If youve been following me on social media or reading my blog, you certainly have come across the term diet culture.Ive mentioned it many times before. But what is diet culture? How does it impact your life? And what should you do about it?

This article tackles this topic and teaches you how to opt-out of it. Also, I offer some resources that will help you start a new life outside of this oppressive belief system. Heres what youre going to learn from this blog post:

What is diet culture?

How to navigate the diet culture

Diet culture educational resources

Now, lets begin exploring the diet culture so you can take your first steps to freedom!

From the sound of it, you might think the term diet culture refers to a group of people who are on a diet. But it actually has a different meaning.

Christy Harrison, a colleague of mine, has the bestdiet culture definition.She defines itasa system of belief that worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue. Its now prevalent in our society and oppresses women from all over the world!

How does this impact your life?

This means you may have spent your entire life thinking that youre broken just because you dont look like the impossibly thin ideal.

Thats just one angle. You can also look at the diet culture from three other angles:

The second angle is that it promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status. It makes you feel compelled, almost obligated, to spend massive amounts of time, energy, and resources, trying to shrink your body so you can fit into this thin ideal. Now, research is very clear that the dieting model has a 95 percent failure rate, so it might as well be an exercise in futility.

The next angle is it demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others. It forces you to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, shames you for making certain food choices, and distracts you from the pleasure of eating as well as from your purpose and power.

Last but not least, it oppresses people who dont match the supposed picture of health or the thin ideal. This affects us most particularly as women, although its starting to affect men.

As you probably know, I used to have a love-hate relationship with food and my body. A 25-year career in dieting left me obsessed, frustrated and confused about food. I was also at a loss on how to take care of my body.

Dieting was stealing my life and at 39. Then I decided that I had enough I finally chose to take my power back and free myself from dieting and body shaming. The Going Beyond The Food Method was born out of my personal journey.

Now, as a health professional, Ive helped hundreds of women work their way out of this oppressive culture and develop a healthier relationship with foodusingintuitive eatingandbody neutrality.

Is diet culture affecting you, too? I invite you to consider its impact on your life. Take our quick self-assessment tool we created to help women determine if intuitive eating is the right solution for them.

I invite you, and honestly all women,to become diet culture dropouts!Below are the four steps you need to take in your journey towards freedom:

Now is the best time to be a woman. Unlike the generations before us, were liberated and empowered! You have to understand that diet culture is a tool that the patriarchy uses to keep us from being in our power. It keeps us busy minding our calories and macros. It induces guilt and so we feel inclined to punish ourselves when we fail.

Whether you want to stay in the diet culture and be oppressed or to break away from it and change your life, its totally up to you. But you should know that you have the power to make that choice.

With great power comes great responsibility. Now, that sounds like a quote from a Spiderman movie, but as an empowered woman, you are responsible for your life. No one else is!

Now, you can be the victim of diet culture and drown yourself in self-pity and helplessness. Or you can say, Screw this! Im going to take responsibility, and Im going to work myself out of it and change my life.

Its your call.

Read books and blogs. Listen to podcasts. Consume content that supports the choice that youve made for yourself. Be on guard against the content that might suck you right back into the diet culture. As Ive said before, beware of diet culture programs disguised as wellness practices.

Ive made it my personal mission to empower women by educating them so they dont allow themselves to be oppressed. And so, I have put together some resources for you.

We haveanti-diet culture podcastepisodes on the Going Beyond the Food Show, where I interview health professionals. I invite you to listen as they share their expert insights and opinions on our relationship with our bodies and with food.

You can also read our antianti-diet culture blogposts on this website. Here, we go deep into the research and the studies around diet culture as well as dieting and its impact on health.

If youre looking for aanti-diet culture book, I recommendHealthAtEvery Sizeby Linda Bacon, PhD. Dr. Bacon does research around health and dieting. Its a book that gave me a lot of aha moments and subsequently changed my life.

Youre going to shift fromthe way of life thatdiet culture has taught you to a more empowering way of thinking and doing things. This means theres a lot for you to unlearn and relearn, so youre going to need all the support you can get.

