Podcast appearances and mentions of deb burgard

The study we're looking at in this series is “Eating disorder risk during behavioral weight management in adults with overw*ight or ob*sity: A systematic review with meta-analysis” by Jebeile et al, 2023In Part 1 we'll look at overarching issues and in parts 2 and 3 we'll dig into the specifics of the study. For this section I reached out to Deb Burgard, PhD and Fellow of the Academy of Eating Disorders for her thoughts and I'm super grateful for her contributions. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

In part 1 we looked at the major issues with the ways that children are labeled “overw*ight” and “ob*se”. In part 2 we'll look at more of the nuances. Again, Deb Burgard, PhD, FAED was incredibly helpful in putting together this piece. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

Today we are breaking down Novo Nordisk's 2-year study of their weight loss drug, Wegovy. I want to thank Deb Burgard for her help with this piece. She is quoted and was kind enough to review and give feedback on the piece and I am incredibly grateful! Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

We're covering a doozy of a topic this week - healthcare and weight. We chat about why this conversation is so crucial and provide strategies for navigating weigh ins in a health care setting. We break it down with tips for before and during your appointment to help you feel more prepared. Much of what we discuss comes from the one and only Ragen Chastain. You can learn more from Ragen here on her website https://danceswithfat.org/ or her newsletter https://weightandhealthcare.substack.com/. We also reference Ragen's appointment action plan, which you can access here: https://weightandhealthcare.substack.com/p/navigate-medical-weight-stigma-by. Check out these studies that specifically showcase the harm in weight loss: The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss: Tracy L. Tylka, Rachel A. Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrún Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, Rachel M. Calogero, "The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss", Journal of Obesity, vol. 2014, Article ID 983495, 18 pages, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/983495 Changing the endpoints for determining effective obesity management: Ross R, Blair S, de Lannoy L, Després JP, Lavie CJ. Changing the endpoints for determining effective obesity management. Prog Cardiovasc Dis. 2015 Jan-Feb;57(4):330-6. doi: 10.1016/j.pcad.2014.10.002. Epub 2014 Oct 25. PMID: 25459976. Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after "The Biggest Loser" competition: Fothergill E, Guo J, Howard L, Kerns JC, Knuth ND, Brychta R, Chen KY, Skarulis MC, Walter M, Walter PJ, Hall KD. Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after "The Biggest Loser" competition. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2016 Aug;24(8):1612-9. doi: 10.1002/oby.21538. Epub 2016 May 2. PMID: 27136388; PMCID: PMC4989512. How dieting makes some fatter: from a perspective of human body composition autoregulation: Dulloo AG, Jacquet J, Montani JP. How dieting makes some fatter: from a perspective of human body composition autoregulation. Proc Nutr Soc. 2012 Aug;71(3):379-89. doi: 10.1017/S0029665112000225. Epub 2012 Apr 5. PMID: 22475574. To access selected annotated studies on Intuitive Eating, visit https://www.evelyntribole.com/wp-content/uploads/Intuitive-Eating-and-Selected-Studies-2022.pdf. Do you have a weight neutral or HAES aligned provider you work with that you think would make for a great guest on GTB? DM us on Instagram @giveemthebirdpodcast, email us at giveemthebirdpodcast@gmail.com, or if you're tuning in on Spotify engaging in our Q&A!  Enjoying the podcast? Feel free to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple or Spotify! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/giveemthebirdpodcast/support

Stigmatisierung und Diskriminierung aufgrund des Körpergewichts, damit sind viele tagtäglich konfrontiert. Ich spreche mit Isabel Bersenkowitsch darüber, was Stigmatisierung mit unserem Gesundheitssystem zu tun hat. Wir sprechen über das gewichtsneutrale und das gewichtszentrierte Gesundheitssystem und warum es einen Wechsel zu einem neuen Gesundheitsparadigma braucht.  KontaktInstagram: @cornelia_fiechtlAchtsam Essen AkademieWebsite Food Feelings - Das Buch HOLi. Gesundheitszentrum Isabel: https://www.ernaehrungsrevolution.at QuellenGaesser, G. & Angadi, S. (2021). O*esity treatment: Weight loss versus increasing fitness and physical activity for reducing health risks. iScience Vol. 24 (10)O'Hara, L., & Gregg, J. (2012). Human Rights Casualties from the “War on Obesity”: Why Focusing on Body Weight Is Inconsistent with a Human Rights Approach to Health. Fat Studies, 1(1), 32–46.O'Hara, L., & Taylor, J. (2018). What's Wrong With the ‘War on Obesity?' A Narrative Review of the Weight-Centered Health Paradigm and Development of the 3C Framework to Build Critical Competency for a Paradigm Shift. SAGE Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018772888Provincial Health Services Authority. (2013). From Weight to Well-Being: Time for a Shift in Paradigms? www.phsa.ca/populationhealthPuhl, R., & Suh, Y. (2015). Health Consequences of Weight Stigma: Implications for Obesity Prevention and Treatment. Current obesity reports, 4(2), 182–190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13679-015-0153-zTomiyama, A., Carr, D., Granberg, E. et al. How and why weight stigma drives the obesity ‘epidemic' and harms health. BMC Med 16, 123 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-018-1116-5Tracy L. Tylka, Rachel A. Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrún Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, Rachel M. Calogero, “The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well Being over Weight Loss”, Journal of Obesity, vol. 2014, ArticleID 983495, 18 pages, 2014.https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/983495Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2020). Intuitive eating: an anti-diet revolutionary approach (4th edition). St. Martin's Essentials.Wu, Y. K., & Berry, D. C. (2018). Impact of weight stigma on physiological and psychological health outcomes for overweight and obese adults: A systematic review. Journal of advanced nursing, 74(5), 1030–1042. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13511 Empfohlene PodastfolgenHealth at every Size® mit @drantoniepostDiskriminierung von Mehrgewichtigen & StigmataWas dir keiner über "gesund essen" (& Abnehmen!) erzähltEmotionales Essen - psychologisch betrachtetÜ*ergewicht - Der Begriff unter der Lupe Foto: Patrick Schörg I https://www.theportraiture.at 

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing!I think that one of the more dangerous and disingenuous parts of the new American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines is their claims about eating disorders. These are claims that I am hearing echoed in other spaces as well, so I wanted to write about them in depth. In terms of the guidelines themselves, I wrote a deep dive about their three main recommendations around “Intensive Health Behavior and Lifestyle Treatment (IHBLT), weight loss drugs, and weight loss surgeries here. I also looked into undisclosed conflicts of interest here.When it comes to eating disorders they claim (in bold, title case) that “Evidence-based Pediatric Ob*sity* Treatment Reduces Risks for Disordered Eating.” Is this remotely true? Let's get into it.They begin by saying “concerns have been raised as to whether diagnosis and treatment of ob*sity [in the case of these guidelines starting at the age of two] may inadvertently place excess attention on eating habits, body shape, and body size and lead to disordered eating patterns as children grow into adulthood.”Well, let's examine the situation. They are “diagnosing” kids as having a “disease” based solely on their body size and shape, and then recommending “Intensive” interventions and dangerous drugs and surgeries that put significant focus on food and food restriction with the goal of changing the child's body size and shape. There is nothing inadvertent about this, it's about as advertent as it can get.They go on to claim “Cardel et al refer to multiple studies that have demonstrated that, although ob*sity and self-guided dieting consistently place children at high risk for weight fluctuation and disordered eating patterns, participation in structured, supervised weight management programs decreases current and future eating disorder symptoms (including bulimic symptoms, emotional eating, binge eating, and drive for thinness) up to 6 years after treatment. “I'll get to the research they cite in a minute, but I want to point out that in their list of current and future eating disorder symptoms, they left a few out including (from the AAP's OWN 2016 paper on eating disorders prevention in adolescents):“Severe dietary restriction, skipping of meals, prolonged periods of starvation, or the use of self-induced vomiting, diet pills, or laxatives”Let's remember that even if their “intensive” behavioral therapy recommendations don't devolve into disordered eating and eating disorders (and they certainly could,) their recommendations around pharmacotherapy and weight loss surgery literally induce all of these symptoms, sometimes for the rest of the child's life.It's pretty difficult to reduce eating disorders symptoms when you've created 100 pages of guidelines to literally recommend them. This reminds me of something the brilliant Deb Burgard says, which is that we prescribe to fat people what we diagnose and treat in thin people, and in this case the people are children.Now, I don't know if those symptoms are left out accidentally because the authors are so ignorant about eating disorders and higher-weight kids that they assume higher-weight kids aren't susceptible to these (potentially fatal) symptoms, or if they left them out on purpose because they know that being honest about this renders their claims of their “treatments” decreasing eating disorder symptoms not just false, but patently ridiculous. Either way, the fact that they don't even mention these symptoms means that, at best, they don't have the expertise necessary to even talk about this, let alone create guidelines.Ok, so let's look at the research they cite to back up their claims that ob*sity “treatment” reduces risks for disordered eating.Forkey H, Szilagyi M, Kelly ET, Duffee J; Council on Foster Care, Adoption, and Kinship Care; Council on Community Pediatrics; Council on Child Abuse and Neglect; Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health. Trauma-informed care. Pediatrics. 2021;148(2):e2021052580Given that this clinical report doesn't mention supervised weight management programs, eating disorders, or eating disorder symptoms, I would suggest that it does not support their claims.Something interesting that it does talk about is that higher-weight children are “more likely to experience discrimination, both overt and as a series of microaggressions (small slights, insults, or indignities either intentional or unintentional) that accumulate over time” and that “the lifelong effects of toxic stress are statistically related to many adult illnesses, particularly those related to chronic inflammation, and causes for early mortality.”This is important because the authors of the AAP guidelines are ignoring it in order to uncritically assume that if higher-weight kids have these health issues then it is because of their weight without mentioning that (as explained in a study they, themselves, cited) it might not be their weight but, in fact, the weight stigma they experience that is the root.The next study is Jebeile et al., (2019) Association of pediatric ob*sity treatment, including a dietary component, with change in depression and anxiety: a systematic review and meta-analysis. We're getting warmer here, at least this study actually talks about “ob*sity” treatment. However, they do not examine eating disorder symptoms, they look at changes in depression and anxiety. They find that “structured, professionally run pediatric ob*sity treatment is not associated with an increased risk of depression or anxiety and may result in a mild reduction in symptoms.” First, note the use of “may result,” not exactly a clear conclusion. Beyond this, the studies offer follow-up between 2 weeks to 15 months. We know that weight regain typically starts around the 12 month mark, but this study fails to address (or even consider) what will happen to depression and anxiety symptoms during/after weight regain. I wonder if the study authors actually meant to cite this study, by the same authors:Jebeile et al.. (2019). Treatment of ob*sity, with a dietary component, and eating disorder risk in children and adolescents: A systematic review with meta-analysis. I noticed right away that there was a letter written about this study by Louise Adams. I know Louise, I have been a guest on her podcast All Fired Up (including recently with Fiona Willer to talk about the dangers of Wegovy and Saxenda). Her letter to the editor was behind a paywall, and while I could access it, I knew that if I wrote about it nobody else who wanted to read it could. So I reached out to her and I got something even better. I received the full text of the letter she wrote (not the shorter version that they published.) Here is the summary, the letter is re-printed in its entirety at the end of the piece. Her work is always spot on, you can check out her work and sign up for her newsletter here. Here is Louise Adams' summary of the issues with this study: Given the errors and serious omissions in Jebeile et al's article, the