Happy International No Diet Day!

Ahh yes lets all celebrate not buying in to the whole diet horror!

For those of my readers who might not ever been on a diet, lucky you! And now to the rest of us who have suffered through, bad food, hunger, and all the nasty yo yo weight fluctuations; a hearty WOO HOO!

I have a firm belief that diets are the worst things you can do to your body. Hunger is not the key to being healthy nor to loosing weight.

The diet industry is just that in industry, it is a faceless monster, money hungry before all else.. Sadly it's one that really kills people.
I don't know the exact numbers of people who have died to be thin but the numbers are too large for my comfort. The Idea of being able to not just restrict what you eat and exercise, but pop a pill and be loose weight is a lie. One that too many people rush off to do. A last ditch effort to conform to what society says you need to look like. Oh and not all of those magic pills haven't been tested to work or be safe.

Then there is the medical 'weight loss miracle' of lap band and gastric bypass. More lies and deaths. Now while These things do work for some people and have improved the quality of life for some; it isn't the cure it all for the mass overweight population. You might not see as much coverage of the people who have been failed by these things, but they are out there. Suffering more now than when they were simply just fat. Worse for wear after putting their bodies through a large medical procedure, and then the subsequent mental distress of not only a failed surgery but the way their medical professionals treat them. Told over and over again it must be something they are doing to make this procedure fail. Wrong on sooo many levels.

The Fact of the matter is not just the overweight are dying to be thin. There is a whole community of people who are already at a healthy weight who want to loose weight too. On the polar extreme of overweight you have people who believe its not enough to be 'skinny', these poor people believe that  being anorexic and bulimic are the answer. Huge communities of mostly young girls hating themselves and truly starving themselves to fit in and be smaller. Again the whole stigma of what it means to be fat scaring people in to starvation.

So today I celebrate not only not buying in to the whole diet lie, but how much I love my own body that I don't want or need these things to be a complete, or valuable person.

I'm gonna go sew a dress and be happy with who I am.

I vow never to let society tell me how I should look, that I am not worthy of things just because of my size, I refuse to let doctors treat me like an inferior person because they can't look past my BMI, I will not let men or women's judgements of me stop me from living and loving others, I will also look people in the eye when they bully me or others due to our size and tell them they are not only rude but closed minded bigots. But most of all I vow to never self hate.

Feel good about yourself and what you do with your body. don't let someone else tell you what is right for you, or how you need to be!

Love and kisses,
Raven