Julilla asked, “How can anyone have a healthy relationship with food…?” The measure of the health of that relationship is not body weight or BMI per se, but what underlies how food is used. If food is used to manage anxiety, that’s unhealthy just as use of alcohol to manage anxiety is unhealthy. If nourishment needed for physical health of the body is avoided due to an obsessive drive by a woman to be noticed, loved, and chosen by virtue of a more extreme body shape than other women, that’s unhealthy.

We know that exercise and thinness through control of food intake and motivated by desire for health are in fact both healthy – they lower disease, increase longevity, and may make us feel better. Engaged in compulsively to extreme, almost anything can kill you.

Disregulation of food intake is a symptom. The key to health is identifying, understanding, and dealing with the underlying psychological distress, the source of which is ultimately more about families and other social factors than about the women (or men) with problems with food intake. Regulation is about as likely to be helpful as the war on drugs has been for substance abuse, and for the same reasons.

Novella, you said early in your essay that you had decided to “face [your] inner killer”. And the very last thing you told us – really, that you needed to tell yourself, and leave yourself with – was this: that all that you are left with, the only thing, are “all those fond memories”.

But that’s a lie, isn’t it Novella? Because crying over Maude’s ugly death can’t be a “fond” memory at all; nor can being a “wreck: worried and scared”; nor feeling “like an ax murderer”, then “sad”, then “shameful”, a “begrudging killer” with “little comfort”; nor feeling the “burden” of needing to rationalize the killing. None “fond”.

For you, being a carnivore and killing appears to require that you lie to yourself in order to avoid the real feelings you experience, and to attempt a “rationalization” in order to be “guilt-free”. It didn’t work, it never does.

Now dear carnivorous readers, stop thinking furiously about how you’re going to reply to this with logical arguments about blah, blah, blah. You’re feeling quite defensive and angry right now, and you’re avoiding the underlying feelings. Instead, go to your local shelter and adopt a kitten or puppy. Bring it home, put it in your bathtub, and kill it with a sharp kitchen knife. Barring psychopathology, that felt very wrong, just as Kelly had the courage to say. Now write your letter and try, with courage, to write about your real experience of the killing.

The only real question here is: why do we go through life doing things our feelings unambiguously tell us are wrong? Why do we then transparently lie to ourselves and rationalize to attempt to avoid those feelings? We don’t really need the Milgram experiments to tell us, because daily experience gives more direct answers. You don’t tell a significant other that you think her drinking is harming her, because you’re afraid of the reaction, or rejection, then you rationalize away the guilt. You hold your tongue in every meeting at work, knowing (because you feel it) that what’s going on is unethical, because you’re afraid – of becoming the outsider, the anti-team-player, afraid of the loss of prospects.

Novella told us quite clearly what she is afraid of – losing the approval of Mom and Dad and of the social group she wants acceptance and approval from. Interestingly, a number of writers, presumably adults, mentioned “Mom” or “Dad”.

To face it squarely, it’s cowardice. We go along with what our inner experience tells us is wrong because of our overwhelming fear of defying norms or authority, our fear of disapproval and rejection.

I can’t not kill, because I never grew up.

Ms. Traister could have saved several thousand words by choosing to simply and honestly access her experience. Her article (and many of the letters that follow), in its entirety, would have appeared as:

“As a national day of gluttony approaches and I anticipate allowing social pressures to drive what I ingest, I feel anxious, fearful, and angry at my inability to assert myself and to control my unhealthy impulses. The anger makes me want to attack others who do have the self control I wish for. I’ll pick a target that’s safe to attack – not because they’re harming anyone, including themselves, but because their harmless behavior is deviant.”

BTW, my impression is that most women (unless trying to conceive) would not object to freedom from monthly bleeding. But when amenorrhea comes as a result of achieving a high level of physiological health and fitness, that’s a bad thing? Just wondering.

woodviolet, I’m wondering how it could conceivably be that anyone would be forced to partake in a mother and child nursing. Would you be unable to control whether you stared or looked away? Would you be unable to control your own thoughts and impulses?

Despite the age of the child, are you not in control of how you react and how you construe the nursing? And if you construe it as to some degree sexual, then. . . . . . . . . . what?

Will someone also force you to have unacceptable or shameful impulses? Will you be unable to control those impulses and your own behavior? What, exactly, is the problem?