I’m excited to share two things with you this week:
The replay of my live conversation with Alicia Kennedy about her new book, On Eating: The Making & Unmaking of My Appetites. This book has rocketed to the top of my favorites list; it is both a beautifully written and structured memoir about her relationship to food throughout her life, and an education on food systems and history. I (sorry) devoured it.
Fun fact: Alicia is the first person I ever interviewed for Body Type, back in 2022, only a few months after I started it. You can check that written Q&A out here.
Alicia and I talked about things like:
How she decided on the (stunning) first line of On Eating
How the book might convince people who “aren’t ‘foodies’” or who “don’t care about food” to think about their relationship to it more deeply
What it was like to grow up in a home without relentless diet culture pressure (lucky, can’t relate)
Given that On Eating focuses on the author’s personal relationship to eating and food, it naturally brought up another author’s (me) history with the same.
My book, The Forever Project, offers an argument and a philosophy about exercise: It is not only for shaping your body, it is for expanding your life.
I write of how exercise, of any kind, can offer you transferable skills—or personality traits, if you like—that you cultivate in fitness spaces and then bring to all your other experiences. I argue that movement can make you more curious, compassionate, resilient, perceptive, and more (each chapter is about one of these character traits!)
The book is a practical guide to how to start exercise (or start again, or relate more deeply to it) and stick with it forever, but it is also a memoir of my relationship to it. My relationship to food, though, came first.
Before I was someone who hated exercise, and before I was someone who came to love it, I was someone who loved to eat. Like Alicia writes of herself: “As a girl, I ate like a king.” We joked during our discussion about our early appetites. I told her that I drove my mom crazy because I was a 10-year-old who didn’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; I wanted cured meats and olives for a snack. My mom’s family is Italian-American, and rich food served in colossal quantities was central to my childhood holidays and Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s house.
But then, as I grew into a girl who was big in all ways, I learned that my appetite was apparently a problem. This is what led to the disordered eating that robbed me of an adolescence and was destroying my physical and mental health by the time I was 19. Exercise, particularly strength training, is what gave those back to me (and then some), and is what helped me develop a different—and joyful again—relationship with my appetite and eating.
As I was writing The Forever Project, I had to begin at the beginning, as they say. The beginning of my troubles with my body, then my healing about my body, then this writing career I’ve established: it all comes back to eating and appetite.
So here is a sneak peek into The Forever Project, an excerpt from Chapter 1, which is titled “Vital Signs: How exercise brings you to life.”
Please upgrade to a paid subscription ($5 month, $50/year) to read the whole excerpt, or:
Email me your proof of purchase at mikala.jamison@gmail.com, with the subject line “Chapter.” Onto the excerpt1…
I hope you’ve never heard of a dish called “Fancy Pants.”
If it’s a known entity, don’t tell me. I submit it to the historical record as my mother’s invention that she made for me on my birthday every year. Fancy Pants consists of two burger patties with American cheese melted between them, covered with mashed potatoes and baked beans. Fancy Pants is a sloppy temple of lowbrow indulgence with an ironic moniker and a transcendent taste. How could such a mélange be anything but? My perpetually tiny mother was often on a diet—and would sometimes encourage me to be on one, too—so birthday Fancy Pants was served with her implicit declaration: To hell with it. To hell with Atkins and the fear of saturated fats. To hell with everything but contentment on this day that is all about you, and I’m so glad you exist.
Fancy Pants is my most sharply defined example of food as love. But when I was living at home and my mom would make it for me, I was also learning that women aren’t supposed to love food like this. We can tuck in only after declaring that we are transgressing and we know it. If we eat food like this, we must acknowledge that we are doing wrong, we are being bad. I think of every office in which I’ve ever worked, how when someone would bring donuts or cookies the women would fall all over themselves to proclaim they shouldn’t take one, that they were breaking their Weight Watchers or their keto or their Whole30 and their trainer could never know about this. The men would just take one.
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