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Eat this, not that. This one food will cure everything. That food is poison. Cut this food out. Try this diet. Dont eat at these times. Eat this food and youll lose weight. With societys obsession with food, health, and weight, statements like these are all over social media, gyms, and even healthcare offices. But do you need to follow rules like these to be healthy? Most often the answer is no, because health and nutrition is much more complex and nuanced than a simple list of what to eat and what to avoid. Despite this, rules about health and nutrition are so common because of diet culturea morality imposed by society that sees falling outside the arbitrary ideal of thinness as a personal failure. Diet culture and the people promoting it expect you to pursue or maintain thinness at all times. Diet culture norms have led to a multibillion-dollar industry promoting diets that each come with their own set of rules, with each claiming its the only way to be healthy or lose weight. When access to nutrition information is at an all-time high online, people are often left digging through conflicting information when trying to figure out what to eat or what a healthy diet look likes. As a registered dietitian specializing in eating disorders, the majority of my clients have been, and continue to be, harmed by diet culture. They wrestle with guilt and shame around food, and their health is often negatively affected by rigid rules about nutrition. Rather than improving health, research has shown that diet culture increases your risk of unhealthy behaviors, including yo-yo dieting, weight cycling, and eating disorders. If the solution to health isnt following the rules of diet culture, what is the answer? I believe an all-foods-fit approach to nutrition can offer an antidote. What is “all foods fit”? “All foods fit” may sound like eat whatever you want, whenever you want, but that is an oversimplification of this approach to nutrition. Rather, this model is based on the idea that all foods can fit into a healthy diet by balancing food and nutrition in a way that promotes health. It does this by enabling flexibility in your diet through listening to internal body cues to decide what and when to eat instead of following external rules. All foods fit allows for nuance to exist in health and nutrition. Diet culture is black and whitefoods are either good or bad. But nutrition and health are much more complex. For starters, many factors beyond diet affect health: exercise, sleep, stress, mental health, socioeconomic status, access to food, and healthcare, to name a few. Similarly, while general guidelines around nutrition are available, everyone has individual needs based on their preferences, health status, access to food, daily schedule, cooking skills, and more. The flexibility of all foods fit can help you make empowered food choices based on your health goals, tastes, exercise habits, and life circumstances. All foods fit in action A common pushback to the all-foods-fit approach is that you cant be healthy if you are eating unhealthy foods, and giving yourself permission to eat all foods means youll primarily eat the bad ones. However, research shows that removing the morality around food can actually lead to healthier food choices by decreasing stress related to food decisions. This reduces the risk of disordered eating, resulting in improved physical health. To see what an all-foods-fit approach might look like, imagine youre attending a social event where the food options are pizza, a veggie and dip tray, and cookies. According to the diet youre following, pizza, cookies, and dips are all bad foods to avoid. You grab some of the veggies to eat, but are still hungry. Youre starving toward the end of the event, but the only food left is cookies. You plan on eating only one, but feel so hungry and guilty that you end up eating a lot of cookies and feel out of control. You feel sick when you go home and promise yourself to do better tomorrow. But this binge-restrict cycle will continue. Now imagine attending the same social event, but you dont label foods as good or bad. From experience, you know you often feel hungry and unwell after eating pizza by itself. You also know that fiber, which can be found in vegetables, is helpful for gut health and can make you feel more satisfied after meals. So you balance your plate with a couple slices of pizza and a handful of veggies and dip. You feel pretty satisfied after that meal and dont feel the need to eat a cookie. Toward the end of the event, you grab a cookie because you enjoy the taste and eat most of it before feeling satisfied. You save the rest of the cookie for later. Rather than following strict rules and restrictions that can lead to cycles of guilt and shame, an all-foods-fit approach can lead to more sustainable, healthy habits where stress and disruptions to routine dont wreak havoc on your overall diet. How to get started with an all-foods-fit approach It can be incredibly hard to divest from diet culture and adopt an all-foods-fit approach to nutrition and health. Here are some tips to help you get started. Remove any moral labels on food. Instead of good or bad, or healthy or unhealthy, think about the name of the food or the nutritional components it has. For example, chicken is high in protein, broccoli is a source of fiber, and ice cream is a