The Going Beyond The Food Method is a 5-step strategic process to help women move out of diet mentality and into self-care. Our 5 pillars are: mindset, emotional wellness, mindfulness, body neutrality and intuitive eating.

As a clinical nutritionist, Ive found thatintuitive eating is the most effective toolfor developing a healthy relationship with food and your body. Intuitive eating teaches you to tap into your innate hunger and fullness cues. It requires you to relearn how to engage with food without restriction and without labeling food as good or bad.

The trauma around body image is more powerful than the one around food. What I have found over the years is that when we work through our relationship with food, its a lot easier and faster to heal body image issues.

We offer a variety of programs that will help you should you decide to opt-out of diet culture:

1)TheIntuitive Eating Project This is a self-study program that will help you relearn how to eat intuitively at your own pace.

2)The Going Beyond the Food Academy This is group coaching program where we teach the Going BeyondTheFood Methodandoffersupport and coaching in a more in-depth approach.In this program, wetalk about mindset, emotions, body image, intuitive eating, and mindfulness.

3)Conquer and Thrive Thisis a six-month, high-touchintensiveprogramwhere you work one-on-one with me. Here, you learn how to work your way out of the diet culture and heal your relationship with food, your body, and yourself.

See more here:
What is Diet Culture and 4 Steps to Navigate It - Thrive Global

Strained relationships with parents, siblings, or extended family members may be more harmful to peoples health than a troubled relationship with a significant other, according to a study published by the American Psychological AssociationsJournal of Family Psychology.

The study, conducted by Patricia N. E. Roberson, assistant professor in UTs College of Nursing, and her longtime collaborators Sarah Woods, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Jacob Priest, University of Iowa, looked at data collected over a 20-year span.

Roberson studies marriage and family relationships and how they are linked to health outcomes, both broadly and specifically in rural and underserved Appalachian populations. Her work has looked at chronic conditions, breast cancer, and diabetes. Woods and Priest are licensed marriage and family therapists. In the trios work together, they began to focus on the fact that family and marriage are linked to levels of depression and anxiety as well as overall health.

We wanted to understand how family relationships, as compared to marital relationships, are linked to health outcomes over time, Roberson said. The existing research tends to focus on marital relationships, but as we knew from our own experiences as therapists and from research broadly, family is really important, even into adulthood. What we found was that family relationshipsboth positive and negative aspectscompletely blew marital relationships out of the water in health impacts.

In their study, the researchers used data from 2,802 participants in the Midlife Development in the US survey, which included a nationally representative sample of adults. Three rounds of data were collected over a 20-year period from 1995 to 2014. The average participant was 45 years old during the first round.

The survey asked questions about family strain and family support as well as intimate partner strain and support.

Health was measured using participants total number of chronic conditions, such as stroke, headaches, and stomach trouble, experienced in the 12 months prior to each of the three data collection rounds. Participants also rated their overall health from excellent to poor at each round.

The researchers found that greater family relationship strain was associated with a greater number of chronic conditions and worse health appraisal 10 years later, during the second and third rounds of data collection.

We thought that family relationships would be strongly connected to health because those relationships tend to be longerwe have them from when were a child all the way through our livesbut we didnt think they would make the health impacts of marital relationships seem almost insignificant. It was quite surprising to us, Roberson said.

Roberson invoked an adage attributed to Harper Leeyou can choose your friends, but you cant choose your familyto explain why the relationships are so different in the way they affect long-term health.

If youre in a toxic marriage, you can choose to get a divorceyou can set yourself apart from that person, she said. Family relationships arent like that. Those people are around us from when were a child into adulthood; if those relationships are harmful or toxic, its very difficult to get away from that.

But in addition to the negative effects, Roberson pointed out, positive relationships affect us as well.

Im fascinated by marriage and family in terms of health outcomes because we know those relationships can change, she said. We can identify facets of family and marital relationships that are linked to long-term health outcomes. These are untapped interventions to improve health care outcomes.

When were considering how to improve our health, in addition to considering eating healthfully and exercising, we should think about how to reduce the stress and strain in our relationships. Not all relationships can change, but you can find the supportive ones to focus on. Rally those relationships around you because that can also influence your health.

Podcast:Roberson, Woods, and Priest discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly advice about relationships in their podcast, Attached. Learn more about their research on family and marital relationships in episode 7.

CONTACT:

Karen Dunlap (865-974-8674, kdunlap6@utk.edu)

Emily Kissel (864-974-4180, ekissel@utk.edu)

Read this article:
Diet, Exercise, and Apologize to Your Sister: A Prescription for Long-Term Health - Tennessee Today

Skilled nursing providers may have a new method for improving memory problems in residents. A study found that aerobic exercises and a heart-healthy diet helped improve cognitive function for seniors.

Seniors who exercised and followed the diet had a better ability to think, remember and make better decisions when compared to those who didnt exercise or follow the diet, according to researchers.

The study was conducted on 160 sedentary adults, ages 55 and older, who had cardiovascular disease risk factors and cognitive impairments with no dementia, over a six-month period.

Seniors were placed in four different groups: the aerobic exercise group, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet group, combined exercise and diet group, and a group that just received standard health education.

The data provides promising evidence that better executive function [one] year after completion of a sixmonth exercise intervention can be sustained, the authors wrote.

The findings were published Nov. 22 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

View post:
Aerobic exercise, improved diet could slow memory problems in nursing home residents - News - McKnight's Long Term Care News

One thing that Cristiano Ronaldo is known for around the world is how physically fit he is. The Juventus Forward has been the king of the gym for a long time, ever since he first started taking himself seriously as an athlete in school. He used to sneak out his dormitory to hit the weight room at night.

The 34-year-old soccer star now stays busy off the field with his long-time girlfriend Georgina Rodriguez and his four children. He still sticks to a strict workout program and is serious about sticking to his specific diet.

However, his children led Ronaldo to discover the one thing that hell let himself indulge in every now and then.

Ronaldos most notable career years began when he was recruited to play for Manchester United in 2003. The Portuguese soccer star spent six years with them, where he developed into the player his fans now know and love.

He helped lead the team to three league titles and the UEFA Champions League in 2008. He scored 118 goals for Manchester United in the six years he played for them, making him one of the most prolific scorers in the teams history.

In 2009, Ronaldo was recruited by Real Madrid to the tune of a $133 million contract, one of the most expensive deals for an athlete at the time. In his first two years with the team, Ronaldo scored 33 goals and 40 goals, respectively. Real Madrid won the UEFA Champions League in 2013, after Ronaldo brought the team a total of 51 points by himself.

Now, Ronaldo is playing for Juventus after they offered him a four-year contract in 2018. With a contract worth $117 million, he became the highest paid player over 30 years old the team has ever had. And hes still got plenty of playing years ahead of him, thanks to how fit he stays year-round.

While Ronaldo has a strict workout regimen to keep in top shape, its his diet that he feels does the majority of the work for him. When he started out in soccer, he was a skinny kid with little muscle at all. He toldThe Sun that he decided at age 11, after hearing coaches talk about what a shame it was that he was so talented but didnt have any muscle, that he would become stronger.

And thats exactly what he did. He started working out religiously, developing a regimen that works right for him. But he says that his diet plays a big part, as well.

Ronaldo eats high-protein food and limits his sugar intake. Instead of eating one big meal, hell eat six small meals throughout the day to keep his energy levels up.

But theres one thing that Ronaldo admits to keeping in his diet more than most of his fans would think: pizza! He says that he would get bored of his regular diet if he didnt sneak in some pizza time with his oldest son, Cristiano Jr.

Even though Ronaldo may take the occasional pizza break, hes still one of todays most physically fit athletes. Ronaldo actually stated last year that he feels he has a biological age of 23 and wants to keep playing into his 40s.

The 34-year-old certainly has plenty of years left on the field, as long as he keeps his pizza nights in check. We cant wait to keep seeing what he brings to the field in the years to come.

