Episode 134 - Does Fat = Bad?

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[Music] our world is built with stories [Music] sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other the liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart today's story fat is bad so almost two months into this quarantine now and i know that i'm not alone in the fact that i've put on a few lbs during this quarantine you know not being able to go to the gym the reduced movement the extra pancake breakfasts and late night snacks have all become part of my newly fashioned quarantine body and i know that i'm also not alone in feeling that on some level these extra pounds on my body are somehow a bad thing that this extra fat is something that i'll be able to you know fix when we are done with quarantine because like you i live in this culture where we are bombarded on every side with this story that fat is bad from the depictions of who is beautiful in our media to the diet ads on all of our timelines and all of our billboards and magazines and everything else to the practice of getting on the scale at the doctor's office which i never thought twice about until we recorded this episode by the way but it's all around us we're taught that a thinner body is a healthier body a more beautiful acceptable body and that story that we swim in affects everything it affects the way we eat the way we think about ourselves we feel ourselves the way we feel our own bodies the way we shop the way we connect to one another experience our lives and like so many other fundamental myths that impact the way we experience our lives most of us rarely take the time to really pull this story apart and ask if it's even true is it actually true that fat is bad or maybe are there some other reasons why this story has become so commonplace in our society and in our minds today hillary mcbride and i are going to be talking with christy harrison who's a certified intuitive eating counselor and the author of the book anti-diet welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] i'm curious if you have some insights into where we even got this story around weight stigma like what what is going on that we have believed that fat is so bad because from my preliminary readings the bias against fat existed long before the research that correlated size and other health concerns yeah so would you have a sense of what was going on there and how we got here yeah that's absolutely right it really is that the the bias against larger bodies predated any health concerns about fatness by quite a bit and you know i think especially in in today's culture it seems so self-evident supposedly that you know fat is bad but really it's only about you know 150 years or so ago or so that we started thinking that way and the the ways in which that came about were you know sort of a confluence of factors one of which was racism and misogyny and pre-existing racist ideas about you know the great chain of being and the supposed hierarchy of you know people from different cultures and also people of different genders and their supposed proximity to god so you know it was basically existed to reen or to justify slavery to justify the enslavement of people of color from africa and you know of the genocide of native americans and other indigenous peoples and you know so it put them at the low at the bottom of this supposed great chain of being and then you know going up the chain going up the ladder it was always you know women were lower than men from any given culture and people from you know southern europe were lower than people from northern europe and you know white northern european men were situated at the top of the supposed great chain of being and then around you know the early to mid 1800s when evolutionary biology came on the scene that great chain of being idea got sort of wedded to the idea of evolution in the sense that evolutionary biologists started arguing that you know people from uh you know people of color and the people who had always been thought to be at the bottom of this great chain of being were now less evolved and you know more savage quote unquote and and the people at the top of this supposed great chain of being were more more evolved and you know closer to the sort of ideal human and the with that idea with that belief in this evolutionary hierarchy of people came a real obsession with cataloging the different traits that supposedly telegraphed where someone fell on that evolutionary hierarchy and so people you know evolutionary bio just started looking at traits like head size and the size of one's nose and this the length of someone's arms and that you know just all these minute little details about a person including body size including fatness and with this idea of evolutionary theory came the idea that larger bodies were supposedly less evolved fatness was a sign of supposed evolutionary inferiority or savagery and so with that you know fatness the anti-fat sentiment started to really come into the mainstream started to started to be spread you know pretty far and wide and with that came also you know people starting to demand i think the growing weight stigma in society at that time led to the development of the first ever diets the first real sort of fad diets and popular diet books you had william banting in 1865 i believe who wrote this book called letter on corpulence addressed to the public which was basically a proto-atkins it was like the first you know low-carb diet to sort of sweep the the western culture's consciousness and he also weighed himself regularly and talked about you know his weight loss throughout this process and that kind of ignited a desire for weight loss among everyday people and people started to really request that at the doctor's office came to the doctor asking for weight loss plans and with that demand you know at first doctors were like what are you doing this is this is taking you away this is taking me away from the things that i really need to be paying attention to from real legitimate health concerns this is not a health concern this is a matter of cosmetics this is mere vanity taking me away from you know what we should really be doing and as time went on you know years wore by and i think that cultural fat phobia that was starting to be so present and in fashion in you know media that was emerging the sort of new cultural ideal of the gibson girl was much thinner than her victorian counterpart of the feminine ideal um all of these things you know started to add up and people in greater and greater numbers started wanting to lose weight also scales became much more widely available and clothing companies also you know emerged so that it wasn't like everybody was just having someone make their own clothes and getting custom-made clothes now it was mass-produced clothing where you had to fit into a specific pre-made size and so all of these things sort of came together in the you know mid to late 1800s and created this real tinderbox i think of you know for diet culture to be ignited and true to form you know in the early the turn of the century the early 1900s doctors started to come over to the side of okay well you know people are asking for weight loss we got to start giving it to them and insurance companies as well around that time started to publish actuarial tables looking at you know what body sizes were the most likely to die and their early data was showing that people in larger bodies you know the quote-unquote overweight men were more likely to die earlier and so you know i think that the culture