My advice is to never make weight loss the goal. Weight loss, in and of itself, is (in my experience) a hollow goal. Your body becoming “lighter” doesn’t mean very much in terms of health and wellness. Yes, a person’s weight will often change when they make healthy changes to their lifestyle, but weight can also change when a person is sick, if their hormonal balances shift, it can depend on the time of year, it can fluctuate with changes in digestive health that might be completely unrelated to anything they’re actually trying to do, etc etc. 

If you’re working on eating better and getting healthier, your body might offload extra weight that it doesn’t need, which is/may be a direct response to your healthier habits. But that cause/effect relationship doesn’t go both ways - “losing weight” doesn’t necessarily mean that you got healthier.

If you’re tired of struggling with motivation, try setting a goal that actually makes sense. Perhaps your goal could be “building a healthier lifestyle”. Instead of constructing your “plan” around changing your body weight, construct the plan around figuring out what positive changes and habits will make your life a healthier place - physically, mentally, and emotionally. Your body will respond accordingly to how you treat it/yourself, which certainly may include weight loss if your body is carrying more than it needs to.

If I may speak from personal experience: I consider myself physically healthy. My current body weight is at least 100 pounds lower than my highest weight, which was at a time when I was very unhealthy in my habits. If I had “started” making changes by saying “my goal is to lose 100 pounds”, I never would have stuck to anything I tried to do. By saying “my goal is to create a healthier lifestyle”, I found that it was much easier to stay motivated to do that. My body has responded accordingly and become a much healthier version of itself, to match the healthier lifestyle I built for myself. That healthier version happens to involve a 100+ lb. weight loss that I have not struggled to maintain, at all. It also involves a happier, stronger, better-educated me that enjoys exercise, eats lots of tasty food, and actively works to navigate unhealthy thoughts and concepts perpetuated by our society’s harmful diet culture. I never would have gained all of those things by just trying to “lose weight”.

I also strongly encourage you to practice body positivity and be open to the idea that your body's version of healthy may involve a scale weight that does not "match" the weight you've been told you should be, and that is totally okay! Health and happiness is the ultimate goal, not a number on a scale.

See, the thing about marketing is that it’s designed to appeal to in the element of pathos, or someone’s emotional reasoning. This is that to the extreme. “Perfect nutrition”, “cheat clean”, and all that pseudomotivational garbage I can’t even stand to look at is designed specifically to assign emotional and moral value to food. Food didn’t have such an “ingrained” moral value until the diet industry started playing on the concept of “sinful” and “guilt-free” to make hella cash off our insecurities with their contrived nonsense. However upset you are about this post, you are unable to claim that diet culture is not at play here.

The other thing about marketing is that people respond to it. Quest Bar’s marketing is motivational to some but highly toxic to others who struggle with disordered eating, perfectionism, obsession with control, etc etc. What I posted (their actual advertisements straight from their actual products) reads like a how-to manual for orthorexia nervosa and anorexia athletica. Eating disorders destroy lives and it is already hard enough to defeat them without the “health” industry trying to instill them anew in people trying in earnest to live a balanced lifestyle, not to mention beating it deeper into all of us working hard to beat the obsession with perfection and achievement. I understand if that is obviously not how Quest’s marketing affected you, but the 100+ people who have liked and reblogged my post seem to agree with my thoughts. Their feelings (and mine) are not invalid just because you think we are wrong.

Speaking of unfollows, you’re certainly encouraged to unfollow any blog that doesn’t offer content that you like. I’m therefore glad that you have removed my content from your timeline if you do not like seeing it.

…. oh, and I clicked way over 5k followers last night BECAUSE of this post. I certainly hope they are here because they like the content. :)

iwishiwashome -

Ohhhh my gosh that’s amazing news!! I’m really glad you gave it a try!

It’s really mindblowing how much food a body actually needs to completely function. You can convince your body to “operate” on 1200 calories a day, but it’s not going to be operating at 100%. A lot of important internal things are going to be running way slower than they would, and that just means all the hard work towards fitness and progress and results or whatever, is just going to waste. Because your body doesn’t have enough fuel to actually improve itself after you break it down. Change requires fuel, and you can’t make something out of nothing. If all the calories are already “spoken for” by your brain, lungs, heart, and other vital organs, nothing’s going to be left for everything else. Skin, muscles, metabolism, joints, all that stuff that we work hard to improve, isn’t going to improve because there just isn’t enough fuel for anything to happen. For fitness, a body just needs more.

The reason we have “1200 calories” as a law of diet culture, is because of bad science. Some doctors and scientists estimated that the average female requires at least 1200 calories a day to prevent her body from going into medically-defined starvation. And the field of weight loss is so fucked into its “eat less, lose more” mindset that it latched on to that 1200 number. Now the big problem with that is, 1200 net calories (calories consumed with exercise calories factored in) is the medical minimum that the average, 5’4” 140lb woman MUST consume daily, to prevent her internal organs from slowly consuming themselves. But, pretty much everyone on a 1200 calorie diet treats 1200 as a maximum. Right from the start, people are deliberately inducing a state in which their bodies will literally refuse to change. If that’s not insane enough, many people who begin a 1200 calorie diet are not that “average” 5’4”, 140lb woman (in fact, that “average” woman doesn’t seem to apply to the majority of women. See: bad science). A person who is larger than that will require a larger intake simply to function, even while losing weight. And the real nail in the coffin (and by “coffin” I mean fucked up lifetime of yo-yo dieting and disordered eating) is that these same people who are eating bird portions and are probably larger than the “average”, are also starting to exercise. The 1200 calorie minimum is 1200 NET calories. That means you need 1200 calories just for your body to use, not counting exercise. If you workout and burn 300 calories, you now need to eat a total of 1500 calories to make up for it. So basically we’ve got an entire culture of miseducation, people convincing their bodies to suddenly run on 500 net calories a day, forcing the body’s processes to a grinding halt via some backwards-logic, unsustainable crash-diet lifestyle, and then they honestly wonder why they continuously fail to see lasting results? Or why their body seems to hate them a little more with every go-round? It just, blows my mind.

Anyways, really sorry for the rant there but I’m really happy you’ve started eating a little more and I hope you keep seeing the progress you’ve wanted. :) Some good foods to consider (if you haven’t already) are avocados, oil-based salad dressings, nuts and nut butters, fish, full-fat dairy, and high-density whole grains like quinoa.