaining, weight. That is not good.

Since weight loss is supposedly about “getting healthy,” why not cut out the middle-man? Focus on doing stuff directly for your health, and let your weight sort itself out.

That’s it for now. I’m sure there is a list of these misconceptions as long as my arm, but I’ll have to address more of them later. I just want people to keep in mind that there is a tendency to think in dichotomous, black-and-white, all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us terms when it comes to food, eating, weight, and health.

When I haven’t specifically written about a topic, and so people don’t actually know what I think about it, there is a tendency to want to fill in the gaps with what they assume based on my other positions, or based on what other people in the fat acceptance or HAES community have written or said. I do this too. It’s only human. But it’s not always accurate, either.

Or can we?

If some people’s relatives had their way, the answer would be a resounding HAHA, SUCKER! Because certain people exist only to make your food-eating life as a fat person (or a whatever-sized person) miserable.

So, here’s the thing: whether or not you are fat, you are the only person who gets to decide what food goes in your mouth, what tastes good, and how much of it makes you feel full and satisfied. No matter how many busybodies and dietary conspiracy theorists get in your face, you are still the only one who can decide.

This goes for holidays just as much as any other time of the year. And maybe especially for holidays, given that they have been specifically set aside for centuries as feast days. A time to get your feast on. A time to enjoy food without the usual constraints of looming scarcity, whether naturally- or artificially-imposed.

So, with that in mind, I have a few holiday tips for you. And they are not of the “fill up on celery before the party!” variety.

1) You have permission to eat. Period. You have permission to eat what and how much you want. Food is not poison, your body belongs to you, and you are a grown-up who gets to decide what to eat. That’s it. That’s all. It’s the plain truth. So give yourself explicit permission to eat when you sit down to eat. Remind yourself who is really in charge (it’s you.)

2) It’s your job to take care of your body. I mean, I guess you don’t really have to if you don’t want to, but your body is going to make you pay for any sort of neglect. And when I say “take care of it” that is not code for “eat some ridiculously restrictive diet predicated on the notion that food is poisonous.” It means to take care of yourself in a way that feels good and allows you to function well, both physically and emotionally. When it comes to food, taking care of yourself usually means eating often enough so that you’re not starvingly, desperately hungry in between times, and that you eat enough to feel pleasantly satisfied, maybe even really full, but not physically ill. So, even on holidays, the mandate to take care of yourself with food stands: eat some breakfast. If you’re having an early afternoon dinner, maybe have a snack around midday, or a light lunch. If you’re eating your holiday dinner at regular dinner time, then have a regular lunch. You will actually enjoy your holiday meal more on moderate hunger. Desperation makes things exciting and dramatic, but actually can make it more difficult to taste and enjoy your food. It also makes you cranky and more prone to family blow-outs. Drama-free is the way to go.

3) Eat foods that are enjoyable, but that also make you feel good. For me, this means including roughage and fruits and veggies and whatnot with my meals. Your mileage may vary. You know what foods make you feel good. Milk? Bananas? Chocolate on the side? Provided you like eating them well enough, just add them onto whatever you’re already eating. Make it as easy on yourself as possible. Raw baby carrots will get the job done, as will pre-cut, pre-washed salad from a bag, or some mandarins, or a cut-up apple, or even some applesauce or orange juice. Supplement your meal with feel-good foods, no matter how imperfect.

4) Don’t eat stuff you don’t like, either before the holiday meal, or AT the holiday meal. It is not your job to appease Aunt Bessie’s conscience about her horrible cooking. “No, thanks,” is all adults need to say. Repeat it, repeat it, repeat it if they pressure you. “No, thanks.” It’s a complete sentence. It can stand as an answer even to follow-up questions like, “But don’t you like it? You used to always like it!” Just, “No, thanks.” If they push, they are the ones making things weird, not you. In the wise words of Captain Awkward, “Let it be awkward.” It’s not your job to smooth over the awkwardness from their neurosis. It is your job to do right by your body and not force yourself to eat stuff you don’t enjoy, or that will make you feel overfull and terrible later.

5) Don’t engage with the inevitable weight talk, or talk of food-related sinning (“I’m so bad! This is so bad for you! Watch me eat the entire thing because I am totally in denial about my own neurosis!”) Don’t engage. It’s not your job to educate people about eating, or self-acceptance, or Health at Every Size, although a light reassurance that food is good, and it’s a holiday so lighten up, Francis, may not go amiss – if you think it won’t set off further self-flagellation or lecturing. Gauge the situation. You know your relatives better than I do. But it’s a holiday – you should not have to be educating other people about how to eat on a holiday. It’s your day off. And, here’s a hint, they probably won’t listen to you anyway. So keep your own counsel and save your energy for pie.

6) One simple phrase, “Let’s just enjoy this,” can work wonders. If people are insistent on indicting the food sitting on the table (while everyone around them partakes in it and then feels vaguely dirty), say lightly, “Let’s just enjoy this,” and keep eating. Again – repeat and repeat as often as necessary until they lay off. They don’t have to eat the food if it’s giving them anxiety-hives, or if they don’t like it, or if it doesn’t sit well in their body, but it’s rude for them to vomit their issues all over the food that other people are actively eating and enjoying.

7) In case you were tempted, lay off other people’s eating. Put down that responsibility today. Don’t push food on people. Don’t comment on how much or how little they take. Don’t ask them “Should you be eating that?” or “How’s your blood sugar?” It is not your, or anyone’s, place to police what other people eat, even if they have honest-to-goodness dietary issues. They are grown-ups. If they have health issues, presumably they have seen a doctor and have been made aware of what they should be doing. It is their choice to follow those guidelines or not, and it is not your place to play food cop – doing so is a great way to totally spoil a holiday and potentially wreck your relationship. So sit on your hands, zip the lip, do whatever you need to do to stay out of other people’s business.

8) If the food police descend on you, hear them, then drop it. You can go the passive-aggressive-Southerner/Miss-Manners route and give them a “Bless your heart! Thank you for your concern,” and keep eating or walk away. Or you could go the blunt honest route and say, “I know you mean well, but I know what I’m doing,” and try to change the subject or walk away (warning, this one is likely to start a fight if you have contentious family members. Use with caution.) Mostly, someone just wants to make sure their (usually obnoxious) opinion has been heard and validated, so to save your sanity you can just nod gravely and say, “I see! How interesting. Thanks for the advice,” then completely disregard it and go about your meal. Pick whichever strategy matches best with the unique flavour of neurosis present in your family. Then debrief with an understanding friend or family member later on and get a hug. If you expect this kind of thing, see if you can set up a phone hotline situation with a friend ahead of time – agree to text or phone each other to check in at some point during the day, and offer each other support.

9) Focus on your own food and enjoy it. Eyes on your own plate, if you will. This can be really hard to do on a holiday, ironically, because of all the distraction and hubbub of the holiday itself. So, before diving into the plate of delectation set before you, take a good, deep breath. Give your mind two seconds to settle itself. Take a good look at your food, and smile to yourself, and feel how your stomach is feeling. Smell the food and taste the food. It is usually pretty awesome.

10) If all else fails, go sit at the kiddie table. Sure, they don’t want their food touching other food, and will often end up with peas in their nose, but otherwise they tend to be pretty chill about letting people eat what they eat.

Dig in. Be thankful for your food. That’s what this is all about, right?

In an earlier post, I wrote about why some people find food restriction comforting and reassuring. Today I want to talk about the idea of food addiction and why some people find it a helpful construct, but why I ultimately do not think it is accurate or helpful in the long term.

To begin with, I do not doubt that people experience feeling out of control with certain foods in a way that feels very much like an addiction.

I also don’t doubt that, at least partially or temporarily, banishing the particular foods that seem to trigger this feeling can result in feeling more in control.

But “addiction” is a specific thing, and feelings alone are not enough to make it a reality. In order for food addiction to be real (behavioural addictions like gambling aside, for the sake of simplicity), food should qualify as an addictive substance in and of itself. Indeed, several writers and researchers would argue that certain foods are indistinguishable from addictive drugs, but I disagree.

It is true that reward pathways in the brain are triggered by foods (some types of food more than others), and those same reward pathways are activated by the use of certain addictive drugs. But this does not mean, ipso facto, that certain foods are identical to drugs.

First, we need food to survive. We do not need addictive drugs to survive (except in some cases where the addiction has progressed to the point of very high drug tolerance.) Second, it is next to impossible to overdose and kill yourself with food (in the form of food, not a concentrated vitamin or mineral supplement) unless you have some disease, food allergy or intolerance – and in this case, it is the condition that is to blame, not the food. Third, while food can certainly impact your mood and give you pleasure, it does not produce altered states of consciousness or affect one’s judgment in the way addictive drugs do.

All of this should be obvious, but people seem to forget these important points in their desperation to compare fat people to drug addicts.

Even more importantly, I would assume that the reward pathways shared by both food and addictive drugs exist, in the first place, because of things like food. These are called natural rewards.

Food needs to be rewarding to eat, or we all would have died off long ago, because it requires a lot of effort to find and prepare. It requires far, far less effort now than ever before in human history, and even still, a lot of people find food gathering and preparation to be such a pain that they avoid it at all costs. Imagine how much worse those people would have fared as hunter-gatherers, or farmers, or even just home cooks before the rise of value-added/convenience/pre-prepared foods.

Even the foods people now think of as very basic staples used to cook from “scratch” are actually pretty highly processed compared to the raw article – dried pasta and legumes, canned tomatoes, bread or milled flour, pasteurized and homogenized milk, ripened cheeses, butchered and packaged cuts of meat, ground and dried herbs and spices. And still, we often complain about how much effort cooking is – meaning that food has to be pretty damn rewarding to make it worth even a moderate effort, while still remaining absolutely essential to survival.

Additionally, certain foods in the wild are more scarce, and more biologically valuable, than others. When food is hard to come by, stumbling upon a source of concentrated calories, such as sugars and fats, or stumbling upon a source of the very important electrolyte sodium, is extremely lucky and makes us more likely to survive and pass on our genes. Finding a stash of honey or a salt lick or seal blubber is like winning the biological lottery, and as such, it makes sense that we would evolve mechanisms to reward us for that.

Yes, it is true that we now live in a world where sugar, fat, and salt are available on demand. It’s also true that many of us have plenty of all kinds of food at our disposal – both macro- and micronutrient dense – provided we have enough money and access to stores and cooking facilities. And, lastly, it is also true that having too much or too little of any nutrient can directly cause disease or generally increase risk.

However, even in an environment where food is abundant and cheap, I believe humans do have the ability to self-regulate, even in the face of extremely naturally rewarding foods containing lots of sugar, salt, and fat. If we are well-fed and nourished on a regular basis, and if we include those extremely rewarding foods as part of our diets along with all the other foods we need to maintain good health, we are far less likely to go off the deep-end when presented the opportunity to eat a random Twix bar.

So why, in this food-secure world that many of us inhabit, do many of us still snatch after the Twix bar like it’s a life raft?

Because, with the rise of the accessibility of food to those who can afford it, also came the rise of food restriction, food rules, and a scarcity mindset around food. You can think of these things as a sort of induced food insecurity. Even if you have adequate access to food and eat enough of it on a regular basis, the continual messaging from both internal and external sources that you shouldn’t eat that food, that you shouldn’t eat that amount of food, that you will start dieting on Monday, that that delicious food will kill you, or even that you are too fat to deserve to eat at all, scares the shit out of the very ancient and vulnerable part of you that still thinks starvation could be around the corner at any moment, and thus throws a little neurotransmitter party whenever a wild Twix appears!

