“will you help me?”

i’m at a coffee shop in east nashville, surrounded by 3 distinct lil groups of people who all met here to discuss/organize solutions for community issues. i feel emotional thinking about the stark difference between the convos i’m overhearing here vs. back in new york. 

nyc = “let me tell you about this awesome thing i’m working on/building/thinking about. will you help me with my awesome thing?”

nashville = “let me tell you about this thing that’s wrong with our community/world. will you help me fix it?”

The act of restricting food and the constant hunger “made food the most important thing in one’s life,” said one of the participants. “Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.”

These experiences are familiar to those who’ve spent their lives dieting. In fact, many of the symptoms once thought to be primary features of anorexia nervosa are actually normal biological responses of undernutrition and restrictive eating….

It was actually Dr. Keys’ research that first evidenced the role of dieting in increasing risks for eating disorders. The extreme physical and mental effects Dr. Keys observed led to his famous quote: “Starved people cannot be taught democracy. To talk about the will of the people when you aren’t feeding them is perfect hogwash.”

This was also what led early feminist activists to see dieting and weight concerns as a way to keep women preoccupied with food, filled with guilt and self-hatred, more easily influenced by others, and too mentally and physically exhausted to succeed professionally and politically

some interesting ideas about our obsession with diet drawn from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment