ClosePhoto: EatingWellOne of my fondest memories from my childhood was running errands with my mom and stopping for a chocolate milkshake afterward. It was something I always looked forward to. Until I turned 7 and started dieting for the next 20-some years.I was pointedly made aware of my body being bigger than the other kids when my second-grade teacher made everyone in my class weigh themselves, write our weights on the chalkboard, then stand from the lowest to the highest weight. I was the heaviest and right on the very end. Cue: shame. While I knew I was slightly chubbier than my friends, I never thought about it or cared about my body before then. But that event made me hyper-aware of how I looked, maybe for the first time ever.Around the same time, my parents had started becoming more health-conscious and signed us up for a gym. On our way in, they showed me the kids' playroom with its boxes of puzzles and toys. As a 7-year-old, that was really exciting, but I decided that I should get on the treadmill instead. Trying to lose weight as a child takes away from aspects of joy in childhood, and for me, becoming thinner became (until recent years) my never-ending goal. Everything was going to be better if I just got thin.The thing is that I loved chocolate so much, and I missed having chocolate milkshakes with my mom. Sometimes, we’d still go and have them, but instead of it being a joyful experience, I would just end up feeling bad about myself afterward.It makes me really sad now to remember that I was thinking like that at all, let alone at such a young age. But it’s not like the world around me was telling me differently. In fact, I was praised or encouraged to think thin from every corner of my life.When I entered my 30s, after two decades of failing at becoming thin, I decided to stop dieting and discovered intuitive eating. I found out about all the ways that fat shaming and weight stigma were more harmful than being fat, and I started to heal my relationship with food. There was a movement for body positivity generally that led me to read about fat liberation, and that helped me understand that fatphobia was a thing and that it legitimately harmed fat people. That’s not something I wanted to be a part of anymore, toward myself or others!I decided to stop associating food with bad and good, guilt and shame. Eating chocolate for pleasure, something that had always been an incredibly charged experience, became my marker of progress. I found that I enjoyed it the most in the afternoon, like I had with my mom as a child.Your Relationship with Food Is Just as Important as What You EatSo on this journey of healing my relationship with food, I decided to lean into my love of chocolate milkshakes. But having dairy in the afternoon didn’t sit well with my stomach. I started playing around with nondairy milks and ice creams to re-create my favorite shake, but they weren’t reaching that level of chocolaty-ness that I was reaching for.That’s when I came across the recipe for thisChocolate Avocado Shake. It’s made with things that make me feel good. But above all, the pleasure is in the taste and consistency. Adding avocados actually made a lot of sense to me because my husband comes from a culture that eats avocados sweet, as a dessert, and not as a savory “healthy” food the way we sometimes think of avocados in the Western mindset. The avocados make it so thick and creamy, and it’s so intensely chocolaty from the generous amount of cocoa powder, that it actually rivals my childhood shake. (Healing my inner child—yay!) And afterward, I feel so satisfied that I can continue my day without any dips in energy from a sugar crash or the tummy ache that I get from drinking milk.What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Dairy Every DayThe slight tweak I sometimes make is that I don’t melt the chocolate chips, I add them in as-is (sometimes with a short time in the blender and sometimes not at all) because I love having the texture of little bits of chocolate in there to chew on. It’s become part of my weekday routine and I look forward to my delicious midafternoon pick-me-up. I listen to an “Ultimate 90s” playlist and savor each cold, creamy, sweet sip. The songs take me back to a time when I thought very differently about myself, but listening to them now with a different mindset helps me rewire those associations, to a kinder, gentler and happiness-centered place.Was this page helpful?Thanks for your feedback!Tell us why!OtherSubmit
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One of my fondest memories from my childhood was running errands with my mom and stopping for a chocolate milkshake afterward. It was something I always looked forward to. Until I turned 7 and started dieting for the next 20-some years.I was pointedly made aware of my body being bigger than the other kids when my second-grade teacher made everyone in my class weigh themselves, write our weights on the chalkboard, then stand from the lowest to the highest weight. I was the heaviest and right on the very end. Cue: shame. While I knew I was slightly chubbier than my friends, I never thought about it or cared about my body before then. But that event made me hyper-aware of how I looked, maybe for the first time ever.Around the same time, my parents had started becoming more health-conscious and signed us up for a gym. On our way in, they showed me the kids' playroom with its boxes of puzzles and toys. As a 7-year-old, that was really exciting, but I decided that I should get on the treadmill instead. Trying to lose weight as a child takes away from aspects of joy in childhood, and for me, becoming thinner became (until recent years) my never-ending goal. Everything was going to be better if I just got thin.The thing is that I loved chocolate so much, and I missed having chocolate milkshakes with my mom. Sometimes, we’d still go and have them, but instead of it being a joyful experience, I would just end up feeling bad about myself afterward.It makes me really sad now to remember that I was thinking like that at all, let alone at such a young age. But it’s not like the world around me was telling me differently. In fact, I was praised or encouraged to think thin from every corner of my life.When I entered my 30s, after two decades of failing at becoming thin, I decided to stop dieting and discovered intuitive eating. I found out about all the ways that fat shaming and weight stigma were more harmful than being fat, and I started to heal my relationship with food. There was a movement for body positivity generally that led me to read about fat liberation, and that helped me understand that fatphobia was a thing and that it legitimately harmed fat