Ellyn Satter says “permission is the paradox that gives control.” I’ve seen this at work in myself, and in dozens of clients.

With a truly addictive substance, permission and unfettered access would likely perpetuate the addiction and the feeling of loss of control. With food, in the context of eating competence, the opposite is true. The more permission you have, the less scarcity you fear, and the more responsible you become about feeding yourself in the ways that count, the more in-control you feel around food.

I used to have a bit of a fixation on sweets. Since childhood, they had been a mildly forbidden food, and even when I was allowed to eat them, it was always with the understanding that they were somewhat bad, and I assumed that I was somewhat bad for liking them so much, and I believed that I could never really be in control with them.

In adulthood, my experience with dieting only intensified this feeling, and when I stopped dieting and tried to learn to eat normally, it took several years of giving myself permission and sometimes overeating and feeling slightly out-of-control with sweets before I finally calmed down. What seemed to do it was 1) making sure that I ate dessert once or twice a day, usually with lunch or dinner, every day, and 2) keeping at least some basic sweet (like vanilla ice cream) in stock in my kitchen at all times, buying more when I ran out, and 3) acknowledging that part of human nature is to find sugar really attractive, because of the aforementioned biological value.

I feel quite happy now with sweets. I will occasionally eat too much in one sitting and feel a little bit off afterward, and I accept that. It only happens once every few months, and I think it is part of the human experience, and part of eating competence even, to sometimes make mistakes with eating and then let your body sort itself out. I learn from those mistakes because I don’t get caught up in the shame-spiral of judging myself. I usually end up feeling less hungry afterward for the next few meals or the next day, or I start craving a completely different type of food that seems to address the feeling of imbalance.

Most of the time, I eat an amount of sweets that feels fine in my body, even if it’s more than the serving size on the label, and I accept that. And sometimes I don’t think about or crave anything sweet at all, except for the sugar in my coffee, often for days at a time. Candy, cookies, and ice cream can sit in my kitchen without being eaten immediately, waiting for the time when I actually want them.

In my opinion, the model of food as addictive substance ultimately is a distraction from the real issue, which is a lack of eating competence or a rift in a person’s relationship with food. As one of my commenters pointed out in the previous post on this topic, sometimes people simply don’t have the resources to deal with the root problems, and some form of restriction can be a temporary work-around. I agree, this is true with dieting, and it can be true with the idea of food addiction.

However, my problem is that when people take on these temporary measures as a means of self-help, they often don’t leave them at that. They often start to generalize these measures into absolute truths about the nature of food and people, and reify concepts like “food addiction” into actual, concrete phenomena rather than useful metaphors for how they, personally, feel about food.

That is a problem because it adds to the negative, controlling discourse around food and bodies in our culture, and because people within this culture, who have internalized negative, controlling ideas about eating, are likely to take such a concept at face-value because it feels true, even if the biology of natural rewards vs. addictive substances, and the fact that food is essential to survival, say different.

The truth is, food is not an addictive substance, although addictive substances hijack the same reward pathways that were forged by food. That, combined with a fear of scarcity in a very food-negative culture, can very closely mimic an addiction. But the food addiction concept and the subsequent treatment of complete abstinence from that particular food are limited solutions, and they do not reach the roots of the problem, which are poor eating competence and fear of scarcity. If we continue to promote the concept, I believe that it will deepen people’s fear of scarcity, and subsequently their lack of control with food, and become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you call food an addiction often enough, it will scare people. When people are scared, they will have a harder time eating competently. When they are not eating competently, they will often succumb to binge eating and being out of control with “forbidden” foods, which we will then diagnose as a food addiction. So it goes.

The answer is to treat all food like it is food, calm down and manage anxiety about eating, make sure you are eating enough food at consistent times, and eat a variety of different foods, healthy and “unhealthy” alike, with lots of permission and a refusal to beat yourself up over it.

(Or we could just keep doing what we’re doing and see how miserable and food-preoccupied everyone becomes in the coming years.)

It gets fuzzy at times. I am actually quite lucky in that I don’t come under attack too often, and usually the really obvious stuff (UR A DUMB BITCH!!!) doesn’t get to me much, and I just delete it. But recently, it has been harder than usual to stomach that stuff because I am exhausted.

It gets especially fuzzy when people want to come here to debate. I want them to have a chance to air their questions and arguments so that I may answer them honestly for the sake of everyone else reading who may have similar questions. For some people, this is simply an engaging intellectual exercise in which they get to argue for or against the right of fat people to exist without having their bodies legislated against or their personal choices controlled. Debate club! Fun!

But it’s a little bit less fun and intellectual for those of us who live in those bodies – it is no longer just an exercise in civil debate, it is an exhausting and frankly scary conversation to have. In the current political climate, our lives may literally be on the line.

For some others, this is an issue of intense emotion because they have struggled with weight, and either found a way to lose weight and keep it off, or are still struggling and are very angry and frustrated with me for seeming to take their hope away. Or they have a family member who is struggling, or who died of some illness associated with being fat. Difficult personal experience has led them to the firm belief that fat kills, and that they must do everything they can to save themselves and others from that fate – and my viewpoint, and the statistical indicators that fat people can be healthy, represents an intolerable fly in the ointment.

For me, this is also an emotional conversation, for reasons I mentioned above, and because my beliefs about this issue are anchored to an immovable ethical conclusion that I have come to in my life: that it is not right to treat people poorly, or to afford them fewer rights, because of their body or appearance. This belief is the foundation not just for my beliefs about how fat people should be treated in society, but also my beliefs about racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and all the various ways we have of marginalizing each other as human beings.

People have complained about my inability to be shaken from my position, to which I respond: to some extent, that is true. From this position – that it is not right to treat people poorly or afford them fewer rights because of their appearance – I will not be moved. It is not a position based solely on logic (although there are logical arguments to be made in its favour) – it is a deeply-held moral conviction arrived at after years of study, relationships and conversations with others, questioning my priorities, spiritual belief/unbelief, and often painful personal experience.

On all other matters, I may be impressed by evidence, though I will not accept evidence on the strength of forced consensus, or comfortable and privileged status-quo. I also recognize that, while the scientific method is the best way humans have of observing and grasping something of a reality that is much larger and more complex than we can fully apprehend, the humans themselves, the researchers, reviewers, publishers of journals, university PR departments, and finally, the journalists who disseminate findings through the mass media, are all vulnerable to bias.

Nevertheless, science and sociological research has shown some things about fatness that I accept.

I am comfortable with the fact that, yes, there is a clear association between higher levels of weight and ill health. (There is a similar association between underweight and ill health, and there is data to show that healthy behaviours can lower this risk for fat people, even without weight loss.)

I am comfortable with the fact that, yes, behaviour contributes to weight. (But it is not the whole story. There are also significant contributions to weight from genetics, living conditions, and social determinants of health.)

I am comfortable with the fact that, yes, many people do not find fat people sexually or aesthetically attractive. (I don’t need them to. There is a subset of people who do, and aesthetic ideals of beauty are partly socially constructed, subject to change over time and place, and should never be used as a referendum on whether someone has the right to exist and be treated fairly.)

None of these facts shakes my conviction that It Is Not Okay To Engage In Appearance-Based Discrimination, to deny rights or enforce unfavourable social policies on people because of their appearance.

These facts also do not preclude the peculiar theory to which I subscribe, that people can be healthy and happy at a variety of weights by focusing on self-care instead of weight loss, and that, in my opinion, this is a preferable policy to the destructive and ineffective “War on Obesity” we have waged for the last decade.

I have been studying this topic, and writing about it online, for over ten years. I was so interested in it that I went and got a degree in nutrition, and worked in hospitals for nearly five years. I am not always right about everything, certainly, and my friends, mentors and colleagues can easily point out holes in my arguments and flaws in my reasoning that make me laugh and blush (Dee, Joy, Kate, Regina, Katja, Linda, Ellyn, Deb, Jacqui, Ricky, Kelly, closetpuritan, the two Chrises, and many others, I am indebted to you.)

I usually welcome this, though it may smart at times, because ultimately it makes my understanding better and my arguments stronger. What makes me able to take in these suggestions is the trust and respect we have established, and the fact that I can count on their sharing my moral belief that it is not right to discriminate against people based on appearance, and that all people have the right to bodily autonomy.

It is going to be much harder for me to engage in intellectual exercises and arguments with people who do not share those ethical underpinnings. It is uncomfortable and draining to talk with someone who seems to wish, more than anything, that people of my size and shape would just go away and stop ruining the world for everyone, or someone who genuinely believes that my body is proof of my laziness, gluttony, and moral corruption. I don’t debate about women’s rights with transparent misogynists, either. How could I have a productive, civil debate with a person who, not to put too fine a point on it, hates me at first sight?

Occasionally, I am up for it, and sometimes I am not. Right now is one of the latter times. As great as the outpouring of support and interest has been, it cannot undo the damage that is done when someone hurls epithets at me, wishes my death, or questions my worth as a human being. Love and abuse are two different things, and one cannot entirely erase the other, which is both a blessing and a shame.

This is my long-winded way of saying, I hosted a bit of debate at the beginning of the month for the sake of people who were finding my website, and this wild notion of fat people being equally valuable, for the first time. Now I’m done. Maybe we’ll have another debate again sometime, but it’s time for me to take care of myself, to take care of my regular readers and commenters, and to get on with the business of communicating with the people who largely get it, even if we disagree on the details.

As such, I’m no longer letting through naysayer or pro-weight-loss comments, because I do not have the time and energy to deal with them, and since this website is not intended to be a Speakers’ Corner, I will not let them stand without rebuttal.

If I get caught up in devoting my time to the same arguments I have had repeatedly for the last ten years (all of which ultimately boil down to the question, “Is it okay for fat people to be fat? Is it acceptable for fat people to exist?”), I could use all of my energy doing that and never progress in doing what I am trying to do, which is to help people who are looking for ways to care for themselves at their current weight, and to offer a different viewpoint in the largely negative, punitive, controlling and orthorexic discourse around eating, health and nutrition.

The right of fat people to exist as fat people is assumed here, and it is the foundation on which I am attempting to construct something larger. Continually questioning that foundation at the request of new commenters spoiling for a fight undermines my work.

I may touch on the basic arguments in my writing, like whether or not fat people are unrepentant gluttons, or whether food is poisonous and killing us all, or whether safe, permanent weight loss is possible for most people, or the health risks of being fat and what to do about them, but I am not going to engage in those arguments with commenters who come here with the agenda of proving, once and for all, that fat people are less than other people, and need to be forcibly re-educated into complying with the prevailing aesthetic standard.

Everyone else may stay.

Thank you all for the support you’ve given me, and all the sharing of personal stories and experiences, and the support you’ve given each other.

Carry on, and be excellent to each other.

If short-term weight loss were the sole barometer of success, then just about every diet you can think of, including the completely nonsensical ones involving cabbage soup or apple cider vinegar + a healthy dose of pseudoscience, works. They will all induce short-term weight loss.

For a very small number of people – those who were going to lose weight anyway because they were somehow temporarily above their body’s naturally-defended weight, or those who have the good fortune to both not regain while still dieting, and have the emotional/physical/financial/temporal resources to devote themselves to the full-time, lifelong project of controlling their weight – they can even trigger long-term weight loss.

