How to start liking your body.

Remember how we talked about how if you don't like your body, it may mess up your eating?

Obviously, the follow-up question is: how do I start liking my body?

And that’s a hard, multi-faceted task. Today I want to talk about one important way: purposefully looking at a variety of women’s bodies.

Why This Is Important

This may be obvious but it’s worth saying: if you are judging others because of their weight or body shape, you are probably judging yourself.  And all of those negative judgments cause pain, for everyone involved.

The only way that I know to break the cycle of judgment is to notice. Notice, notice notice.  And that’s hard, because often when we truly notice, uncomfortable thoughts come up. Thoughts that we feel like a completely terrible person for thinking, like “she doesn’t look good,” or, “I hope I never, ever look like her.”

But it’s worthwhile to ask yourself: Is that true? Is it true that only thin women can be beautiful? Are all thin women beautiful?

And, perhaps most importantly: What does beauty mean, anyway?

I’m not trying to tell you what beauty is, and I can’t give you a pill or a quick 2-step tip to reverse what are deeply, deeply ingrained beliefs about what is beautiful and what is not in our world. You probably don’t want to be having unpleasant or even mean thoughts about other women’s bodies, and telling yourself to just knock it off doesn’t generally work (at least for me).

In my experience, the only way to even begin to work on this process is to gently, very gently, begin to pull at the strings of this knot, by noticing what is already happening, in a delicate, thoughtful way.

And maybe, just maybe, looking at women in a variety of shapes will remind you that your weight has much less to do with your beauty that you might have thought. I know that it did for me.

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Your “Homework” 

1. Once a day for the next week, spend at least 5 minutes purposefully looking—really looking—at a range of women’s bodies.

If you don't know where to find pictures of beautiful ladies who are not “typical” models, here are some great sites with real women in a range of shapes, from slender to more full-figured:

2. As you do this, notice what thoughts and feelings come up about their bodies. Write down as many of them as you can, without judgment. It’s okay if your thoughts sound like a Mean Girl; the point is to notice them.

3. For now, your work is just that: look at pictures, have the thoughts come up, write them down, look at what you wrote down. That’s it.

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But Katie, spending 5 minutes didn’t fix all of my body image problems!

Have some patience there, buckaroo.

This probably something you will have to keep doing. You’ve spent hours each week for your ENTIRE LIFE consuming images of mostly very slender people. You are probably going to need to make a conscious effort to look at other bodies, to remind yourself that it’s not just fat-you and Heidi Klum out there.

But I deeply believe that it is worth it. Because as long as you don’t think that you are beautiful in your body, and you don’t think that other women are beautiful in their bodies, you will struggle with your weight.

So let’s look at some fantastic women together. And let’s keep doing it.

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If this post resonated with you, I’d love to hear in the comments: What was it like for you to consciously look at women in a variety of shapes? What thoughts or feelings came up for you? 

How self care can reduce emotional eating

How often do you find yourself eating way too much food when you are cuddled in your favorite armchair, reading an engrossing book, with a cup of tea on the table next to you?

Or when you are at a spa, wearing a fluffy white robe and lazily staring at the ceiling after a great massage, with a glass of lemon water in your hand?

Or when you are catching up with one of your best friends, who you haven't spoken with in months?

Yeah, probably food isn’t on your mind.

And when it is, you’re probably actually hungry, and after you eat something, you move on with your life.

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My invitation to you is to stop worrying so much about your eating and start worrying about taking good care of yourself.

If you take excellent, radiant, lovely care of yourself….the food stuff will fall into place so much more easily.

Really.
Really, really.

But so many of us are out of practice of doing this. I’d love to know: What do you do to take really, really good care of yourself? Leave a comment below so we can all trade ideas. 

Science Sunday: Some things that are more important than the number on the scale

Most of the people I speak with want to lose weight. Though some of this worry is connected to the belief that magically amazing things will occur when they are thinner, many people also have very real concerns about their health.

And, yet, some interesting research suggests that as long as we engage in relatively basic healthy habits, our weight does not matter to our health as much as we think it does.

Head's up: this is one of my longer posts. I think you’ll find that it’s worth it, though, when you repeat this information to everyone you know.

