#Weight Loss For Women Over 40

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The Best Weight Loss For Women Over 40

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Trim Your Waistline: Effective Strategies to Achieve a Toned Body!

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Weight Loss Diet Plan for Women Over 40: Managing Hormones and Metabolism

Women over 40 who want to lose weight frequently concentrate on controlling the special hormonal and metabolic changes that come with becoming older. Hormonal changes can affect metabolism and cause weight gain in women in their forties and beyond, so it's important to adjust dietary choices accordingly. Stressing the importance of eating a balanced diet rich in fiber-rich foods, healthy fats, and lean proteins will assist maintain metabolic health and control blood sugar levels. Including meals high in vitamins and minerals, such whole grains, almonds, and leafy greens, can also help you keep a healthy weight and manage these hormonal fluctuations.

During this phase of life, maintaining hydration and modifying meal timing can also be extremely important for weight loss diet plan management. A healthy body is one that has a healthy metabolism and is supported by adequate fluids. Eating in a planned manner, with smaller, more often meals, helps moderate hunger and energy levels. Incorporating these dietary principles with consistent physical activity can improve general health and support weight management attempts. Women over 40 can design a diet plan that meets their evolving demands and aids in weight loss by concentrating on these factors.

[dietitiangagan]

Expert Dietitians in Chandigarh: Your Path to Sustainable Weight Loss

Weight loss is a journey that many embark on, but few achieve lasting success. The key to sustainable weight loss isn’t just about cutting calories or hitting the gym; it’s about finding a balanced approach that fits your lifestyle. This is where consulting an expert Dietitian in Chandigarh can be a game-changer. If you’re struggling to lose weight or maintain it, a nutritionist in Chandigarh can provide the personalized guidance you need to achieve your goals in a healthy and sustainable way.

Understanding Sustainable Weight Loss

Sustainable weight loss isn’t about quick fixes or fad diets. It’s about creating lasting changes to your eating habits, lifestyle, and mindset. An expert Dietitian in Chandigarh can help you understand the science behind weight loss and guide you toward making healthier choices that you can maintain in the long term.

Why Choose a Dietitian in Chandigarh?

Personalized Diet Plans Every individual is unique, and so are their dietary needs. A Dietitian in Chandigarh will assess your current health status, lifestyle, and weight loss goals to create a diet plan tailored specifically to you. This personalized approach ensures that your weight loss journey is effective and sustainable.

Holistic Approach to Weight Loss Sustainable weight loss involves more than just dieting. It requires a holistic approach that includes physical activity, stress management, and adequate sleep. A nutritionist in Chandigarh will work with you to develop a comprehensive plan that addresses all aspects of your health.

Expert Guidance and Support Navigating the complexities of weight loss can be challenging. An experienced Dietitian in Chandigarh provides continuous support and expert guidance, helping you overcome obstacles and stay motivated throughout your journey.

Focus on Long-term Success Many people lose weight only to regain it later. A nutritionist in Chandigarh focuses on long-term success by helping you adopt healthy eating habits that last a lifetime, reducing the likelihood of weight regain.

Safe and Healthy Weight Loss Rapid weight loss can be harmful to your health. A Dietitian in Chandigarh ensures that your weight loss is safe and healthy, promoting gradual and steady progress that doesn’t compromise your well-being.

The Role of a Nutritionist in Chandigarh in Your Weight Loss Journey

A nutritionist in Chandigarh plays a vital role in your weight loss journey by helping you make informed choices about your diet and lifestyle. They offer practical advice on meal planning, portion control, and mindful eating, empowering you to take control of your health.

Overcoming Plateaus and Challenges

Weight loss plateaus are common, but they don’t have to derail your progress. A Dietitian in Chandigarh can help you overcome these challenges by adjusting your diet plan, introducing new strategies, and providing the encouragement you need to stay on track.

Achieving a Balanced Lifestyle

Sustainable weight loss is about more than just losing pounds; it’s about achieving a balanced and healthy lifestyle. A nutritionist in Chandigarh will guide you toward a balanced diet that includes all food groups, ensuring you get the nutrients your body needs while losing weight.

Conclusion

Sustainable weight loss is achievable when you have the right support and guidance. Consulting an expert Dietitian in Chandigarh or nutritionist in Chandigarh can set you on the path to long-term success. With their personalized approach, expert advice, and ongoing support, you can achieve your weight loss goals in a healthy and sustainable way. Don’t let another day go by—start your journey toward a healthier you with the help of a Dietitian in Chandigarh today!

[jaymartinstudios]

Mucusless Diet Better Moods

[someone-will-remember-us]

So many aspects of the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other defendants in France over the past month have been so extraordinary to experience that they feel somehow surreal, or upside-down. In 2020, Gisèle Pelicot, a 67-year-old retiree living in the small French town of Mazan, was told by police that her husband of almost 50 years, Dominique, had been arrested after trying to film up women’s skirts in a shopping center. At first, Gisèle was cautiously understanding. If Dominique was willing to go into therapy, she thought, they could stay together. But then the police confronted her with something infinitely more shocking. On his hard drive, a folder titled “abuse” contained some 20,000 photographs and videos of Gisèle being raped and assaulted by strange men—72 in total—as well as her husband. For about a decade, they told her, he had been drugging her food and drink, and inviting men he met on the internet to abuse her. In court last month, Dominique Pelicot validated the charges against him. “I am a rapist, like the others in this room,” he said. Fourteen of the other men on trial have pleaded guilty to the charges against them, but the majority claim innocence, arguing that they thought they were simply participating in a “libertine” game between husband and wife.

Before his arrest, with regard to his own security, Dominique was meticulous to a fault. The men who came to his home had to warm their hands on a radiator before entering his bedroom. They had to undress in the kitchen. They weren’t to smell of cigarette smoke or aftershave, lest they leave any discernible trace of themselves behind. If Gisèle stirred while an assault was ongoing, Dominique ordered the assailant to leave the room. He kept detailed records, saving videos and photographs of each man in file folders categorized by their first name—“part pleasure,” he later explained in court, “but also, part insurance.” With regard to his wife’s safety, however, he was strikingly nonchalant. He didn’t require that any of the men accused of raping his wife use condoms. Some are accused of choking her while Dominique watched; others, of assaulting her with objects. One man, who was HIV-positive, allegedly raped Gisèle on six separate occasions, telling Dominique that he couldn’t maintain an erection if he wore protection. When Gisèle began to complain of strange physical symptoms—substantial weight loss, hair loss, huge gaps in her memory, difficulty moving her arm—Dominique drove her to doctor appointments, but didn’t stop drugging her, or facilitating her abuse. When she mentioned that she’d been having unexplained gynecological issues, he accused her of cheating on him. Of her husband, she said in court: “In 50 years, I never imagined for a second that he could rape.”

The mass trial of Dominique and 50 other men who could be identified (more than 20 alleged assailants remain at large) began in September, exposing a case that’s both wholly unprecedented and dully familiar. The fact that we’re aware of it at all is because of Gisèle, who gave up her right to privacy so that the allegations of what happened to her could be made public. What she believed, her lawyer said, was that “shame must change sides”—for the men accused of raping and assaulting her to be the ones whose characters were stained, whose reputations were maligned. In the process, she’s become a feminist icon in France, in whose name women’s groups have rallied, seeking to raise awareness about sex crimes involving drugging and pointing out that women are most likely to be raped by someone they know. Every day, before she enters the courtroom, Gisèle is applauded by crowds who have gathered outside to support her.

In court, though, Gisèle’s cross-examination has mostly been by the book, which is to say that lawyers for the defense—more than 40 in number—have done everything they can to impugn her character. “There’s rape and there’s rape,” one defense attorney told her, implying, as many of the defendants have argued, that Gisèle and her husband were swingers participating in an elaborate sex game. “No, there are no different types of rape,” she replied. Although the judges in the trial denied the prosecution’s request that videos documenting her abuse be shown in court, agreeing with defense lawyers that doing so would compromise the dignityof the defendants, they did allow those lawyers to show some 27 pictures that revealed Gisèle’s genitalia, and her face with her eyes apparently open. (A medical expert has testified that, given the medication Dominique was secretly administering, Gisèle was so heavily sedated, she was closer to being in a coma than being asleep.) Lawyers asked her whether she was an alcoholic, and whether she had “a secret inclination for exhibitionism.” In response, Gisèle stated that every day since the beginning of the trial, she’d been intentionally humiliated, and that she understood why most rape victims don’t press charges. Although she appears composed on the surface, she has said that, internally, she is “a field of ruins.” Even so, a few weeks into the trial, one defense lawyer, Nadia El Bouroumi, posted an Instagram Reel of herself in her car, miming to the Wham song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” (She later deleted the video and posted a statement saying she was profoundly sorry if her meaning had been misinterpreted.)

This kind of ritualized cruelty toward victims is standard in legal systems worldwide, and yet the Pelicot case has stripped away all the usual obfuscations and muddying of details to make certain things clear. There are just so many accused rapists in this case, each one caught on camera. There are so many men who are alleged to have assaulted a drugged grandmother of seven that before they go into the courtroom, they have to form a queue, shuffling one by one in hunched, sullen fashion, as though waiting in a breadline, or for a bus. The men range in age from their 20s to their 70s. One was a firefighter. One was a nurse. One was a journalist. One was a prison guard, one a civil servant. Many were apparently happily married with children. One, a 22-year-old, missed the birth of his daughter the night he went to allegedly rape Gisèle.

Not all men rape women, the adage goes. But the Pelicot case has upended that argument: not all men, but any man, of any age, any profession, any marital status. Living in a small town of 6,000 people, Dominique was able to find 72 men nearby who were allegedly willing—as per his invitation on a forum titled “Without Their Knowledge”—to “abuse my sleeping, drugged wife.” The site he used, Coco.fr, was shut down earlier this year, but it has been implicated in 23,000 separate crimes that are under investigation by more than 70 public prosecutors’ offices across France. Not all men but, still, so many men. One defendant in the Pelicot case, a 72-year-old former firefighter and truck driver who was described by friends and family as “kind,” “attentive,” and “open to others,” told the courtroom that he had “a deep respect for women,” and that if his ex-wife were present, she’d tell them, “He loves the woman in all her diversity, all her complexity.” Nevertheless, he is accused of raping an unconscious woman, Gisèle’s lawyer countered; the man has denied the accusation. Another defendant explained that he realized what he was doing was wrong when Gisèle moved while he was assaulting her, and Dominique quickly ushered him out of the room. “When I crossed the garden, I thought about reporting the incident,” he said in court. “Then life resumed its course; the next day, I went to work very early, and that was that.”