in general was really starting to be a wash in fat phobia and that led doctors to start offering weight loss and also to start researching body weight and early studies of diet started to be done and you know they were actually really scientifically um terrible like there wasn't a lot of good quality data in those early years um but up until like you know the 19 late 1950s there were more and more and more studies that emerged on you know the effect the supposed effects of weight on health wow a long history that most of us don't even know exists and yet we're living out every day when i was in kindergarten i remember feeling embarrassed and hiding my school picture because i'd forgotten to suck my belly in it's hard for me to remember a time before i felt ashamed of my body one of my earliest memories is of my brother and his best friend making fun of the way that my four-year-old breasts were jiggling as i was running across the room i started my first diet when i was seven years old it was when kids in elementary school compared their weight during physical education tests and my number by comparison was a lot higher than other kids and i immediately felt shame and embarrassment i knew even as a child that my lived experience was different from people who weren't fat that they didn't pay attention to things that i was hyper aware of whether it was an adult handing me an outfit or a costume that i knew just by looking at it would never fit or going with friends to an amusement park and freezing when i saw the size of the seats on the rides while my friends charged right in i experienced size and public spaces differently than straight sized people they moved through the world with an ease and carefreeness that i never can as a teenager i was incredibly skinny because i was struggling with an eating disorder and now according to the bmi considered obese a lot of people in my life have a lot to say about it and i feel like because i'm not in that tiny body anymore i'm not as valuable as i was when i was a teenager that's really hard my body was not only ugly that was a given it was useless the shame there's something wrong with me that i must be lazy and stupid and i can remember like looking at my body in the mirror and just wanting to like cut off the excess skin from my belly like just wishing that i could wish it away or pray it away my value is placed in how i look i am constantly being appraised by others from high school onwards the only thing i got praised on was if i had lost all the weight that's the only thing i would praise for [Music] my worth has been tied to my weight girls who don't look a certain way gets used kind of as caricatures or overblown characters you know the bitchy fat girl that the sad fat girl there's no there's no normal person they don't they're not seen as normal we're not seen as normal people it's humiliating it's humiliating i was starving myself because i thought if i was thinner i could advance my career and i'd have more sex and life would be better the reality is none of those things came true and when they didn't it was devastating being fat in a world that worships then is like being an atheist to an evangelical church everyone else believes they know the right way for me to live the only way for me to live and that i'm actively rebelling against that right way they believe i've chosen to be this way of course i have when instruction manuals line the grocery store checkout are plastered on every school cafeteria wall flow quickly out of every doctor's mouth when the cure to the disease of me is so obvious that literally everybody knows it of course i must be choosing my fatness they believe if i lived just the right way followed the capital t truth then i could magically become the thing they all worship that i could fit into their box marked good instead of bad because that's what i am i'm fat i have been since i was 10 from a chronic illness but i can't escape but it doesn't matter the backstory to everyone else i am bad and when you hear that over and over again year after year from everyone and everything in your life you accept it here's the thing stigma surrounding body size hasn't simply hurt me in my life it has shaped every inch of my life from the day i knew i would be seen as less than by any person i ran into if they perceive me as fat i have been trying to become small ever since okay christy so could you tell us a little bit about your work who you are uh how you came to do the work that you're doing and maybe even how you as a as a dietitian have started to focus in on this idea of diet culture intuitive eating fat phobia all of that i came to doing this work through my own winding path to recovery from disordered eating so when i first started my career back in 2003 as a journalist i was actually struggling with my own relationship with food i was not eating enough restricting most of the day and then binging at night over exercising to try to compensate and then getting up and doing it all again the next day and that restriction that deprivation caused a lot of health problems for me it caused me to lose my period caused me to have fatigue and low energy and just all kinds of nebulous symptoms and i sort of fell down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out what was causing those symptoms not ever looking at how much or little really i was eating how much i was over exercising but looking more towards what foods might be causing this is it gluten is it dairy can i cut out more foods to try to you know overcome these symptoms and at the time i was also starting my career as a journalist and so of course since i was so personally obsessed with food and nutrition and gluten and all kinds of different foods and also like sustainability and agriculture and the food system i naturally gravitated towards reporting on those things and this was the early days of michael pollan like i think i had read the omnivore's dilemma came later actually after i was already sort of ensconced in this work but i read his first one i think it was the one about the plants i forget what it was called but um there was that there was fast food nation by eric schlosser there was food politics by marion nessel like all these things were really formative for me in the early days of my journalism career and i took hold and really sunk my teeth into these ideas of sustainability and eating local and trying to cut out so-called processed foods and eat more you know small batch organic locally produced et cetera et cetera et cetera types of foods and i think that there was really a there still really is uh an idea of morality attached to eating that way this idea that you're being pure you're being good you're doing something good for the planet you're doing something good for your health that it's purifying in some way to eat that way and that you know all the toxins of modern life are present in the standard american food system the standard american diet and that that's really harmful to our well-being and you know with that philosophy and that way of trying to eat i really drove myself to distraction i was constantly obsessing about what i could and couldn't eat spending hours in the grocery store reading food labels trying to decide between you know organic this and local that and you know vegan milk from a quote-unquote industrial plant versus small batch local organic milk from a cow and all these different things all these this this calculus of what was the quote-unquote best food kind of all day every day and it really took a toll on me mentally and physically as well it was