Jennifer Aniston tells InStyle that it took “years of peeling back the onion to finally stop using makeup as a mask and feel comfortable in my own skin.” (Via PopSugar.)

Of course she also makes the requisite Pretty Celebrity reference to her “dumpy teenage” self. By golly, Americans love an Ugly Duckling-Turned-Swan story. But I’m stuck on the creepy yet accurate onion metaphor. It reminds me of cleansing clients during facials at Beauty U. Whenever someone came in with a full face of makeup on, the process did feel rather onion-like. And the face that was revealed once I swirled, swirled, swirled with my finger tips and cotton burgers didn’t always bear much resemblance to the face they walked in with. Sometimes they really did look older or less attractive without that mask. Sometimes they just looked… clean.

Still, I’m always a bit pleased when a Pretty Celebrity admits that she too, has struggled  to accept herself without the mask. And not in a “she’s just like US!” way. I think it’s for the same reason I wanted Tina Fey to be more honest about Photoshop (and I’m so pleased when magazines get Photoshop so very wrong): Jen is letting us see how the sausage is made and that reminds us that it is, in fact, sausage (with onions — oh dear, these food metaphors are getting away from me…).

Because these women have to encounter the masked version of themselves on every newsstand and TV channel. It’s got to be way harder to like what you see in the mirror when you first wake up in the morning when you’re constantly inundated with images of your perfected self.

In contrast, I may never achieve Jennifer Aniston levels of perfection (assuming we subscribe solely to the Hollywood Beauty Standard and don’t work on broadening that definition to include a whole spectrum of ideas about beauty, in which case, Jen and I are both hawt). But the difference between me first thing in the morning and me after I’ve put some effort in isn’t nearly so stark. (Mostly, it’s hair-related.) And that’s pretty freeing: Those of us who don’t need to fulfill the beauty ideal in order to keep our jobs also don’t need to work nearly as hard as Jen and friends to achieve and maintain that ideal. I think maybe that makes it easier to feel comfortable in your own skin — because you get to wear your own skin all day long, while they have to constantly change their skin. To please us.

Thoughts?

PS. The migration from old blog to new blog is complete — I’m hoping y’all have come along for the ride, but please do leave a comment or shoot me an email if you’re having any trouble with your email or RSS feed subscriptions. (And if you have any questions or feedback about the new site, I’d love to hear that too!) 

PPS. Oh and don’t forget to like the new page on Facebook! Okay, now go about your day.

[Image: "Jennifer Aniston - Original Acrylic Painting" because when you're this pretty, random people will paint you. And put a price on you. In this case $150,000. Or, $60 for a print. Wow. By Artist Jon Mick.]

Congratulations — if you’re reading this post, it means you’ve successfully found your way to my new and improved blog on my new and improved website.

In case you missed the news on the old blog, here’s the deal. For the past few years, I’ve maintained a professional portfolio site at a whole other domain. This made sense when I first started beauty school and had to keep a low profile. But it stopped making sense awhile back and so I’ve finally rectified the matter, bringing blog and portfolio together at last.

Or rather, Liz and Jeff, the geniuses at Super Runaway have rectified the matter and I can’t say enough good things about them. (They also designed my best friend Amy’s website, and we joke that we maybe have a collective crush on them. If you need web folk, hire them. Stat.)

So. Click around and check out the new, improved virginiasolesmith.com right now. 

And here’s one big change you might notice: Beauty Schooled — as in, the complete chronicles of my time in beauty school — is archived as a special project. So is Never Say Diet. You can still read every word of every one of those posts if your little heart desires, but those adventures are officially complete. (See where it says SPECIAL PROJECTS up in the top right corner? Click and this will all make sense.)

Here’s the other big change: As of Monday, January 30, my old blog at beautyschooledproject.com — where I wrote about beauty, body image and other women’s issues — will become this new blog that you’re reading right now on this here new site, where I’ll be writing about beauty, body image and other women’s issues. In other words, nothing will change beyond the URL. But as I said in this post, 2012 is the year for new adventures. So I do hope you’ll subscribe via email or RSS feed (or update your old subscriptions*) and come along for the ride.

xo

*Some helpful fine print:

RSS Subscribers: We think your feeds will automatically update, but please do double-check and resubscribe here (or by clicking the link in the righthand column) if you don’t see any new posts from me next week —I’d hate to lose you!