people. That’s not something I wanted to be a part of anymore, toward myself or others!I decided to stop associating food with bad and good, guilt and shame. Eating chocolate for pleasure, something that had always been an incredibly charged experience, became my marker of progress. I found that I enjoyed it the most in the afternoon, like I had with my mom as a child.Your Relationship with Food Is Just as Important as What You EatSo on this journey of healing my relationship with food, I decided to lean into my love of chocolate milkshakes. But having dairy in the afternoon didn’t sit well with my stomach. I started playing around with nondairy milks and ice creams to re-create my favorite shake, but they weren’t reaching that level of chocolaty-ness that I was reaching for.That’s when I came across the recipe for thisChocolate Avocado Shake. It’s made with things that make me feel good. But above all, the pleasure is in the taste and consistency. Adding avocados actually made a lot of sense to me because my husband comes from a culture that eats avocados sweet, as a dessert, and not as a savory “healthy” food the way we sometimes think of avocados in the Western mindset. The avocados make it so thick and creamy, and it’s so intensely chocolaty from the generous amount of cocoa powder, that it actually rivals my childhood shake. (Healing my inner child—yay!) And afterward, I feel so satisfied that I can continue my day without any dips in energy from a sugar crash or the tummy ache that I get from drinking milk.What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Dairy Every DayThe slight tweak I sometimes make is that I don’t melt the chocolate chips, I add them in as-is (sometimes with a short time in the blender and sometimes not at all) because I love having the texture of little bits of chocolate in there to chew on. It’s become part of my weekday routine and I look forward to my delicious midafternoon pick-me-up. I listen to an “Ultimate 90s” playlist and savor each cold, creamy, sweet sip. The songs take me back to a time when I thought very differently about myself, but listening to them now with a different mindset helps me rewire those associations, to a kinder, gentler and happiness-centered place.Was this page helpful?Thanks for your feedback!Tell us why!OtherSubmit
One of my fondest memories from my childhood was running errands with my mom and stopping for a chocolate milkshake afterward. It was something I always looked forward to. Until I turned 7 and started dieting for the next 20-some years.I was pointedly made aware of my body being bigger than the other kids when my second-grade teacher made everyone in my class weigh themselves, write our weights on the chalkboard, then stand from the lowest to the highest weight. I was the heaviest and right on the very end. Cue: shame. While I knew I was slightly chubbier than my friends, I never thought about it or cared about my body before then. But that event made me hyper-aware of how I looked, maybe for the first time ever.Around the same time, my parents had started becoming more health-conscious and signed us up for a gym. On our way in, they showed me the kids' playroom with its boxes of puzzles and toys. As a 7-year-old, that was really exciting, but I decided that I should get on the treadmill instead. Trying to lose weight as a child takes away from aspects of joy in childhood, and for me, becoming thinner became (until recent years) my never-ending goal. Everything was going to be better if I just got thin.The thing is that I loved chocolate so much, and I missed having chocolate milkshakes with my mom. Sometimes, we’d still go and have them, but instead of it being a joyful experience, I would just end up feeling bad about myself afterward.It makes me really sad now to remember that I was thinking like that at all, let alone at such a young age. But it’s not like the world around me was telling me differently. In fact, I was praised or encouraged to think thin from every corner of my life.When I entered my 30s, after two decades of failing at becoming thin, I decided to stop dieting and discovered intuitive eating. I found out about all the ways that fat shaming and weight stigma were more harmful than being fat, and I started to heal my relationship with food. There was a movement for body positivity generally that led me to read about fat liberation, and that helped me understand that fatphobia was a thing and that it legitimately harmed fat people. That’s not something I wanted to be a part of anymore, toward myself or others!I decided to stop associating food with bad and good, guilt and shame. Eating chocolate for pleasure, something that had always been an incredibly charged experience, became my marker of progress. I found that I enjoyed it the most in the afternoon, like I had with my mom as a child.Your Relationship with Food Is Just as Important as What You EatSo on this journey of healing my relationship with food, I decided to lean into my love of chocolate milkshakes. But having dairy in the afternoon didn’t sit well with my stomach. I started playing around with nondairy milks and ice creams to re-create my favorite shake, but they weren’t reaching that level of chocolaty-ness that I was reaching for.That’s when I came across the recipe for thisChocolate Avocado Shake. It’s made with things that make me feel good. But above all, the pleasure is in the taste and consistency. Adding avocados actually made a lot of sense to me because my husband comes from a culture that eats avocados sweet, as a dessert, and not as a savory “healthy” food the way we sometimes think of avocados in the Western mindset. The avocados make it so thick and creamy, and it’s so intensely chocolaty from the generous amount of cocoa powder, that it actually rivals my childhood shake. (Healing my inner child—yay!) And afterward, I feel so satisfied that I can continue my day without any dips in energy from a sugar crash or the tummy ache that I get from drinking milk.What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Dairy Every DayThe slight tweak I sometimes make is that I don’t melt the chocolate chips, I add them in as-is (sometimes with a short time in the blender and sometimes not at all) because I love having the texture of little bits of chocolate in there to chew on. It’s become part of my weekday routine and I look forward to my delicious midafternoon pick-me-up. I listen to an “Ultimate 90s” playlist and savor each cold, creamy, sweet sip. The songs take me back to a time when I thought very differently about myself, but listening to them now with a different mindset helps me rewire those associations, to a kinder, gentler and happiness-centered place.
