I've finally realised why diets are 💩
I thought I was failing to change my butt. Turns out, I was fighting to reprogramme my brain.
Happy new year, and thank you for being here! Your support for The Flock is so appreciated, and I can’t wait to step things up a gear in 2023 - so if you know someone who’d enjoy this newsletter, I’d be so grateful if you could send them this way!
It’s been 24 years since I first went on a diet, almost to the day.
It was January, I was 16, I’d been told (brutally) at a dance school audition that I had “a nice figure for a normal girl, not a dancer” and I decided to do something about it. By the time I was 17, I had a dancer’s body. Success! Sure, some days I ingested more laxatives than carbs, but I won a scholarship to ballet school so it was all worth it, right?
I’m a lot older and I hope a lot wiser now. Yet it is only now that I’m realising how much of my adult life I’ve spent hardwired to believe the lessons of that year – not just that weight loss is good, but that it can be achieved by anyone with enough willpower. That the ‘right’ figure is one that comes from deprivation and self-sacrifice.
And while it’s deeply unfashionable to admit it these days, every year, come January, I was ready to commit to that sacrifice again, convinced this would be the year I’d crack the cheat code. Now, having lost 14kg in three months using what arguably is a cheat code – albeit a controversial one – I’m calling bullshit.