On Gentle Nutrition Tuesdays, we share anything related to gentle nutrition. If you need help on your GN journey, want to share a win/struggle, or share something that has been helpful, do so below! You can share anything related to GN.
On Service Sundays, we talk everything skincare service. Share your experience or ask questions about a service you're interested in. Facials, peels, micro needling, and more.
You may also discuss skincare devices (LED masks, micro current, etc).
Note: Please keep it *strictly to topical skincare* and not surgical procedures/injectables (check out r/PlasticSurgery or r/cosmeticsurgery for that.)
On Struggle Sundays, we can share some things we've been struggling with in the past week on our Intuitive Eating journey. Struggles can include difficulty with gentle nutrition, learning how to read your hunger/fullness cues, having a hard time with weight gain, etc.
On General Question Saturdays, we can ask any questions about IE that we have in mind. Controversial questions, misunderstandings about IE, and anything else.
The mod team and other sub members will do their best to give you the answer you're looking for. Remember to keep it civil, respectful, and be mindful of sub rules.
Trolls will not be tolerated and this is not a space for people to argue about whether IE is healthy, right, or to try to debunk it. It is a thread for general questions and curiosity so if you post here you must be ready to engage in respectful and open dialogue. Failure to do so may result in a ban.
On Food Fridays, we share anything related to food. This can include sharing a great meal you had this week, talking about how your taste for certain foods has changed since starting IE (such as finding a beverage you used to love too sweet or finding a vegetable you used to hate really enjoyable), trying a new food, eating a fear food, and anything else you see fit!
Please avoid posting things that fit here in their own posts on other days of the week. This post will only be stickied on Fridays, but you are free to comment whenever you'd like!
I've read:
- ZA 1-3
- RB 1-5
- ZA 4
- ZA 0.5 Origins of an Academy Bully
- ~10% into ZA5
Most reading orders place 1.5 after ZA4 and 0.5, but obviously after that palpitation-inducing finale, I couldn't help but start ZA5 to know what the hell would come next and appease my fickle heart...
Since I've heard the series continues to wreak total havoc on your soul until ZA8, I'm kinda dreading taking a break to read 1.5 and I'm thinking of getting through the rest of the series, or at least books 5-7, before reading 1.5.
Do you think it's REALLY worth reading 1.5 before continuing on with the series, or will I not be missing out if I just read it later on?
If I do read it later on, do you think I'd get a lot out of reading it between 7 and 8, or at that point would it not make a difference to just read it after 9?
TIA (:
On Weight Talk Thursdays, we dedicate this thread to discussing any difficulties with weight and intuitive eating. Weight change is a normal part of IE and it happens to many people, but it can be extremely difficult to navigate so we have created this thread to discuss all things weight related.
Please refrain from sharing numbers, but if you absolutely must, preface your comment with: "TRIGGER WARNING:" followed by the exact trigger (numbers, restriction, binging, etc).
Note: If you are mentioning weightloss that has naturally occurred through IE, please ensure to do so in a neutral and respectful way.
I’m honestly so irritated at how Gabriel is treated by Elise. I feel like he always gets the short end of the stick with her. The least praise out of all the guys, the least time, the least attention, the least compliments… She’s always going on about what she loves about Dante, Leon, and Ryder, while there’s almost no talk ever about what she feels for Gabriel.
Now that she’s elysian mates with Dante and Ryder, it was clear as day Gabriel would feel like total and utter shit and have all his insecurities thrown in his face, and she hardly made an effort to make sure he’d be okay. You’re gonna tell me a fae as powerful as her wouldn’t have been able to get the other guys off of her and dominate the situation to ensure she could talk to and spend time with Gabriel?! Her effort felt very half assed compared to the power and abilities we know she has.
There better be a good ass redemption arc for their partnership because I’m wholly unimpressed with how Elise is going about it.
Please no actual spoilers for the rest of the series!
I'd basically just like some vague yes/no answers and roughly when I can expect to see more of Gabriel... I'm dying over here.
God, I'm such a fucking sucker for him, I love his character and I feel like I'm being completely STARVED by how scarcely he shows up! He's definitely popping up a little more in RB3 than the first two, and now that they're visiting ZA I'm hoping he'll take centre stage a little more... but I want MORE MORE MORE!!!! This isn't enough to satiate me!
Edit:
End of book three thoughts: >!NOOOOOOOOOOOO GABRIEL MY HEART!!!!! If it doesn’t turn out that all four guys are Elise’s elysian mates then fuck her Gabriel deserves better 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 My fickle heart nooooooooooooo!<
On Service Sundays, we talk everything skincare service. Share your experience or ask questions about a service you're interested in. Facials, peels, micro needling, and more.