That number has never been very high in any diet plan, so it’s hard to count it as a success. By the same marker of “success,” you could say that chemotherapy works, dysentery works, smoking works, methamphetamine works, and chronic alcoholism works – because they all induce weight loss, and yet they are all pretty terrible for one’s nutritional health.

What I’m talking about when I say “dieting works” for some people, some of the time, is the fact that I hear stories from lots of people about how a particular diet approach (which they often insist Is Not A Diet! despite the fact that it comes with a strict meal plan, food rules, or some counting mechanism) helps a person eat normally and feel in control of their eating and feel healthier. To me, these are more important barometers of whether or not something “works” than weight loss ever will be.

So, being a person who is pretty anti-dieting, how can I reconcile the stories I hear about various diet plans making people feel happy and healthy, with what I know to be true about eating competence?

I’ve noticed two common denominators about many of these stories: structure, as in structured meal times, combined with a form of blanket food restriction, like one forbidden food group, counting points or controlling portions, or even a set of complicated food-combining rules. I’m going to talk about structure first, and restriction second.

All by itself, having regular meals at set times, and respecting the non-eating times in between those meals, can give a person a really helpful sense of control over their eating.

In the eating competence approach, structured meal times work for a few reasons:

1. They are set at reasonable intervals, allowing a person to get comfortably hungry, but not TOO hungry, in between eating times.
2. Within those times, you are allowed unconditional permission to eat what, and as much as you want. This allows you to have a sense of organization about your eating, but without it feeling restrictive.
3. Since many cultures, the world over, seem to have organized their eating into mealtimes for much of human history, when you practice eating at meal times, you and your body will fall into a rhythm of hunger and fullness that feels damn near instinctive.
4. It is also way more convenient if, like most people, you work a day job and don’t have the luxury of simply choosing to drop everything and eat whenever you feel like it.

The second common denominator in many of these stories is a set of food rules or a type of food restriction. Despite the fact that lots of people find rules and restrictions immediately threatening and unsustainable, there are plenty of other people who find them comforting, because they set helpful limits on a world of seemingly endless food choices.

If you just know that you are never going to eat bread (or sugar, or wheat, or meat, or whatever) again, because that’s the universal food rule you’ve decided on, it can making choosing your food much simpler than having to go through the internal mental struggle of asking yourself what you want from the entire universe of foods available, and then filtering your desire through a lifetime of internalized, half-remembered nutrition theories picked up from friends, magazines, family members, Dr. Oz, and diet books.

Similarly, portion-measuring and calorie-counting, while still technically allowing a person to eat any type of food they want, can be comforting because they eliminate the need to decide internally how much you are hungry for, and what level of fullness you want to reach, and then filter that decision through a lifetime of internalized, half-remembered rules about how many calories is too much, what people will think if you eat two sandwiches in one sitting, and whether or not you are a bad person for wanting dessert on top of a really big meal.

Most diets, in fact, attempt to combine a sense of permission within comforting limits, just like eating competence does – low-carb diets pull you in with promises of endless steak while prohibiting mashed potatoes, Weight Watchers says you can technically eat anything you want as long as it stays within your Points allowance, and food combining plans claim you can eat any food as long as it is combined properly with other foods (the upshot being you can never again eat a tuna sandwich or other common food items) – but in my opinion, they fail miserably.

The permission they offer is conditional and incomplete, and the limits they offer are arbitrary, artificial, and sometimes downright cruel, because they disrupt people’s foodways and traditions, and encourage them to override the internal appetite signals that actually are trying to steer them in the right direction.

Unconditional permission to eat food that you truly want, that is meaningful to you (and it might sound silly to say that tuna sandwiches or mashed potatoes have meaning, but they do), in amounts and combinations that feel right in your body, is true permission. Anything less is counterfeit permission.

The helpful structure of predictable, routine eating times interspersed with non-eating times where you are not left hungry or unsatisfied and longing for more, and can actually devote your attention fully to other matters – which requires you to devote enough time and thought to food that you get fed and nourished, but also gives you a break from needing to think about food – is real structure. Other forms of structure are often restriction in disguise.

So why do people find these forms of restriction appealing and helpful? Well, aside from helping people to negotiate a varied, complex, and ambivalent food world, I also believe these things feel comforting because we have been trained to distrust our own appetites.

This is often expressed through the idea of food addiction, which I will talk about in the next post.

I like to go on walks. I live in a good neighbourhood for it, near the beach.

During the summer, I spent a fair bit of time swimming at the beach. I have a lot of anxiety about going outside at all, thanks to about twenty years of sexual harassment and fat bashing from strangers, so it took me a couple of summers of living here to work up to that point. (And I still got exhorted to consider polyamory by some dude on the boardwalk. This world is just one big ambivalent boner, sometimes.)

I got a swimsuit that covers me nearly head-to-toe. I practiced going down to the water on my own and putting my toes in, and then walking back home. Then I practiced going down to the water and wading around and then walking home. Finally, one day I cannonballed into the lake from a pier, and this summer I went swimming several times and enjoyed the absolute shit out of myself.

I was aware, the entire time, that the people around me (it’s crowded) were very likely judging me. Or at least, some of them were. Maybe some of them pitied me, maybe some of them thought I was “inspiring” for being a fat lady exercising in public (maybe I was on a Weight Loss Journey ™ !) Probably some of them just thought I was gross, disliked having to see my fat body in tight swimwear, and wished I had stayed at home under a blanket. Such is life.

It is painful to know that people make judgments like this, and that they sometimes directly tell me all about it (WOOOO FAT BITCH!!!), but ultimately I have decided it is none of my business until they make it my business. And despite being an oversensitive sadface whinybaby, I work hard to fight against the impulses that tell me to just stay home forever, or at least until everyone else has been killed in the coming zombie apocalypse.

(No shit, sometimes I fantasize about a world where I am blissfully, peacefully alone, and can walk down the street without anyone looking at me or thinking anything about me; where my body and my time are not subject to the whims of strangers. I watched the first twenty minutes of 28 Days Later with morbidly rapt attention.)

Now that the weather has cooled and the fall colours are out, there’s no more lake swimming to be had, but plenty of lovely walking to do. I have a complicated relationship with exercise, due to a history of overdoing it and hurting myself, but since I work from home now, I have to be extra mindful of making the effort to get out.

I make that effort as often as I can, because it makes my legs feel awesome, because my knees get cranky if I sit around for a couple of days in a row, and because I love the slight burn and tingle in my lungs and heart from going up a really good hill. I love having an excuse to listen to loud, obscene music through eardrum-killing headphones, and to be as close as I can get to blissful aloneness. I love coming home and peeling off my sweater and letting the sweat dry and feeling the happy warmth in my chest while I drink delicious cold water.

But when I stood up to go for a walk on Tuesday, I hesitated more than usual. The conversation of last week – about how fat people need to be shamed and harassed for their own good – came back to me. I was hyper aware that, if I went out, people would be judging me, pitying me, or wondering if they should speak up and point out to me, for my own good, that I am fat.

I went out anyway. Almost the entire time, I felt like a plague rat. I felt that people would look at me and assume I was diseased, and shudder and move away. And even though I was doing something ostensibly good for my health, this understanding and awareness that people find me gross did not make it easier or more rewarding to care for my health.

The emotional risk of being fat in public makes it tempting to not care for yourself by going out and getting some fresh air and walking around like you deserve to be in this world. The emotional risk of being fat in public makes it safer to stay home in your dinky, 90-year old city apartment with creaky floors and a tiny living room in which it is not fun for you, or for your downstairs neighbours, to exercise.

Eventually, though, I got home and enjoyed the lovely feeling of having moved my body in a way that wasn’t punishing. I took this picture and reminded myself, once again, that I deserve to exist and to take care of myself in the ways I deem most appropriate. And that, even though people will question me and judge me, they are wrong. They are on the wrong side of history, and until the sea change happens that will show just how ridiculous our culture was for stigmatizing people based on appearance, I need to survive.

I went out again the next day, and I’ll go again today. It’s stupid that it has to be an act of rebellion, but for now, in this world, that’s exactly what it is.

For those of you hate-reading my blog right now, welcome and carry on. People do so love to be slightly irritated. I probably won’t approve your comments, though.

Further reading:

Health at Every Size blog
Dances with Fat
This is Thin Privilege
Fatshionista
Living ~400 lbs.
It Gets Fatter
Fierce Fatties
Two Whole Cakes
Lesley on xoJane
The Rotund
Marianne on xoJane
Shapely Prose archives
Notes from the Fatosphere
Shakesville
The Health Culture (not a blog about fat, per se, but about a lot of other cool things)

Yesterday, the video of Jennifer Livingston (and here’s a transcript of the video), a fat news anchor responding to an email about how fat and unhealthy she was, went viral. I figured I should probably talk about it, rather than just making oblique references to it.

Here’s the email:

Community responsibility.

Hi Jennifer,

It’s unusual that I see your morning show, but I did so for a very short time today. I was surprised indeed to witness that your physical condition hasn’t improved for many years. Surely you don’t consider yourself a suitable example for this community’s young people, girls in particular. Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain. I leave you this note hoping that you’ll reconsider your responsibility as a local public personality to present and promote a healthy lifestyle.

A lot of people have tried to make the argument that the email was not bullying, since it referenced concern for her health.

Health is always and forever the argument weight bigots lean on to give a socially acceptable veneer to their harassment. Marianne has something to say about that:

If you gave a good goddamn about the health of fat people, you’d shut up about our fatness. You are destroying our mental health — and that can kill a person just as surely as anything else.

Every single fat person in the world already knows they are fat. They may not know their exact BMI, or where that BMI falls on the ridiculously arbitrary classification system from overweight to obese to morbidly obese, but it is very difficult in this culture not to be aware when your weight is higher than average, or higher than the cultural ideal.

Telling someone that they are fat, even when couched in expressions of “concern for their health” is not giving them any new information. It’s not helping them. And, especially when that person is a perfect stranger, it is most likely a transparently aggressive maneuver to shame and put them in their place.

Women in the public eye are held to ridiculous and gender-specific scrutiny for the way they look – their hair, their clothes, whether their faces are pretty, and the size and shape of their bodies. While people have the legal right to say whatever they want about any woman in the public eye, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a total dick move, that it’s not an expression of one of the most insidious forms of entitled misogyny.

And that means we are going to call you out on it, just to make sure everyone knows what an asshole you just revealed yourself to be.

This issue, despite the protests of the emailer and some of his defenders, is not really about health at all. It’s about making sure there is always an underclass of people who can be readily identified, and that identity used as the foundation on which to prop up hackneyed stereotypes and value judgments (lazy, smelly, gluttonous, stupid, low-class), which ultimately results in an entire group of people being devalued as human beings for having one, relatively unimportant characteristic in common.

Welcome to appearance-based discrimination 101.

Humanity seems to revel in this. We have done this to so many different groups of people over time. It is our calling-card as humans, and it is complete and utter bullshit.

Oppression hurts all human beings. It hurts civilization itself, which requires the contribution of many and diverse people to remain strong and to grow in sophisticated and sustainable ways. Oppression effectively prevents, or marginalizes, certain people’s contributions to society, often based on nothing more than a surface characteristic. It squanders their talents, lives, health, intelligence, and humanity by arbitrarily deciding that, because they look a certain way or their body does or doesn’t do certain things, they are simply not good enough to contribute.

