jesse_the_k | Insight from the Fat Nutritionist (Reply)

The Fat Nutritionist, aka Michelle Allison, is a smart thinker and clear writer. Her education and experience as a Registered Dietician and fat woman illuminate her understanding of dieting harms and how to move forward into “competent eating.”

A wee taste:

I’ve met many people who appear to be engaged in a one-person mission to discover the universal truth of human nutrition by conducting a series of uncontrolled experiments on themselves. It’s a very human, and very noble, undertaking, but one that always strikes me with its futility. It also carries with it a great deal of stress, and a great burden of effort with very little promise of reward for its champion.

http://www.fatnutritionist.com/index.php/you-dont-have-to-figure-out-the-universal-truth-of-nutrition

There’s plenty of great reading in her blog archive.

She works as an RD in her native Canada and remotely via Skype. She’s also just published a powerful essay in The Atlantic, where she zooms out for a psychological perspective on why diet talk is so painful, thoughtless, and selfish.

By creating and following diets, humans not only eat to stay alive, but they fit themselves into a cultural edifice that is larger, and more permanent, than their bodies. It is a sort of immortality ritual, and rituals must be performed socially. Clean eating rarely, if ever, occurs in secret. If you haven’t evangelized about it, joined a movement around it, or been praised publicly for it, have you truly cleansed?

[…snip…]

People willingly, happily, hand over their freedom in exchange for the bondage of a diet that forbids their most cherished foods, that forces them to rely on the unfamiliar, unpalatable, or inaccessible, all for the promise of relief from choice and the attendant responsibility. If you are free to choose, you can be blamed for anything that happens to you: weight gain, illness, aging–in short, your share in the human condition, including the random whims of luck and your own inescapable mortality.

[…snip…]

This is why arguments about diet get so vicious, so quickly. You are not merely disputing facts, you are pitting your wild gamble to avoid death against someone else’s.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/eating-toward-immortality/515658/

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