findings and conclusions of this review are unreliable. I am concerned that the overarching message of this paper projects an air of certainty regarding the long-term safety and efficacy of adolescent weight loss interventions on ED risk that does not reflect adequate data and places children and adolescents at risk of harm. I am concerned that this paper will be used as evidence to justify ever more invasive weight loss trials and products in vulnerable adolescent populations. The authors' conclusion that ‘structured and professionally run ob*sity treatment leads to a reduction in the prevalence of ED, ED risk, and ED-related symptoms for most participants' is extraordinarily misguided, given that (a) quality long-term data were available for only 7.5% of the sample, and (b) clear evidence of a subset of adolescents who developed ED symptoms was present in the longer term studies. Moreover, the high numbers of missing data due to adolescents lost to follow up is important to note and cannot be overlooked as a potential indicator of even higher risk.In our conversation, Louise pointed out that her concern that this study would be used to justify additional weight loss trials is exactly what happened here. She also mentioned that in the “conflicts of interest” section of her letter to the editor, the original study authors pushed for her to include “The author discloses that in addition to practicing as a consultant clinical psychologist in private practice, she derives income from an online anti‐diet program for adult chronic dieters.” She points out that their zeal for conflict of interest disclosures did not extend to their own study. In fact they claimed “no conflicts of interest”  despite the fact that they worked at the adolescent ob*sity clinic and that Baur didn't disclose her role as president of the weight loss industry-funded  World Ob*sity Federation. I discussed the issues with the false equivalence between anti-diet work and diet industry work here. The last study they cite is Cardel MI, Newsome FA, Pearl RL, et al. Patient-centered care for ob*sity: how health care providers can treat ob*sity while actively addressing weight stigma and eating disorder risk. J Acad Nutr Diet. 2022;122(6): 1089–1098The short story about this study is that it reads like a bunch of diet industry shills trying to co-opt the language of weight-neutral health in order to obfuscate the plain fact that intentional weight loss is incompatible with eating disorders prevention and treatment, so they can continue to market the same old failed “interventions” for “ob*sity”* and dodge responsibility for all the harm they create. I did a deep dive into this paper here.The challenges in diagnosing EDs in the context of the treatments recommended in these guidelines are due to the fact that the behaviors recommended by these guidelines (and created by the drugs and surgeries recommended) are consistent with eating disorders symptoms. Another way to say this is that the same behaviors that are considered red flags for an eating disorder in thinner children are being recommended as “healthcare” for higher-weight children bolstered by the dubious claim that they will reduce eating disorder symptoms.I do not think any of the research they cite comes close to supporting their claim that “evidence-based pediatric ob*sity treatment reduces risks for disordered eating.” In fact, I think significant research (which I wrote about here) shows that if the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines are followed, they will create a generation of kids struggling with disordered eating and eating disorders , starting as early as two years old. Compounding the issue, since (by their own admission,) the “treatments” recommended by their guidelines almost never result in significant, long-term weight loss, these kids will still be higher-weight and, thus, have a more difficult time getting properly diagnosed with these life-threatening conditions (especially if their doctors read claims that the weight loss “treatments” the kids have survived supposedly prevent eating disorders.) This will do the most harm to higher-weight kids who are multiply-marginalized and/or under-resourced who, even if they can get a correct diagnosis, will have a very difficult time getting treatment. The top eating disorders organizations have come out unequivocally against these guidelines:International Federation of Eating Disorders DietitiansNational Alliance for Eating DisordersShame on the AAP for bending themselves (and the data) into pretzels to defend and recommend a dangerous and failed weight loss paradigm to children as young as two years old.Here is Louise's full letterProfessor David YorkEditor-in-ChiefOb*sity Reviews444 W Willis #307DetroitMI 48201Dear Professor York,I am writing to bring to your attention my significant concerns about an article recently published in Ob*sity Reviews:Jebeile, H, Gow, ML, Baur, LA, Garnett, SP, Paxton, SJ, Lister, NB. Treatment ofob*sity, with a dietary component, and eating disorder risk in children and adolescents: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Ob*sity Reviews. 2019; 20: 1287– 1298. https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.12866Please note that I send you this communication not with a view to being published in your journal (unless you believe this to be appropriate - I leave this decision to your discretion), but to ask that you consider the points I make below and consider retracting the article.This review sought to investigate the impact of ob*sity treatment, with a dietary component, on eating disorder (ED) prevalence, ED risk, and related symptoms in higher weight children and adolescents. The review analysed 29 studies, claiming data for 2589 adolescents. The authors concluded that ‘structured and professionally run ob*sity treatment was associated with reduced ED prevalence, ED risk, and symptoms'. I have three main concerns about the quality of this paper: (1) review methods, (2) follow up period definitions and (3) omission of dietary restraint analysis. These concerns are detailed below:1. Review Methods: Decision to Run a Meta-AnalysisThe fact that a meta-analysis was conducted rather than a narrative summary is troubling considering the heterogeneity of the studies included. The 29 studies involved interventions ranging from 1 week to 13 months. 11 of the studies had no follow up period. Those with follow ups varied considerably, ranging from 12 weeks to more than 5 years post intervention. The intervention types and locations were vastly different: including inpatient and outpatient hospital programs, school-based health clinics, and even an intervention in which adolescents attended a Jenny Craig program.A systematic review of 9 adolescent weight management interventions exploring the same subject - ED risk factors - by De Giuseppe and colleagues (2019) shared five papers in common with Jebeile et al (2019). However, De Giuseppe et al concluded that a meta analysis was not possible due to heterogeneity of the papers, and instead conducted a narrative summary of the findings. I believe that Jebeile et al should also have conducted a narrative review due to the heterogenity of the studies. Both Jebeile et al and De Giuseppe et al conducted a quality assessment, albeit using different assessment tools. Jebeile et al used the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Quality Criteria Checklist (Handu et al 2016) and rated 11 of their included papers as ‘positive' and 25 as ‘neutral'. The De Giuseppe et al (2019) study utilised the Effective Public Health Practice Project Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies (Thomas et al, 2004). For 4 of the 5 studies in common, Jebeile et al 's quality ratings were higher than those assessed by De Giuseppe et al :Study Cited                                         Jebeile et al (2019)          De Giuseppe et al (2019)Cohen et al (2018)                           Positive                                                ModerateDeNiet et al (2012)                          Positive                                                ModerateHalberstadt et al (2016)                 Neutral                                                 WeakGoossens et al (2011)                     Neutral                                                 WeakSaverstani et al (2009)                    Neutral                                                 ModerateThere is clear disagreement between these authors as to the quality of the same studies, with Jebeile et al consistently producing more positive assessments.2. Follow Up Period Definitions 18 studies cited by Jebeile et al included follow up periods. In their Eligibility Criteria they stated that data at last follow up was ‘defined as a period in which there was no contact with study personnel and no intervention delivery' (pg 1288). Given this definition, the paper should have consistently referred to follow up periods from the end of intervention rather than baseline.However, throughout the paper and supplementary document, Jebeile et al (2019) repeatedly provide data reflecting time periods from baseline, often without explicitly stating that the period cited was taken from baseline and did not reflect their given definition.An example of this is on page 4 under “Prevalence of diagnosed eating disorders”, where Jebeile et al stated that “from 110 participants who completed the 24 month follow-up measures in the study by Braet et al…”. This should have been reported as a 14 month follow up.A further correction is needed in that the Braet et al (2004) study only had data on ED measures for 89 participants, not 110. Another example of this type of error in the reported number of participants occurred in the reporting of the De Bar et al (2012) study, where they stated that the intervention had n=100 in usual care and n=100 in the usual care control group, when in fact there were n=90 in the intervention group and n=83 in the control group. It is of concern that both of these errors overstated the number of participants in their dataset.Defining the follow up period in one way in the Eligibility Criteria and reporting it another way throughout the paper had the impact of making the included studies' follow up periods appear longer than they actually were. It is critical that the correct follow up period definition is adhered to, as Jebeile et al have used these to claim that a ‘strength' of their meta-analysis was that it ‘addresses concerns over longer term ED risk….with follow-up timepoints of up to 6 years from baseline, including seven studies with a follow up of >2 years” (p. 1295). If we use the correct definition for follow up periods as beginning from the end of an intervention period, only 3, not 7, of the studies in their meta analysis have a follow up period of 2 years or longer, representing just 7.5% of the total sample. This low number certainly does not adequately address concerns over longer term ED risk in adolescents, and represents a weakness, not a strength, of the meta analysis.3. Quality of the Analysis of Risk Posed by Adolescent Weight Loss InterventionsJebeile et al's claims regarding the safety of adolescent weight loss interventions is at odds with the widely held view, supported by theories of the etiology of ED development (Ahern, Bennett, Hetherington, 2008; Berge et al, 2018, Fairburn, Cooper, Doll, Welch,1999, Golden et al, 2016, Ouwens et al, 2009, Polivy & Herman, 1985, Stice & Presnell, 2007) and a substantial body of longitudinal research (Field et al, 2003,Neumark-Sztainer et al, 2007, Patton et al, 1999, Stice 2001, Stice et al, 2000, Stice et al, 2005, Urvelyte & Perminas, 2015) which demonstrate that over time, dieting is a major risk factor for both increased weight and increased risk of development of disordered eating and ED. In order to accurately assess the impact and potential harms of adolescent weight loss interventions, three conditions must be met:1) Quality data that captures disordered eating/eating disorder symptomatology for a period of at least 2 years, if not longer, after the diet intervention ends. This is because in childhood and adolescence eating disorders can take considerable time to appear; Stice and Van Ryzin (2019) have identified a 4-step pathway of eating disorder development which demonstrated that eating disorder symptoms did not appear until, on average, 26.8 months after youths began dieting.The need for longer follow up data has been apparent for a considerable time: over 20 years ago, Casper (1996) discussed this need to improve research standards and recommended even longer minimum follow-up durations of 4 years.2) ED instruments that have been developed and normed for higher weight adolescents. These measures should include an exploration of internalised weight stigma, so that researchers can untangle the apparent positive impact of weight loss from the experience of a reduction in internalised and external weight bias. Unfortunately such ED instruments do not yet exist. In the absence of such sensitive measures, quality studies must include follow up data for ED measurements of some kind.3) In order to determine the efficacy of weight loss interventions, best practice is to include a control group from the same population (Brown et al, 2019). It is even more important in youth, since BMI algorithms include the speed of growth, not just height and weight, and weight loss and gain are being assessed in relation to other youth. To answer the question of the impact of dieting, it is important to track the weight trajectories of larger bodied adolescents who do not diet. Phenomena such as regression to the mean (RTM) in higher weight adolescents and normal variations in growth spurts can impact