I appreciate the article because I did grow tired of the recent « gimmicky » titles including diet that you’ve sent since ~ December. BUT I didn’t say anything here or on reddit (good lord) because well, I can always stop reading if I want to (and I didn’t! Because the work you do is great!). I guess it would make more sense to me to actually give a name/word instead of saying « is__a diet? ». Like is __ perpetuating a patriarcal system of oppression ? Is __ a conduit for economic dominance and community isolation ? Are __ another way to control women’s bodies and autonomy through « performance » ? Honestly just throwing titles out there and I debated even commenting at all but I do believe you shouldn’t be afraid of big complicated titles because we can handle it and not everything has to be « reduced » to the word « diet » ! Thank you
I also really agree with this statement comment. I think that by naming the core issues are being addressed, it causes us to confront the 'isms' that perpetuate the 'diet culture' that we are naming. I think we should name racism/sexism/transphobia/etc when we see it and questioning "is heterosexual marriage a conduit for economic dominance/community isolation" seems more to the point and less bait-y than "is heterosexual marriage a diet?" Because the reasons that heterosexual marriage is 'diet-y' are still different than what makes native plants 'diet-y.' And those two things impact different people, so to call both a diet (especially when most readers equate dieting to things like Whole30/Atkins/etc) almost cheapens the issues that are being addressed.
I'd like this because I always just feel a little confused by the use of "diet." I'm very (too?) literal. Every time I read what Virginia has to say I get it once it's explained more explicitly, but every time I also start from square 1 despite being like "I know I should kinda get this use of "diet" by now."
Your bullet points are illuminating and made me think “is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy a diet??” I work as a clinical psychologist using CBT and other modalities. I believe CBT is a very effective treatment for anxiety, depression, and other conditions, but it’s rooted in change and improvement — changing thoughts to be more accurate and helpful and changing behavior to be more adaptive and less avoidant. Emphasis is on individual change and can ignore societal and structural forces that make change challenging. It is sometimes applied in a manualized approach involving structured tracking logs, worksheets, and homework. It also is used by various programs and institutes for the goal of weight loss specifically, although that is just one of many applications.
In contrast, a therapeutic approach like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on building psychological flexibility, which is the opposite of the diet mentality you lay out. Good CBT, when applied flexibly, with compassion, and with realism and awareness of society forces and inequities, doesn’t inherently check your bullet points, but the way it’s often taught and sometimes applied has some striking echos.
Online definition: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a structured, goal-oriented form of talk therapy that helps people manage mental health issues by changing how they think and behave.
Therapist (LCSW) here and I loved this reflection. I primarily utilize ACT and, as a client myself, have benefited enormously from Somatic Experiencing. My own therapist absolutely believes CBT "is so patriarchal and rooted in white supremacy" -- even just in its top-down approach, and prioritization of cognition above all else. When she first said it, I admit I bristled a little. But lots more work with her and lots more reflection on my own ... I agree.
Lizzie, this is exactly how I moved more towards ACT from CBT and took trainings on how to implement really good CBT with more adaptations when I was doing clinical work.
I love exploring “is this is a diet?”! It’s so important to train ourselves to see those patterns showing up *everywhere* to understand the reach of the system we live in. I’d encourage folks who feel bumped by calling something a diet to swap it for a label they resonate with, like perfectionism, capitalism, white supremacy or patriarchy. The conversation doesn’t change; the framework of diet culture just gives us a shared inroad. (I can swap “budget” for “diet,” and the answer is usually still “yes” :)
WHEW. Shame on me for not realizing how many negative comments you get. For a few years I wrote for an online pub with an audience about the size of yours and the comments were WILD. I've been writing on the internet since 2006 and I've had actual trolls, but no one has ever been meaner to me than the women in those comment threads. On posts that they were willingly reading!
Comment culture is my Roman Empire. I am never not thinking about it. It's why I try to leave positive comments as often as I can - because I know how much hate women get when they write online. The work you do here is so important. If it wasn't, no one would be saying a goddamn thing. Thank you for shouldering the negativity in order to shine a light on what the majority of us love about you.
"Comment culture is my Roman Empire." Ha! I love this. Me too. I guess I had this idea that Virginia only gets positive comments based on these threads - but of course jerk wads permeate the internet. And everyone is so harsh and thoughtless!
It can be a fine line between "diet" and "setting boundaries in a culture that's always trying to extract every last drop out of us."
