If you’ve been led to the ‘what I eat in a day’ and ‘try this workout routine to reduce cellulite’ side of the internet, I’m so sorry. At this point, we’ve lost too many divas on the dark side of the diet web. To the peers who profits off women’s exhaustion, doubt, and desire to belong. It hands you a pre-scripted life and calls it wellness.

What I found out was that the only way out isn’t another hack or plan. It’s stepping back far enough to see the story itself and choosing to rewrite it. I needed to reject high-protein meal plans and ten step wellness routines, and simply begin the journey of exploring what health meant for me. Surprisingly, it lead me to a mindset shift that pulled me back in tune with myself.

After keeping up with the most recent trends for so long, ending them made me realize that none of my wellness eras were ever about food. They were about authorship. I started asking, ‘Whose voice is shaping my choices?’. And slowly, one decision at a time, I begin to reclaim my own narrative in bodily authority. But more importantly, found the ultimate antidote to the protein craze and skinnitok ideologies that most of us are so sick of seeing.

I’m here to to unpack the narrative we see online, and offer an alternative approach to the ever-repeating trends around health and wellness.

But to get there, I first had to lose the plot.

Fitness Side Quest Turned Into a Personal Hell

It was a random Tuesday night. The kind where your brain starts developing a new project just for the rush of it all. I’d been quietly craving a side quest, something low-stakes yet highly demanded. That night, I had what felt like a breakthrough: I would create user-generated content for fitness influencers.

I figured, why not monetize my athletic background? I’d try creators’ routines, track the experience, and make content from it. Within hours, I’d pitched 20 people. The next day, one replied. She had 100k loyal followers. I had 200 on a burner account and a vision. We clicked immediately. In hind-site, this was one of my wildest side quests to date.

I had just moved cities, still recovering from the worst burnout of my life, and this opportunity felt like a bridge back to something familiar in its movement, discipline, and momentum. Within days, my whole rhythm changed. Lifting heavy. Tracking protein like it paid the bills. I loved the structure. I loved the way my days took shape around it. And for a while, it worked. I was “in control.” I felt powerful.

But the moment the collaboration ended, I unraveled. It wasn’t empowerment I’d found. It was a performance. I realized I hadn’t been living my life. I’d been acting out hers. What once felt motivating now felt like mimicry. I was eating on autopilot, thinking on autopilot. My body was over it. Begging me to stop.

The Final Deep Dive That Made Me Lose My Sh*t

Desperate for direction, I went looking for my next fix. That’s when the algorithm led me to the wrong corner of the internet: Skinnitok.

For the lucky ones who haven’t seen it, Skinnitok is a niche on TikTok that glorifies thinness as discipline, packaging it in sterile morning routines and “tough love” narratives. The vibe is polished, judgmental, and deeply unwell. As someone who’s recovered from an eating disorder, it hit hard. For a second, I almost fell back into old habits. Then I did something simple: I deleted the app and sat in silence.

Because what looks like beauty advice on the surface often carries the fingerprints of control, power, and politics underneath.

In Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over, Julia Ebner explains how far-right movements use thinness as part of a larger ideology, treating women’s bodies not as homes for their souls, but as vessels for producing “pure” and “strong” children. A chilling return to old, oppressive ideals, masked as fitness goals.

In a piece by Lois Shearing, How the far right is using thinness to radicalise women and teen girls, Ebner talks about how these narratives strip away the possibility of body neutrality or joy. Instead, thinness becomes a kind of moral high ground performance of control and discipline aligned with narrow, Eurocentric beauty standards. It’s not just about looking a certain way. It’s about reinforcing hierarchies of race, gender, ability, and worth.

If this makes your blood boil, good. Let it. That rage is part of waking up. Channel it into reclaiming it. In remembering that control sold as empowerment is still control. And that you always have the right to opt out.

