Twenty-Something Year Old Journalist

I love mac and cheese. I love dry turkey sandwiches. I love cornbread. I love chocolate chip cookies. I love mashed potatoes. I love all forms of potatoes. I love a lot of food. 

I also love Thanksgiving. I love fall. I love the winter. (In California) I love the overcast and gloomy weather. I love seeing family. I love the decorations and the nonconformist menorahs. 

This is my most favorite time of year. The holiday spirit and the complete abandonment of anything that remotely resembles a diet fills me with joy and is something I look forward to the whole year. Although the sun is now setting much earlier, my spirits couldn’t be any brighter when the holiday season rolls around. 

Despite now a deep, deep love for the holiday season, this love was often overshadowed by my fear of calories and by my fear of the number on the scale. So much time I could have had to laugh with my friends, be present with my family, eat that last sprinkle cookie, or giddily point in cheer seeing a dreidel decal on a window was taken from me by my intense dread towards quite literally what we all need to survive. 

What was once a child-like excitement to go out to eat, or go to family get-togethers, or to take those cringy mirror selfies, suddenly held a different meaning. Going out to eat now meant frantically attempting to calculate the amount of calories in a dish, family get-togethers now meant carefully paying attention to how much others are eating in comparison to myself, and mirrors now meant an excuse to rigorously criticize the way my body looked. 

I don’t recall how I ended up getting to that state though. I do remember being insecure when I was younger with no awareness of why. I was insecure enough to refuse to wear bathing suits, to refuse to wear shorts to track practice, or take off my shirt during summer beach runs. I remember all of this and all the insecurity around my body, but I do not remember its conception. 

I remember one day thinking that the less I eat the skinnier, and therefore prettier, I’d be. I remember the primal need to track and count every calorie that touched my tongue, the intense guilt after going over my self imposed ‘calorie limit,’ and the humiliation and shame I would feel after I starved my body enough that it would end in a binge where I would eat until I was physically ill. I remember all the unkept promises that I would make to do better tomorrow. I remember all of this, but not its conception. 

I didn’t just one day magically wake up and decide to dislike my body enough to find ways to punish myself for it, or one day wake up and realize that my favorite foods were now my adversaries. Where did this obsession with my body and food come from?

Coincidentally enough, I can remember the People magazines that populated check out stands comparing women against one another. And I remember the debates from every news outlet about whether or not Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model Kate Upton was plus size. And I remember how fashion trends just so happen to include the shape of a woman’s body. And I remember the language we use to categorize foods as ‘good’ and ‘bad.’

I remember constantly hearing about men’s unwelcomed opinions on their preferred shape of women’s bodies and learning about how plus-size individuals struggle to get proper medical care. And I most definitely remember the seemingly small, one-off, well-intended comments from family members that somehow end up throbbing through your head everytime you come face to face with a carb. 

So many years and so many memories were taken from me and taken from so many others because of the culture we live in. From starving yourself, to excessively working out, to staring at yourself in the mirror in disgust, to overeating, to simply just hating yourself, there is no end.  There is no amount of weight you can lose, calories you can count, or mirrors you can avoid that will suddenly cure your relationship with food and with yourself. What it takes is a complete overhaul of what society and media has attempted to shove down our throats since before we could even reach the cookie jar. 

Instead of seeing areas of my body that I thought could be aesthetically better, I now recognize that my body is doing exactly what I need it to do. I’m able to get out of bed in the morning, I’m able to take long walks with family and friends, I’m able to do yoga and pilates and see my body grow stronger with each squat and each plank. My body keeps me alive and keeps me moving, and that is what makes it beautiful. 

I don’t criticize myself for reaching for a second serving, I recognize that if my body tells me I’m hungry, I should probably eat. I recognize if I’m wanting that second serving of mac and cheese, you bet your ass I’m going to go get myself that second serving of mac and cheese. Life is much too short to live out of fear of calories or live out of fear of other’s opinions. I’d rather be able to look back on my life and salvate thinking of all the food I was able to enjoy, rather than the efforts I went to to attempt to conform to society’s standards. 

For a long time, Kate Moss’s words of “Nothing tastes better than skinny feels” served as a point of motivation for myself. What I have come to realize overtime, though, is that Kate Moss has never met a chocolate danish.