significantly, and without control groups the true impact of weight loss interventions on larger youths will remain unknown. Brown et al (2019) have called for researchers to “clearly, and without reservation, acknowledge the distinct possibility that RTM could explain the improvements after intervention (p.4)”.None of the studies included in Jebeile et al's meta-analysis met all 3 of these requirements. None of the studies included a randomised control group with 2 year post intervention data. Only 3 studies - Braet et al (2000, 2006), and Goossens et al (2011) meet criteria for providing ED measures with a follow up period after the intervention of 2 years or longer. Once drop out rates and the number of adolescents with complete ED data at follow up are factored in, Jebeile et al's paper included quality data on 195 adolescents; just 7.5% of the sample.It is accurate to state that the meta-analysis revealed more about how much we do not know about the link between adolescent weight loss interventions and ED development, rather than claiming evidence of safety. I am concerned that the way this paper is written obscures the true message of the data. The authors' conclusions do not mention the dearth of meaningful long-term data, instead the opposite message - one that suggested a degree of certainty - was conveyed.A closer examination of the 3 studies with longer term data on ED is warranted. Braet et al (2000) conducted a three-armed intervention on 136 adolescents aged between 7 and 17 years. There was no control group. The intervention compared 3 conditions of a CBT based ‘healthy eating' program. A follow up was conducted 4.6 years after the intervention ended.ED data were available for only 53 of the original 136 participants (39% of the sample). A large number of adolescents did not return for follow up, and it is plausible that these youths may be experiencing negative impacts from the intervention. The authors called for “caution in interpreting these data” given the large amount of missing data.Participant data for the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ) was gathered at baseline and at follow up. The results of the DEBQ showed a significant reduction in external eating, a significant increase in restrained eating, and no change in emotional eating.Braet et al also administered the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) at the 4.6 year follow up. These results revealed that girls scored higher than average on the Drive for Thinness subscale, and boys scored significantly higher than average on the Body Dissatisfaction subscale. 9% of the sample had a score of five or more on the Bulimia EDI-subscale. Analysing a subsample of 76 of the youths, one had been hospitalised in an eating disorder unit.In terms of weight reduction, the Braet et al study showed that mean % overweight was 55% at the outset and 42% at follow up. Without a control group it is not possible to interpret these results. Further, almost half of the subsample reported that they had continued to seek weight loss after the intervention ended. This would impact on ED measurements: if adolescents are still dieting, some ED symptoms (eg binge eating) may not be apparent. This does not mean however that they have not been harmed, or that an ED will not develop in the future.It is important to note that other authors in the field have cited the Braet et al (2000) study as evidence for the emergence of ED symptoms after weight loss interventions.For instance, Goossens et al (2011) make the following statement: “results from a recent study...demonstrate that despite initial improvements (post-treatment and 2-year followup), eating pathology stagnated and even tended to increase in a subsample of youngsters at 3-year follow-up.”It should further be noted that the description of Braet et al's (2000) study presented in Table S2 in Jebeile et al's paper lists only the DEBQ and omits the EDI . Furthermore, the elevated Bulimia subscale scores in Braet et al's study were omitted in section 3.6.1. Bulimic Symptoms, despite the obvious relevance. In fact the Braet et al (2000) study is completely absent from this section, which is of concern. Jebeile et al state that “Two studies reported on participants with scores above a clinical cut-point for bulimic symptoms”. This should be corrected to say 3 studies, and include an overview of the Braet et al (2000) EDI data including that girls scored higher than average on the Drive for Thinness subscale, boys scored significantly higher than average on the Body Dissatisfaction subscale, 9% of the sample had scores above a clinical cut-off point for Bulimia, and one participant had been hospitalised for an eating disorder.The study by Braet et al (2006) followed 150 adolescents through a ten-month inpatient weight loss program. 2 years later, 110 youths provided weight data and Eating Disorder Examination (EDE) data was collected for 86 participants at baseline and follow up. This represents an absence of data for 43% of the sample.In terms of weight, the authors reported a 10% reduction in adjusted BMI, but without a control group it is not possible to ascertain the actual impact of the weight loss intervention. Of note, 75% of the sample were reported to be regaining weight after the intervention, even though 78% reported that they were engaging in further weight loss attempts after the study period ended.The overall EDE scores were reported as reduced at the 2 year follow up mark, but detailed subscale data was not reported. The same sample was discussed in a 2009 study by Goossens et al, where they reported increases in dietary restraint scores, and further warned that “in younger age groups, as was the case in this study, restraint attitudes have probably not yet reached their peak, and, as a consequence, full-blown eating disorders are still hard to detect.” The authors themselves are acknowledging that even a two year follow up is not enough time for ED symptoms to start showing in this population.The third study by Goossens et al (2011) was conducted on a sample of 108 adolescents aged between 10 and 17. There was no control group. The intervention was a 10 month inpatient program (the same program reported in Braet et al 2006). The follow up period was five years and two months after the intervention ended. Overall, 48% of the sample were lost to follow up, and the authors obtained complete ED measures (Child Eating Disorder Examination [chEDE] and the EDI) for 56 adolescents.No participants met criteria for binge-eating disorder (BED) at baseline. However, at follow-up, 5.4% met BED criteria. 8.3% of youths who did not report Objective Binge Eating (OBE) at baseline reported OBE at follow up. 8.5% of youths who did not report Subjective Binge Eating (SBE) at baseline reported SBE at follow up. Half of the adolescents who reported OBE at baseline still reported OBE at follow up.In summary, the data for studies with follow up periods of 2 years or longer show that from an initial pool of 394 youths, data on 195 were available, representing just 49.5% of the starting sample. Within this group, roughly 5-9% are showing signs of disordered eating and increased risk of ED following weight loss interventions. Disordered eating symptoms arise over time, and are easily erased when meta analyses include no or short term follow up periods. It is imperative that any research in this area focuses on long term outcomes, not allowing the shorter term data to obscure the big picture. We must also keep in mind the fate of the large group of adolescents (in this case, roughly half) who are lost to follow up. The fate of these youths is too often overlooked, and it is plausible that many of these people end up with disordered eating and ED.3. Omission of Dietary Restraint AnalysisJebeile et al's paper does not include a section reporting the impact of adolescent weight loss interventions on dietary restraint (DR) , a glaring omission given this is a central precursor to and symptom of eating disorders. In the studies included in the review, ample data was collected for DR and warrants further analysis.The differing frames between the eating disorder literature, in which DR clearly features as a central symptom of EDs, and the ob*sity research literature, in which DR is viewed as desirable for larger bodied people, is critically important to highlight. The treatment of ob*sity requires a practice that has been found to be a gateway to the development of eating disorders for people with eating disorders. For ob*sity researchers to omit any analysis of the impact of adolescent weight loss interventions on DR is a tacit admission that higher weight people should be prescribed what is diagnosed as disordered eating in thinner people.Many of the papers in the meta analysis demonstrated increases in DR soon after the intervention (eg, Braet et al 2000, Braet et al 2006, Brennan et al 2012, Goossens et al 2011, Halberstadt et al 2016, Saverstani et al, 2009). Several of the authors involved in these studies themselves raised the issue of dietary restraint as an important issue to study in adolescents, noting that it is important that interventions do not make DR worse. For example, Braet et al (2000) note that “ we wanted to avoid the type of dietary restraint that has been linked to the development of eating disorders” .In comparison, the De Giuseppe et al (2019) analysis discussed DR at length, noting conflicting results. Some studies found the interventions reduced DR, whilst others found they increased it. Regardless of whether DR is viewed as a precursor to both weight regain and the development of ED (Jansen et al, 2009, Stice et al, 2005), or viewed as a necessary and potentially useful method of weight control for larger sized adolescents (Smith et al 2018), this topic needs to be analysed, discussed and argued, not ignored.Given the errors and serious omissions in Jebeile et al's article, the findings and conclusions of this review are unreliable. I am concerned that the overarching message of this paper projects an air of certainty regarding the long-term safety and efficacy of adolescent weight loss interventions on ED risk that does not reflect adequate data and places children and adolescents at risk of harm. I am concerned that this paper will be used as evidence to justify ever more invasive weight loss trials and products in vulnerable adolescent populations. The authors' conclusion that ‘structured and professionally run ob*sity treatment leads to a reduction in the prevalence of ED, ED risk, and ED-related symptoms for most participants' is extraordinarily misguided, given that (a) quality long-term data were available for only 7.5% of the sample, and (b) clear evidence of a subset of adolescents who developed ED symptoms was present in the longer term studies. Moreover, the high numbers of missing data due to adolescents lost to follow up is important to note and cannot be overlooked as a potential indicator of even higher risk.I respectfully request that this paper be considered for retraction. Thank you for considering my submission, I await your response.Yours sincerely,Louise AdamsClinical PsychologistUntrappedSydney, AustraliaDid you find this post helpful? You can subscribe for free to get future posts delivered direct to your inbox, or choose a paid subscription to support the newsletter and get special benefits! Click the Subscribe button below for details:Liked this piece? Share this piece:More research and resources:https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da'Shaun Harrison Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing!Every day I see something about how this diet, or that activity, or this federally funded program will help “solve the ob*sity* epidemic.”  In truth, this “epidemic” could be solved today.Just stop talking about the “ob*sity epidemic”.  There, problem solved.  But perhaps in our current society this bears some explanation – here's why we should banish the whole concept.Before we get too far into this, the term “ob*sity” (and overw*ight, while we're at it) was made up to pathologize fat bodies. This pathologization is rooted in, and inextricable from, racism and anti-Blackness and continues to disproportionately harm Black people and other folks of color. I urge you to read Sabrina Strings' Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia and Da'Shaun Harrison's Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness to learn more about this. So let's break this down. First of all, fat people existing doesn't meet the definition of an epidemic.  The CDC's official definition of an epidemic is: “The occurrence of more cases of disease than expected in a given area or among a specific group of people over a particular period of time.”While there is certainly no shame in having a disease, being fat simply does not qualify. (Even the American Medical Association's expert council on Science and Public Health agrees.) “Ob*sity,” as defined by the CDC, is simply a ratio of weight and height.  