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We cannot see the gift in what we resist.

Throughout the Pandemic folks have been wringing their hands about gaining Covid 19 pounds, and I was one of them. I can’t blame Covid-19 for my weight gain though, mine started two years ago. Well, let’s back up – more like four years ago because as soon as I started losing it, I started gaining it back.

I had gone to see my endocrinologist at Ochsner. He was not only the head of endocrinology, but also my friend and neighbor. He was the medical professional who put a name to my thyroid condition – Hashimoto’s disease – which explained the sudden loss of my hair.

I had been seeing him professionally for four years when he told me I needed to lose weight. My weight pointed to obese on his charts. For those four years, I would put him through the paces, asking all sorts of nutritional information, and I was frankly surprised he would not engage with me on this topic. He would hem and haw and then he would suggest I speak to a nutritionist if I thought it would help.

My questions concerned gluten, soy, walnuts and all sorts of other foods that I was suddenly having a reaction to and my autodidactic research kept pointing to Hashimoto’s necessitating a restrictive diet. The challenge was the more I restricted the more I had gut problems. It seemed that everything I ate caused my stomach to churn in turmoil.

After a lifetime love of eating, I suddenly didn’t want to go out to eat, cook, or accept an invitation for dinner from a friend. I had too many restrictions and inevitably something would trigger my stomach, and I would be miserable for hours afterwards.

What I didn’t understand is I was developing a new problem – which has a name – orthorexia. Orthorexia is an unhealthy attachment to healthy eating. Are you with me now?

So about this time a friend was starting to oversee an obesity weight loss program for the state and since she didn’t have any clients, I became her guinea pig. She put me on a restrictive diet – 900 calories – and I started to lose weight. It wasn’t a healthy diet, as a matter of fact it called for me to curtail any exercise.

In a span of three months, I lost 27 lbs. I was obsessed with my diet and when I traveled to see my family in Atlanta, I brought my own boiled eggs, carrot and celery sticks, and while everyone participated in meals together – fried chicken, biscuits, mac n cheese, I sat with my own sad little meals trying my best to adhere to my weight loss plan. I had lost the weight already, but now I lived in sheer fear I would put it back on.

And I did. I gained 30 lbs for the 27 lbs. Fast forward to the pandemic. I noticed people around me who had lost weight through a myriad of diets. Three were on Weight Watchers. One was on her own diet and exercise program. One did it through green smoothies. One did it via cutting out dairy, grains, and a multitude of other food items, plus a divorce. One did it through Whole 30 and intermittent fasting.

So I began to look at how I would lose weight. The pandemic had opened up more time for my walks, which had been compromised by going back and forth to New Orleans six days a week, so I began to walk three miles per day and some days would walk up to 9 miles. I rode my bike for an hour in the afternoons on most days.

First I started following one of my friend’s diets – the green smoothie and liver focus pills. I didn’t lose a single pound in a month. Then I looked into the intermittent fasting diet where you eat for six hours but not for 18 other hours of a 24-hour period. I thought I would go back to the small plate meals I had done with a nutritionist in San Francisco when I had lost 30 lbs in my 40s. I kept trying the small plates on my own, but it wasn’t leading to weight loss. I was about to check out Weight Watchers for the first time in my life.

Then one day while walking I looked for a podcast on mindful eating. I had become a daily meditator when I lost my hair in 2012, and I now sought podcasts for whatever I wanted to know and I knew nothing about mindful eating. So I searched the term “mindful eating.”

Only what I sought was not what I found.

I listened to one podcast and it opened the door to a completely different universe, one where dieticians were urging people to give up diets. Eating professionals were pointing to a diet culture that had pervaded the medical community and society and made us all sick. Authors, speakers, and medical professionals were saying everything you know about food is wrong, everything you tell yourself has been warped and manipulated, and everything your body needs is in your hands. One even spoke of Michael Pollan as a wrong headed person. [Note: he had been my guru.]

MIND BLOWN.

The first podcasts I listened to were hosted by Christy Harrison, who wrote The Anti-Diet. Next I listened to Isabel Foxen Duke about stopping the fight with food. Then I listened to Dan Harris’s 10% Happier where he interviewed Evelyn. This led me to Evelyn Tribole who wrote Intuitive Eating 25 years ago. I am on a roll – every day I go for my walk and listen to yet another dietician with a story to tell – one who was put on a restrictive diet at three years old by her pediatrician, one who sold diet products to doctors, one who went to school to be a nutritionist and almost quit because it meant she would have to have a weight loss practice.

During this discovery that I am still on, I began to envision a world where I am happy with my body. I thought about my 34-year-old niece who exudes body positivity and pleasure principles. She told me she follows Sarah Jenks and Taryn Brumfitt on Instagram because she loves their body sense. I realized that I was perpetuating this crazy messed up version of myself by carrying all the stress of wanting and trying to be the “thinner than my body wants to be” person, trying to lose weight to reach and hold an acceptable body weight for society and the medical profession, and that all of this self loathing that had gone into my body for 61 years was a sham!

If I asked a gal pal if she liked her body, 99% of them would say no. How much has the diet culture permeated, pervaded, perverted and punished all women into self loathing? I told all this to a friend on a walk the other day about how all of it – dieting, self-loathing, thin obsession, and body image challenges were all a product of everything else – patriarchy, capitalism, misogyny, and that it had infiltrated the medical profession to such a degree that headlines purporting fat people die from Covid-19 more than not-fat people are common (and statistically inaccurate). Even NPR blames higher Covid-19 mortality on Black folks who have high BMIs. It’s a lie!

Now what? Could you envision a world where you love your body? Does the idea of sitting down to a meal that includes all of your favorite foods turn you on? Would you imagine your body telling you when it needs food and when it is full? Could you imagine it without interference from a narrative that has been shoved down your throat your whole life while being upheld by everyone you know?

There are examples in my life where suddenly everything I knew to be true became false:

I am a woman, I had to learn that women are dismissed, undervalued, and kept out of locked rooms where important decisions get made.

I have a son, I had to learn that boys get a bum deal via the Boy Code, and realized that as a woman I uphold this protocol.

I am an American, I had to learn that the United States built racist institutions and as a white woman I have helped maintain a system that blatantly harms groups of people.

Why should it come as any surprise that the food we grow, the food we eat, the food we desire, avoid, prepare, crave, market, sell, and buy has been manipulated by avarice and misinformation?