Email Subscribers: Your subscriptions will not transfer, so you’ll need to resubscribe to the new feed. As always, rest assured that I’ll never do anything unseemly with your email address.

WordPress Followers: Alas. I’m going where you can’t follow (to wordpress.org). So please consider swapping over to an RSS or email subscription — or just bookmarking this site!

Facebook: I’ll be retiring the Beauty Schooled Facebook Page and switching to a Virginia Sole-Smith Facebook Page, so I’d be extra delighted if you’d head over and like that. 

I know, right?!

Here’s the deal. For the past few years, I’ve maintained a professional portfolio site at a whole other domain. This made sense when I first started beauty school and had to keep a low profile. But it stopped making sense awhile back and so I’ve finally rectified the matter, bringing blog and portfolio together at last.

Or rather, Liz and Jeff, the geniuses at Super Runaway have rectified the matter and I can’t say enough good things about them. (They also designed my best friend Amy’s website, and we joke that we maybe have a collective crush on them. If you need web folk, hire them. Stat.)

So. You can go check out the new, improved virginiasolesmith.com right now. 

UPDATE: If you’ve been to the old virginiasolesmith.com recently, you may need to clear the cache on your Internet browser to see the new site. Good luck with that!

And here’s one big change you might notice: Beauty Schooled — as in, the complete chronicles of my time in beauty school — is archived as a special project. So is Never Say Diet. You can still read every word of every one of those posts if your little heart desires, but those adventures are officially complete.

Here’s the other big change: As of Monday, this here blog that you’re reading right now — where I write about beauty, body image and other women’s issues — will become this new blog on the new site, where I write about beauty, body image and other women’s issues. In other words, nothing will change beyond the URL. But as I said in this post, 2012 is the year for new adventures. So I do hope you’ll subscribe via email or RSS feed (or update your old subscriptions*) and come along for the ride.

xo

*Some helpful fine print:

RSS Subscribers: We think your feeds will automatically update, but please do double-check and resubscribe if you don’t see any new posts from me next week —I’d hate to lose you!

Email Subscribers: Your subscriptions will not transfer, so you’ll need to resubscribe to the new feed. As always, rest assured that I’ll never do anything unseemly with your email address.

WordPress Followers: Alas. I’m going where you can’t follow (to wordpress.org — hooray, no ads!). So please consider swapping over to an RSS or email subscription — or just bookmarking this site!

Facebook: I’ll be retiring the Beauty Schooled Facebook Page and switching to a Virginia Sole-Smith Facebook Page, so I’d be extra delighted if you’d head over and like that. 

If you have any questions or concerns about your subscription or just general feedback about the new site, feel free to leave a comment or email me: virginiasolesmith [at] gmail [dot] com.

I’ve been delightfully inundated with your sweet comments and emails this week, in response to Tuesday’s post about my body not liking me right now. I won’t lie — I was nervous to press publish on that post. Migraines and cysts are the kind of “female complaints” that carry no small amount of crazy girl stigma, and I worried I’d come off as unwrapped, self-indulgent or just… weak.

But you guys reminded me that we don’t fight stigma by succumbing to it. And hearing from those of you who have dealt with this same kind of nonsense reminded me that I’m not alone — which is a cliche, but also, everything.  Apologies to anyone I haven’t yet responded to directly. Please know that I’ve read what you wrote and am so thankful for it.

And also: Please know that I am okay. At least, it’s been five days now since a migraine or a Horace flare-up. We’ll take it!

I’m not out of the woods — yesterday, my doctor and I made the tough decision to cancel a trip to visit family in the UK, which I was supposed to take next week, because we have every reason to expect Horace back for the kind of party then that would make air travel completely miserable. (You’re welcome, everyone who would have been my fellow passengers on that American Airlines flight.) This is the first time these problems have caused me to completely miss out on Something Big, and it sucks. But there has been at least one potentially positive development on the health front and I’ll be writing more about that when it seems appropriate. Without turning this into a sad sack sick girl blog, I promise.

