Hi! We're in my kitchen!
Get comfortable.
We're in my kitchen because this is where I make food,
one of my favourite things in life.
But in the past, I've had sort of a complicated relationship with food.
When I was 17, I went on a diet,
it said no cheese, no bread, no ice cream!
Basically all my favourite unhealthy things were off limits.
I did it because I wanted to loose weight in time for summer
though I worked out a lot and my body does great working out.
It was really my relationship with food
and everything going on up here
that was not good.
I weighed myself every day,
obsessed over love handles and thigh gaps, and arm flaps...
I remember this one time when I went to my friends' house
and they wanted to order pizza
and I was like: "Yes!... Nooo!!"
And I ate it and I felt terrible
the next couple of days.
Dieting in the US is a big part of how we learn
to develop a relationship with food and with weight.
If you're talking about making healthier choices in your life
replacing butter with olive oil or avocado,
grilling instead of frying,
I'm not gonna call that a diet.
This is a lifestyle change.
When I say dieting, I'm referring to a temporary restriction
in what you eat, it can be very minimal restriction
or it can be very extreme,
driven by a toxic mentality.
The mentality I had where, if I loose weight,
I could finally love and accept myself
and wear a bikini.
But it's a lie!
Loving yourself as long as you look a certain way
isn't self-love, it's self-destruction.
Dieting for me was really a solution
to the problem of feeling terrible about myself.
And I didn't know that there were any alternatives to deal with it.
But there are!
For instance, if you're dieting to be skinnier,
maybe just... stop.
These types of restrictions on food can lower your metabolism,
they make you feel weak
because you're not getting all the nutrients that you need,
make you more susceptible to getting sick...
95% of diets just straight don't work, people gain all the weight back.
The perfect body that so many people are chasing after
is like 20% below the ideal healthy weight.
We're driven, we're driving.
And the gas in our tank is feeling that we are not good enough.
1 in 3 female students in this big survey in the UK
said that they would be willing to shave months or years off of their life
to have the perfect body.
Willing to die earlier...
Like: "Houston... We have a problem."
But the problem isn't you.
It's 1, the media, which is a huge source of our learning
about what's valuable, what's beautiful...
2, sexism: women are socialized
to constantly monitor their own bodies
and to make sure that they don't take up too much space.
3, our social environment,
our friends' and our parents' diet and body image issues
seep into our brain.
And 4, the ginormous scam that is the diet industry.
They actively work to make sure that, in people's minds,
weight loss is paired with things like:
"And now I can keep up with my kids, my job, the house..."
"More feminine, more sexy, more energetic, and happier!"
Becoming more beautiful, becoming more desirable,
a better girlfriend, a better person...
The diet industry collectively helps to create
a false need and insecurity
and then offers you a false cure
and makes 60 billion dollars a year doing it.
But here's the big fucking secret
that jeopardizes their entire existence:
you are good enough.
You...
are...
good enough.
The people's goodness, their value
does not come down to their weight.
You are a whole-ass human being
that is so much more than just a number.
And that this drive, this cultural obession with loosing weight
even though we say it's for health,
is indicative of a much broader sickness.
And what do you do when you're sick?
You take some medicine.
I'm talking about giving yourself the love that you deserve,
I'm talking about not shit-talking to yourself
and comparing yourself to other people.
I'm talking about choices that are actually healthy.
Not letting the world stop with some pizza.
Or bikinis.
I'm talking about the end of meticulous self-monitoring,
defining ourselves by our weight.
I'm talking about the end of dieting.
I'll see you guys next time.
Special thanks for transcript : despairia