Playing Pinterest Bingo!

Hello, harpies! It's time for another round of everyone's faaaaavorite game, Pinterest Bingo!!!

Today's image is this stunner:


Are you ready? LET'S GO!

1. "Every guy thinks" BZZZZT. Guys are not a monolith. They do not all think the same thing. The idea that guys all think the same thing in this case is based on the assumption that all guys are straight, cisgendered, and thinking about girls. Hello patriarchy, how are you?



2. "that every girls' dream is to find the perfect guy." BZZZZT. As above, girls are not a monolith.
   



3. Also, calling women "girls" is infantilizing. There are many things to recommend girls! Small children can be really fun! However, adult women are not small children! They have significant differences in their mental and physical capacities. Using the same term for six-year-olds and thirty-six-year-olds erases those differences and builds a base of support for treating women as if they just don't know their own minds, they aren't logical, they can't make decisions on their own, they just need someone to take care of them... see also the recent push of anti-choice legislation surrounding mandatory ultrasound before abortion. It's predicated on the opinion that IF ONLY WOMEN KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING! LET'S GIVE THEM MORE INFORMATION! Which ignores the fact that um, yeah, people getting abortions? Know what they're doing. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE DOING IT.



4. Women do not exist for men, or to find men, or to date/fuck/sleep with/marry men. Many women do these things! They are not the end-all, be-all of women's existence.
   
   
5. "every girls dream is to eat without getting fat!" Hello fat hate my old friend!
   
   Leaving aside the repeated use of "girl", leaving aside the non-standard grammar, leaving aside the assumed monolith, we're left with "women dream of eating without getting fat." The thing of it is, I have known people who have actually yearned for this. The question becomes, why? Oh, perhaps it's because we live in a society that clearly privileges thin-ness, conflates it with health, and are awash in messages that fat kills. I'm not even talking about the subtle messages here, I'm talking about the blunt messages that fat kills.
   
   Thanks for your FIRST PAGE OF RESULTS, Google.
   
   So again, leaving aside the subtle messages about "increasing your health" and such, when you are told that fat kills, and you see fat people made fun of and stigmatized (see: every fat joke, ever), it's adaptive behavior to not want to be fat. It is! It lessens the stigma you face, and if you buy the message that fat will kill you, then clearly it'll keep you alive longer.
   
   Flaw number one, though is, you're going to die anyway. You are! Fact of life!
   
   Flaw number two is that a lot of the science on weight and fat are pretty fucking wrong! If you haven't already, I recommend reading Junkfood Science. There aren't super-recent updates, but there are a lot of takedowns of the common things we're told about fat and weight there. I also strongly recommend Fat Nutritionist. No, really, go read her blog NOW. It's amazing.
   
   So yeah, this is actually a common dream. However, it's not universal, and it's straight up fat hate.
   
   It also plays in to sexism - if you're obsessed with how you look, and making sure you don't eat too much and don't get fat, you literally do not have the brain power to deal with other things, like ohhhhhhh fighting the good fight against restrictive anti-choice legislation. (No, really - when you're hungry (and if you're on a diet so you don't get fat or become not-fat, you're hungry, since you're literally starving yourself) your capacity for thought is diminished.)
   
   And like we've detailed here before, images like this just propagate these memes. How many people see this and laugh because well DUH, of course it's true!
   
   It's really, really not, though.
   
   So yup, BINGO.
   
   

Intuitive Eating

Intuitive Eating Principles

• Reject the Diet Mentality. Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

• Honor Your Hunger. Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.

• Make Peace with Food. Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.

• Challenge the Food Police. Scream a loud "NO" to thoughts in your head that declare you're "good" for eating under 1000 calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

• Respect Your Fullness. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?

• Discover the Satisfaction Factor. The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence--the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you've had "enough".

• Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food. Find ways to comfort , nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

• Respect Your Body. Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.

• Exercise--Feel the Difference. Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it's usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.

• Honor Your Health--Gentle Nutrition. Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well. Remember that you don't have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.

from What Is Intuitive Eating?