Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with salmon? I bet you have one. Even if you are a vegan or are landlocked, you know something about salmon, because if you are a woman, you know something about diets.

I know a lot about diets. I've eaten so much steamed fish I'm surprised I can't breathe underwater, in some sort of "you've now become one with the fish" kind of way. I've steamed broccoli within an inch of its life, even three inches past its life, until it becomes a mushy sort of stew. I've had "sandwiches" made of 100-calorie bread. I would rather eat a paper plate than this bread, but that's just coming from a woman who likes things like spice and flavor in her food, and plates have more of that in comparison.

One day, I will travel upstream to the land of the salmon and stand on the rocks, thanking the fish for all they've done for us. I will lay down the many celebrity diet issues of People magazine, with the after-baby-weight-lost-in-only-three-months photo shoots. "Look," I will say. "Look how quickly Gisele Bündchen jumped back into shape from the baby because of your sweet flesh. Look how Jennifer Lopez stays so sexy after 40. All because of you." Then I will take a fish out of the ocean, and I will steam it without any oil and just a squeeze of lemon, and I will ceremoniously eat it in skinny jeans....

On another note, what are your feelings about egg whites? Do you ever order an all-egg-white omelet at a brunch place because you truly want to put it in your mouth? I myself have sat in many greasy spoon diners, valiantly shoveling piles of canola-oil-soaked egg whites, or "rubber-no-flavor-pain," as I have named it in my head. I have not enjoyed this. I have stared across the table at my comrades, sporting plates with the most American of cheeses lying comfortably across white bread soaked in butter, idly oozing next to crisp French fries, and I have thought of murder. This is for my body, I think, not for my happiness. Or: You can't stab your friends with a fork and steal all their French fries, but you can at least try to steal some when they go to the bathroom....

I myself have sat in many greasy spoon diners, valiantly shoveling piles of canola-oil-soaked egg whites, or "rubber-no-flavor-pain," as I have named it in my head.

I've been on diets since I was a little girl. Call it tragic. Call it a woman thing. Call it whatever you want, especially the norm.

I know all the ways you can eat as a woman: Eat only chicken the size of your fist or a deck of playing cards (the size of fists varies), eat only the one lone square of dark chocolate, drink glasses of water between courses. We are always saying things before we dive into a meal—"Oh, I'm being good, I wish I could have the pasta, I'm only going to eat a little bit of this." "It's my cheat day," if it's fries. "I'm being naughty," if it's fries. When you ask for no butter, it's to keep your girlish figure. When you push the bread away from your plate and say, "I just can't," it's not because you physically can't, it's because you're not supposed to.

Jen Chalet

Can you tell me, then, the last time you were allowed to be totally satisfied with the way you ate? I think I had to have been about 10. When I was born, Rafiki from The Lion King probably rubbed that red stuff on my forehead and said, "You will learn to eat a handful of nuts before you go to a party, so you won't be so tempted to snack on chips." Women treat chips like they treat hard drugs. "I have one, and then I just can't control myself." Soon, we're making pace between the kitchen and the living room just to grab another clandestine handful of sour-cream-and-onion chips. Soon there will be a chip intervention, people tearfully crying, saying they found Pringles cans in your sock drawers.…

As a kid, nobody ever told me directly about dieting, but I heard things. The women in my life told me how beautiful I was. I heard that. I noticed how much all the women in my life wanted to change their own bodies. I heard people talking about it; I saw commercials; I saw that flimsy tabloid magazine at supermarket checkouts that was devoted just to pictures of women pulling out their jeans to show how much weight they had lost. I understood the end game here. You were a work in progress, constantly. Extra weight was bad, but ve haf our vays of keeping it off.

Yogurt was one of those vays. Ah, yogurt. Yogurt is the kind of thing we're all told, nay, forced, to like. There was an ad campaign a few years ago in which these women would sit on chairs and kind of sexually moan over yogurt. I can confidently say I have never moaned over yogurt, sexually or otherwise. It is fine, but it's also very mucous-y. But there they were—commercials of women reaching their sexual peak over strawberry-cheesecake yogurt that tastes like the real thing, if the real thing were put in a blender and scolded till it lost all its fun.

Through conversations at Thanksgiving and Easter, talk shows, and the magazines lying around the house, I began to learn the Good Housekeeping mantras of dieting. These tricks are as old as humans themselves. There is a magazine cover featuring a low-fat whipped topping and Joan Lunden smeared in blood on the cave walls of our ancestors, no doubt.

