The results of eating a McDonalds Quarter Pounder Meal after a year of eating on a calorie deficit, and I might as well talk about why "diets don't work" while I'm at it.

TW: diets and diet culture, including describing extreme dieting techniques of the 80's and 90's.

I've been waking up really late recently, daylight savings time is not helping this, and I had an 11:30am appointment yesterday. A normal person would have plenty of time to pull themselves together, but I slept until nearly 10am, and it takes my stomach a couple more hours to wake up than the rest of my body, so I went to that appointment on water, coffee, and collagen powder. And by the time the appointment was over, the McDonalds in the parking lot looked pretty amazing.

Do I eat fast food? Depends on how customize-able the app makes the food. Taco Bell is my go-to, Jimmy John's and Popeye's are also favorites, but fast food is a once every other month kind of thing, maybe. That's road food. And I am so rarely on the road anymore. The last time I ate a quarter pounder meal was sometime last summer. And I should state, for the record, that I'm taking Contrave, aka Buproprion and Naltrexone, as a weight loss aid, as well as eliminating my diagnosed food allergies from my diet - dairy, soy, nuts, eggs, and tomatoes - and eating a "Mediterranean Diet" based primarily on beans & lentils, rice, lean meats, seeds, fruits & veg, and olive & avocado oils.

Alright, according to the Maccas website, the burger is 520 calories, the fries 320 calories, and the regular Coca-Cola 270 calories, for a grand total of 1,110 calories. I typically eat around 1,600 calories per day. How did my body react?

I spent the rest of the day sucking down water and electrolytes. But food? I finished my grandma's fries around 9pm, so maybe 100 more calories, and had two mandarin oranges, total 80 more calories.

So, I ended up eating fewer calories than usual, but also got almost no fiber, and WAY more sugar and salt than I'm used to.

Why bother blogging about this? As an OG Body Positivity girlie with an Anthropology degree who had Obesity Class 2 on my chart this time last year, I find the current Fat Activism pretty fascinating. Particularly the "What I eat in a day as a fat girl who dgaf about counting calories" videos where these women start their day with a meal like that, subbing in or just plain adding a coffee drink with double the calories of the Coke, and they just... keep eating normal-sized meals in the same vein after that. I used to be able to do that. And I just... can't anymore.

Something I've been seeing a lot of these fat activists say lately is "diets don't work," but they just... leave it at that. Diets don't work, so that absolves them of trying. Problem being, since I am an OG, I remember the rest of that saying - "diets don't work, you have to make permanent lifestyle changes."

See, I'm even old enough to remember what diets were before social media - I remember "a Slim-Fast shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and a sensible dinner," essentially tricking your body into thinking it's consuming nutrition by feeding it two chemically processed 12oz protein shakes and nothing else all day, and then eating the current US administration's recommended budget dinner of a small piece of baked chicken, a couple of broccoli florets, and a single tortilla. I also remember the one where you eat nothing but a cabbage and tomato soup for a whole week, nothing else. Or the "Atkins Craze," where you only consumed protein, to the point where it was causing brain damage from lack of carbohydrates.

When people say "diets don't work," they're specifically talking about these "quick fix" starvation techniques that might get you "fast results" if you want to lose 15 pounds for your vacation next month, but you'd never be able to take significant weight off, let alone keep it off, with any of them. You need lifestyle changes - you need to re-shape how you feed yourself every single day for the rest of your life, and you can't set yourself up to fall back into your old food habits. That means learning to cook from scratch for yourself, and having a stocked pantry and go-to recipes. That means meal planning. That means knowing where and how you can eat out while still maintaining your food habits. That's not a "diet" in the "diets don't work" sense like we see above, that's making healthy lifestyle choices. Learning how to independently care for your electrified meat sack, like the Sovereign Being you're supposed to be.

And for the record, people with epilepsy have been eating Keto since the 1920's, and the Mediterranean Diet has obviously been eaten for millennia even though the book wasn't written until 2014. As a matter of fact, that's my biggest piece of advice for anyone who wants to make healthy food changes - don't try to eat like an American, but in a calorie deficit. Pick a culture or five that prioritizes whole foods and traditional recipes in their daily food system that you really enjoy eating cuisine from. And find cooking content creators from that country demonstrating what they're actually feeding their families on a daily basis. And learn their recipes, start to incorporate them into your meal rotation, keep the ingredients to make them on hand.

WIX is riding the technical struggle bus today, and I just took a pause to reload this post, finally (at 12:45pm! Damn, McDonalds...) eat my usual breakfast of dairy-free yogurt, flax seed meal, and raw honey from my neighbor's hives before taking my meds. I also brewed a pot of masala chai, and discovered my sprouting jar lid just delivered, so I put a cup of lentils on to sprout, which I'm excited to eat in a homemade flatbread wrap with all kinds of sauces and spreads. As I was doing this, I was describing Japanese-style rice in tea broth to my grandma as a way to serve the smoked salmon we picked up yesterday. Lifestyle changes. Learning from cultures that prioritize whole foods. And taking responsibility for yourself.

That's the other thing I hear so much, "I tried [diet and/or exercise] and it didn't work." Okay, but did you fight to find out why? Did you get tested for food allergies or try an elimination diet to see if there's a particular food that's at the root of your symptoms? Did you try therapy or any other treatment for any neuro/psychological issues that could be contributing to your failure here? Did you just jump into a full exercise routine right off the bat, injure yourself, and not recalibrate your routine so you could build your strength and endurance slowly? Before you "but..." me here, I learned to strength train at a fibromyalgia pain clinic, where I was also diagnosed with non-EDS joint hypermobility. The method is called "greasing the groove." It trains your nerves as it trains your muscles, so even a brain with Central Sensitization Syndrome like mine finally realizes what you're doing is a safe move. And it trains your muscles at a reasonable pace, so you'll see fast results without injuring yourself. I lost 29" total and got buff af using this method with multiple physical disabilities. Y'all always talk about how healthy you are...

And as for the people who are mad that people who were into "fat activism" are now going on GLP-1s or hitting the gym, because they profited off of being fat as a fat activist influencer on TikTok and now they're going to just cast off that identity... repeat after me, feminists: MY BODY, MY CHOICE. You only get to make decisions about your own physical form, not anyone else's. And I hate to break it to you, but being bitter about someone's personal choice about their own body just comes off as you being mad that they're proving that you can do it, too, no matter how much you claim you can't.

OG Body Positivity is about loving yourself, no matter what. Let's just say that Acts of Service is your body's primary Love Language. Feeding yourself nutritionally dense food and moving your body in functional ways is an act of love. And if the result of that self-love is fat loss, that is not a "betrayal of the movement," that's being fully successful in your Acts of Service, you're seeing real world results of loving yourself enough to care for yourself in real ways. And you get the benefit of living in a strong body with all the tools at hand to function correctly, which, trust me here as a person with MANY chronic physical disabilities that have nothing to do with my weight or my general overall "soft bits" health, makes a massive difference in your life experience.

I'm 100% for everyone doing whatever they want with their body, but let's at least be real in the discourse about it.