Let’s get to it :)

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When we’re worried about our health, we’re often concerned about…you know, making sure that we don’t die.

Modern medicine is pretty clear about the health benefits of exercising regularly, eating a diet high in fruits and vegetables, not smoking, and consuming alcohol in moderation. It is well documented that engaging in all four of these healthy habits can significantly reduce your risk of death.  

But Matheson et al. wanted to look into something that hadn’t been researched as much: if you are overweight or obese, does being healthy do as much good as it does for thinner people? Or are you doomed to never be as healthy as “normal” weight people?

The results of their research are going to blow your socks off.

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Matheson and his colleagues looked at a sample of 11,761 people over 21, and figured out how many of the following four “healthy habits” they regularly exhibited:

  • “Healthy eating”: eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables per day

  • “Regular exercise”: exercising at least 12 times a month, or approximately three times a week

  • “Moderate alcohol consumption”: drinking no more than one drink a day for women, or two drinks a day for men

  • “No smoking”: participants with this healthy habit defined themselves as non-smokers

They divided people into groups based on their BMI (“normal, ” “overweight, ” and “obese”) and based on how many of the four healthy habits they regularly did. They compared how much more likely members of each group were to die over a period of more than 20 years than people with a healthy BMI who engaged in all four healthy habits. They call this the “hazard ratio.”

If the hazard ratio is more than 1, you are more likely to die than a person who is at a normal weight who does all four healthy habits.

Let’s look at a chart of what they found, and then I’ll break it down for you:

Risk of Mortality, by BMI and Number of Healthy Habits

Here are four things that pop out at me:

1. Among people with ZERO healthy habits, it’s better to be in the normal BMI range.

If you are going to smoke, drink a lot, not exercise, and eat very few fruits and vegetables, yeah, it’s probably a good idea to be in a “normal” BMI range. People with an “overweight” BMI in this category are at a significantly higher rate of mortality.

That’s that YUUUUUGE light blue spike on the far left of the chart.

 

2. But once people take on at least ONE healthy habit, the difference between people with a “normal” and an “overweight” or “obese” BMI radically decreases.

In fact, for people with one, two, or three healthy habits, the people with an “overweight” BMI actually have a slightly lower hazard ratio (meaning they are less likely to die) than the “normal” weight people with the same number of healthy habits.

How wild is that?

 

3. Taking on an extra healthy habit has a bigger impact on your risk of death than lowering your BMI.

Again, this kind of blows my mind, but it is true nearly across the board. For example, if you are an “obese” person with only one healthy habit who lost enough weight to have a only an “overweight” BMI, your “hazard ratio” would drop by 25% (from 3.3 to 2.5). Not bad.

But if you instead just took on one additional healthy habit, your hazard ratio would drop by 45%! That’s nearly twice as much!

 

4. Once people have all four healthy habits in place, their death rates are virtually indistinguishable.

This point is so important that I made you another, simplified chart to make this 100% clear:

This is freakin’ crazy.

The research suggests that when it comes to lowering risk of death, as long as you engage in all four healthy habits, it doesn’t matter what you weigh.

BOOM.

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What are the counterarguments?

The obvious counterargument is, “Well, death isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to health. Quality of life matters, too.”

And that is certainly true. But it’s important to note that mortality rates are relatively good predictors for quality of life.

For example, one thing that ruins quality of life is heart disease. Matheson et al. point out that taking on a single healthy habit reduces heart disease between 29% to 85%, while statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) only 12%.

12% versus 29-85%. In other words: taking on a single healthy habit is at least twice as effective, and potentially seven times as effective as taking cholesterol-lowering drugs. Which one would you choose?

Moreover, if people are getting nutrients from healthy foods, exercising regularly, not smoking, and drinking only moderate amounts of alcohol, they are likely to be feeling relatively good. I mean, don’t you feel better when you do those things?

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One More Fun Thing

One of my favorite things about this study was how relatively “chill” the requirements for healthy habits were.