One of my fondest memories from my childhood was running errands with my mom and stopping for a chocolate milkshake afterward. It was something I always looked forward to. Until I turned 7 and started dieting for the next 20-some years.
I was pointedly made aware of my body being bigger than the other kids when my second-grade teacher made everyone in my class weigh themselves, write our weights on the chalkboard, then stand from the lowest to the highest weight. I was the heaviest and right on the very end. Cue: shame. While I knew I was slightly chubbier than my friends, I never thought about it or cared about my body before then. But that event made me hyper-aware of how I looked, maybe for the first time ever.
Around the same time, my parents had started becoming more health-conscious and signed us up for a gym. On our way in, they showed me the kids' playroom with its boxes of puzzles and toys. As a 7-year-old, that was really exciting, but I decided that I should get on the treadmill instead. Trying to lose weight as a child takes away from aspects of joy in childhood, and for me, becoming thinner became (until recent years) my never-ending goal. Everything was going to be better if I just got thin.
The thing is that I loved chocolate so much, and I missed having chocolate milkshakes with my mom. Sometimes, we’d still go and have them, but instead of it being a joyful experience, I would just end up feeling bad about myself afterward.
It makes me really sad now to remember that I was thinking like that at all, let alone at such a young age. But it’s not like the world around me was telling me differently. In fact, I was praised or encouraged to think thin from every corner of my life.
When I entered my 30s, after two decades of failing at becoming thin, I decided to stop dieting and discovered intuitive eating. I found out about all the ways that fat shaming and weight stigma were more harmful than being fat, and I started to heal my relationship with food. There was a movement for body positivity generally that led me to read about fat liberation, and that helped me understand that fatphobia was a thing and that it legitimately harmed fat people. That’s not something I wanted to be a part of anymore, toward myself or others!
I decided to stop associating food with bad and good, guilt and shame. Eating chocolate for pleasure, something that had always been an incredibly charged experience, became my marker of progress. I found that I enjoyed it the most in the afternoon, like I had with my mom as a child.
Your Relationship with Food Is Just as Important as What You Eat
So on this journey of healing my relationship with food, I decided to lean into my love of chocolate milkshakes. But having dairy in the afternoon didn’t sit well with my stomach. I started playing around with nondairy milks and ice creams to re-create my favorite shake, but they weren’t reaching that level of chocolaty-ness that I was reaching for.
That’s when I came across the recipe for thisChocolate Avocado Shake. It’s made with things that make me feel good. But above all, the pleasure is in the taste and consistency. Adding avocados actually made a lot of sense to me because my husband comes from a culture that eats avocados sweet, as a dessert, and not as a savory “healthy” food the way we sometimes think of avocados in the Western mindset. The avocados make it so thick and creamy, and it’s so intensely chocolaty from the generous amount of cocoa powder, that it actually rivals my childhood shake. (Healing my inner child—yay!) And afterward, I feel so satisfied that I can continue my day without any dips in energy from a sugar crash or the tummy ache that I get from drinking milk.
What Happens to Your Body When You Eat Dairy Every Day
The slight tweak I sometimes make is that I don’t melt the chocolate chips, I add them in as-is (sometimes with a short time in the blender and sometimes not at all) because I love having the texture of little bits of chocolate in there to chew on. It’s become part of my weekday routine and I look forward to my delicious midafternoon pick-me-up. I listen to an “Ultimate 90s” playlist and savor each cold, creamy, sweet sip. The songs take me back to a time when I thought very differently about myself, but listening to them now with a different mindset helps me rewire those associations, to a kinder, gentler and happiness-centered place.
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