In cheerier news, we’re going to be getting back to regularly scheduled programming around here as much as the above circumstances allow. And be sure to check back here later today — my website redesign is thisclosetodone and I’ll be unveiling the goods.

xo

Not in a life-threatening way. Or a crazy way. But rather, in a way that makes it hard to even type “I’m sick,” because I definitely don’t identify with those words. I don’t have cancer. I’m not dying. I’m tremendously fortunate to pass with flying colors on all of the physical markers of health that they check at your annual physical (blood pressure, cholesterol, reflexes, what have you). And I spend so much of my time behaving very much like a not-at-all-sick person.

But I have two chronic medical conditions — migraines and ovarian cysts — which are what doctors call “benign,” because they don’t kill you, they just beat you up so much that sometimes, you kinda wish they would.

Since I woke up today pain-free for the first time in six days, and this is a victory, I decided it was high time for me to write about what’s been going on. Because the fact is, being sick like this profoundly impacts how you feel about your body. And that seems like something we should be talking about more, but just aren’t.  

The main reason we aren’t is because this sh*t is personal. Despite the fact that I’ve told you my weight, shown you my house, and disclosed all sorts of random facts about my wedding, I have an aversion to the kind of blogs that depend on oversharing every dirty detail. (Exhibit A: the Dooce Divorce Debate.) It’s a bit hypocrtical, because I also get hopelessly addicted to these blogs — I connect with the bloggers, start to incorporate their updates into your daily life, and sometimes, they’re like a train wreck, and I Can’t. Not. Watch — but I’ve never wanted to be one. There are just some boundaries that I want to keep firmly in place.

But I don’t think we can get into this without a little context, so here goes: For the past 18 months, I’ve spent the better part of every weekend, and a goodly number of week days, with a migraine.

For the uninitiated, a migraine is not a headache. It’s a neurological disease where pain receptors in your brain are hyper-sensitive and sound blaring alarms all over your body. So yes, I have a headache, if that’s what you want to call the ice axes hacking their way into my skull, but I also have throbbing pain in my neck and back, plus a bunch of sexy accompanying symptoms like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. Oh and this weird sensation of feeling like I’ve been shoved underwater. It’s a full body experience.

That’s where the body image stuff starts to trickle in. I write all this stuff about being nice to your body, but behind the scenes? I’m pretty mad at my body a lot of the time for making me be in pain this often. Which gets tricky. Proper migraine management centers on being nice to yourself — you have to get plenty of sleep, drink lots of water, be careful around alcohol, and exercise, but not too hard. You can’t work insane hours or live on chocolate chips and Diet Coke, like I might have done on deadlines during more carefree days. But even when I’m doing everything “right,” it’s no guarantee that I’ll escape that week’s migraine. Stress, weather conditions, and hormone fluctuations beyond my control can trigger an attack.

Plus, when you’re sick, “be nice to your body” takes on a different meaning. It’s more about lying around with your head packed in ice, watching Gilmore Girl reruns and eating whatever you can keep down — saltines, pasta, chocolate chip cookies. (Why do I never puke up chocolate chip cookies? Because they are our most perfect food, obvs.)

This was fine back when my migraines hit only once a month or every few months, which is how they behaved most of the time from age 18 to 29, give or take a few spikes. But then right around the time I finished beauty school, they spiked up to once or twice a week. And stayed up.

Suddenly I was spending a lot more time in migraine “be nice to my body” mode versus every day “be nice” mode. That leads to being-nice hangovers, where I feel bad about days spent in refined carbohydrate slothdom. Yes, it’s what I need to get through the migraine hell, but I don’t necessarily like how it makes my body look later on.

And yes, I’ve tried insert-whatever-you’re-going-to-suggest-here. Drugs, physical therapy, a chiropractor, more drugs, acupuncture, talk therapy, more drugs, you get the idea. After eight months, out of desperation, I did one of those dreaded elimination diets in March 2011 — and I didn’t tell you guys about it. Partly because of the above-mentioned boundaries thing, but also because doing an elimination diet for health reasons feels an awful lot like doing a regular ole crash diet, and frankly, I was embarrassed. I had just started the Never Say Diet gig… and I was sorta on a diet. Also, it sucked to go to a friend’s engagement party and have to explain that I’m really not pregnant, I just can’t drink (or eat this ridiculously long list of yummy foods, all of which are being served).