So, even if you believe that there are more fat people who exist than would be expected, that still wouldn't qualify as an epidemic, it's just a bunch of people whose weight in pounds time 703 divided by their height in inches squared is over 30. Not only is the ob*sity epidemic not a real thing, it's also dangerous in the following ways:It is used to harm fat people in the interest of weight loss industry profits. The idea of conceptualizing simply existing in a higher-weight body as a disease has largely been architected and pushed by the weight loss industry. By pathologizing body size, they don't have to demonstrate that their products actually improve health in any way. They can claim that simply by producing (very small amounts of short-term) weight loss, they are a “healthcare intervention.” This has been wildly successful for their revenue, and companies like Novo Nordisk are banking on this strategy to make fortunes from selling dangerous weight loss interventions. (Novo made a literal fortune price gouging insulin, so they are no strangers to harming people for money.)It encourages appearance-based stigma, because fat people are perceived as being part of a dangerous epidemic. And here we have an intersection between healthism, ableism, and sizeism. There should be no shame attached to body size, health, or disability – the “ob*sity epidemic” propaganda encourages all three.It causes people to be viewed, and encourages them to view themselves and the bodies that they inhabit 100% of the time, as a problem – and a problem that needs the attention of the public.  This leads to a world where fat people face shame, stigma, bullying and oppression everywhere – homes, schools, workplaces, doctor's offices, churches, sidewalks – anywhere that they are visible. This is especially significant since the experience of weight stigma is correlated to many of the same health issues to which existing in a fat body is correlated.Its use in public health messaging is an impediment to actual public health.  Health is not an obligation, barometer of worthiness, entirely within our control or guaranteed under any circumstances.  How people prioritize their health and the behaviors they choose are nobody else's business. For those who are interested in talking about or participating in health supporting behaviors, the stigma associated with a fat body based on the “ob*sity epidemic” idea, and the bullying and harassment that come along with it, become barriers to fat people participating. Further, the focus (including monetarily) on trying to get individuals to lose weight means that we aren't putting resources toward reducing barriers and increasing access to health for people of all sizes. The assertion that the only “good” outcome of engaging in health-supporting behaviors is a thin body – or, said another way, that if someone isn't thin then they obviously aren't doing the “right” behaviors – means that fat people are misinformed that behaviors can't support their health unless the behaviors make them thin, which is not supported by the research.The verbiage around “solving the ob*sity epidemic” encourages the public to stereotype fat people based on appearance, and to make negative judgments which impacts things like hiring and healthcare. It also confuses the idea of public health promotion with making fat people's bodies the public's business, which in turn makes the world a very unwelcoming place for fat people.It has also fostered an “eradication at any cost” philosophy that has led to people, including healthcare practitioners, suggesting that fat people do incredibly unhealthy things in the hopes that it will make us look “healthier” by becoming thin by any means. This includes, as Deb Burgard points out, prescribing to us what would be diagnosed as harmful in thin people, and suggesting that we take dangerous drugs and have dangerous surgeries that risk our lives and quality of life all for the chance to have a “socially acceptable” body in our size-bigoted society, so that we can escape the stigma of being seen as a walking talking “epidemic.”Finally, you cannot have a war on “ob*sity” without having a war on fat people –  you can't reasonably say that you are waging a war to eradicate however much of someone doesn't fit into a prescribed height-weight ratio.  Nor can you reasonably suggest that you want to eradicate fat people from the Earth but, you know, in a non-stigmatizing way.  No matter what people believe about “ob*sity” it should be horrifying to suggest that we wage a war on people with the goal of eradicating them because they think the world might be cheaper if they did not exist.Whipping people up into a frenzy about an “ob*sity epidemic” is highly profitable, and often provides good political cover (“brave mayor does something about ob*sity blah blah blah”)  but it doesn't actually do anything helpful or good, and is doing untold harm.If people are interested in public health then I suggest they busy themselves increasing access and decreasing barriers (including oppression, including weight stigma) and focusing on creating shame-free, blame-free, future-oriented healthcare.We can solve the “ob*sity epidemic” right this minute – just set the whole concept down, stop pouring money and energy into the utterly failed weight loss paradigm, and move forward into a weight-neutral (and, as soon as possible, weight-inclusive) paradigm that offers more benefits with far less harm.Did you find this newsletter helpful? You can subscribe for free to get future newsletters delivered direct to your inbox, or choose a paid subscription to support the newsletter and get special benefits! Click the Subscribe button for details:Liked this piece? Share this piece:More ResearchFor a full bank of research, check out https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings: Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da'Shaun Harrison: Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe

Today I'm super pumped to be speaking with New York Times bestselling cookbook author Julia Turshen. As well as writing cookbooks Julia is the author of the Keep Calm & Cook On Substack and hosts the Keep Calm & Cook On Podcast, both of which I highly recommend. She also hosts these awesome Sunday cook along classes where you can make recipes in real-time with her from the comfort of your own kitchen. This may be my favourite conversation of the series so far. It just feels so wholesome and I know it's going to be one I keep coming back to and sending my clients to, so I really hope you love it too. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Julia here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here. Here's the transcript in full.Julia Turshen I think for so long, I thought having, you know, a large appetite for food or, honestly an appetite for food period. I thought that was not a good thing. And that was something I would spend my whole life working against. You know, I thought I was gonna spend a lifetime trying to diminish my appetite. And then when I kind of zoomed out and I thought about that, I thought, Wow, that's so fucking sad. And I guess my relationship to my appetite or my appetites now is one of just tremendous curiosity. I feel like I've spent so long trying to pretend I don't want things that now I am just so curious about like, what do I want and then finding moments when I want a lot of something or a lot of things like when I have like a large appetite, I am just trying to go towards that with open arms.Laura Thomas  Okay, welcome to Can I Have Another Snack podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they are nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them? I'm Laura Thomas, an anti diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter? Today I'm super pumped to be speaking with New York Times bestselling cookbook author Julia Turshen. As well as writing cookbooks Julia is the author of the Keep Calm & Cook On Substack and hosts the Keep Calm & Cook On Podcast, both of which I highly recommend. She also hosts these awesome Sunday cook along classes where you can make recipes in real-time with her from the comfort of your own kitchen, so check them out if you're looking for some kitchen and recipe inspo. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley in New York State with her spouse Grace and their pets. So as you'll hear, Julia's career started off, much more deeply rooted into wellness and diet culture, which was a reflection of her own difficult relationship with food. We talked about how she got from there to where she is now, which is a badass anti diet advocate who is vocal about anti fat bias in the food industry. And we have this really wonderful delicious conversation about how healing it can be to reclaim appetites both in terms of food and in a more generative and expansive sense. Julia talks about why this has been such a powerful tool as she divest from diet culture, and shares how she deals with those funky body image days. So, this may be my favourite conversation of the series so far. It just feels really wholesome. And I know it's going to be one I keep coming back to and sending my clients to. So I really hope you love it too. And also check out Julia's work, because she's really awesome. Before we get to the episode, I just wanted to give you a quick reminder that this is the last week where all Can I Have Another Snack content will be free. So don't sweat, you'll still get a weekly pod and twice monthly essays from me if you're free subscriber. But from the start of October, I'll be turning on the paid subscriber only features and sending out some posts to paid members only. So this is kind of a scary moment for me. It tells me whether or not this little newsletter and podcast has legs. If people are actually picking up what I'm putting down and whether or not there's a future here. To those of you who have already signed up, thank you so much. It means more than you know. And if you followed my work for a little while now, you'll know that earlier this year, I had to close my business, my entire career trajectory was uprooted. And I had to try and figure out my next moves while also trying to bring a sense of stability back to my family after an absurdly chaotic year. Actually make that two years. Anyone who has ever read one of my Instagram captions will know that I have a lot to say. But aside from my books, writing has never been part of my job. Substack offers this really neat model where I can make writing my job without having to sell out to do sponsored content or exploit my child for likes. He would get a lot of likes, by the way. But I don't want to exploit my baby. While I love my clinical work and I will always see clients I want to make my work accessible to more people. I wanted to really give this my best shot. And that's what this month has been about, to see if there's an appetite for conversations about food, bodies, and anti-diet parenting. So if you're in this for the long haul with me, then let me know by becoming a paid subscriber. There are tonnes of benefits to becoming a paid subscriber over and above the free subscription option. You'll get exclusive commenting privileges and access to our weekly discussion threads on Thursdays called Snacky Bits. You'll also get a monthly downloadable resource like the snacks guide from earlier this month, you'll get access to a column called Dear Laura, where you can submit questions and have a non diet nutritionist in your pocket, you'll get bonus essays and access to all of the archived posts. Plus, you'll get my unwavering affection. It cost five pounds a month, or it's 50 pounds for the year, you can also become a founding member if you're a Can I Have Another Stack stan, where on top of everything I just mentioned, I'll also send you a signed copy of both of my books. I'm suggesting 100 pounds for that tier, but you can name your price, kind of like a donation to help me get this work off the ground. And if you can't afford to support me financially, then you can help spread the word by forwarding your emails to friends who might be interested. Liking posts also helps a lot. And you can rate and review on Apple podcasts. And if you need a comp subscription for any reason whatsoever, then email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk with snacks in the subject line and we'll hook you up. You don't need to give an explanation of your situation. I trust that if your circumstances change, you'll do your best to support my work. Alright team. Thank you so much for being here and for supporting my work. Now let's get to this juicy conversation with Julia Turshen. Laura Thomas  All right, Julia, I want to know who or what are you nourishing right now?Julia Turshen  I love this question so much. I think who or what am I nourishing, the first thing to come to mind is just myself. I think I've been doing a lot of nourishing myself, which feels really important. In addition to that, I would say, just my household, my spouse, Grace, our many animals, the house itself, I think we're just trying to do what we can to keep this a very nourished and safe and happy place.Laura Thomas  What does that mean to you, a nourished place? I've never thought of that in terms of like a physical place before.Julia Turshen  I mean, we were really lucky. I guess it was, I guess, close to eight years ago, we got to become homeowners, which is, you know, a huge privilege. And something I think about a lot is that a house is, it's also like this living thing. You know, our house, we live in a really old house. And there's, I, you know, I could phrase it a number of ways I could say there's always something broken. Or I could say there's always an opportunity to improve something, I don't know but we're always kind of tinkering and adding things and fixing things and tending to things. So to me a nourished house is one that's kind of just taken care of, you know, just like our bodies, and, you know, anything that's urgent, and broken and kind of dangerous is made safer, you know, and then we get to kind of enhance things too. And, you know, we just cleaned our like couch cushions, which was like the most annoying job but then it just makes our living room feels so nice and kind of fresh. And you know, stuff like that. We do a lot of, I guess just home caretaking. Laura Thomas  That was kind of the word that was that popped into my mind was care, just tending and caring to your physical space. And I love the reframe of, you