I was a little awestruck by the response to my cellulite post last week. I knew cellulite was a bit of a hot-button issue, but didn’t anticipate the depth of people’s passion on the subject.

I received numerous comments here and on my facebook page that were some variation of the ‘cellulite is caused by toxins in processed food’ theme. The suggestion being that anyone who has cellulite is simply not eating ‘cleanly’ enough. For shame. Lets explore this, shall we?

Industrial food production really didn’t come into existence until the first half of the 20th century. Since then, it’s spread across the globe, but even today there are small pockets of humanity that still consume traditional diets. I’ve gathered some images of women, most of them historical, that indicate that cellulite existed before industrial food production.

These first few images are photographs, taken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, of women from various pre-industrial cultures. Not only do these images indicate that cellulite is normal, they indicate that women eating traditional diets and living traditional lifestyles had a wide variety of body types, dispelling the myth that pre- and non-industrial bodies were ubiquitously lean. None of these women were eating twinkies. You can click on each image to see the original source.

1938

Then there’s the Rubens women. Rubens produced his paintings in the 15th century, LONG before the advent of industrial food. The women he painted embodied the ideal of feminine beauty at the time, and they clearly have dimpled flesh indicative of normal cellulite:

The Jarawa are one of the last cultures left that have resisted contact with the outside world. They live on the Andaman Islands in Indonesia and still eat their traditional diet of seafood and fruit, supplemented with tubers and meat from the jungle they depend on for survival. You can see more amazing photos of Jarawa culture here:

So, who wants to tell me that the women in these images are just eating too much junk food and not exercising hard enough?

The women here represent a wide variety of healthy body types. Different shapes have adapted to meet the challenges of different environments, but there is no one ‘standard’ healthy ‘pre-industrial’ or paleolithic body type. Or one standard ‘healthy human diet’. The variety found in the human race is breathtaking, and stepping outside our preconceived notions of what is ‘healthy’ and ‘attractive’ opens up a world of richness and beauty.

I tend not to give very specific eating guidelines, mostly because every body is unique and every person has unique needs, goals, tastes, cultural traditions and local food systems.

I want you to learn to tune into your own body and how it responds to what you eat, and it’s REALLY hard to do that when someone is telling you that foods are good or bad, or that you should or shouldn’t eat such and such.

I don’t believe there are any truly bad foods. Even processed simple carbs can be beneficial for some people and in some circumstances (specifically recovery from starvation/anorexia, participation in endurance sports, or in the case of malabsorption and digestive problems that make it difficult to keep weight on).

For every study showing that a food is ‘unhealthy’, there’s another study showing that it’s ‘healthy’.

So I won’t tell you what to eat and what not to eat.

How to Get Started

If you’ve been struggling with diets, feel overwhelmed with all the conflicting information out there, just feel hopeless and fed up: forget EVERYTHING you’ve learned about food. Toss out ALL the rules, right now. Use my metabolic calculator to figure out how many calories your body needs to support your activity and a healthy weight (it’s probably a lot more than you think, and in many cases more than you’ve conditioned yourself to eat), and then just eat *whatever you want* within your calorie needs. For a few weeks you will probably go crazy eating all the foods you’ve been denying yourself for months or years. But after a while, you will notice that those foods are less and less appealing. You will start to want to eat a more balanced and rich variety of foods. Vegetables will probably start sounding appetizing. You can still eat those ‘bad’ foods (except that they’re not bad) whenever you want. But you’ll find that you don’t want them all the time any more. It’s true. It really happens this way. Just ask the people who’ve tried it!

Your body isn’t your enemy and if you start actually listening to it and letting it guide you, you will learn so much about how foods affect your own individual biochemistry. Pay attention to energy levels, digestion, recovery after workouts, and all the other little signals it sends you that you’re on the right or wrong path. You are your own guru!

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Want to know more about this approach to eating? Check out Matt Stone’s Diet Recovery 2 for another take on escaping the mental maze.

I’m not sure there is a trait that is used more ubiquitously to shame women than the presence of cellulite. Case in point:

Uh...Scarlett Johansson does NOT look like hell. She looks freakin' HAWT.

Listen folks. Cellulite is not a ‘problem’. It is not a flaw. Cellulite is a normal function of the way women’s bodies store fat. 80-90% of women have cellulite to some degree. Lean women have cellulite, healthy women have cellulite, vegan women have cellulite, paleo women have cellulite, celebrities have cellulite, body builders have cellulite, bikini models have cellulite, women in isolated cultures who still live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle have cellulite, women with access to unlimited amounts of plastic surgery have cellulite. Most of the women reading this have cellulite. You’re not flawed. You’re normal.

