The line must be drawn here.

Yeah, I'm getting all Captain Picard/"First Contact" on your ass because I am officially DONE, DONE, DONE with the food policing and the dubbing of foods as "sinful" or "decadent" or "bad" or "good" and people turning their lives over to what the hell they place into the mouths.



It's Sunday and on a Sunday I like to lounge and channel surf. More often than not, I land on Food Network because I like food and I love to cook. They have a show called "The Best Thing I Ever Ate", featuring assorted FN hosts as well as people that are connected to food somehow - though I find it questionable why you'd have someone like Lisa Lillien, the Hungry Girl person on since she's built a career off being constantly focused on food and how "good" or "bad" it is and what you should and should never eat. In my fat, humble opinion, there's no place for anyone who sees food as the enemy, as an adversary, in anything to do with the enjoyment and consuming of food. But hey, she's thin and I'm decidedly not, so clearly SHE'S THE BIG BIG WINNER, AMIRITE???!

But I digress, kinda. The episode I watched was all about - bing bong - Guilty Pleasures.

ZO.
M.
G.

Twenty-two minutes of *gasp* people eating things that have been deep-fried or involve cream or cheese or cream AND cheese and...the worst worst WORST thing of all...strap in and grab your socks and pull because it's about to get so fucking tragically real it's going to blow your hair back:

SUGAR

The only person who managed to not apologize once for his love of clam chowder from a place called Cabby Shack was Beau MacMillan. He was rapturous in his love of the chowder - and let me tell you, it looked fantastic if you're someone who loves a quality clam chowder. He said right out of the box that he wasn't going to apologize for eating or cooking with foods like heavy cream, cheese, or basically anything else that falls on "the naughty list". Everyone else - Michael Symon, Sunny Anderson, Michael Psilakis, Donatella Arpaia, Claire Robinson, and even my beloved Duff Goldman pretty much fell over themselves to talk about how TERRIBLE and AWFUL and LETHAL their particular "guilty" pleasures were. My head was already primed to cave in AND bust right on out again when Lisa Lillien appeared - I didn't know who she was until the big-ass HUNGRY GIRL caption popped up and I almost fell right the fuck out of my bed. This is someone who, on her website's front page, doles out "advice" on eating, trots out a disclaimer about how she's not a medical professional or a nutritionist, and caps her elaborate dance with:

But it's entertaining, helpful and pretty...so enjoy it!

No, I don't think I will, but thanks for asking anyway! In fact, one of my dreamiest, fattiest, most corpulent dreams is to help people not to torment themselves about what they eat - it's that we'd live in a universe where people are allowed to believe and TRUST THEMSELVES ENOUGH to EAT FOOD. STUFF YOU LIKE. AS MUCH AS YOU WANT. You are capable of so much more than you think you are, which terrrrrifies the weight loss industry. You aren't a grown-up who takes care of your business but the second a “forbidden” or a “decadent” or a “sinful” food is anywhere within your view you morph into a gibbering toddler whose hand must be slapped and be told "NO BAD WRONG NAUGHTY".

Trust yourself. You can eat. You will not eat any innocent bystanders who happen to be close when the melty goat cheese in tomato basil sauce appears (spread appropriately on crusty bread instead). How much more energy do you want to spend berating yourself and policing yourself at every single party, at every single breakfast/lunch/dinner? How much longer are you going to put up with it?

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Prepare ye the way of the fail.

Dear New Year’s Dieters,

It is with some degree of sadness that I inform you that chances are rather good your “New Year’s Diet” or so-called “Lifestyle Change” that you’ve adopted effective at 12:01 January 1, 2010 is going to fail. Unfortunately, I’m unable to give you a precise date or time as to when the Brand New You is potentially going to revert back to the Old Old You, but suffice it to say you may want to begin considering a new approach.

I know you’re going to get angry with me, which I expect. I mean, it’s harsh on the ears to hear “you’re probably going to fail”. But in this instance, since it’s early in the new year and there’s still time to kick back and do a little introspective poking into one’s own gray matter, let’s use my admittedly harsh statement to do just that. Let’s have a bit of a think together.



I’ve been where you’re at, about…oh, I’d say 15-20-25-30 times or more over the course of the last 37 years. And every single time I believed that THIS TIME WILL BE THE LAST TIME because “I know what I’m doing this time and I did it alllll wrong the last time!”. Uhhhhh-huh. I just KNEW I had to cut out all carbs or never eat sugar or only eat salads or only eat things the size of my fist or never use butter or only eat fat-free products or only eat at certain times or never eat after six p.m. or drink 180,000 ounces of water a day so I felt full or constantly chew gum or eat only using chopsticks or only use my non-dominant hand to eat or put down my fork between every bite or drink a sip of water with every bite or or or or or or or or or. Sure, I lost weight.

