DIET CULTURE

Though the Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and non-theistic holiday season will look very different this year, there’ll no doubt be some familiar occurrences. It’s the season in which food advertising is everywhere and, even in a year when food shortages and excessively long lines at supermarkets consistently made the headlines, food sales continue to soar as people prepare to make special meals and amass seasonal treats.

In centuries past, winter was traditionally the time when people started to wrap up their work due to darker days and increasingly cold weather. …

There’s a scene in Mad Men that cuts straight through me each time I see it.

Don Draper takes his son Bobby, who’s not feeling well, to the cinema. Martin Luther King has just been assassinated. The world outside of that big, dark room makes no sense, but inside, Bobby is safe and — for a rare moment in his childhood — has the sole attention of his dad.

Bobby returns from the concession stand as an African-American usher is tidying around Bobby’s seat. Bobby sits down and excitedly asks the usher if he gets to watch the movies for…

DIET CULTURE

What stops rational, compassionate people believing that fatphobia exists, and not treat it as the life-threatening problem it is? Why do those who ordinarily fight against the status quo on all manner of issues — who eschew received wisdom in favour of critical thinking, and who value equality — not accept the scientific evidence of the dangers that fatphobia presents, and become allies?

I was eating lunch in a local cafe with a friend a couple of years ago. The conversation moved to what we’d each been reading, and I mentioned that I’d started to become interested in fat activism…

Those of us on the outside look to the US for hope, and for evidence that democratic systems work — and we need that to be true now more than ever

On Tuesday night, I stayed up until 2.30am, London time, watching MSNBC’s live election coverage on YouTube. This is unusual for me: I didn’t stay up for the UK general elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019, nor for the Brexit referendum in 2016, the reason being that the outcome seemed inevitable for all of them, and I didn’t want to waste precious energy on being disappointed and baffled by…

Dear Norwich,

This letter is hard to write. It’s been a while since I last saw you, and I’m worried that you might not recognise me at the moment. My hair is different and it’s autumn now; spring was just peeking out of the branches when I saw you last. If you’re wondering if I’ve forgotten you, please know that there’s no way I could, and that I think about you all the time.

I miss you. It’s not like we fought and now there’s distance; it’s nothing like that. It’s just, I can’t see you right now. I can’t…

DIET CULTURE

As a teenager, I pored over the ‘before-and-after’ images of weight loss in my mother’s magazines. They’d be splashed across the cover of every kind of periodical that was aimed at women, enticing them to part with hard-come-by cash with the promise of revealing The Magic Secret of how they, too, could transform. Some of these magazines were cheap, their flimsy covers soaked in coarse-coloured photographs and attention-grabbing headlines. Some were expensive: glossy, heavy paper-stock displaying pastel mastheads in refined fonts.

But they were all selling the same thing: some variation of the story about how a 300-pound woman had…

1. Define For Yourself Why You’re on Medium

This sounds like such a basic thing to mention, especially as the first point on this list, but I really think it’s the most important. Once I’d written down my reason, I knew what to come back to when my motivation started to flag.

Why are you here? Why are you spending your time and energy on writing articles?

Is it to make money? Is it to get better at writing? Is it to make connections?

Take a piece of paper and write down all the reasons you’re working hard here on Medium, then distill them down to one sentence…

It was 1983, I was five years old and we’d just moved house. We’d relocated from a large, packed city to a place that was part of the New Town movement in the UK. After World War 2, the government commissioned planned towns to be built across the country, to stop overcrowding in cities. I don’t know the details of how we came to be part of it; all I knew was that I was leaving my one-street world and moving somewhere far away. Not understanding the constraints of time and space, it didn’t occur to me that I’d never…