An Anatomy Lesson

Above is a depiction of the way women’s bodies store fat. From the Mayo Clinic:

“Cellulite is caused by fibrous connective cords that tether the skin to the underlying muscle, with the fat lying between. As the fat cells accumulate, they push up against the skin, while the long, tough cords are pulling down. This creates an uneven surface or dimpling.”

This is a matter of structural mechanics, folks. It’s not caused by poor circulation, PUFAs, animal foods, sugar, toxins, ‘negative energy’, poor diet, laziness, or any of the other novel and ridiculous things charlatans have come up with to sell you ‘cellulite cures’. Men are less prone to cellulite for three reasons: their connective tissues have more of a criss-cross pattern, their skin is actually thicker so any unevenness in fat below the skin is less evident, and they store more fat viscerally (around their internal organs) than subcutaneously (between the skin and muscle). Ie, their bodies are structurally different.

In 2008, Dr. Molly Wanner, from Harvard Medical School, did an in-depth review of cellulite treatments and the evidence supporting them. You can see the abstract here. I got my hands on the full text and wasn’t surprised at all by the conclusion she reached after examining the evidence:

“The best of the currently available treatments have, at most, shown mild improvements in the appearance of cellulite, most of which are not maintained over time.”

In other words, even the best treatments produce only mild changes and those changes are temporary. When you consider how expensive cellulite treatments are, and how painful and time consuming some of them can be, I have to ask WHY we are willing to spend the money and put ourselves through the discomfort for such a minimal return on our investment. I’ll tell you why: because the media and our culture have made us feel ashamed of something that is perfectly normal and that almost ALL of us have. And in response, we spend our emotional and financial resources chasing an impossible ideal. It’s time to get the hell over it. We have FAR far far better things to do with our time and energy and money than ‘fight’ cellulite.

And here’s another thing, for the single women reading. Once a man has seen a couple real-life women naked, he knows that real-life women have cellulite and stretch marks and jiggly thighs and other normal little traits that the media tries to convince us are flaws. Men who expect women to be perfect are men who have more experience with porn and magazines and blow-up dolls than real-life women. Any man who judges your worth on the basis of the presence of cellulite is only doing you the favor of letting you know that he doesn’t have much experience with women, and that he isn’t worth your time. There are plenty of men out there who know what real-life women look like, and who will value you for who you are and not the dimpliness of your thighs. Do yourself the favor of not wasting your time on the former.

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 Join the conversation on facebook.

A few days ago, a new study on sugar and diabetes risk hit the news and BOY has it been exciting! Mark Bittman ran an op-ed piece titillatingly titled ‘It’s the Sugar, Folks‘ that has been widely circulated among the Real Food, carb-gnostic, and fad diet communities. It sure sounds, based on the press this study has received, that we’ve definitively proven that sugar is the culprit behind diabetes and other ‘diseases of Western Civilization’. Hooray! We have our answer. And a path forward is clear, lets simply eradicate sugar and all our problems will go away!

I’m not going to pick apart the study (you can read it for yourself here). I suspect others will do that better than I could (Alan Aragon, I’m lookin’ at you). And truth be told, this is the kind of study I like. It’s large and mathy. The study authors put a lot of thought into it and controlled for multiple factors that are frequently ignored. I’m willing to accept their conclusions at face value, because I think their conclusions are fair and well supported. What I’m going to do is put those conclusions into perspective so you can decide how to apply them to your life.

First, lets talk about what those conclusions are and what they’re based on. This study examined the statistical correlation between sugar availability (availability, not consumption. Although it stands to reason that consumption is probably reflected by availability) and diabetes prevalence on a population scale. That means that they measured how much sugar was available in a population’s food supply and correlated it with diabetes rates in that population. Lets frame that with something you’re familiar with: the BMI scale. The BMI scale measures the statistical correlation between weight-to-height ratio and mortality risk. Most people know that the BMI scale is actually a very poor indicator of an individual person’s risk because it takes only two data points (out of thousands) into account. On a zoomed out, population scale level, a pattern emerges that as a population’s average BMI increases so does it’s mortality risk, but it’s very difficult to apply that statistical correlation at an individual level because so many other factors come into play in determining an individual’s risk (such as genetics, physical activity, body composition, diet quality, medications, epigenetics, gut microbiota, etc). This study is showing exactly the same kind of zoomed out, statistical correlation.

