I was asked, indirectly, to respond to the question “Why do you think you’re healthy?” Definitions of health are important to me, as I’ve spent a lot of time in school and at my job considering what it means to be “healthy,” and watching how those definitions play out in real life. This is what [...]

I’m writing this because nearly every day someone finds my blog by typing the question ‘how can I eat normally?’ into a search engine. This is, to me, equal parts sad and inspiring.
We’ll start with a definition: Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT), which is what a clinical dietitian practices to address a specific disease or condition, [...]

It is sad that this even needs to be said, but given the fact that we essentially live in a health meritocracy, let me be the first to announce:
You are under no obligation to be healthy.
And, as an addendum: even if you were, eating “well” and exercising wouldn’t guarantee your success. There. I’ve said [...]

On Monday, I presented the PSA and the rest of my social marketing campaign to my classmates and professor. I barely slept the night before, I was so nervous. I seriously entertained fantasies of being pelted with things and booed out of the room for ‘promoting obesity,’ or something. At the very least, I expected [...]

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With a special appearance by Maria Callas. See if you can spot her.

ATTENTION FAT PEOPLE. Or not-fat people. Rather, attention people of all shapes, sizes, nationalities, colours, sexes, and assorted wonderfulnesses.
I am creating a (fake) Public Service Announcement for one of my courses. I am a nutrition student, and the course is about communicating nutrition messages to the public. My project is to create a social marketing [...]

Paul Campos says it all:
This girl has already learned two ignoble truths about appearance in our culture: That, as a woman, nothing she accomplishes will ever be considered as important as how she looks, and that the conventional definition of feminine beauty in our culture is both extraordinarily narrow and radically different from what most [...]

Did someone say “third piece of pie“?
I’d like to say something about how much fat people eat. I, personally, would be neither surprised nor offended if it were somehow proven that fat people, on average, eat more than thinner people. Of course, this hasn’t been proven, and if it were, there would be exceptions and [...]

Re: this.
Dan Savage does occasionally give lip-service to the idea of not discriminating against people based on their size and weight. But at the same time, he comes back again and again to statements that are not backed up by evidence, such as:
And if Ms. English—a 400 hundred pound woman—stops eating drive-through garbage, starts [...]

A famous actress was quoted in the newspaper regarding a role that required her to gain weight. Something about the quote struck me as odd. To paraphrase, she said, “Sure, it sounds great to gain weight. You can indulge all your fantasies of endless chocolate, unlimited pasta and garlic bread…but after a while your blood [...]

I recently received a Becel newsletter (don’t ask) very excited to announce that “Being moderately overweight increases heart disease risk.” You won’t be terribly surprised to find that this description stretches the truth just at leeeetle.
The original study (Association of Overweight With Increased Risk of Coronary Heart Disease Partly Independent of Blood Pressure and Cholesterol [...]

…I was a runner. I never got very good at it (because, even as a child, I was never good at it), but I found it to be peculiarly satisfying. The shape of my body is not conducive to the mechanics of running, generally speaking. I have short legs and flat feet. I am very [...]

I wanted to address was something I read a while back, and have been sort of turning over in the back of my head ever since. [Via The Fat Girl.]
“These are the fat acceptance zealots — using fat acceptance and ‘in your face’ fat imagery and messages in order to shock the world into accepting [...]

Mary Bush, “the director general for Health Canada’s office of nutrition and planning,” visited my nutrition class yesterday. I loved her.
Recently, she’s taken a lot of flack for revising Canada’s Food Guide. For example, changing the range of fruit & vegetable servings from 5-10 to 4-9 (not to discourage people from eating fruits and vegetables, [...]

Kell Brigan’s riff on Ellyn Satter’s definition of “Normal Eating.”
“Normal moving is being able to exercise or play when you enjoy doing so, and being able to continue until you’re bored, or the class or the game is over. It is being able to choose activities you like, and to pursue them without being afraid [...]