But I did it. And at first, it seemed like we were getting somewhere because the elimination diet pinpointed red wine as a definite culprit, with bacon and aspartame as runner-ups. I had a blissful six weeks of being totally migraine-free — and then, while out to dinner with friends one night in April 2011, felt a sudden, stabbing pain in my pelvis that made every migraine look like a hug and a hot bath.

That turned out to be a cyst next to my left ovary, rupturing with all its might. I won’t bore you with a long explanation of cysts, mostly because I’m still learning about them myself (versus migraines, which I’ve been researching out of necessity for over a decade). If you’re curious, there is some good info here. Because most women of reproductive age have cysts and most are teensy and don’t cause any trouble, my gynecologist hoped that the April rupture was just a fluke. Instead, it was followed by two more flukes. So she put me on the Pill.

Bam, no more cysts… welcome back, migraines. Plus bad skin and weight gain. And feeling bad about my body (plus feeling bad for feeling bad because hello, high-class problems!) ratcheted up another notch.

I stopped the Pill after six months because my neurologist was convinced it was the culprit behind my now-back-to-once-a-week migraines and my gynecologist thought maybe I’d be over the cyst situation after six months of suppressed ovary action. Twist! I started getting twice as many migraines and I developed a new cyst during my first period off the Pill. And instead of rupturing, this guy — I’ve named him Horace — is hanging out. Horace is roughly seven centimeters in diameter and leaking blood all around my reproductive organs. He flares up whenever I have a migraine. So, often. And then he settles in to party every day for a solid two weeks around my period. And then again for several days when I ovulate.

Add it all up, and I’ve spent 29 of the past 54 days sick.

And this is where the body image stuff gets super nuts. As Joshilyn Jackson wrote in her Open Letter to the Fat Girl in Hot Yoga, “I AM VERY ANGRY WITH [my body] for being sick, for getting fat, for not doing what I SAY. But I am nice to it anyway, three times a week, at Hot Yoga.”

When I was just dealing with migraines, yoga was my lifeline. It made me be grateful for all the cool things my body can do (backbends! headstands!) instead of obsessing over how it looks. This helped with all the days where my body couldn’t do a damn thing and looked like crap because migraines and hygiene don’t tend to go hand in hand. Plus my neurologist was all for it, what with yoga being great for de-stressing and stress being one of those nebulous migraine X factors that f*ck up any decent treatment plan. And certain yoga poses even help ease migraine symptoms. As long as you combine with them tasty painkillers.

But Horace and yoga do not mix. Engaging your mula bhanda, twisting into pretzel-y poses, working your lower ab muscles? All off the table when one of your ovaries is trying to claw its way out of your body. A simple prayer twist can make Horace mad. My teachers are lovely about modifying poses for me and encouraging me to go at my own pace, but there have been whole weeks lately where I can’t even make it in to class.

This adds yoga to a whole long list of beloved activities — parties, hikes, visits with friends, house projects, regularly scheduled blogging (ahem) — that I have had to start bailing on. To be clear, I fight this tooth and nail. I’ve taken Horace plus a migraine to Christmas Eve, to a friend’s wedding, to help my parents’ move. Having to cancel plans makes me feel pathetic and old before my time.

Because I’m young and I have sh*t to do. I should be out conquering the world.

Instead, while my husband goes rock climbing and my girlfriends make babies, I curl up with the cats and fire up another episode of the Big Bang Theory. Sometimes I go for a gentle walk, which makes me feel even older and more pathetic. (Not to knock walking — it’s great. I’m just used to being able to do so much more.) Last Sunday, the best I did was to stand on the back porch for five minutes to watch the cat dive around in the snow. And when I do go to yoga, I want to be happy and grateful for every not-sick day, but it’s hard not to focus on how I’m losing my strength and flexibility because I’m not practicing as often.

And then there’s the weight thing. As y’all know, I’m not a fan of frequent weigh-ins. But my body changes so dramatically when Horace gets frisky that I had to start collecting some data, to keep it in perspective. So I can tell you with authority that I gain about six pounds every time he freaks out. Even last weekend, when I spent the wee hours of Sunday morning throwing up violently while watching infomercials until I passed out next to a spaghetti pot full of my vomit, I still weighed three pounds more on Sunday afternoon than I did on Saturday morning.

