Forty-fiveÌęmillion AmericansÌę, and though they might see short-term success,Ìę of those people regain the weight they lost. That’s because dieting, at least as we’ve been doing it,Ìę.Ìę

We’re made to believe that diets fail because weÌęlack willpower or discipline. But the odds are stacked against a person trying to lose weight through dietary restriction. Recent research has shown that our bodies have a set weight range largely , and aÌę found that if you dip below your natural weight, your brain triggers changes in metabolism and energy output to get you back to normal and prevent further weight loss.Ìę

Fixating on appearance and weight also affects our well-being. A Ìępublished in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass indicates that many of the poor health outcomes associated with Ìęcould instead be traced to the stigma against bigger-bodied people and the stress it causes.

In short, what ails us isn’t weight—it’s our obsession with it, according toÌę, a registered dietitian nutritionistÌęand New York Times contributor. In herÌębook,Ìę, which came out in December, Harrison proposes that the solution isn’t weight loss—it’s burning diet culture to the ground.ÌęWe’re trained to believe that being thin means you’re healthy and being fat means the opposite, Harrison says, when you can actually be healthy at any size.

“Weight bias explains much if not all of the excess health risks in people with larger bodies,” Harrison says. “Framing people’s body size as an [obesity] epidemic is weight stigma.”

The overzealous pursuit of thinness—under the guise of a visual indication of health—has an unfortunate byproduct: the foods, lifestyles, and body types that don’t fit into thisÌęnarrow paradigm are demonized, Harrison argues. When a low-carb diet or a juice cleanse is dubbed “clean eating,” the natural assumption is that other ways of eating are dirty. Before-and-after photos celebrate weight lossÌębut also imply that a bigger body is a problem to be solved or a project to be worked on. Complimenting someone on looking thin suggests that something was wrong with their body before. Harrison also notes that our physical spaces reflect these ideals, like how bus and airplane seats only accommodate people of a certain size. Clothing stores often don’t carry sizes that accommodate larger bodies, andÌęif they do,Ìęthe options are typically few.

“The way [wellness and diet culture] conceives of health is bound up in healthism: the belief that health is a moral obligation, and that people who are ‘healthy’ deserve more respect and resources than people who are ‘unhealthy,’” Harrison writes. “Healthism is both a way of seeing the world that places health at the apex and a form of discriminating on the basis of health.”

Anti-Diet explains that discrimination itself can leadÌęto a wide array ofÌęnegativeÌę: aÌę from Obesity ReviewsÌęfound that repeated weight loss and gain can lead to blood pressure and heart problems. AÌę in ObesityÌęfound that people who had experiencedÌę in the past year were twice as likely to have a mood or anxiety disorderÌęand 50 percent more likely to have a substance-use disorder than those who had not.Ìę

Institutional fatphobia can also affect the quality of health care thatÌęlarger-bodied people receive, Harrison explains. Women with high BMIs—above 55—are almost 20 percent less likely to get gynecological cancer screeningsÌęand have to deal with disrespectful treatment, unsolicited weight-loss advice, and inappropriately sized medical equipment in the doctor’s office, a Ìęfound. That kind of treatment leads larger-bodied people to avoid spaces where they can expect to be stigmatized, like doctor’s offices or gyms, according to research from theÌę and theÌę. While there is a correlation between and health outcomes like hypertension or heart disease, high weight alone doesn’t necessarily cause poor health—there are other risk factors to take into account.

It is possible to change what and how you eat without becoming a part of diet culture yourself. Instead of going keto, quitting sugar, or committing to Whole30, Harrison suggests her readers try something a little simpler:Ìęintuitive eating, which basically means eating what you want without stress, shame, or restrictionÌębut with careful attention to how your body feels. (If you’re looking for a how-to guide on the approach,Ìęcheck out Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch’sÌę.)

“Diet culture convinces us that honoring our hunger, seeking satisfaction, and feeling full will send us down the road to perdition. It tells us our instincts
areÌębad and wrong,” Harrison writes. “We have the capacity to get back to a place where our relationships with food are as simple as they were when we were babies—where hunger and pleasure are nothing to be ashamed of, and where fullness is a signal that we can take our minds off food for a while.”Ìę

Anti-Diet offers a much-needed unbrainwashing for anyone feeling stress, stigma, or shame about their appearance, diet, or activity levels. Even the socially conscious reader will have an ahaÌęmoment when Harrison debunks something they have accepted as truth. Though some of the more nuanced concepts are tricky to absorb, like the ways in which diet culture infiltrates progressive movements like food activism, Anti-Diet is an approachable read for anyone ready to untangle their eating habits from their self-worth.