know, rather than things being broken, which I think when you're a homeowner, that's kind of how you tend to view things but flipping it and thinking about okay, what needs sort of a bit more TLC maybe?Julia Turshen  Yeah, yeah, I think I have to think about it that way, or I'm very overwhelmed. I'm just trying to manipulate myself, I guess, I don't know.Laura Thomas  I think you sort of, you alluded to this a little bit before, when you said that you're nourishing yourself. And I'm not sure if you said you're working on yourself, but it was sort of something to that effect. And this was something that I was going to ask you about, which is, or I suppose just a preface is that you are someone who was on my radar, ages ago, like when I was deep in my wellness culture kind of days. And then you kind of, I think our paths kind of diverted a little bit. And now I feel like you are popping up everywhere. In all my usual haunts, as it were. So I feel like yeah, you're you're back on the radar. I feel weird to compare you with like a submarine.Julia Turshen  I'm happy to be a boat. That's great. Yeah.Laura Thomas  But um, I would be really interested to hear more about what that arc has been like for you, from your perspective, and like, what's been going on behind the scenes?Julia Turshen  Yeah, so it sounds like it. Like the arc from kind of wellness culture to maybe more than like, I don't know, to kind of culture. That arc or path or whatever, for me, has been incredibly personal. And I've also in the last probably, like year or two, something like that. I've made it a bit more, I guess, public slash professional, which those things tend to blend a lot. And my work has always been very personal. And I've always in my cookbooks and my writing about food. It's always been about, you know, what I'm cooking and eating and making for people. And that used to be a lot of things rooted in diet culture, a lot of things rooted in what I've come to understand after many years of therapy was like a decade's long eating disorder. And getting myself out of that, you know, it's changed how, why and what I cook, and how I think about it. So it's changed what I write and what I share and the kinds of conversations I have. And the more I've come to do this sort of healing work for myself, this kind of nourishing work for myself a truly nourishing, figuring out what it is I, you know, want and I'm not just talking about, like, intuitive eating, like, just in life in general. What makes me feel my best and you know, I'm trying to do more of just those things and less than other things, including my work. You know, we were just chatting very briefly before we started recording that I'm not working on any book projects right now, which is all I've done for the last, like 15 years or so, you know, taking myself a little bit further away from sort of like the publishing industry, like just being in touch with all these types of things and doing this sort of more. Yeah, I guess, maybe paying closer attention to what makes me feel good, as opposed to what I think I am supposed to be doing. What I should be doing. That kind of stuff. Yeah, that arc, that path has been both. Yeah, personal. And now a little bit more, I guess, loud. So if I'm maybe reappearing on your radar, yeah, that's interesting for me to hear and to hear where I came up before. And, you know, I think that speaks to probably your journey as well. So yeah, I mean, I could get more into it. I'm happy to but I feel like I'm, I tend to go on slight tangents. And I forget the actual question.Laura Thomas  I mean, same. Yeah, I yeah, there were so many, like threads that I wanted to pull on in what you were saying there. And I think the first that struck me was this idea that you had, upon reflection, survived a 10 year long eating disorder. And to me, where my mind went immediately was just thinking about how pervasive and normalised diet culture is, that an eating disorder can just slip under the radar like that.Julia Turshen Yeah, I mean, I have a few thoughts about that. And one is that I think people who aren't in like the smallest of bodies tend to not be diagnosed and tend to not be given care and support. And, you know, I don't it's, it's, it's tricky. I don't know, I don't have like a date on a calendar when I was like, oh, that's when I first developed an eating disorder, it was sort of a, you know, 1000 paper cuts kind of thing, I feel like and you know, very much around just the household and culture I grew up in, which was not very different than most people's, at least, like in the West. And I think that I feel like my, sort of my issues and challenges and mental health issues like around food, and around my weight, I mean, started really, really young. But because I was always in like a slightly, like a little bit of a fat body. I was just constantly told any effort I made to lose weight, to make my body smaller, was a really good thing. And it was rewarded. And it was validated, which went on for more than 10 years, and like for, you know, a huge portion of my life, and that it's just really confusing to be struggling with something and then to get just a lot of validation, a lot of kind of like endorsement for that struggle. That's a very confusing thing. I think that's something a lot of people go through. And I've talked to a lot of fat friends who have really, really similar experiences, and people who are in bodies much larger than mine who deal with a lot more stigma and a lot more hate and who have had raging eating disorders and have never received any help and haven't known how to ask for it, where to ask for it, even how to talk about it. So I think that's kind of a big part of it for me. And yeah, I think the normalising the, like socially accepting way, a lot of eating disorders and just sort of disordered eating just is, you know, it's so pervasive, and I think especially among people who are you know, socialised and conditioned as women, especially among I think like affluent white women, it's, I think it's, it's, it's uncommon to not have that kind of relationship to food. I feel like I've viewed that a lot not to say eating disorders, I mean, they're prevalent among people of all different races and backgrounds and I think appear in different ways. But yeah, I think it's, it's really fascinating to me, how much people are struggling and how little recognition there is of that, and not even just the small amount of recognition but also like the celebrating that happens around that. So you know, back to your like, first question, which is just such a lovely question. Like in terms of who am I nourishing and the fact that my mind went to myself, something I think a lot about now at this point in my life is like I don't receive that much outside validation about my body from anyone anymore except really like my spouse. And I used to when I was actively trying to like make myself smaller, I used to hear a lot of yeah, validation. But now, it's the type of validation I can give myself. And I was never able to before. So to me, that's a form of nourishment to validate my own body and to treat it kindly, and to give it what it wants and needs.Laura Thomas  Yeah, what an amazing gift to be able to give yourself and I want to come back to that in a second. Because, as you were talking earlier, just about I think what colloquially or maybe more academically gets called weight. Stigma is certainly a term that I've used before. But the more I'm doing this work, the less comfortably it kind of sits with me just because for all kinds of reasons we can get into another time. But I think what we're talking about really is this deeply entrenched t bias in eating disorder care. And it made me think of Deb Burgard's, quote about, you know, we, we prescribe behaviours to higher weight folks or fat folks that we diagnose as disordered, in thin and lower, you know, small, that's not I'm paraphrasing, obviously. But, but that I think that sentiment is so powerful. And I remember the first time I heard Deb, say, that kind of like, really just stopped me in my tracks. It's so true. And then, you know, having worked in the eating disorder field, and the number of clients that I've seen in bigger bodies, and, you know, they don't, you know, they could be kind of normal size bodies, in inverted commas, and still be gaslit and undermined and not believed, just constantly, and then, you know, that only intensifies as people's bodies get bigger. So all of that is to say, you know, there's, there's a lot that we need to do in that space, to make sure that folks across the weight spectrum, get the appropriate care. And then going back to your, I just remembered, going back to this idea of, of offering, being able to offer yourself care and, and sort of validation. How, how did you get to that point? Because I think this is something that so many of us struggle with constantly. And that's not to say that, you know, you feel like you're nailing it every single day. But I'm curious to hear, you know, what, what does that look like for? Julia Turshen Yeah, no, I think that turning point question is so important. It's something I asked a lot of other people to, because that's been really helpful for me to find my own turning point. It's so easy to kind of talk about the sort of like before or after that moment, but like, you know, what, like, informs that moment? And I wish I had a simple answer. I wish I was like, I read this one page, and here it is. And you can all have it too. Yeah, again, it was just a large amount of small things, I would say the major ones are, first was meeting Grace, my spouse who also has a history of an eating disorder. But something we both brought to our relationship, just Grace was more aware than I was. So I got to have the benefit of being in love with someone who had been through something really hard that I was about to go through and didn't quite know. And so I had this built in support that I'm just incredibly grateful for. I also had Grace's boundaries, because Grace entered into a relationship with someone who, you know, me, who had a really, really just disgruntled relationship with my own body. And that was very challenging and triggering for grace to be around. So Grace set up boundaries around that. Grace asked me not to talk about whatever diet I was on or asked me to kind of not talk about the excessive exercise thing I was doing. And, you know, I won't go into like more detail, because I know that can bring up stuff for people but Grace set really firm boundaries in our relationship. And those were really helpful for me, because made me kind of pause and I didn't feel judged in what I was doing. But I felt like oh, if I if what I'm doing is potentially causing the person I love harm. I think it's worth pausing and being like, is it causing me harm? So that was incredibly helpful. Another big thing that I would say inform this kind of turning point for me this kind of, I don't know what I can only think of as like sort of like a paradigm shift is really doing the kind of education and learning to understand where all of this comes from and to realise how not alone am in any of this, I'm sure, there's probably people who listen to your show. Like, I don't think we're just talking to each other, right. And there's probably a lot of people who understand what we're talking about, like, we're all safest to all of us. Like, we're just not alone. This is so common. And it's common, because it's not personal, like this all comes from these huge systems. And so the more I learned, and continue to learn about things like racism, and you know, the roots of anti fat bias being very racist roots being rooted and things like white supremacy, the more I understood these systems and and I've seen how diet culture and anti fat biases comes from them. One, I get it more. Like, it just makes sense. Where it used to feel kind of, I don't know, a bit more opaque now, it just feels incredibly clear to me. And with that clarity, I guess to I don't know if I'm like numbering things. But But yeah, with that clarity comes this feeling for me, that feels very energising where I don't feel, I don't feel so not, I don't mean this to be such a bad pun, but I just I don't feel as weighed down by all of this, I feel like Oh, this isn't, I didn't do anything wrong. Like I have just grown up in a, in a group of systems that are really harmful. So kind of like to use by house metaphor we were talking about earlier, like, I live in a house where a lot of things are broken, yes. But like there's a lot of opportunities to improve things to make this a nicer house to live in a safer house to live in. So looking at it that way, to me feels, yeah, kind of galvanising like, and making it feel less personal. Also, lets me take myself out of the centre of it, like I, I feel like I got to a place with diet culture with my own eating disorder, where I just felt like I was sick of thinking about myself all the time, talking about myself all the time, like, I felt like I got to this incredibly self centred place. That was, I don't know, it's sort of boring for me, like, I find other people a lot more interesting. Or being in community with other people a lot more interesting. So yeah, I'd say those were the major things was just my, my personal, closest relationship, and having this kind of anchor of love and safety and support, and understanding. And then the other big thing is sort of the opposite. It's like this understanding of huge systems that just aren't personal. Those two things really have helped me. And then some more tangible things are working on this in therapy, specifically, with people who have training in, you know, helping people with eating disorders, and specifically