For example, setting screen time limits can feel like a "virtuous" diet culture-y move. Or those limits can feel like drawing a clear line in the sand to prevent corporations from continuing to steal our attention and money; or preventing our employers from getting us to look at work email at all hours of the night and day.
Same with no-buy or low-buy pledges. Our consumer culture is killing the planet and wasting my hard-earned $$$ -- it can feel really subversive and radical to put up some limits. But it can also feel gimmicky and rigid, much like a diet.
I have been thinking a lot about these issues, and as always, I'm grateful for Virginia framing it so thoughtfully and honestly.
As someone who has had a few things to say about "Is ____ a diet?" I would just say this:
When a great deal of the content of Burnt Toast is concerned with how diets, dieting, diet culture, etc are actively harming us and our children, and how to thoroughly excise anything diet-y from our lives, and then the *rest* of the content is about how X or Y other thing is sneakily a diet, the thing we are spending all this energy trying to divest from lest it harm us or our children, it is very much to be expected that people who find X or Y thing actually beneficial to them are going to point out the broad presumptions being made. This is as causally-related as ordering a pizza and then receiving a pizza 30 minutes later.
It is to be expected precisely because of the good girl effect described here: If diets are bad, and _____ is a diet, then I am f-ing up in some way because I have allowed it into my life and now I have one more way in which I am not measuring up.
If that's not the intended impact, perhaps the pithiness is flattening the nuance.
And I'm not saying any of this in a spirit of hostility or even frustration; I value Virginia's work and this space very much. But I find that this framing very much tickles the very perfectionism it's intended to expose.
I think I had the strongest reaction to the podcast conversation about breast reduction, and I have to say that I bristle at this: "they are annoyed that I’d suggest that there would ever be any other experience."
That is not the root of my issue with your take on this specifically. It was more that there were inaccuracies you and Corinne shared. Some objective and some subjective. I didn't pay a penny for my medically necessary, fully covered by insurance--and yes, elective--surgery. My appearance was a secondary, or even tertiary, consideration in having the procedure. I woke up feeling like I could take a deep breath for the first time in twenty years, and that is just the beginning of what it changed for me. In fact, breast reduction has some of the best longitudinal outcomes and patient satisfaction scores of any elective procedure.
I suppose I have had some of the same reaction to the pieces on GLPs. It is not that I don't think anyone could have had a different experience than I, more that neither you nor Corinne have personal experience with breast reduction or GLPs, to my knowledge. It does not mean you can't talk about them, of course, but my disagreement and reaction ARE based in personal experience.
I just caution against leaning too far into the framing of "they disagree because they are defensive" and embracing that people have their own informed opinions and might, as I did, bristle against labeling a personal medical choice a diet.
Also, not saying that I particularly agree or disagree with this take, but I interpret the "is labeling everything a diet a diet" as asking if are we applying that good girl, over-analytic, pleasing lens of diet culture toward things that might bring us pleasure, happiness, or improved health. That rather than trying to physically shrink ourselves to please men, our parents, our patriarchy, whatever--we are over-examining interests and activities through this lens to please and assimilate with the anti-diet crowd.
Yes, I agree. As someone who is a former health journalist like Virginia, and who also personally investigated breast reduction surgery, the way the conversation immediately went to thinness and dieting was frustrating. Even a quick Google search would’ve turned up longstanding statistics about patient satisfaction around the procedure, not because of reasons of thinness. In the discussion of GLP-1s too, there is always some note at the end of “of course we’re not telling you what to do and each case is different” following quite a good deal of judgment without actually talking to anyone who has used those medications or a cursory look into research or the nuances of who is getting them and why. (For this, I highly rec Samhita Mukhopadhyay in The Cut.) On the flipside, there is the justification of online shopping, even though that too may be a diet. For what it’s worth, I don’t care how much anyone online shops. But agree, it’s the lack of trying to investigate the actual facts and experiences of people who have undergone breast reduction or using these medications in favor of mere supposition that bothers, particularly from a journalist. In any case, I did appreciate this post for its recognition of those of us who have been feeling this way. I admit that part of my consternation comes from the fact that I perceive the anti-diet space to also be a place free of judgment, which is probably unfair, so I often walk away feeling judged and unsettled for feeling that way. Of course you can’t tell us whether or not we should go on Ozempic or get a breast reduction or eat more or less snacks but it’s very clear how you feel about it. I guess needing validation from a Substack writer is my diet!
