Ingrid Michelsen Miller
Diet Recovery and Weight-Neutral Life Coach
Certifications: Center for Weight Neutral Coaching and SheRecovers Coach Training
Completed life coaching coursework at Academy for Coaching Excellence.
How I Got Here.
It was 2014 and I should have loved my life. I was 41, newly married, and had a great career in online advertising. But the puzzle pieces weren’t fitting together. For all of my adult years I’d spent a ton of mental and emotional energy on securing what I considered the ultimate validation for a fat woman: a man who loved me enough to marry me. In what seemed like a cruel twist of fate, winning that prize was the thing that was tipping me over into despair.
When I wasn’t flying around the world for work I spent the early evenings of my newly-married life on the front porch of our tiny West Seattle house cradling a giant wine tumbler in one hand and scrolling through Facebook with the other. When one of those hands became free, it held a lit American Spirit because I hadn’t really quit smoking, despite trying to quit a million times. I still hated my body even though it was no longer fashionable to say so. I’ve hated my body since I was five years old and have lost and gained at least three hundred pounds in my lifetime using every diet and purging routine known to humankind. At 41 I had settled on semi-strictly adhering to a low-carb diet to maintain my wedding weight, but my diet restrictions meant I ate my steak salads alone - my new husband had the gall to eat whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
A year and a half of marriage flew by and my clearest memory of that time is just me, alone, on the porch drinking wine, calling friends, clicking “like.” I was miserable and somehow I thought it was my husband’s fault. I’d tumble into the house and pick fights and then feel angry when my husband didn’t fix everything that was so clearly wrong with him and us. My nightly wine habit made my memory foggy. Most mornings, at home or on the road, I had an overwhelming sense of foreboding that something bad had happened or was about to happen, but I couldn’t pinpoint the source. After a few half-hearted attempts to slow down my daily, solo wine-drinking I had to acknowledge the truth: despite still being fat, exercising almost never, and still smoking cigarettes, my most immediate problem was my growing addiction to alcohol.
After a handful of re-sets on a New Year’s resolution, I quit drinking on April 15th, 2016. The immense relief that came after 30 days of continuous sobriety led me to quit smoking one last time. And quitting both at once led to snacking, which ramped startlingly quickly to what I considered near-constant binging. I was eating a lot and I panicked. It occurred to me that I’d probably prefer to be divorced and dead inside (or even dead-dead) from booze and cigarettes than get even fatter.
I wasn’t alone. Five percent of respondents to a Yale obesity study said they would choose losing a limb over being fat (and 30 percent said they’d rather become an alcoholic).(1) But after some sober time it finally occurred to me that being born an anxious, fat little girl in a world that arbitrarily glorifies thinness was the real problem. I was led to believe that I was ugly because I was fat, and worse - that it was some sort of choice. I started smoking at 14 to have something to do with my mouth that wasn’t eating. And later, in college, related perverse logic led me to drink regularly (ahhh, temporary freedom from my inhibitions and body hatred).
After college graduation in 1995 I moved to San Francisco for an internship at Mother Jones Magazine, which led me to work in the budding web design and digital publishing world. I accidentally wound up with a pretty good career in online advertising, which dropped me into a world of similarly ambitious, hard-partying women who became my instant-friends. We were fabulous career women— single, stylish and quite boozy. I had found my people.
When I decided to quit drinking, some of my worst fears came true. I was setting myself apart from my friends and co-workers - mostly in a bad way. It was suddenly difficult to connect with sales prospects and peers without booze, and, to make matters worse, I felt like I was getting fatter every day. It all seemed like a hopelessly terrible decision, and I almost went back to drinking and smoking.
But I didn’t. Instead I threw a hail-Mary and signed up for Isabel Foxen Duke’s Master Class “Stop Fighting Food”, and it truly transformed me and my life.
Quitting drinking and dieting didn’t make me super popular, but it did make me truly free. I want to help other women connect these dots in their own lives and discover the freedom and power available to us all if we shrug off (wrong-headed) societal expectations and live according to our bodies’ solid, instinctive guidance.
Now, after four and a half years of living alcohol, cigarette, and diet free - despite eating a pint of ice cream three days a week for the first couple of years - I am about the same weight I was when I started. My weight fluctuates a little up and down with the seasons (and COVID lifestyle changes), but I can always wear all of my clothing. I exercise pretty regularly and I eat everything I want, whenever I want - including traditionally “healthy” foods. My body size is what it will be. And I’m the happiest, and healthiest, I’ve ever been.
TONS of research studies tell us that diets really don’t work. In fact, dieting (restriction) appears to be the root cause of binges and permanent weight gain. (3) Our broad cultural understanding of human beings’ ability to actually control our body size - beyond a certain range around our set-point weight - is just patently wrong. And yet we still tell people every day that they can permanently lose weight if they just “try this one thing” or “adopt this one lifestyle shift” or “try harder, for a longer period of time.” Even weight loss surgery is proving to deliver only temporary weight loss (and permanent digestive and organ failures - or death). And weight-loss surgery is now linked to increased chances of developing alcohol addiction. (4)
But despite these facts which have been observed and proven over and over again, American culture is wildly uncomfortable with women (and men!) not expending energy on keeping their weight within an idealized range.
When you quit smoking, people jump up and down and tell you how proud they are of you. When you quit drinking, people look at you with a sad, worried face and say “oh you don’t really have a problem - why can’t you just moderate?” Knowing the horrifying death toll and negative health consequences of excessive drinking (2) - I found the contrast in responses really irritating - though understandable. But when I quit trying to lose weight no one understood what that even meant. And no one wanted to say what they were thinking-- “oh, so you’re giving up,” or “oh, so your health doesn’t matter to you anymore,” or “wow, that’s great for you but I don’t have that option - if I give up my food rules I’ll become enormous - I'll never stop eating!”
None of these things turned out to be true. My hope is to help you see how wonderful life is on the other side. Ease. Balance. Peace. You can do this, and it would be my huge privilege to help you.
2016 Study: Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University
Nearly half of the people responding to an online survey about obesity said they would give up a year of their life rather than be fat, according to a study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.
The 4,000 respondents in varying numbers between 15% and 30% also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese. Five percent and four percent, respectively, said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than be overweight.”Obesity research confirms long-term weight loss almost impossible” "The fundamental reason," Caulfield says, "is that we are very efficient biological machines. We evolved not to lose weight. We evolved to keep on as much weight as we possibly can."