The men accused of raping and assaulting Gisèle, it’s worth remembering, are so numerous that they were arrested in five separate waves, spanning almost a year. In court every week, a new group of defendants has been presented to the judges for consideration, so that their psychological profiles and the testimony of their partners and ex-partners can be taken into account. One defendant, a private nurse, was apparently extremely empathetic to his patients, whom he considered family. He and his wife tried for many years to have children, undergoing multiple rounds of IVF and eventually hoping to adopt. Another, a mason, was reportedly a wonderful father whose friends testified that he was respectful and quiet, never even making dirty jokes at parties. Some of the men have been described as egocentric, aggressive, and routinely unfaithful. One was incarcerated for acts of sexual violence against three other women at the time of his arrest. One has asked about the possibility of restorative justice. Some confessed to having been abused as children. One, although not charged with assaulting Gisèle, is accused of being mentored by Dominique in the drugging and rape of his own wife, who has stayed with him despite learning that both her husband and Dominique allegedly raped her while she was unconscious on several occasions. One defendant was described by his fiancée, with whom he shares a 15-month-old child conceived after his arrest, as having a “heart of gold.”

Following along with the trial, what’s been hard to process is the disconnect between how the defendants are being treated and what Gisèle has endured. The men’s psychological profiles are inherently humanizing—it’s difficult not to feel pity for those whose children have died, or who were reportedly abused themselves, or who apparently fought for their children with special needs to receive the educational assistance they needed. And yet these men also allegedly participated in the abuse and rape of a passed-out woman: an immobile, voiceless, dehumanized body served up to them by her husband, whose actions implied—and were accepted by the men—as ownership. “If a man came to have intercourse with me, he still should have asked for my consent,” Gisèle said in court. But that acquiescence itself would have been in opposition to what so many men apparently wanted: ultimate sexual domination over someone who couldn’t consent, orchestrated by the one man whom she loved and trusted the most.

(archive)

[mpregtales]

Aaron & Lucas Part 1

⬤ [Part 2]   [Part 3]   [Part 4]   [Part 5]

The house was quiet now. A stillness had settled over it, a stark contrast to the lively, bustling home it had once been. Aaron stood in the doorway of the living room, his gaze drifting over the familiar surroundings—the worn, comfortable couch where he and David had spent countless evenings together, the shelves lined with family photos chronicling decades of love and memories, the large windows that let in the soft morning light.

It had been two years since David passed. Two years since the love of his life, his partner in every sense of the word, had taken his final breath. The loss had been devastating, a deep ache that settled in Aaron's chest and never quite went away. David had been his rock, the one who had seen him through the joys and challenges of raising their children, the one who had held him close during their quiet moments together, and the one who had made him feel truly loved.

David had been in his early 70s when he passed, and Aaron, now in his mid-40s, felt the weight of those years acutely. He had aged too—his once dark hair now peppered with streaks of silver, a testament to the passage of time. His athletic build, though still strong, carried the subtle changes of age, softened slightly by the years and by the pregnancies that had shaped his body in ways he never could have anticipated.

The triplets they had together, now in college, were scattered across the country, pursuing their dreams and building lives of their own. Grace and Emily, David’s daughters from his first marriage, had grown into remarkable women, both successful in their careers and happily married. They visited often, filling the house with laughter and warmth when they did, but their visits were brief, and the house inevitably returned to its quiet state after they left.

Michael and Josh, who now lived in Chicago, were raising their twins—children Aaron had carried and brought into the world as a surrogate for his stepson and his partner. Michael and Aaron were as close as ever, their bond deepened by the years and by the unique circumstances that had shaped their relationship. The twins were now nearing college age, and Aaron found himself marveling at how quickly time had passed.

Aaron had adjusted to life without David, but it hadn’t been easy. The early days were filled with grief so profound it felt as though he might drown in it. But gradually, he found ways to carry on. He changed careers, focusing his energy on caring for David during his illness, and when that chapter closed, he sought out new ways to keep himself occupied. Financially secure, he didn’t need to work, but he found that having a job, spending time with friends, and keeping busy helped him navigate the emptiness left by David’s absence.

He was happy, in a way. Content with the life he had built, proud of the family he had raised. But there was also a sense of longing, a feeling that something was missing. He had once imagined his life at this age differently—traveling the world, experiencing new adventures, and settling down with the love of his life to start a family. Instead, he had already lived a full life, with six children and the memory of a man he had loved deeply.

As Aaron moved through the house, he found himself in the bedroom he had shared with David. It was a space filled with memories—of love, of laughter, of shared dreams. The bed was neatly made, the room kept just as it had been when David was alive. Aaron sat down on the edge of the bed, running his hand over the comforter, and allowed himself to remember.

He remembered the day they first moved in together, the joy of combining their lives and the excitement of the future that lay ahead of them. He remembered the nights spent holding each other, whispering about their hopes and fears, dreaming of the family they would one day have. He remembered the day they found out Aaron was pregnant with triplets, the mixture of shock and joy that had filled them both, and the incredible journey that followed.

He remembered David’s strength, his unwavering support, and the deep, abiding love that had carried them through every challenge they faced. He remembered the final days, too—the days when David was too weak to leave the bed, when Aaron held his hand and promised him that everything would be okay, even though his heart was breaking.

Aaron had kept that promise. He had carried on, just as David would have wanted him to. But now, as he sat in their empty home, he couldn’t help but wonder what the future held for him. He had lived a full life, but there was still time—time to find new purpose, new love, and new adventures. He wasn’t sure what that would look like, but he knew that David would want him to find happiness again.

And so, Aaron resolved to keep living, to keep searching for whatever it was that would fill the emptiness in his heart. He would honor David’s memory by embracing the life that lay ahead of him, whatever it might bring.

The seasons had changed, and with it, a subtle shift in Aaron's life. It was early autumn, the air crisp and cool, carrying with it the scent of falling leaves and the promise of new beginnings. Aaron found himself spending more time outdoors, taking long walks through the park, where the trees were ablaze with reds and oranges. It was during one of these walks that he first met him.

The encounter was unplanned, a chance meeting that would set the course for something neither of them had expected. Aaron had been sitting on a bench, lost in thought, when he noticed a man struggling to manage an overly enthusiastic dog. The dog—a large, fluffy golden retriever—had decided it was time to chase after a squirrel, nearly pulling the man off his feet in the process.

Aaron couldn’t help but chuckle at the scene. The man, noticing Aaron’s amusement, flashed him an embarrassed but good-natured smile as he finally got the dog under control.

“Sorry about that,” the man said, walking over to where Aaron was seated. “He’s got a mind of his own sometimes.”

“No need to apologize,” Aaron replied, still smiling. “He’s just full of energy. What’s his name?”

“Max,” the man said, ruffling the dog’s fur affectioLucasly. “And I’m Lucas, by the way.”

“Aaron,” he introduced himself, extending his hand. Lucas shook it, and Aaron couldn’t help but notice the warmth and firmness of his grip.

The two men fell into easy conversation, talking about everything from the changing seasons to their shared love of dogs. Aaron learned that Lucas was only a few years younger than him, in his early forties, and had recently moved to the area. He was a widower too, having lost his partner of many years to cancer. The pain of that loss was still fresh, and Aaron could see it in Lucas’s eyes—the same lingering grief that he knew all too well.

They talked for what felt like hours, the conversation flowing naturally, as if they had known each other for years. There was a quiet understanding between them, a bond forged by shared experiences and the unspoken recognition of the losses they both carried. By the time they parted ways, Aaron felt a strange sense of connection to Lucas, a feeling that lingered long after he returned home.

Over the next few weeks, Aaron and Lucas found themselves crossing paths more often. Sometimes it was in the park during one of Aaron’s walks; other times, it was at the local café where Aaron liked to read and Lucas would stop in for coffee. Each time they met, the conversation was easy, filled with laughter and stories of their lives.

Despite the growing connection, Aaron found himself hesitating. He enjoyed Lucas’s company, but the idea of opening his heart again—of letting someone new into the space that David had once filled—felt daunting. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for that, or if he ever would be.

One afternoon, after they had shared coffee together, Lucas invited Aaron to join him for dinner at his place. It was a simple invitation, offered with a smile and no expectations, but it felt like a turning point. Aaron hesitated for a moment, then agreed, his heart fluttering with a mix of excitement and apprehension.

That evening, as Aaron stood in front of Lucas’s home, he took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. The house was modest, cozy, with a warm light glowing from the windows. It was clear that Lucas had made it his own, filling it with touches of personality and warmth.

Lucas greeted him at the door, Max wagging his tail excitedly beside him. The dinner was simple but delicious, and they spent the evening talking and laughing, the conversation flowing as easily as ever. But there was something different this time—an undercurrent of something deeper, something more than just friendship.

As the night wore on, Aaron found himself opening up to Lucas in a way he hadn’t with anyone since David’s passing. He talked about his life with David, the joys and the challenges, and the pain of losing him. Lucas listened with understanding, sharing his own experiences, and the grief that still lingered from losing his partner.

They talked about Aaron’s children, their lives now, and about their families. There was a vulnerability in their words, a raw honesty that brought them closer together. By the time they finished dessert, Aaron realized that he hadn’t felt this connected to anyone in a long time.

When it was time to leave, Lucas walked Aaron to the door. There was a moment of hesitation, a pause filled with unspoken words. Aaron could feel the weight of the decision before him—the choice to let someone in, to open his heart again.

Lucas seemed to sense it too. He smiled gently, his hand lingering on Aaron’s arm. “I’m glad we met, Aaron,” he said softly.

“Me too,” Aaron replied, his voice barely above a whisper.

They stood there for a moment longer, the silence between them comfortable, charged with possibilities. Aaron felt his heart beat a little faster, the warmth of Lucas’s hand on his arm grounding him, reminding him that it was okay to feel this again—to want this again.

