#diet talk/

[flintsilvers]

reached that point in my diet journey where i always wanna eat but the thought of it makes me feel disgusting and like a failure. so how are yall doing

[dollykiller]

Kate moss for Bella Freud /spring 1994 ♡

[ms-demeanor]

Okay THANK YOU for saying “your body craves what it needs” is bs because that felt like bs this whole time.

Like you don’t need more sugar if you crave sweets that is NOT what that means. Sugar is a food that people crave because it tastes good/sugar I think is an addictive food??

Idk it just felt like people making excuses when they’re supposed to be trying to eat a little healthier (healthier, not low cal, not low fat or keto or whatever. Diets are bs but craving sweets does not mean sugar is healthy thing for your body rn)

People crave sugar because it tastes good, which is not a bad thing, and there is an evolutionary reason that sugar and fat taste good to us. Carbs are your body's favorite thing because it is SUPER easy for your body to break them down into useful molecules.

I'm not a fan of the idea that any foods are addictive and I'm skeptical of models that suggest "refined food addiction" is a thing with a measurable, real-world impact; there's a lot of debate in that area of nutrition science and to me it kind of seems like the tools people use to track food addiction aren't really examining the addictiveness of specific foods, but are decent screening tools for people who have compulsive behaviors around food (for instance, one group of people who the Yale Food Addiction Scale has repeatedly been demonstrated to be REALLY good at identifying is people with anorexia).

But your body needs sugar all the time, whether that's in the form of complex carbohydrates that get broken down into simple sugars by your body, or simple sugars that you stir into your tea that then gets sent to your cells as energy. If your diet doesn't have enough sugar in it, your body has a processes to turn non-sugars into sugar so that it can use the sugar (gluconeogenesis!). Sugar is unambiguously good for you in the way that fat is unambiguously good for you. You need sugar to survive and it's not a bad thing if you want to have a cookie or a soda or some candy, and again - your craving probably isn't telling you that you're deficient in a specific micro or macronutrient, but I still think that you should listen to your craving.

Like, I don't know how much you know about psychotherapy but the attitude that a lot of diet-focused discussion takes toward cravings reminds me of cognitive behavioral therapy. "When you crave chocolate, no you don't! Don't think about the chocolate, you actually probably need starch or sugar or something, let's redirect that into having a banana, or some frozen berries, or some spinach. Point away from the unhealthy craving and into the healthy replacement, or, better yet, ignore the craving. Mind over matter. You choose how you act."

(I actually think "X craving means that I want Y food so I shall replace it with Z, which is similar" "craving salt means that I am dehydrated and need electrolytes so instead of potato chips I'll have some soup" is how this goes most of the time. I think this is a diet culture thing, not a food positivity thing.)

And you know what I think that's a garbage way to look at both food and emotions.

When I'm craving ice cream it's not because I've been mostly vegetarian for a week and am low on dietary cholesterol (AN IMPORTANT NUTRIENT. Don't be scared of consuming some cholesterol), I'm craving ice cream because sugar and fat taste good. So instead of trying to pretend that I'm getting "what I need" from a piece of salmon the size of a deck of cards with no salt and some lemon squeezed on top, I'm going to scoop out a moderate portion of ice cream and eat it while focusing on how much I enjoy it. And I'm going to do that instead of sitting down with a pint and a spoon while I'm stressed at work and eating something that tastes good to distract from the fact that work is stressful. (And sometimes it's fine to sit down with a pint and a spoon but I will say that's generally best not to do while you're in the middle of something stressful)

And if you want to relate that back to therapy I see this as more of the DBT approach. I've accepted that I want ice cream so I'm going to eat it in an intentional way and enjoy it instead of eating so much that I don't want dinner, or that it makes me feel sick, or that I eat it without noticing it because I'm using it as a distraction instead of a snack.

I'm not trying to shut down the negative emotion or shun the "bad" food, I'm accepting that I have that emotion and I'm working this neutral food into my day so that I'll feel good tomorrow and won't get heartburn overnight.

So I see that you're trying to be kind of anti diet culture here, but I don't think people need excuses to eat sugar, and I actually think that making excuses to eat it is significantly less healthy than just eating the sugar (which, again, is unambiguously healthy to eat as part of a varied, filling, nutritious diet). It seems like you may have internalized some ideas about sugar that are not great even if you are trying to separate from diet culture.