You may also discuss skincare devices (LED masks, micro current, etc).
Note: Please keep it *strictly to topical skincare* and not surgical procedures/injectables (check out r/PlasticSurgery or r/cosmeticsurgery for that.)
I finished Yesteryear last night, and the longer I sit with it, the more I realize how multi-layered it is and I'm just dying to put all my thoughts in order to make sense of it all.
First things first, we have Natalie, our possibly most unreliable narrator ever, who, as the story goes on, we recognize is far more unreliable than she seemed from the get-go. We're privy to her inner monologue when she calls Doug to get her out of the mess she put herself in with Shannon, and see for the first time that her inner monologue wasn't so "inner" after all... I originally thought this was when Natalie truly started veering off the deep end, but that theory went to shit when we got to see Clementine's footage of Natalie in the car post-Target trip, ranting out loud about her high school acquaintance, Vanessa, which was also originally presented to us as Natalie's inner voice. This puts into perspective Natalie's entire point-of-view and whether we can trust anything at all that she's relayed to us from the very first page. Did Reena, her Harvard roommate, really punch Natalie in the face? Was Reena truly the instigator of the physical violence? Did Natalie escalate the situation with more violence? Can we trust Natalie's perspective that Reena lied about the night she brought a boy over whom she claimed raped her, knowing that Natalie herself felt violated by Reena having sex in their shared room while harbouring immense resentment towards Reena? What really happened when Natalie blacked out and found herself choking Shannon? Was there a sexual element that Natalie couldn't admit to herself, whether it was based solely on a desire to dominate Shannon after feeling like she stripped Natalie of her authority or a repressed sexual desire for women? Is there more to Natalie's hatred of sex with Caleb, perhaps that she has indeed repressed her true sexuality? Was there something deeper in Natalie's mention of feeling like a man and saying she should've been born as one? We'll never know, because Natalie never gave herself the time and space to ponder these questions herself.
Natalie landed at Harvard with a somewhat open mind. She attempted to get out of her comfort zone that first night by joining Reena in the pre-drink, where she proceeded to get made fun of and be singled out by the girls on her very first attempt to branch out, feeling like a lab rat being studied by women who looked down on her and saw her as both a victim of the patriarchy and a tool perpetuating it herself. I can't help but wonder, if Natalie had actually made a genuine friend at school who didn't make assumptions about her from the moment they laid eyes upon her, could her life have gone in a very different direction? Reena et al's treatment of her pushed her even further along her Good Christian Woman path, and I think one of the many points of this book is to showcase that the way we treat people who hold different beliefs to our own causes us to further silo ourselves in echo chambers, making it even harder for us to "see the light."
This caused Natalie to begin her devotion to hating the Angry Woman... The irony being that Natalie herself is the archetype and blueprint of it but lacks the self-awareness to notice her own hypocrisy. She hates Reena because (from what she tells herself) she assumes Reena will sell her soul, denounce a godly life, and neglect her family in order to pursue a career, meanwhile Natalie ends up doing just that, and more. She believes she's superior to the Angry Women in her phone, yet spends her own free time hate-scrolling random Instagram accounts and those belonging to Reena and Vanessa, judging them and putting them down incessantly. She blames corporatism for women not being present with their children while being money-hungry herself—marrying Caleb solely because he's rich, underpaying all her staff, spending all her time trying to monetize Instagram because that's not really a career, right? She can still be a Good Christian Woman if the way she makes money isn't via a real job! She neglects her kids in the moments she's supposed to be present with them and has them primarily be raised by nannies. She holds so much space for these Angry Women and obsesses over them constantly while demonizing them for doing the same to her. Natalie forfeited her chance to get a degree from Harvard in order to pursue the path of the Good Christian Woman, but despises every second of it and can't look at herself honestly and admit she's jealous she never had the strength to break free of her self-imposed shackles and pursue a life that actually made her happy... Or admit the reason she hates the Angry Women so much is because they never shackled themselves the way Natalie convinced herself she needed to in order to attain salvation. She sees herself in them and she hates them for it, but not as much as she hates herself for it.