Read more:
Cristiano Ronaldo Reveals the Only Way He'll Cheat on His Diet - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Results of a new study in mice suggest that the body may be able to defeat the influenza virus if a person has the right sort of diet a ketogenic, or keto, diet.

Infection with the influenza virus, better known as the flu, has accounted for 12,00061,000 deaths every year since 2010 in the United States, with an annual economic burden of $87.1 billion.

The introduction of the flu vaccine has greatly improved infection and morbidity rates. However, there is still currently no cure for the illness.

Healthcare professionals and scientists alike are continuing the search for novel therapeutics to combat the flu, yet the key may lie within the body's own immune system. Moreover, it may be activated by the keto diet.

Following the keto diet involves eating foods that are high in fat and low in carbohydrates. Meals tend to consist of a variety of meat, fish, poultry, and non-starchy vegetables.

According to the findings of a new study, appearing in the journal Science Immunology, when mice fed a keto diet were injected with the flu virus, their survival rates were much higher than those of mice fed a diet high in carbohydrates.

The main reason for this, the researchers believe, is that a keto diet blocks the formation of inflammasomes, which are multiunit protein complexes that the immune system activates.

Inflammasomes can also cause harmful immune system responses in the host. This triggers the release of gamma delta T cells.

Gamma delta T cells are responsible for producing mucus in the linings of the lungs, which helps the body get rid of infectious agents. The mucus is then wafted up the airways and coughed out.

The joint senior authors of the study are Prof. Akiko Iwasaki and Prof. Vishwa Deep Dixit, both of the department of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, in New Haven, CT.

The objective of the study was to determine how the keto diet affects host defense against a lethal flu virus infection.

The researchers randomly assigned the mice to diet groups 1 week before they induced the infection. Next, they monitored the rodents for signs of infection and assessed their immune responses.

The team found that keto diet feeding confers protection against the flu virus in mice by increasing the number of gamma delta T cells in the airways.

This response occurred relatively late after the infection in the mice, due to their dependence on T cell receptors on other cells. But in humans, this response is much quicker, as gamma delta T cells can expand independently.

In addition, previous research in mice has shown that a specific subset of gamma delta T cells can efficiently induce the cytolytic killing of flu-infected airway cells.

In the current study, the expansion of gamma delta T cells resulted in lower viral titer measurements in the mice that had received a ketogenic diet.

The team also investigated the potential for changes in the levels of genetic activity using RNA sequencing, a technique that can measure the levels of transcription across the genome.

This showed that although a keto diet could impact the expansion of gamma delta T cells, this was not associated with any changes in the activity of genes involved with cytotoxicity.

Interestingly, when mice were bred without the gene that encodes for gamma delta T cells, the keto diet provided no protection against the flu virus.

Commenting on this result, Prof. Iwasaki says, "This was a totally unexpected finding."

"This study shows that the way the body burns fat to produce ketone bodies from the food we eat can fuel the immune system to fight flu infection."

Prof. Vishwa Deep Dixit

How do gamma delta T cells protect the host in response to a keto diet? As the researchers report, the current theory is that the expansion of these cells in response to ketogenic feeding leads to more efficient killing of the flu virus.

This, in turn, results in much lower viral titers and better preservation of the cells lining the airways.

Experts believe that the gamma delta T cells induced by the keto diet may enhance the barrier and innate defense systems of airway-lining cells at baseline, thereby allowing for a better response to the flu virus.

These results demonstrate that the answer to combatting the flu virus does not necessarily lie in producing drugs to relieve flu symptoms and that changing the diet can have a dramatic effect on how the body responds to infection.

The results also suggest that if the flu can be tackled in this way, there is the potential for changes in diet to help the body more effectively fight other viral infections.

This type of research is in its infancy, and much more will be needed to elucidate exactly how the keto diet may help combat the flu.

