Why thinner is not better

Then her doctor prescribed her antibiotics for a small infection she had. Suddenly she couldn’t keep anything down. He GI tract was giving out. The antibiotics had ravaged the bacteria in her gut and she couldn’t properly digest her food. It was scary for a moment and then she found a diet that made it possible for her to eat.

She was surviving on this diet, but she was far from thriving. She continued to work out and stay on her special diet for months. She knew rebuilding her gut health would be a lengthy process and she was very dedicated to it. Eating out wasn’t on the agenda anymore. Simple carbohydrates and even many complex ones weren’t on the menu. Everything had to be made from scratch. She started losing weight, but slowly, so that it wasn’t exactly noticeable at first.

And then one day she was getting into bed and I noticed the definition in her stomach. “My love, you have a six pack!” I was kind of stunned. I knew she had been working very hard at the gym but it’s such a rarity that you see abdominal muscles in women. They’re usually tucked away behind a nice layer of body fat.

Looking back now, I know I should have been alarmed right away. But the thing is, I have been so culturally conditioned to think that having rock hard abs and a skinny body are a good thing, it took me weeks to understand what this actually meant. She was starving. The diet wasn’t really working and her body was malnourished. There was nothing healthy about it. But everyone kept telling her how good she looked.

She was literally starving and got nothing but compliments on her looks! It started to affect her relationship with food in a scary way. She craved things she couldn't have and worried the compliments would stop if she gained weight. I realized that the reason we don’t see abs on most women is because we’re not meant to. Seeing every abdominal muscle behind our skin is not an ideal we should be striving for. We are healthier when we are fatter. That may be a controversial assertion. It’s certainly not a popular one. But I don’t care. There is science to back me up. After seeing my beautiful wife become a skeleton of her former self and fearing for her health every day for months, you can’t convince me otherwise.

These days our family uses the principles of intuitive eating to stay in good health. We eat what our bodies are craving when our bodies tell us it's time to eat and we stop when our bodies signal that we're full. We've learned, firsthand, the dangers of dieting and the trappings of diet culture. My wife is near the end of her treatment. She's slowly gaining back the weight she lost and fighting hard against the fallacious messages that have made so many people sick and depressed. I offer these counter messages in an effort to help cure our culture. I hope you'll share them. Your size does not determine your worth. Dieting is dangerous and ineffective. BMI is a meaningless and outdated measure. Skinny does not equal healthy and fat does not equal unhealthy- you can be healthy at any size. 

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