![]() ![]() The next morning, I was determined to put on my "food writer hat" and make something decent out of them. I grabbed a bag off the shelf, lightly grimacing at the "guilt-free!" label on the bag, and added it to my cart along with some good almond butter. They're crunchy and naturally devoid of gluten. I turned to Google: "Gluten-free toast alternatives." After sifting through a few lists of brands my market didn't carry, I saw where someone recommended rice cakes. The shelves hadn't been restocked after what had apparently been a busy weekend, so the selection was pretty limited. This left me in the bread aisle of my local supermarket looking for some gluten-free toast options late on a Sunday night. I didn't think there was a reason to do so until about a year ago, when my doctor recommended I cut out certain foods to address a few health issues that had been nagging me. I mean, there are infinite options beyond rice cakes, so why bother returning to them? When I finally got help for disordered eating in my 20s, there was a long list of foods that dieting had kind of tainted for me, and as I healed my relationship with nourishing my body, I tended to avoid them. Then, when I was in college, it was dry, plain chicken breasts eaten under the guise of "meal prepping." When I was 17, it was lightly salted rice cakes, eaten so that I could fit into a wedding dress I never actually wore. I turned to plain cottage cheese topped with a ludicrous amount of ground black pepper paired with hours of walking uphill on the treadmill (because that's what I had heard the contestants on " The Biggest Loser" did off-camera). When I was 15, I shifted from figure skating into ballroom dance and was told I needed to "lean out" to look uniform with a more slender partner. Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food's newsletter, The Bite. "Freeze grapes," she once sagely decreed. My best friend's older sister, a volleyball player with her eyes on a college scholarship, doled out tips that she had picked up from sneak-reading supermarket tabloids. So, I finally let myself eat until my body felt full, confident in my newfound knowledge that I could just lose the weight again.įalling into a crash diet was really easy.īut then from that moment on, I was always losing weight for something - and there was always a new diet food to help me get there. I'd get woozy when I'd lift my head too fast and gasped for air when lapping the skating rink but I noticed that both my tights and my plaid, pleated school uniform skirt were looser. Within a few days, I was running on fumes. However, they left this film on my tongue that tasted like wet pennies, which I'd promptly cover up by chewing sticks and sticks of sugar-free gum. The shakes were supposed to taste like chocolate, and they did - while I was drinking them. It was the late 90s or early 2000s, so I just raided my mom's stash of SlimFast shakes and used them to replace two meals a day, typically breakfast and lunch, just as the company itself recommended. I wasn't sure if there was quite an inch of flesh, but there was more than the year prior and that alone seemed like too much.įalling into a crash diet was really easy. I felt the way the new soft curves of my body were constricted by the tights, especially around the stomach. The older girls had always joked about how one of the coaches - a five-foot-two blonde named Barbie whose voice had the distinctive rasp of a lifelong smoker - would threaten them with more cardio if she "could pinch an inch" of fat anywhere on their bodies. ![]()
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