As he walked home that night, Aaron felt a mix of emotions—hope, fear, excitement. There was still so much he didn’t know, still so much he wasn’t sure about. But for the first time in a long while, he felt like maybe—just maybe—he could find love again.

And maybe, just maybe, that love could be with Lucas.

The days that followed their dinner together were filled with a quiet anticipation. Aaron and Lucas continued to meet, their conversations growing deeper, more intimate, as they learned more about each other. The connection between them, which had started as a shared bond over their pasts, began to evolve into something more—a tentative exploration of what the future might hold.

Aaron found himself thinking about Lucas more often. There was a warmth and kindness in Lucas that drew Aaron in, a sense of stability that made him feel safe. Yet, there was also an undeniable spark, a chemistry that had been absent from Aaron’s life for so long. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, the idea of falling in love again.

Despite his growing feelings, Aaron couldn’t help but wrestle with doubt. Was it too soon? Was he betraying David’s memory by allowing himself to feel this way? The questions gnawed at him, keeping him awake at night, even as his heart pulled him closer to Lucas.

One evening, as they walked through the park together, Lucas seemed to sense Aaron’s inner turmoil. The air was cool, the first hints of winter creeping in, and the park was quiet, with only a few others strolling along the paths.

They walked in comfortable silence for a while, their steps in sync, the leaves crunching beneath their feet. Finally, Lucas spoke, his voice gentle. “Aaron, I’ve been thinking a lot about us… about what this is, and what it could be.”

Aaron looked at him, his heart pounding. “Me too,” he admitted softly.

Lucas stopped walking and turned to face Aaron, his eyes searching his face. “I don’t want to rush you into anything you’re not ready for. I know how much David meant to you, and I would never want to disrespect that.”

Aaron felt a lump form in his throat. He took a deep breath, trying to find the right words. “David was… everything to me. Losing him was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. And sometimes, it feels like letting myself care for someone else is… betraying him, in a way.”

Lucas nodded, understanding in his eyes. “I get that. I really do. I felt the same way after I lost James. It took me a long time to even consider the possibility of loving someone else. But I also know that James would have wanted me to be happy. He would have wanted me to live my life, not just for him, but for myself too.”

Aaron felt a tear slip down his cheek, and Lucas gently brushed it away. “I think David would want the same for you,” Lucas continued, his voice steady. “He wouldn’t want you to close yourself off to the possibility of love, to the possibility of happiness.”

Aaron nodded, his heart aching with the truth of Lucas’s words. “I know you’re right. It’s just… it’s hard.”

“I know,” Lucas said softly. “But you don’t have to do this alone. I’m here, and I want to be here, with you, if you’ll let me.”

There was a pause, the weight of Lucas’s words hanging in the air. Aaron felt a wave of emotion wash over him—fear, hope, longing. He looked into Lucas’s eyes and saw only sincerity, only love.

“I want that too,” Aaron finally said, his voice trembling slightly. “I’m scared, but I want that.”

Lucas’s face broke into a gentle smile, and he reached out, taking Aaron’s hand in his. “We’ll take it one step at a time, together.”

They stood there for a moment, the world around them fading away as they focused on each other. Aaron felt a sense of peace settle over him, the doubts and fears that had plagued him slowly ebbing away. For the first time since David’s passing, he felt like he was moving forward, like he was allowing himself to feel again.

As they continued their walk, hand in hand, Aaron felt a warmth bloom in his chest—a small, fragile hope that maybe, just maybe, he could find love again. With Lucas by his side, the future didn’t seem so daunting, and the idea of opening his heart again felt less like a betrayal and more like a tribute to the love he had once shared with David.

That night, as Aaron lay in bed, he replayed the evening’s conversation in his mind. There was still so much he didn’t know, so much that was uncertain. But he knew one thing for sure—he wasn’t alone anymore. Lucas was there, and with him came the possibility of a new chapter, a new love.

And Aaron was finally ready to take that first step.

The night air was cool and crisp as Aaron and Lucas walked back to Aaron’s house after their dinner at the lake. The conversation between them had flowed easily throughout the evening, a natural rhythm that made it feel as though they had known each other for much longer than they actually had. It was in this ease, this comfort, that Aaron found himself truly relaxing, allowing the walls he had carefully built over the years to start crumbling down.

As they reached the porch, the night sky stretched out above them, the stars twinkling softly in the darkness. Aaron turned to Lucas, his heart racing with emotions he hadn’t felt in years. There was something about Lucas’s presence—his calmness, his quiet strength—that made Aaron feel safe in a way he hadn’t expected.

“Thank you for tonight,” Aaron said softly, his voice carrying the weight of his emotions. “I didn’t realize how much I needed this.”

Lucas smiled, the warmth of it reaching his eyes. “I’m glad we could spend this time together. It means a lot to me, too.”

For a moment, they stood there in silence, the night wrapping around them like a protective blanket. Aaron could feel the pull between them, a magnetic force that drew him closer to Lucas, a force he had been resisting for so long. But now, in this moment, he felt ready—ready to open his heart, ready to embrace the possibility of love again.

Taking a deep breath, Aaron stepped closer to Lucas, his gaze locking onto his. “Lucas… I think I’m falling in love with you.”

The words hung in the air, raw and vulnerable. Lucas’s eyes softened, his expression tender as he reached out to gently cup Aaron’s face in his hands. “I love you too, Aaron. I have for a while now.”

The confession sent a surge of warmth through Aaron, a wave of emotions that was both exhilarating and terrifying. And then, without another word, Lucas leaned in, capturing Aaron’s lips in a kiss that was filled with all the emotions they had both been holding back.

The kiss deepened, their movements becoming more urgent as the intensity of their feelings took over. Aaron’s hands found their way to Lucas’s chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath his fingers. The sensation was grounding, anchoring him in this moment that felt almost surreal.

As they broke apart, their breaths mingling in the cool night air, Aaron felt a new kind of freedom wash over him. For the first time since David’s passing, he allowed himself to truly let go, to surrender to the emotions that had been building inside him. The love he had for Lucas was different from what he had felt for David, but it was just as powerful, just as real.

With a gentle tug, Aaron led Lucas inside, the warmth of the house wrapping around them as they crossed the threshold. The tension between them was palpable, a shared understanding that tonight was a turning point in their relationship.

As they reached the bedroom, Aaron paused, turning to face Lucas. There was a vulnerability in his eyes, a mixture of anticipation and nervousness. “Are you sure?” he asked softly, his voice barely above a whisper.

Lucas’s response was immediate and reassuring. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

Aaron smiled, a mixture of relief and excitement flooding his senses. As Lucas reached out, his fingers gently brushing against Aaron's waist, Aaron felt a spark of anticipation. Slowly, Lucas reached for the hem of Aaron's shirt, lifting it with care. Aaron raised his arms, allowing the fabric to glide over his head, revealing the strong, athletic build he had worked hard to maintain over the years.

Lucas's gaze traveled over Aaron’s body, taking in the defined muscles of his chest and the ridges of his abs, each one a testament to Aaron's dedication. But there was more to Aaron's physique than just muscle—there were the subtle curves of his hips, the fullness of his glutes, a testament to the life he had carried twice before. His body told a story, one of love, loss, and resilience, with the faintest hints of stretch marks serving as reminders of the life he had once nurtured within him.

With a tender touch, Lucas let his hands trace the contours of Aaron’s biceps, feeling the strength beneath his skin. He moved to Aaron’s chest, his fingers grazing the firm pec muscles that Aaron had worked so hard to regain after his pregnancies. Each touch was filled with reverence, admiration, and a growing desire. “You’re beautiful,” Lucas murmured, his voice thick with emotion.

Aaron’s heart swelled at the words, and he felt a deep connection to Lucas, a bond that went beyond physical attraction. This was about trust, about opening himself up to love again, about letting someone in after years of guarding his heart.

Aaron, in turn, reached for Lucas’s shirt, tugging it over his head with gentle hands. As the fabric fell away, Aaron took a moment to admire the solid build of Lucas’s chest, the way his muscles moved beneath the surface. Aaron’s hands roamed over Lucas’s strong pecs, his firm abs, feeling the warmth of his skin and the power that lay beneath. There was a quiet reverence in his touch, a recognition of the strength they both possessed—not just physical, but emotional, forged through their individual journeys.

As they moved together, their bodies finding a natural rhythm, Aaron felt a sense of peace wash over him. This was where he was meant to be—here, with Lucas, in this moment of pure connection. The softness of his skin against Lucas’s, the warmth of their bodies pressed together, the way they moved as one—it was all a testament to the love that had grown between them. The subtle marks on Aaron’s body, the gentle flex of Lucas’s muscles, the way they felt each other’s strength and vulnerability—it was a beautiful reminder of the lives they had lived and the love they were now building together.

Lucas’s touch was gentle yet filled with passion, his hands exploring the curves of Aaron’s body with a reverence that made Aaron’s heart race. Lucas’s fingers traced the curve of Aaron’s glutes, appreciating the fullness that had developed over the years, a beautiful reminder of the two pregnancies Aaron had carried.

As Aaron got on all fours, he arched his back, pushing out his bubble butt that had remained with him through the years after his pregnancies. His cheeks gave a slight jiggle as he adjusted to the position, offering himself to Lucas with a sense of liberation—a freedom he hadn’t known he needed. This moment wasn’t just about physical pleasure; it was about healing, about allowing himself to be vulnerable and trusting in the love blossoming between them.

Lucas was in awe of Aaron’s body, captivated by the story it told. He was drawn to Aaron even more, his admiration deepening as he unbuttoned his jeans. The air was thick with anticipation, their eyes locking—a mix of awe and longing shining in them. As Lucas slid off his underwear, revealing the massive length and girth of his manhood, Aaron’s breath caught in his throat. It was the biggest he had ever seen, and a flicker of nervousness crossed his mind. He wondered if he could take it, but then he reminded himself that his bubble butt, which had once brought large babies into the world, was more than capable of handling the challenge. The sight of Lucas sent a surge of raw, primal desire coursing through Aaron, his heart pounding with longing.

Lucas leaned forward, pressing soft, lingering kisses along the small of Aaron’s back, savoring the feel of the smooth skin beneath his lips. His hands moved to gently caress Aaron’s hips, tracing the contours of his plump, previously childbearing cheeks with a reverent touch. Lucas’s movements were slow and deliberate, building the anticipation between them as he lifted himself up with his strong arms, positioning himself over Aaron.

