Lori Harder recounts a personal anecdote about visiting a household with different food habits and an active lifestyle; without dieting she lost five pounds during that week. The story illustrates her central claim that community and environment strongly shape behavior and health, and motivated her to seek a different environment she could control.
The power of community is absolutely insane. It is who you will become. My family was really overweight. I was told I had bad genetics my entire life. So I was like, this is who we are. The first time that I'm allowed to go spend, like, a week away, I remember asking her the first night, where's your snack drawer? And she's like, well, I don't have a snack drawer, but I have an apple. An apple. Like, that is so rude. Like, I literally thought she was being rude. I'm like, an apple? Really? This was mind blowing to me. I'm like, there's kids in the house. Why don't you have a snack drawer? And so I go through the week, we're eating really good food, like biscuits and gravy, eggs. Then we have, you know, sandwiches for lunch, and then we eat something healthy for dinner. I kind of am not thinking about food because we're active, we're having fun. They don't revolve their life around food. It's like activities, conversation. It's very different. So I go home, and at this time, I had been on so many different diets and exercising and, like, trying to lose five pounds to me could take. I go home, I get on the scale, I'm five pounds less, and I'm like, oh, my God. I didn't even think about it. My environment literally changed everything for me without me even trying. That was the moment for me at a very young age where I realized that I had to leave. I knew that if I got in an environment that I could control more, that I would have more control over my life and how I felt.