And sure, I hated every single minute of it as I divorced myself from enjoyment of anything that might have threatened my imagined “virtue” and obsessed about what I could eat, what I couldn’t eat, will there be food I can eat at that party or at my mother’s or at my friend’s or at that restaurant is there time for me to work out what if I don’t work out oh god if I don’t work out and I eat something involving fat maybe I’ll just stay home. But I lost that weight. And it came back. Plus ten. Plus twenty. Plus who knows how much more.

You’re saying right now, “that isn’t me. I’m not obsessed about my diet, and it’s NOT a diet, it’s a Lifestyle Change, thank you very much.” So why am I hearing people getting bent over officemates bringing sweets into the office or sighing heavily over the salad they *must* eat or the amount of miles they *must* run/walk or the amount of pounds they *must* lose and that’s…pretty much all I’m hearing? If you’re not obsessed with your Lifestyle Change, then why is it the only thing you can discuss? Why am I hearing about your laundry list of foods you simply CANNOT eat? Why am I hearing stories of your failure to do a full 45 minutes at the gym (you only did 40, you naughty monkey)? If this Lifestyle Change of yours is such a revelation, such a pleasure, such a delightful thing that is going to bring you nothing but joy and unicorns and butterflies, why are you so terrified? How is any of this healthy?

“Well, the end result will be healthy, I’ll be X pounds lighter and I’ll be super-healthy and super-happy, so eff you, jealous fatty ugly fatty fat girl,” you might be saying. Hey, if that’s your awesome dream, Dreamweaver (gary wright omg) then don’t mind me – and you won’t because I know how people are as I happen to be one of them. You can go back to your Atkinsing, Weight Watchering, Nutrasysteming, Jenny Craiging, Slim Fasting, Optifasting, Medifasting, Gastric Bypassing, Alli-ing, Sugarbustering, and Lapbanding with loads of support from millions upon millions of others. And every January 1, you swear you’re getting back on the wagon, back on the horse, you’re going to be good and do things right and get yourself back under control with loads of support from millions upon millions of others. You will berate yourself for being bad if you have a cookie or two cookies or five cookies. You will berate yourself for being a disgusting slob if you eat more than your daily Points allow. You will berate what you see in the mirror for not looking like Mr./Ms. X down at the gym even though you’ve been going faithfully almost every day for weeks and weeks. You will berate yourself for not losing a third of a pound. You will hate exercise and sweating and moving your body no matter how good it might feel because you didn’t lose that third of a pound. You will berate yourself for being hideous and revolting and appalling to look at while forcefully telling any friends who voice how hideous and revolting and appalling to look at they believe themselves to be that they are wrong and they are beautiful and wonderful and delightful.

You are worth more than this, you know. Take the chance and let yourself “fail” for a while. Allow yourself to eat without involving a book that involves calorie or point counts – you won’t believe me when I tell you, but you’re not going to revert into some sort of gelatinous “Altered States”-esque protohuman that devours absolutely every single sugary, fat-laden foodstuff in sight if you do so. Remove any goal that says “be in size X by Date X/lose X pounds by Date X”. Enjoy what your body is capable of doing instead of hating it for what it doesn’t look like, move your ass because you have fun moving your ass, sweat just to sweat.

But…I know the chances are good you’re not going to listen to me. You’re going to roll your eyes, maybe swear at the screen, perhaps assign me the role of being “delusional”, “crazy” and certainly most definitely “lazy”. You might get angry at me saying such things, insisting I’m advocating people stop being healthy because I would love to see people stop dieting for weight loss purposes. The great thing is that you can click away and trot on over to SparkPeople or any of the batrillions of diet-friendly internet forums and get back to the business of Losing Weight and Looking Great! Or remembering A Moment on the Lips, a Lifetime on the Hips! Or engraving Nothing Tastes as Good as Thin Feels on a plaque from Things Remembered. You do whatever you need to do in order to make yourself happy.

I just hope you take a moment while setting down your fork between bites to figure out what really does.

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Is it really "living"?

Weight Watchers says they're going to help you stop dieting and start living. After seeing their ridiculous commercial 900 trillion times, where they insinuate that being hungry equals an inability to eat anything except junk food, my teeny brain started turning over and over about what their (or any other weight loss industry program) version of living entails.

