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Own Your Beauty is a groundbreaking, year-long movement bringing women together to change the conversation about what beauty means. Our mission: to encourage and remind grown women that it is never too late to learn to love one's self and influence the lives of those around us - our mothers, friends, children, neighbors. We can shift our minds and hearts and change the path we follow in the pursuit of authentic beauty.
In my kitchen and in my life, my goal is to decriminalize food.
That sounds crazy. But for those of us who were programmed into Diet Mentality at a very early age, the world of food has been treacherous, unhealthy and illicit. We are food criminals, and food is either BAD or GOOD, and you are either bad or good depending on what you just ate. The problem of course is that food is integral to living. You need it every day to function, to breathe, to move, to sustain your life. It becomes a way to bond, nourish, show people you care about them. No wonder that food has a whole lot of emotion wrapped up in it. There are some people who see food only as nutrition and fuel. I don't know many of those people. Those people may want to go read something else now, since this will sound like "blah blah blah" to them.
I was not an overweight child. I was underweight, in fact, but I remember my first diet as clearly as I can remember my last one. I was eight years old and I tried so hard to be good, but of course I failed, because I was eight and hungry. I can remember times before that, being six years old (in pictures I am so tiny and blonde and pale) wondering why my brother was allowed to eat anything he wanted while I was told, "Be careful! You don't want to grow up to be fat, do you?" I knew early on that fat was a bad thing.
I'm not blaming anyone here, I'm too old to still be blaming someone for all my issues. At my age, there is no one playing those tapes in my mind but me. I mention the beginning because it's important to cut myself some slack and see that this situation didn't develop overnight, so it won't be fixed overnight.
Truthfully, it's a long process. I have been trapped in diet mentality since I was too young to even understand it. It has taken me years to start unraveling the kinks in my brain about food and eating and body size, and even now I'm not sure how much progress I've made.
When I was on the Atkins diet, I lost a very significant amount of weight. I also lost a very significant amount of hair and broke out in rashes all over my body, and some nights I would wake up in a panic because of nightmare dreams that I ate carbohydrates. I would tiptoe downstairs to be sure I hadn't actually eaten a bagel or a potato in my sleep. Of course I hadn't -- I had stopped buying "bad carb" foods altogether.
There was one day during that period of serious Atkins obsession when I was sitting at a lunch with my coworkers and I was carefully and neurotically picking the shredded carrots out of my salad. You would think someone at that table would have gently suggested that one teaspoon of shredded carrots wouldn't make me fat. Or at least they would have thought such a thing. But instead, I remember everyone at that table telling me, "I wish I had your willpower. You look amazing. Atkins is really working for you. I really need to lose weight, too ... "
While I am not a medical doctor, I am certain that most of the obese people in America (including myself) did not become obese by eating raw carrots. Even so, I developed an irrational fear of carrots ... and bananas, and potatoes and watermelon. Inside my purse I carried a half-cup measuring spoon (enclosed in a Ziploc baggie) so that I could measure out serving sizes