I kept these tips and tricks in part of my brain as "things I knew I would need when I was older," along with minimal advice on taxes. I knew I would need these tips someday. Women diet. It's just what they do.…

Jen Chalet

When I was in high school, everything was low calorie or no calories. You counted all your calories and that was how you lost weight. Instead of eating low-calorie foods made low calorie by nature, you supplemented them with fake aspartame foods that were made low calorie by unreadable ingredients. That was the thing: You could eat anything you wanted, as long as it had been ruined by science or Snackwell's or Lean Cuisine. Or you could eat celery, which apparently made you lose weight while you chewed. Everything else was packaged, but at least you could eat macaroni and cheese, even if it tasted like somebody had run a hose over it.

To do this particular low-cal diet, you picked a food that existed and was delicious. Food science doctors would take it away from you, add chemicals to it, reduce the calories, and return it lifeless and disgusting. None of the food tasted like the thing it was supposed to, but I fooled myself because I was allowed to sometimes eat ice cream sandwiches. I also had to keep a "FOOD LOG" so I could count how many calories I had consumed, but honestly I lied so much about this it was pointless. In my FOOD LOG I mostly skipped how much butter I used. In my FOOD LOG I forgot to mention that I had snuck a couple of handfuls of shredded cheese. In my FOOD LOG I left out anything I ate standing up, like spoonfuls of Cool Whip or rice cakes I had sprayed with that neon yellow butter spray.

I think the low-calorie diets sort of stemmed from the belief that women don't deserve to eat real food.

I also ate a veritable truckload of Lean Cuisines. I can't believe I did this. Back in high school, there were large freezer aisles full of Lean Cuisines devoted to every food and you had to eat them because they took up most of the grocery store. Now, the aisles with Lean Cuisines are much smaller because everybody, I think, ate Lean Cuisines and realized they would rather eat sewage. Have you ever had Lean Cuisine fettuccine Alfredo? It's like eating a hot cereal of instant milk and noodles made with piles of construction paper. Do you remember the Red Points? I am not talking about Hogwarts house points—I am talking about eating Swedish "meatballs" you heated up in your microwave and you got points for doing it. Once you got enough points, you received the worst prize ever, which was to stop eating for the day.…

I think the low-calorie diets sort of stemmed from the belief that women don't deserve to eat real food. I'm kidding about this, but only slightly. Like, what if they eat all the things they enjoy? What would they eat next??? DOGS?! People?!

I do think that this fad eventually died out because it was killing us, with all the chemicals. And the farther we got away from the '80s, the farther we got from the idea that you could snort chemicals up your nose and down your face and still live a functioning life. And the big lesson we all learned was that strict calorie counting our "food" wasn't the best way to lose weight, and also we were probably rotting our insides.

Once I was done with the low-cal thing, lest I fill my stomach with aluminum, I tried a variety of diets that did various forms of "it works, but then you gain the weight back when you eat like a human again." I tried to eat Special K cereal for two meals, which I believe went unsuccessfully because I ate three bowls for each meal with a gallon of whole milk at a shot. I tried to eat half a grapefruit with every meal. I tried to eliminate carbs, but found it impossible to do when I realized that pizza, of all things, is a carb! Didn't somebody declare that a salad?

But nothing, absolutely NOTHING, beats the juice fast. If hell is real, the devil hands out green juice the moment you get in the door. You think it's not that bad until you find yourself unable to poop for all of eternity and you start biting your nails just to chew on something solid.

Jen Chalet

I had a fine relationship with juice as a child. I obediently drank out of all the sippy cups of my youth. When I graduated from sippy cups to regular cups, I saw juice occasionally at continental breakfasts and whenever gin was around but tonic was not. It was sort of an afterthought for me. I thought about juice the way I thought about old episodes of The King of Queens. Fine when it was there, wouldn't go out of my way for it, doubted a return of its relevance.

Then, Los Angeles ruined everything. For a while, Los Angeles and New York City were like yin and yang. You would go to Los Angeles to wear colorful exercise gear and eat local organic and be on television, and you would go to New York to wear no colors at all, spend a lot of money on rent in order to be murdered, and eat more cream cheese than bagel. Then we all started swapping spit on trends so the people in each city could get rid of their FOMO and also become know-it-alls on everything. New York started getting raw food/smoothie/ espresso bars. I would hear my West Coast friends talk about kale or acai bowls, and I would say, "Okay, in like seven months this is going to be in New York and I am going to hate it." Don't get me wrong. New York sends over plenty of trends to the West Coast: SoulCycle, brick-oven pizza, and overcharging for everything, but like New York City itself, the trends are always a little bit naughtier than the trends in L.A. L.A. always sends over its guilt-ridden health trends. And L.A. couldn't have done us more wrong than with the damn juice.

