The Hunger Diaries

Workout: 4 quick miles.  Being slowly lulled into sloth by taper week.

“There was an interesting article in this month’s Marie Claire,” I said.  My boyfriend stopped, breakfast fork in the air, and looked at me.  “Which is not,” I continued, “a sentence I would normally say.”

I was referring to this article, called “The Hunger Diaries,” and focuses on the admittedly bizarre phenomenon of food blogs, specifically healthy living blogs, a category in which this blog both roughly fits and consciously tries to avoid.  The article specifically addresses “the Big 6,” six female bloggers who both created the genre and inspired its recent explosion: of particular interest to me, they include Jenna, Tina, Kath, and Caitlin, blogs that—whatever problems I have with them, related or unrelated to the issues raised in the article—I read more or less every day, and have for nearly three years.  In a very odd and detached way, these women’s lives have become a part of my life, and have affected me, my relationship with food and exercise, and my daily life, in perceptible ways.

The article argues that these healthy living blogs inspire and encourage, basically, eating disordered behavior and extreme exercise, due to the “low body weights” of the women writing them, proclivity toward intense, lengthy exercise, and (what I consider to be the most valid charge) an obsessive documentation of every bite they take, all day, every day, for years.

Okay.  First, I think the article is intentionally inflammatory and polemical, and the author clearly knew what story she wanted to tell while she was looking through these blogs, because, as someone who has read many, many food blogs for years, and stopped reading many others, THESE are not the blogs to point that finger at; those kinds exist, but the “Big 6″ strike me as just normal women, athletes in training, trying to negotiate being both healthy and sane in this crazy world of fast food and obesity, anorexic models and body image obsession.  As one of my friends noted on a (long, 20 mile, but not obsessive, duh) run, in our world it is impossible to define some level of discipline to exercise, and some level of diet restriction, as “disordered”—sedentary lives and large quantities of junk food has gotten our nation into the diabetic, heart diseased crisis it is in.  But I will be the first to say that there is a line, and these blogs walk it.

I first found Jenna’s blog during the summer of 2008, when I was alone in Germany, then isolated linguistically, and staring down the long, dark road once again into the depths of an eating disorder I’d been courting on and off since I was 18.  Jenna’s blog then, and her blog now bear little resemblance to one another—then, a thin, superfit, vegan, runner, and yogi Floridian, she is now a food and wine aficionado, more casual exerciser, and a superb Californian chef, butter and meat and all.  The transformation of her blog and life has been a wonderful thing to watch,  as it has more or less anticipated my own life changes: finding a love for food and wine, learning to relax, put aside the pursuit of perfection, and enjoy life; coming to terms with a few extra pounds gained from dinners with my boyfriend, glasses of wine, enjoying dessert.  But even when I found her blog, I was blown away by the idea that such a beautiful, fit, thin young woman could eat “so much”—thought at the time it wasn’t really—and still be, well, beautiful, fit, and thin.  I read every entry back to the beginning that afternoon, and over the next several months, I read 10 blogs a day, 20, 30.  When I got home several months later, I decided I would eat three meals a day, at normal times, something I hadn’t done in years.  I wanted to be “normal” with food.  And thus began a year of the most normal eating and view of my body in recent memory.

But what I found was that, the more “normal” my relationship with food became, the less I needed or wanted to read these blogs—both because I didn’t need the validation anymore for what I was eating, and because I began to see that many of the women had issues that I was trying to leave behind.  And I’ve had my ups and downs in the last couple of years, but I would say, on the whole, finding the “healthy living blogging community” has helped to some degree.  Blogs like Kath’s and Tina’s on occasion express a level of guilt, or of self-righteous self-control, that makes me a bit squirmy, but honestly, that’s the way I talk and think too.  Find me a woman who doesn’t, really, and I’ll hire her to teach me her ways.  But Caitlin’s and Jenna’s blogs, as well as Angela’s, have been a source of daily encouragement and positivity.  Basically, I want to be friends with these women, however creepy that is.

This blog is trying to be none of the above, just to clarify.  It is merely an amalgamation of celebrity gossip, running commentary, and, mostly, a log of how I try my best to live an awesome life in the Bay Area.  Awesome for me means great food, good beer and wine, but it wouldnt’ be complete without epic running/trail running/mountain biking/road riding.  Obsessive?  No.  Awesome?  Yes.

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