I am in the camp of needing the constant reminder that anything COULD be a diet if I don't stop and take a beat. Interestingly, when I stopped food-type dieting I became obsessed with native plants, lol. Planting in a Post Wild world helped me a lot:) I do always choose northeastern natives (and now mid-atlantic natives, what with climate change) when I'm choosing from scratch, but like, would NEVER remove a lilac that makes me want to cry. And I plant bulbs, they aren't hurting anyone. So yeah, I'm fighting that diet culture inside me by being reasonable.
I've been thinking about this essay quite a bit in the 2 days since I read it -- which is definitely the sign of a successful essay! I agree that a lot of this is semantics and we could easily swap terms like productivity culture or late stage capitalism or the patriarchy or white supremacy for "diet" the way you use it, but I realized that one reason this shorthand of calling so many things a diet bugs me is because it gives outsized weight to food and diets. And kind of short shrift to things that might really be the root of whatever the issue is, like sexism or racism. I know this is your thing (your brand? Kind of) and you're coming at much of the work you do from the eating and anti-diet space, but I guess as a reader it puts me off. I always appreciate the commentary even if I don't agree with the framing so I'll probably just work on substituting one of the other terms in my head as I'm reading it. But I will also say that you and this community obviously don't shy away from nuance -- the Dr. Becky podcast a great example of that -- so I honestly don't think you need a catch phrase like this as much as it might feel you do.
“The “diet mindset” is about the thin ideal, but even more it’s about keeping us locked into a system that tells us that we can’t trust ourselves and we’re never good enough.”
This really hits at the core of it. Since I’ve gotten more used to being off diets for food in the last almost 5 years, I’ve been looking around other areas of my life where I apply this mindset and it boggles the mind. I recently broke up with my Apple Watch. I wear it for my exercise to make sure I don’t go too far and watch my heart rate but I had to put it down the rest of the day because I started watching numbers too much. I didn’t even realize how much stress it was adding. I’ve ironically been exercising more since I put it down. Trust takes time and a lot of steps, even with our own bodies. Maybe even *especially* with our own bodies.
This was interesting and made me think about some of the things that may have made dieting or disordered eating so appealing/reinforcing to my brain. Obviously there is the external validation, but I definitely also have those like perfectionistic/achiever/eldest daughter traits and like in that way, kind of loved getting an A+ on being on a diet.
I definitely think the “it a diet? thing is an interesting lens through which to view a certain behavior or phenomenon. I don’t know that I’ve had the same feeling when I read your pieces on this, but it does make me think about the book Cultish (and the associated podcast which might have a different name). They compare all sorts of things to a cult and when I have listened to the podcast, I have been frustrated because I feel like they use the term cult or culty to the point that I feel like it loses almost all meaning. I do think they are usually not as thoughtful and precise in their comparisons, which is probably part of what annoys me about it.
Great article and explanation. There is very little that I’ve done in my life that doesn’t tie back to diet culture, capitalism, the expectations of patriarchy. I’m older than you, but am hard pressed to find any problem I’ve had that the prevali recommendation
Yes! So well said. My two main hobbies are also gardening and home design. I see people embrace diets, or standards, relating to planting only native plants, attitudes towards new construction, preferences for vintage furniture and artwork, etc. There is an endless list of "superior" ways to garden and decorate, and sometimes I have to remind myself that it's OK to plant a perennial because I like the way it looks, even if it's not native. Or I can buy a night stand from Pottery Barn because it fits in nicely in my room. Not everything has to have a story or deep, soulful meaning. I mean, awesome if it does and I definitely have those pieces in my house, but that doesn't have to apply to everything you own. Just like you might need to plant a privacy screen and those green giant arborvitae are the only way to do it.
What sucks about diet culture, as it pertains to anything, is the all-or-nothing approach we are conditioned to take. Moderation has flown the coop. I am trying to navigate that middle ground, doing better where I can and accepting the places where I can't (or maybe don't want to!).
I haven't seen that Jessie Spano clip in years. My classmates and I used to act it out during recess—we were so weird!! So relatable, though. I always felt a little bit like Screech trying to write with a pencil in each hand when the Micro Machines guy took over their class that one time.