A psychiatrist named Claudia Howard coined what are sometimes referred to as Howard’s Laws of Human Worth, summarized below:

• All have infinite, internal, eternal, and unconditional worth as persons.
• All have equal worth as people. Worth is not comparative or competitive. Although you might be better at sports, academics, or business, and I might be better in social skills, we both have equal worth as human beings.
• Externals neither add to nor diminish worth. Externals include things like money, looks, performance, and achievements. These only increase one’s market or social worth. Worth as a person, however, is infinite and unchanging.
• Worth is stable and never in jeopardy (even if someone rejects you.)
• Worth doesn’t have to be earned or proved. It already exists.

Weight is not an indicator of human worth. Weight is also not a behaviour; you cannot accurately assume behaviours or health status based on appearance.

Healthy people come in all shapes and sizes. Health is not a fixed, one-dimensional commodity; good health looks different to different people, and it encompasses factors from every area of a person’s life, not just their weight or blood pressure or how fast they can run upstairs. Even people who are “unhealthy” by conventional definitions deserve respect and equality, and not to have their private affairs questioned by strangers. Every single person in our society has inherent value as a human being.

Telling fat people that they are bad examples for daring to have jobs and exist in public spaces is eliminationist rhetoric – it suggests that fat people have no place in this world, that they need to just go away, hide at home with the lights off, and starve themselves until they are fit to be seen in public again.

Fuck that. Fat people exist, we have existed, we will continue to exist. We have as much right to this world, and our jobs, and the public eye, as anyone else.

Our bodies and the status of our health are not public property. Our existence is not open to debate or discussion. We are here, and our health is between us and the people to whom we’ve given informed consent to make judgments about it. It is not a handy club for you to beat us with. And if you cared one iota for fat people’s health, you would shut the fuck up and let us handle our business. The constant pressure and questioning and needling and harassment fat people get from family, friends, coworkers, neighbours, and perfect strangers all combines to increase stigma, and that stigma materially hurts people’s health.

Ragen had something brilliant to say:

Everybody has the right exist in the body they have without shame, stigma or oppression. That right is inalienable and not yours to confer. This is not up for discussion, debate, or vote. There are no other valid opinions. Fat people have the right to exist in the bodies we have now. Period.

Next time you are concerned about a fat person’s health, consider that the best thing you might do for them is to treat them like capable adults and let them sort it out for themselves. Don’t add to the unhealthy storm of negativity and pressure and fear-mongering that is already surrounding them.

Until we ask for your advice, just hush. Let us be.

For instance, this happened. That link is to a story about a fat news anchor who called out the writer of a very concern-trolling email about what a bad example she was setting for THE CHILDREN by publicly being a fat person with a job.

Watch the video if you haven’t already seen it. It’s pretty great. She points her finger several times, which I loved.

You might also notice the little link there at the bottom. Kaye, the kind soul who posted the video to Upworthy.com, included a link to my site as a place to read more about fat and health and fat stereotypes. Very cool! The influx of traffic is also kind of bananas. I hope my website doesn’t break – if it’s taking longer than usual to load, that would be why. As a result, I’m kind of sitting here babysitting things for tonight.

If you are new here, from Upworthy or not, hi and welcome. This is a blog written by a fat lady (me, I’m Michelle) who has a degree in nutrition.

I don’t do clinical nutrition (the kind where you get a special diet for diabetes or high cholesterol or kidney disease or cancer and whatnot) and I am not a registered dietitian, but I have similar training and I teach people who’ve had a lifetime of guilty, weird, or otherwise restrained eating to feel good about food again and eat relatively normally.

I didn’t make up the idea by myself – I was trained by a dietitian named Ellyn Satter, who created the approach (known as eating competence.) I’m one of the few people in the world who does this work. I work online over Skype with people all over the world, so if you’re in the market for that kind of thing, check me out.

This blog, and my work, takes a Health at Every Size approach, meaning that instead of focusing on making weight changes as an avenue to good health, I focus first on behaviour changes (like eating normally) that improve quality of life and health, regardless of weight.

As part of this work, a belief in the ideas of size diversity and fat acceptance, or fat liberation, is critical. This is the philosophical and political stance that fat people are not lesser members of society because of their bodies, that appearance-based prejudice is never okay, and that stereotypes based on those prejudices are always flawed. This stance is linked in sisterhood to larger anti-oppression activism.

I also like science a whole lot, and I take an evidence-based approach to my work, although the moral principles (that people of all sizes and in all states of health are equally worthy of respect and have the right to exist) stand independent of weight and health science.

I like comments, if you want to chime in, but I want you to know that I have a whip-smart set of readers already who will be critical of any comments championing weight loss or indulging in stereotypes about fat people. Most people don’t make that mistake, but I thought I should give you a heads up.

At the bottom of this post, however, you are totally welcome to comment and introduce yourself and ask any (polite) 101-type questions you might have about this whole strange idea. We will try our best to help you out. Or you can just post links to funny YouTube videos and cat pictures. I’m happy either way. Comments are on moderation right now – see note below.

Last thing: I live in Canada and often spell things funny. I grew up in the US, though, so I do know what milk in jugs and Milky Way bars look like.

Lately, I’ve had a couple of run-ins with the assumption that all fat people binge eat.

I was surprised to find that it really hurt my feelings, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is. I don’t think it’s purely because I want to distance myself from the stigma of binge eating – I regularly work with and talk to people who binge eat, and I know to my core that I don’t value them any less, or judge them any more harshly. I just think that they are going through a tough thing.

But I dislike stereotypes to begin with, even the seemingly favourable ones (“Those gays are so creative!” etc.) because they gloss over the real, individual human being who is standing right in front of you, and paste over their humanity with snappy lapel-button aphorisms, conveniently hegemonic common sense, and bumper sticker wit.

And when you are ignoring the humanity of someone standing right in front of you, it shows you can’t be bothered to get to know them, to make the effort to incorporate their complexity into your understanding of the world. It also shows you aren’t really paying attention to what they’re saying, which is just flat-out rude.

Finally, I hit on the best way to describe how I feel about the assumption that all fat people are binge eaters – it’s like repeatedly calling someone by the wrong name, even when they’ve reminded you of your name over and over again.

And even though you might not find the other name personally offensive (I’ve got nothing against the Allisons of the world, but I’m not one, and dear Lord stop calling me that), but because it is not yours. It is not you. And somehow, in an absurd little way, it hurts.

(I will take this moment to offer my apologies to Craig, who I accidentally christened Greg a while ago. You know who you are.)

A simple mistake is a simple mistake, but a consistent pattern of “mistakes” is often a manifestation of disrespect, or even a deliberate display of social dominance.

My name is Michelle, I am fat, and I don’t binge eat. Binge eaters are not bad, out-of-control people – I simply don’t share that experience, despite being really fat. Assuming I do based on the way I look is stereotyping. And because stereotypes are a way of applying individual characteristics to entire groups of people, often based on appearance, they are by definition inaccurate. Because people vary.

The part of stereotyping all fat people as binge eaters that I find the most hurtful is when it comes from other fat people, or formerly fat people – because their experience of looking like me, at some point, apparently lends them the veneer of rarified insider knowledge; because fat people in our culture are such an intensely stereotyped group that, of course, it is assumed that the experience of a single fat person represents the experience of all; and because confessions of binge eating represent useful anecdata to prop up the dominant narrative of fat people as unrepentant gluttons.

(Which is not only a stereotype of fat people, but also a moral judgment of people who binge eat. Two birds, one stereotype.)

Let me make this very clear – I am not hurt when a fat person or formerly fat person discloses that they do or did binge eat. Not only is binge eating morally neutral, but a person sharing their personal experience is not about me.

But when they make it about me by promoting the idea that, because they did it, every other person of a particular weight must be doing it too – then I am hurt.

So let’s talk a bit about binge eating, what it is and what it isn’t. (Caveat: I am not an expert on binge eating or eating disorders by any means, more of an interested observer who has done some reading, since it is closely related to the work I do.)

What it’s not:

• Binge eating isn’t accidentally or even deliberately overeating (which is something people of all sizes do sometimes – either you don’t realize you’re full until it’s too late, or it’s Thanksgiving and you purposely eat to the point of feeling stuffed because the food is awesome.)
• It’s not any act of eating undertaken by a fat person (though this is often the assumption.)
• It is not even eating for emotional reasons.

What it is:

• The American Psychiatric Association defines binge eating as a large amount eaten in a discrete period of time, while feeling out of control.
• In an “objective binge,” the amount eaten is much larger than most people would eat within that timeframe (e.g. three large meals’ worth of eating within an hour or two), and it can become a very expensive habit.
• Sometimes, however, a “normal” amount of food is eaten in a way that feels out of control – this is called a “subjective binge.”

And, in my experience, I have observed that:

• Binge eating is often used to blot out or completely dissociate oneself from emotions.
• Binge eating is sometimes a reaction to starvation, fear of food scarcity, or dieting.
• Binge eating is often very rapid and marked by feelings of restlessness or agitation while eating.
• Binge eating often happens in secret.
• Feelings of pleasure from starting a binge are quickly replaced with disgust and revulsion, even while continuing to binge.

(Some of the preceeding points come from Christopher Fairburn’s excellent book, Overcoming Binge Eating.)

And despite just about everything you will read online about binge eating, Fairburn states that it’s a misconception that binge eaters are all fat –

It is a common misconception that all people with binge eating disorder are overweight. Community studies indicate that only about half are overweight (defined as having a body mass index of 27 or above…)

Note that this book was written before the BMI category cut-offs were revised downward, making a BMI of 25 or above “overweight.” It is still serves my argument that you can’t pick out a binge eater based on who looks fat, given that people with BMIs between 25 and 30 often pass for “normal.”

Bottom line – people with eating disorders come in all shapes and sizes, and you cannot make accurate assumptions about someone’s eating based on their appearance alone.

In those who are fat and who do binge eat, the cause-and-effect relationship between eating and weight may not be clear. At least one study reported that fat people who believed in negative stereotypes about obesity were more likely to binge eat after experiencing stigma – so it’s possible that the experience of being fat (and hating yourself) may sometimes cause binge eating, instead of purely the other way around. There is also the possibility that people who diet may be more vulnerable to binge eating, and guess who might do a lot of dieting? That’s right, fat people.

Another thing you might read online is that the proposed treatment for binge eating is, essentially, dieting – trying to control your food intake for the purpose of weight loss. The problem is that dieting often preceeds, and can trigger or perpetuate, binge eating.

Here’s one more thing binge eating is not:

It’s not a moral failing.

Binge eating can be many things – an impulse control problem among people who have other issues (like addictions, or certain psychiatric diagnoses), a compulsive response to intense anxiety and/or depression, or a reaction against food scarcity. But no matter its origins, it is disordered eating, not greed, gluttony, or lust. Not a character defect. Not a sin.

It’s painful and it’s a really difficult thing to go through, and it deserves treatment. No one sits down and rationally decides that they want to have an eating disorder. Binge eating is not willful disobedience against the cultural mandate to eat as little as possible at all times. It is often a side-effect of trying to do exactly that.

How often do you hear someone say they need to “work off breakfast,” or that they spoiled their workout by eating some calorific food afterward?

