Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

There’s also an individualistic—and, arguably, masculinist—assumption at work in diet culture, which minimizes the role of food in shared pleasures, both daily and during special celebrations. But there is something immensely valuable about being tied to the world, and our bodies, and each other, by the thrice-or-so daily practice of satisfying our

taken me a long time to realize that part of eating well is making friends with hunger. We are not the starving children. To feel mildly hungry two or three times a day—when you are lucky enough to know that another meal is coming soon—is a good thing. All my life—except when I’d been attempting to lose weight—I’d responded to the gentlest of tummy

Food is an inescapable fact of life, and the task for each of us is to find a way to make our peace with it. Disordered eating is very different from alcohol addiction, whose cure is sobriety. When eating goes wrong, the antidote is not a life without food, but figuring out how we can bring ourselves to eat new foods in new ways.