[Feel free to skip if you don’t want to think about dieting right now.]
It’s January and there is the usual plethora of diet commercials extolling weight loss. Google “dieting” and up comes Special K’s “Healthy Eating Plan”!
That said, it is a bit refreshing to see someone write:
As a lifelong dieter, let me tell you from experience: A diet need have nothing to do with “eating healthy.”
[…] It’s possible to lose weight by eating more healthily. But losing weight and eating more healthily can also be two totally different goals.
The cultural conflation of “eating healthy” and “dieting” has a lot of built-in assumptions.
- Fat people are fat because they overeat.
- Thin people are assumed to eat “healthy”.
- Fat people are expected to diet, which leads to weight cycling.
- Cultural expectations to lose weight causes pressure.
- After a few years (decades?) of being burned by diets, folks end up rebelling against the pressure.
There’s certainly more (and I haven’t even gotten into all the debate over what “healthy eating” means).
One result of the end-of-year crunch at work is that I haven’t been eating lunch regularly. I’m going to work on permission to eat what I want, and eating at regular intervals. But I am still avoiding diet commercials.
Living ~400lbs 
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