still you know really under eating and over exercising and still having health problems wasn't quite as restrictive as i had been in the early days because now i was reporting on food and actually ended up getting a job at a food magazine full-time gourmet rest in peace where i worked for two or i think two and a half years until it closed in 2009 and [Music] thought were good and pure and okay and worth it worth the calories versus these foods that were bad and dirty and unsustainable and not worth the calories and that was kind of the mindset that i had when i went back to school to become a dietitian and i also went to get my masters in public health and specifically public health and nutrition which really focused a lot on ending the so-called obesity epidemic and when that when i made that career transition when i went back to school to start studying this stuff i was still very much in it in my own relationship with food still really struggling but thinking you know fat is bad and and helping people become less fat is the way and i should say that in all of this and my own thinking that i was too fat and needed to lose weight i have never been what society would consider fat i've never had the stigma placed on me that people in larger bodies do of going to the doctor and being told they have to lose weight or being teased by peers or family members being you know not not fitting onto an airplane seat having to buy two seats not being able to shop in mainstream clothing stores all the things that are part of the weight stigmatizing experience that people in larger bodies deal with every day in the society i had none of that i had the privilege of being in a small enough body that i never had to experience those things and so really for me the weight stigma was all internal it was all in my mind and directed towards myself but there was definitely also some that was directed outward and thinking like i'm going to help people lose weight and be thin and book you know that's that's the way that's the healthy thing to do because of course that's what we know in this culture that's what this culture has indoctrinated all of us into believing since very early in our lives so you know i thought i was doing the right thing and it wasn't until i started seeing clients and seeing people really struggling with what i was trying to tell them to do and starting to binge and starting to have reactions to you know some of the prescriptions that i thought were right that i had learned in school to be a dietitian that the light bulb started to go off and you know coupled with my own personal recovery journey and my discovery of intuitive eating and learning to let go of all the food rules for myself you know i started to see that other people were struggling with some of the same things and you know thoughts and beliefs that i had had at behaviors that i had had in my disordered eating days and that even though they were having the same disordered patterns going on the fact that they were in a larger body meant that they were getting praised for losing weight or praised for restricting their eating and that was kind of the turning point and i started working with disordered eating specifically i started specializing and when i was training to work with this population i started to see at conferences and in scientific journals this concept of health at every size coming up again and again as the gold standard of recovery really the way that we need you know people in the eating disorder field need to approach our clients for the best possible rates of recovery and so that was a huge turning point for me in terms of how i saw weight and weight loss because the health at every size paradigm really says you don't need to push weight loss in order for people to be healthy and that weight loss is actually unattainable for the vast majority of people anyway that up to 98 of people who lose weight you know through their own efforts will gain it back if not more within five years and that that process of weight loss and regain is actually worse for our bodies than just staying the same weight and that weight stigma itself is a risk factor for health and that the you know this culture that stigmatizes people for their size is actually worsening health outcomes and it you know likely is not the weight itself that causes the increased negative health outcomes we see in people in larger bodies but it's the stigma and the weight cycling they experience together that can explain much if not all of that excess risk for people in larger bodies wow you said so many important things that i think we need to jump back to probably intermittently but i'm i'm so grateful that you're able to specifically think about health from a social constructionist perspective looking at health not necessarily this thing is objective but actually something that we have values and privilege woven into in terms of how we're defining what is a good body what's health and that actually we can start to think critically about that in a way that helps us see the way we treat people is actually contributing to their well-being and not just if their weight is lower or higher or if their body is a certain size it sounds like the the work that you've done has really been to pull apart these sociocultural narratives about what health is yeah it really has because i think we have so much received wisdom in this culture about what health is and what it means and you know we don't really think critically about it we we're never we're we never are conditioned to sort of ask ourselves those questions of like who defines health what does health actually mean who gets to decide who's healthy and not healthy and you know what how have these definitions changed over the years over the centuries in the millennia and i had the benefit i think of having studied rhetoric in college which is a you know critical theory focused sort of discipline and so i did have experience kind of pulling apart those you know the cultural basis of various beliefs and thoughts in western culture i just hadn't applied that lens to health before and i think when i started to do the work in eating disorder recovery and started to look into the science i thought like gosh why is this so counter to everything that we hear in our culture and it makes so much sense and yet you know the the idea of health that is given to us is so completely opposite and you know i think that the this sort of idea that there's a correlation between higher body weight and poor health outcomes you know that that is true and that exists right but correlation is not causation and i think it's the cultural narrative about fatness that creates this false idea of causation that creates the sense that yeah it's actually the fatness that's causing these health problems instead of looking at alternate explanations that we're now starting to see more researchers do which you know is looking at weight stigma and its effects on well-being and weight cycling and its effects on health and how physical activity or other behavioral patterns might you know mediate that link as well i'm thinking about all of my clients who have who are in larger bodies and feel the stigma constantly when they are trying to do the thing that society's told them to do you need to lose weight to be good right and that comes back to the moralization of bodies and size and food but when they're going to do exactly what society told them to do when they try to exercise when they try to engage with the world meaningfully they're shamed for it it's like this it seems like there's