Feeding Ourselves

A heroic journey story—unfolding every week for a year—of letting go of diet culture and learning to trust my own hunger.

I was trained to mistrust my own hunger.

Maybe you were too.

We were the girls of margarine tubs and Tab soda. Snackwells cookies. Special K for dinner. Women who pinched the soft part of their stomachs in fluorescent dressing rooms and said, “I have to lose weight. I'll start tomorrow.”

Tomorrow has been going on for 40 years.

I’m done.

Feeding Ourselves is my year-long heroic journey to leave diet culture behind and come home to my body. Not by white-knuckling my way to perfection, but by paying attention. By telling the truth. By eating the sandwich, savoring.

This newsletter follows the actual path of change, step by step. I’m writing four essays for each stage of the heroic journey—the call, the refusal, the crossing, the long middle where nothing is certain, and the slow return to myself.

Some weeks I might feel free.
Some weeks I might eat three cookies while standing at the counter and listen for the old shame.
Some weeks, the old voices might get very loud right before they leave.

I write it all down.

Not as a guru. As a witness.

If you grew up between the 1950s and the 1990s, you inherited a thousand invisible rules about food and your body. You learned to override your hunger. You learned to call that control.

This is where we learn something else.

How to listen again.
How to eat when we’re hungry.
How to stop when we’ve had enough.
How to sit at the table without negotiating our worth.

This is not a plan.
It’s a crossing.

I’m in it. Writing my way through.
You can walk beside me.

Why this is a paid newsletter

This is not content. It’s a crossing.

The first four essays are free, so you can recognize yourself here and decide if this path feels familiar. After that, the journey continues only with paid subscribers.

For $5 a month, you’ll receive the weekly essays as I write them—the honest record of leaving diet culture behind and learning, slowly, to trust my body again.

Paid subscribers are the only ones who receive the new essays. You’re not reading from the outside. You’re stepping onto the path with me, in real time.

You’ll also be part of the conversation. Paid subscribers can leave comments, share their own experiences, and join the monthly live online gatherings I host on the last Saturday of each month. We’ll talk together, listen together, and make this crossing less lonely.

This work cannot happen in the performative noise of the open internet. It needs a quieter room. A room full of women who are ready to stop fighting themselves.

You don’t have to be certain.
You don’t have to be ready to do it perfectly.

You just have to be willing to begin.

If you’re tired of negotiating with yourself every time you eat, come walk this path with me.