Is it living when you weigh yourself three times a day?

It is living when your entire day is ruined because you gained .00005 of a pound?

Is it living when your entire self-worth is based on the number on the scale?

Is it living when the only topic of conversation you're capable of having relates to what you've eaten or haven't eaten, how many reps you've done or haven't done, and what size pants you can wedge yourself into?

Is it living when you injure yourself working out but are terrified at dialing back on it in order to heal because you might gain weight?

Is it living when you think you can't live because of the size you wear?

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Pardon me if my party hat's not on.

When I think about achievements one could muster up in life, I can dream up many things: having a book published, passing a difficult test, getting a promotion at work. Losing weight through dieting will never be one of those things I will muster up praise for.

I can’t clap my hands and say “yay!!!!” for the kind of mental trauma people put themselves through, counting calories or points and berating themselves and kicking their own asses around the block and then some if they don’t do everything just so on any given day. I can’t say “bully for you” when you talk about how hideous you look and how terrible a person you are because your thighs don’t look like a supermodel’s. I won’t encourage self-hatred. I won’t congratulate self-abuse. I won’t lead a cheer for obsession.

If that makes me a bad person or if I'm overreacting or if I'm mean-spirited, so be it. My disinterest won’t stop you from beating yourself up for not being the “real you” you think is lurking somewhere underneath your skin since there are many, many more people in the world that are willing to fall over themselves to give you kudos for weight loss. You can mutter I’m jealous because I’ve obviously “failed” and “given up” and don’t have “control” (oh, that mystical “control”). You won’t be the first person to tag me with that, believe me. I’m jealous of assorted people for many reasons, but not of the mindset that is inevitable when it comes to dieting for the purposes of weight loss. I did my time angsting over the size of my ass and it’s not a place I ever care to go back to again. If I learned anything, it was that the ever-elusive happiness that I still seek isn’t going to appear if I whittle myself down to a socially acceptable size. Satisfaction with my life won’t come simply because I can shop at a straight store. The issues that I have creaking in my cranium aren’t going to go away if I boogie down to the local J. Craig and get my salt-laden crapfeast on.

There’s a scary percentage of people who would rather get hit by a truck than look anything like me. In a life where any number of things can go horribly, horribly, horribly wrong, where we can suffer so much loss and hurt and hate and misery...really? Being hit by a truck is preferable? But I’m the one with the problem. Hmm.

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When Miss Manners bans your ass, you know you're in trouble.

This letter in today's Miss Manners column was so chucklelicious I knew the second I read it there was no way I couldn't put fingers to keyboard. It's rare I come across something that puts a skip in my step--actually, not just a skip, but a full-metal skip, hop, and a half-twirl in this case because I get what the letter writer is trying to say, but hoo boy, it's just so...dammit, it's downright loopy. It's like the first sentence got my arm up in the air to give the writer an imaginary high-five, but as I continued on, my arm slowly fell back to my side with every subsequent bizarro conceit. Basically, the letter is a textual LOLcat of "UR doing it wrong".



I have to break it down because it's just that yummy.

Dieting in public is a serious etiquette problem in a society that has made saints of women who wear a size 2. Okay, all right, I'm with you. I mean, I can't quite tie it to an etiquette violation, per se, since the "if you're not dieting, it is YOU who is the ball-licker" attitude is so widespread that it's perfectly acceptable and considered quite normal to spend a dinner out with friends talking about all the food you aren't going to eat. While certainly the pressure is most high on women to adhere to an unattainable perfection, it's getting harder and harder for men to dodge the bullet, so dropping it all on women is fairly douchey. I also think "saints" is something of a push. The sainthood is temporary -- just ask anyone who's lost weight and gained it back and then some.

It is rude and offensive for a person to attend a joyous food-related outing and spoil the trip by ordering "a small salad." Well...I...um...I mean, salads are yummy, you know. Sometimes you feel like a nut (a steak) and sometimes you don't (a small salad).

Public dieting casts a pall of misery over any such occasion. Actually, let's shorten that a bit to simply dieting casts a pall of misery.

This is where the train completely derails in a massive fashion (and had me rolling):

If the dieter wants a diet soda, she should ask for it quietly, as though requesting something with which to take medication and have it poured into a glass to ensure that the nature of the drink is not obvious.

