Just a little reminder… Dr. Gershon (a professor of cell biology and pathology at Columbia, who specializes in gut bacteria and the microbiome) told me this when I asked him to explain “detoxing” for the readers of SELF Magazine in 2015.

For that same article, I actually went on a detox diet… yes, me, Virginia Sole-Smith, full-time diet culture skeptic. And I went in assuming that this scientific understanding of how WE DON’T NEED TO DETOX would inoculate me against the crazy. Well… I walked out of the first consult feeling gross, unhealthy and full of sludge.

Not because they were right; but because diet culture lies are just that g-d powerful. They worm inside your head and find all your insecurities. They offer plausible-ish sounding explanations for everything that’s ever worried you about your body. They claim this will be so easy, but also that it’s the most important thing you could ever do. That if you can’t get it together to detox or “eat clean” that you’re a lazy slug. As opposed to, you know, a normal healthy person who likes bread.

Diet culture plays dirty. Your body is perfectly clean.

You can read more about the clean eating myth in Chapter 2 of The Eating Instinct. Read a free excerpt here.