I appreciate the article because I did grow tired of the recent « gimmicky » titles including diet that you’ve sent since ~ December. BUT I didn’t say anything here or on reddit (good lord) because well, I can always stop reading if I want to (and I didn’t! Because the work you do is great!). I guess it would make more sense to me to actually give a name/word instead of saying « is__a diet? ». Like is __ perpetuating a patriarcal system of oppression ? Is __ a conduit for economic dominance and community isolation ? Are __ another way to control women’s bodies and autonomy through « performance » ? Honestly just throwing titles out there and I debated even commenting at all but I do believe you shouldn’t be afraid of big complicated titles because we can handle it and not everything has to be « reduced » to the word « diet » ! Thank you
I also really agree with this statement comment. I think that by naming the core issues are being addressed, it causes us to confront the 'isms' that perpetuate the 'diet culture' that we are naming. I think we should name racism/sexism/transphobia/etc when we see it and questioning "is heterosexual marriage a conduit for economic dominance/community isolation" seems more to the point and less bait-y than "is heterosexual marriage a diet?" Because the reasons that heterosexual marriage is 'diet-y' are still different than what makes native plants 'diet-y.' And those two things impact different people, so to call both a diet (especially when most readers equate dieting to things like Whole30/Atkins/etc) almost cheapens the issues that are being addressed.
I'd like this because I always just feel a little confused by the use of "diet." I'm very (too?) literal. Every time I read what Virginia has to say I get it once it's explained more explicitly, but every time I also start from square 1 despite being like "I know I should kinda get this use of "diet" by now."
Your bullet points are illuminating and made me think “is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy a diet??” I work as a clinical psychologist using CBT and other modalities. I believe CBT is a very effective treatment for anxiety, depression, and other conditions, but it’s rooted in change and improvement — changing thoughts to be more accurate and helpful and changing behavior to be more adaptive and less avoidant. Emphasis is on individual change and can ignore societal and structural forces that make change challenging. It is sometimes applied in a manualized approach involving structured tracking logs, worksheets, and homework. It also is used by various programs and institutes for the goal of weight loss specifically, although that is just one of many applications.
In contrast, a therapeutic approach like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on building psychological flexibility, which is the opposite of the diet mentality you lay out. Good CBT, when applied flexibly, with compassion, and with realism and awareness of society forces and inequities, doesn’t inherently check your bullet points, but the way it’s often taught and sometimes applied has some striking echos.
Online definition: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a structured, goal-oriented form of talk therapy that helps people manage mental health issues by changing how they think and behave.
Therapist (LCSW) here and I loved this reflection. I primarily utilize ACT and, as a client myself, have benefited enormously from Somatic Experiencing. My own therapist absolutely believes CBT "is so patriarchal and rooted in white supremacy" -- even just in its top-down approach, and prioritization of cognition above all else. When she first said it, I admit I bristled a little. But lots more work with her and lots more reflection on my own ... I agree.
Omg came here to say “consider ACT” (I’m an MFT) and there it was in your second paragraph! Yes yes yes!!!!!”
Lizzie, this is exactly how I moved more towards ACT from CBT and took trainings on how to implement really good CBT with more adaptations when I was doing clinical work.
I love exploring “is this is a diet?”! It’s so important to train ourselves to see those patterns showing up *everywhere* to understand the reach of the system we live in. I’d encourage folks who feel bumped by calling something a diet to swap it for a label they resonate with, like perfectionism, capitalism, white supremacy or patriarchy. The conversation doesn’t change; the framework of diet culture just gives us a shared inroad. (I can swap “budget” for “diet,” and the answer is usually still “yes” :)
WHEW. Shame on me for not realizing how many negative comments you get. For a few years I wrote for an online pub with an audience about the size of yours and the comments were WILD. I've been writing on the internet since 2006 and I've had actual trolls, but no one has ever been meaner to me than the women in those comment threads. On posts that they were willingly reading!
Comment culture is my Roman Empire. I am never not thinking about it. It's why I try to leave positive comments as often as I can - because I know how much hate women get when they write online. The work you do here is so important. If it wasn't, no one would be saying a goddamn thing. Thank you for shouldering the negativity in order to shine a light on what the majority of us love about you.
"Comment culture is my Roman Empire." Ha! I love this. Me too. I guess I had this idea that Virginia only gets positive comments based on these threads - but of course jerk wads permeate the internet. And everyone is so harsh and thoughtless!
It can be a fine line between "diet" and "setting boundaries in a culture that's always trying to extract every last drop out of us."
For example, setting screen time limits can feel like a "virtuous" diet culture-y move. Or those limits can feel like drawing a clear line in the sand to prevent corporations from continuing to steal our attention and money; or preventing our employers from getting us to look at work email at all hours of the night and day.
