We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of pandemic lockdown. I spent the weekend thinking about the enormity of this, and about hard anniversaries in general. Hard anniversaries mark the passage of time since death, loss, breakups, or other traumatic personal events. We all have some of these in addition to the happier anniversaries in our lives. A close friend from college jokes with me that I have a lousy track record with springtime, and it’s true. As crazy as it probably…

On Monday morning, I realized that it was National Eating Disorders Awareness Week 2021, and I had completely forgotten about it. This came as no surprise, given how scatterbrained and forgetful I’ve been through all of quarantine. So I’m forgoing the usual musings and link roundup today to say something about recovery, especially as it relates to this unprecedented year. My private practice is mostly focused on eating disorders and their afterlives, which means that I have a sense of how triggering the…

Last Saturday, my yoga teachers arranged to have David Swenson talk to our community about teaching and practicing yoga. He had many encouraging, insightful things to tell us. One of his responses during the Q&A part of the class really stuck with me. A member of our community shared that she had twin boys over the summer. Since then, it’s been hard to reconnect with her practice for obvious reasons: the demands of caring for two infants that had been in the NICU…

I woke up thinking about Valentine’s Day a year ago today. I’d been a little mopey that morning; I love Valentine’s Day in all of its Hallmark holiday corniness, and I was longing for the presence of a special somebody in my life. My yoga teacher invited me to join some of her teacher trainees for a special part of their curriculum that evening. They’d be making garlands with fresh flowers, sharing candy, talking about Bhakti. She assured me it would be low-key…

I think I’ve mentioned that cooking has been unpredictable this year. Sure, I’ve made dishes that were successful (as in, I liked the way they tasted, the recipes turned out more than once, they weren’t too laborious to make). But this has also been a year of recipe fails. I can’t remember the last time since I taught myself how to cook in my twenties that I’ve had so many culinary flops. Sometimes things haven’t worked out technically: odd texture, wrong cooking time,…

Four or five years ago, I had breakfast with my friend Kim. We were chatting about cookbooks and cookbook writing. I told her that I had criticisms, looking back, of my first cookbook. It isn’t the fact that the book focuses on raw foods. It’s true that the recipes in there aren’t really reflective of how I eat now, or my nutrition philosophy overall. But that’s OK. We grow, we change. In some ways, it’s nice to have that book as a record…

First, a thank you for the kind comments and wishes last week, as I was venting about hitting a wall. That mood carried right through the early part of the past week. By Tuesday evening, I felt as though I was only a few millimeters away from a good, old-fashioned meltdown. And then it was Wednesday. And there was the inauguration, and Amanda Gorman’s beautiful poem, “The Hill We Climb,” and a sense of relief that was more profound than I expected it…