with people who have kind of a weight neutral anti diet approach to that, because that's not everyone who's trained in eating disorders is I don't have to explain to you,Laura Thomas  Yeah, it can be so harmful, yeah, if they don't have, if they're not using that lens. Julia Turshen  Yeah, that's the kind of thing but like, honestly, that keeps me up at night is thinking about how hard it is to ask for help to realise you even need help, and then to go seek it and have that help turn out to be more harmful. And then, you know, that can put you off of help in general like that. Just it makes me so scared. Sad, but yeah, seeking out people who have this approach. That's been amazing. And the other thing that's been hugely, hugely helpful, which I continued to this day is just a not doing this kind of healing work alone. I've been part of a group therapy, which has been amazing. I've also joined groups, including a hiking group that I like love so much that it used to be called the plus size hikers of the Hudson Valley, the Hudson Valley is where I live. And now there's been a renaming. It's the body liberation hiking club, just to kind of include some more people, but being with a group of people expanding the just my friendship circle and being able to be in community with people who have had similar experiences to not feel so alone in it has been really powerful. And it's helped me develop like language to talk about the people who are in my life who don't have that background. That's been amazing because I think diet culture isolates us I think it's part of how it sinks its teeth in and how it kind of thrives. So I think combating it in community is I don't know for me it's it works.Laura Thomas  100% This is a kind of any of my clients are listening, they'll recognise that I've been banging on about community quite a lot lately is for this exact reason. You know, you you said earlier that you know when you learn about all of the, you know, plethora of systems of oppression then you're kind of making us feel a particular way about our bodies, that when we kind of externalise the blame and the shame, we realise that it's not personal. It's not about us. And at the same time, what you've just said, is that diet culture makes us feel like we're completely alone in it does feel so personal, even though it's not right. And I think like, their connections to white supremacy culture, and they're just connections to capitalism in there in terms of like, keeping us isolated and separated and, and make us feel like, you know, we're competing not just with the people around us, but like, our, our past selves.Julia Turshen  Yeah. Big time.Laura Thomas  It's a bit fucked up when you think about it.Julia Turshen  Yeah, like I one of my things, that continues to be like a really big challenge for me. And I know, a lot of people feel this too, is like, seeing, you know, a picture of myself from a different point in my life, when my body was different, when it was smaller, and feeling that kind of like, competing with myself thing, and then talking myself through that moment, and, you know, remembering what I was experiencing, to be in that body, and also not belittling that time in my life, either. And just, you know, just trying to be compassionate kind of all around. But yeah, that is definitely like a hard thing for me. And then I have the moment where I think, Wow, this feeling of feeling like competitive with myself, or just judging myself, which is all I think, like competition is, that's part of it. Right? So then I just in that moment, I'm like, oh, that's what this is. And to just be able to name it just helps me move through it more quickly, and not kind of dwell on it and have it, you know, get me down.Laura Thomas  Yeah. And I think that's also where that community piece comes in, again, isn't being able to say, I'm feeling like this. This and yeah, that validated and have that held. tenderly and then someone also remind you well, yeah, but like, that's what you've been indoctrinated to think and just pull you you back out of that a little bit?Julia Turshen  Yeah, having someone else, whether it's in person, on Zoom, or maybe listening to a podcast, whatever. But having someone else just be able to say like, of course, like, of course, this is why you feel that way, like, I have experienced that moment, so many times. And it is, it's never not helpful to just have someone just see that and get it and, you know, to feel not alone. And that is a really incredible feeling.Laura Thomas  Something you have been talking about a lot on your podcast recently, which I have just been beating up is you've been kind of exploring appetites with people and what it means to be a human that has an appetite and what it means to embrace your appetite and not be ashamed of it, I suppose. And so I'm really curious to turn that question back with you and ask you, what's your relationship with your appetite now?Julia Turshen  Well, first, thanks for listening. It's been a great series to work on, because I'm just I'm fascinated by this word. And this concept. And I think for so long, I thought having, you know, a large appetite for food, or, obviously an appetite for food, just period. I thought that was not a good thing. And that was something I would spend my whole life working against. You know, I thought I was going to spend a lifetime trying to diminish my appetite. And then when I kind of zoomed out, and I thought about that, I thought, Wow, that's so fucking sad. And I guess my relationship to my appetite, or my appetites now is one of just tremendous curiosity. I feel like I've spent so long trying to pretend I don't want things. But now, I am just so curious about like, what do I want, and then finding moments when I want a lot of something or a lot of things like when I have like a large appetite, I am just trying to go towards that with open arms. And I feel grateful to be someone who wants Yeah, who wants. I'm grateful to be someone who wants. I'm grateful to live a life that has desire in it. But I know, there's a lot of things I want, because there's a lot of things I enjoy. And it's not just food, but it's also very much food like I love food. And I love cooking. And part of why I've spent so long working on cookbooks and doing the work I've done is because I genuinely love it. Like I love growing it. I've spent a lot of the last kind of year two working at a farm. I love preparing it. Like I love cleaning vegetables. It's like a really, I don't know, it's something most people hate. But like, I love running water. I'm grateful for running water like, and I love cooking and I love eating and like my favourite memories like my, especially like my closest friends. I just got home from a week with two of my absolute best friends. And we all just love to eat together. And it's like we're so many of my best memories are so there's so much joy there and so much pleasure. And I guess I'm just pretty sick of trying to make that smaller. I just I want I want lots of that. So I guess that's where I am with my appetite now for food specifically and just my appetites in general. I just feel very open, I think. Yeah.Laura Thomas  I love that you pluralise, is that word? Julia Turshen  I'm with you, maybe, I don't know.Laura Thomas  Appetites, and I yeah, I love that kind of thinking about it about the word appetite in a kind of more generative and expansive way rather than just simply food. Also, you know, what I'm really hearing you say is that's being able to reclaim your appetite has been, It sounds really healing and really powerful for you.Julia Turshen  Yeah. Yeah, it definitely has been for sure.Laura Thomas  And I, you know, yeah, sorry, my brain is going in lots of different directions. I just, I guess, I guess something that I want to also acknowledge is that, you know, that that in and of itself is a privilege, right? Being able to own, your appetite and your desire. I was rereading Roxane Gay's memoir hunger recently. And it just kind of Yeah, it was just prompting me there that that that's it's an enormous privilege to be able to own your appetites and desires around food, particularly, you know, as your body gets bigger, and there's a loss of privilege that comes along with that. So just yeah, I just wanted to acknowledge that more than anything. Sorry. Were you going to add something to that there?Julia Turshen  No, I was just thinking, I appreciate you doing that, and kind of adding that layer to it. Because it is so complicated. You know, it's really, it's lovely for me to sit here and tell you how much I love to cook and eat. I mean, that's great. But it's also various, I mean, that's like reeks of privilege, like Grace, my spouse, we do a lot of work with our local food pantry. And I'm always thinking about, you know, my neighbours, like people I live with, in my zip code in my community who don't have the same agency I have to choose what I'm eating, you know, even if we're able to give as much choice as we possibly can at the pantry, it's still not, it's not the experience I have of going to the farmers market, and then this grocery store to purchase this brand of thing I like and to go to the other store, because they have the bread I prefer and to have the time to do all that to have the money to do all that. To have those resources to have the kind of choice I have, is a huge, huge privilege. So yeah, not to mention what you brought up with Roxanne's book, which was just, you know, so phenomenal. But yeah, the privilege of being in a body that isn't judged as much as others when I am eating to be able to eat what I want in public as a privilege. So yeah, it goes on and on and on. I think I just appreciate any opportunity to like, name those things and recognise it because none of it is that simple. It's like all incredibly nuanced.Laura Thomas  Yeah, no, and I think of you very much as someone who's very aware of your privilege, and will name it at, you know, with unprompted without any kind of, you're like "here's all my privilege, look at it." And at the same time, I brought you here, I invited you here to talk about you and your appetite and there is something so powerful about being able to reclaim appetite and appetites. And I was wondering if you could for anyone who's like, well, that's a bit abstract. When you talk about appetite, are you able to just kind of share a little more what that looks like in your life?Julia Turshen  Sure. Yeah, I mean, I guess I use the term appetite to mean anything, I guess that I'm longing for or that I desire. And I think it's yeah, it's interesting to have this question turned on me.Laura Thomas  I hate when that happens when you're doing an interview and you're like, Oh, God, that's what it feels like.Julia Turshen  It's really interesting. Because I think there's things we need, right like we need food and clothing and shelter. We can have appetites for those things but I guess I think about appetite as kind of yeah, can, I guess all needs have appetites, maybe? But not all appetites are necessarily needs? I don't know I might be making this too complicated. But I yeah, I guess I think about appetite and the plural of appetite, multiple appetites as being a way to describe the things I want, not just the things they need is, I guess a simpler way of saying that. So for me, that includes things like I have a large appetite for rest. Like, I want a lot of rest. It's not something I permitted much of in my life. And I have, at this point in my life, a large appetite for it, I want, I guess, a lot of connection. Like, I have an appetite for connection, like I want time with my friends, I want time with my family. I want time with my spouse that, you know, isn't just both of us, like on our phones, while we're watching TV.Laura Thomas  No shade if that's all you can muster up.Julia Turshen  We all need to zoom out, totally. I have a large appetite for nature, I feel my best when I'm outside, I have a big appetite for water, like being in water, like pool, ocean, shower, a puddle, I don't care, like I love being in water. So I guess my appetites are, when I'm in touch with them. To me, that means I'm in touch with the things that make me feel just really good. And I guess overall, my appetite is I want to feel good. And the more I'm able to do that, the more time and energy, I have to help provide that for other people.Laura Thomas  I love that everything that you talked about there. I mean, again, with all the caveats around around privilege, but everything you talked about, there was non-material, right?Julia Turshen  That's true. Yeah.Laura Thomas  And, as I'm, you know, I'm always kind of half thinking with like, a clinician's hat on or, I was just thinking about this idea that maybe some of those indulging as it were, some of those other appetites may be more accessible for people as they are, you know, reclaiming. You know, being able to kind of take pleasure in the outdoors or in water or with rest might feel like an easier starting point than, than food, like, to kind of graduate towards.Julia Turshen  Totally, and I think, at least for me, the, anytime I am aware of an appetite of mine, and I go towards that thing, and I experience it, it liberates me to seek that in other areas. So, you know, the more I take a nap, when I'm tired, the more I remind myself that it's okay to like, feel what my body wants and provide it so that can then later extend to food, you know, or other things. So I think it feels more accessible. To acknowledge your appetite in one area of your life. Like I definitely would start there. Like, go through the door that feels easy to walk through food can be hard to can. I mean, I definitely know that. So I think sometimes when it comes to recovery