With a playful smile, Lucas tapped Aaron’s right cheek, causing it to bounce slightly. The gesture sent a delicious ripple of desire through Aaron, the sensation heightening the tension and deepening the connection between them.

Taking his time, Lucas applied lubricant to his impressive length, ensuring every inch was slick and ready. With a gentle touch, he spread a cool layer of lubricant over Aaron’s entrance using his index finger, the sensation sending a shiver of anticipation through Aaron’s body. In a moment of spontaneity, Lucas slid his finger inside Aaron’s entrance, a tantalizing sensation that elicited a soft moan from Aaron, his body instinctively responding to the care and intimacy of Lucas’s touch.

Lucas then carefully positioned himself between Aaron’s cheeks, guiding the tip of his manhood to rest just at the entrance. Aaron could feel the pressure of Lucas’s broad head against the delicate folds of his skin, a sensation that made his heart race with a mix of excitement and nervous anticipation.

As Lucas began to press forward, the tip slowly breached Aaron, who instinctively flexed his glutes to accommodate the initial intrusion. With each measured push, Lucas eased himself deeper, the sensation of stretching and adjusting intense yet exhilarating for Aaron. His hands clenched the sheets beneath him, gripping them tightly as he felt Lucas fill him, inch by inch. The stretch was intense—Lucas was just so big—but Aaron relished every moment of it. Finally, Lucas’s hips met the firm, rounded muscles of Aaron’s cheeks, their bodies fully joined.

Both men let out deep, resonant moans, the pleasure they shared unlike anything Aaron had ever experienced. As Lucas leaned forward to place a tender kiss on the nape of Aaron’s neck, they both reveled in the closeness and profound intimacy of the moment. Aaron’s body was inviting, perfectly fitted to Lucas’s, as though they were made for each other.

Their movements were slow at first, careful as they adjusted to the newness of their connection. But as the intensity built, as their breaths quickened and their hearts raced, they found a rhythm that was both powerful and tender. Aaron felt himself becoming lost in the sensation—the way their bodies moved together, the way Lucas’s hands gripped his hips with a firm yet loving touch, the way he bounced against Lucas, pulling him closer, grounding him in this moment of pure connection.

The softness of Aaron’s skin, the fullness of his hips as they moved in perfect harmony, the way his body responded to Lucas’s every touch—it was all a revelation, a rediscovery of the intimacy he had once known, but in a way that felt entirely new and profound.

Lucas pressed himself forward, leaning into Aaron, his chest against Aaron’s back, feeling the warmth and strength of the man he loved. Aaron’s massive cheeks were firmly pressed against Lucas’s crotch as he pushed his manhood in deeper, filling Aaron completely. Leaning in close, Lucas whispered in Aaron’s ear, his voice husky with desire, “You’re so hot, Aaron.” He kissed Aaron’s cheek, the intimacy of the moment deepening the bond between them.

Lucas leaned back, throwing his hands behind his head, and looked down to watch as Aaron’s bubble butt bounced rhythmically against his crotch. His massive manhood slid in and out of Aaron’s wet, eager entrance, each movement eliciting moans of pleasure from both of them. As they reached the peak of their passion, Aaron felt a surge of emotion—a wave of love and gratitude that took his breath away. The sight of Aaron moving against him, the feel of his body responding so perfectly, was too much for Lucas, and he felt the intensity build within him, reaching a climax that sent shudders through his entire body.

Aaron gasped as he felt the warmth of Lucas’s release deep inside him, filling him with an overwhelming sense of connection and fulfillment. There was so much of it, and the sensation of being so completely filled left him trembling with emotion. This was more than just physical pleasure—it was a deep, soul-connecting experience that reminded him of the power of love, of the strength it took to open his heart again.

As Lucas gently pulled out, he couldn’t resist one final look at Aaron’s plump, quivering cheeks. He parted them slightly, admiring the sight of the small drip of his own essence left behind, a tangible reminder of the intimacy they had just shared. Aaron’s body shuddered once more, the aftershocks of their passion still rippling through him.

When it was over, they lay together, their bodies entwined, their breaths still coming in soft gasps. Aaron felt a deep sense of contentment settle over him, a feeling of being exactly where he was meant to be. Lucas’s arms wrapped around him, holding him close, and Aaron felt a peace he hadn’t experienced in years. This was love—a love that was different from what he had known before, but just as real, just as powerful.

As they drifted off to sleep, Aaron’s heart swelled with gratitude for the journey that had brought him to this moment. He had loved and lost, and now, in Lucas’s arms, he had found love again—a new beginning that felt both hopeful and true.

Part 2

The Aaron Trilogy: Aaron & David I ; Aaron & David II ; Aaron & Lucas

[soniamaries]

Best Diet Plan for Over 40: Essential Guide by Nutritionist

The Best Diet for Women Over 40: Essential Guide by Sonia Marie Nutrition

As women enter their 40s, nutritional needs shift to support changes in metabolism, hormonal balance, and overall health. This stage often brings new challenges, including maintaining a healthy weight, managing energy levels, and promoting bone strength. Sonia Marie Nutrition knows what is required of Diet for Women Over 40 with professional nutrition guidance. A well-balanced diet can empower women to feel their best, embrace healthy aging, and maintain vitality.

Understanding Nutritional Needs After 40

Aging naturally impacts metabolism, causing it to slow down, and hormonal changes related to perimenopause and menopause often follow. These changes make nutrient-dense foods crucial for maintaining energy, muscle tone, and metabolic health. Three nutrients particularly beneficial in this stage are calcium, fiber, and antioxidants. Calcium is essential for bone health, fiber aids in digestion and supports heart health, while antioxidants protect cells from damage, promoting overall wellness. The best diet plan for women over 40, these nutrients help in managing weight, strength maintenance, and long-term health.

The Role of Hormonal Health in Diet 

Hormonal fluctuations can influence weight, energy, and even mood. Foods rich in phytoestrogens—found in flaxseeds, soy, and legumes—may help balance hormones naturally. Additionally, incorporating omega-3 fatty acids from sources like fish, chia seeds, and walnuts can support mood stability and reduce inflammation. A diet rich in nutrients can also help ease symptoms associated with menopause, including hot flashes and fatigue. Adopting a well-rounded, nutritious diet helps maintain hormonal balance, which is crucial for women navigating these natural changes.

Key Components of the Best Diet Plan for Women Over 40

The best diet plan for women over 40 emphasizes whole foods, balanced meals, and nutrient diversity. Key components include lean proteins, healthy fats, and complex carbohydrates. Protein is essential for muscle maintenance and metabolism, while healthy fats (such as those found in avocados and olive oil) support brain function and hormone production. Complex carbs—like whole grains, sweet potatoes, and legumes—offer sustained energy and stabilize blood sugar levels. A variety of colorful fruits and vegetables also ensures a broad intake of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.  

Weight Management Strategies

Weight loss after 40 can be challenging, but it’s achievable through a combination of diet, exercise, and mindful eating. To lose weight, creating a moderate calorie deficit while prioritizing nutrition is key. Incorporating high-fiber foods and protein-rich meals can promote satiety, reducing the likelihood of overeating. Physical activity, particularly strength training, is also crucial as it helps maintain muscle mass and boosts metabolism. These combined efforts make weight management more sustainable and rewarding. 

Personalized Nutrition Plans

A personalized approach to nutrition addresses individual goals, health needs, and food preferences. Sonia Marie Nutrition specializes in creating customized plans to suit each woman’s unique lifestyle. Personalized plans can focus on specific areas like weight management, hormonal balance, or enhancing bone health. By tailoring each diet plan to individual needs, women are empowered to achieve their best health outcomes effectively and enjoyably. 

Common Myths About Dieting After 40

Misconceptions about dieting often circulate, especially concerning aging. For example, it’s a common myth that metabolism declines sharply after 40, making weight loss impossible. In reality, while metabolism is slow, balanced nutrition and regular exercise can significantly improve metabolism and overall health. Another myth is that restrictive diets are necessary to lose weight, but overly restrictive diets can harm metabolic health and make it harder to maintain results. A positive, balanced approach to food and exercise is far more effective for lasting wellness.

How Can Top Nutritionists Help with the Best Diet Plan for Women Over 40?

Working with a nutritionist like Sonia Marie Nutrition, who has over 30+ years of experience, provides invaluable support in navigating dietary changes. They offer expert insights into specific nutrients, portion sizes, and food choices that align with each woman’s health goals. Services offered include personalized diet plans, ongoing guidance, and meal planning strategies. With professional guidance, women over 40 can confidently manage their health, improve energy, and enhance quality of life.

10 Best Diets for Women Over 40, According to a Dietitian

Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet focuses on whole foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats, especially olive oil. Known to support heart health, it’s rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory nutrients, which help manage aging-related issues like joint health and hormonal balance.

DASH Diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension)

The DASH diet is designed to reduce high blood pressure but offers benefits for women over 40 by emphasizing fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and low-fat dairy. This diet also limits sodium, helping to improve heart health—a vital focus as the risk of heart disease increases with age.

Plant-Based Diet

A plant-based diet focuses primarily on whole, plant-derived foods while limiting animal products. High in fiber, antioxidants, and phytonutrients, plant-based diets are excellent for hormone health, weight management, and reducing risks of chronic conditions.

High-Protein Diet

After 40, maintaining muscle mass becomes a priority, and protein plays a crucial role in this. A high-protein diet—emphasizing lean meats, fish, eggs, and plant-based proteins like legumes and quinoa—supports muscle tone, metabolism, and bone health.

Anti-Inflammatory Diet

This diet includes foods that reduce inflammation, such as berries, fatty fish, leafy greens, nuts, and olive oil. Chronic inflammation is linked to numerous health issues, including arthritis and heart disease. Following an anti-inflammatory diet can alleviate joint pain and support overall health.

Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting (IF) focuses on when to eat, rather than what to eat. Popular IF patterns, such as 16:8 (fasting for 16 hours, eating within 8 hours), have been shown to help with weight loss, blood sugar control, and energy levels, especially beneficial as metabolism slows with age.