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John Huston is no stranger to the cold. From northern Minnesota to the arctic wilds of Canada, Greenland, and both poles, this explorer knows how to survive in the most extreme conditions, making (or remaking) history on his expeditions. Now Huston’s survival skills are being put to new use as a father to newborn twins.

Age: 40
Hometown: Evanston, Illinois
Day Job: Polar explorer
Expeditions Completed: Greenland; Baffin Island, Canada; South Pole; North Pole (the first American unsupported expedition); Ellesmere Island, Canada.

Coldest Temperature He’s Experienced: “I’ve bottomed out my thermometer at minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit, so I don’t actually know my coldest temperature. This wasn’t with wind chill; it was standing temperature. It didn’t go above minus 50 degrees for the next 48 hours.”

Side Jobs: Huston also gives speaking presentations and has a flexible job at Northwestern University as an adviser for a student group that coordinates a backpacking trip for incoming freshmen. He occasionally teaches Outward Bound courses, too.

How to Become a Polar Explorer: “I started out as an Outward Bound instructor in Ely, Minnesota. As soon as I got behind a dogsled, I knew I had found my niche in the outdoor world. I was totally hooked on the immediate consequences and hardiness of working in the cold and working with dogs and how even very popular wilderness areas are desolate in winter. Then I got into polar exploration history, specifically Roald Amundsen’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole. That made me want to jump into the pages of the stories I was reading. In 2005, I got drafted by a team of Norwegians to join a rerun of Amundsen’s race to the South Pole for a BBC/History Channel documentary. The expedition was in Greenland and was 1,400 miles in 72 days. That catapulted me from northern Minnesota into the Norwegian polar exploring community. And I’ve kept going.”

An Average Expedition Day: “We wake up at 5:30 or 6 a.m. and spend an hour and a half or two hours in the tent—eating breakfast, journaling, tinkering with equipment, posting on the blog, and feeding the dogs, if we have them. Then we’re out by 7:30 or 8 a.m. We ski in 90-minute sessions, and then take a break for ten or 15 minutes for food and water. We do that throughout the day. When we get to camp, which might be a flat spot with wind protection, we put up the tent, collect blocks of hard-packed snow or pieces of icebergs for water, and make camp. Depending on how intense the expedition is, we might either start dinner right away or have a snack and go for a side ski to check out some other territory. Finally, we have dinner, relax, and get to bed early enough to have at least eight hours of sleep.”

An Average “Office” Day: “I work for myself and set my own schedule, but I have nine-month-old twins, so my work hours are highly variable. Typically, I work 8 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m. I include workout routines as part of my work schedule, because I need to stay in shape when I’m preparing for an expedition. That can be an hour and a half to two hours a day of tire pulling, biking, running, or strength training.”

Choosing Expeditions: “Since expeditions are so expensive and take a lot of time away from home, I want to make them count. When I was younger, I was doing expeditions every single year. Now I do them every several years, so I try to pick ones that I’m motivated to do, that are interesting for the right reasons, that will challenge me, that will take me someplace I’ve always wanted to go.

“I don’t have a lot of downtime when planning an expedition, because I’m obsessed with fundraising, training, and getting every detail right before the trip starts. Other aspects of life, whether it’s taking vacations or family things, go on hold for a while. For example, when I’m fundraising for an expedition, it’s very hard to do any other work, so I’m not going to be earning a lot of money at that time. It’s a full-time job, so I put aside income potential there.”

Dealing with Desk Work: “I started fundraising two years before the North Pole expedition. It’s really about developing relationships with people at companies. We approach companies that make equipment we like and have experience with and pitch our project to them for a sponsorship. It’s a lot of work: a lot of knocking on doors, a lot of dead ends, and a lot of figuring out the best way to sell yourself and what you’re doing.

“I would love to minimize all that computer work. It’s about communication, and I have to do it in order to have a successful expedition. But the physical training and equipment tinkering are still a big part of the trip and parts of my workday. It’s pretty cool—if someone told me I’d be at a computer doing what I love but still get to work out for a few hours a day as part of my job, I would’ve said, ‘That sounds like a good job!’”

And Prep: “A lot of prep for polar expeditions is gathering knowledge about where we’re going and how we’re going to travel there—for example, some places are better to use dogs, some sleds. That also includes talking to people who have been there, going on a training trip in similar areas, reading, and looking at clothing, skiing, and camping systems.