The main conclusion of the study was that for each 150 calories of sugar availability per person in a population’s food supply, there was an increase of roughly 1% in diabetes prevalence in that population. 150 calories of sugar is about 1 soft drink, so basically, for every soft drink’s worth of sugar per person per day, diabetes risk went up 1%. Remember though, this is at a population level. It’s very difficult to apply this at an individual level because of mitigating factors (like genetics and physical activity and weight and body composition etc), but lets imagine that we can. Lets pretend that we can safely say that for every soft drink you consume a day, your diabetes risk increases by 1% (we can’t say that based on this study, we’re pretending here). Got that? Your diabetes risk increases by 1%.

Lets put that risk into perspective. This study found that low levels of physical activity conferred a 71% increased risk of impaired glucose tolerance (a precursor to diabetes) over high levels of physical activity across ethnicities, cultures and genders. In this study, inactive individuals had more than a 100% increase in prevalence of diabetes over those who got 150 minutes or more of exercise a week. In this study, inactive lean women were at twice (100% more) the risk of diabetes as lean active women, and obese inactive women had 16 times (1600%) the risk of lean active women. This study on almost 6000 men showed that for every 500 calories expended per week on physical activity (that’s like an hour of brisk walking), diabetes risk decreased by 6%. This study suggests that inactivity confers a 30% increased risk of Type 2 diabetes in women. These risk ratios make that 1% increase from sugar look pretty measly, don’t they?

My take on the whole thing? Sugar may be relevant. This study certainly raises some questions that should be further explored in clinical and epidemiological settings. I suspect, though, that sugar only becomes problematic under certain conditions and in certain individuals. That is certainly what my research has led me to believe. If you are metabolically healthy, regularly physically active, eat a nutritious diet and maintain a healthy weight and body composition, you probably don’t need to worry about having some sugar here and there. If you are NOT metabolically healthy, are obese, are sedentary or have a genetic predisposition to diabetes, you should probably be mindful of your sugar consumption (but you should ALSO be mindful of increasing your activity level, losing excess body fat, and optimizing your energy balance, as those things will improve your metabolic function and may ultimately make sugar much less of an issue for you).

Here’s the big problem with the way this study is being interpreted in the media: sugar is not THE problem. Sugar may be (and probably is, under some circumstances) A problem, one of many. But if we’re going to treat sugar as THE problem, and then ‘solve’ that problem by simply eliminating sugar, we’re missing the forest for the trees. Well, for one tree. A bush really. Inactivity is a bigger problem than sugar, and fixating on sugar gives the inactivity a free pass. To improve metabolic health we really need to address all the problems. Don’t get hung up on Sugar As The Bad Guy. You cheat yourself out of vibrant good health, and miss out on some yummy and perfectly appropriate desserts.

Everyone else is doing Strength Training Tips for Women, so I might as well too, since I’m a woman and all. You really only need to know a few things and here they are:

1. There’s no such thing as ‘too big’ in regards to quads or shoulders or traps or backs or glutes or calves. You’re allowed to look however the hell YOU want to look. If someone else doesn’t approve it’s THEIR problem, not yours. It is not your obligation to try to please anyone other than yourself. If you want to be big and muscular go for it. If you don’t, don’t. It’s your body. If someone else thinks it’s appropriate to criticize your body for whatever characteristic they don’t approve of, they are aren’t worth your time and mental energy.

2. Most of the meatheads grunting and slamming weights in the weight room have no idea what the fuck they’re doing. Don’t let them intimidate you.

3. There are plenty of decent, considerate men in the weight room too. Those kind of men are happy you are there and will be supportive and respectful. Give them a chance to be awesome and they will!

4. You are stronger than you think you are. Just because lifting a 5 pound dumbbell 25 times makes you tired does not mean you aren’t capable of lifting a 25 pound dumbbell 5 times. You will get more out of lifting the 25 pound dumbbell. Trust me on this.

5. Eat the food. Eat it. You have a right to not exist in a state of semi-starvation. You have a right to be strong and healthy and have opinions and enough energy and mental bandwidth to stand up for yourself. You have a right to have a body that takes up space and makes a statement of presence and strength when you walk into a room (if that is what you want). You have a right to live to your fullest potential, and to pursue more meaningful goals than conforming to an aesthetic ideal. And it starts with finally allowing yourself to eat enough food to be healthy and strong and not HUNGRY all the time.

