Salon talks with Kelsey Miller, author of “Big Girl,” about unlearning toxic messages around food and weight.
Masses of Americans will resolve to lose weight for New Year’s, but Kelsey Miller, a senior features writer at Refinery29 and author of the upcoming memoir “Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life” (Jan. 5), would propose a different solution to body image woes.
Miller struggled with her weight since childhood and hopped on and off fad diets throughout her teens and twenties. It took collapsing in the woods after a failed “Spartan Warrior Workout” for her to realize this method wasn’t working. She had tried the same thing — dieting — for years and expected different results, the oft-cited definition of insanity. The outcome, of course, was instead the same: She’d grow miserable, relapse to “unhealthy” eating, and end up back where she started, eager to check another weight-loss regime off her list.
So at 29, Miller embarked on a fast from fasting itself, chronicling her experiment in Refinery29’s Anti-Diet Project column. Secretly, she hoped this new approach would somehow help her shed pounds. But when her nutrition therapist asked if she’d be okay never losing an ounce through intuitive eating — consuming exactly what she was hungry for — she was forced to reconsider what health and fitness meant.
At a café in her home borough of Brooklyn, Miller told Salon about what she learned along her diet-free journey, the toxic messages the media sends about food and weight, and the advice she’d give others seeking a saner relationship with their bodies. The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
At the beginning of your book, you ditch dieting in favor of a new philosophy called intuitive eating. Could you explain what intuitive eating is?
It sounds like a fake thing, and that’s what I thought it was when I first heard about it, before I quit dieting. I’d stumbled across it a couple times and thought it sounded sort of adorable and crunchy and like something I should probably definitely do, but not yet — when I was thinner.
When I had the big turning point, that phrase was hanging around in my head. Really, it’s just diet deprogramming and learning to eat like a normal person again. For better or worse, most of us don’t have a sense of the way we ate when we were 3 years old, when we weren’t afraid of basic carbohydrates. It’s learning to eat again as if you were a child with all those instincts firmly in place, before they got polluted by diet culture and outside influence. It’s having full permission to eat whatever. Nothing is going to make you a bad person if you eat it. And then it’s monitoring your fullness, which is just a very fancy way of saying, “You eat when you’re hungry. No matter what, you do it. And when you’re full, you acknowledge that.”
Some people think it means you can only eat according to hunger and fullness and there’s no leeway for when you’re just like, “Oh my God, that cookie looks really good.” But of course you’re allowed to do that. I have a friend who’s an intuitive eating coach who references birthday cake as a case of “emotional eating” that’s important. We eat birthday cake for a reason. If you’re really not in the mood and you don’t feel like it, you don’t have it. But you don’t eat birthday cake because you’re like, “My body really needs some birthday cake right now, and I’m going to honor that,” and that doesn’t make it illegitimate.
Can intuitive eating include consideration for what is healthiest to put in your body? Or is that its own form of disordered eating?
That was my fear when I started. I really thought I was just going to eat pizza until I died of pizza. But the truth is, when nothing is off limits and you’re eating mindfully, you realize pizza is good, and then too much pizza doesn’t feel good. And if you have a sense that there will always be pizza, you can always get more pizza, and it isn’t going anywhere, you’re not going to have that need to eat all the pizza when it’s in front of you. That sense of deprivation is really what leads to overeating.
Once you have a sense of security around food and you’re not approaching food with a sense of deprivation and fear, absolutely, you can think of nutrition. I’ll have the thought sometimes, “There aren’t really a lot of vegetables in my breakfast this morning. I’ve got to get some greens in there.” I know my body feels better when I have roughage in it. Most people who have been dieting their whole lives have a sense of what’s healthy and what’s not, and the issue is that a lot of the ideas we form are a perversion of health. Instead of being like, “I don’t want to eat too much sugar because obviously I know that eating cups and cups of sugar won’t make my body feel good and function well,” we end up thinking, “Sugar is Satan, sugar is the devil, and if you eat sugar, I’ll call the police.” That sense of moralization around food and healthiness is different from wanting a vegetable on my plate.
The association between food and morality was a major theme in your book. You wrote that while you were dieting, you viewed eating after 7 p.m. as “a crime on par with infanticide.” How do you think we learn to assign moral value to food?
Man, we should write a thesis on that. I’m sure there is one somewhere. But, for one thing, we associate thinness with goodness and restriction with being good. “I’m being good this week” — that kind of thing. So, our language and the way we perceive and talk about food totally foster that connection. On the flip side, we hear about junk food and garbage food and poison — “gluten is poison,” people say — and so we take it to extremes. That’s the other side of the perversion of healthiness: that sense that I’m a bad person if I eat refined bread. It’s really hard to let go of that….
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