Same with no-buy or low-buy pledges. Our consumer culture is killing the planet and wasting my hard-earned $$$ -- it can feel really subversive and radical to put up some limits. But it can also feel gimmicky and rigid, much like a diet.
I have been thinking a lot about these issues, and as always, I'm grateful for Virginia framing it so thoughtfully and honestly.
As someone who has had a few things to say about "Is ____ a diet?" I would just say this:
When a great deal of the content of Burnt Toast is concerned with how diets, dieting, diet culture, etc are actively harming us and our children, and how to thoroughly excise anything diet-y from our lives, and then the *rest* of the content is about how X or Y other thing is sneakily a diet, the thing we are spending all this energy trying to divest from lest it harm us or our children, it is very much to be expected that people who find X or Y thing actually beneficial to them are going to point out the broad presumptions being made. This is as causally-related as ordering a pizza and then receiving a pizza 30 minutes later.
It is to be expected precisely because of the good girl effect described here: If diets are bad, and _____ is a diet, then I am f-ing up in some way because I have allowed it into my life and now I have one more way in which I am not measuring up.
If that's not the intended impact, perhaps the pithiness is flattening the nuance.
And I'm not saying any of this in a spirit of hostility or even frustration; I value Virginia's work and this space very much. But I find that this framing very much tickles the very perfectionism it's intended to expose.
Appreciate this, Tiffany!
Oh, ‘good girl culture’ goes straight to it for me.
I think I had the strongest reaction to the podcast conversation about breast reduction, and I have to say that I bristle at this: "they are annoyed that I’d suggest that there would ever be any other experience."
That is not the root of my issue with your take on this specifically. It was more that there were inaccuracies you and Corinne shared. Some objective and some subjective. I didn't pay a penny for my medically necessary, fully covered by insurance--and yes, elective--surgery. My appearance was a secondary, or even tertiary, consideration in having the procedure. I woke up feeling like I could take a deep breath for the first time in twenty years, and that is just the beginning of what it changed for me. In fact, breast reduction has some of the best longitudinal outcomes and patient satisfaction scores of any elective procedure.
I suppose I have had some of the same reaction to the pieces on GLPs. It is not that I don't think anyone could have had a different experience than I, more that neither you nor Corinne have personal experience with breast reduction or GLPs, to my knowledge. It does not mean you can't talk about them, of course, but my disagreement and reaction ARE based in personal experience.
I just caution against leaning too far into the framing of "they disagree because they are defensive" and embracing that people have their own informed opinions and might, as I did, bristle against labeling a personal medical choice a diet.
Also, not saying that I particularly agree or disagree with this take, but I interpret the "is labeling everything a diet a diet" as asking if are we applying that good girl, over-analytic, pleasing lens of diet culture toward things that might bring us pleasure, happiness, or improved health. That rather than trying to physically shrink ourselves to please men, our parents, our patriarchy, whatever--we are over-examining interests and activities through this lens to please and assimilate with the anti-diet crowd.
Yes, I agree. As someone who is a former health journalist like Virginia, and who also personally investigated breast reduction surgery, the way the conversation immediately went to thinness and dieting was frustrating. Even a quick Google search would’ve turned up longstanding statistics about patient satisfaction around the procedure, not because of reasons of thinness. In the discussion of GLP-1s too, there is always some note at the end of “of course we’re not telling you what to do and each case is different” following quite a good deal of judgment without actually talking to anyone who has used those medications or a cursory look into research or the nuances of who is getting them and why. (For this, I highly rec Samhita Mukhopadhyay in The Cut.) On the flipside, there is the justification of online shopping, even though that too may be a diet. For what it’s worth, I don’t care how much anyone online shops. But agree, it’s the lack of trying to investigate the actual facts and experiences of people who have undergone breast reduction or using these medications in favor of mere supposition that bothers, particularly from a journalist. In any case, I did appreciate this post for its recognition of those of us who have been feeling this way. I admit that part of my consternation comes from the fact that I perceive the anti-diet space to also be a place free of judgment, which is probably unfair, so I often walk away feeling judged and unsettled for feeling that way. Of course you can’t tell us whether or not we should go on Ozempic or get a breast reduction or eat more or less snacks but it’s very clear how you feel about it. I guess needing validation from a Substack writer is my diet!