Whoops, that turned into more of a manifesto than a list of fitness tips. Am I sorry? Not one little bit.

Click me! To see study.

This study is making the rounds of the paleosphere, so I thought I’d take a moment to look into it and see if it lives up to it’s claims that a paleo-’type’ diet ‘has strong and tissue-specific effects on ectopic lipid deposition in postmenopausal women’ (‘ectopic lipid deposition’ = fat deposits on organs and skeletal muscles).

I got my hands on the full text and had a look. Quick synopsis: researchers put 10 overweight and obese, sedentary, post-menopausal women on a diet that they call ‘paleolithic type’ and measured changes to several metabolic and anthropometric measures. The main areas they were looking for changes were fat deposits in the liver and skeletal muscles, and insulin sensitivity, but they measured several other things as well, including:

-weight
-BMI
-waist circumference and waist-hip ratio
-blood pressure
-cholesterol
-insulin
-blood glucose
-cortisol

The diet:

“All meals were prepared by the food service at Umeå University Hospital and were weighed and frozen after preparation. The diet included lean meat, fish, fruit, vegetables (including root vegetables), eggs and nuts. Dairy products, cereals, beans, legumes, refined fats and sugar, added salt, bakery products and soft drinks were excluded. Participants were instructed to complement the provided food with other included food items from the list, ad libitum. To enable preparation of additional complete meals at home, the women received 14-day menus together with recipes and instructions regarding portion sizes. They were also advised to
use only rapeseed (canola) or olive oil in food preparation.”

The diet worked out to roughly 30% protein, 40% fat (predominantly PUFA as saturated fat was limited in this study by design, and most of the fat the subjects consumed came from nuts, fish and canola and olive oils. Wait, canola oil? DO YOU EVEN PALEO?). They ate to appetite and documented their intake.

The results were quite good. The subjects lost an average of 10 pounds, blood pressure improved, both waist circumference and waist-hip ratio decreased, and heart rate decreased! And there was indeed a reduction in liver fat! Good stuff! Lets look a little deeper at that. From the study:

“The dietary regimen resulted in a significantly reduced energy intake (520 kcal/day reduction) despite the ad libitum approach. This may be one of the factors contributing to the striking decrease in liver fat content. A series of studies have indeed shown that hypocaloric diets reduce the amount of liver fat.”

Layman’s terms: the subjects spontaneously ate about 500 calories less per day than they had been eating before the study (I talk about why diets high in protein and fiber, like the one in this study, can lead to a spontaneous reduction in caloric intake here. Protein and fiber are satiating and highly thermic foods. Diets rich in protein and fiber, paleo or otherwise, are very good at producing a spontaneous caloric deficit. It’s not magic, it’s science). It’s been established that hypocaloric diets (hypocaloric = fewer calories consumed than burned) reduce liver fat. Rut roh. Are they saying it might have been the calorie reduction that decreased liver fat, not the magic of paleo? Why yes, yes I think they are.

Speaking of which, you know what else a caloric reduction decreases? Weight. Could it be that the subjects lost weight because they were eating fewer calories? That’s certainly where my money is. The study authors note that the weight loss seems out of proportion to the degree of calorie reduction but then go on to acknowledge:

“Possible explanations include over-reporting of energy intake, increased thermogenic effects of protein (versus other macronutrients) and loss of glycogen which may contribute to loss of body water during the study period. Of note, increased
urinary volumes were commonly reported among participants during this intervention.”

Layman’s terms: maybe the subjects were overreporting their food intake. Maybe there’s something to the Thermic Effect of Food dealio (if you didn’t read my post that I linked above on food thermogenesis, you can do it now). Or maybe, just maybe, the low-carb diet they were on did what low-carb diets always do: flushed out several pounds of water weight as the body’s glycogen stores depleted. The subjects did report peeing more, after all.

So, we looked at the anthropometric changes the diet produced, lets take a look at the metabolic changes. Some good news. Blood glucose and insulin both decreased, and total cholesterol, LDL and triglycerides decreased. HDL also decreased though (that’s the good cholesterol), and cortisol increased (cortisol is a stress hormone). So the metabolic measures were a mixed bag, but overall more good than bad. Not so fast though, glucose, insulin and cholesterol all respond favorably to weight loss, as does blood pressure. Could these improved markers be a response to the subjects’ weight loss, which was a response to reduced calorie intake? That conclusion is certainly supported by decades of credible science.

