The One Word I Wish Every Woman Would Eliminate From Her Vocabulary

I dream of a world where women would never utter, lest engage in the D-word.  That’s right, I said it, the most dirty, destructive, despicable word in the language of life…..Diet.  This simple word, so wrought with implied sacrifice and hopeful yet unattainable outcomes.  This word embodies hours of counting, judging, and evaluating food, calories, ingredients, and portion sizes creating pain and immeasurable emotional toil, setting up lifetimes worth of sadness and self-imposed inequality. 

The truth is this word affects women and men differently.  For men, dieting is largely simple, cutting calories, increasing movement and the end result is weight loss.  But for women, this process initiates a biochemical shift of unimagined proportions, which cannot produce what it is intended to nor can it’s metabolic and psychological damage be undone without significant work. The lowered calories often slow the metabolism, the foods chosen are lacking in nutrients and fat which hinders hormonal function and the psychological directive largely ends up being that to starve and be thin will always be better than to eat and be fat. 

I speak from experience, I like many spent my teenage years dieting. Cutting back, eating only this, or only that, skimping and splurging until one day, someone classified my obsession as Anorexia. I don’t recall starving, I can’t remember feeling hungry, or excessively tired, having obvious signs and symptoms of a lack of food.  But low and behold, eventually I had become too skinny.  The every elusive…too skinny, with which came no periods, and thus a trip to the doctor. I was told to eat, or I would be put on an IV, I was told I had PCOS now, and that I might never have children, I was told I needed to take hormones, and that I might never be off of them.  All this to a 15-year-old who didn’t even feel hungry and finally felt skinny….for the first time in her life.

This skinny got me a metabolism that can’t tell up from down, a body that would rather hold weight than let it go under any conditions and a mind that feels fat even when not.  The D-word, for me and for so many created a pattern that has no end except one: to disengage completely from any concept, association, or fragmented aspect of what one would call a diet.  Through my twenties, into my thirties, having three children, and a busy life, I have come to understand that being nourished is far better than being skinny, and nourishment comes in many forms and appears in many ways.

Nourishment is a combined effort of mind, body, and soul, it is equal parts taking in and letting go while expressing joy, gratitude, and love for every step on the journey.  Nourishment sometimes looks like an organic lasagna, and other times like steamed kale.  There is no formula for a good nourishing life, no one size fits all approach.  You cannot skimp on nourishment, there is no way to limit and be nourished, it is an all in full scale, whipped cream on top kind of enterprise and it is a lot more fun than dieting. 

I long for a world where 15-year-old girls wouldn’t lose their ability to feel hunger out of a misplaced desire to be thin.  I long for a world where women do not spent their lives trying to fit into a pair of jeans or a bikini, sacrificing everything to achieve an unattainable goal.  I dream of a time where the metamorphosis of being a woman will embody a well-nourished life, centered on a grounded sense of joy, love, compassion and full flavor living in which judgment and self-criticism are saved for how fully we lived rather than how fully we filled our jeans.