I am in the camp of needing the constant reminder that anything COULD be a diet if I don't stop and take a beat. Interestingly, when I stopped food-type dieting I became obsessed with native plants, lol. Planting in a Post Wild world helped me a lot:) I do always choose northeastern natives (and now mid-atlantic natives, what with climate change) when I'm choosing from scratch, but like, would NEVER remove a lilac that makes me want to cry. And I plant bulbs, they aren't hurting anyone. So yeah, I'm fighting that diet culture inside me by being reasonable.
I've been thinking about this essay quite a bit in the 2 days since I read it -- which is definitely the sign of a successful essay! I agree that a lot of this is semantics and we could easily swap terms like productivity culture or late stage capitalism or the patriarchy or white supremacy for "diet" the way you use it, but I realized that one reason this shorthand of calling so many things a diet bugs me is because it gives outsized weight to food and diets. And kind of short shrift to things that might really be the root of whatever the issue is, like sexism or racism. I know this is your thing (your brand? Kind of) and you're coming at much of the work you do from the eating and anti-diet space, but I guess as a reader it puts me off. I always appreciate the commentary even if I don't agree with the framing so I'll probably just work on substituting one of the other terms in my head as I'm reading it. But I will also say that you and this community obviously don't shy away from nuance -- the Dr. Becky podcast a great example of that -- so I honestly don't think you need a catch phrase like this as much as it might feel you do.
“The “diet mindset” is about the thin ideal, but even more it’s about keeping us locked into a system that tells us that we can’t trust ourselves and we’re never good enough.”
This really hits at the core of it. Since I’ve gotten more used to being off diets for food in the last almost 5 years, I’ve been looking around other areas of my life where I apply this mindset and it boggles the mind. I recently broke up with my Apple Watch. I wear it for my exercise to make sure I don’t go too far and watch my heart rate but I had to put it down the rest of the day because I started watching numbers too much. I didn’t even realize how much stress it was adding. I’ve ironically been exercising more since I put it down. Trust takes time and a lot of steps, even with our own bodies. Maybe even *especially* with our own bodies.
This deserves a Pulitzer
This is the comment I wish I'd written.
Oh shit. Genuinely the first few paragraphs are like a Rosetta Stone for my life. Didn't realise this is so common!!
This was interesting and made me think about some of the things that may have made dieting or disordered eating so appealing/reinforcing to my brain. Obviously there is the external validation, but I definitely also have those like perfectionistic/achiever/eldest daughter traits and like in that way, kind of loved getting an A+ on being on a diet.
I definitely think the “it a diet? thing is an interesting lens through which to view a certain behavior or phenomenon. I don’t know that I’ve had the same feeling when I read your pieces on this, but it does make me think about the book Cultish (and the associated podcast which might have a different name). They compare all sorts of things to a cult and when I have listened to the podcast, I have been frustrated because I feel like they use the term cult or culty to the point that I feel like it loses almost all meaning. I do think they are usually not as thoughtful and precise in their comparisons, which is probably part of what annoys me about it.
Great article and explanation. There is very little that I’ve done in my life that doesn’t tie back to diet culture, capitalism, the expectations of patriarchy. I’m older than you, but am hard pressed to find any problem I’ve had that the prevali recommendation
(Cont) isn’t a diet, a list, a hack or someone telling me to spend more $$$. Keep it up Virginia!
Yes! So well said. My two main hobbies are also gardening and home design. I see people embrace diets, or standards, relating to planting only native plants, attitudes towards new construction, preferences for vintage furniture and artwork, etc. There is an endless list of "superior" ways to garden and decorate, and sometimes I have to remind myself that it's OK to plant a perennial because I like the way it looks, even if it's not native. Or I can buy a night stand from Pottery Barn because it fits in nicely in my room. Not everything has to have a story or deep, soulful meaning. I mean, awesome if it does and I definitely have those pieces in my house, but that doesn't have to apply to everything you own. Just like you might need to plant a privacy screen and those green giant arborvitae are the only way to do it.
What sucks about diet culture, as it pertains to anything, is the all-or-nothing approach we are conditioned to take. Moderation has flown the coop. I am trying to navigate that middle ground, doing better where I can and accepting the places where I can't (or maybe don't want to!).
I haven't seen that Jessie Spano clip in years. My classmates and I used to act it out during recess—we were so weird!! So relatable, though. I always felt a little bit like Screech trying to write with a pencil in each hand when the Micro Machines guy took over their class that one time.