All a person needed to do in order to be a “healthy eater” was to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables per day. That’s it. The study didn’t measure how much sugar, how many carbs, or how many slices of cheesecake they ate. As long as you eat your fruits and veggies, the rest of your diet is basically up to you.

All a person needed to do to be a “frequent exerciser” was to exercise 12 times a month, or about 3 times a week. But the researchers didn’t measure how long that exercise lasted, or how intense it was. Meaning: that leisurely 20-minute walk around the block you take a couple of times a week? Totally counts.

I wrote about it more here, but I believe that one of the tragedies with modern health and fitness is that because people are convinced that they have to go to CrossFit six times a week or give up sugar completely, they forget that they can be healthy in a relatively easy, do-able, everyday way.

It doesn’t require anguish. Just eat some fruit and go take an easy walk.

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What’s the take-away?

Health matters.

If you want to improve your health, why not focus on these relatively simple healthy habits instead of killing yourself going on diets that don’t work for  you?

No matter what your weight is.

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If you like this post, I’d love to hear: Which healthy habits do you do already? Which would you like to take on?

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p.s. As a final note, I first heard about this study through Sandra Aanoodt’s Ted Talk, which definitely deserves a watch.

p.p.s. Obviously, there are significant objections even to the usefulness of BMI as a metric that are worth acknowledging, but I have set them aside for purposes of analyzing this study. 

Essential summer advice

There is something very, very important that I would like to tell you this week: 

It’s summer. Please go eat something delicious.

Seriously.

If you have been in diet purgatory for so long that the only delicious foods you’ve eaten have been in the form of a frantic, stuffing-slightly-stale-barbeque-chips-from-the-cabinet-into-your-mouth-so-quickly-that-even-you-aren’t-sure-that-it’s-happened experience, then you might be slightly bewildered about what to eat to truly enjoy summer.  

In that case, I have done the very challenging task of compiling a list for you:

 Katie’s Recommended Summer Treats
(Please consume at least 3x/week from June-August)

 An ice cream cone
Popsicles (when was the last time you had one of those?)
Watermelon
Snow cones
Fresh cherries
A chocolate chip ice cream cone
Strawberries
More watermelon
Grilled burgers
Grilled chicken
Grilled corn
Grilled bell peppers
GRILLED ANYTHING
A rainbow sherbet ice cream cone
Peaches
Peaches
Peaches
Funnel cake (preferably at some ridiculous state fair or roller coaster park)
Did I mention an ice cream cone? 

I am sure I have missed some essential summer foods from this list. Please let me know what you’d add in the comments below. This is a public service, people :)

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p.s. I just had a rainbow sherbet ice cream cone last week, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The experience of actually going to the local ice cream store and getting a scoop in a cone—I went alone! On a Thursday!—felt indulgent and fabulous and like I was a 7-year-old with a credit card.

What you should do with your scale

Here’s my suggestion: get rid of your scale.

I mean it.

Really.

I say this as someone who was convinced, for a long time, that a scale was necessary.

During my college years, I had not one, but two scales. A girl needs a scale in her dorm and also her childhood bathroom, right? When I spent a summer working in France, I stuck a glass scale (glass!) in my luggage and brought it there, too.

I weighed myself every morning, but also, as my “issues” with food got crazier, sometimes in the afternoon and the evening and also just before I went to bed. Weighing yourself right before bed is essential because then you can make a prediction about what your weight might be in the morning. Obviously.

A resolutely analytical person, I was convinced that monitoring my weight would ensure that I made the “right” kind of decisions, the kind that makes weight go down.

Of course, this didn’t really happen.

What did happen was that I became obsessed with thinking about what the “right” decisions should be, and I beat myself up when I didn’t make them.

What did happen is that I would eat in secret, or eat in public in a kind of trance—without really noticing or enjoying or feeling full from the food that I was putting in my mouth.

What did happen is that tiny fluctuations in my weight that were probably due to water had the power to make me feel on top of the world, or like a complete failure.

And no matter whether the news was good or bad, I always felt like eating after being on the scale.

So my weight sometimes went down, but mostly it went up. I felt like such a freaking idiot.