this double bind for a lot of people where we just want to demonize bigger bodies and even people who are trying to adhere to the social narrative get punished absolutely it really is a double bind because the minute people step out into the world and start trying to move their bodies or you know eat in a certain socially prescribed way they get constant feedback about that it's usually negative feedback you know and even if it seems like positive feedback even if someone is out in public eating a salad or if they're you know out in in the world moving their body and someone says hey good job good for you keep up the good work you know it might seem like a compliment it might seem like encouragement but it's actually got this you know underhanded quality to it because it's saying that the person's body size is bad now and it's good that they're eating a salad because they're going to shrink that terrible body or it's good that they're exercising because that means they're going to get smaller and so you know i think all of the messages that people in larger bodies get pretty much at every turn from the doctor from people out in the world from peers from family members can have that really stigmatizing quality to go back to your comment about rhetoric it makes me think about the problem with the obesity epidemic not necessarily even being obesity but the creation of a narrative an epidemic around it and how we've responded to that i think about content and process and therapy constantly what what we're talking about but then what's actually going on the subtext what's happening between us and other people and it seems like as social beings when we ostracize other people it's so much worse for them maybe maybe this isn't a fair statement but it seems so much worse for other people than whatever they might actually be doing with their body anyway and somehow the shame around it the the narratives of exclusion and oppression and marginalization around bigger bodies does more damage than whatever might be going on with size or in their body anyway i would agree with that 100 you know i really think that the marginalization the weight stigma that people face in you know people in larger bodies disproportionately face but people all across the weight spectrum can have internalized weight stigma as well and we really see in the literature that it's an independent risk factor weight stigma is an independent risk factor for health and that no matter your body size the more weight stigma you experience the worse off your health is the worse off you are in terms of your well-being and you know i think that really speaks to the need to reduce weight stigma and see what happens you know because i think the narrative right now is like keep stigmatizing people maybe in in big or small ways you know i think now the sort of medical mainstream is as hip to the idea that weight stigma is a risk factor for health but they haven't quite gotten far enough to say okay we need to actually stop telling people to lose weight because that in and of itself is stigmatizing we do actually have scientific literature that shows that it's just not really mainstream it's not really out there yet but there's you know a couple of studies that show merely telling someone that higher body weight is a health risk and that you need to lose weight in order to improve your health actually increases weight stigma for people and we know that weight stigma is an independent risk factor for things like heart disease diabetes early mortality some forms of cancer all these things that tend to get blamed on weight itself but they can actually better be explained by the stigma that people face in your experience what is the result when people have the the weight stigma lessened how did how do you see that happening and then and what is the result of that usually like what by what have you seen effective ways of lessening that stigma for people and then what's the result in their life yeah i've seen you know i would say i've seen effective ways of lessening stigma to some extent in terms of you know the things that people can control in their environment like unfollowing and unsubscribing from you know social media accounts or email lists of people that are weight stigmatizing that are selling diets that are selling the myth that body size is you know larger bodies are bad for your health and that kind of thing getting that sort of stuff out of your environment to the extent that you can and learning how to set boundaries with the people in your life that are maybe perpetrating weight stigma on a sort of interpersonal basis you know learning how to say i don't want to talk about my diet i don't want to talk about my body size you know i we need to talk about something else or i'm going to leave the room or i'm going to have to leave this relationship and so in that sense people can have some impact in terms of the the weight stigma they face but i think you know a lot of what a lot of the weight stigma people face is societal and is something that can't really be addressed at the individual level and so the way to help people through that is to help them develop resilience you know to help them develop the capacity to question the messages that they're getting to have a community to go to to to vent and process and sort of get positive reinforcement when they do experience weight stigma you know having people get angry on your behalf and say that is so messed up what you experience that's not okay you know really goes a long way towards feeling like you belong and feeling like you have some resiliency towards that experience i think that's really the you know the sort of you need both of those things i think to be able to heal from weight stigma in the society and of course people like myself and you know many other people doing this work are trying to help change society and change the culture so that it isn't stigmatizing people at every level the way that it does now but that's kind of a longer term project so in the short term it's really about developing that resilience but what i see with clients who are able to sort of alter their environment as much as possible to reduce weight stigma and develop resilience to the weight stigma they experience in the world is that they do end up having better health outcomes they their disordered eating is dramatically reduced they stop having the the binge restrict cycles that keep them locked in battle with food in their bodies they start being able to engage with movement and physical activity in a way that doesn't feel punishing and you know compulsive but that actually feels joyful and sustainable and nourishing and same with their relationship with food you know i think people often need a long time to heal from the diet culture edicts around food and to get the rules you know sort of break free from all the rules and at subtle levels that diet culture has instilled in them and so it can take a while and it can it can be a while before people can reapproach nutrition in a gentle way and you know there might be a moment of feeling like they want to just eat everything under the sun that was previously forbidden to them and we actually have research that really shows the forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest when it comes to food and when people are no longer prohibited from eating certain types of foods those foods really kind of lose their luster and they take their place as just one of many foods that the person can choose so that all takes some time and you know i think that is part of the process of