and healing, a thing I noticed myself doing, which I'm sure is true for a lot of people as you kind of get stuck in the same mindset that got you to the place where you you need the healing and recovery. Like sometimes I feel like I need to ace healing. Yes. Like I need to excel at healing. I need to be the best at healing. It's like what are you doing? This is how you got here.Laura Thomas  I totally get what you mean, I had this conversation with a client the other the other week who was like, seeing, this is kind of a detour. But she was seeing a lot of kind of examples of intuitive eating that kind of had this like wellnessy tint to them. And she felt like she was failing at intuitive eating. I felt kind of heretic. I felt like a heretic saying it at the time. But I was like, what if we just don't use the label intuitive eating. If that's not helpful for you then let's just completely ditch that. Yeah, because otherwise what we're doing is replicating that same all or nothing, black and white, perfectionist thinking that made you so good at dieting.Julia Turshen  Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I like I also I think about the word success all the time. Like you said, your client felt like they weren't succeeding at this. And I'm constantly just evaluating how I'm defining that word, and what it means. So whether it's --Laura Thomas  Sorry, I just I'm so curious to know because, you know, in my mind, you know, I guess ostensibly you are a successful person you've written a best selling cookbook. So I'm so curious to hear what your relationship to that word.Julia Turshen  Sure now. Yeah, I mean, in terms of, like, I guess, career wise or professionally, you know, I guess the way I think about success now is just having total control over my time, being able to say no to things, because it gives me more time, it gives me more flexibility around my time, that to me feels like success. And being able to be, you know, comfortable enough. I mean that financially, but I also mean that in terms of like time, to be able to think help the people I'm closest to, and help my community that feels like success, like we, I don't know, maybe it was February or something of this year, there's a really terrible ice storm in our area. And I don't know why knock on wood, but we didn't lose power, even though like everyone else did. And good friends of ours who live nearby, they did. And, you know, it was February, in the Northeast, and an ice storm. So you know, their house was quickly turning freezing cold and like their water didn't work, all that kind of stuff. And so they came over with their dog and their cat. And they stayed with us for a few days until their power came back. And we had such an easy time, kind of welcoming them, kind of wrapping our arms around them, we had plenty of food to share, we had a really good time we like you know, watch TV, and we cooked and and we were all safe and fine. And Grace said to me has really stayed with me, Grace was like, This feels like success, like, you know, getting your book on any particular list or getting a certain amount of money for an advance or that kind of stuff. Like, yeah, those are all markers that mean a lot of things to a lot of people but getting to be able to like, provide this safe space for our friends when there was a really bad storm like that felt successful. So I would say that's how I define it kind of professionally, in terms of kind of healing work, like this idea of it just really has struck me this idea of someone trying to succeed, intuitive eating, like I just really identify with that and where I am with that kind of personal kind of internal work. The way I think about success is how do I repair as opposed to, like, prevent. And so what I'm thinking about is like that example I gave before about like, it can be hard for me to see pictures of myself when my body was different. So for a while, I just stopped looking at any pictures, because like, I don't look at them, then it's not challenging, which was really helpful for a while because I just wasn't really ready to. And then I thought, Oh, if I do enough kind of work and therapy and whatever, and all this personal kind of internal work, maybe I can get to a point when if I see a picture, I won't feel anything like I'll just feel natural. Or I'll feel like I love my body no matter its size or shape or you know, this like really kind of Pollyanna. And now I feel like I might not be able to prevent that feeling. But I know I can repair when I when I have a hard time. So to me success is in the is in the repair. And it's not being afraid to feel kind of hurt. But knowing I can kind of get through it that feels like I don't know if that's success, but it's like definitely where I feel most energised.Laura Thomas  Well, it's definitely a much more realistic approach, you know, we're never going to be able to fully tune out diet culture as much as you know, we'd love to create that. Julia Turshen  Yeah, yeah, yeah,Laura Thomas  It's just, you know, probably not going to happen in our lifetime, at least, but having the tools to be able to, as you say, repair when there's that rupture between you and your body. That feels like yeah, definitely. I don't know the success like you say doesn't doesn't feel quite right. But it feels like that's that's the right track to be.Julia Turshen  Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah.Laura Thomas  So I would love to know who or what is nourishing you right now.Julia Turshen  This question feels easier to answer. There are so many people and things nourishing me. Grace, we've talked a lot about our animals, we have two dogs and a cat who provide such a huge amounts of just joy and humour and, like non judgement, and just affection and they nourish me so much. And my closest friends nourish me so much. And I mentioned briefly but I just got home from about a week with two of my closest friends. One has two young kids and we've all known each other for a long time now and you know, getting to watch like one of my best friends, like, become this really awesome parent is that feels really nourishing it feels really incredible to watch people you love, just enter new chapters. That feels really good. And yeah, deeply connected. And I was realising the other day like, oh, well, I've known your kids since they were born like, they're really little now. But like, I'll know these people since they were born. Like, that's so cool. That made me feel really happy. So, yeah, I guess people and animals are very nourishing to me. And where I live, I get to live in a place where I can go hiking a lot, and I can go see a really beautiful view. And I just have a lot of opportunities to remember the world is a lot bigger than me.Laura Thomas  Ah, it has been. So I think I feel like I say this to all my guests. I hope that listeners will get bored of me saying this, but it's so nourishing just to have these conversations, which is really the idea behind this podcast. So I hope that it's it's felt nourishing for you as well. Before you go, I would love it. If you could tell us what you're snacking on right now. So that is that can be you know, literally, a snack that you're enjoying are it can be kind of anything, a book, a TV show. Anything. I would just love to hear what your recommendation is?Julia Turshen  Yeah, I have many. But first, I will just tell you, Yes, this has been very nourishing, creamy and just great. And I think conversations like this one, to me are a big part of this kind of healing work. And help me just feel connected to you, in this moment. feel more connected to myself just have a chance to reflect on this. And obviously to feel connected to whoever you know, have stayed with us at the end of this conversation. Laura Thomas  I'm sure lots of people will be hanging on to the very end.Julia Turshen  Thank you. Um, what am I snacking on? So much, I am literally snacking on so much popcorn. I make popcorn all the time. But we also live near a place I don't know how widely available it is outside of the East Coast. But there's a popcorn company called Bjorn Qorn. And it's actually made really close to where we live and they make all these great flavours and it's just so good. And I buy so many bags of it and it's delicious. And I just had some which is why it's on my mind. But other than popcorn, and lots of I'm like in a big melon moment. Melons are really good right now. Also lots ofLaura Thomas  I really miss late summer in the north, the northeast and like going to, it's a bit boujee, but like the farmers markets are they are like out of this world.Julia Turshen  Now's the time, like I know that from when we're recording and this comes out it'll be you know a little bit but kind of end of August, beginning of September, is like if you're gonna go to a farmers market just like one or two weeks of the year like though now, like now is just the best time so yeah, like a piece of toast with a lot of mayonnaise and a slice tomato and lots of salt. That's a go to snack right now. And other than all these delicious foods and getting lots of soft serve ice cream, other things I'm snacking on that I think are, I don't know sort of pertain to the conversation we're having. I feel like I've been telling everyone in my life to read Angela Garbes's book Essential Labour, which I believe her subtitle is mothering as social change. And yeah, I got to talk to her on my podcast. She's incredible. She's such a phenomenal just person and thinker and writer. And her book, whether or not you're a parent, you know Grace and we do not have biological children. I don't mean biological, I mean human children. To say we have animals is what we have. But even still, I took just so much from Angela's book and the way she talks about care work, which is I think, really what we're talking about today, I think it's just really profound. I think anyone who got anything out of our conversation would get so much so much more out of Angela's book. Laura Thomas  I have been buying it for all of my friends. Julia Turshen  It's so incredible. And then a TV show just to throw in there. I watched now for the second time Lizzo's show, which is her what's it called? Like, Welcome to the Big Girls? I might be getting that wrong or just Big Girls and it's her kind of reality show about getting backup dancers for her performances and it's incredible I just love it. Love it love it. I think it's kind of required viewing for everyone.Laura Thomas  I had forgotten actually that it exists, I haven't seen it yeah, I'll put my hand up and say that I haven't.Julia Turshen  I'm jealous that you get to watch it for the first time. I'm so envious.Laura Thomas  I keep, I keep meaning to, and then it just like yeah, I forget. That seems to be a theme. I'm gonna write it down because I really need to get on that. I've heard amazing things about it. So,Julia Turshen  It's so much fun. It's just great fun to watch. And it's just really sweet. And yeah, I think it's incredibly empowering. Laura Thomas  Oh, I need to check it out for sure. So my thing real quick, I feel like I'm probably really late to the game with this. And you might have read it, but it kind of, it's called, Julia Turshen  oh, mmhmmLaura Thomas  Yeah, Crying -- I'm holding the book up for Julia to see -- but it's called Crying in H Mart. It's by Michelle, I think, Zauner is how you pronounce her last name. And it is, this isn't a spoiler. But basically, this young, I believe she's a Korean American woman, her mother dies. And she's kind of exploring their tumultuous relationship through food and the meaning of food and what that means, what that meant for their relationship and what it means for her going forward. And I'm only a couple of chapters in and it's just such a beautifully written book. It's got, it's got a bit of everything in it. So yeah, but the bringing the, you know, all the stories kind of revolve around food, which I totally enjoy. And I love that about Angela's book as well. There was so much food. I think I found out on, was it your podcast? I think I found out that she used to be a food writer. Ah, that makes sense.Julia Turshen  Yeah, for a newspaper in Seattle, it was like, yeah, this makes sense. I recently, I don't know maybe a month or two ago, I read Crying in H Mart and I felt the same. I felt like everyone in my life had read it. And I was like, how come I haven't read this yet? So I just read it. Her writing is beautiful. And yeah. Food is everywhere in that book. And I think she just reminds us how much it can kind of tether us to other people. So yeah, I loved that that was your snack. Laura Thomas  Yeah, well, I'll link to that in the show notes and some of the other bits and pieces like Angela's book that we mentioned. And I'll also link to your newsletter, which I just have to just gush about for a second because I love it. And I just love that the way that as I'm reading it, I feel like you're kind of telling me what to do. But I don't mean that in like a, you're not doing it in a patronising way, but it's just this really like, here's how you can do this. And I just feel like you're right there kind of like holding our hands through it.Julia Turshen  I'm thrilled it feels that way. That's great. Yeah. Laura Thomas  And it just is so helpful. Because there's like all these, like, great, I think I feel like you're cooking is about making things like, just not easy and like, again, like a patronising way, like trying to, like water things down, but just like what's going to be accessible and tasty and delicious. And just like make food, like joyful that, like I really there is this like palpable joy that I get from your newsletter. So I will link to that. I think you've changed my mind about