Caroline Dooner

Have you ever noticed how cultish fad diets can be? I didn’t, because I was in the cult. And cult members never think they are part of a cult. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that today’s diets may be filling the same human societal role that religions fill, and not in a good way.

You can improve your health without losing weight!

Dieting is bad for your body, health, relationship with food, relationship with your body, metabolism, and really bad for natural weight stabilization. Of course we are not taught that. We are taught in so many ways that dieting works long-term (it doesn’t) and that losing weight is the simplest and easiest life enhancement we can pursue (it’s not).

We haven’t quite escaped the influence of the Puritans yet...We still tend to regard our bodies, our eating, our desires, and anything else of this earth as “bad,” “weak,” or “sinful.”

In response to Nicole Arbour's fat shaming video. . .

Do you feel like you have an addiction to food? Do you think about it all the time? Fixate on it? Crave it constantly? Feel like you have no control once you start? Do you just eat and eat and eat until you are stuffed and miserable?

I teach people how to eat normally after dieting. And across the board, the people I work with all describe themselves as “type A personalities” or “perfectionists.”

For years I felt ashamed for having a body. Embarrassed to have big boobs. Embarrassed to be anything but tiny and perfect. Embarrassed to be anything bigger than a dainty wisp of air. I felt like taking up physical space in this world was both vulnerable and too powerful.

These are two concepts that I think we are all a little confused about. Even writing on this topic for four years, it’s taken me time to master explaining the difference between emotional eating and bingeing. We often use those two terms as if they’re interchangeable. But they’re absolutely not the same thing!

It’s really hard to exist in this culture as a woman who does not talk about or complain about weight. Why? Because we are so conditioned and used to talking about weight that it is a big shift to leave it behind.