My Evolution to Becoming an Intuitive Eater

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been self-conscious about my body.  As women, we’ve been programmed from an early age to see ourselves as a canvas for self-improvement.  It’s reinforced by headlines on women’s magazines that characterize fat as something that needs to be torched and shedding for the wedding hashtags that suggest our slimmest self is our best self.  There’s always a subtle reminder that you’re only ten pounds away from the perfect life. Just ask Jennifer Hudson who revealed to Self Magazine that the most important accomplishment in her life was weight loss, rather than her Oscar.  I cringe at the pervasiveness of the pursuit of conventional beauty standards.

Image from Vogue

Why I Didn’t March in the Women’s March

Inspired by a high school classmate who encourages regular “Twitter purges,” the releasing of tweets in draft status to one’s timeline to reveal our true selves, often dissociated from the Internet avatars we feel compelled to keep up, I’ve decided to release of a series of articles that I wrote several years ago, but never pushed publish on.  My hope is to live up to the name of the blog “Otis Unfiltered” by publishing more unfiltered content.

When my mom asked if I participated in the Women’s March, I hesitantly said no.  I felt a sense of guilt for not partaking in one of the largest single-day protests in United States history, one in which many of my close friends participated, one in which hundreds of thousands of women traveled to Washington D.C. to demonstrate their civil rights.  While I struggled to articulate why at that moment, time has provided clarity.