For a lot of people, adhering to a traditionally held mainstream beauty ideal is not, in fact, the healthiest way to be. There are as many bodily variations as there are people on this earth, and it is crucial to at least begin to accept the one you’ve got, which leads to the next intuitive eating maxim: Consider your health. The tenets of the intuitive eating movement sound distinctly sane in a world where the rejection of entire food groups has come to pass as health: reject diet mentality, honor your hunger, make peace with food, challenge the food police (their station house is too often your own psyche), discover satisfaction, feel your fullness, and accept that your body is your body (its healthiest form may or may not match up with Kaia Gerber’s).

(Even former Goop CCO Elise Loehnen recently posted online about leaving behind “punishing” cleanses when she quit her job in 2020 and “eating like a teenager” for two years to reestablish a healthy relationship with food.) I, like almost every woman I know, can laundry list the diets I’ve tried: reducing carbs, reducing wheat, reducing fat, reducing nightshades, reducing reducing reducing, and ultimately reducing joy every single time. The big trick here is not to consider it another diet but, rather, to begin from a position of understanding just how complicated your relationship to food is in the first place. The need for intuitive eating in the current diet-slash-wellness landscape is immense. In this context, weight loss is often described as an “oops” sort of side effect.

(The food combining–colonic combination is but one of the many increasingly popular “health” trends I have investigated for the book I am writing about the origins and the current shape of America’s ever-extrapolating wellness industry, and it is, upsettingly, one described regularly by its adherents as a “cure” for disordered eating.) And because “dieting” has gone out of fashion-it reeks of your mother, Tab soda, and a scooped-out cantaloupe stuffed with cottage cheese-a lot of dieters have had to go underground, claiming to restrict food intake not out of vanity but because of some other, larger concern, something to do with health, or purity, or even the health of the earth. Really, if anything has changed these 25 years later, it is how many more people need to hear that eating a wide range of healthy foods in response to the body’s natural cues is probably a better way to go than eating like a caveman, or like a performance athlete (unless you are, of course, a performance athlete), or only eating things that are raw, or only eating things that are cooked, or only drinking juice, or only eating during specific hours of the day, or only eating foods in certain combinations and then signing up for a weekly colon cleanse via pulsating hose.

New York Look Book by Amy Larocca