Happy New Year, You're Not Fat.

Happy New Year, now stop thinking that you're fat.

Stop thinking that being beautiful has to do with your lack of muffin tops, or your BMI, or your slightly jiggly thighs.

Stop thinking about your jiggly thighs, everyone's thighs jiggle.

Stop looking at crapola like this:

 or this:

because you are not these people, and because you think they're beautiful you might be setting yourself up for failure. You will never be someone else, you will never look like someone else.

So you will fail if you want your legs that long, your arms that thin, your waist that small, because simple science says you don't have the same DNA. You can't be that. It will be incredibly difficult to ignore what your mother, teacher, boyfriends, waiter, billboard and Groupon advertisements are trying to sell to you. But just the same, be aware that deprivation is not becoming of anyone.

Please, stop talking about your diet.


I don't want to tell you how to eat. I'd love to tell you how I love to eat, I'll tell you all day. What I don't want to tell you is about how I stopped eating food altogether until I needed to tell a doctor about it. I also don't want to tell you about all the meals I spent imagining each inch of food I wasn't eating traveling through my body and creating huge fat bulges. And I certainly don't want to divulge how difficult it was to force feed my organs to bloom to a normal size again.

When you talk about your diet, I feel extremely uncomfortable, about as uncomfortable as you would feel if I told you about the day I found out my bras stopped fitting and I cried. It's bad enough we can't make it through a commercial break without hearing "less calories" or "slimming." It makes me happy that you're happy, but it would be good practice to stop sharing the details of how small your portions are at every meal. Can't we just talk about how tasty it is?

Happy New Year, let's just talk about how tasty it is!