Low-Carb Diet

Low-carb diets can be helpful for women over 40 aiming to manage weight or improve insulin sensitivity. Reducing refined carbs and increasing protein and healthy fats can stabilize blood sugar levels, reduce cravings, and support weight management.

Paleo Diet

The Paleo diet emphasizes foods our ancestors ate, like lean meats, fish, vegetables, and fruits, and excludes processed foods, dairy, and grains. It’s nutrient-dense and can help women over 40 improve digestion, energy, and metabolic health.

Flexitarian Diet

A Flexitarian diet encourages primarily plant-based foods but allows for occasional meat and dairy. This approach provides the benefits of a vegetarian diet while offering flexibility. The diet supports heart health, reduces the risk of certain cancers, and helps with weight management.

Ketogenic Diet

The Keto diet, while restrictive, can be effective for women over 40 looking to manage blood sugar and shed pounds. By drastically reducing carbs and increasing fat intake, the body shifts into ketosis, using fat for energy. It’s best followed under professional guidance to ensure nutritional needs are met.

Book Online consultation with Sonia Marie Nutrition today

Conclusion

A balanced diet that meets the evolving nutritional needs of women over 40 promotes overall health, vitality, and wellness. By incorporating whole foods, key nutrients, and tailored support, women can feel empowered to live healthily as they age. Sonia Marie Nutrition offers personalized guidance to help each woman achieve her health goals effectively and sustainably.

Ready to prioritize your health and wellness? Book a free 15-minute consultation with Sonia Marie Nutrition today! Whether you’re in the USA, Canada, or Australia, contact us directly at (818)-864-6540 or email sonia@sonia-marie.com for personalized support.   

[basicsofislam]

BASICS OF ISLAM: Fasting :What is the scientific validity of fasting?

The Effect of Fasting upon Human Health

Introduction

Muslims all over the world observe fasting in the ninth month of the lunar calendar. It is forbidden for Muslims to eat and drink from dawn (that is, approximately one and a half hours before sun-rise) until sunset. But from sunset (iftar) until dawn (sahur), they can eat and drink whatever they want.

Fasting becomes obligatory for every healthy male who has reached the age of 15 or who has reached puberty and for every healthy female who has reached the age of 12 or who has reached puberty. As is stated in the following verse of the Qur’an, fasting is not mandatory for those who are ill or traveling:

“…But if any of you is ill, or on a journey, the prescribed number should be made up from days later…” [al-Baqarah 2:184].

Because the lunar calendar is eleven days shorter than the solar calendar year, fasting in the month of Ramadan is observed during different months of the Gregorian year. Therefore, Ramadan begins eleven days earlier each year according to the Gregorian calendar.

The fasting hours in the day change in different regions around the world and during different seasons of the year, and therefore the hardship or ease of the fast constantly changes. Sometimes the fast can last for 12 hours and sometimes for 19 hours. Thus, the number of meals may vary from sunset till dawn during different seasons in different countries.

The effects of fasting upon the human body have long been subjected to scientific research. While some studies argue that fasting has certain negative effects, many others have stated that it does not have any detrimental effects upon the organism, as long as it consists only of a change in the eating hours and the daily intake of calories does not change.

•The Study

In the research conducted at the Dakar Medical School thirteen volunteers, two of whom were pregnant women, were taken as the experimental group. The main objective was to analyze the effect of fasting upon the human organism. Another object of the same experiment was a 27-year-old woman who was not fasting. Through these studies the effects of fasting upon weight, temperature, pulse, blood pressure of the body, the absorption activities of the cells, and the liquid equilibrium of the organism were analyzed. Blood and urine analyses of the participants were also carried out.

•Method

Three of the thirteen participants were women. One of them was 17, another was 27, and the other was 40. The youngest of the male participants was 22 and the oldest was 33. All participants were chosen from middle class and had an intake of 2,500 to 3,000 calories per day. What is more, all of them were healthy people with no known organic or infectious disease.

During the week before Ramadan, the normal values of the participants were recorded in order to compare them later with the values of the observers of fasting during Ramadan. Pre-Ramadan analyses were done before breakfast and during-Ramadan analyses were done after drinking some water, that is, just after breaking the fast with some water (iftar). The analyses were carried out on the first, the tenth, and the last day of Ramadan and once again 30 days after Ramadan.

• Results

1.

Weight Loss or Gain: 

No significant change in the weight of those who were fasting was observed. Except for two volunteers, the decrease in the weight of those fasting was 2.8 kg at most.

The increase in the weight of the pregnant woman was 1.6 kg. Post- Ramadan data show that half of the volunteers regained the weight lost during the month of fasting.

2. Circulatory system: No significant effect of fasting upon pulse or temperature was observed. The hemoglobin rate of the blood was normal. This finding means that the one-month fasting was not a long enough period to cause any degradation in the hemoglobin. In general, no significant change in the blood pressure of the volunteers was evident.

3. Cellular respiration: No significant change in the cellular respiration rate was recorded during Ramadan.

4. The blood sugar balance: The blood sugar rate of the fasters significantly decreased. The decrease rate was 70 mg, which is the lowest rate for the human organism. The rates observed were no higher than 104 mg for any participants.

5. Sugar consumption in the blood: Four of the people fasting, one of whom was a woman, took part in the experiments carried out first before Ramadan and once again on the last day of Ramadan to find out the effect of fasting upon the sugar consumption rate. Analyses demonstrated that there was no significant difference between the glucose rates of fasters and non-fasters. Blood compounds were observed to be stable between the upper and lower normal levels. Moreover, the liver was found to be functioning well.

6. Fluid balance of the body: Most of the people fasting were observed to have a normal fluid balance in their body. Interestingly, some of the people fasting were able to achieve an intake of 2.4 lt. of fluid in twenty-four hours, which is slightly more than what the body requires. Urine discharge (micturation) was normal during the 24-hour period.

General Conclusion: 

The medical experiments summarized above show clearly that fasting has no negative effects upon the body. Although some changes in the blood sugar values were observed, these were not above physiologically normal levels. However, it should be made clear that the abovementioned experiments were carried out on healthy participants. Therefore, the results cannot be extended to those who are sick or handicapped.

•Some Comments

This scientific study conducted at Dakar Medical School has established that fasting is not harmful to the human body. There are many other scientific studies verifying the fact that fasting is even beneficial to the body. Some of its benefits are as follows:

a) The digestive system of the person fasting is able to take a complete rest. The digestive system is an organic mechanism that begins to function with the intake of the first substance that a newborn takes and it continues until the time of death. Therefore, abstaining from food for a few hours is a widely used natural method of providing relief for this system. This method is used before serious operations, as it is recommended for the patient to have an empty stomach before undergoing anesthesia.

b) It is a well-known scientific fact that eating little is more beneficial than eating a lot. That is, so long as the organism attains enough nutrients it is better to eat only at definite hours of the day and to avoid filling the stomach with non-nutritious junk food throughout the day. Actually, fasting brings about this important benefit to the body. The person fasting is advised to eat little, even when breaking the fast.

This is a sunnah, or general practice, of the Prophet, and Allah the Almighty says in the Qur’an:

“Whatever the Messenger gives you accept it willingly and whatever he brings you fulfill it, and whatever he forbids you, refrain from it” [al- Hashr 59:7].

c) It is a well-known fact that over-eating is harmful to the body. Over-eating is among the causes of some common ailments such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Therefore, it is an important curative method to relieve the stomach of one with unhealthy eating habits for one-twelfth of his life. Scientific studies have verified that the ailments mentioned above tend to be less common in regions where fasting is observed as an obligatory practice than in other regions in the world.

[xtruss]

This Doctor Pioneered Counting Calories A Century Ago, And We’re Still Dealing With The Consequences

When Lulu Hunt Peters brought Americans a New Method For Weighing Their Dinner Options, She Launched a Century of Diet Fads That Left Us Hungry For a Better Way to Keep Our Bodies Strong and Healthy

— By Michelle Stacey

Illustration By Zoë van Dijk

In 1909, more than a decade before the 19th Amendment would grant her the right to vote, Lulu Hunt Peters had already achieved a rare status for a woman of her time. She earned a doctor of medicine degree from the University of California, when fewer than 5 percent of American medical students were female, and she was the first woman to intern at Los Angeles County General Hospital; she led its pathology lab for a time and later served as chair of the public health committee for the California Federation of Women’s Clubs in Los Angeles. The role, wrote the Santa Cruz Evening News, came with “more power than the entire city health office.” She lectured frequently about public health and child nutrition.

Over the next decade, though, what Peters came to regard as her greatest triumph was more personal than professional. As she entered her 40s, Peters used stringent and unrelenting discipline to slim what she described as her “too, too solid” body by dropping 70 pounds. That was what she really wanted to tell people about, with a fervency that approached the messianic. She began tailoring her lectures toward the holy grail she had discovered, a tool that she saw as the key to her weight loss: something called the calorie.

Familiar territory even to schoolchildren today, the calorie was, more than a century ago, a niche concept just beginning to emerge from the laboratory and into public view. Peters was about to supercharge that evolution, in the process turning the meaning and use of the calorie on its head and spurring its transformation into one of the most enduring and significant health concepts of the modern day. The calorie gave the public its first penetrating view inside the foods they ate, providing an elementary understanding of nutrition. But it would also go on to torment millions, enrich corporations, inspire generations of advertising campaigns, provoke widespread guilt and pride, and even, some argue today, lead Americans, fat gram by carb gram, calorie by calorie, into epidemic levels of obesity, by instructing the masses to focus on calories rather than on nutrients and steering them toward highly processed carbohydrates.

Left: The cover of Lulu Hunt Peters' book Diet and Health. Right: Having lost 70 pounds, Peters wanted to help others reduce.“I will save you; yea, even as I have saved myself and many, many others,” she wrote. Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Peters ended up distilling her passion for calorie counting into a slim handbook, which was published in 1918 and went on to become the first diet best seller in history. Titled Diet and Health With Key to the Calories, Peters’ book did not stint on humor and playfulness. She engaged her 10-year-old nephew (“the little rascal”) to contribute whimsical stick-figure illustrations, and she made up satirical names like Mrs. Ima Gobbler and Mrs. Tiny Weyaton for hapless members of what she in later works would call the “Friendly Fat Fraternity” (epithets and terminology that would not go over benignly today). But throughout, she paid constant obeisance to the invisible, ineffable calorie. “You should know and also use the word calorie as frequently, or more frequently, than you use the words foot, yard, quart, gallon and so forth,” she wrote. “Hereafter you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories of pie.”

