Women Who Fled to Picture-Perfect Towns During the Pandemic Are Struggling with Their Mental Health
Plus, why you should actually let yourself eat the foods you "can't be trusted" around
Leading up to Christmas last year, I got my husband something he’d wanted for months: a standup paddleboard. Now, we live in the high desert, with access to about 1% of the number of lakes I grew up near in Minnesota, so we’ve never really been a water sports family. But he was so excited about it that I caved and bought the last one in the store. It took three employees to deflate the display SUP and box it up for me to take home.
Fast forward a few weeks and my former colleagues and I were cleaning out the gear cage (IYKYK) in the old Outside office (RIP), and a friend of mine pointed to a huge bag. “You should grab that paddleboard,” he said, “but it’s kind of a weird one.” At first, I resisted, because, after a decade in outdoor media, I’ve got enough gear, but thinking back to the giant box with my husband’s new SUP in our pile of gifts, I thought, “What the heck. It’ll be nice to have two.”
I then promptly forgot about it.
Then last weekend, despite a sketchy forecast, we took the two inflatable units up to Abiquiu Lake to try them out. It turns out the one from the gear cage is a kind of mix between a paddleboat and a really stable SUP, perfect for taking the baby out with minimal tipping risk. My husband, stepdaughter, son, and I spent hours floating around the water, enjoying the first sun we’d seen in days during an unusually rainy spring.
Just as we were packing up, it started to rain again, and we piled into the car and headed to the local ice cream shop. “That was so much fun,” we kept exclaiming to each other. And it was. So great, in fact, that we’re going back tomorrow.
What I’m reading
I always appreciate a good Christine Byrne piece. For those of you who aren’t familiar with her work, Byrne is a former journalist-turned-RD, who specializes in intuitive eating. What that really means is that she uses facts to debunk a lot of food myths and diet culture, and I love her for it. Her latest piece in Self, like many of her pieces, is wonderfully counterintuitive. In it, she basically makes the case for keeping your favorite ice cream in your freezer and a good bag of chips in your pantry.
Usually, this is enough of a deterrent for anyone who might have otherwise tried to engage me in the topic of, say, Joe Rogan’s all-meat diet. But, inevitably, at least one person in the group will say something like: “Oh, intuitive eating sounds great, but I could never do it. If I let myself eat [insert delicious food typically thought of as ‘bad’] whenever I wanted, I’d eat it all day long/gain so much weight/never stop eating!”
I’ll let the conversation end there because this person isn’t asking for my professional opinion on their relationship to that particular food, so it would be unprofessional of me to give it. But since this is a nutrition article and not an awkward small-talk situation, I’m happy to tell you what I’ve learned from the research and my clinical experience: People who give themselves permission to eat all foods without judgment, and who eat enough overall, are much less likely to feel out of control around food than folks who live by rigid food rules or try to only eat “healthy” foods.
Read “Why You Should Actually Let Yourself Eat the Foods You ‘Can’t Be Trusted’ Around” here.
In this powerful piece, Amelia Arvesen explores the less picturesque part of living in a rural town—isolation, loneliness—and the effect it can have on women’s mental health.
The tendency to believe that moving to a picture-perfect destination will solve your problems, or make life significantly easier, is a concept recognized among mental health experts as the “Paradise Paradox.” The idea is that beautiful surroundings should neutralize mental anguish, but often, these postcard-worthy areas aren’t the solution and can even contribute to or worsen it in unobvious ways. Experts and folks who’ve lived in these areas for a while, like Alex Garcia, 30, recognize this common misconception among newcomers.
When Garcia was living in Summit County, Colorado, in the middle of the Rockies, rent was so expensive that she spent all her time working to stay afloat. She had a 9-to-5 marketing job and picked up a second gig at an ice cream shop. The extra hours on the clock left her physically and mentally drained, to the point where she couldn’t enjoy the gorgeous surroundings and learned firsthand the meaning of “Paradise Paradox.”
Read “Women Who Fled to Picture-Perfect Towns During the Pandemic Are Struggling with Their Mental Health” here.
In other troubling news, add exploiting the climate crisis to the long list of messed up things extremist groups are doing these days.
Despite years of abnormal weather events that have laid its shortcomings bare, FEMA still doesn’t have the personnel or the budget it needs to ready Americans for disasters or respond adequately when multiple disasters strike at the same time. Experts say that federal lawmakers, who decide how much funding FEMA gets every year, lack the foresight required to actually prepare for climate change. Instead, disaster management centers around response, which means FEMA is constantly playing a game of catch-up.
The agency’s shortcomings leave gaps for militias to step in. Teams of Oath Keepers moved into Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico in the wake of the 2017 trio of hurricanes. They showed up again in Florida in 2018 after Hurricane Michael struck the state. Leaked Oath Keeper chats, shared with Grist by the nonprofit watchdog group Distributed Denial of Secrets, show that members of the group put out a call for volunteers following a damaging outbreak of tornadoes in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee in the spring of 2021.
It’s not just the Oath Keepers. Armed vigilantes reportedly set up roadblocks and interrogated people fleeing wildfires in Oregon in 2020; a different militia tried to recruit people affected by the Oak Fire in central California last summer. “Disaster relief in this country is pretty broken because of the way it often takes months to get federal funding activated,” Stall said. “There’s a long time during which groups can often get active.”
Read “Boots on the Ground” here.
But if you need a feel-good piece, this delightful long read by Leath Tonino for Outside tells the story of a grinding, grunt-work job he took after college in Antarctica. It sounded physically and mentally brutal. Then, he comes across a cross-country kit in the electrician’s shop one afternoon and the rest is history.
I’d adored cross-country skiing since toddlerhood, not as a sport but as a portal to the local landscape, a gateway to Vermont’s stubble cornfields, leafless birch groves, and pillowed beaver bogs. At the pole, the portal opened and opened, the gate swung wider and wider, and I was suddenly, astoundingly alone with sastrugi, Van Gogh brushstrokes, ripples and wrinkles, fragile aeolian sculptures, micro textures flowing eternally beneath a macro sky.
Testimonial: Skiing tempered my alcohol intake, invigorated my sex drive (lie), improved my mood, flooded my soul with Jesus’s divine compassion (lie), and saved my sanity. The Love Shack, in turn, saved my earlobes and nostrils from frostbite. I liked to pop in there, slam Double Stuf Oreos, thaw my skull, then relaunch.
Read “Working in Antarctica Was Mindless Boredom. Until I Found a Pair of Skis.” here.
The good stuff
Thule Chariot Cross ($999): I’m embarrassed to type this, but my son already had four strollers: a fancy one for jogging, a cheap travel one at one of his grandma’s houses, a 10-year-old hand-me-down for around the farm, and another hand-me-down that my husband basically just uses to move chopped wood now. So I know it’s a bit ridiculous that I forked over another grand for a fifth stroller.
But this one is everything I wanted: it’s a three-in-one stroller that can be used for walking, jogging, biking, or cross-country skiing (although the jogging wheel and XC ski set are sold as add-ons). It has a nice recline option, and a zip-in screen, sun shade, and rain shield, which help keep the elements out, but also keep my son’s stuff in. Gone are the days of picking up dropped snacks and bottles.
The Thule Chariot Cross folds down easily, only weighs 30 pounds (the lite version is even lighter!), and has ample storage both inside and outside of the kid compartment. Sure, it was an investment, but longer, more comfortable outings mean we’re both happier. Plus, I can’t wait to use it this winter.
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Last but not least
We have entered the potty-training phase. My son has yet to use his new toilet once. Please feel free to send any tips.