Let me preface this "diet slam" by saying the diet in question is actually not that slam-worthy. In fact, it's kind of awesome.
Called the "Hungry Girl" diet, it advocates for this "revelatory" idea: eat a lot of healthy stuff and don't, like, feel starved and deprived and miserable all the time. (Wow, what a concept!)
Maybe it's because I myself am consistently, constantly, cavernously hungry (including right this very moment, as it turns out), but it's easy to get behind a plan that calls for three full meals and three snacks a day. The trick? Focus on healthy ingredients and dishes that also—bonus!—sound legitimately satisfying, like tuna lettuce wraps and chicken fajitas.
A diet that doesn't call for sanctioned borderline-anorexia, thigh gap shaming, or juiced prunes? Sign us up!
So why gripe? Because the fact that this eating regimen is considered as a "diet" at all reveals a disturbing truth about the way we view our bodies.
I'm sorry if this is a shock to anyone, but every woman gets hungry. Hunger is what tells us we need to eat because eating keeps us alive and stuff. At what point did we veer so far from this very basic concept—food good, food keep us alive!—that something based on this idea could be branded and marketed as a groundbreaking concept? (Not to mention the whole, "fruits and vegetables are good for you, deep-fried oreos are fattening," thing.)
To the creator of the "Hungry Girl" diet, I say: you go girl . . . and thanks for the excuse to eat again. To everyone who made this "diet" necessary in the first place: please stop bastardizing good common sense about bodily health by telling us the road to happiness is paved with starvation and shitty pseudo-food.
Now, off to eat my third healthy snack of the day. What can I say? Sometimes, a girl gets hungry.
Image: ThinkStock