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Eventually, as I learned to listen to my body, I threw away my scale. In fact, I actually yelled “F*** YOU” as I threw it into a dumpster, and my mom heard it (which wasn’t my intention) and got kind of worried about me.

Despite that awkward situation, it was one of the best things I ever did.

Why? Because throwing away my scale let me make decisions about food based on how my body felt, without any fear of what the scale would say the next day.

It let me substitute the external scale on my bathroom floor for the internal scale of my own experience.

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I know, I know, if you are a hardcore scale-junkie, you might be worried: if I get rid of my scale, what’s to stop me from gaining 40 pounds?

My answer? Your own experience in your body. That’s the only thing that can stop you.

If you are aware of how your body feels, if you tune into it, you can tell whether you need more cookies or fewer.

And seriously, if you start to gain weight, you’ll feel it. You’ll feel rounder around the edges and like there’s a bit more of a layer of padding all around.

I feel like that sometimes—pudgier, rounder, softer. Even though my weight has been relatively stable or gone down in the past six or so years since I started doing this, there are definitely times when I notice that my pants are fitting a bit tighter and there is more cushion in my hips.

And yes, even now, I sometimes start to freak out a bit about that. I sometimes start to think that I should weigh myself again so I can “make sure” to lose the weight.

But after a few extremely unhappy experiments with re-introducing the scale, I kept coming back to my truth:

Scales don’t help me take care of myself better.
Taking care of myself better helps me take care of myself better.  

So if you aren’t weighing yourself and you are feeling pudgier? Do what you need to do to take care of yourself so you feel awesome.

Which for me means walking every day, going to yoga, and making sure I have foods I love in my house—which, yes, includes homemade brownies with chocolate chips in them.

It also means doing my hair so I feel pretty and wearing clothes that are soft and I feel elegant in.

It also means setting healthy boundaries with others and my work, and making sure I have plenty of time to sleep and read books and watch Netflix and do random Internet surfing.

And after a while of that, I usually feel awesome. And my pants start to fit more normally.

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So my challenge to you this week is to throw away your scale. (Bold, eh?)

Or if you can’t do that, tell me in the comments why you need to keep it. I’ll respond personally, and we can talk about it.

Because I hope you know, I really, really care about you.  

Some real talk.

I tell you this with love: if you are asleep at the wheel, you have got to freakin’ stop. 

Stop.

If you get to the end of a meal, or a day, or a week, or a year, and think wow, I guess I must have eaten a ton but I didn’t even notice, then seriously, you need to do something.

You’ve got to find a way to wake up and listen to yourself.

And no, I don’t mean, “Wake up! You’ve got to eat ‘reasonable’ portion sizes,” or, “Wake up! you’ve got to go back to Weight Watchers.”

You’ve probably already done that anyway.
Maybe even multiple times.

I mean that you’ve got to find a way not to go blank.

You have to find a way to be awake in your life, to know when you are furtively eating a candy bar in your kitchen or at your desk or in your car. Sticking the food in so quickly, or with a mind so blank, that you don't even realize that it happens. 

You have to find a way to open the lines of communication between you and yourself.

On a daily, hourly, moment-to-moment basis.

This is hard.
Man-oh-man, it is hard.

It is so hard, so terrible, so tough that many of us would rather micro-manage our portion sizes, or go back to Weight Watchers or Atkins or fill-in-the-blank, rather than do it. And you can do that. 

But if you don’t want to do the “diet” thing, then you cannot be asleep at the wheel.
You have to find a way of listening to yourself.

How?

Journaling is a two good ways to start. Or you can get help. I know that I needed help—I really couldn’t do it alone at first—and coaches were incredibly useful. If you’d like some help from me, I'd love to have you join a group. Here's what some people said about their past experiences.

But no matter how you do it, you have to do it.

You have to.

Seriously, the only requirement of eating without dieting is that you have to be able to listen to yourself.

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How is this going for you? Scary, hard, impossible? Let me know in the comments, and we can brainstorm ways to help you with this.

Beauty matters

When we think that we want to lose 10 pounds (or 5 or 15 or 500), often what we are really thinking is “If I lose weight, I will feel beautiful.”

So here’s my suggestion to you: If you want to feel beautiful, why don’t you focus on feeling beautiful? 

