How to Eat Healthy- By Someone Who Has No Knowledge of that Topic

Guess what. I have to eat healthy now. And I hate it.
But, it's fine because the rest of my life is going pretty well and it provides for a decent topic for a blog post, since I guess it's amusing to have a guide to eating healthy by someone who, you know, has no actual expertise on eating healthy. Is that amusing? I hope so, because I don't have any other ideas for a blog post.

So, why is eating healthy the worst? As far as I can tell, it's due to a whole lot of reasons that pile up on top of you and make it bad. Number one: I love food, food is beautiful, food is not other people, God I really love food. Number two: I love salt. And fat and sugar and carbs and starch. They are the heart and essence of food and I love them. Number three: Food is freaking everywhere, did you know this? I followed like a hundred food blogs on Tumblr and they are always posting pictures of cupcakes and pasta and I feel bad unfollowing them because, you know, they're doing such a nice job, I don't want to discourage them. Also, every place is filled with food, in the real world, all the stores and check out counters and stupid other people eating bags of chips in every location. ALSO MOST IMPORTANTLY you APPARENTLY need food to live, so, you can't really avoid it.

Number four: when you've been eating terribly for a good chunk of years and it's made you fat and gross and whatever, as it has to me, the entire world seems to be plotting to make you feel terrible in your brain area about yourself, and any attempt to change your diet in any direction gets rained down upon with bad feelings because of this. Which is not really helpful if bad feelings already rain down upon you for other reasons.

Anyway. So... those are the reasons that eating healthy is like, an impossible mountain to climb, because every time you get to the foot of it, somebody comes up to you on one side and offers you a plate of fries, and somebody comes up to you on the other side and says, "15 Reasons Why You Suck and Any Endeavor to Change That Will Fail!" Both of those people are Buzzfeed articles, half the time. Sorry this blog post isn't making any sense by the way; I just finished watching this TV show about characters who talk really fast and annoyingly and they're rubbing off on me.

OK. So, I've avoided "going on a diet" (I hate that phrase. Ugh. It makes me feel weird) until now because of (vague gestures to the above paragraphs) all of that nonsense. But then I heard that apparently I have high cholesterol or something, I honestly don't know the specific words because as soon as I started hearing the report my brain started formulating a plan to make myself seem like a Good Fat Person Who Will Redeem Herself From This Fate of Bad Health. Which is, by the way, the worst plan, because it usually leads to a nervous breakdown within a couple of days, the solution to which is, guess what? Warm brownies and ice cream. Just a circular path back to overeating.

The solution to that vicious circle is not where you'd think to look for it, which is, with a doctor or nutritionist, or a health food blog, or that annoying person in the comments section of that Reddit post that how did you even get there, it's just a bunch of guys talking about how much they hate fat people, but pretending they're concerned for your health. Ugh. How did they get here? Anyway. The solution is not with them. Because they want you to be like Chris Traeger on Parks and Rec, or if you don't know who that is, they want you to replace your addiction to sugary foods with an addiction to proving yourself as a good thin healthy person. It doesn't work and it's pointless.

Annoyingly, you can't NOT listen to them, either, because they're in your head now. Every time your stomach growls they're yelling "NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS," which is by far the stupidest thing I've heard about dieting. (That's a lie; I'm sure I've heard stupider things.) If you crumble feta cheese on your salad one of them links you to a Buzzfeed article, yes, they link you to an article in your HEAD, that's titled, "50 Reasons Why Adding Cheese to Salad Basically Means You're Eating A Block of Velveeta Cheese Now." And then you feel like you're standing on a shore in front of an ocean of Weight Watchers pamphlets and chia seeds and you're going to drown in it, so you go back to the boardwalk behind the shore, and as everyone knows boardwalks are full of greasy foods. Back to square freaking one again.

So you have to get rid of them. You can't start climbing the mountain until you get rid of at least one of the annoying guys on the bottom. Your body's constant yelling of "whatever, I'm getting cheese fries" is much easier to work with than the other annoying guy. So get rid of that other annoying guy. Stop demonizing food, even high fructose corn syrup. It's just food, it's just chemicals, it isn't The Highest Sin and it isn't proof that you're a bad person and it isn't the Mr. Hyde you give into and it doesn't make you that character on the sitcom that gets a cheap laugh track for a second. It's just a bunch of molecules that can mess around with the molecules in your body in different ways. And stop demonizing yourself. You won't be worthless no matter how much you weigh and how unhealthy the food you eat is.

Once you stop thinking of eating healthy as the Herculean task that you absolutely must do to make all the annoying people stop hating you, it's easier to listen to the genuine health advice of qualified nutritionists and stuff. Because that advice doesn't have to be followed as an exact rule; you can mold it to fit your life best, you can take your time adjusting to it and change your diet in baby steps. You can, if you want, say, "All right, I'm not changing my diet, but I will learn about what my diet consists of so that I understand what I'm doing exactly to my body." And you can do all that knowing that you're doing it for yourself. Because the whole toxic crappy shenanigans going on around dieting as a fat person is that you don't feel like you're doing it to be healthy, you feel like you're doing it just so you deserve to exist in the world. Thank you, entire mainstream media, for that particular idiosyncrasy in all our heads.

Anyway, I guess this was supposed to be a funny post, but I didn't really have an outline for it so I just followed where my stream of consciousness led and apparently, my stream of consciousness led to a very sappy and social-justice-y place. As I said, I am really not qualified to give diet advice, hence why there was no real, you know, diet advice in this post. I mean, you can't say I didn't warn you. It's right there in the title that I have no knowledge of this topic.

Here's hoping that I manage to come up with an idea for next week's post,
-Ariel