Originally posted here:
Can the keto diet help beat the flu? - Medical News Today

Every year I get totally bummed out as I watch so many of you glorious moms bust your butts to create spectacular holiday gatherings for your big extended families, creating magic and memories that truly lift the spirits of those around you, only to worry the entire time about every calorie you take in, obsess over what you look like in what you wear, and fret over what the scale might read when the new year arrives. Im not talking about the kind of self-checks that are about ones overall physical health or current fitness/wellness goals that their doctor supports. Im talking about the self-smackdowns that are tied to ones self-worth.

Sorry Im late; I looked fat in everything I owned so it took me forever to find something even halfway decent to cover myself up in.

Oh no, thanks, I really shouldnt eat that.Or that. Or that.

Delete that pictureI look terrible and obviously cant go near any more food until the holidays are over.

Cut me the tiniest sliver, like just a taste. No, smaller than that. Even smaller.

Welp Ive already ruined my diet so Ill have another slice of pie and just keep hating myself, ha ha ha.

(And dont even get me started on jokingly calling someone a bitch because you think they look good, or commenting on other peoples food choices as if they should be on a diet, too.)

A non-stop narrative that threads throughout the holiday season that I genuinely want to grab in my fists, tear into itty bitty pieces, and bury away in a deep deep hole beneath a large boulder forever is the one between women about how much they should eat, are eating, or did eat, and the Negative Nancying of yourselves the whole time. The word diet gets thrown around a lotusually about yours being ruinedas does the insistence that you do not look good because of your weight/size/shape. Caloric math is often announced at the cheese station or dinner table, making sure everyone within earshot knows how many calories are in each serving size and what it would take to burn them off. Fad diets are discussed in great detail, for loads of ladies in the room have already tried a slew of them and saved others to their Pinterest boards for later.

Then once the holidays are over, it never fails that even with all this extreme willpower to not enjoy any of the foods the festivities have to offer, you believe you gained a few pounds (ignoring the fact that humans were designed to fatten up during winter) or decide that you simply dont look as good as such-and-such did at some party, so you need to make a New Years resolution to do something about it. Restrict yourselves more. Allow yourselves nothing. Squeeze in a fitness routine that gives you the punishment you deserve for being so bad during various celebrations.

So the months of holiday joy are miserable, as is the beginning of the new year.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, well. This sucks. It sucks for you and it sucks for me to have to watch this because I adore you and want you to be happy and there is a really, really simple solution to it all: stop dieting during the holiday season if it makes you so freaking miserable.

I have never dieted over the holidays.

Yes, I love food. Loooove it. Im also a grown-up who can tell when shes hungry and when shes full. My body is a machine to fuel and my mouth is a place that prefers fuel that is delicious, so during a time when treats and meals that arent the typical 365 fare appear, I enjoy myself.

Enjoy the meals, the company, the experiences.

Enjoy the moments and believe I deserve it all.

I deserve to take care of myselfbody, mind and heart.

I deserve to talk to myself like Im worthy of all that joy.

You do, too.

You can do this, too.

Start talking yourself up instead of down. Say it until you believe it.

Throw out that word diet forever. Instead of looking at food, calories, weight as the enemy, look at yourself as a beautiful machine that needs fuel. Choose what makes you happy and enjoy reasonable amounts of it. Theres no need to deny yourself everything or on the flip side, gorge on everything: happy middles do exist. So do to-go containers, freezers, and recipes online with which to recreate the foods you want more of (but just not right now).

Instead of battling your weight, battle the weight youve been giving to the unwarranted opinions of people, media, and product marketing that insist women must fit into a certain aesthetic in order to be worthy of happiness.

I pinky swear that not dieting during the holiday season has yet to cause me to explode out of my clothing (whatever size it may be that year) or make people love me any less (including myself). In fact, since I dont spend months tangled up in a losing head game about food, Im both less likely to fall into the feed-my-feelings trap of grossly overeating, and am simply more pleasant to be around.

Not dieting has been a win-win for me in so many ways. I encourage you to try it this year. Love yourself exactly as you are for the next couple of months. Crawl out of the diet mindset and relish every moment for what it is: a quick taste of a fleeting holiday joy that should be savored while we can.

Read more:
You Do Not Need to Diet Over the Holidays - Momtastic