The idea had a novelty and simplicity that sparked a movement. By 1922, Diet and Health reached the best-seller list and remained there for four years, nestled among works by Mark Twain and Emily Post. And just like that, a century of calorie-counting began—for better or, as it’s become increasingly clear, for worse.

When Peters Started Proselytizing For The Calorie In The Mid-1910s, the concept was so new to the general public that she had to tell her readers how to pronounce the word. (Kal’-o-ri, she explained, adding coyly that yes, calories are kosher.) But researchers had been studying the calorie for decades, for reasons that could not have been more different from Peters’. The calorie, based on the Latin root “calor,” meaning heat, was first identified and used by the French chemist and physicist Nicolas Clément, who described it in the 1820s as a measure of heat that could be converted into energy. Specifically, it was defined as the quantity of heat needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Centigrade. Clément was not concerned with food or body weight, but with how to measure the steam energy needed to operate engines. In the decades that followed, though, other European scientists extended the idea to the human body, using the logic that the body is also a machine that burns fuel (food in place of coal) to create energy. By the late 1800s, German physiologists were measuring the energy values of foods using Clément’s methods, and using a “respiration calorimeter”—an enclosed chamber that measures an animal’s oxygen and carbon dioxide, as well as heat given off—to track how that energy was actually processed in the body.

Beginning in 1869, and again in the 1880s, a New England chemist named Wilbur O. Atwater went to Germany to study the emerging science of nutrition. He returned with an idea that would revolutionize how Americans view food. The calorie, he believed, could help improve dietary health at a time when malnutrition, not obesity, was the greater problem. And as a fitting addition to the ongoing Industrial Revolution, which was showing how science could transform daily life, the calorie could also make American workers ever more productive—and at a low cost.

Chemist Wilbur O. Atwater built the first American respiration calorimeter, a copper-lined box that estimated a person’s calorie expenditure by measuring the heat they produced while living inside the device for as many as 12 days at a time. Right: GL Archive/Alamy; Left: Volgi Archive/Alamy

The “father of American nutrition science,” as Atwater became known, wrote fervently in the 1890s about improving “the intellectual and moral condition and progress of men and women” by establishing a standardized formula for deriving calories from various foods, calling them “physiological fuel values.” This would allow Americans to choose their foods by the numbers—rather than by guesswork or emotion—and thereby get the biggest nutritional bang for their food buck. “In our actual practice of eating we are apt to be influenced too much by taste,” he wrote. The solution was to “regulate appetite by reason,” aided by his lists of calories. His work has proved so durable that nutritional labels on every grocery-store item today hark back to it. Calories are still based on the heat they generate, though scientists no longer subject food to a calorimeter, because their nutritional contents can be calculated by the “Atwater system,” which assigns a calorie value to each gram of protein, fat and carbohydrate found in foods.

In 1894, Atwater’s nutritional guide became the first published by the United States Department of Agriculture. Hammering the economic point, it was filled with price calculations for various foods factored with the calories they provided. A section titled “Cheap vs. Dear Food” compared the “calories of energy” available from, say, 25 cents’ worth of oysters with 25 cents’ worth of wheat flour (news flash: the flour was less “dear”). This little-known economic aspect of the calorie likely reached its apex in 1920, when former Michigan Governor Chase Osborn proposed that international trade should use the calorie rather than precious metals as a universal currency: The value of an item, he proposed, would be based on the calories required to produce it. For example, the cost of a wool coat would depend on the calories needed to raise the sheep, shear the wool, sew the garment, transport it to market and so on. Unwieldy to say the least.

The Progressive ideals of the age, which fixated on science, rationality and quantification, were pervasive, and the nascent food-marketing industry saw a possible bonanza. As early as 1915, the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company seized upon the calorie. “Pure Beer Is Next to Milk as Energy Builder,” Schlitz proclaimed in a newspaper ad. “A glass of milk yields 184 calories; a similar glass of pure beer, 137 … And Doesn’t Make You Bilious.” An ad for Presto Quick-Flour compared a pound of prime beef with a pound of its flour—1,000 calories versus 1,600 calories—and their respective prices, 25 cents versus 6 cents. “Presto is thus proven four times as good value as beef—just ponder on that!”

The excitement was also filtering into academia. When Peters was earning her medical degree, she likely would have studied Atwater’s writings and his calorie guides as a tool in determining children’s nutritional needs, one of her areas of expertise. (Atwater died in 1907, while she was still in medical school.) But her novel insight was to look at the calorie the other way around, by hypothesizing that it might be used not only to guide healthy weight gain but weight loss as well. “Peters was part of a movement of food reformers in this time period who were turning toward making food more rational,” says Helen Zoe Veit, a food historian at Michigan State University and the author of Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early 20th Century. “The idea was to eat, not because of tradition or god forbid for pleasure, but according to science and numbers, and to the new knowledge about nutrition.”

Having struggled with what she felt was her own excess weight, Peters made her body her first research subject, and she interpreted her 70-pound loss as a resounding mandate.

Peters Was A Savvy Promoter, but she was also lucky. The decade in which she launched her calorie crusade was uniquely suited to her skills as a communicator—and to her message. A tsunami of social transformations had been building from the turn of the century, including a shifting cultural preference from the curvy Gibson Girl of the 1890s to a whittled-down, boyish silhouette that would become the 1920s flapper. Through the second half of the 19th century a certain plumpness, especially in women, had been seen as charming, healthy and feminine. It also served as a signal of wealth and abundance. As the 20th century began, however, excess weight came to be associated with the lower classes and the poor, while slenderness became counterintuitively a sign of affluence and status.

To explain the shift, many historians point to the ideas of the American economist and social scientist Thorstein Veblen, presented in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The new upper-middle class that arose in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, he posited, displayed not only “conspicuous consumption” but also “conspicuous waste.” And what said “waste” better than being food-secure enough to turn away food? A starving person would never diet, but a debutante could if it meant slipping into a form-fitting ball gown.

In addition to her Diet and Health book, Peters penned a daily newspaper column with the same title, often responding to readers’ letters by sharing her own weight-loss struggles. Newspapers.com

That shift is illustrated in a study of dieting among women at Smith College, published in the Journal of Women’s History in 1995, which documented how body weight was seen between the 1890s and 1920s. In the earlier years, students wrote home about the wonderful feasts they enjoyed at school, and even about their goals to gain weight. A student weighing 135 pounds wrote to her mother in February 1892: “It is my ambition to weigh 150 pounds.” Educators and social pontificators had fretted that academic life would take a toll on young women’s health and, importantly, their feminine appeal and future reproductive capacity. Packing on a few pounds, rather than wasting away, was seen as proof of robustness.

By the early 1920s the script had flipped. Dieting culture became so pervasive that a letter to the editor published in the Smith College Weekly in 1924 was titled “To Diet or Not to Die Yet?” Written by three Smith students, the letter warned against the obsession with weight loss: “If preventive measures against strenuous dieting are not taken soon, Smith College will become notorious, not for the sylph-like forms but for the haggard faces and dull, listless eyes of her students.”

Fashion followed a similar trajectory. Nineteenth-century designs had exaggerated female-specific roundness, first with hoop skirts and later with bustles, although the generous bottom halves were balanced out by a nipped-in waist, courtesy of corsets. But by the late Victorian era, doctors were railing against the garment, and what was coined the corset controversy arose. Almost a century before the so-called bra-burning movement in the late 1960s, early feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote, in 1873, “Burn up the corsets! … Make a bonfire of the cruel steel that has lorded it over the contents of the abdomen and thorax so many thoughtless years, and heave a sigh of relief; for your ‘emancipation,’ I assure you, has from this moment begun.”

Fashion finally began to loosen its hold on the corset in the first decade of the 20th century, only to usher in the hobble skirt—a straight, narrow silhouette that replaced the nipped-in waist with a hem so tapered that the wearer’s legs could barely move. Fashion designer Paul Poiret, the hobble skirt’s inventor, wrote of this era in his 1931 autobiography, “It was in the name of Liberty that I proclaimed the fall of the corset,” while adding that though he “freed” the bust, “I shackled the legs.”

After World War I ended, Peters (front row, center with glasses) traveled to Serbia with fellow women doctors and dentists on a Red Cross humanitarian mission to deliver food and treat disease. Tango Images/Alamy

The irony was that while women were giving up the torments of corsets and hobbles, they substituted a form of internal torture to control their bodies: what became known as “reducing.” To that end, they were aided by another innovation: the bathroom scale, which appeared on the American market in 1913. Until then, people had their weight measured only at doctors’ offices, or at public “penny-slot” scales found in movie theaters and department-store restrooms. When medical advances like sanitation systems, vaccination and pasteurization presented the promise of better hygiene and longer life spans, people began to feel that their health was in their own hands. A personal scale, like the calorie, offered would-be reducers a magic number, a way to quantify their success, or failure, and a sense of control over the process of reducing—or, as Peters came to call it, “Petersizing.”

Into This Newly Weight-Conscious Landscape Stepped Peters. She began her book by being daringly honest about her frustrations with her weight, even as many other details of her life remained in shadow. We know that Peters was born to Thomas and Alice Hunt in 1873 and reared in the small town of Milford, Maine. She attended Eastern Maine State Normal School and then moved to California, where she married Louis H. Peters in 1899. Several years later, she began her medical training.

Louis Peters plays nary a role in the history books, and he rarely appears in Lulu’s writings. What did he make of her growing fame—and of her hard-won smaller silhouette? Was part of her impetus to lose weight a desire to please her husband? On the contrary: In her book, Peters wrote that once you start reducing, you will have to combat “your husband, who tells you that he does not like thin women. I almost hate my husband when I think how long he kept me under that delusion. Now, of course, I know all about his jealous disposition.” She also mentions that she was near her heaviest when the two married, so presumably her plumpness was not a deal-breaker.

