Caroline Dooner

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?

Our culture has decided that gaining weight is the worst thing ever. And we have gotten the message in a multitude of sneaky or super blatant ways.

It’s that time of year when everyone is obsessed with not eating too much food. It’s like a cultural rite of passage: Will you complain about how much food you’re eating this holiday? Will you discuss how bad you’ve been and how you plan on repenting come January 1st?

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

So many of us try to stick to diets, only to find ourselves bingeing, then restricting more, then bingeing again, then restricting more, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. Our weight is all over the place, our sanity is all over the place, and we feel totally out of control with food.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people are really resistant to movements that aim to inspire people to drop the fight against weight. There are lots of fat-haters.

So many of us are waiting until we're skinnier. We're putting off dreams, big plans, and just plain old feeling good about ourselves until an elusive, future day when we think we will finally deserve what we want. Do you do this?

Pretending you’re OK when you're not is lying — lying to yourself. And it will keep you not OK.

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).

How many diets are out there? How many of them are backed by doctors and gurus who claim they know “the most natural way to eat” or “the fastest way to burn fat and never gain it back!” or “the most definite way to never be hungry again, become beautiful, have everyone love you, and have all your dreams come true!”? So many.