Losing My Apetito from Love Is Blind

I know that we all, not just me, we all have the ability to lead this next generation in loving their bodies and it truly starts with ourselves. So today might not be all about our own personal healing journey, but I've gotta get some stuff off my chest and call out some diet culture bullshit on Netflix. So, Love is Blind. Have you guys seen it? Did you binge the entire third season like I did? It's literally the worst kind of trashy reality tv.

So I'm not sure if I'd advise to watch it, but if you already did, this podcast episode is made for you. So let's just get into it because I have a lot of things to talk about. The first thing I wanna talk about, the first person I wanna talk about is Alexa. Alexa is my Jewish Israeli Zionist goddess Queen, and I loved her right away. She's funny, she's smart and beautiful and very high maintenance, and she owns it.

She also owns her body, which of course that is something that I'm obsessed with, and I was super excited that she was on the show. Why was I excited? Because she's in a larger body than any of the other participants in, I think all of the seasons that I've seen, and that right there is fucked. Like why am, why am I excited about that? Because love is blind generally selects men and women who fit society's definition of a "good body", which is, of course, thinness above all else.

And so here I am excited about body diversity in 2000 fucking 22. Like, come on guys. This needs to be happening way faster than it is. Okay. But still, I am glad she's on the show, but within the first episode, she's already said something like, I know I could or should lose weight, but I don't want to because I love food so much. So number one, no one should ever, and I mean, ever have to justify their body size or type.

Number two, it sounds like Netflix, or maybe it's her, but of course you know this is a show, so we can't really know whether something is prompted, or she just said it outright and then they decided to highlight it, but someone here has bought into this idea that thinness comes from discipline and healthy eating. News flash, even if we all ate and exercise the exact same, our bodies would look completely different. And also her body is fucking gorgeous.

It's healthy and normal, and it shouldn't be surprising that she's on the show or that someone would be attracted to her. Was anyone else kind of nervous that her fiance Brennan would say something about her weight when he first met her? I think a lot of us were, which is such an indication of the thin obsessed society that we live in.

Truthfully, the fact that Love is Blind added that clip in the show as her intro shows that they felt like they needed some kind of justification for why she deserved to be on the show. Fuck that. I'm so fucking sick of the Bachelor, Love Island, and the Bachelor in Paradise shit that present an incredibly narrow definition of attractiveness and beauty. It's so damaging to society and impressionable teenagers and honestly even adults who are struggling with their body image.

Okay, we can move on from that, but now I have something super serious to discuss. Two dumb asses of the century, Bartise and Cole. They both quote unquote, fell in love in the pods Bartise with Nancy and Cole with Zanab. Literally, the moment that they met the other contestants, they started comparing and contrasting. They both thought that women, they dated in the pods, not the ones that they chose were hotter than the women that they did end up choosing.

Pretty fucking immature for two guys who claim to want to find love on a show called Love is Blind. why don't you just like do it the regular way, go on a dating app and be as picky as you want. I'm not saying that physical attraction isn't important, it definitely is. But you literally went on the show to find someone that you connected with on an emotional level, you actually develop feelings for them. I'm talking to you, Cole and Bartise. Then you met them face to face.

You were physically attracted to them because duh, Zanab and Nancy are gorgeous. Then the minute you're in a real life situation, you want to throw that all away because you think someone else is hotter. Like, wow. There's just no words for that. Bartise goes to hit on Raven in the pool. He tells her that they look good together because they both work out, barf. She's not having it. Thank God that woman has great intuition and good taste.

She knew that there was no connection with Bartise and he was just acting really immature. Then he goes back to Nancy and tells her all of this, the, I'm just being honest thing needs to go. You know what? Go to therapy Bartise. Stop projecting your issues on this poor woman. Like, "I'm just being honest." I just can't believe that Nancy let that relationship go on for so long and that she would've said yes to him at the altar. That would've been the worst relationship ever.