*whispers to waiter* "May I have a...:: narrows eyes and checks the perimeter :: diet pop, please?" I mean, seriously. Believe me, it makes my asshole close up when I hear or read things like "I ran five miles in 90-degree heat while wearing a sweatsuit in order to lose that last half a pound" or "I was SO BAD because I had three cookies" or "I can never eat _____ again!!!!!" But to get bent over someone ordering a diet pop? This person would clout me about the ears because 99.999 percent of the time, I'm only drinking diet pop because I just...do. Undoubtedly, I started fueling myself on it when I was 13 or 14 in some attempt to lose weight, but now, I like the taste of the shit. Every so often, I get a jones for a full-metal pop (or, in the case of Flesor's Candy Kitchen in Tuscola, Illinois, an old-school cherry Coke made with soda water and syrup and OH MY GOD IT IS AWESOME). Yes, many fatties drink the diet beverages as much as the dieting dieters of Dietonia do, so do have the decency to shut it.

If a person is on a super-restricted diet that requires she eat abnormally, she needs to stay home, instead of making everyone miserable.

Hear that, you diabetics/keepin' Kosher/observant Muslims/vegetarians?? STAY. THE EFF. HOME. Your insistence on eating abnormally is a BUZZKILL and making all of us MISERABLE. I'm so MISERABLE THAT I AM LEANING ON THE CAPSLOCK KEY WITH ALL MY MIGHT TO EXPRESS MY MISERY AT YOUR ABNORMAL NOT-EATING-OF-PORK-AND-WHATNOT DIETS.

Dieting is not something I do anymore. I don't cheerlead when people I know and often love (if they haven't crossed me) do on a frequent basis. They know that I am not the person who is going to rub their butts with praise when they've lost X amount of pounds. They also know that if we're out to breakfast/lunch/dinner and they start going on and on about what they "can" and "can't" eat or start the air-raid-siren whine about "feeling fat", they're going to get the John Belushi eyebrow of "Really?" from me. But the nature of the beast is that unless you're very lucky and you're at a table with like-minded FAers or you're with people who don't feel it necessary to inform the universe constantly that THEY ARE WATCHING THEIR FIGURES, you're going to be participating in social eating rituals with someone who is actively dieting--probably multiple people, in fact. And the odds are quite high that at some point, they will engage in diet yammer. In my way of thinking (which might not be yours, of course), if they don't comment on what I'm ingesting, I'm able to muddle through the evening. However, the second any sort of shade gets thrown at my particular meal choice, I simply have no other option than to be a vengeful, snotty child and order the most bodacious, luxurious dessert imaginable (think deep-fried cheesecake with whipped cream, hot fudge, and vanilla ice cream) and make the most rapturous yummy sounds I can manage while I lovingly spoon each morsel into my mouth. It's how my rolls roll.

I was at a wedding once where a person at the table was very pointed about making sure everyone at the table knew she was on a diet and that she was being VERY bad for eating pretty much anything off the scrumptious buffet. What made it even more appalling was how, as she was eating a slice of cake, she made sure the BRIDE was aware that she was breaking her diet to have that slice of cake. It's that sort of mania, among many other things, that helped seal my "I will never fucking diet again" belief. And what's so utterly sad is that that almost nobody at that table blinked an eye (my eye, on the other hand, was blinking like I'd just had a contact slip behind my eyeball). They praised her for her restraint. They assured her that a brisk walk or time on the treadmill would quickly take care of that sinful, terrible, life-taking buffet and cake. And whenever I see things like that or read stories along those lines from people who are so devoted that they flagellate themselves for having anything that isn't on their "plan", it only makes me more determined to be as vocal as I possibly can about HAES in the hopes that it might turn at least one head for even a millisecond.

Anyway, back to this very special episode of Miss Manners. The letter writer isn't done yet--he/she has to get in one last bit of snark before ten-fouring Miss Manners:

Perhaps she can join the group later for a concert or movie if she is not too weak to stay out past 8 p.m. Now that's just bitchy. Admittedly, I chortled a bit, but still. Miss Manners shuts the shit down with her version of "STFU", manages to wedge in a little tsk-tsk at dieters who would blow shit at someone for eating in a non-Weight Watchers fashion, and all ends firmly and yes, as ever, politely.

Letter Writer, there are so many awesome ways you could have gone with this. Instead, you came straight from Planet Bwuuuh?, and blew an opportunity to say something good and biting about the dieting culture. On the flip, however...thanks for putting a spring in my bloggy step.

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Orthorexia is the new black and other random thoughts.