Veit, the food historian, cautions against drawing conclusions about Peters’ marriage. “She does make sure to establish that she is married, because that would be a sign of status,” Veit says. “For a single, middle-aged woman—what was then called an ‘old maid’—to write a book like this would have been a mark against her. So she makes clear at the outset, ‘I have been successful on the marriage market.’” Other writers of weight-loss narratives in the 1920s, who were enjoying their first boom thanks to both Peters and the new flapper ideal, were also explicit about slenderness being “part of maintaining the chemistry in your marriage,” Veit adds. “At that time, attractiveness was being more and more linked to a certain kind of figure.”

In the early 1900s, fashion trends evolved from tight-fitting and often uncomfortable corsets that exaggerated women’s curves to looser flapper dresses that created narrow, almost boyish silhouettes. Left: Smithsonian Libraries, American History Trade Literature Collection; Right: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

In a presage of a confessional media environment still far in the future, Peters’ struggles with weight were part of her public persona—and, as with Oprah Winfrey and Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch, key to her business pitch. Of her pudgy childhood and relentless weight gain, she wrote, “I never will tell you how much I have weighed, I am so thoroughly ashamed of it,” only to add “but my normal weight is 150 pounds, and at one time there was 70 pounds more of me than there is now.” The use of the word “ashamed” to describe her 220 pounds was no accident. Peters believed that shame was a strong motivator, a notion that comes up repeatedly in her works. (She later wrote a newspaper column titled “A Disgrace to Be Fat.”)

Today we would call this language fat-shaming and recoil at the words, says Chin Jou, an interdisciplinary food historian at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the author of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food With Government Help. And yet, while we may not use such blunt language, Jou says, Peters’ “underlying fatphobia is still very much a part of dominant American ideas about what constitutes a healthy and aesthetically pleasing body.” As for the word “fat,” she continues, today’s self-described “fat acceptance�� activists and advocates are trying to reclaim it by untangling it from ideas about morality and self-control.

For Peters and others in her time, though, the supposed immorality of plumpness was intimately bound to her message. She compared keeping up dieting to keeping up “other things in life that make it worth living—being neat, being kind, being tender; reading, studying, loving.” Veit says, “Being fit was seen as the visible expression of moral issues—having to do with self-control, being smart, ambitious, efficient. All of these virtues from the era were tied up with not eating too much.” Moreover, Veit goes on, “She felt that she was speaking with authority: ‘I’ve done it so you can, too.’ And that gave her license to be really outwardly, explicitly bigoted against fat people. Today, it’s become socially unacceptable to say that fatness results from personal failings, but there remains a tremendous amount of moralization of thinness and fatness that’s part of mainstream culture.”

Peters, ever the intuitive marketer, also linked what she saw as the inherent morality of slenderness to another high-profile virtue: patriotism. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the federal government promoted cutting back on consumption with the catchphrase “Food Will Win the War.” Colorful cookbooks and posters extolled flourless “victory meals” and “sowing the seeds of victory” by growing your own vegetables (“Every Garden a Munition Plant!”). One leaflet explained the value of self-sacrifice more explicitly. “Sugar Means Ships: The sugar used in sweet drinks must be brought to America in ships. … These ships must now be used to carry soldiers to the front. Drink less sweetened beverages. We are at war. Every Spoonful—Every Sip—Means less for a Fighter.”

The U.S. Food Administration urged Americans to cut back on sugar, wheat, fats and meat during World War I. © 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved. Gift of John T. Spaulding/Bridgeman Images

Peters put her own spin on the calories-patriotism equation. Barely four paragraphs into Diet and Health, she wrote, “In wartime it is a crime to hoard food. … Now fat individuals have always been considered a joke, but you are a joke no longer. Instead of being looked upon with friendly tolerance and amusement, you are now viewed with distrust, suspicion and even aversion! How dare you hoard fat when our nation needs it? You don’t dare to any longer.”

Peters advised rounding up one’s overweight friends and forming a Watch Your Weight Anti-Kaiser Class. The class should invest in a good accurate scale, she explained, and meet once a week to weigh themselves—an idea (minus the kaiser element) that found new life in the early 1960s when Nidetch launched the neighborhood weight-loss clubs that would become Weight Watchers. To her credit, Peters put her own boots on the ground in Europe after the armistice. In 1919, she joined a Red Cross medical delegation to the Balkans and stayed there for almost two years, earning decorations from the Serbian and Albanian governments for her child welfare and public health work amid the devastated postwar civilian population. Peters later wrote about “medical calls on foot in the scorching sun over unkind cobblestones, long-distance calls on unkinder mules, long hours in nerve-racking clinics [and] ferocious man-eating mosquitoes.”

She returned home in 1921 to find her book going into multiple editions, and on April 25, 1922, she debuted a daily “Diet and Health” column in the Los Angeles Times, which propelled the book to the best-seller lists. The column would ultimately be syndicated to newspapers nationwide and continue until her untimely death, from pneumonia, in 1930.

From the start, Peters’ column put her talents as a sprightly and engaging writer on display. She addressed the reader as a friend whose struggles she understood. She was also shrewd, in a surprisingly modern way, about the power of the come-on—and the cliffhanger. Titled “What’s Your Weight?,” that first column walked readers through the various ills, such as diabetes, that could be attributed to excess weight, before ending with: ���Do you want to reduce? Foolish question number 13,579. Why, you want to reduce more than you want anything on the face of the globe or the feet of the gods! We’re going to show you how. Tomorrow’s the day. And it’s oh, so simple!”

The simplicity was the draw, in the same way that modern-day diets promise “easy” weight loss. What also likely kept readers coming, though, was Peters’ frankness, her willingness to get into the trenches with other “fat friends.” One week into her column’s run, she wrote an entry titled “My Most Embarrassing Moment.” In it, she described an incident when she was about 50 pounds overweight, and she stepped into an elevator. “No one got out, and I got in,” she wrote. “The operator shut the door and pushed the lever of the car. No response. Back and forth he pushed. … Car did not quiver.” A “gracious gentleman” got out; the car didn’t budge. Another gentleman followed, to no avail. “Blushing, but game, I said with a wan smile that I would get out. The car shot up”—but not fast enough for her to miss the “imbecilic laughter” of those inside. It was “embarrassing,” she admitted, but also “invaluable. … I reduced.”

The resulting “victory meals” left more supplies available to feed both members of the military and starving civilians in Europe. Tango Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Peters urged her readers to “send in your most embarrassing moment!” in the style of a modern-day master of social media soliciting likes and comments. And it worked: Eventually she was receiving thousands of letters, which she often used as material in her columns. To “Mary,” who wrote to Peters saying how much she was encouraged by her personal story of weight loss, she replied at confessional length. “It’s a continuous fight, Mary! … I find that if I get started on candy nuts, I’m just like a drunkard with his dram. … It was only last week that I had my last gorge. I had had a good dinner, but I had a longing for those pernicious candied nuts. I bought a pound, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t eat the most of them myself. … When I averaged my calories for that day, they mounted to nearly 4,000, almost enough to keep me going for three days!”

Peters Was A Product Of Her Times, with flapper-style bobbed hair, fringed headbands and plucked eyebrows, but she was also a harbinger of the future. Many modern marketing ploys echo Peters’ methods—for instance, the fixation on 100-calorie portions. Peters organized her “key to the calories” by units of 100 calories: For that number, you could have one and two-thirds ounces of chicken, three ounces of lean fish or one average-size apple. Today, a vast array of snack items, from pretzels to mini-protein bars, are offered in 100-calorie packages. And Peters’ instructions are familiar to any contemporary dieter: “You may be hungry at first, but you will soon become accustomed to the change,” she wrote. Elsewhere, a warning: “Don’t ‘taste’! You will find the second taste much harder to resist than the first.”

Generations of Americans have adopted Peters’ idea to count calories, encouraged by a public health infrastructure that instructs us to “eat less and move more.” Unfortunately, the fruits of this advice have been dismal. The vast majority of calorie-restricting diets have been shown to fail in the long run and in fact often result in a weight regain beyond the starting weight. Numerous studies over recent decades have shown that taking in calories and burning them (that is, eating and exercising) are not separate processes but are instead intimately related in a complex dance: Cutting calories triggers a cascade of hormonal reactions that increase hunger and fatigue while slowing metabolism, making it more difficult to lose weight. One research analysis in the journal Public Health Nutrition describes attempts to achieve and maintain a calorie deficit as “practically and biologically implausible.” New weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic appear to interrupt that cascade, by manipulating hormones in the gut and the brain to decrease appetite.

Peters’ focus on units of 100 calories still influences today’s food industry. Snacks of all stripes strive to project a healthful aura by touting their calorie counts and designing serving sizes that hit that magic number. Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via Getty

Meanwhile, the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 42 percent of American adults are obese, compared with 30 percent just 20 years ago. (In 1962, it was 13.4 percent.) As these numbers rise, along with rates of Type 2 diabetes, the edifice that Peters—and Atwater, in his own way—constructed around the calorie has begun to crumble. Increasing amounts of research suggest that the mathematical equations they promoted are drastic over-simplifications. Consider Peters’ calculations, outlined in her book: “Cutting out 1,000 calories per day would equal a reduction of approximately 8 pounds per month, or 96 pounds per year.” Under this logic, one could continue to shrink away to nothing by simply continuing to cut out 1,000 calories per day, but it doesn’t work that way. Peters herself discovered the limits of her body’s ability to shed pounds. She longed to break through her own plateau and dip down closer to 150 pounds, but despite a draconian regimen limiting her to about 1,200 calories per day plus regular exercise, she never succeeded.

The error in the “calories in-calories out” equation may boil down to this: Human bodies are not coal-burning machines, and food is not coal. Rather, the body and food are both vastly more complex, and they interact in complicated ways that have evolved in humans over eons. Researchers are finding that body weight and virtually everything that influences it—hunger, satiety, metabolism, fat storage—are affected by a broad range of factors that were a mystery 100 years ago. These include hormones, such as insulin, which increases appetite and promotes fat storage; ghrelin, the “hunger hormone”; and leptin and peptide YY, which are called “satiety hormones.” We are also still learning about the microbiome—the unique population of bacteria in an individual’s digestive tract—and how specific bacteria can powerfully affect weight loss or gain, as well as mechanisms like the parasympathetic nervous system, which can affect energy expenditure (the “calories out” part of the equation).