Okay, so now I've got to talk about the relationship and diet culture bullshit that actually pissed me off the most, and that was Cole and Zanab. Cole did something similar to Bartise when he hit on Colleen in the pool. He told her that she was more "his type" physically, and that if they were in a bar, he would definitely come up to her. He also, just like Bartise, went back to Zanab and shared some of these conflicting feelings with her.

I actually don't know how they got on the subject, but he ended up rating Zanab's looks a nine out of 10. I mean, who the fuck gave this guy permission to start rating women? Women's bodies and physical attractiveness cannot be reduced to a number. Never, ever rate yourself or someone else. That is so 1990s Cosmo girl, pre thousands of dollars of therapy that we all needed after what we went through.

So after he rated Zanab, she asked him, "is there anyone here who's at 10 out of 10?" I'm sure she had some insecurities and an inclination about this based on his behavior in the pool, and of course he said, "yeah, Colleen is." He just set up his entire relationship for failure. The fact that he even sees women on a one to 10 sliding scale shows what an asshole he is. Zanab was pretty open about how it made her feel self-conscious and less than.

How she started comparing herself to Colleen right away. She even said on the show, "I'll never look like Colleen." I'm like, no, you won't. And you're so freaking beautiful in your own right. Why would you want to look like her? You're beautiful. Because literally one person thinks she's hotter than you. Cole? Who's Cole anyway? We need to stop seeing ourselves through the eyes of men. It's called the Male Gaze, and it's had its moment in history. Goodbye male gaze.

Hello stepping into our power and appreciating our own beauty and our own sexuality for ourselves first. Then, if someone appreciates it or is attracted to it, great, but our self-concept is not reliant on someone else's opinion and definitely not Cole's. I'm so happy that Zanab spoke her mind and put him in his place at the altar. Even then, Cole pretended to be totally blindsided, but it was so obvious to me that he was trying to come out of this situation looking like a good guy.

So when they got together on the reunion episode, he broke down in tears and people started feeling bad for him. I even saw someone that I was Facebook friends with write, "you know, something is wrong when you see a grown man cry on national television." So what? It's fine when women cry because they're overly emotional and blah, blah, blah, but when a man cries, then "wow, oh my God, he really cares." Or maybe, just maybe, he has narcissistic tendencies and is a master manipulator.

That is what I felt when I watched him break down. And obviously I can't say for sure. I'm not giving any diagnoses here because this is reality tv, but he literally gas lit Zanab the entire time she was talking, invalidating her feelings and experiences, and placing himself as the victim. He even asked her if she was bipolar earlier on the show. That's classic gaslighting right there. Then comes the cutie story, which they aired after the reunion episode.

If you're thinking like many people around the world that that was proof that Cole isn't a jerk, let me share with you why this conversation actually proves that he is not that I needed any further evidence. Firstly, he commented on her food choices. He asked her if she was going to have a second tangerine, and when she said, "yeah, are you okay with that?" He said, "you better save your apetito for the big old supper."

and when she said she hadn't eaten anything or barely anything all day, he asked her why? She was quiet. And then he was like, "oh, are you getting wedding dress bod?" And she's like, "yeah, something like that." People think it's normal that other people, especially our partners, can just freely comment and have opinions about our food choices. It's not. Okay, well maybe it is normal, but it's not something that we should be accepting as normal anymore.

It's straight up diet culture, and it was freaking fruit for God's sakes. Also, it's become so normalized that we lose weight or change our bodies for our wedding dress, that Cole brought it up as something that he just assumed that she'd do, and it was another way to make her feel badly about her body when he already knew she was so sensitive. Okay. I'm tired. And I'm done y'all. All this needs to be called out. And in case you are wondering, I don't hate men.

I thought SK and Brennan were amazing until, of course, a TikTok revealed that SK was cheating on Raven after the show. Damn. Oh, well, that's reality TV for you. Anyway, that's a wrap on episode two. I can't wait to share episode three with you next week. There are some super exciting things happening in my world. If you're feeling this body image journey and want to go even deeper, definitely tune in for the next episode. It's going to be so good. Love you all.