We don’t have to follow paths carved by ideology and algorithms. We can build our own. Rooted in curiosity, care, and radical choice. A life that’s not about shrinking, but expanding. Not obedience, but authorship.

After one fitness craze and a red-flag rabbit hole, I finally stopped looking outward. And started asking better questions.

Share

Coming Back to the State of Aliveness

When I looked back, I realized the best things I’ve ever built, whether it was routines, rituals, or rhythms, didn’t come from pressure or perfection. They came from paying attention, and curating life around me, that made me feel more alive. One aspect of my life didn’t align with my vision. That’s how I began what I now call gut gardening. With special focus on the curation of colorful plates.

Gut gardening in it’s simple form means nourishing your gut in the same way you would take care of the different flora of your garden, all with unique needs. According to Jenna Templeton, research scientist in the nutritional industry, the mix of fiber, protein, carbohydrates, fat, and micronutrients in your diet determines whether your microbiome will flourish. With this in mind, my approach has shifted from rigid-routine-following to mindful-focus-on-flourishing.

marthastewart

A post shared by @marthastewart

I realized, I craved mentally and physically more than just dog food on evenings after work. By curating meals on vintage plates that once belonged to grandma's kitchen, focusing on color, texture, and meaning, I wasn’t just feeding myself. I was making room for intention in a world that thrives on automation. Choosing beauty as a form of resistance. Choosing care over control. And that brought me bliss.

I’ve always been more or less healthy. What hasn’t always been healthy is my relationship to autonomy. Beauty softened my mindset, giving me small moments of aliveness in everyday life. It helped me realize I didn’t need to live life on a borrowed template. That I could rebuild, not just habits, but meaning behind them.

aimeefrance

A post shared by @aimeefrance

The Approach of Colorful Meal Curation

Since ancient times, humans have believed that color holds power over the body and mind. The Egyptians painted healing rooms in vibrant hues. Orange to ease fatigue, purple to restore the skin, and blue to soothe pain. In Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, color was medicine, part of the spectrum of healing. What if I could apply that to how I nourish myself?

Not in a performative or perfect way but in a playful one. I stopped obsessing over labels and macros and started listening to my sense of joy. Color became a compass, intuition my strategy and bodily peace the intention of the process. Now I shop by hue. I choose meals like seeds for the flowers I’m growing.

Here’s how to do it. Choose some items from each category, and curate a plate of your taste and colors. This is not a prescription, just an invitation to try something different:

Greens: cucumber, avocado, kale, zucchini, kiwi

Reds: tomato, strawberry, red pepper, apple

Pinks: radish, red onion, raspberry

Yellows: corn, lemon, potato, banana

Purples: beetroot, eggplant, black beans, figs

Blues: blueberry, blackberry

Oranges: carrot, sweet potato, mandarin

Proteins: eggs, yogurt, lentils, salmon, chickpeas

Add more things you love, take out the foods you don’t care for. It’s your curation after all.

aimeefrance

A post shared by @aimeefrance

Moving From Control to Creation

This world is loud. It thrives on feeding us blueprints on how to look, how to live, how to stay small and palatable. But a life built on external scripts will always feel hollow.

The real revolution comes from shifting from coping to creating. From surviving the noise to curating your own movement.

Not in a way that seeks perfection or applause, but in a way of soft, devotional rituals. This approach might not be for everyone. Maybe color-coded gut gardening plates aren’t your thing. And that’s the point. It isn’t to adopt my method, but to remember you get to choose your own. Your path doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s to be valid.

If you’re exhausted by aesthetics dressed up as politics, by ideologies that were never yours to begin with, get mad. Then get still. Backtrack. Reclaim.

We need more people who think for themselves. Who live like they mean it. Who remember that they were never here to perform, but to create. A life that feels like something you designed for yourself. Curated, not controlled. Nourishing, not numbing.

Don’t just swallow what the world feeds you. Taste. Question. Arrange. Reimagine.

Choose again, and this time, choose you.

Leave a comment