THE WEEKLY PAGE 📝 No. 185

The #1 predictor of weight gain + this week's picks for work, wellness, and wonder.

(This week’s newsletter contains mentions of weight loss and dieting. As always, feel free to skip the top section if needed.)

By the age of 45, the average American woman has been on 61 diets.

And did you know that dieting is the #1 predictor of future weight gain?

Few of us have thought about what it would look like to eat healthy, nutritious foods that fuel and energize us…without the expectation that they are going to make our body smaller.

And many of us have failed to actually build the strong, healthy body we desire — because we are focused on calorie reduction or eliminating entire food groups. Both practices that are destructive to our relationship with food as well as our body.

This puts many of us in a cycle of dieting over and over and over again — while being unhappy with our bodies the entire time.

And the thing is…having to “get back on track” or “repeat a diet” is proof that diets don’t work long-term.

So that leads me to this question: how would you eat if the goal wasn’t to lose weight?

How might that change your relationship with food? With your body? With eating healthy? With being able to do it consistently for the remainder of your life, rather than starting and stopping diets multiple times a year? With feeling confident about yourself? Your life? Your work? How might your attitude, energy, and mood change?

One of the best things I have ever done for my physical and mental health was ditching diet culture for good. It restored my energy and cleared up so much mental space that was once reserved for calorie counting and stressing about food ingredients — time and energy much better spent on writing these newsletters, creating new products, and building community with folks like you!

Ditching diet culture and exploring nutrition in a fun, informed, and gentle way will be one of the focuses of my group program, The Better Self Collective. It starts at the end of October, and while we’ll spend the last two months of the year learning the basics of wellness, getting organized, and setting up systems to support us — we’ll also meet online once a month throughout all of 2024 to learn from guest speakers on various topics (SO excited about this), check in with each other, adjust our goals, and focus on gentle, sustainable progress month by month.

I’ll be sharing more about the program to the launch list, so make sure your name is on it!

📚 READ: This won’t be news to *most* of us, but research shows that there is no right age to be a woman at work (LOL). Under 25? We’re not taken seriously and called “kiddo” or “girl”. Between 25 and 40? Omg, you hormonal, baby-crazy person. I’m not hiring or promoting you, sorry! Over 40? We kinda need to replace you with someone younger. This article from Business Insider summarizes the bullsh*t women face when it comes to a literal lifetime of age discrimination in the workplace. Read it here.

📅 EVENT: Thanks for all your feedback last week about our FIRST EVER CO-WORKING SESSION! This is just a note to let you know it will take place online from 9-11 AM CST on Tuesday, September 19th. I’ll send out an official invite with more info early next week. What it is in a nutshell: a time and place for you to meet online with like-minded folks and work independently on a specific task or project that you need to complete. From 9-9:30 I’ll also host an open Q+A session for anyone needing help with what they’re workin’ on. Would love to see ya there!

🍎 EAT: I know it’s not quite flannel + apple season yet (we’re supposed to have record-setting temperatures in Copenhagen today!) but my only “to-do” this weekend is to teach myself to make this Salted Caramel Apple Galette….if I can stand to have the oven on, that is. The thing I love about galettes is that they are generally pretty easy…but they look (and sound) fancy. Grab the recipe here.

📚 READ: Last year, over 425 people died of extreme heat in the city of Phoenix, Arizona. One city! One year! 425 people! Many of them also had a condition that made them more vulnerable to a hotter climate, schizophrenia. The Washington Post recently published this engaging, interactive post about one young man named Stephan Goodwin who left home in the Arizona Heat and never returned. The article is a harrowing look at how a warming climate will impact the most vulnerable among us, including those taking medications for mental health issues (which cause dehydration and make it harder for the body to regulate temperature), the elderly, and those with heart or kidney disease. Read it here.

💬 Comment & chat below! Anything in this week’s newsletter spark your curiosity? What did you try/read/listen to?! Have questions? Got a recommendation of your own? Pop ‘em below.

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