And while I know that weight isn’t my main barometer of health, in my case, it is  a symptom in the bigger “what’s wrong with this picture?” Which makes it tricky to tease apart the Beauty Myth and the health thing — it feels like I’m failing on both fronts. I suppose you might say it’s shallow to obsess over how faux-pregnant I look (answer: tremendously!) when I should be worrying about how to get my health back. To that I say: You can suck it. Being sick doesn’t erase my complicated relationship with beauty and wanting to be pretty isn’t some healthy-people-only privilege.

But also: The irony isn’t lost on me that my biggest body hang-up (mid-section) is the site of so much physical pain. Armchair psychologists, go!

Now I want to bring this around to some kind of hopeful conclusion, but the truth is, I’m still too in the trenches with this whole mess to be entirely hopeful. There are new treatments and new doctors who may be able to help, but it’s going to be a long process. Neither of these conditions has a magic bullet cure. But I will say this: If my biggest downfall in dealing with this stuff has been that my gut instinct is to push through, propped up on painkillers, I am slowly coming around to understanding that I can’t do this all the time. I have to do less when I’m sick and give myself permission to curl up with the cats, watch television, and eat cookies when that’s what I need to do — even when it means disappointing someone I love. Especially when that someone is myself.

So I’m doing less. I’m being nice to myself in the sick sense as well as the everyday sense. I’m working on liking just walking.

But I’m also kind of proud that it is so hard for me to write this post, to miss yoga, to bail on my life. Because that reminds me how much I love my life — and that includes loving my body, flawed and infuriating as it may be. It’s my body and it can do backbends and headstands.

And I’m not giving up on it without a fight.

I know Bossypants is kinda 2011, but 30 Rock is back with new episodes (thank God — does anyone else start to despair and watch The Big Bang Theory reruns on TBS ad nauseam during the dark days of December? Just me?), and so my friend Kate and I started discussing this Tina Fey question via email the other day. So, seeing as I’m tres busy making my new website all pretty for you, I thought I’d reprise that email into a blog post and… go!

Kate: I just finished reading Tina Fey’s book, Bossypants, which is great and funny and I really enjoyed it… although I found her bit on Photoshop to be somewhat curious.  It also made me wonder if one’s relationship with or ideas about Photoshop in magazines changes if you’re actually, you know, in magazines on a regular basis.  I would probably obsess over how I look in those photos, too.  But anyway, I’d flagged some pages to show you and then while bored at work the other night I typed up some passages, as I’m curious to hear what you think. 

 You can barely recognize yourself with the amount of digital correction.  They’ve taken out your knuckles and given you baby hands.  The muscular calves that you’re generally very proud of are slimmed to the bone.  And what’s with the eyes?  They always get it wrong in the eyes.  In an effort to remove dark circles they take out any depth, and your face looks like it was drawn on a paper plate.  You looked forward to them taking out your chicken pox scars and broken blood vessels, but how do you feel when they erase part of you that is perfectly good?(pp. 156-57)

 I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion.  It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society…unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool. (p. 157)

 Aaaand then…

 Do I worry about overly retouched photos giving women unrealistic expectations and body image issues?  I do.  I think that we will soon see a rise in anorexia in women over seventy. Because only people over seventy are fooled by Photoshop…. People have learned how to spot it… As long as we all know it’s fake, it’s no more dangerous to society than a radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. (pp. 157-58) 

 If you’re going to expend energy being mad about Photoshop, you’ll also have to be mad about earrings.  No one’s ears are that sparkly!  They shouldn’t have to be!  You’ll have to get mad about oil paintings – those people don’t really look like that!  I for one am furious that people are allowed to turn sideways in photographs!  Why can’t we accept a woman’s full width?!  I won’t rest until people are only allowed to be photographed facing front under a fluorescent light. (p. 158)

 And there’s this whole section on feminism + Photoshop:

 Some people say it’s a feminist issue.  I agree, because the best Photoshop job I ever got was for a feminist magazine called Bust in 2004. (p. 159)I looked at the two paltry lights they had set up [for the photo shoot] and turned to the editors.  ’We’re all feminists here, but you’re gonna use Photoshop, right?’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ they replied instantly.  Feminists do the best Photoshop because they leave the meat on your bones.  They don’t change your size or your skin color.  They leave in your disgusting knuckles, but they may take out some armpit stubble.  Not because they’re denying its existence, but because they understand that it’s okay to make a photo look as if you were caught on your best day in the best light. (p. 160) 

What has been fun: Looking back over 2011 to pick my 12 nominees for the Diet Hall of Shame over on Never Say Diet. (This post obviously went live on New Year’s Eve — sorry that I’m just now telling you about it! Let’s put prompter posting on my resolution list, shall we?) Oh, Beef Fat Lady, AskMen.com A**holes, and Kelly Osbourne… what a weird and wacky year it was.