Rachel at The F-Word takes care of the heavy lifting on this subject, and you should make her required reading anyway for her remarkable insight on a variety of subjects. She threw down a great letter to the editor in response to this reporter's half-assed article--you can catch a link to it at The F-Word.



The reporter's decision to go for the snark rather than, you know, any kind of actual reporting/insight only highlights to me how little people understand eating disorders. What little *I* know comes from having a mother (a retired registered nurse) who worked with eating disordered patients, and the wee bit of knowledge I have could fit into a thimble. But there seems to be a fairly decent-sized contingent of people who believe that if the ultimate result of thinness is achieved, who the fuck cares how you got to that point in the first place or what kind of toll it took on one's mental state. The article put me in mind of an interview I saw many, many years ago on that Judith Regan interview show that was on...Fox News, maybe? She was talking to Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi on "Star Trek: The Next Generation) and at some point, the conversation turned towards looks and Hollywood standards for women. Marina discussed having been anorexic in her youth and Judith said, "boy, I wouldn't mind catching a little anorexia". It stuck with me so hard because I wanted to reach through the television and shake Judith by her shoulders for saying something so fucking moronic and dismissive. I'm sure she would have said she was just joshing around, and believe me, I like a good chuckle. BUT I'M NOT GOING TO HAVE IT AT THE EXPENSE OF A GUEST ON MY TALK SHOW WHO HAS JUST REVEALED HER EATING DISORDERED PAST. OH, and ALSO? ANOREXIA: NOT FUNNY. Eating disorders: NOT A HOOT.

But nothing matters more than being thin, no matter how you do it or what it winds up doing to your mind, your body, or soul. That is the message being sent, loud and clear, each and every day to all of us. If you really want to see me get bent, trot out any number of the "inspirational" cliches that have been trotted out over the years regarding weight loss:

you can never be too rich or too thin!
nothing tastes as good as thin feels!
a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips!
"What? Lose weight."

That last one was my sister's "inspiration". Brief explanation: I have two older sisters, and all three of us were always big, stocky women. They got the boobs, however--I'm not particularly gifted in the knocker area. Anyway. My sister J.M. was fat for most of her life, and shortly after high school was enamored with a fella. She and he got on like crazy, the chemistry was unreal. However, his response to her when she confessed her feelings for him? "What? Lose weight." For a few months afterwards, she taped up pictures of swimsuit models to the wall with "What? Lose weight" scrawled underneath one of the pictures. She lost some weight...and gained it back. And lost it. And gained it. She did Jenny Craig. She did Weight Watchers (back when you weighed every portion of food). She did Sugarbusters, she did Atkins, you name it, she tried it. And in 2001, she had gastric bypass surgery.

I wasn't down with her having the surgery, and I certainly wasn't down with the second adolescence she went through. For about three years, J.M. was kind of insufferable because she was dealing with people's revised perceptions of her (suddenly, she was "good" because she was losing weight) and testing out just what she could do in her "new" body. After all, there were loads of things she simply "couldn't do" when she was fat versus her being thin. Now, almost seven years down the road, she's gained some weight back which happens with almost all bariatric surgeries. While she's still well, well, WELL below her top weight of 374 pounds, the nagging is still there, the voice screaming "you're not good enough, you're not thin enough" remains in her head. She's still "a fat pig", still "lazy", still all those things she was before having her stomach jacked with. But one thing I'm extremely grateful for is that she's starting to get it. She's starting to understand the Fantasy of Being Thin and how it applied (and applies) to her situation. Does she regret having the surgery? No. Does she appreciate how lucky she was that she didn't have any massive complications to date? Oh, yes.

It's not unusual for my sister to tell me that she's impressed that I go out and do things at the size I'm at, that I've rarely not done something because of my fat. I've done a lot of shit fat--I've been on Comedy Central, I've done a one-woman show, I recently traveled to New Zealand on my own, I've spent many nights going out dancing. I wish she could have realized the "old" her was just as good and able as the "new" her. But that she's starting to understand that her "old" self was as good as her "new" self? That impresses me more than she'll ever know. Read more on this article...

Yes, you DID!

Sorry about the long gap between posts. I was out of the country for a couple of weeks and am still in a bit of a recovery mode.

I had a strange moment when I returned to work. Well, maybe "strange" is an odd way to put it. To the average person who isn't invested in the concept of Fat Acceptance and thinks it's front page crazy bonkers, the moment wouldn't be strange at all. In fact, it'd be a moment that they would crave experiencing, and it was something I used to crave myself.