Many are quick to make Caleb out to be the ultimate villain in the story, but I think that's a very reductive way of viewing his story... Men are inherently evil, blah blah blah. Eye roll. Caleb was failed by everyone around him his entire life. He wasn't given a true chance to discover himself, he was ostracized by his own brothers and family for being an embarrassment, he wasn't ever allowed to lean into his "feminine" qualities, as Natalie called them, and was shamed for his lack of traditional masculinity. He wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, and Natalie acted like that was the most horrific possibility. He wanted to do yoga in the mornings on the lawn, and Natalie hated him for it because of the beliefs she held about others' perceptions of him, and by proxy, their perceptions of her. She treated him like an idiot and believed herself to be superior to him, attempted to manipulate him, and was never honest with him both about what she wanted or what she thought. Caleb is just as much a victim of the patriarchy as Natalie, and they both perpetuated it equally. Shannon was the first person Caleb ever encountered who gave him space to be himself and challenged him, and it worked—he stopped believing in the manosphere and right wing conspiracies he was busy filling his head with all day—but Natalie couldn't bear facing the consequences of her actions or losing the Online Natalie persona she convinced herself was real and that Caleb was integral to, so she dragged him down with her. She wasn't solely responsible, of course, as the only out his own father gave him was... Her murder. Since, you know, a Good Christian cannot get a divorce, so murder is the most Godly alternative. By the grace of God, Caleb possessed enough decency to recognize that murdering her would be wrong, and sacrificed his own happiness to fulfill the role of the Good Christian Man to Natalie's Good Christian Woman. His own family put their "Godly image" over Caleb's own happiness, and as a result, he spiralled further down the rabbit hole of hate, conspiracy, and misogyny, because every other door was slammed shut in his face by the people who should have been encouraging him to walk through them. It's easy to say that he should have had the strength to do so himself, but very few people will willingly put themselves in a position to lose absolutely everything in the name of the Right Thing, no matter how much we wish they'd do so anyways.
Natalie finally got what she wanted when she found herself transported "back in time..." A manly, domineering husband who'd slap her into obedience. But of course, she still wasn't happy because she never truly wanted that in the first place. The moment she'd manage to gaslight herself into believing she was content, she'd try to run away or scream that she hated everyone and wanted to know why they kidnapped her. She blamed everyone around her for her unhappiness and failed to recognize her unhappiness was a result of trying to fit herself into a box she never truly wanted to fit into. She exhibits many traits of narcissistic sociopathy and is unable to admit when she's wrong in any capacity, so doubling down despite her own misery was the only option she believed was available to her. The other Good Christian Women in her life, like her mother, all lied to her about this lifestyle leading to true happiness. It was all a facade to one-up the other Good Christian Women peering over and judging them. Natalie couldn't cope with her whole life and set of beliefs being founded on lies, further propelling her into her eventual psychotic break so she wouldn't have to confront the reality of the situation she put herself in, and that she was manipulated to believe was in her best interest.
Natalie is a villain as much as she is a victim. As is Caleb, as is Reena, as is her mother, and so on. Reena finally made it to the top of the TV food chain and decides to interview the mentally unwell Natalie, but for what? She reads the prologue of Mary's book to Natalie—and she's intelligent enough to know that reading such a thing on live television to a woman going through some form of psychosis will likely have no positive impact—before delving into an hour-long spotlight interview, which will ultimately further humiliate Natalie and turn her into more of a laughing stock than she already is. What's the benefit here, and who is benefiting?
I think Yesteryear does a really excellent job of highlighting the nuance in the world around us and the humans living in it, or the lack thereof. We're quick to judge and assume the worst when the truth is that most of us are genuinely acting out what we believe to be in the best interest of the greater good. None of these characters are wholly good or bad, they exist in the space in between, and those of us who refuse to see that and focus on pointing fingers or picking sides are the very people the author is calling out in this book.
I finished Yesteryear last night, and the longer I sit with it, the more I realize how multi-layered it is and I'm just dying to put all my thoughts in order to make sense of it all.
First things first, we have Natalie, our possibly most unreliable narrator ever, who, as the story goes on, we recognize is far more unreliable than she seemed from the get-go. We're privy to her inner monologue when she calls Doug to get her out of the mess she put herself in with Shannon, and see for the first time that her inner monologue wasn't so "inner" after all... I originally thought this was when Natalie truly started veering off the deep end, but that theory went to shit when we got to see Clementine's footage of Natalie in the car post-Target trip, ranting out loud about her high school acquaintance, Vanessa, which was also originally presented to us as Natalie's inner voice. This puts into perspective Natalie's entire point-of-view and whether we can trust anything at all that she's relayed to us from the very first page. Did Reena, her Harvard roommate, really punch Natalie in the face? Was Reena truly the instigator of the physical violence? Did Natalie escalate the situation with more violence? Can we trust Natalie's perspective that Reena lied about the night she brought a boy over whom she claimed raped her, knowing that Natalie herself felt violated by Reena having sex in their shared room while harbouring immense resentment towards Reena? What really happened when Natalie blacked out and found herself choking Shannon? Was there a sexual element that Natalie couldn't admit to herself, whether it was based solely on a desire to dominate Shannon after feeling like she stripped Natalie of her authority or a repressed sexual desire for women? Is there more to Natalie's hatred of sex with Caleb, perhaps that she has indeed repressed her true sexuality? Was there something deeper in Natalie's mention of feeling like a man and saying she should've been born as one? We'll never know, because Natalie never gave herself the time and space to ponder these questions herself.