developing resilience to diet culture but i think it at the end of that process i really see people able to reapproach nutrition in a gentle way able to you know think about what foods feel good in their body and how how to create a balanced meal that gives them energy and you know eating snacks that help sustain them throughout the day and feeling like pleasure is a part of every meal but they can also think a little bit about you know different types of foods that might help them function better or address a certain chronic disease or what have you so you know i really really do see such positive benefits to people from becoming resilient to weight stigma but it can definitely be kind of a long process you mentioned some things that individuals can do to create resilience but you also mentioned the social change piece that that is the longer project but also we all have a hand in i remember learning about the tripartite model looking at peers media and parents as funnels for social discourse for attitudes about bodies for values around food and eating and the way that i think about it yes all of us are getting funneled those messages but we are also part of shaping culture we are part of creating or perhaps deconstructing the narrative that fat is bad this weight stigma or you know deconstructing diet culture so i'm curious if you have ideas around what people who aren't necessarily feeling stigmatized in their body can do to support the the disentangling of how we're all propping this up even when we don't know it yeah such a good question and i really do think everyone has a role to play in this and depending on your level of you know comfort and healing in your own relationship with food and your body you might be more or less inclined and you know have more or less you know greater or fewer resources available to you to be able to make that change so you know i think a couple things that people can do who are not actively experiencing stigma can be speaking up for people who are in larger bodies or fat if they use the term fat in the reclaimed sense of fat acceptance you know speaking up for them in situations where people are being body shamed or where just general ideas about fat being bad are being sort of bandied about if you can talk to whoever is is having that sort of point of view in the conversation and say yeah you know what fat isn't actually bad fat is not the the thing about you know fat is not the thing that causes these health problems it's actually much more likely to be weight stigma and weight cycling a combination of those things that results in poor health outcomes for people in larger bodies you know just kind of helping change the narrative with people in your life and and arguing back with the science if that's available to you in the moment you can also you know just set a boundary and say you know what i don't want to talk about your diet i'm really i diet talk is you know even if even if this is not actively true for you if you can say you know diet talk is problematic for me i don't like to engage in talks about you know discussions about how you're restricting your food or how you're trying to shrink your body but let's talk about anything else instead you know tell me about your trip to vegas or whatever it might be you know sort of changing the subject and and that does actually help plant a seed in people's minds as to like huh i wonder why this person thinks that talking about weight is bad i never would have thought that that was a problem you know similarly if you're someone with the privilege to do this and who doesn't struggle in your relationship with your body so much refusing to be weighed at the doctor's office can be a really helpful political statement and pave the way for other people to do that who might not have as much privilege as you do and that can start a conversation you know so i do this myself like never go to the doctor and the nurse is like okay can you pop on the scale for me and say no i don't do scales you know and i'll say i have a history of an eating disorder and scales and i really don't get along so you know you can write refused in my chart if you need to put something there and that really that magic word refused by the way i think seems to to work pretty well because a lot of times you know hospitals and healthcare facilities and stuff will need to have something in the weight part of your chart to report to insurance companies because they get you know they have to have a certain number of anthropometric readings for every visit so if you say refused i think that can count as the the weight reading and they won't get dinged by the insurance company you're also hitting on something i think super important for creating social change which is empowering people to have a voice in what has been historically disempowering dynamics between care provider and the person receiving care in which we feel like we're not allowed to have authority over our bodies we're not allowed to make choices about what works best for us and how we define health and somebody else gets to have a voice into what is the best way to be in our body i'm really wowed and impressed by that even that little choice that we could make to sort of disrupt that power narrative not in a way that would be a disrespectful of a person or silencing of someone or miseducated but to to really say no actually i i get to have a say in how i show up here and we can still work together but um my voice matters too yes yeah i think especially in today's healthcare system it's really important to take back that power because doctors and and medical providers of all kinds are seen as such authority figures and we have to remember they work for us not the other way around you know and we you can fire your doctor if your doctor refuses to stop talking about your weight and shames you for your body size and prescribes diets even though you tell them that you're trying to heal your relationship with food you're allowed to go to a different doctor i know that can be challenging in the american healthcare system with you know some hmos and things that sort of restrict who you can see but you still have the ability to change primary care providers you still have the ability to you know shop around and find a doctor who is willing to abide by your boundaries really what i have believed for a really long time is that fatness is a failure and that you have failed to be the right thing which is small and thin and particularly i think as a woman growing up in a super conservative christian household that um taking up less space physically emotionally spiritually psychologically was sort of part of the whole rhetoric and narrative around what it was to be a woman the body as a temple was used implicitly to mean if not thin or not athletic then your physical form was not honoring to god and his creation i've always been fat food was my first love as a kid and i remember you know just being really young pre-k kindergarten holding my stomach while i'm looking in the mirror and just crying and saying mom i'm so fat mom i'm so fat i'm just because i was bigger than the other girls and um i remember going on this secret diet i wrote about it in my journal when i was just six or seven where i was just going to eat cottage cheese that's all i was going to eat and i'm not even sure where i got that idea but i'm looking back it's just so sad because even at such a young age i was just so ashamed and those feelings definitely carried on until i was older i became a secret eater you know i would hide my food that i was eating when i