This fitness guru is vowing to quit restrictive diets for the best reason
You may know Cassey Ho as the reigning queen of the YouTube fitness community. She’s built a following of almost 3 million people with her free Blogilates workout videos, meal plans, and clean eating recipes. Cassey’s positivity feels endless; her personality is as bright as her neon booty shorts. She smiles through each squat and every low-calorie dessert.
Which is why it’s both surprising and amazing that this past week she publically announced that she’s giving up dieting.
Offering an explanation, Cassey discussed a serious, deeply personal aspect of her own fitness journey. In a video titled, “Why I Will NEVER Diet Again,” Cassey revealed that, after training for a bikini competition in 2012, she developed a form of orthorexia – an obsession with eating healthy food.
After limiting herself to only proteins, greens, and the occasional squeeze of lemon (for flavor) in order to lose 16 lbs in eight weeks, Cassey said she spent the next year and a half feeling scared of food. “I wasn’t prepared for it, but I got myself in a really bad situation,” she shared. “I was scared to eat apples. I was frightened of bananas and I just didn’t want to touch a grape because I thought it would make me fat.”
Cassey pointed out that eating and exercising only to achieve visible abs isn’t sustainable. Your mental health and physical health are interconnected: you can’t focus on one and ignore the other. Cassey’s solution? She is giving up diets.
“Diet has a connotation of starvation, of restriction. If you are serious about getting fit and being healthy for life, you can’t go on a diet,” she said. “It’s not going to achieve those things for you.”
Instead of weighing self-worth on a scale, Cassey encouraged her viewers to instead weigh themselves by their accomplishments, their smarts, their inner beauty.
How can we explain how this makes us feel?
Check out Cassey’s full story below:
(Image via YouTube)
