The thing about taking care of yourself is that it’s not just about healthy food and exercise – it’s about making sure you are being honest to yourself. That extends from skipped workouts to a proclivity towards negative thinking. Being honest with yourself is not easy. Often it means you have...
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Brooks Firth
Check out Brooks’ column, “The Things We Carry”
The Things We Carry
Not just weight maintenance — emotional maintenace matters too
The Things We Carry
Stranger Than Fiction
I was reading the New York Times the other day and came across an article about the end of dieting and the acceptance of the overweight body. It went so far as to advocate being “overweight” as an unchangeable and possibly healthier way to live. The bloggers and celebrities who are embracing the fat...
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The Things We Carry
State to State, Who’s the Fairest of Them All?
A friend of mine, Denyse, recently visited Atlanta with thoughts of relocating there. Considering she never lived outside of Massachusetts, she was among those who refused to believe me on two topics regarding my homeland: 1. It is hot. Not Massachusetts hot, but actually hot. We don’t have winter, but we sure make up...
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The Things We Carry
Calorie information hides in plain sight. But what if I want to hide from it?
I had always suspected Coney Island was like some kind of collective imagined place, a modern El Dorado. Much like the subway signs that lead to Wonderland in Boston, the signs that lead to Coney Island in New York make me think of a dingy version of The Polar Express. But what I love...
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The Things We Carry
The Things We Pick Up When We Stop Carrying
I have just finished applying to graduate school. A year ago, I never would have imagined doing this. Not just because I disliked college so much that another second of higher learning had seemed like a death sentence, not just because I worried about reaching for something I might not be able to actually...
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The Things We Carry
The Price of Arugala
So, are we officially in a depression yet? If I did not listen to NPR in the shower, talk to my friends and family in other parts of the country, or look at my bank account I wouldn’t think so. But, I live in Cambridge MA, around the poverty line in one of the...
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The Things We Carry
Sleeping with the Enemy
So I ventured into the unknown, behind enemy lines as it were, and asked ex-boyfriends about naked women. I recently had the chance to ask the ex-boyfriend who saw me through my weight gain and loss why he didn’t leave me after I gained the weight, after I started to lose hope, and after...
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The Things We Carry
Food everywhere … and not a thing to eat
Posted March 23, 2009 | The cruise industry apparently has a motto, “Keep them eating, keep them drinking, and they won’t care if the ship is sinking.” Last week on a family cruise, when I first encountered this endless ocean of food, I had Now that I’ve had an experience of weight gain and...
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The Things We Carry
Wet Blanket
There are some things that we carry outward for the world to see, like weight. But there are all sorts of things we carry that don’t reveal themselves until the unlikeliest of moments. Case in point – I moved twice in the past six months, towing a wardrobe rivaling a medium-sized consignment shop in...
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The Things We Carry
Shiva the Destroyer
We live in a world that is very comfortable talking about weight loss and weight gain, calories and exercise, carbs and fat. What is unfortunate is that somewhere in all the white noise, we have developed a body unconsciousness that no one likes to talk about. Our body is only that which we feel...
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