Nobody is ever going to eat a diet so healthy and nutritionally complete that they don't want candy or cake or cookies sometimes. Food is not only fuel, it is entertainment and culture and comfort and distraction and celebration and a million other things, but it is not bad. I don't think there's a single universally bad food out there, or any food that never belongs as part of someone's diet (unless it's something you're allergic to - I don't care if you're craving peanuts, do not eat peanuts if you have a peanut allergy).

So it's okay to make sugar, you don't need to make excuses. It's okay to eat sugar if you're craving sugar, even if that's not what your body "needs". But also sometimes a craving is your body saying "I'm hungry and this sounds good, please feed me" even if you're not a finely-tuned spectrometer that's craving blueberries pie because you actually need antioxidants from the blueberries (you're not a finely tuned spectrometer, you don't need the antioxidants from the blueberries, it's perfectly fine to just eat a slice of pie).

[thepeacefulgarden]

[fairyhaos]

cruelest thing that kpop has ever done is impose a "you can't eat anything" rule on their idols in the country that says "have you eaten today?" as a way of showing love

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

vampires are obligate carnivores stop diet shaming them

[girlintodust]

[sergle]

It really is like. you don't realize until you ask other fat ppl, how common it is for a thinner person to use you as a Fat Sounding Board for their feelings about THEIR own weight.

[tetedurfarm]

i thought it was possible to starve on rabbits? also whats your take on raising ducks for meat

yeah that is one of the most annoying myths that keeps getting spread around. while 'rabbit starvation' (a colloquial term for protein poisoning; it can also be called 'mal de caribou' or caribou sickness,) IS real, it only occurs when you eat only protein, no fat or carbs or anything else, for an extremely long time - like months to years. it gets that name because it's something that did happen historically with some frequency in people who were consuming nothing but wild rabbits or other lean game over long winters.

domestic rabbits are fat. they have been bred to gain weight in both muscle and fat, live sedentary lifestyles, and eat a diet formulated for production. and even if wild rabbit is your only protein source forever, the average modern person with access to a grocery store will not be eating ONLY rabbit for every meal, nothing else. eat a balanced diet with both fat and carbs in addition to protein and you'll be fine, i promise.

[stupidcowboykid]

yeah yeah. i hear ya.

[elsinore-and-inverness]

This is random and from ages ago but I was thinking of the 2000s era TV interview where David Tennant was like I’ve been ill and I haven’t eaten in a week and I’ve lost too much weight, clearly looking for some sympathy and concern, and instead getting the response of “I wish I could lose that much weight” and you just see him sort of falter and shut down, and the fear in David’s eyes when Alan Carr made him step on the talking scale “to see how much holiday weight he had to lose” - like. fuck diet culture. everyone deserves better.

[dreamer-xoxo]

natural hair finally ‼️

[dollykiller]

Wedding dress

[ms-demeanor]

Nutrition science IS a mess largely because a huge number of food and weight loss studies are limited by "how long can we reasonably expect this study group to eat only what we're feeding them" and "how many people can we reasonably include in this study when it needs to be local and the participants need to meet XYZ standards" and then you ALSO have the problem of people p-hacking the research and the whole thing is a nightmare but it's a nightmare in the same way that a LOT of science relating to humans is a nightmare because humans are fucking hard to study.

Like, yeah, obviously a fucking 8-week study of how effective keto is for weight loss isn't going to provide a ton of useful information but like how the fuck else are you going to study it and have high compliance to a notoriously hard-to-comply with diet???????

"Good" studies tend to be short because they have to be to prevent participants from quitting the diet OR because twelve weeks is probably the longest time you can reasonably expect people to stay at an inpatient facility where their food is 100% controlled by researchers unless you're willing to pay them A LOT which you can't do unless your fucking study is funded by fucking coca cola and creating a massive conflict of interest.

What this means is that we should be very narrow in what we take away from these studies and shouldn't generalize them to a broad population, not that the studies are inherently bullshit.

[libraford]

As it becomes winter, so many of my friends are trying to lose weight. So my feed is all about counting calories.

And it's like... would I rather be fat... or have to do math?

And fat always wins over math because I suck at math.

[tillman]

redrew eddies isuka portrait if you have any issues take it up with daisuke for drawing it in the first place.