I n t r o d u c t i o n

Life is about relationships, and we all obsess over cultivating the best. The rock-solid marriage. The best friend. The mother-daughter bond. But in the process of trying to be domestic superheroes, we’ve forgotten how to nourish the one relationship that we will never be able to divorce: our relationship with food. Let’s face it—it’s pretty messy. Like Jerry Springer bad. We’ve all tried at least one buzz-worthy diet under the guise that we’ll be healthier and happier if we just weighed ten pounds less, but somehow we never escape that diet rollercoaster cycle of restrict-binge-regret-repeat.

Trust me, I know; I chose this as my profession. I’m a registered diet-itian, an educated woman who devoted the early years of her professional life to finding the one diet that actually works. Sadly, after $20,000 in tuition fees and weeks of my life lost to memorizing the Krebs cycle, I’ve come to terms with a fact everyone who’s ever dieted already knows: diets don’t work. And much like Shakira’s hips, statistics don’t lie: fewer than 5 percent of dieters who have lost weight actually keep it off. Apparently, it takes more than willpower or an endorsement from Oprah to change our relationship with food. That statistic alone is more depressing to me than my student loans, but it hardly surprises me now.

Diets are physical, emotional, and mental traps. They lure us in with a sexy sales pitch and then supress our self-confidence with every kick at the can. Once you’re in, it becomes even harder to get out (but you surely already know that). Diet culture is that nagging internal voice that tells us that we’re not good enough, that our bodies aren’t right, and that we lack self-control, but we hold on under the pretense that the struggle is for our own “good.” It’s amazing how bad “good” can feel, but That’s the diet game.

Diets are controlling and malicious activities that isolate us from our bodies and from each other. They deny us communication with important people who enrich our lives—the people who could make every calorie count. Not only are they emotionally and socially disruptive and not helpful, but they can also do great physical harm. I’m talking about hormonal imbalances, weight fluctuations, eating disorders, and more. Seriously, if all these character flaws were listed on a dating app, we would totally swipe left.

While locker-room conversation has led us to view diets as an innocuous part of eating to meet our health goals (you know, we’re on them, we’re off them, whatev), if we look deeper, their true colours emerge. Diets don’t teach us how to eat (and live) well. They teach us that our bodies need to be policed, and that if they are policed well enough, our lives will one day be better. Friends, do not wait for that day.

Why Diets Don’t Work
Dieting may be encouraged by our skinny-obsessed culture, but research suggests it may actually be counterproductive to achieving those, ahem, #bodygoals. The shape, size, and weight of our body is a lot more complicated than a simplified equation of energy in and energy out. In fact, we all have a natural narrow weight range—the place where our bodies are most comfortable being—called our “set point.” Believe it or not, if we were to never count, track, or control anything we put into our mouths, but rather simply ate in response to hunger and satisfaction, our weight would remain remarkably stable. For most of us, our set point isn’t on par with those Victoria’s Secret models we see walking down the runway. But, when we do diet, whether we know it or not, our bodies act out.

Let me explain. First, dieting slows down our metabolism so that we conserve the little energy we give it. Second, it messes with our hunger and satiety (fullness) hormones, kicking in cravings for foods that we didn’t even know we liked. Third, it makes us feel sluggish, and as a result, we end up taking the elevator up one floor and an Uber to grab coffee a block away. Sure, we may lose a little bit of weight at first, but our bodies will fight savagely to get it back. Usually, it comes back with a vengeance, bringing along a few extra pounds just to make sure we don’t try to pull a fast one again.

A diet is like excess baggage always following us around. We’re always either preparing to go on a diet, are on a diet, or have just come off a diet—restricting, binging, regretting, and repeating the diet cycle again and again and again. Unfortunately, studies suggest that our set point tends to go up after each kick at the diet cycle can, and it rarely comes down, leaving us heavier and hangrier than we were before. To make it painfully clear, dieting actually makes us gain more weight than where our bodies naturally want to be.

The reality is that even if dieting did result in long-term weight loss, that would be totally missing the point. Studies suggest that weight is not a good indicator of longevity, the absence of disease, or good health in general. In fact, research indicates that being just five pounds “underweight” is more dangerous than being seventy-five pounds “overweight.” Let’s face it: we may think being skinnier will make us happier, but dieting in the long run won’t do much. According to research, the process of losing weight and adhering to a diet makes people more unhappy and anxious. Nope, we can’t hate our way to health or a rippling six-pack of abs.

Clean Eating: The “New” D-Word
These days, “dieting” isn’t a sexy word, but it has never gone out of style. It’s just been rebranded, repackaged, and resold. Welcome to the world of “clean eating.” This buzzy new diet is more sinister than it appears.

Words like “clean eating” and “wellness” seem to be body-positive, holistic, and even feminist. They “empower” us to combat the “obesity epidemic.” They advocate for a world free of toxins, Big Pharma scandals, and, of course, GMOs. So what could possibly be wrong with a “lifestyle” geared towards feeling your best? Clean eating may seem softer, even kinder, than the old wave of diet rhetoric, but it is actually more calorically restrictive than any of our moms’ grapefruit diets. Do not be fooled when clean-eating programs tell you, “Hey, try me out, I’m different. I’ve changed and you can too.” Their self-righteous colours and militant eating regimens will soon emerge to drag you back down. I should know: I fell victim myself.