As I got myself arranged in my cubicle, a co-worker approached to ask me about my trip. The thing that she got most excited about was that it appeared to her that I'd lost weight.

"You've lost weight," she said, her eyes all a-glowy.
"Oh, well, I don't know," I answered, shrugging.
"Yes, you DID, you've lost weight!"
"Okay," I replied, because that's pretty much all I could think to say.

When I was still going through the diet-lose-regain festival of life, I wanted nothing more than someone to notice that I'd lost weight. I wished I could walk around with a sign saying "WORKING ON IT!" so that society would know that I was being a good fat girl and doing my darnedest to lose the unsightly pounds. I stopped dieting a few years ago because it never worked and I was a failure. It took a while for the light bulb to fire up in my synapses and inform me that I wasn't the failure, it was the simple fucking fact that 95 percent of diets do not work full stop. My carcass had found the point it was hanging at, and I could either continue to lose and regain the same 60 pounds I'd been losing and regaining since I was in high school, making myself a complete mental disaster, or work and rock what I got.

It's not unusual for co-workers to spy me in my terribly fashionable gym outfit of yoga pants and smartassy tee shirts from ThinkGeek.com, and the default question always is, "OH! Are you on a diet??" Sometimes, I still feel kind of bad that my answer is no, because they're so damn excited by the concept. Dieting is a bonding activity for many. When you're not joining in the bonding, it's hard for many to absorb that concept, particularly when you look like me. I'm not someone that you look at and say "she just needs to lose a couple"--I could quite easily be used on a poster warning the world about the evils of Teh Fats. The notion that I, someone who should (for the LOVE of GOD and ALL THAT IS HOLY) be dieting is *not* dieting...cue heads tilting like Nipper the RCA dog hearing His Master's Voice.

The heads get even more tilty when I don't flip out with joy when I'm informed that I've lost weight. My standard reply is usually a very cheerful "okay!" It's just bizarre to me that so much attention would be paid to my, or anyone else's body. There was a period of time where a co-worker paid a lot of attention to what I would eat for lunch. I like salads. I like vegetables. I like slapping them together and involving a tasty dressing. If I was having a salad-esque item on a day, he'd appear and say a variation of "Oh my GOD, a salad?!?" But he wasn't saying it to try and punctuate the idea of "yeah, fattie, eat that salad"--he absolutely loathed anything that wasn't fried, smothered, and fried some more, so someone devouring green things voluntarily was baffling to him. I knew where he was coming from, so I wasn't particularly offended or annoyed.

I had another co-worker, however, who felt it was necessary to let me know I needed to "get my health under control". A male whose cubicle was in front of mine, he would often opine about various subjects including my state of health and how it was time to get it under control. It never struck him as being obnoxious or violently impolite to inform me how to live my life--after all, he was thin and clearly an expert on health. It's not an unusual attitude for people to take when trying to wrangle fat people. We're informed from a very early age that there is something very very wrong with us and that we're out of control. Therefore, we are to be quite grateful when someone who is thin and "healthy" takes time out of their busy schedule to let us know just what's wrong with us and how to fix it.

I'm not grateful anymore. On a regular day, I'm just kind of amused, and on a bad day, I'm ready to spit some nails. It is disturbing to think about how much money is made off of all of us, fat or thin, based on the idea that it's normal and expected to hate our bodies and search endlessly for some sort of fix, some sort of cure. It is disturbing how pervasive the message is, for all of us, that we are not good enough, and how often that message is delivered to us by people we admire, people we're related to, people we love. Most of the time, it's not being delivered to be unkind. It's simply the default position that is pushed at us over lifetimes by media, by society, by any number of factors. So much so that when we do receive a compliment regarding our appearances, we knee-jerk reject it because it's simply not possible that something involving our bodies is okay, is pretty or handsome, is sexy. And if one's particular aesthetic taste leans toward something that isn't considered conventional by societal standards, it's dismissed as odd and freakish. Hating yourself and considering it par for the course isn't a healthy state to be in, my friends.

If you're a person who immediately provides reasons why someone's batshit crazy for thinking you are attractive or liking the way you've done your hair or the outfit you're wearing or something you've said or thought, I invite you to try an experiment for...let's say, a week. Instead of giving the someone a laundry list of reasons why he/she is out of his/her gourd for finding the cut of your jib fetching, try whipping out a "thank you", even if you're still thinking the person is loco. On the flip, do the same for someone else and if they start to give you the reasons why you're wrong, head them off at the pass and let them know your compliments aren't negotiable. Read more on this article...