“We have food spreadsheets, equipment spreadsheets, funding spreadsheets, and formal communication chains. Once we’re all packed, we go out and make sure we have everything we think we have and make sure we didn’t miss a single detail. We come up with a critical-scenario list that we talk about in detail with the rest of the team members.”

Handling Emergencies: “I went through the ice on the way to the North Pole on day 47. I tested whether we could ski over a place where the ice had separated and refroze. The test checked out, I got the thumbs-up from my expedition partner, and I started skiing across. It was like an escalator going down, and next thing I knew, I was in the water up to my neck. At first it felt strangely warm, then the water pushed through my clothing and my skin started burning from the cold since the water is about 28 degrees.

“I awkwardly dog-paddled back to my partner, where he was reaching out to me with a ski pole. I’d lost feeling in my hands, and finally, after seven or eight attempts, the ice held and I got out into the 15 mph wind and minus-10-degree temperature. We stripped me nude right there and got me into dry clothing. I dove into a sleeping bag and worked like crazy trying to get feeling back into my hands and feet. I was panicked about getting frostbite. I knew I wasn’t going to die—it was terrifying, but we had anticipated one of us going in at some point, so we had practiced this scenario a lot.”

Most Invaluable Piece of Gear: “Stoves. We use MSR WhisperLites so we can melt snow and ice to make water. We choose a lot of our gear because we know it well, it’s been tested for many years, and we know we can fix it. We don’t choose the highest-tech gear, because how we are able to repair something out there can mean the difference between failure and success.”

Expedition Diet: “I eat a lot of fat. After ten days or two weeks in the polar environment, it’s like a switch is flipped in my stomach. It becomes a fat-burning furnace, and I can’t get enough. On an expedition when it’s minus 40 degrees and you’re skiing ten to 12 hours a day, you go through calories like crazy.”

Witnessing Polar Melt: “What we see on an expedition is a snapshot in time. When we compare that with what existed 25 or 30 years ago, we can definitely see how the ice on the Arctic Ocean is thinner, more jumbled, less stable, and more susceptible to melt. We can see how glaciers in certain valleys have receded, how ice that used to cover most of the Arctic Ocean and much of the Canadian archipelago is less and less frequent. We see an image, and when we compare that to historical records, that’s when we see the big changes. It’s sad.”

Balancing Fatherhood with Expeditions—and Their Similarities: “Our twins were born in April, and it really reorganized my life priorities, which big expeditions also do. There’s a patience that is very similar. On the ice, we don’t control much about our situation, between ice conditions, visibility, and how our teammates behave. Same with parenting: the babies are running the show, and we just have to roll with it and be flexible.

“I’d love to get the twins outdoors as much as possible. We take them outside in all sorts of weather, even though it’s still early in their lives. I’ve slowed down my expeditions and don’t have an expedition agenda for a couple years around the birth of the children, but I’ll have several trips happening over the next five to seven years. My wife is super supportive. She tells me that I better do some more big trips before I get too old.”

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Perri Spreiser worked her way from ecology-loving first-grader to park ranger at the Grand Canyon. But there’s more to being a ranger than trekking one of the most iconic natural wonders in the world, especially since the national park surpassed a record-breaking 6 million visitors in 2016. We talked to Spreiser about hidden side canyons, clueless visitors, and the job perk known as informal roving.

Age: 28
Hometown: Tucson, Arizona
Day Job: Park ranger at Grand Canyon National Park
Where She’s Worked: Coronado National Forest, Arizona; Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska; Coronado National Memorial, Arizona; Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona; Fort Bowie National Historic Site, Arizona; North Rim, South Rim, and Phantom Ranch at Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona.
Work Hours: Spreiser works nine hours a day; every other week is a four-day workweek.
Credentials: Wilderness emergency medical technician; Leave No Trace trainer; certified in search and rescue; certified paddle boat instructor​; degrees in ecosystems of the Southwest and parks and recreation management, plus a partial degree in park protection and forestry from Northern Arizona University.

On Choosing to Be a Park Ranger: “I give a lot of credit to my first-grade teacher, who noticed that I wasn’t the average kid. Instead of trying to mold me to be like everyone else, she embraced my differences—like how I had a full entomology lab set up in my bedroom. Then, in high school, I took a field studies course with river rafting, rock climbing, hydrology, ecosystems. That was the first time I realized I could do something like this forever. When I realized a park ranger was a real thing, it was the only thing I ever wanted to do and be.”

On Choosing Arizona’s Parks: “I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, and actually joined the Park Service to get out of state. I lived in Alaska for two years after school while working at Katmai National Park and Preserve, but then I was drawn back in. Arizona has a lot of national park sites, and I’ve worked at quite a few of them, from southern Arizona all the way up to the Grand Canyon. It’s where my heart is. I love the West—the geology here is incredible.”