could drive i would eat in my car away from everybody else and it was just so much shame it was a cycle of shame and self-hate and it impacted my relationships even i was afraid to talk to guys because heaven forbid they think i thought i was worthy of their affection you know i wanted them to know like oh no i i know i'm fat i know you'll never love me um so i never wanted them to get the wrong impression because i knew i wasn't worthy of their love because i was fat in the medical field having to go to doctors over and over about conditions because their only cure was for me to lose weight and so they missed a major diagnosis with endometriosis and other things that were causing a lot of pain and i was not getting the pain medication or the therapies that i needed to help go through that so i was suffering alone from a young age when i would go to the doctor i was just told that i needed to lose weight and that was kind of the gist of the appointment and even as i got older when i would come in with questions or a list of symptoms that i was having for something it would always circle back around to my my bmi my body size and how if i lost weight then this would go away or that would go away and so i didn't get answers and just felt like i had to live with certain pain or certain symptoms because my body was less than one of the things that i i struggle with when we're talking about weight bias and diet culture and looking at its socio-political and historical roots is also doing work as a trauma therapist and finding this tension where i'm wanting for people to have experiences of bodily autonomy where they are getting a chance to choose and yet knowing that sometimes what feels like autonomy agency for a person with their body actually looks like replicating this diet culture story and the tension between them is again one i i don't necessarily want to be the kind of person who says to another person particularly a woman particularly somebody who's been in a marginalized body you don't get to do that you i'm going to be the authority on how you be in your body and so you know what i'm going to tell you having researched all of the literature and all of the findings that dieting doesn't work that changing your body doesn't work and it's perpetuating this problematic narrative because i i don't want to again like we were talking about recreate this experience for people where somebody on the outside is telling them what to do with their body the challenge is that a lot of times as i was saying people are making choices that feel like agency and autonomy but are actually just performing everything that was handed to them about what it means to have a good body and i'm just curious if you have experience of sitting in the tension between those or how you help people move through that yeah definitely i definitely experience that tension myself i think that bodily autonomy is so important and we really do need to give people back their agency and that includes the agency to choose weight loss if they want it and you know i knowing what i know as a healthcare provider and a public health professional and someone who's researched all of this i can't in good conscience recommend weight loss and there's you know i can give people so many reasons why and so i think that having those conversations can be messy and difficult and you know i think that i do my best to offer information and say here's what here's what i know here's what you know this cultural environment is pressuring people to do here are the roots of that culture and you know the the roots that people don't always recognize and that they might sometimes have a problem being a part of like the racism and the misogyny and the you know homophobia and all the rest that sort of go along with this creation of an idealized body you know i think that having those conversations about the roots of this are really important and and give a lot of people a real energy of anger and rebellion and desire to change things so you know i think to me that's really important to have those conversations and i think not everyone is in a place where they're able to do that because of the marginalizations they might face so you know someone who's in a much larger body at the really high end of the bmi spectrum faces near constant weight-based discrimination in their daily life including sometimes not being able to get access to the medical care they need like literally not being not having an mri machine near them that fits you know that fits their body or not being able to get gender confirmation surgery until they lose weight or things like that so you know i'm aware of the realities for individuals and that's why i think you know people do ultimately have body autonomy they can do whatever they want with their bodies and i think it's my job just to try to educate people on the system of beliefs that's constraining their choices and also trying to change the culture so that people don't feel like they are stuck in this place of you know between two really difficult choices and i know people who are in the fat acceptance movement who've had weight loss surgery you know and like that's not something that they wanted to do ever or did because they thought it was going to make them thin they did it to try to get access to better care access to medical care that they desperately needed and you know so i i don't ever want to demonize anyone for making those kinds of choices and i would like to help create a culture where people aren't forced into that sort of choice you know where there is uh compassionate evidence-based medical care available to people even at the highest end of the bmi spectrum that doesn't force them to lose weight in order to be able to access it it makes me think about all the things that we do the ways that we massage our our embodied selves i'm thinking about code switching even to say like i'm going to protect my safety in this one area or get access to something else that i need by silencing or suppressing this one part of ourselves and how how that is a survival strategy that many of us have used at some point in some way and yet i feel the painfulness around that that it's that it's on us to negotiate and code switch instead of the broader society changing kind of the the narratives around bodies and which bodies they've decided are problematic there's a um kind of a thing that happens in my family and something that i've that i do as well and i'm trying to become more conscious of it but using like there's not a whole lot of overt fat shaming in in my as far as like you know you're too fat you need to lose weight kind of things but jokes and a lot of times it's self-deprecating jokes um from the you know whoever it is and i'll do this as well i have i often have a significant booty and i make jokes about it all the time um and some of it's i'm just curious from here hearing from both of you about approaching you know i love christine you're talking about speaking up for people and i can i thought of a scenario that just happened this week that i wish i would have spoken up for somebody um but what about when it's like from a person themselves who is like making jokes about their own weight or if they're trying to make light of it like i don't i don't often know how to respond in that kind of situation um i'm trying to i want to do less of it myself making fun of my own body um but you have any thoughts about when when you encounter that like how you can be a a loving helpful friend or family member to somebody who does that a lot about their own body yeah it's so