Let’s ditch the diets and the cleanses in favor of a healthier perspective this swimsuit season

As a professional in the wellness industry who has written a book and writes regularly for this paper on topics of the mind-body variety, I know this is the time of year when I am expected to share diet advice. Swimsuit season is around the corner!, I should trill. How to get toned legs in time for shorts weather, my seasonally appropriate clickbait might read.

But, I cannot.

I’m tired of this content, of equating thinness with health and implicitly helping to veil the weight loss machine with wellness parlance. I was once part of a toxic yoga environment (sadly, those things are not mutually exclusive) where the phrase, “You look lighter” was bandied about as the consummate compliment. The observation of someone having shed whatever psychic burden was weighing him or her down often coincided with physical weight loss as well.

I recall having a terrible cold once, but because yoga teachers are independent contractors without sick time, I drugged myself on Sudafed and showed up to work anyway.

“You look great,” I was told. “You look lighter.”

“I am deliriously hopped up on cold medicine,” I replied, and trotted into the studio to preach the good gospel of downward dog. The irony did not escape me then; it still doesn’t.

There is so much to celebrate about all the ways the wellness industry has expanded (exploded, really) in recent years, but the unspoken truth often remains that the worlds of yoga, fitness, and nutrition — to name a few — take their cues from the rest of the world, which is still very much addicted to a specific fantasy of what being healthy means. Answer: skinny — being it, staying it, pretending it happens by virtuous accident of “detoxing,” “cleansing,” or “intermittent fasting,” the newest arrangement of buzzwords apparently more palatable than “fad diet.”

Thin people, beautiful people, people who subsist on green juice and Soul Cycle can be unhealthy. Someone who is overweight can be in perfectly good health. Health takes different forms for different people, and our personal versions can change many times over the course of our lifetimes.

People often presume that because I teach yoga, I must subscribe to a specific diet. Likely: vegan, gluten-free, derived from celery, or all three. I am none of those. I eat a mostly plant-based diet, but I’m not vegan. I like toast for breakfast each morning, and I have a fine relationship with celery. I can’t pretend it has magical powers, though. (Celery juice has been a big wellness trend of late.)

A friend once made me adorable holiday sugar cookies, but instead of being shaped like snowmen, ornaments, and trees, they were bendy ginger people doing yoga.

“They’re not vegan or anything, though…” she demurred as she handed them to me, tidily wrapped in colorful tissue paper. I was touched, and her caveat unnecessary.

“Are you kidding? Thank you!” I gushed. I took them home and ate them.

But there was a time when I wouldn’t have. I still would have gushed, but I wouldn’t have touched something that fattening.

In the most impressionable years of my adolescence — we’ll call them the ’90s — fat was the enemy. This message sparked an entire industry of diet foods wielding nonfat and low-fat labels, processed foods filled with artificial ingredients that mimicked food but were not food and therefore required higher quantities to stave hunger, and scared me away from fat well into adulthood.

Before that, at age 9, I’d become a vegetarian. The impetus for this decision was my sympathy for animals and wanting to protect them from ending up on my plate, but it was also my first restrictive diet and resulted in the first time I lost weight, noticed it, and began monitoring it as a measure of something meaningful.

Which brings me back to my original point: I don’t want to participate in the weight game anymore. Not my own. Not yours. Enough already.

After a long history of restrictive eating and struggles with body image, I eventually shed the ingrained habits of calorie-counting and calculations, evaluating my food intake as “good” or “bad.” Now, I eat more intuitively. I’m more flexitarian than vegetarian. I crave roast chicken sometimes. I enjoy cooking it for our family, the way the house smells and my daughter peers through the oven window in happy anticipation.

The practices that helped change my perspective and improve my mind/body health were simple: cooking for myself, eating vegetables at every meal, banning processed diet foods and sodas, and, finally, thinking about all the brainpower I was wasting on worrying about weight and dieting for this season or that one.

I’ve been a fitness model in big ad campaigns and the instructor in yoga DVDs; I recognize that how I look suggests certain things about what the wellness world values. Brands use these images to sell things, and I’m not in control of most of it. But, my words are different. I’m the sole proprietor of those.

There will always be a season upon us, for shorts or swimsuits and any number of glossy ploys, but our bodies are not seasonal. Setting a goal to be healthier is an admirable one any time of year. For those of us who are leaders in this field, let’s stop couching the language of weight loss behind promises of health and happiness, as if the former is a direct route to the latter.

If we can do that, we will all feel so much lighter.