Back to the original aim of the study: to determine if a paleo diet reduces liver fat and increases insulin sensitivity. Liver fat did decrease, but it turns out that whole-body insulin sensitivity didn’t change, nor fat deposition in skeletal muscles:

“…lipid content in skeletal muscles, as determined by 1H-MRS, was unaltered, as was peripheral insulin sensitivity…”

Because:

“…exercise regimens must be included to demonstrate effects on muscle/whole-body insulin sensitivity…”

Layman’s terms: to improve insulin sensitivity you gotta move yo’ ass.

Bottom line: paleo is, as fad diets go, pretty decent. It encourages eating nutritious, whole foods, and accentuates protein and vegetables (staples of weight loss diets from the beginning of time). But it’s not magic. The positive outcomes experienced in this study fall right in line with decades of credible science showing similar outcomes from weight loss due to reduced caloric intake. I’m not hating on paleo: paleo is a healthy diet. But promoting the myth that eating paleo will magically reduce weight and improve metabolic markers is irresponsible for one very big reason: it won’t work for everyone, because not everyone will spontaneously eat fewer calories on a paleo diet. Some people will even eat MORE calories on paleo. And when those people don’t magically lose weight and get healthier, they may blame paleo. Or they may blame themselves. They may think they’re just not ‘paleo-ing’ hard enough. Let be honest: paleo is a healthy diet, and some people may lose weight and see health improvements on it because they spontaneously eat less. But it’s the eating less that is responsible for the weight loss, and if you’re NOT one of the people that spontaneously eats less on paleo, it’s not because paleo is bad, or because you’re doing it wrong, or because you’re destined to be fat or whatever else people have come up with to rationalize away undesired results. Paleo is a pretty decent way of eating but it’s not magic, it can’t rewrite the laws of physics.

Improving the quality of your diet is GREAT, and paleo can help some people do that. There are other ways of improving the quality of your diet, though, and there are other ways of optimizing your calorie intake. Lets sweep away the dogma and magical thinking and be realistic. This study shows what countless other studies have shown before it: that calories matter, that food quality ALSO matters, and that exercise is essential for healthy metabolic function. If paleo provides a framework that helps you succeed in those aras, that is fantastic! But it’s one possible helpful tool out of many, and what works for some doesn’t work for others, we must look critically at the causative factors here (calories, weight loss, exercise) if we want to create a balanced and effective path forward and help more people achieve better health.

I talk about metabolic health a LOT, and it’s a really misunderstood term, so I’m going to very briefly explain what I mean by it.

Here is the definition of metabolism I base my philosophy and recommendations on:

Popular culture has distilled the term ‘metabolism’ down to some variation on ‘how many calories the body burns per day’. Energy expenditure is only one aspect of metabolism though. Metabolism is actually every chemical process of every single cell in your body. When I refer to ‘metabolic health’ what I mean is the function of every cell in your body. Proper cell function produces proper endocrine function, which produces homeostasis and metabolic health.

Exercise, appropriate energy balance, sleep, sunlight and good nutrition all affect your body on a cellular level. Supporting proper cellular function supports health on a systemic level. Our approach to health must be expansive and systemic, and not fixate on only one or two aspects of cellular function. Only when the SYSTEM is healthy is metabolic health achieved.

My name is Go Kaleo and I’m about to turn 40 years old. I’ve given birth to two babies. From the age of 8 until I was 35, I struggled with my weight, yo-yoing up and down between obesity and ‘merely overweight’. Here’s what I looked like a decade ago, and what I look like today.

I have been on many diets and tried many weight loss techniques. Some worked better than others at taking OFF the weight, but none of them resulted in permanent weight loss; I always regained the weight.

That was until 5 years ago when I decided to stop dieting and instead take responsibility for my behavior, the behavior that had made me fat, and was keeping me fat.Over the course of the next 18 months I lost 80 pounds, and I have maintained a healthy, stable weight ever since.

According to any of the various and sundry fad diets I tried, I am doing EVERYTHING wrong.