I hear it quite a bit, and it always bothers me. Let me count the ways.

First of all, reducing food to “calorie intake” and movement to “calorie expenditure” – setting them up as opposites, one cancelling the other out – disregards the real, complex, essentially human experiences of eating and moving.

It sets food and movement up to be rivals, competing for control over your weight. In doing so, it centers weight as The Priority.

It assumes one should always be in a state of calorie deficit, pursuing weight loss to the exclusion of enjoying your food, or moving for the fun of it.

It also implies that the only reason a person would exercise is for the purpose of off-setting what they eat – that food is matter, and exercise anti-matter.

Black or white. Zero or one. Positive or negative. All or nothing.

Even if you have given up the intentional pursuit of weight loss, it can be hard to escape this kind of thinking. It is imbedded, in many ways, into our culture and our language about eating and exercise. If you find yourself thinking this way, that’s okay – we all internalize messages from our surroundings. The question is whether you examine those messages, and how you act on them.

The best reminder you can give yourself in these instances, where either you have thought of food and exercise as negating each other, or someone else has sent this message in your general direction, is this:

Food and exercise are not enemies. They are friends. They work together to create and sustain life.

If you were to only eat without moving, you might remain nourished, but gradually become weakened in your bones and muscles, your cardiovascular fitness would wane, and you would become very ill. If your internal organs also stopped moving, you would die.

On the flip side, if you were to only move without eating, you would also become weakened (but probably not gradually), and then you would die.

Important note here: “moving” means literally that – any movement that you do in a day. We’ve come to prioritize and privilege rarefied forms of movement in our culture, usually involving gym memberships and special clothes and/or equipment, but your body does not care – your body cares about whether you can do your activities of daily living with adequate energy and strength, and how well your heart and lungs function. You don’t need a gym membership to do any of that (though if you just like going to the gym, then bully for you.)

Simply moving through your day – hell, simply existing without voluntary movement at all – uses up energy. But how many people reduce their activities of daily living to just “calories burned?”

“Oh, I need to burn some calories, so I guess I’ll clean up the kitchen and then concentrate on this book for a while!”

It would be absurd – because even simple activities like kitchen-cleaning and book-reading are about so much more than just calories burned. They are experiences that involve emotion, problem-solving, engaging your senses. They are the stuff human lives are made of.

You cannot reduce human life to a thermodynamic transaction.

There is more to it than that.

There is more to eating than calories, even biochemically – there are vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, antioxidants, electrolytes, fluids, dietary fibre, all the raw materials for repairing and remodeling every single cell in your body. More than that, there is culture, family history, occasion, artistry, skill, growth, feelings of joy or resentment, pleasure or distaste. There are emotional associations and memories, and there is the basic affirmation of life – “I need to eat to survive, and I am worth the effort to survive.” Every act of eating reaffirms your right to exist.

There is more to movement than calories, even biochemically – there is bone strengthening, muscle building, aerobic fitness, neural growth, balancing of hormones and lipid transporters, and every single involuntary movement and chemical reaction carried on below your conscious awareness, working around the clock to stave off entropy. More than that, there is fun, adventure, challenge, mastery, strength, place associations, social bonding, the experience of being an alive thing on a round, blue speck in the galaxy. There is a basic affirmation that you exist in a world you were designed to navigate.

Even if you are disabled, even if you have some impairment, your body is still exploring – from the bat of an eyelash to a trip to the bathroom. You are negotiating, discovering, navigating a physical existence.

You were made for this world. You belong in it, and it belongs to you.

Eating and moving: your right to exist, and a world in which to exist. They are not rivals. They do not annihilate each other. They collaborate to make a whole person, body and soul.

I agree.

It’s scary because, if you have any history of hunger, whether due to not having enough money to buy food, or what I like to call “self-induced food insecurity” such as dieting or food restriction, or even due to just not placing a priority on eating regularly, and hence “forgetting” to eat for a long time — a part of you still remembers that experience, and you carry the fear of not having enough to eat inside you, sometimes for a very long time.

We talked about the fuzzy self a bit before — and it seems that the fuzzy self has a long memory. It does not forgive and forget easily.

As such, grazing and eating on demand seems very comforting. It sounds, on paper, like the perfect solution: just eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full! And, indeed, lots of people apparently do this successfully by teaching themselves to eat intuitively and to give up dieting. This is the basis for programs like Overcoming Overeating, an approach that has helped lots of people.

But for some people, it doesn’t work out. Hi, I’m one of them.

I think demand feeding can work, but it’s not the only option. For adults with structured work or school schedules, it can be impractical. And if you are one of my clients or readers struggling with eating, then there’s a good chance demand feeding did not work for you.

If you are eating on demand or grazing and it’s going well for you, great. Keep on keeping on. What I’m about to say applies to people who tried demand feeding and only received partial benefit, or couldn’t make it work at all.

Eating regular meals and snacks, having discrete periods of eating interspersed with discrete periods of not eating (and not having to think about food), can be really helpful if you struggle to feel hunger and fullness signals. It can also be incredibly reassuring to the small, scared part of you who remembers going hungry, who didn’t know where its next meal was coming from (or when.)

I try not to be too rigid about this structure. For me, it means eating in a routine way, at roughly (roughly) the same times every day. The way this works out in my life, at present, is that I eat breakfast soon after I get up, then drink coffee, and then around 12 or 1pm, I will have lunch. Around 3 or 4pm I will usually want a snack, and then dinner happens at 6 or 7pm. Usually there is an evening snack, either with a client right after dinner, or later in front of the TV around 9pm.

The way I arrived at this schedule was through a series of trials and errors. It also changes as my other daily routines and work schedule change.

It is not easy to simply impose a meal schedule on yourself and then stick with it. I am a firm believer in planting seeds of routine, and then letting the routine grow itself a bit, until you’re ready to plant another seed. This is the only way I have ever managed to get myself to develop a routine in any area of my life, because I am incredibly resistant to self-imposed routines (FEELS LIKE RULES!!! MUST BREAK THEM!!!), and yet I am so much happier when I’m in a good one.

And this is how the transition from grazing to structure happens: one seed, one piece at a time.

The first piece is simply observing what you do with food now, and the ways in which grazing isn’t working for you. When is the first time you usually eat during the day? How do you feel before and after eating? How long does it take before you are hungry again? Uncomfortably overhungry? Are there any times of the day during which you consistently get overfull or keep eating when you’re not even enjoying it?

Don’t just think up the answers after the fact — practice observing how these things happen in the moment. The answers you come up with will show you the best place to plant your first seed of structure.

For me, it was making the real-time observation that I was drinking coffee before eating in the morning, and then feeling not-hungry but incredibly tired and crappy. On the mornings when I ate something first, even if I didn’t think I was feeling hungry, I noticed that I felt much, much better. (Guess what? Sometimes hunger manifests itself as tiredness!)

That gave me the idea to make one, single deal with myself: to eat something for breakfast (even if it was just one slice of toast, or a glass of milk and a banana) before drinking coffee.

That was it, that was the whole deal.

I focused on that one thing, and let everything else slide for about a week.

During the time of seed-planting, it is important to continue observing. With observation comes the all-critical intrinsic motivation to do, or not do, something.

When you observe the actual consequences of what you are doing, by paying actual attention in the moment and not sort of putting two and two together long after the fact, you develop a memory that lasts, and you begin to apply it automatically when making decisions in the future.

I do this now, when deciding each morning to eat breakfast, even when I don’t think I am particularly hungry. It goes something like this:

“Self, what should we have for breakfast?”

“GAWD BREAKFAST THAT IS SO MUCH WORK, TOO TIRED.”

“Well, we could skip it and just have coffee instead…”

“OH SHIT LAST TIME WE DID THAT OUR EYES FELT SANDY AND WE STALAGMITED TO THE COUCH, TOTALLY SUCKED.”

“Okay, let’s pick the easiest thing and then have coffee.”

“GOOD DEAL BRO, DIBS ON THE BANANA.”

(I don’t know why my internal dialogue sounds like a very reasonable Bob Ross coaxing a drunken frat boy to eat a banana, but there you have it.)

The trick to this entire process is the willingness to let yourself make mistakes, and instead of letting your mind jump immediately on the judgey train to Verbal Abuse Station, just watch, notice, and mentally jot down what happens under “Notes for Future Consideration.”

Other useful observations I have made, noted, and continue to use to inform the choices I make around eating:

• If I do not eat something fibrey for breakfast a few times a week, there will be digestive consequences.
• If I wait too long for lunch, I will get desperately overhungry (even if I think I am not overhungry) and then feel like taking a nap for the rest of the day even after I have fed myself.
• If I do not eat fruit and/or vegetables with lunch, I will feel “off” and vaguely dissatisfied and noshy for the rest of the afternoon.
• If I do not eat an afternoon snack, I will be in no state to cook dinner.
• If I do not start cooking dinner before I actually feel hungry, I will fumble around the kitchen like the unfortunately-named Fourth Stooge, Droppy — and by the time dinner is ready, I will be overhungry and spend the rest of the evening in a toddler-like state of insolence to all authority figures, real or imagined.

In order for me to make these observations, and plant the corresponding seeds, I actually had to make every single of these mistakes. Repeatedly. But with one critical condition: I paid attention while it was happening, made the connection between the consequence and the action (or lack of action), and refused to berate myself.

One step at a time, structure grows from the mistakes you make, and the seeds you plant in response.

When your seeds are all planted, and structure growing from them, a remarkable thing will start to happen: you will start to feel hungry, comfortably hungry, at the routine eating times through your day.

Even if you forget to eat, the feeling of hunger will come knocking on your door to remind you — and if you respect it and respond to it, you will make friends with it. Instead of hunger being scary, it will become your little handmaid, reminding you to take care of yourself.

When you sit down to eat feeling comfortably hungry, it’s easier, in turn, to eat until you feel comfortably full. “Eat when you are hungry, and stop when you are full” becomes second nature. It just happens to occur at roughly (roughly!) the same times every day.

And with time, the fuzzy self will start to forgive you and feel safe again — no more scary.

Ragen has written about The Vague Future Health Threat before, and The Death Threat is its close cousin.

The Vague Future Health Threat and The Death Threat are two of a kind because they allow a person to openly vent their fat hatred in public, but under cover of plausible deniability: it’s not about hatred, it’s about your health!

Let’s unpack this.

Here’s how the theory goes: “obesity” is a disease – the disease of being fat, specifically.

The word “obese” implies that the “disease” is caused by eating yourself fat. Which, you know, might not be true. These studies imply that not only do fat people eat roughly the same amount as thin people, but also that recent calorie intake has increased by the same amount across people of different weights. So maybe some people are just fat, because different bodies have different genetic blueprints that respond differently to the same environment? I know, weird.

But for the sake of this thought experiment, let’s go with “obesity is a disease caused by eating too much,” which means you did it to yourself, fatty.

In the grown-up world where rational people live, it is not actually set in stone that “obesity” is a disease, not least of all because the definition of “disease” is still somewhat fuzzy – which is handy, because it can be stretched to conveniently cover physical traits and behaviours that you find distasteful, thus becoming a useful means of social control that sets “health” (definition also fuzzy) as the new meritocratic standard of Good Dog/Bad Dog, a game we all love to play.

The “obesity = disease” theory is also not set in stone because being fat does not lead to an exclusive, inevitable set of symptoms or health outcomes, despite all the alarmism in the media.