And I’m so grateful to Angela, Dina and all the other folks over at iVillage who gave me the opportunity to write the Never Say Diet blog and get up to my eyeballs in all of this body image business. I thought ten months in beauty school taught me a lot about how women relate to beauty — but ten months of blogging about diet scams, obesity research, and celebrity silliness was an education in its own right.

Nevertheless, I’ve decided that 2012 needs to be open to new adventures — so this is actually my last post as the official iVillage Body Image Expert/Never Say Diet blogger. But don’t fret — I’m still an unofficial body image expert (that’s a real thing, right?*) and for sure, I’ll still be blogging right here, all the time. In fact, I’ve got a fancy schmancy website redesign in the works that I’ll be rolling out in the pretty soon future, at which point I expect your socks to be metaphorically off.

In the meantime, please bear with me as some of my blogging energy goes into working on that vs. publishing posts — but expect a more regular and entirely-this-blog-focused posting schedule to resume shortly.

Oh and Happy New Year! (I know, I know, so last week.)

*I’m also an unofficial expert on chocolate gelato, shoes, and why Veronica Mars should not have been cancelled after just three seasons. In case those are issues that come up for you a lot.

The main thesis behind Why Women Need Fat (out this month from William Lassek, MD and Steven Gaulin, PhD of the University of Pittsburgh) is super fascinating and builds nicely on the Fat Trap business we were talking about yesterday: Your body fights weight loss tooth and nail because evolution has found fat to be quite handy in a survival of the species sort of way. So I went ahead and blogged about all of that on Never Say Diet.

But, full disclosure: I haven’t read the book yet. I’m still waiting to get a copy into my hot little hands, so I had to restrict my analysis to the unfortunate, red flag-waving subtitle (How “Healthy” Food Makes Us Gain Weight and the Surprising Solution to Losing It Forever — oh boy!) and, more encouragingly, the way Dr. Gaulin describes their research in this Salon.com interview.

So I’ll be back with a more in-depth post about the book itself once I, you know, read it. Ahem. Yes, tireless and thorough reporting is what you can expect around here.

In the meantime, let me clarify that I’m not blaming Gaulin or Lassek for the subtitle. My guess is that was the publisher’s doing, as part of their “now this is how you sell a book about evolutionary biology!” strategy. They’re probably not altogether wrong either. But it does put the researchers between a bit of a rock and a hard place because they are simultaneously trying to explain why we’re probably all supposed to be a bit fatter than the Beauty Trap (and the diet industry) allows — and yet also, that we’d all weigh less than we currently do if our diet wasn’t so heavy in highly processed omega-6 fatty acids or “bad fats.” (There’s another red flag.)

Depressingly, I guess that sounds about right: We chase an unrealistic standard of thinness (that has nothing to do with health) while ignoring the kind of basic healthy lifestyle choices that might result in a more attainable version of thinness — because we’d just reject that as not good enough. (Caveat: It also might not result in us getting any thinner and some of us would even gain weight — the link between lifestyle and weight being so much murkier and potentially less causal than we’ve been led to believe.)

This dichotomy is perhaps better illustrated by the “Your Natural Weight” chart on their website. At first I was annoyed, because the chart says, as a woman over 30 (I mean, by a hair, but anyway!) who weighs 157 pounds or thereabouts, my “natural weight” is really 20 pounds less. How is this any better than using the Body Mass Index scale? I thought. (In the Salon piece, Dr. Gaulin gives an excellent explanation of why BMI is a total fallacy, at least when it comes to women’s health.)