tricky i think you know sometimes my instinct is to say you know i love your body i love your i love your belly or you know whatever part the person is um denigrating and i think sometimes you know in some context that can be really validating to the person and really helpful and i think you know sometimes it's also reinforcing the notion that like we are our looks and we're valued for our looks and you know our bodies are only acceptable if other people deem them acceptable and you know that's not a message i love to send either so i think you know it's it's sometimes you know kind of unpacking it might be helpful like you know i i think you're amazing no matter what size or shape your body is and you know i'm curious like why you're so um you know self-deprecating about this this area of your body or um you know that's certainly a deeper conversation that if you're just kind of like having brunch with your family or something on sunday it's not really appropriate um but yeah you know you can sometimes kind of laugh it off too and be like oh come on you're amazing you know and just kind of give a little validation in that moment and and maybe plant a little seed again that like oh self-deprecation isn't the only way to look at this and you know that maybe my body isn't isn't all of my worth and maybe people aren't even noticing my body in the way that i think they are you know this this uh i think about lots related to all sorts of comments that people make about themselves as a therapist one of the things i find difficult is our expectation around closeness and connection is that we match what's going on for a person so if they laugh we laugh if they smile we smile and disrupting that can feel like this fracture in the sense of closeness so often when i'm sitting across from someone if they're really belittling themselves the temptation and they're laughing about it and it seems playful on the surface as this kind of defense it can be really tempting to want to laugh along to say like we're together right see look we're together and it can feel so so uncomfortable and painful to subvert that by saying i'm not going to join you with that in that in that game you're playing not just because i don't agree with it but also because i see you totally differently but to do that means risking this rupture or fracture in closeness so one of the strategies that i found has been really helpful for me is to ask a question oh i i see it so differently i'm wondering i'm wondering where you learned that or i'm wondering i you know asking something that opens up something for a person or in the situations like you were saying christy where it's not appropriate just choosing not to laugh along right planting that seed and perhaps coming back to something later but i find for the people in my life who have done this and i've heard it more than once i'll often come back to them at some point and say hey i'm really conflicted because if someone else was talking about you that way i would be so angry with them i would tell them you're never allowed to say that in front of this person that i love but i don't know what to do when you're that person and so i feel stuck because i want i want to protect you but i don't know how to protect you from you but those are things that i don't agree with and so i'm feeling kind of stuck and i guess i just wanted to let you know that i don't know what to do with that but that it hurts me when you talk about yourself that way because i care about you and that takes a certain level of vulnerability and authenticity but i think that whenever we soften a kind of um invitation to reflect by making it about ourselves saying this is how i experience you we're making a self-disclosure instead of the person feeling criticized or belittled like they're doing something wrong we're inviting them to see themselves the way that we see them yeah and that invitation is best delivered when we're using our gaze our eyes um our perspective and it's loving and tender and an invitational instead of accusatory that's beautiful so that that has worked for me in some of my relationships like oh you're hurting yourself i don't i don't know what to do but it is really uncomfortable because we're not playing along and sometimes that means if i'm saying i'm not going to play along with your laughter i want to lean in extra hard to show you i am connected and close to you in this way so you don't perceive my decision not to laugh as being a rejection of you but actually just about the the statement that you're making or a disagreement with the belief not not who you are there's nothing threatening my love for you it's there's something else going on here that's a yeah like i love that it's so beautiful and it's hard to imagine some of especially like guy family members that you have like the bro thing for one like i i think for a lot of times guys that might even be more extreme where like your connection is yes is just the punching each other in the shoulder kind of vibe that is the connection to like get rid of that can feel extremely vulnerable and like yeah you're totally just like risking the like what's wrong with you bro i'm just playing around yeah right yeah and it i mean you're highlighting even in that that question or that tension that the systems that prop up these defenses need to go too so maybe there's a moment there to talk about like hey buddy like i i love joking around with you but there's also this other part of me that i want to connect with you in maybe a more vulnerable way and maybe that's hard for you but i'd love to try if we could i wonder if there's a way we could find closeness without throwing each other under the bust or without tearing each other down and saying like i'm trying to step outside of toxic masculinity which creates this sense of restricted emotionality and the lack of emotional vulnerability between men if we can do that then maybe it'll be easier to have some of these more vulnerable conversations but looking at how all of these social systems prop each other up and make it impossible to to move into loving and tender connection with ourselves and others wow yeah uh if only all men could talk to each other like that yeah yeah it's tough yeah that's so tough one of the things that our listeners i think the people in this community that we're a part of christie wrestle with is the sense that the body is pure or impure and a lot of times that has been connected more to sexual purity or sexual impurity but you mentioned this um this notion again that that there is a bad or impure body and that body is a big one and that's a problematic story that we're trying to get underneath but i'm wondering if if we could think about it from this angle what do we miss out on when we believe that fat is bad what is that keeping us all away from even the people who are not necessarily on the higher end of the weight spectrum maybe maybe kind of the people who fit more within the the socially constructed ideal what do all of us miss out on when we have moralized bodies this way yeah such a good question i think the biggest one that comes to mind is connection you know connection with ourselves connection with each other connection to the natural world connection to the present present moment you know being able to really be present in your life without having thoughts of food and body size and calories and exercise and clothing sizes and all that stuff clouding our you know ability to really be there because i know from experience and maybe you've had this too hillary of you know having the disordered eating