There are fat people who exist in all states of biomedical health, with different health conditions, and with varying life expectancies – just like thin people. There is no particular disease or syndrome that all fat people get, or that only fat people get* – just like thin people. And some fat people don’t seem to have any symptoms or risk factors (other than weight) at all – just like some thin people. So it’s a fairly controversial classification that is still under debate.

But for the sake of this thought experiment, let’s also roll with the “obesity is a disease” theory, within which The Death Threat operates.

If “obesity” is a disease, then that means people are concerned about fat people’s health. Because we care about each other, right? (And our very important Health Care Dollars ™ which we alone contribute to the system through the sweat of our virtuous little brows.)

And when you see someone who has a real, honest-to-goodness disease, it’s only natural to remind them that THEY ARE GOING TO DIE, and also to take some measure of delight in the fact.

Because only losers get sick and die, amirite?

I imagine the death threateners would argue that, no, it’s only people who are clearly not treating their disease in the prescribed manner who receive their judgment. And also because fat people brought their “obesity” on themselves by simply eating too much, something that is super-easy to remedy by simply eating less.

So, if a fat person is caught in the act of being “obese,” it means that not only is it their fault, they are being willfully non-compliant. They aren’t following The Rules.

And just like you would taunt a smoker who develops lung cancer, and just like you would taunt a person with cancer who is trying non-traditional treatments, you would naturally take it upon yourself to charitably spread the news to all the diseased, doomed, and non-compliant fat people of the world that they are GOING TO DIE. HA HA!

Of course you would! It makes perfect sense, provided you’re a terrible person with absolute shit for brains.

*With the rare exception of fat-person-who-literally-can’t-leave-the-house syndrome, in which case there are probably underlying medical issues, just as there are with thin-person-who-wastes-away-to-nothing syndrome.

I forget that sometimes. And when I am reminded, it is not always in the kindest terms. Usually, it’s in terms like, “But your body is not okay because it’s fat and I find that gross! I mean, unhealthy!”

Comments like these question my right to bodily autonomy, and even my right to exist.

I find it stunning that in a country — the US, where many of my commenters live — that is supposed to be so staggeringly individualistic and freedom-oriented, and which, by the way, does not have universal health care yet, commenters will so readily lean on the notion of costs to the state as an excuse to strip away someone’s bodily autonomy.

Trust me, this is not a road that has led anywhere good in the past.

Commenters also question my right to privacy, by asking me openly about confidential medical information — which might seem reasonable at first, but consider whether someone else in a similar position, but who is thin and promoting the popular view would be asked the same questions.

Probably not, even though the questions would be just as relevant. Maybe we should start asking Dr. Oz about his blood glucose and cholesterol numbers. It’s only fair, right?

No. Not only is it rude and presumptuous, it’s incredibly ableist – a term you’re probably not familiar with if you haven’t heard about this Health at Every Size thing (and maybe even if you have.)

In short: shaming people based on physical impairments or medical conditions is wrong. Treating someone as less of a person, or presuming that they are stupid, illogical, or not worthy of listening to because they have physical impairments or medical conditions is wrong.

I have worked with health care professionals who had diabetes. Did it make them less capable? No.

Was it any of my business? No.

Was it the business of their patients, most of whom were being treated for diabetes?

No. Not even then.

Refusing to engage with the logic of someone’s argument because it might be easier to attack them for the way they look, or for the way their body functions, is not only wrong but transparently foolish.

Engage with the argument, not with the arguer’s body.

I used to be willing to talk about my metabolic health indicators as a way of stereotype-breaking, but I’m not going to do that here. It is a way of throwing “unhealthy” people under the bus. It implies that it’s okay to be fat only if you meet X criteria.

You know what? No.

It is okay to be fat, because fat people already exist.

Fat people have existed for a very, very long time.

Even if all of us tried, not all of us would become permanently thin.

Fat people exist. We have existed. We will continue to exist. So to say that it’s not acceptable to be fat is to deny our right to exist.

Weight is not a behaviour; it is a physical trait. You don’t get to decide that people with certain physical traits don’t get to exist, no matter how distasteful you may find them.

And despite popular belief, you cannot presume to know a person’s behaviour based solely on their weight.

If you are fat and you don’t want to be, that’s fine with me. Do your thing — I’m not going to stop you.

But you do not get a say in my right to exist as I am, or to treat my body the way I think is best.

I am fat and I do not participate in intentional weight loss for various reasons, both personal and professional, and I still get to exist. The fact of my existence makes it okay, because whether or not you like me, or agree with me, or find me gross to look at, or “worry about my health,” I still get to have human rights. I don’t need you to find me appealing, or to agree with me, in order to have civil rights.

I still have the right not to be subject to appearance-based discrimination. I still have the right to exist.

My fatness is not an attack on anyone. And those of you who want to complain about how many “health care dollars!!!” it costs to help fellow citizens fallen ill need to re-examine your priorities. Nobody wakes up and says, “You know what? I just want to get really, really sick and use up lots of health care dollars!!!”

Thin people get sick too. What if I refused to fund medical care of thin people because they were thin? Because I assumed they all had eating disorders, or smoked cigarettes, or were heroin addicts?

I’d be a complete asshole, that’s what. Because you can’t assume behaviours based on weight.

Also – I am happy that some of my tax dollars go to help people with eating disorders and people who develop addiction-related illnesses. I’m not glad those people got sick in the first place, no, and I wish they hadn’t — but I can’t possibly wish it more than they do.

How much do you value Health Care Dollars ™ above the most intimate, basic forms of bodily autonomy? Above the right to eat and move in the way you want? Above the right to exist in the body that is naturally yours?

Your money doesn’t give you any rights over my body. Since I don’t live in the US — and even if I did, I would be denied the privilege of paying for my own private health insurance based on my weight* — you can stop worrying about it anyhow.

Don’t be such a willing little proto-fascist, playing games of who gets to exist and who doesn’t, based on weird appearance-based prejudices — you might end up on the wrong side of someone’s aesthetic preferences one day and find your own right to exist called into serious question.

Because fat or thin, you get to exist, too.

*Edited to Add: lol Affordable Health Care Act was upheld by the US Supreme Court minutes after I published this.

I seem to be a firmly intermediate cook, which is a surprisingly embattled position to occupy in a very food-judgey culture. I am going to kindly ask those of you who are more advanced than I am to please suspend judgment, and those of you who are not as advanced cooks as I am to please not give in to feelings of intimidation or obligation. We all start from where we are.

This is simply an example of foods that I cook – not foods I require or expect anyone else to like or cook. I am hoping you will all share your own recipes or meal concepts in comments.

You will notice that many of the below recipes are distinctly American, or else Americanized versions of other cuisines. I’m a decently adventurous eater, and I especially love heavily-spiced food. Living in Toronto, I am very lucky because I can access food from so many different places in the world, and I like trying new things.

However, when I cook at home, I stick to simple, culturally familiar food because I’m comfortable with the cooking techniques required, and because it gives me a homey feeling. (Though I am not averse to busting out a stir-fry or new combinations of spices when I feel like it.)

Below is a brief sampling of the recipes in my stash. Many of them come from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 12th Edition which is the first cookbook I ever owned, handed down to me from my mom when I was 19 and living the country housewife lifestyle for the first time.

It still has my pencil-scrawls in it from when I was about 8 years old and baking cookies for the first time. I still remember the trip my mom and I took to the bookstore to buy it, and how it was handed to her over the counter, carefully wrapped in its (long since lost) dustcover. It is one of my most cherished possessions.

I basically taught myself how to cook out of it, after reading it cover-to-cover and after much (very much) trial and error, so it holds a special place in my heart – as do all older American cookbooks, like Joy of Cooking, McCall’s Cookbook, Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, and Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook.

However, with these kinds of older encyclopedic cookbooks, I do sometimes need to tweak the recipes for flavour or to make them more convenient.

One of my favourite newer cookbooks is Cook’s Illustrated The New Best Recipe, but most of the recipes are too involved for weeknight meals, in my opinion. Everything I’ve made from it so far has been amazing, though, and if you are of a food science bent at all, you’ll love reading their discussions of how the recipes were developed.

Another favourite cookbook represented below is Pantry Raid by Dana McCauley. This is a Canadian cookbook, but it is not necessarily traditional Canadian food. It is, however, full of simple weeknight recipes that also happen to have tons of flavour, with hardly any modifications needed. It’s out of print, and I don’t own a copy, but I originally got it from the library.

Every year or couple of years, I will get a bug and borrow a ton of recipe books from the library, and then copy down anything that seems likely onto recipe cards to try. I find the process of copying by hand allows me to fully think through the recipes, and also to adapt the instructions to suit my kitchen and my particular collection of bowls, pots, and pans.

I often streamline the instructions before I ever try the recipes. However, I always cook the recipes with the exact ingredients called for the first time around, before I make modifications for flavour. Then I make notes on the card of what needs changing.

Honourable mentions: Cool Kitchen (recipes for when it’s too hot to cook), Aunt Maud’s Recipe Book (recipes from L. M. Montgomery), and Baking in America (includes Emily Dickinson’s fruitcake recipe.)

I very rarely buy cookbooks, because you can easily over-collect them. Thankfully, my mom-in-law has a huge collection of sometimes old, sometimes strange and wonderful cookbooks (like Food that Really Schmecks, a Mennonite cookbook) that I poke through every time I visit.

I’ve also stolen many recipes from my own mom’s collection, including the Popover Chicken Tarragon recipe below.

Since I mostly cook from recipe cards, and am such a prodigious recipe-thief, I have to carry 3 x 5″ index cards when I travel. I’ve made peace with that.

I keep them in this very 1950s recipe card box I picked up at a flea market years ago. You cannot look at this thing without smiling idiotically.

I consider meals that do require cooking, but don’t require a recipe, to be more Level Two-ish, since they require physical effort, but next to no mental effort.

I also consider recipes that use something pre-prepared, like a sauce or side dish (frozen pierogis, or Uncle Ben’s as a side dish, and possibly even frozen veggies, since they are pre-cut) to be Level Two-ish. Your mileage may vary.

Slab o’ Meat Dinner: This is a broiled piece of meat or fish, with seasoning that doesn’t require a recipe – maybe jerk seasoning or hoisin for chicken, seasoning salt for pork chops, sage or rosemary for pork tenderloin, sausage with mustard, or maybe just salt and pepper – along with potatoes of some kind (boiled, mashed, baked, or even pierogi’d), steamed rice or a packaged rice/pasta side dish, and some kind of very basic vegetable, usually steamed.

Thankfully, I like steamed vegetables with butter and salt, so this is not offensive to my sensibilities – you may feel differently. Cheese can help. I have learned through experience that I feel somehow offended if there is no vegetable with my dinner, despite spending much of my youth indifferent or openly hostile to vegetables. Even something very basic will make me happy – for example, if there are tomatoes in the sauce, or a pre-prepared salad on the side. I’ll eat cocktail carrots or an apple in a pinch.

Pasta with Sauce, Protein, and Vegetables: Vegetables can be in the sauce and/or on the side via salad. I can either make sauce from plain canned tomatoes, or use jarred sauce. The protein can be ground beef or veggie ground round, or whatever else will sauté up easily in a pan, like shrimp or baby clams. I can also add store-bought garlic bread or make it myself from a loaf of French bread toasted in the oven, with real garlic mashed up in the butter. If there is salad it’s almost always from a tub, because I really hate tearing lettuce and I really love baby spinach or arugula. I love spaghetti like a 10-year old, probably because my mom used to make it for me, and that is how I made the fateful and life-altering discovery of garlic.

I know there are more non-recipe meals, but because they don’t have recipes they require me to trawl my memory, which is undercaffeinated at the moment. So, onto the actual recipes.

Most of these will be around Level Three.

Savory Casserole of Chicken – Fannie Farmer. We’ve made this only about three times. When I hear the word “casserole” I expect “meal in a pot,” so I throw a cup or two of rotini or pasta shells into the pot for a starch. I also add a whole green pepper instead of the measly and timid “2 tbsp finely chopped green pepper” because I love the taste of green pepper. With bread and salad, or even just bread, it’s pretty good.

Linguine with Clam Sauce – Pantry Raid. I have gone on about this one at some length. This is a definitely Level Two for me, possibly bordering on Level One. It only requires pantry ingredients, for the most part, and I have it memorized. It also makes a meal-in-one, so I don’t have to bother with a side dish unless I am feeling particularly bready or salad-y that day. Incidentally, Pantry Raid is also one of the few cookbooks with recipes I don’t have to modify. Make of that what you will.

Citrus-Tarragon Roasted Salmon – Pantry Raid. I have one thing to say about this, and it’s that this is absolutely delicious and wonderful. It is another Slab o’ Meat meal, but it requires a recipe because my memory sucks. I usually have a pasta primavera packaged side dish, and broccoli (though sometimes Saucy Brussels Sprouts from BH&G New Cookbook, but they have to be fresh sprouts because frozen ones taste like sulfur when cooked.)

Popover Chicken Tarragon – BH&G New Cookbook. This makes the starch along with the chicken, so all you’re left with is to add a vegetable on the side. I think I made some kind of fancy green beans from The New Best Recipe with this once, and I liked them, though Jeffrey didn’t.

Boiled Beans – Joy of Cooking. This is the most uninspired recipe name ever, but it makes an actually kind of elegant-looking creamy white set of beans with chives on top. I drink every bit of wine that comes into my home on sight, so I use a few tablespoons of sherry instead. (FACT: I will eat anything that has sherry in it.) Usually I add to this some kind of fancy bakery bread and salad. I try to make beans on the weekends because life is just cheaper that way, and because then I have leftovers I can freeze for future lunches.

Beans Bretonne – Fannie Farmer. I have been making this one for ages. It is rather surprisingly spicy, for a Fannie Farmer recipe. It’s bright red-orange, and since I got rid of my food processor and my blender is a pain to clean, I usually skip pureeing the pimientos and just cut a big can of roasted red peppers up into strips or chunks. Again, salad and bread with this…or nothing, if I’m feeling lazy. If I’m making beans, it means I had to soak something overnight and refuse to cook anything else on principle. Although once I did make this as a side dish with sausage.

Jeffrey’s Clam Chowder (no recipe linked because it’s his family’s recipe to share, not mine) – We have not had this in a while, but it’s Jeffrey’s papa’s (that’s English for grandpa) recipe. It is very easy and we usually eat it on holidays. It’s a red clam chowder. I grew up eating only New England clam chowder, because that’s how we do it on the Oregon coast, and even I will eat the hell out of this with some homemade bread. FACT: I will also eat anything with canned baby clams.

Chicken Cacciatore – Fannie Farmer. I haven’t made this in a while, but I used to make it all the time. It’s getting up there to a Level Three for me, as it requires soaking things, chopping things, AND grating things. I usually add orzo to the pot to soak up the liquid and make an easy starch. Because I am lazy, and I like orzo. This recipe requires me to have white wine on hand, which is probably why I don’t make it anymore.

Pork Tenderloin Teriyaki – Fannie Farmer. (Link is an adapted version, not exactly as I make it.) Another Slab o’ Meat that requires a recipe. This is one of the first recipes I ever successfully made from scratch. I make this a lot because it is simple, I love pork tenderloin with my whole heart, and because I love the marinade. I serve it with some kind of rice and some kind of green thing. This is one of the quickest meals I make, though the broiling makes the smoke alarm go off.

Creamed Chicken and Mushrooms – Fannie Farmer. I love mushrooms, and this also has sherry in it, so you know I will eat the hell out of this. It’s totally delicious with mashed potatoes because it makes a gravy. I usually have green beans with it.

Moroccan Spiced Pork Tenderloin – Pantry Raid. Totally sweet and flavourful. Because I really don’t know what in the hell I’m doing with anything Moroccan, I just serve it with rice and some kind of easy vegetable.

Bean and Vegetable Soup – Fannie Farmer. This is maybe a Level Four, actually, because it requires extensive chopping of fresh vegetables, as well as more than an hour of cooking. But it is absolutely delicious, involves Parmesan cheese and bacon crumbles, and you can get away with just bread on the side. I would only make this on a weekend, like with beans.

That’s only part of my box of recipe cards, so I will spare you the rest. The point is (and I guess we will talk about meal planning at some point) I keep the weeknight dinners simple. I will probably cook 2 to 3 actual-recipe meals a week, and fill in the rest with leftovers, pasta, slabs o’ meat, or pre-prepared food – or, in summertime, hotdogs. I really like hotdogs.

Whatever happens, we sit down and eat together at an actual table most nights. Not because it is a moral imperative, but because we both feel well-fed that way. Better-fed than if we busted out the dinner party fare once a month, and spent the rest of the time eating the Rice-a-Roni of resentment.

If you are resentful or rebellious about cooking, lower your standards and figure out some Level Two or Level Three recipes. You won’t suddenly become a bad cook (or a bad person) if you rely on basics.

…Or even if you totally screw up a recipe. Ruining food has been my own private cooking school, and I will gladly fall back on Kraft Dinner or takeout if I mess up.

Willingness to experiment and make mistakes, and to possibly keep a frozen pizza on hand when something doesn’t work out, will only make you a better cook.

I told you in the previous post there would be no criticizing my food. I am touchy about this, and I think we all should be a little touchy about it, actually, instead of just taking the food abuse and hanging our heads in collective food shame. This blog is a food shame-free zone.

Food snobbery has run amok recently, especially online – and this is coming from someone who likes fancy food and has decent cooking skills. But knocking myself out one night results in not cooking at all for the next twenty, so I tend not to. That’s just how I’m wired. Like many people, I run on spoons. Some days more, some days less.

This blog is definitely not the place for food snobbery of any kind. Your style of eating works for you, and I fully support your right to buy and cook and eat anything you want – whether that means raw, vegan, organic food, or processed food from a box. I think they are both fine choices, depending on the person and their life. The key here is that the way you cook and eat may work for you – not necessarily everyone.

If you enjoy fancy cooking and do it every night, good for you! Now be grateful and don’t rub other people’s noses in it.

If you’re a fancy cook who doesn’t judge other people’s less-than-fancy meals, then I love you. You are welcome here.

If you don’t know how to cook, or are just learning to cook, or don’t care about cooking at all, I also love you and you are also welcome here. I will not let anyone shame you.

My basic template for dinners is classic American: protein, starch, and vegetable. Sometimes something sweet for dessert. But if I have the basic three, I’m usually happy.

Protein can be eggs, cheese, meat, poultry, fish, or legumes.

Starch can be potatoes, pasta, rice, or some other kind of grain. Sometimes just bread.

Vegetables are usually salad or steamed frozen veggies (broccoli is my favourite), but I also love steamed fresh spinach, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, sweet potato (kind of does double-duty as a starch, too), or even raw crudites with dip. Sometimes I will get fancy and cook a vegetable side dish that requires a recipe, with sauce and everything, or will use a bunch of different vegetables in a stir-fry, but usually not on a weeknight because that requires lots of chopping and I am lazy. Canned tomatoes of all varieties are my best friend.

I consider beans to be a protein and a starch, and also sort of a vegetable since they are fibre-y. I will eat them on their own if I need to, but of course everything is better with rice. I am in love with the sheer efficiency of beans.

When I am cooking, this is the order I do things in:

-2) The night before, preferably while cleaning up from dinner, put meat to thaw in the refrigerator, or put beans in a bowl to soak on the counter. If I forget to do this, the microwave or canned beans will save me.

-1) After breakfast in the morning, wash up any dishes that I will need later, wipe the counters, and if feeling very organized, put out the pans, cans, spices and recipe card on the counter.

-0.5) Halfway between lunch and dinner, eat an afternoon snack so no one gets injured during the cooking process.

0) An hour or half-hour before dinner needs to be on the table, turn on music, get myself a beer or a glass of wine if I have some.

1) Put away any clean dishes that are in the dish rack or dishwasher, and set the table (though I often forget this until the last minute, and just yell desperately for someone to come do it while I drain the pasta.)

2) If there will be multiple pots or pans involved, fill one half of my sink (the side closest to the stove) with hot, soapy water. All dirty dishes produced by the cooking process will be tossed in here to soak while we eat.

3) Get everything that I will need on the counter – pots, pans, cans, spices, meat, vegetables, knife, cutting board, measuring spoons/cups, mixing bowls if needed, and recipe card. If I already put stuff out in the morning, then all I need is to get the refrigerated ingredients out.

3.5) If I failed to defrost my meat the night before, or if it is still partially frozen due to my damn fridge, defrost it in the microwave using the “Defrost by Weight” setting. Seems to work better laying flat on a plate than in a bowl.

4) Get water boiling in a big pot if I will be boiling anything, preheat the oven if there will be broiling or baking, making sure to put the oven rack in the right spot. If I am going to sauté something, I will start the oil heating in the pan on medium-low heat to avoid smoking (I can turn it up just before things actually go into the pan.)

5) If there are potatoes involved, start prepping them since they take the longest to cook. Wash, peel, cut into chunks, etc.

6) Start chopping onions or other vegetables, if needed, keeping a bowl for garbage scraps right on the counter. Or the plastic bag the vegetables came in, if there is one. (Turns out, this is actually handy, not just something they forced us to do in school.)

7) If potatoes need to go in the now-boiling water, I do that. If I need to start cooking plain rice, or a packaged side dish that can tolerate standing around for a few minutes after it’s done, I start that. If it’s pasta, I will usually wait until the sauce is started cooking, because I really like my pasta al dente.

8) While other things are cooking, if there will be frozen veggies, I put them in a microwave-safe bowl (my smallest glass mixing bowl), add a tablespoon or two of water, then put the lid on (I don’t have a lid, so I use an upside-down salad plate, which happens to fit perfectly on my smallest mixing bowl. I prefer not to use plastic wrap, but I will if necessary.) I stick the whole thing in the microwave, but I don’t cook it yet. Leave the door open if you’re liable to forget.

9) If I’m broiling or baking something, I get it set up on the pan and start it now. If I need to sauté something, I start that now. I definitely use a timer if it’s in the oven.

10) Pasta can go in the water now. I make sure to stir it well, and add oil if I need to leave it alone for a while and attend to other things.

11) In the last 5 minutes of cooking, I close the microwave door and cook my veggies for 5 minutes. It takes a bit longer than the package says because I use a plate as a lid, remember. They may need stirring halfway through, and I have to use oven mitts to hold the bowl and open the lid because steam is evil.