And not on feeling beautiful three weeks from now after your juice cleanse, or eight weeks from now after you’ve gone to boot camp classes and finally have defined arms, but feeling beautiful right now, today, this very second.

Let’s cut to the chase.
Let’s cut out the middleman.
Feeling beautiful is available to you today.

So get out your pen and paper, and spend five minutes answering this question: “What do I need to do to feel beautiful as possible today?”

When I really sit with that question, the answers that come up kind of shock me. Right now, to feel as beautiful as possible, I’d love to:

  • Put on “real people clothes” that feel soft on my body, and that I think are fashionable (I may or may not be writing this post to you in my pajamas).
  • Wash my face, brush my teeth, and put on some moisturizer and some lip gloss.
  • Do something with my currently frizzy hair, so it feels smoother and softer and elegant.
  • Get out of the house and buy a cappuccino and do some work in a coffee shop.
  • Get a massage.

First, let’s talk about how bizarrely easy most of this list is to accomplish. I need to…brush my teeth and stop wearing pajamas? Do my hair?

Those last two points, in particular, kind of blow my mind. To feel beautiful…I need to get a massage or leave the house and sit in a coffee shop? What do those things have to do with beauty at all?

Yet, it becomes clear to me that when I really ask the question, “beauty” is about feeling good and radiant.

That point is so powerful that I think it is worth repeating: feeling beautiful is about making myself feel good.

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I’d really love to hear what’s on your beauty list. Is what you need to feel beautiful as surprising as mine? Let me know in the comments.

Bad news and good news

I’ve got good news and bad news.

The bad news: your life is going to be painful.
The good news: you can choose what pain to experience.

If you want to close this page, I get it. I don’t blame you. I like sprinkles and rainbows, too.

But we’ve also got to face the gosh-darn-terrible truth: life is painful.

I don’t mean just in those big ways: that there is terrible suffering and people living in hunger and poverty and atrociously unsafe conditions around the world. That people you deeply love can die.

I mean in those small, tiny, annoyingly painful ways that you—as an evolved, emotionally mature person—don’t even think you are “allowed” to consider painful.

Like that you work all day and the only break you take is for lunch.
Like you wish that people around you would appreciate you more.
Like you are exhausted and just want a break and to close out the world for three days.

You might not even explicitly experience these situations as “pain.” Most of the women I work with don’t. They think that they aren’t allowed to acknowledge that they are feeling pain unless their organs are falling out of their body.  

But you know how I know that they are feeling pain in these situations?

Because they are eating.

Because they are eating food that they don’t really want, food that doesn’t make them feel good.

Or because they are eating friggin’ delicious or even healthy food, but not even enjoying it because they are sneaking or not paying attention to it.

Because when I suggest to them that they might perhaps consider not eating food they don’t even want in those moments, they look stricken: how would I deal with that crazy-feeling if I wasn’t eating?

And that, my friends, is the point of it all: your dysfunctional eating is a bright neon arrow pointing to your pain.

If you can’t bear to not eat while you study, or while you work, or while you meet with friends, there is something painful—something that is uncomfortable or awkward or weird or painful—in that moment.

So here’s the deal, friends: you can’t avoid the pain.

Let’s face it, you’ve been trying to avoid the pain. You’ve been eating to avoid the pain. I’ve done it, too. If I eat a cookie while forcing myself to do everything on my to-do list, I won’t hate it so much.

But the problem is, in trying to avoid this life-pain, you’ve created an entirely new kind of pain: food pain.

The pain of kicking yourself for eating an entire slice of cake you didn’t even want.
The pain of your pants not fitting.
The pain of looking back on that meal out with friends and wondering what demon possessed your body.
The pain of feeling gross and full but like you’d still eat six pints of ice cream if given the chance.

It’s one pain or another.
The pain of your life, or the pain you create by covering up your life with food.

You get to choose.

Did I mention? You get to choose.

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If you’re feeling brave, here’s my challenge to you: Think about the last time you were unhappy with your eating. What “pain” were you feeling or trying to avoid?

And if you’re feeling especially brave, let me know what you find in the comments.