just get in the way of so much in my life and distracting me for i mean one of the reasons honestly that i started reporting about food nutrition i started out reporting about local politics and i could not pay attention and couldn't focus on the work that i was supposed to be doing i was just obsessing about food nutrition all the time so i figured well might as well write about this you know because it's the thing that i can't stop focusing on and you know i sometimes think about i'm very happy with how my career has gone but sometimes think about where it would have gone if i hadn't gone down this road if i hadn't been so obsessed with food all the time you know i had lots of other long-standing interests at the outset of my career and could have gone many different directions and it ended up in this food place because that's what i was so fixated on but you know i think i think there's so much more out there there's so much more available to all of us than just constantly thinking about food in our bodies and i talked to lots of people on my podcast lots of colleagues of mine and in this you know anti-diet work that i do who were drawn to the field of nutrition or fitness or you know anything related to that because of their own issues with food in their bodies and they were so obsessed with it they couldn't see themselves doing anything else but that you know eight to 10 hours a day and you know really cut them off from other aspects of their life they cared about and sometimes keeps them stuck in a career that is hurting them you know before they at least before they can transition into a different way of doing things and i think it also you know diet culture and and this fat phobic thinking really keeps us from connecting with each other at all kinds of levels you know keeps us from being present at meals with each other and really hearing what each other has has to say because we're in our heads focusing on what we're eating or not eating what other people are eating or not eating and how skinny they look or how they measure up to us and you know it's that kind of obsession really eats away at our ability to be present with each other and connect with each other at a deeper level yeah yeah so well said i think the the best thing i did the whole 30 one time i think the uh the best thing i took from that experience was they actually recommended when you start reincorporating foods to be more mindful when you eat that chocolate chip cookie like enjoy it and that actually was really great and to see when you're not just focused so much on diet or calories or what kind of food and you can just the joy of of eating and connecting and and life when you that stuff it can really just it can disembodied your whole experience to such a degree yeah that it pulls you away from the the joy that it is that it can be to eat god eating can be such a beautiful blissful experience and and the sensuality of it the connection of it the the joy of life the tradition yeah and how much do we lose by by focusing on some other thing about rather than just like being with that experience fully so thank you for that christine that's really beautiful yeah and thank you for sharing that too i mean i think that the only thing i would probably say that's positive about the whole 30 is that you know that it gives people i yeah it's i see it as just another diet really but yeah because it is so restrictive and depriving and and regimented but i think that emphasis on pleasure and you know the ability to really sink in and enjoy the foods that you are eating is something that we're missing in this culture and you know i think does kind of go back to puritanical values about you know not just food but sex and bodies and everything interestingly one of the early figures in modern diet you know figured one of the prominent figures in early diet culture was sylvester graham the creator of the graham cracker who was a presbyterian minister who um you know saw food and and specifically supposedly stimulating foods as kind of gateways into sin and over stimulation was the the scourge of the modern age at the time and he advocated you know really bland austere foods without a lot of flavor without you know really anything pleasurable and also advocated abstaining from masturbation and abstaining from quote unquote too much sex between married couples and you know had these ideas about purity around sex in addition to purity around food and um you know was really he was sort of integral in in bringing this idea of like cutting out foods as a path to wellness into diet culture it's pretty and pretty unbelievable when we think about all of the the things that have gone into these beliefs that we carry around mindlessly that shape the kind of unconscious behaviors that we that we engage in on a daily basis it is uh i think it's sometimes scary to realize how shaped we are by culture without even realizing it and it really disrupts this story that we have that we are totally autonomous and have free choice about everything and even the things that we want maybe we want them because somebody else a long time ago said they were good when it's all you know you can't just unlearn it it's hard work it's a practice to think differently and undo what you've learned but it is possible and i'm doing it it's a struggle it's something i have to think about and manage and and continue to process and work through every day of my life i have to remind myself that i'm lovable i'm worthy i'm valuable i'm beautiful in in the body that i was given my body is a gift and the things that i do with it and use it as a way to love and support people is far greater of something to put my energy and time into than wasting it on what size it is or trying to control or manipulate it my body protects me the fat that i have on my stomach protects my organs and will protect my future baby if i choose to have one the fat on my legs protects the rest of my body the fat on my breasts is what will feed my future child my body is beautiful but it took me over 20 years to learn that and i wish someone would have told me sooner my children are going to have a new narrative that's my hope and prayer but i feel like i did hate and shame talk to myself for years and years and i would say it about 38 years old i broke free from that and so i'm teaching my children to speak truth to themselves until they believe it i'm telling them how beautifully and wonderfully they are made and to dance around in their bodies and the second i had children and i had marks and i was clapping and hanging i just said yes isn't mommy's body so beautiful because i am set free and i want my children to be set free as well if you'd like to talk more about this we'd love to invite you to join us this sunday at the sunday thing being part of the liturgists community has all sorts of perks and activities and the sunday thing is one of the ways that we can all get together and dive deeper into these ideas and it's an online zoo meeting that happens every sunday you can check out that and all the other things that happen in the literature community at the liturgists.com i'd like to thank all those who called in with their stories and their thoughts uh thank you for sharing of yourselves it's really beautiful we'd like to thank christy harrison for being part of the program thanks to the patrons for making what we do possible your hosts for today's show have been dr hilary mcbride and me michael gunger the show was edited by tages lair heiden and myself [Music] we hope to see you this sunday the sunday thing all the love everybody