dessert. Neutral labels can help determine what food choices make sense for you in the moment and reduce any guilt or shame around food. Focus on your internal cueshunger, fullness, satisfaction, and how food makes you physically feel. Becoming attuned to your body can help you regulate food choices and determine what eating pattern makes you feel your best. Eat consistently. When you arent eating regularly, it can be hard to feel in control around food. Your hunger can become more intense, and your body less sensitive to fullness hormones. Implement an eating schedule that spaces food regularly throughout the day, filling any prolonged gaps between meals with a snack. Reintrduce foods you previously restricted. Start small with foods that feel less scary or with a small amount of a food youre anxious about. This could look like adding a piece of chocolate to lunch most days, or trying out a bagel for one breakfast. By intentionally adding these foods back into your diet, you can build trust with yourself that you wont feel out of control around these foods. Check in with yourself before eating. Ask yourself, how hungry am I? What sounds good right now? How long until I can eat again? And sometimes, more support is needed. This can be especially true if youre experiencing disordered eating habits or have an eating disorder. Consider working with a dietitian to help challenge nutrition misinformation and heal your relationship to food. Charlotte Carlson is the director of the Kendall Reagan Nutrition Center at Colorado State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
There is a deeply unsettling paradox in how aging women are represented today. The louder the discourse on inclusion and diversity becomes, the fewer women we see who actually look like women over 45. Women who age normallywho live in their bodies, with their features, their lines, their visible agehave almost vanished from public view. When women in their 50s or 60s do gain visibility, it is often with a body and a face that belong to the strange category of Forever 35: perfectly smooth, ageless, suspended in time. This is not a trivial aesthetic issue, for it has major consequences for work, careers, and power. When women disappear from view as they age, they lose access to role models at exactly the moment when careers are supposed to stretch and evolve. If you are expected to work for 50 years but can only see the first 20 years of that life representedin leadership, in organizations, in the mediathen most of your working life remains unimaginable. There is no shared script for what professional authority, ambition, or success look like at 60. When women in their 50s or 60s are made visible, it is often on the condition that they look 10 or 20 years younger. As a result, women in their 60s are effectively invisiblepresent only if their age is erased. This narrows ambition, encourages self-censorship, and makes later-life leadership or reinvention seem abnormal rather than expected. It quietly redistributes power away from aging women by making long careers harder to imagine, claim, and inhabit. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Theres no point in blaming the women Let us be absolutely clear: This is not about condemning womens individual choices. Gray hair or dyed hair. Injections or not. Surgery or not. Filters or not. To suggest that women are responsible for their own invisibility because they give in to beauty standards would be both unjust and profoundly naive. We do what we can with the constraints and possibilities we have. We do what we can with the contradictory injunctions we receive. The problem is not that women try to look younger. Thats perfectly understandable. The problem is that older women are either not there or only tolerated if they do not look old. As a result, the normal faces of aging womento borrow the central idea of a brilliant newsletter by author Caroline Criado Perezhave almost disappeared from our visual landscape. This disappearance is anything but accidental.It reflects the demographic structure of power in which men are allowed to age as they move up the ladder, while women in the workspace are expected to remain in their placesubmissive, at the bottom of the hierarchy, there to please the eye, whatever their job and position. A double disappearance: organizations and media Sociologists have long documented the progressive invisibilization of women in U.S. organizations, and the numbers tell a familiar story. In Fortune 500 companies, women now make up roughly 30% of executive leadership roles, but this progress is uneven and heavily skewed toward younger cohorts. Women over 50and especially over 60are dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels of visible power, despite decades of accumulated experience. This organizational invisibility mirrors what happens in the media. Research by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media consistently shows that women are both underrepresented and age-erased on both the big and small screen. Women over 50 account for a small fraction of speaking roles, even though they represent more than a third of the U.S. adult population. As women age, they quite literally vanish from movies, television, and advertising. And when they are allowed to reappear, it is often on the condition that their age be visually erased. Across film, TV, and ads, female bodies are toleratedeven in