Well, Dr. Gaulin defines your “natural weight” as “how much you would have weighed if you had not experienced” the process-izing and Super-sizing of the American diet, which began 40 years ago. Except: Ever since leaving my Beauty U McDonald’s habit behind 18 months ago, I don’t eat the typical American omega-6-laden diet. And the only time in my adult life I have sustained my so-called “natural weight” of 137 (20 pounds less than where I am now) was for about five minutes during the year I ran two half-marathons. There were a lot of pros about that experience (stronger lungs! awesome endorphin rushes!) but it also resulted in a stress fracture and some fairly disordered body-related feelings. To say nothing of: 40 years ago, Americans did not spend all of their free time training to run long distances. Jogging was barely even a sport. If that’s what it takes to get to my “natural weight,” I’m not sure how “natural” that weight can really be.

So the “natural weight” concept has a few problems — namely, that it’s incredibly problematic to use weight as your main barometer of health, as we discussed yesterday. (The “natural weight” chart doesn’t factor in your gender, height, activity level, or any physical markers of health like blood pressure and cholesterol.) For all of the biological reasons discussed in the Fat Trap story, it’s entirely possible that my “natural weight” at this age/stage of my life is somewhere in the 150s, not the 130s, despite my willingness to generally avoid omega-6 fatty acids because they aren’t so good for my heart. Again, once I read the book, I’ll let you know if any of these questions are resolved. I will say one point in Gaulin & Lassek’s favor: I did gain 20 pounds when I adopted the more processed, fat-heavy diet in beauty school. So it’s also possible that my weight is still settling back down to “natural” on a healthier diet. Research published in The Lancet last year showed that when weight loss does work at all, it takes for-freaking-ever – think three years to lose 25 pounds.

But enough about my weight, because that’s so not the point here. When I looked back at the chart, I realized something kinda cool: It covers a big range of weights from “less than 130″ to “250+” but suggests a much smaller range of weight loss. Someone weighing less than 130 needs to lose only 10 pounds to reach their so-called “natural weight” (I know, I know, does someone weighing less than 130 pounds ever need to lose weight? Unless she’s shooting a Vogue cover, probably not), while someone weighing 250+ needs to lose only 40 pounds. The goal is not to make everyone weigh a uniform 120 pounds, no matter what. 

So at the very least, I like that Why Women Need Fat explains why women do, in fact, need fat — and that it seems to subscribe to the idea that human beings come in a naturally occurring range of sizes, and that however unhealthy our processed diet may be, the solution is not to drop drastic amounts of weight to correct for that. In my perfect world, the solution would be to incorporate more healthy foods into your life and let the weight shake out where it may. There’s still that troubling subtitle to contend with, so I’m guessing that’s not quite where Gaulin and Lassek land… but a girl can dream!

Apologies to the friends who were sharing the New York Times around my breakfast table over the weekend and thus, have already heard all of my rantings on the subject of Tara Parker-Pope’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “The Fat Trap.”

But for those of you who missed that diatribe — or perhaps, just want to digest the more articulate I’ve-had-my-coffee-now version — here’s my Never Say Diet take on the weird left turn she makes in that piece. Which is mostly, so excellent. I just read her “Behind The Cover Story” Q&A with the Times‘ 6th Floor Blog and it makes me like the first three-quarters of the article all the more. It’s the first time I can recall a major media outlet taking on a story like this. And we really do need to be talking about all of the research that shows, over and over, why permanent weight loss is such a moving target for most people: Because “a number of biological factors that have nothing to do with character or willpower can make it extraordinarily difficult,” as Parker-Pope explains.

Where Parker-Pope and I part ways is in what we want to do with this information. She views obesity “as a medical condition” and thinks the kind of all-consuming, food gram-counting measures adopted by the people she profiles are inspiring, if exhausting, preventive health strategies. So she wants to use this new scientific understanding of why weight loss attempts almost always fail… to keep on trying to lose weight. Even though it will be really difficult and ineffective for the majority of people.

In contrast, I think* the jury is still out on whether obesity itself is a medical issue (at least 20 percent of obese people have no health issues at all, and there are studies show that overweight women actually live longer than normal or underweight women) or whether it tends simply to correlate with lifestyle habits that are bad for our health in other ways. And since we don’t know for sure, but we do know for sure that diets don’t work and the war on obesity has mostly just led to a war on obese people, why don’t we stop chasing the weight loss dragon once and for all, and instead focus on the specific lifestyle habits that definitely do impact our health’s bottom line?