Numerous factors inherent in foods affect how many calories are actually retained in the body, and whether those calories are stored as fat or, for instance, burned for energy or used to build tissue and muscle. Highly processed carbohydrates break down almost instantly in the body, prompting insulin release and fat storage; protein breaks down slowly and requires more energy to do so, essentially “using up” some of its calories just in digestion. Some foods, including certain types of nuts, have considerably fewer calories when measured in the body than they have in lab tests. And food when raw yields fewer calories in digestion than the same food cooked. These anomalies are just the tip of the iceberg.

Ozempic and similar drugs, first prescribed to regulate diabetes, have reshaped the debate around losing weight through will-power alone. George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images

No surprise, then, that a 2013 book titled Why Calories Count faces off against another from 2021 titled Why Calories Don’t Count, and that nutritional conferences have become hotbeds of argument and contention. Some experts on the anti-calorie-counting side believe that, beyond being a disappointment for generations of dieters, calorie-reduction regimens and their promoters bear some responsibility for the obesity epidemic. Jason Fung, a nephrologist and expert in obesity and Type 2 diabetes, writes in his book The Obesity Code that calorie reduction is a “cruel hoax.” By prioritizing calories over other considerations, such as macronutrient makeup (proportions of carbs, fats and protein) and the effects of industrial processing, the “just cut calories” theory fostered the idea, he writes, that “100 calories of cola is just as likely as 100 calories of broccoli to make you fat.” Making calories the kingpin also helped lead to the low-fat-diet movement, which Fung and other experts blame for ushering in our current age of obesity. The medical establishment decades ago prescribed reducing fat intake in favor of moderate protein and plentiful complex carbs. In practice, that advice seemed to give many people license to load up on simple, processed carbs in place of satiating fats. That in turn leads to more insulin release, in order to move sugar out of the bloodstream and into storage—which leads to more hunger, more snacking and bigger fat stores on the body.

There are signs that the “calories aren’t everything” message may be seeping into the public consciousness, but many of Peters’ talking points about obesity and weight loss still linger: for one, the obsession with quantification. While fewer people may be counting calories, Veit says, “Whether it’s our weight, our BMI, clothes size, life expectancy, cholesterol levels, there are all these other numbers we associate with our bodies.” Not to mention replacing counting calories with counting carb grams, as some are now doing. And while the overt fat-shaming of Peters’ era is now more frowned upon, striving for slenderness seems to retain a moral dimension. In some ways, says Jou, “Feminine diet culture today can be even more taxing on women. Not only do participants of diet culture manage their food intake, but they also tend to undertake considerable exercise regimes to achieve a ‘toned’ look. The women following Peters’ diet program were just trying to be thin.”

Today’s strivers may talk about eating “clean” and improving their health, but the ideal baseline is still to be lean, and those who are heavy frequently continue to be quietly judged and found lacking in simple willpower. Will new drugs like Ozempic, which demonstrate the biological underpinnings of obesity, begin to lift that blame? Possibly. But for many people, there appears to be an inherent logic to the idea of simply buckling down and cutting back.

Decades later, Peters’ belief in willpower over want still resonates. “Your stomach must be disciplined,” she wrote in 1918.

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Marisol had grown up within this world. Lorraine had taught her the art of subtlety, the necessity of restraint, of wielding power without letting it show. From a young age, Marisol had been instilled with the knowledge that magic was not for display, but for survival. The Hargrove women never needed to prove themselves; their strength was understood through the weight of their name and the land that stretched beneath their feet. The estate was not just a home—it was a living thing, bound to them, speaking to them through the winds and the soil.

Lorraine, though a tough and unyielding figure, had raised Marisol to embrace this role with grace and power. She had never been a typical mother. There were no soft words or tender moments; instead, Lorraine had imparted her teachings with a stern hand, guiding Marisol with the expectation that she would take up the mantle when the time came. Marisol had learned that love, in the Hargrove family, was not spoken, but shown through lessons, through preparation, and through the quiet passing of knowledge. Lorraine had not raised her to be delicate, but strong—to carry the weight of their family's legacy with dignity, even when it meant bearing the burden of the land’s curse.

The women of the Widow's Wail were feared and revered, a strange mixture of pride and power, and it was this pride that had often led to their ostracization. But beneath the whispers and the mistrust, there was also an undeniable sense of awe. They were outliers, yes, but formidable ones. The Hargrove women carried themselves with an air of mystery, an understanding that they were not to be underestimated. And though the world turned its back on them, those who truly understood the weight of their power came seeking their guidance—oftentimes in the dead of night, when the haunting wails could be heard echoing through the trees.

Lorraine had instilled in Marisol the belief that power was not something to be flaunted, but something to be lived with. And now, standing at the heart of the Widow’s Wail estate, Marisol felt that power deep within her, a quiet hum beneath her feet that connected her to the land, to the women who had come before her. Lorraine's lessons, though harsh, had prepared her for this. And though Lorraine remained the head of the family, Marisol could feel the weight of the mantle slowly passing to her—she was ready to carry it forward.

The wails of lost men, the secrets buried beneath the soil, and the power of the Hargrove bloodline were all intertwined in Marisol’s life. It was a legacy she had inherited, one she would continue to honor—both in the garden and beyond. As the earth whispered its secrets to her, Marisol knew that the land, with all its sorrow and magic, would forever be a part of her—just as it had been for Lorraine, and for the generations of Hargrove women before them.

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[evilwriter-originals]

Through the Heart

Rated: teen

Warnings: injury, blood

Pairings: none

Word Count: 1,006

Summary: Sol is accidentally stabbed while sparring with one of King Dyon's men.

A/N: Happy Ides of March! Here is the stabbing story!

Sol had sparred with a sword probably a million times by now. His parents had made sure that he was skilled in at least one kind of weapon, despite his magic, and despite being royalty. Nessari royalty were not the kind to sit around and let others do the hard work without helping. His lessons in battle had gotten more rigorous after his brother’s capture and disappearance. 

Sol was sparring now. He couldn’t let his skill falter, especially now that they were at war and with Anaria missing.

He was fighting one of King Dyon’s men, a human. Sol noticed that, oddly enough, Dyon did not really let women into his army like Sol did. Why halve your army based on sex? Why not have more skilled fighters?

Either way, this man was rather skilled. He used his one-handed sword with ease, parrying all of Sol’s attacks. They weren’t using wooden swords, as both of them were much too old for that. Besides, they wouldn’t actually hurt each other. The most one would get would be a slap with the flat of a blade.

Though, Sol had more experience than this man had life. He had been sword-fighting for over 200 years now. This man had yet to reach the age of 40, it seemed. 

It didn’t take long for Sol to get him on the defensive. He was taking steps back, but parrying each blow perfectly, sword dancing in the air. The man could call to be finished if he wanted to be, but he didn’t. If anything, being on the defensive seemed to make him more fierce.

His blows came harder and harder, and Sol could feel the shock of them reverberating up his arm. Soon, he was on the defensive. He could have easily used his wings to back away farther from the man, but that wouldn’t be a fair fight. Not that any fight in war was fair, but sparring had some rules at least. 

The humans watching around the edges of the courtyard cheered on his opponent. Girad was there too, seemed to be a little at a loss of who to cheer for. He clapped anyway, possibly for both of them. 

Though, Sol had become distracted by watching the audience, and he lost his footing. He tried righting himself with his wings, missed a parry of his opponent’s blade, and then there was a horrible shock of pain in the right side of his abdomen. 

His sword clattered down to the smooth stone of the courtyard, and he gasped, looked down at the wound that the other blade had gouged. When he looked at his opponent, all he saw were wide eyes and a gaping mouth. It had been a quick stab, an accident, but it still hurt nonetheless.

“My lord, I am… I am so sorry.”

His opponent dropped his sword as Sol doubled over, a hand to his bleeding wound. He instantly offered himself to support his weight, and there were shouts from the audience to get a healer.

Girad was there in an instant. He helped Sol to sit down. He felt himself breathing hard, which just made it hurt more. It had been a good long while since he’d suffered a wound. 

And that just made him think of Anaria. She was still missing. Gods, what torment was she being put through? Would this wound have paled in comparison to whatever she was being inflicted with?

Tears sprang to Sol’s eyes, and not because of the physical pain he was in, but the emotional. 

Anika, the royal healer, was quickly found, and Sol was made to lay on his back and remove his hand from the wound. He groaned, turned his head away. He didn’t want to watch the healing process.

He shuddered and cried out as she laid her hands on him, and his flesh began to meld back together. It was always a painful and uncomfortable experience to be healed by way of magic. Though, Sol did wonder how humans dealt with wounds without magic.

“Catch your breath,” Anika told him once the wound was closed. She eyed the sword he’d been stabbed with, how much blood was on the blade. “It was deeper than I expected.” 

“It was just… unexpected,” Sol said breathlessly. He eyed his opponent. “You’ve earned my respect.”

“By… stabbing you?” 

“Well, yes, I have been at this for longer than you.” Girad and Anika helped Sol to sit up. “And you managed to best me.”

“It was an accident, my lord.” The man looked away, clearly feeling shame and humiliation for stabbing the king of the Nessari.

“Well, it was still a good swing.” Sol didn’t want the man on his knees begging for forgiveness. Better to compliment him instead. Sol knew why he’d let his guard down, why he’d gotten distracted. 

He’d thought he’d seen Anaria in the crowd, and had taken a split second too long to search for her face.

But she wasn’t there. 

Sol’s chest ached more than the remnants of his stab wound. He might as well have been stabbed through the heart.

“Let’s get you into bed,” Anika said, hoisting Sol up with the help of the humans. 

“No,” Sol growled. It took effort to get off the ground with how much the stab wound ached. “Escort me to the war room.”

“But, Your Majesty, you need rest,” Girad argued. 

“No.” He shook his head, sweat dripping from his hair. He was breathing hard, shaky on his feet. “I will not rest until my daughter is returned to me.” 

Girad and Anika exchanged glances, but then nodded.

“As you wish, my lord,” Anika said, and Girad echoed the “as you wish.” 

Shaking off their worried holds, Sol stumbled from the courtyard and into the castle, heading for the war room, uncaring of the blood on his shirt. He’d been sparring to ready himself for unavoidable battle, but now, he had to find the target of that battle. 

He had to find his daughter.