Going to talk about food, eating, weight, diet culture, fasting, etc. Going to also use a lot of scare quotes.

A trainer I generally like and respect and consider safe suggested via social media that people handle Thanksgiving by skipping a meal to “bank” calories so as to avoid both undoing “progress” and also food guilt from “overeating."

I reached out to them privately to let them know that this is something most RDs wouldn’t advise because a) it backfires and b) it encourages a relationship to food and the body that’s rigid and really binary-based (eating=bad, not eating=good)

They thanked me for sharing my thoughts but said that it’s just IF, which “works.” But that they’d add a note on the post that banking calories isn’t recommended for anyone with a history of ED. The thing is though, whether or not IF “works” is really up for debate.

Works for what goal? Works for who? What kind of IF (there are tons of ways to do it)? Works longterm? For a day? I wish we thought about how well deprivation “works” for our mental health when we talk about whether diets work.

This is also a great reminder that you really should only take nutrition advice from people who are qualified to give it. This isn’t something I say to be gatekeep-y.

It’s just there are lots of fitness and “healthy eating” enthusiasts who have anointed themselves experts because they participate in online fitness communities, read books, and look at studies.

These people sometimes really do have a good grasp of what the science says (but not always or even often in my experience). But what they generally don’t have is training in how to understand people’s food and eating behaviors, how diets affect mental health, how trauma shows…

…up in the body, the effects of weight stigma, how intersecting oppressions are relevant in this entire discourse, and the numerous other ways food and eating are part of our lives and our psyches. Endorsing certain diets because you’ve read studies and think they “work” isn’t…

…the same as helping people make decisions for their bodies and lives because you have trained in a discipline that helps you understand, in a holistic way, what people are going through around food, eating, and weight.

Going back to the trainer’s response that they’d add a note to their post to explain that skipping meals to bank calories is not an appropriate strategy for anyone who doesn’t have a healthy relationship with food—that’s a bit of a concession to my point, so fine.

But my response to that is: what is a healthy relationship to food when we live under diet culture? How can we even assess that or know if it applies to us? Is it even possible?

(I don’t know.) Everyone is just trying to get through the day and should do whatever they need to do to survive in the moment and then, out of the moment, what they need to do to not just survive, but to feel whole.

(lol easier said than done.) Whatever that is for you, it is, and I hope you find it and keep finding it (just as I hope to find it and keep finding it myself).

But I guess what I’m saying is that you should probably think twice about taking prescriptive food advice from people whose only qualifications to give it are that they are fitness enthusiasts and they assume we’re all just trying to lose weight.

Listen to people who not only have training that relates to food, eating, and nutrition, but also who have done work on their practice to try to decolonize their own thinking about diets, bodies, weight, fat acceptance, and weight stigma/bias.

I also can’t recommend enough that you read writers like Your Fat Friend, advocates like Dr. Joy Cox, and RDs like Jessica Jones and Wendy Lopez, Christy Harrison, and the Fat Nutritionist.

These people and lots of others have all helped me unpack and deconstruct my own assumptions and thinking on all these topics and say a lot of brilliant things way better than I do here.