-I eat carbs. Lots of them. I have averaged 350-450 grams of carbs a day for the last 5 years.
-I eat fat. Avocados, peanut butter, full fat dairy, full fat salad dressing, etc. Fat typically makes up 30-35% of my daily calories.
-I eat grains. I enjoy oats, rice, corn and more. I even eat…
-WHEAT. I bake my own bread and partake liberally of the handmade scones from my local baking co-op. I eat pancakes and waffles and sourdough.
-I eat sugar. I have a serving or two of ice cream almost daily. I eat chocolate, and again with those scones.
-I eat soy. Tofu and Tempeh are some of my favorite foods They are not my primary source of protein, but I do eat them regularly.
-I also eat lots and lots of legumes. Legumes ARE my primary source of protein. Peanuts, lentils, beans, yum.
-I eat epic amounts of fruit. During the summer it’s not uncommon for me to make an entire meal of fruit.
-I don’t take supplements or rely on meal replacement powders or bars. I haven’t found any that rival real food for taste and nutrition.

Is your head spinning yet? So there are all the things I do WRONG, according to the gurus. Here’s the factors that I attribute my success to:

-I stay aware of my calorie intake, because calories matter. They are not the ONLY thing that matters, but they certainly do matter. My intake has averaged 2800 calories a day for the last 5 years. I eat far too many calories to qualify as a calorie restricted diet. Too many carbs to qualify as low carb. Too much fat to qualify as low fat. Too little protein to qualify as high protein. My diet is, by any standard, moderate and balanced. No restrictions. Calorically balanced to my weight and activity level. Yes, calories matter. Anyone who tells you they don’t is selling you a magic pill.
-I exercise regularly. The kind of exercise I do doesn’t really matter. I’ve done lots of different things over the last five years, and I’ve made progress with them all. The form the exercise takes is not important, the consistency of exercise is. There’s no optimal workout, no ‘right’ way to exercise. Do something, preferably something you enjoy. Do it regularly. Keep doing it.

Some of you (those who are not regular followers of my blog) may be experiencing an uncomfortable sensation right now. You feel a little anxious, maybe even angry. You have a suspicion that I am lying. You believe firmly that there is a magic macronutrient, or magic food or food group that is the source of your problems, or you believe that there is a magic diet or workout or supplement that will make your problems go away. What you are experiencing is called Cognitive Dissonance. Don’t worry, it’s pretty normal, and others have experienced it when confronted with my story. Cognitive Dissonance arises when a person is confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. People who believe deeply that there is a ‘right’ way of eating or exercising frequently react to hearing my story with dismissal, excuses and even anger.

One typical reaction people have is to ridicule my appearance. I hear ‘you look like a man’ a lot, and ‘you turned into a dyke’ which I don’t consider an insult but the deliverer clearly does. People have insulted my hair, my tattoo, my breasts, my face, and my body in general. I’ve been compared to an Auschwitz survivor and called a whale. It is a way of dismissing me and my story, attacking the messenger so to speak.

Another common reaction is to try to rationalize away my success, and/or make up excuses as to why my method wouldn’t work for them. I’ve had people say I am a genetic anomaly more than once (I’m not). One person said she can’t do a power clean due to an injury so my methods would never work for her because I do power cleans. Someone else speculated that I get all my protein from soy, and since that person didn’t eat soy my methods clearly weren’t relevant to her situation. These are fairly minor excuses, but there have been far bolder accusations flung at me. One blogger dedicated an entire post to speculations that I use steroids (I don’t) and have an eating disorder and exercise addiction (I have neither). Others have accused me of lying about how much I eat (I don’t).

Cognitive Dissonance is a very uncomfortable state to exist in, and people have all sorts of ways of rationalizing it away. When one is deep, deep in the dogma of a dietary philosophy, evidence that someone has succeeded by doing things they have been indoctrinated to believe are ‘unhealthy’ or ‘make you fat’ can cause agonizing dissonance and confusion. If you are having that experience right now, I invite you to spend a little time in those feelings. Really explore them with a critical, rational mind. Maybe it’s worth questioning your dogma, especially if you’re frustrated or feeling like you’re not having the results you’ve been promised.

I am here to tell you that there is no magic anything. There is taking responsibility for the behavior that has created your problems, and there is doing the work necessary to change that behavior and create new habits. No ridicule or excuse will take away the cognitive dissonance. No amount of ridiculing me or making excuses for my success will take away the fact that I succeeded by creating new, healthier habits and practicing them consistently. I do not need to be perfect or eliminate foods I enjoy or buy into a dietary dogma to maintain my success, because I have learned that (mostly) good habits, practiced consistently is more important than ALL those things.