Out of nowhere, I woke up in Brooklyn and juicing was a thing. One day, one of my friends is drinking a bloodred beet thing, and I make a topical True Blood joke, and boom! True Blood is lame and juice is everywhere. Nobody's regular anymore, and everybody in New York City becomes a little unhappier under the guise of "I've never felt better in my entire life." Juice is basically this: Imagine buying about 12 cents' worth of vegetables and then putting them in a blender and charging 12 bucks for them. That is juice. Again, this apparently makes you feel fantastic. Everybody tells me how fantastic they feel with all this juice. Everybody talks about getting rid of toxins like they don't have livers....

Jen Chalet

I've spent my entire life fighting food. I've spent years feeling guilty about it. I can tell you it's not even to look a certain way, anymore. I like the idea of "seeing" results, but my body has been on the same roller-coaster ride for a long time— gaining 10 pounds by eating with absolute reckless abandon, losing 10 pounds, gaining it again, restricting myself, and the cycle repeats. I wouldn't know what to do if that wasn't my life. I wouldn't know how to act or eat if I wasn't on one of those peaks. If I was being naughty, or if I was being good.…

Being healthy or getting in shape aren't bad things. I just believe you can love your body as is, even when you are in the process of changing it. I believe you can do this by changing the desire from "wanting to lose weight" to "wanting to gain power, strength, and health." The power we can get from the power we give to our bodies is a fantastic thing. But healthy people don't deprive themselves of anything. Why deprive yourself when you can give yourself so much? Give yourself strength and stamina through exercise; give yourself nutrients and vitamins by eating well.

And I love eating healthy. The truth is, I actually find salmon kind of delicious. If you blacken it with some good seasoning and serve it with a nice side salad of arugula with lemon and olive oil, it's pretty satisfying. I love delicious, creamy avocado, with all its healthy fats and vitamins. I love mincing garlic and baking tofu and roasting chickpeas. I love walking through the farmers market and choosing a rainbow of delicious fruits and vegetables—purple spicy radishes, pickled beets, spiced carrots, red and green Swiss chard, white jicama. I love eating whole grains and quinoa and barley, loaded with olive oil and fresh herbs.

"For now, I will live my life with greens in my belly and a little bit of back fat."

Here's the other thing. After years of fighting, and depriving, and holding back, I realized something important about myself: I love food. There is something inside of me, something raw and animalistic that sees a plate of nachos and wants to house the entire thing. I love food-truck fare and processed cheese and hot dogs at baseball games. I love shoving my face into an entire hamburger or drunkenly making myself a grilled cheese. I love butter. I love it all—from the high-end, expensive fusion cuisine to the 99-cent bags of Cheetos, to the trendy dumplings and artisanal gelato, all the way down to hastily boiled ramen noodles, I love food.…

I am not willing to sacrifice my joy of food to be thin. I will never be thin unless I make a conscious effort to do so. I am genetically curvy, or chubby if you want to say chubby, with a fat tummy and cellulite thighs and arms that jiggle a bit. I also have thin, long legs, a larger chest, and a thin face. Without a consistent, persistent exercise regimen and a restricted, mostly healthy diet, that is the kind of body I will have.…

My general rule is this: If I don't crave the bad food, I don't eat it. I don't grab a slice of pizza or order takeout because it's easier than cracking an egg and whipping up an omelet. I treat myself to something I love a couple of times a week. I don't turn down potato chips, but I always keep fresh veggies in my fridge.

On occasion, I decrease my unhealthy food and increase the juice, the vegetables, and running habits. I work out a little more and eat a little less junk. And I lose a couple of pounds until whatever event I wanted to look good for happens, or whatever dress I wanted to look cute in is worn, and then I go back to normal.

Maybe one day I will change. For now, I will live my life with greens in my belly and a little bit of back fat. I choose to live with the freedom of my own choices, and I refuse to guilt myself or shame myself for them.

I will find balance. I will stop using the word "diet." And I will stop feeling so bad about myself. Swim against the current for a change. And you should, too.

Believe me, the salmon will thank you.

From You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism by Alida Nugent. Reprinted by arrangement with Plume, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2015 by Alida Nugent.

Courtesy Plume

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