The Daily Grind: “There’s no such thing as an average day. One of my responsibilities is informal roving, which is talking to people at the edge of the canyon and answering any questions that they may have
It’s the catchall for visitors. I love when I get to go roving.

“My other duties include cleaning the geology museum and restocking. I give a variety of different park programs, including critter chats; fossil walks; and talks about geology, the Kolb Studio building, and the California Condor. I am on the Employee Safety, Health, and Wellness Committee. I am in charge of park publication distribution. I assist with the building operations and maintenance of the Grand Canyon Visitor Center. I work as a park emergency medical technician. There is never a time when I’m wondering what I should do to fill my day!”

Best Parts of the Job: “My office is the Grand Canyon. Mic drop.

“Anytime I’m in the canyon, I’m a happy camper. Swimming in the Colorado River is deadly [due to the current], so I choose the side canyons to swim in. In those small riparian areas, so much life is packed in to utilize that precious water resource. I love geology, so watching how the water not only carves but builds is incredible.”

Worst Parts of the Job: “The most challenging part of my job is working the visitor center desk. I like it because that’s where you interface with the most people, but there are days when there’s not much for people to do and you get the same question 3,000 times a day. You have to answer it with a smile every single time.

“Even though I’m a permanent [employee] now, I wish that more people understood how hard it is to be a seasonal park ranger. As a seasonal, you’re not legally allowed to work full-time for more than six months. After that, you have about 24 hours to pick up and move. That being said, as a seasonal in between jobs, you have the opportunity to go camping and hiking for months at a time before going back to work. [It’s possible for rangers to return to the same park after such a break.] The seasonal lifestyle is incredibly challenging, but it’s also the most rewarding thing you can imagine.”

Minimizing Desk Time: “I have an office desk where I spend between zero and six hours per day doing publication work; Employee Safety, Health, and Wellness Committee proposals; writing programs; researching; or working on the Grand Canyon Facebook page. The other desk is at the visitor center, where I can spend between zero andÌę4.5 hours per day. That desk is simply answering questions from visitors, or if there is a medical emergency—since I’m one of the park EMTs—I help with that.

“If work needs to be done, then I sit down and crank it out. But thankfully I have open sections of my day where I’m not required to be anywhere specific, so if I begin to go office-crazy, I go for a walk along the rim to rove. My job is very fun. I don’t have a lot of paperwork.”

Even Rangers Use Calendars: “Our day is broken up into 1.5-hour blocks, and if there’s not something specific in those time frames, then it’s up to me to do what I need to do. If I need or want to do extra reading, I’ll take that home with me. But my projects stay at work.”

Free Time: “I try to go exploring and camping or backpacking in the canyon. Sometimes people are surprised by that. They’ll ask, ‘You camp for a living. Why are you camping more?’ Everyone has an activity that helps them recover and relieve stress, and even though I have what I consider a vacation life, hiking and camping still help me unwind.”

Following Orders: “My supervisor told me there’s no place like this in the entire world, and not many people get the opportunity to work here, so I should explore every single day. I said, ‘Yes, boss!’”

Tourists’ Worst Habits: “Visitors will ask, ‘Where are the rides? Where are the ziplines and water parks?’ I always ask people to remember to bring their brains on vacation.

“People also stop on the highway to approach elk, which is illegal for many reasons. They see this amazing animal and their first thought is, ‘Get out of the car and take a picture.’ Fortunately you see just as many people helping us out, saying, ‘Get back in your car. Don’t approach the wildlife!’ In the parks I’ve worked in that are wildlife heavy, like the Grand Canyon, the elk are human-habituated. But just because an animal seems OK with your presence, they can change their behavior like a light switch and become dangerous. This is not their fault if you have entered their personal space.”

Visitors’ Worst Habits: “It’s always concerning to me when people climb over the railing to get closer to the edge or jump a gap in the rocks to get farther out. I’ve spoken to people once they get back and had responses like, ‘Oh, I’m a rock climber,’ ‘I hike a lot,’ or ‘I run marathons.’ Those are all great things, but I don’t care, and neither does erosion.”

How to Talk to Your Ranger: “I may share a few ‘secrets’ with you if you’re going to be here for a while and if you obviously care about the park—if you’re a cool person! All of our ‘secret spots’ are still public. You just need to be adventurous and go seek them out. But if people are pushing me or specifically wanting to know, I usually resist sharing—those are not the folks I want sitting next to me as I watch the sunset.”

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