Natalie landed at Harvard with a somewhat open mind. She attempted to get out of her comfort zone that first night by joining Reena in the pre-drink, where she proceeded to get made fun of and be singled out by the girls on her very first attempt to branch out, feeling like a lab rat being studied by women who looked down on her and saw her as both a victim of the patriarchy and a tool perpetuating it herself. I can't help but wonder, if Natalie had actually made a genuine friend at school who didn't make assumptions about her from the moment they laid eyes upon her, could her life have gone in a very different direction? Reena et al's treatment of her pushed her even further along her Good Christian Woman path, and I think one of the many points of this book is to showcase that the way we treat people who hold different beliefs to our own causes us to further silo ourselves in echo chambers, making it even harder for us to "see the light."
This caused Natalie to begin her devotion to hating the Angry Woman... The irony being that Natalie herself is the archetype and blueprint of it but lacks the self-awareness to notice her own hypocrisy. She hates Reena because (from what she tells herself) she assumes Reena will sell her soul, denounce a godly life, and neglect her family in order to pursue a career, meanwhile Natalie ends up doing just that, and more. She believes she's superior to the Angry Women in her phone, yet spends her own free time hate-scrolling random Instagram accounts and those belonging to Reena and Vanessa, judging them and putting them down incessantly. She blames corporatism for women not being present with their children while being money-hungry herself—marrying Caleb solely because he's rich, underpaying all her staff, spending all her time trying to monetize Instagram because that's not really a career, right? She can still be a Good Christian Woman if the way she makes money isn't via a real job! She neglects her kids in the moments she's supposed to be present with them and has them primarily be raised by nannies. She holds so much space for these Angry Women and obsesses over them constantly while demonizing them for doing the same to her. Natalie forfeited her chance to get a degree from Harvard in order to pursue the path of the Good Christian Woman, but despises every second of it and can't look at herself honestly and admit she's jealous she never had the strength to break free of her self-imposed shackles and pursue a life that actually made her happy... Or admit the reason she hates the Angry Women so much is because they never shackled themselves the way Natalie convinced herself she needed to in order to attain salvation. She sees herself in them and she hates them for it, but not as much as she hates herself for it.
Many are quick to make Caleb out to be the ultimate villain in the story, but I think that's a very reductive way of viewing his story... Men are inherently evil, blah blah blah. Eye roll. Caleb was failed by everyone around him his entire life. He wasn't given a true chance to discover himself, he was ostracized by his own brothers and family for being an embarrassment, he wasn't ever allowed to lean into his "feminine" qualities, as Natalie called them, and was shamed for his lack of traditional masculinity. He wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, and Natalie acted like that was the most horrific possibility. He wanted to do yoga in the mornings on the lawn, and Natalie hated him for it because of the beliefs she held about others' perceptions of him, and by proxy, their perceptions of her. She treated him like an idiot and believed herself to be superior to him, attempted to manipulate him, and was never honest with him both about what she wanted or what she thought. Caleb is just as much a victim of the patriarchy as Natalie, and they both perpetuated it equally. Shannon was the first person Caleb ever encountered who gave him space to be himself and challenged him, and it worked—he stopped believing in the manosphere and right wing conspiracies he was busy filling his head with all day—but Natalie couldn't bear facing the consequences of her actions or losing the Online Natalie persona she convinced herself was real and that Caleb was integral to, so she dragged him down with her. She wasn't solely responsible, of course, as the only out his own father gave him was... Her murder. Since, you know, a Good Christian cannot get a divorce, so murder is the most Godly alternative. By the grace of God, Caleb possessed enough decency to recognize that murdering her would be wrong, and sacrificed his own happiness to fulfill the role of the Good Christian Man to Natalie's Good Christian Woman. His own family put their "Godly image" over Caleb's own happiness, and as a result, he spiralled further down the rabbit hole of hate, conspiracy, and misogyny, because every other door was slammed shut in his face by the people who should have been encouraging him to walk through them. It's easy to say that he should have had the strength to do so himself, but very few people will willingly put themselves in a position to lose absolutely everything in the name of the Right Thing, no matter how much we wish they'd do so anyways.