My Story
As a prisoner of weight-loss culture, I know all too well the allure of the diet promise and the dangers that the reality poses. I was never the “fat” kid in school. In fact, I was always teased for my undefined waist, narrow hips, and somewhat boyish form. But eventually, diet culture got me, too, under the pretense of success. Damn perfectionism. It’s way less glamorous than our progress-obsessed society makes it out to be.

It started in the dance studio when I was a wee toddler in a tiny kilt. Despite the fact that I was notably one of the top Highland dancers in my company, I would cry myself to sleep before competitions, worrying I wouldn’t take home the gold. And, listen, I was real good at dancing over those sharp swords! But I became so miserable trying to be the best, I quit before puberty hit.

Next, singing became the outlet to channel my relentless drive. I travelled across America, collaborating with different producers, songwriters, and agents. But slowly, my fear of failure ate away at my breath. And it’s kind of hard to sing if you can’t breathe. Not surprisingly, I quit that, too

Seeing the world in black and white, as a failure or success, as good or bad, drove me to find a new chamber to pour myself into. That was university. On the outside, I looked poised and put together, graduating with a perfect GPA, the top honours of the entire university, and a full scholarship from a prestigious graduate program. But on the inside, I was racked with anxiety, physically sick if I got anything less than a perfect grade. (Seriously, I cried when I once got an A minus. I’m still kinda pissed about it.) Surprise, surprise, I dropped out of grad school a day before my first presentation (on societal causes of extreme suffering and distress; how ironically fitting).

Constantly striving for perfection affected every aspect of my life. Like a tea kettle, I would let the steam simmer, bubble up, and burst open with a hasty cry until I was so dry, I could then just give up and move on. That is, until my perfectionism invaded one of the most intimate and essential areas of my life: eating. When the pressure became too heavy, I could give up dance, I could stop singing, and I could drop out of school, but I
Couldn’t as easily escape eating. “Easily” is the key word.

My quest for diet perfection started out with innocent intentions. To be quite honest, I didn’t care about my weight, my love handles, or the size of my ass. Oh, and I most certainly did not think about how I could achieve the perfect thigh gap, which apparently some folks on Instagram are obsessed with. Rather, after some uncomfortable digestive issues, I just wanted to feel better (the bait of the entire clean-eating movement). After visiting a naturopathic doctor in my impressionable late-teen years, I was diagnosed with some sort of mysterious sugar intolerance. My treatment? A full “detox” to completely eliminate all sugars from my diet.

My diet went from a well-balanced selection of colourful salads, turkey burgers, and chocolate chip cookies to fitness-model clean—a sad melange of baked chicken breasts, hardboiled egg whites, massive green salads, and mountains of steamed veggies. What started as an attempt to kick a sugar habit turned into a full-blown, irrational fear of “unclean” foods. In my quest to feel Gwyneth Paltrow fabulous, to achieve that halo of health, I sacrificed friendships, hobbies, laughter, life, and, oh, about fifty pounds from my already svelte frame. If glowing meant looking like a sunken ghost, then yes, I had that down.

Although it is still not defined as an “official” eating disorder, we now know my condition as orthorexia, a disordered eating pattern characterized by an unfounded fear of eating something deemed “unhealthy” that occurs as often in men as it does in women. Orthorexia was a natural place for me to park my perfectionist tendencies. Eating clean was a way for me to control my surroundings and ensure a pristine, perfect life, free of disease and discomfort. The reality was, I was the farthest that I’d ever been from comfort and control.

When I “cleaned” up my diet from the perceived “toxins” in my life, my goal was never to lose weight. As with most victims of orthorexia, weight loss was the pretty little package neatly gift wrapped and delivered to me with a bow. Diet culture frames it this way so we don’t give it back or re-gift it to someone else. Soon, I was being praised for my malnourished body and for my “dedication” to clean eating. At the same time, I was growing increasingly bored eating fat-free chicken and steamed broccoli day after day. The pleasure in food was quickly wilting like a bag of baby spinach in a hot pan as I began to eat merely (barely) to survive. And if you thought turkey breast without gravy was bad enough, it was just the beginning. I was steadily shrinking, taking up less space, silencing my voice and confidence—the quiet manifesto of the diet industry itself.

Apparently, there’s a wafer-thin line between being too fat and too skinny, and while it’s well documented that bigger people endure a world of social stigma, it can be similarly lonely at the other end of the scale. I quickly fell into a vicious anti-social cycle. My fear of food and my self-consciousness over my disappearing body prevented me from wanting to go out with friends, but not being social only perpetuated my disordered eating and depressive thoughts. I needed an intervention, but one that could only come from me. That was the birth of my blog.

When I was still in university, one of my classmates suggested that I start my own blog to share my kitchen adventures. Being an overachiever, I blindly accepted the challenge, only to go home and Google “how to blog.” But thanks to the powers of the interwebs (and a few Wordpress for dummies tutorials), on that day Abbey’s Kitchen was born. Slowly, as my following grew, I began to get invitations to food launches and restaurant openings. Getting noticed was exciting . . . until I realized that I was terrified of leaving my safe, detoxed kitchen and being pitched right into a deep-fried bowl of sin. Restaurants aren’t exactly known for their “clean” eats.

That’s when it hit me. I had a choice: give up on the blog or let go of that tight-fisted grasp I had with food. Trusting that my body was smarter than the “rules” I had arbitrarily set, and that if I could just listen to what it was quite literally screaming at me, meant that I could find health and happiness. I closed my eyes and I chose to jump. I leaped out of my prison and into the comforting arms of a thin-crust pizza that reignited my love affair with food. And the romance hasn’t died.