To be clear: I don’t mean this in that “it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change” bullsh*t way that the diet industry uses when they want to sell a healthy-sounding diet. I mean actually ditching weight as a health marker (since we’re not sure how much it can tell us) and just focusing on the lifestyle changes. Eating well. Moving more. Sleeping plenty. Managing stress. Not smoking. But not worrying about whether any of that causes you to lose weight. Just paying attention to how it improves your mood and energy level, and decreases your blood pressure, cholesterol, and other physical markers of health.

The biggest hurdle with my plan is that the Beauty Myth is so inextricably linked to our current definition of health that a lot of us have what feels like an almost primal, knee-jerk reaction to the idea that we just forget about weight loss. That wouldn’t just be a health decision for most of the population. It would also mean divorcing ourselves from a very pervasive beauty standard that has so successfully wormed its way into our brain because we’re convinced that it isn’t a beauty standard at all. “I’m not trying to be a size two, I just want to be healthy,” is the line that a lot of women give when they tell me about their diets. What we mean is: “I know I can’t be a Victoria’s Secret Angel without a full body transplant — but I will feel prettier if I can get into my old jeans.” We give a lot of lip service to health. But when you’re having a mean reds moment in front of the mirror or vowing to never eat another carbohydrate — those really dark, hot-angry-tears moments that inspire the diet in the first place – health is not what you’re thinking about. Pretty is. And it’s powerful stuff.

So my biggest criticism of Parker-Pope’s article is that she failed to take this secret Beauty Trap into account when she exposed the Fat Trap — even though she acknowledged, “nobody wants to be fat [...] to be fat is to be perceived as weak-willed and lazy. It’s also just embarrassing.” Right. So we need to work on fighting that stigma both by broadening our definition of beauty and by rethinking our criteria for health. Because I’d like to say we could take weight out of the health conversation but still occasionally want to lose ten pounds for bikini season, just because it makes us happy — as you might recall, I made the conscious decision to diet purely for aesthetic reasons last January — and maybe we can. I absolutely do support every person’s right to pick and choose what beauty means to them. And as Ragen is always reminding me, we must respect other people’s right to make different choices with their health and their appearance if we want our own choices respected.

But until we unravel this weird health-beauty connection, and can be sure that our choices aren’t going to fuel further size discrimination, I think we need to tread carefully here.

Thoughts? Anyone else need to rant about the Parker-Pope piece? Do you think it’s remotely feasible to take weight out of our conversations about health and/or beauty — and should that even be the goal? 

*PS. I’m not the only one, of course. L. V. Anderson on Slate’s XXFactor blog is speaking my language, and my girl Ragen on Dances With Fat has a fantastic breakdown of Parker-Pope’s piece that explores all of this in almost paragraph-by-paragraph detail. And of course, all of what we’re all saying originates with the Health At Every Size movement, founded by Linda Bacon, PhD. 

[Photo: "Human Trap" by Memkaos.]

I actually wrote this Never Say Diet post back before Thanksgiving, but I somehow missed posting about it here (maybe this was why). (Un)Fortunately, it’s what we in the news biz call an “evergreen” because, well, mountains of holiday food + family members who press all of your body image buttons can = mayhem at Christmas or Chanukah just as easily as at Thanksgiving. I could probably also make a note to repost this at the 4th of July. See also: Arbor Day.

So I brainstormed some helpful responses to the variety of well-meaning (or, um… not so much) comments you might get about your weight/body/food choices/etc as you gather round the yule log this weekend. Oh, and since this post first went up, Ragen on Dances With Fat has written about avoiding holiday weight shame and wading through weight loss compliments, which are both fantastic reads if you’re anxious about facing either/or.

I mean, hopefully it won’t even be a thing. Your loved ones will gather, merrying will be made, and food will be enjoyed as the nourishing, community-building, comfort-providing, joyful experience that it should be.

But just in case, please remember: You look great. Your health is your business. And you can eat (or not eat) whatever you want. 

Wishing you all everything that’s merry and bright! xo

[Photo: Adorable and tasty chocolate-covered marshmallow reindeer -- with pretzel antlers, gah! -- via Pinterest, originally from here.]