Natalie finally got what she wanted when she found herself transported "back in time..." A manly, domineering husband who'd slap her into obedience. But of course, she still wasn't happy because she never truly wanted that in the first place. The moment she'd manage to gaslight herself into believing she was content, she'd try to run away or scream that she hated everyone and wanted to know why they kidnapped her. She blamed everyone around her for her unhappiness and failed to recognize her unhappiness was a result of trying to fit herself into a box she never truly wanted to fit into. She exhibits many traits of narcissistic sociopathy and is unable to admit when she's wrong in any capacity, so doubling down despite her own misery was the only option she believed was available to her. The other Good Christian Women in her life, like her mother, all lied to her about this lifestyle leading to true happiness. It was all a facade to one-up the other Good Christian Women peering over and judging them. Natalie couldn't cope with her whole life and set of beliefs being founded on lies, further propelling her into her eventual psychotic break so she wouldn't have to confront the reality of the situation she put herself in, and that she was manipulated to believe was in her best interest.
Natalie is a villain as much as she is a victim. As is Caleb, as is Reena, as is her mother, and so on. Reena finally made it to the top of the TV food chain and decides to interview the mentally unwell Natalie, but for what? She reads the prologue of Mary's book to Natalie—and she's intelligent enough to know that reading such a thing on live television to a woman going through some form of psychosis will likely have no positive impact—before delving into an hour-long spotlight interview, which will ultimately further humiliate Natalie and turn her into more of a laughing stock than she already is. What's the benefit here, and who is benefiting?
I think Yesteryear does a really excellent job of highlighting the nuance in the world around us and the humans living in it, or the lack thereof. We're quick to judge and assume the worst when the truth is that most of us are genuinely acting out what we believe to be in the best interest of the greater good. None of these characters are wholly good or bad, they exist in the space in between, and those of us who refuse to see that and focus on pointing fingers or picking sides are the very people the author is calling out in this book.
99.9% of people making snide comments towards people with HP books on their shelves aren't doing so because liking HP is inherently bad or transphobic. Are there many racist elements to the works? Yes, but we can say the same for LOTR and tons of other works that reinforce harmful stereotypes about various types of people, and engaging with art and being able to point those issues out and discuss them is how we move forward and do better as a society.
Are there some people who take it too far and claim that simply liking HP makes you evil? Yes, but that is a very, very small percentage of those who of us who are pointing out that supporting JKR is quite literally directly contributing to systemic transphobia in the UK, and social transphobia there and around the world.
No matter how much you love HP, if you have been financially contributing to the HP-verse since JKR has made her views known, you are literally giving her money that she is using to make trans people suffer. If you don't care, that's fine, but own up to your apathy instead of acting like people should pat you on the back and tell you it's okay to keep giving her money. If facing that reality makes you feel badly about yourself, maybe you should think more deeply about who you give your money to before saying "fuck it, I really like HP and want these special editions and I'm allowed!!" You're absolutely allowed, and people are also allowed to point out that it's selfish and shitty of you to do put owning collectibles over caring about human rights.
The vast majority of people who agree with my "fuck JKR, and HP by proxy" stance are not upset about people who have old HP books on their shelves, are not upset about people who loved HP as kids and for whom it still holds a special place in their hearts... Pretty much everyone likes or has liked something created by someone incredibly problematic, and that isn't the issue here... The issue is continuing to financially support them by buying their books or merch or whatever other media or items.
If you bought your books before JKR made it well-known that she's a raging nutcase, no one is mad at you or scolding you. But there is a very big difference between having 10/20/25-year old copies of the series and owning fresh special editions, various HP lego sets, and so on, and continuing to pour money into the HP franchise. THIS is precisely what many of you don't seem to want to understand, and are instead taking "financially supporting JKR is bad" and hearing "you are en evil person solely for enjoying HP."
Liking HP doesn't make you shitty.
Owning old copies of the books etc. doesn't make you shitty.
Continuing to buy HP products after being made aware of how JKR is using those profits to go on transphobic witch hunts? At best, you're apathetic, at worst, you're a transphobe—and one isn't much better than the other.
I'll leave you with the wise words of Desmond Tutu:
>If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.