12) When the timer goes off, measure the temperature of the meat, if necessary, or bite a piece of the pasta to test doneness, and then turn off the oven and any burners. Drain the pasta and mix into the sauce.

13) Throw any stray bowls, pans, measuring cups or utensils into the sink or dishwasher, then plate the food (or yell for people to come and get it themselves) and eat.

When all is said and done, I am not the world’s fanciest cook, but if push comes to shove, I can pull off something more elaborate. I just know that elaborate is the enemy of the every day, and perfect is the enemy of the good-enough. If I want to get fed with decent food on more than a monthly basis, I need to not be a perfectionist.

I can push myself to reach up to the second or third shelf, but reaching for a 10 too often results in falling on my ass into a pile of takeout menus.

One last request – No advice-giving in comments, unless someone specifically requests it. If you would LIKE to receive some advice, please add a little “Help, please?” or something to the end of your comment, to make everything nice and clear.

I know most advice is well-meaning, but sometimes it can feel hurtful or dismissive when someone is just trying to express their feelings or their frustration.

I will also try my best not to give unsolicited advice, since I am often guilty of it myself.

Part of it is due to black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking. Part of it is due to fear of criticism and wanting to cover all my bases. But all that aside, the bottom line here is perfectionism. I hold myself to an impossibly high standard, for various reasons internal and external, and ultimately it results in a mash-up of writing things I think are good, and writing absolutely nothing at all.

WHICH IS STRANGELY A LOT LIKE MEAL PLANNING.

Good segue, huh?

Transparent as this attempt at breaking my writer’s block by writing about my writer’s block may be, it is absolutely true. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen perfectionist cooking paralysis in my people.

Often those who are the best, most skilled, and most passionate cooks are also those who cannot bear to set foot in the kitchen, except for sporadic episodes of party-induced panic-cooking, in which they exhaust themselves by making pasta from scratch in quantities large enough to feed a stable of pubescent Olympic swimmers. The rest of the time? It’s Rice-a-Roni-athons and Pizza Hut.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Rice-a-Roni and Pizza Hut – they make a lovely addition to an otherwise varied diet and will let you survive in a pinch – but when it turns into months or even years of the same no-cook delights because you are feeling paralyzed and resentful about the prospect of making actual food in your kitchen, it can get rather dreary. Demoralizing, even.

And this is where I become a cheerleader for mediocre cooking.

Don’t get me wrong – I adore fancy food, and will eat it every chance I get. But I do not adore spending hours in the kitchen (if you do, I will gladly come to your house and eat your food – leave address in comments), especially when I’m hungry, have worked all day, and my feet are tired.

I have flat feet, a tendency toward low blood sugar, and a mood disorder so trust.

If I have to face the prospect of 6pm with an hour or more of cooking ahead of me, there are two possible outcomes: either it’s not going to happen at all, or someone’s going to get hurt. And it won’t be me.

Out of desperation, I have developed a repertoire of what I think of as Level Two and Level Three meals. Let me explain.

Level One is as close to absolutely no effort as one can reasonably get and still eat. This may vary somewhat from person to person, but for me Level One is ordering pizza, eating a bowl of cereal, or having cheese and crackers – maybe, possibly, in the extreme outward edges of Level One, preparing a box of Kraft Dinner or a frozen boxed casserole with nothing on the side. (Level Zero is having someone else cook the food, bring it to you on the couch, and possibly spoon-feed you.)

At this point, it’s subsistence-level eating. It will get you through, and you should probably plan to do this a couple times a week on purpose, but it’s no way to live for months or years at a time.

Level Five would be making a reasonably complex meal, or trying a totally new and unfamiliar recipe. From there, you’d work your way up through levels that include cooking increasingly complex meals with multiple dishes, to basic holiday fare for a crowd, to high-pressure dinner party where you are cooking fancy things for several people.

Maybe Level 10 would be head chef in a gourmet restaurant, cooking incredibly fancy things for many, many people – I really don’t know because from where I stand it is basically terra incognita.

Levels Two and Three, then, would encompass meals that are partially homemade and partially pre-prepared, or meals that are entirely homemade but easy enough that you can put them together in half an hour or so, or one-pot meals that take longer due to slow-cooking, but require little effort outside the assembly stage.

It would also include meals that require some basic pre-prep (taking out something to thaw or soaking beans the night before, or making a simple marinade in the morning), but are not difficult to cook.

The reason for this system (who am I kidding – it’s not really a system, it is totally something I made up on the spot while talking with a client) is to assess where the gaps in your cooking repertoire are. Because those of you who can’t bear to set foot in the kitchen may only have recipes at Levels One and Eight. Black-and-white. All-or-nothing.

See where I’m going with this?

On a weeknight, most human people will not be able to countenance more than an hour of cooking. (And if it’s an hour, part of that hour should probably be spent with something in the oven that you don’t have to baby along.)

This is okay, really. If you are one of the lucky few who love spending more than an hour in the kitchen on a weeknight, then you may safely ignore everything I say in this post. Go forth and be happy – but I beg of you, don’t be a snob about it. Just enjoy your gift.

Because I don’t put massive amounts of pressure on myself to cook elaborate meals on a nightly basis, I paradoxically end up cooking more than I otherwise would, and, I suspect, more than a lot of people. Except for periodic seasons in the abyss, when it’s sufficient to survive at levels zero and one, I’m a pretty reliable cook.

I also get huge enjoyment out of cooking corny American staples, so that is reflected in my repertoire.

In the next post I am actually going to share with you a few of the things I regularly cook. Some are recipes, and some are just concepts that don’t require a recipe. Fair warning though: no serious food criticism allowed. None of it is fancy, and this blog is a food-shame-free zone.

I want people to feel comfortable enough to share their own cooking, at any level. So don’t be snotty, but also: if someone cooks fancier things than you, don’t be bitter about it. I won’t be hosting Mommy Wars, The Sequel: My Cooking [Or Lack Of Cooking] Makes Me Better Than You.

We all start at different places, and some people like cooking more than others, or have more practice at it. Some people don’t like it, or don’t care about it, or just don’t know how. That is okay. There’s no reason for any competition or comparison judgments – you start where you are.

Where other people are has no bearing on your place, other than to encourage or inspire you – and in my case, maybe amuse you.

See you soon.

Early in the year, thanks to a post-traveling readjustment crisis, I was pretty awful at feeding myself for a while. I was scrounging up the bare minimum required for survival at random times of the day, and not giving any thought whatsoever to frivolities like “vegetables” or “food groups” or “not feeling like total crap.”

And given that I deal with depression on a semi-regular basis, this is something that comes up cyclically – one of the first things to go with my mood is eating well.

For me, eating well looks like this: I eat a breakfast that contains multiple food groups soon after waking up, and then about four hours later (five if I’m drinking coffee through the morning), I eat a lunch that also contains multiple food groups. Then around three hours later, I have a snack, and then dinner in another three or four hours. Dinner contains multiple food groups, and possibly even more than one dish. In another three or four hours, I will have dessert or a snack.

In the course of all this, I end up eating fat, protein, and carbohydrate at each meal, and I make an effort to offer myself roughly five fruits and veggies throughout the day, as well as a couple servings of meat/nuts/legumes.

Everything else kind of takes care of itself. I remind myself that I do not need to clean my plate or finish my vegetables if I don’t want, but that I have permission to get seconds or thirds if I do want.

So that is what I focused on for the past three months, while I worked with my group on eating competence.

At first, I just made a deal with myself that I would eat food before drinking coffee in the morning, because I noticed that if I drank coffee first, it killed my appetite, but that the lack of breakfast left me lethargic and tired for the rest of the day.

That was my first step – food before coffee, and preferably soon after getting up.

This probably took a week or two to get going. Then I focused on having lunch at a reasonable time each day – I eventually settled on 1pm because it fit into my work schedule, and because it was long enough after breakfast that I would actually feel hungry, but not starving. If I tried eating at noon, it felt like I was just forcing it.

After practising for another week or two, I started getting predictably hungry right around 1pm each day. Sometimes 12:45 and sometimes 1:15, but relatively consistent. And on the days when something came up and I didn’t get around to lunch until 2pm, I was very hungry but not desperate.

The last, and most difficult, was dinner. Dinner requires cooking. Cooking requires planning, and when I’m feeling gloomy, planning is my least favourite thing to do. But after a few weeks of eating frozen lasagna and other no-plan delights, I was tired of it, and willing to put up with some amount of planning to get a more decent variety of food.

I hauled out my meal-planning sheet (yes, I actually have one), put it in a plastic sheet protector and stuck it to the fridge, next to a dry-erase marker. Then I started by writing down three easy dinners to make in the coming week, and I filled in the rest of the nights with leftovers or more frozen lasagna.

It began with a few of my no-brainer favourites – spaghetti, clam linguine, pork chops. Then the next week, I added a day for beans (usually Sunday, to accommodate slow cooking) and a pizza night on Fridays (because it’s Friday, and we always want pizza on Friday, so I may as well plan for it.) The bean recipes usually made a ton of leftovers, so I began freezing them in individual containers, and then I also had an easy lunch.

Eventually, after a few more weeks, I worked my way up to planning 5-7 meals per week. Sometimes the plan literally is “frozen pizza and pre-prepared salad” because, goddammit, it still counts as a meal. It’s got food groups and everything! Plus if I don’t buy a frozen pizza, I will just order one at some point anyway. There’s no point in fighting it.

For a while, the plan was almost the same rotation every week (spaghetti on Tuesday, linguine on Thursday, pork chops on Monday, chicken on Wednesday, etc.), and then I got bored of that, too.

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting more. I made some marinated salmon, tried a new green bean recipe (hint: Parmesan cheese), and last night we had Moroccan-style pork tenderloin. One weekend, I made a very labour-intensive stir-fry that I hadn’t made in years.

It’s been nice, and along the way I’ve developed a bunch of short-cuts and sanity-saving techniques to help myself along. One of them is that I rarely cook a recipe all in one session – I always do some pre-prep in the morning so that the burden doesn’t all come crashing down at 6pm. For the stir-fry, I actually made the sauce the night before, then chopped up all the veggies in the morning, and then just assembled it and cooked the noodles in the evening.

Because I’m terrible about doing too much at once, and then never wanting to do it again, this is essential for me. I also started making my meal plan and grocery list the day before I go shopping, because I hate doing them both on one day.

Overall, I’d call this past three months of putting my eating back in place a success. Right now, I’m operating at a pretty high level – although we still have frozen pizza night on Friday like clockwork, and I intersperse a bunch of easier recipes along with one or two more complicated ones during the week.

But here’s the thing: it won’t always be this way.

Something will happen to mess up my routine again, and it will all fall apart. That’s life. Once I get used to whatever has changed I can work up, step-by-step, from the bottom of the pyramid again – because I know how. And I also know that periods of just getting by, and just doing the bare minimum with eating, are survivable. They’re not going to hurt me, and they don’t say anything about my worth as a human being, or my overall capacity to feed myself well.

I used my boredom with repetition to help push me along, because if I’d set out with a goal of “cook fancy new recipes all week” I would still be eating frozen lasagna every day. I did it because I wanted to, and because it felt good.

Eating falls apart for everyone, from time to time, but it doesn’t have to stay that way forever – and it won’t if you refuse to beat yourself up about it, and focus instead on doing what helps you to feel good.

Now I have to figure out what I’m going to work on for the spring groups. I’ll let you know what happens.