I was recently asked to contribute to an article on the mental health impact of weight loss advertising for Metro.
You can read the article here, but I also wanted to share with you the questions I was asked and the answers I gave.
This is the time of year when most New Year diets have failed.
Yes, The Eating Silly Season is coming to a close. To be fair, Eating Silly Season is now all year long, but in January it’s especially silly as Diet Culture stages its annual Grand Parade of Bullshit and Misinformation.
Look – there’s that “celebrity doctor” shamelessly promoting disordered eating on social media in the name of “science”. There’s that “diet guru” on TV forcing people who are Not Thin to lose weight rapidly with zero regard for their psychological wellbeing.
Then there’s you.
How are you doing with all of this?
The path to a peaceful relationship with food can be long and twisting.
And many things can try to pull you away from it.
Maybe someone at work raves about losing weight on the latest diet and you consider joining them for yet another “quick fix” attempt.
Maybe you go clothes shopping and nothing fits well or looks right, and you decide your body is to blame.
Maybe someone snaps a photo of you and your Inner Bully has a field day pointing out all your “defects”.
There’s one thing, though, that’s perhaps more disheartening than anything else.
“Our ancestors did not have a constant supply of food. When a large animal – a whale, a bison, a woolly mammoth or an elephant – was killed, everyone feasted, gorged… it might be weeks or months before another big kill, so large amounts had to be eaten quickly and then stored in the body for the times of scarcity that were sure to come.
This is an ancient or atavistic memory that calls us to eat all we can now, even if we are not hungry, just in case there won’t be any food tomorrow… there is something deep in our primitive brain that still fears starvation, scarcity, famine.” – Jan Chozen Bays, “Mindful Eating”
Remember the panic-buying we witnessed when the Covid-19 crisis first hit?
Continue reading “Expert Insight: Dieting and the Fear of Famine”
At a Christmas party, two guests are standing by the buffet. One has their plate piled high with food. The other has cleverly taken a Buffet Tour and has selected only the food they really wanted. The first guest is eating very quickly, the other is taking their time and savouring their selection.
Julie de Rohan 