leadership or expert rolesonly if they are filtered, smoothed, lifted, and polished. We want women leaders, but not their wrinkles of concentration nor the visible marks of 25 years of work. When aging becomes a defect to be corrected Criado Perez describes how she started collecting images of actresses whose faces have not been artificially rejuvenatedEmma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Kate Winsletbecause encountering a female face over 35 that looks real has become a rare event. Seeing such faces should be familiar and banal. On-screen, its exceptional. Thus, we have lost our collective visual memory of what women in their 40s, 50s, or 60s actually look like. Perfectly normal featureslines of expression, changes in skin texture, saggingare now perceived as signs of neglect and personal failure. The traits of a normal age have been reframed as flaws. New generative AI tools are making this visual amnesia even worse. Ask an image generator to show you a 50-year-old woman, and you will usually get either a smoothed, poreless face that could be 35or a woman who looks closer to 70. The technology merely reproduces and amplifies the biases of the image databases it is trained on. AI does not show us women of 50; it shows us what the internet imagines they should look like. It is just as pervasive in corporate stock photography, in recruitment materials, and in the visual representations of the business world more broadly. The world of work, as it is depicted today, is populated by smooth, vaguely thirtysomething faces, where age is either erased or reduced to a stereotype. Women in their 50s or 60s are largely absentexcept when they are used to illustrate end-of-career narratives, mentorship, or decline. The enduring double standard of aging This brings us back to a concept articulated more than 50 years ago by Susan Sontag: the double standard of aging. Male aging is associated with added valueauthority, gravitas, experience, powerwhile female aging is framed as decline. Nothing fundamental has changed. After 45, women are expected either to fade into the background or to invest enormous energy into looking younger, but never to sho visible signs of aging without consequence. Many describe a feeling of literal disappearance, what French journalist Sophie Dancourt has memorably called the convent syndrome: an unspoken injunction to withdraw from public life once youth, fertility, and sexualized visibility are presumed to be over. This logic is brutally familiar in the entertainment industry, where womens careers are still shaped by narrow and unforgiving norms of desirability. Aging men are cast as mentors, leaders, or lovers; aging women are quietly written out, unless they conform to increasingly unrealistic beauty standards. The result is not only professional marginalization, but also a cultural message that equates womens worth with youthand treats aging as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be lived. That is precisely what makes the sketch Last Fuckable Day, from Inside Amy Schumer, so powerful. Schumer unexpectedly runs into her show-business heroesTina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquettewho are celebrating a darkly comic milestone: the age at which women are deemed no longer desirable or castable. Made 10 years ago, the sketch does not feel dated at all. It turns ageist erasure into a sharp piece of feminist satireone that feels even more relevant today than when it first aired. Why this matters so much at work The absence of older female role models is extremely costly. First, it deprives younger women of projection. How can you imagine a long, evolving career when most, if not all, visible success stories stop at 40? In a world where working lives are getting longer, this lack of role models is deeply destabilizing.Second, it reinforces discrimination. When women over 45 are rarely seen in leadership, those who succeed are perceived as exceptions rather than as the norm. This fuels stereotypes about atypical careers and legitimizes bad decisions in hiring, promotion, and training. Third, it creates collective anxiety around aging. When the only acceptable image of professional success is youth, aging becomes something to fear. This anxiety affects all womennot just those who are already older.Finally, organizations lose out. Women over 45 represent a massive pool of experience, skills, and leadership potential. Treating them as obsolete is economically irrational. Its about diversity Calling for more older female role models does not mean prescribing how women should age. There should be no new rulewhether to go gray or not, to reject aesthetic medicine or embrace it. The aim is not to replace one norm with another, but to leave room for choice. What we desperately need is more diversity of the ways of aging. Wrinkled faces and smooth ones. Gray hair and dyed hair. Bodies that show time in different ways. Making this diversity visible expands what is socially imaginable. Every woman who chooseswhen she can, when she wantsto show her real, aging face widens the spectrum of the visible. She sends a simple but powerful message: I am here. I am aging in my own way. And I matter. In doing so, she not only challenges stereotypes todayshe also helps shape the images, datasets, and representations that will train the technologies and imaginations of tomorrow. Older female role models at work are not a niche demand. They are a condition for fairer careers, healthier organizations, and a society that can finally accept womens lives in their full lengthnot just in their youth. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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Have you ever watched someone try to come up with a creative idea: Postit notes, coffee, laptop, a determined glint in their eye and a solemn expression on their face? If the idea isnt coming, add a few sighs, some squirming, and the magical rearrangement of every object on the desk. Most workplaces still reward this try harder ritual. This is rarely where creative energy actually emerges. We all know the stories. The best ideas come in the shower, on a walk, doing dishes, or even during everyones beloved folding of laundry. Heres the thing: its not a quirk. Movement helps foster creativity. It occupies the body in a repeating pattern that doesnt require the brain to do too many mental pull-ups, which is why it reliably restores access to insight. When the nervous system settles even slightly, the mind widens its search and connects ideas that didnt seem related a few minutes earlier. When employees end up performing creativity instead of accessing it, their attention often tightens around the problem. They start monitoring, judging, checking. That pressure narrows perception and makes it harder to notice new connections. If your team is struggling to find creative solutions, do not ask people to push harder. Instead, try to get your team to move so people can relax enough for their creative ideas to flow without force. Here are three moments when leaders should watch for and what they should do when they happen. 1. Redlight: Reactive Pause Red-light moments are fight or flight situations, with burn it to the ground imagination at play. This looks like: Lets scrap the entire project and start over, fire off an unprofessional email, or make an impulsive, on-the-spot yes commitment. Perception narrows, patience disappears, and rarely does acting or creating from that charge produce a positive, generative outcome. Red-light pauses call for brief, more vigorous movement to discharge the stress response. Build in a quick change of scene: a fast lap around the building, a flight of stairs, or shaking out the arms. The purpose is to burn off adrenaline, widen perception, and step back out of emergency mode so people can return their creative focus to the ideas and projects they should be solving. If your team is up for it, jumping jacks definitely give that destructive charge somewhere to go with some humor added. 2. Yellowlight: Reroute Pause Yellowlight moments are the Ive been staring at this for an hour and its not getting better days. The mind is running the same idea over and over, the idea of the outcome is sabotaging the actual creating of it, instead of building the conditions for imagination to thrive. Normalize small, rhythmic movement that lets the mind drift. Unlike red-light pauses, which are brief and vigorous, yellow-light pauses are slower and sustained. Close the laptops and take a slow 10-minute walk outside, with the main intention of shifting attention to sensory input, like noticing different types of cars, sounds, or colors, or spend a few minutes doodling the same shape. The plan is to give the brain enough repetition to relax its grip so energy can reroute toward new options. Teams quickly learn that this isnt slacking. Its a practical way to refocus creative energy so work can move faster, not slower. When people step away without technology, theyre far more likely to return with a fresh angle instead of the same recycled thought in a slightly different font. 3. Greenlight: Proactive Pause Green-light moments are when you want to generate new ideas and can see the tank is empty: people are exhausted or viewing the unknown like its an uncertain void. This is where move and think brainstorms shine, because moderate movement feels spacious and supports idea generation. Instead of another conferenceroom session, leaders can take a product question, culture question, or whats next for this team question on a slow lap. For strategy days or longer meetings, consider gifting each person a small notebook for doodling or standing while they think. Making movement part of how your team creates Treat movement as a legitimate part of the creative process, not something people squeeze in at lunch. Many employees discover that language for what they think about a project arrives much more easily in motion than it does under fluorescent lights. Add movement time to the projects creative process, especially for undefined work. Recognize and ask, Is it a reachforthesneakers moment? and then give clear permission to do it. Extra-long meeting? Book two conference rooms and switch at the halfway mark. Model it yourself. Take your own red-, yellow-, and green-light pauses and name them so your team sees that movement is part of how you think. When employees arent generating ideas, its rarely because they lack creativity. Its usually because theyre trying to access it under the worst conditions. The most effective leadership move is giving people permission to step away and trusting that their best thinking often happens when they are given the freedom to move.
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E-Commerce
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