Six days a week, Milwaukee wellness expert Amy Lyons repeats positive affirmations, appreciates her body, and willfully ignores the waifish store mannequins. But one day a week, she takes a vacation from her balanced sense of perspective to relish in self-hatred.
“Sure, loving my natural shape is great,” says Lyons, “but once a week, I like to let loose and indulge all the horrible, destructive thoughts I push away most of the time.”
“I figure once a week can’t hurt!”
Lyons, a massage therapist, prides herself on living a healthy lifestyle with a secondary emphasis on weight, and always compliments her friends on their inner qualities instead of external ones. Friends can tell it’s her cheat day when Lyons is found staring wistfully into mirrors, dropping her “ballooning” weight into unrelated conversations, and calling out how thin all her friends look.
According to best friend Sasha Barrett: “Amy is relentlessly healthy about her body image, which is great. But honestly, I’d rather hang out with her on cheat day, because she’ll complain about her thighs with me instead of reminding me that Marilyn Monroe was a size 14.”
While most of the time she eats an unrestricted diet including a moderate amount of sweets, one day a week Lyons can be found saying, “I’m such a fat pig” as she rejects a cookie, only to be seen devouring the whole box later.
“It’s okay,” Lyons remarked, “tomorrow I’ll be a real women with curves again. But today I get to be a fat ogre whose stomach would make any red-blooded man throw up. Just let me have this!” She then looked into a mirror and broke it with her bare hands, sobbing something about going off carbs as she sank to her knees and curled up in the fetal position.