air fryers.Julia Turshen  That's really, that's success.Laura Thomas  If I had enough space in my like tiny, postage stamp sized apartment in London, then I would definitely be getting one of those. But I don't so. Yeah, I thought they were like the reserve of like this 60+ set. And you've changed my mind on that.Julia Turshen   I mean, that's where I am emotionally for sure. But I'm thrilled to hear you say all this.Laura Thomas  But yeah, so would you like to let everyone know where they can find you on the internet?Julia Turshen  Yeah, for sure. So I guys, everything about me, my work, various kind of things I've done. And I do. It's all at juliaturshen.com. I'm on Instagram @turshen. And, yeah, right now the things that I'm excited about that I'm doing regularly are writing a mostly a once a week newsletter, sometimes a little tiny bit less, sometimes a little bit more. But yeah, a mix of kind of recipes and some essays and a love letter to my airfryer, which I just really do adore. It's not for everyone. But for those of us who love it, it's great. And I also teach these online, live cooking classes every Sunday afternoon, which is something I started nearly a year ago and they are just so much fun. And it's kind of this opportunity I have once a week to just together with other people who love to cook at home to do what you just described as best I can to make cooking feel really joyful and really approachable. And I just I love teaching these classes and I've taken a little time off during the summer but they're back now in September and yeah, it's I look forward to it so much and people from all over the world joined so if it's not at a convenient time for you, they are recorded so you can watch it at a different time. But yeah, There are a lot of fun. All of that's on my website.Laura Thomas  All on your website and also your newsletter and your podcast are both called Keep Calm and Cook On so I'll link to everything in the show notes for everyone. Julia this has been such a delight. I knew it was gonna be great talking to you, but I had even more fun than I expected. So thank you so much for being here.Julia Turshen  Yeah, thank you for having me. This was great was felt very meaningful and I just felt very held in this. So thanks for for asking meLaura Thomas  Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Can I Have Another Snack? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review in your podcast player and head over to laurathomas.substack.com for the full transcript of this conversation, plus links we discussed in the episode and how you can find out more about this week's guest. While you're over there, consider signing up for either a free or paid subscription Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter, where I'm exploring topics around bodies, identity and appetite, especially as it relates to parenting. Also, it's totally cool if you're not a parent, you're welcome too. We're building a really awesome community of cool, creative and smart people who are committed to ending the tyranny of body shame and intergenerational transmission of disordered eating. Can I Have Another Snack? is hosted by me, Laura Thomas, edited by Joeli Kelly, our funky artwork is by Caitlin Preyser. And the music is by Jason Barkhouse. And lastly Fiona Bray keeps me on track and makes sure this episode gets out every week. This episode wouldn't be possible without your support. So thank you for being here and valuing my work and I'll catch you next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurathomas.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and some answers) around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I am Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.Today, I’m pleased to be chatting with Dr. Rachel Millner, a psychologist based in Newtown, Pennsylvania who specializes in eating disorders. Welcome, Rachel! I’m so excited to talk to you. Before we dive into our big topic, why don’t you tell our listeners a little more about yourself and your work?RachelAs you already said, I’m a psychologist, outside of Philadelphia, I’m in private practice here. I work primarily with folks who are dealing with eating disorders, disordered eating, those wanting to heal their relationship with food and body. I do a lot of work around anti fat bias and weight stigma. And I frequently talk about “atypical anorexia” and weight stigma and how those issues play out within the eating disorder field.VirginiaAnd you have an awesome Instagram that I will link to in the transcript. I also interviewed you for a New York Times piece last year. (And this Good Housekeeping story!) What I wanted to chat with you about today, what kind of inspired this conversation, is an Instagram post you did back in June, and I’ll just read the text here. You wrote: And I sort of had a real like, yes moment reading this. I think this probably resonated with a lot of folks, and for other folks, this might be sort of confusing. There are a lot of misconceptions about the relationship between trauma and weight. There’s just a lot we can unpack here.So first, I would love to hear a little bit of the background of what inspired this post for you.RachelI think, you know, there is so much nuance here. And it’s one of those topics that I think does bring up a lot for people, because of all the weight stigma. You know that when we start a conversation around trauma and fatness, given the weight stigma in the culture, of course, we all kind of go into high alert and brace ourselves for like, okay, what’s coming next? What prompted this Instagram post was just sitting with clients and hearing their stories and feeling like their stories aren’t being told. And wanting to name that for some people, there might be a connection between fatness and trauma. The other side of that narrative that’s so harmful, is this idea that if we heal trauma, then somehow we’re magically not going to be fat anymore. This is something that’s projected onto my clients all the time. So I was just thinking about these conversations that I have in my office all the time, that are never told.VirginiaI’ve heard this from readers before, where they almost feel like they’re being a “bad fatty” if they say, “I think my body size is related to this experience I had.” That really denies their truth. And it makes it difficult for them to tell their story.I mean, it gets really messy, it gets really messy. So, I guess, you know, for folks who are newer to this conversation, it might be useful to start by talking about some of those relationships you’re seeing among your clients? How does trauma sometimes relate to body size? What scenarios are you kind of referencing here?RachelThe story that I hear from my clients is that when they were going through trauma, particularly childhood trauma, although I think it’s also true for people who have experienced trauma as an adult, that oftentimes food is what’s available to cope. If somebody is in a home where they’re being traumatized, or a child who doesn’t have access to therapy or other ways of getting support, food is often available. And it’s a really effective coping mechanism. It can be really helpful to eat in response to sadness or pain or suffering. And for some people, that eating may lead to weight gain, not for everybody, but there’s, you know, people who, that eating in response to emotions over time might lead to them gaining weight.Then too, I think for a lot of people who have trauma around weight stigma, and are put on diets at a very young age, we know that dieting often leads to weight gain. A lot of my clients talk about what it was like to have trauma around weight stigma, being told that their body was wrong at a young age, and being forced to restrict their food intake, which then, of course, leads to bingeing and leads to weight gain.VirginiaAnother narrative I often hear about is what Roxane Gay wrote about in Hunger. She framed it as almost more of a deliberate decision to eat as a form of protection. What are your thoughts are on that, if that’s something you also see coming up for folks?RachelI appreciated Roxane Gay’s book so much, because I think this is a narrative that doesn’t get told. And I’m really of the belief that we need to believe people. And you know, when people share their story, we can trust that what they’re saying is true and real. When I have clients who talk about intentionally gaining weight, or thinking about fatness as a way to be protected from the male gaze, that makes a lot of sense. And we still know that that’s rooted in weight stigma. Because this idea that if we’re in bigger bodies, then men are not going to be attracted to us is rooted in weight stigma. And it’s real, right? This is the water that we swim in. It doesn’t mean, you know—there are many people in fat bodies who are in wonderful relationships and have lots of people that are attracted to them. But I think this idea, especially, I hear a lot with my clients who have had sexual trauma, is that there’s a feeling of protection when their body is bigger.VirginiaRight, that somehow they can hide more that way. Which, yes, again, there’s the layers of fatphobia built right into that, but it’s also an understandable path to seek when you’re struggling in that way.RachelAnd we know that when people either lose weight, or their body is smaller that, especially for those socialized female, oftentimes their body is sexualized, is put on display, people feel free to comment and you know, “compliment.” And that can be really vulnerable for people, for anybody, but especially people who have trauma history, especially around sexual trauma.VirginiaI think that’s really important to articulate. The more you’re talking about this, the more I’m realizing how weight stigma plays into it right from the beginning, for so many folks navigating trauma and weight. Even, as you were saying earlier, that the sort of idea of emotional eating, getting demonized, that’s something we talk about a lot here—I’ve certainly experienced it myself. We tend to praise the idea of people losing their appetites while undergoing trauma, like that gets celebrated as if that was a good coping strategy, when actually, that’s quite alarming. That weight loss that can result, again, doesn’t always result but sometimes results, isn’t a good thing.I remember when my daughter went through a lot of intensive medical experiences, and we lived in a hospital for weeks and months at a time at various points. And people would always sort of encourage me to get out and go for a walk, like that’s what you should do as a “healthy coping strategy.” And I was like, hey, I can’t leave her hospital room. We live here. And I’m terrified if I leave, she’ll stop breathing. So no, I’m not going for a walk. And actually, eating Au Bon Pain chocolate croissants while I sat in this hospital room for hours a day like felt good, and was comforting and it alleviated boredom and stress. I just remember wondering, through that trauma, why is my chosen coping method feeling wrong to everybody around me? And that’s weight stigma. It’s because they didn’t see it as “healthy” because it might result in weight gain, or did result in weight gain.RachelInstead of being able to see the wisdom in that, that having access to food while sitting in a hospital room is so wise and comforting. If we were neutral about food and body size, then it would be like, okay, bring all the croissants, and have as many as you want, and comfort yourself and try to get through this really horrific time. Instead, we hold up some coping mechanisms and vilify others, which is ridiculous. VirginiaI will say, for the people in my life listening to this, that I did have people who supported me on the croissants and understood when I said, “No, I really can’t. Yes, my husband can leave and go for a run, and that’s really helping him through this time, but me leaving is not something that will feel—like, that feels terrifying.” And people did respect that, but it was tricky to articulate. And it’s tricky that when you’re in the active experience of trauma, to have to articulate your need and defend a need. You shouldn’t have to assert to other people that your need is valuable at that point.RachelRight, you shouldn’t have to defend it. Even just thinking over the past year and a half with COVID, there is some subset of people who have coped by eating, and there is some subset of people who have coped by restricting. And we don’t name the restriction as harmful. We praise it when really, restriction weakens your immune system and makes you more vulnerable to stress and the impact of stress. But instead, what we say is, oh, if somebody is restricting and losing weight, that that’s a positive thing. We don’t name the harm of it, where, you know, eating to cope actually makes a lot of sense. And is way more beneficial than restricting.VirginiaBecause that’s at least meeting a physical need. It’s getting you through. Absolutely.So, we see the weight stigma showing up in the active trauma space, and as people are kind of navigating coping strategies. And then we also see it, you know, I don’t want to say after, because of course, trauma can be a long unfolding process, but in terms of how these fat bodies are then pathologized by the world, right? So talk a little bit about what is often the approach to when, you know, whether it’s in eating disorder treatment, or in trauma therapy, in general, when you know, providers encounter someone in a bigger body, and the focus goes to weight loss, and why that is not actually going to help with the healing from the trauma.RachelWhat I often hear and see from clients is, there’s two paths that come up the most: I see clients who went to therapy, are in a fat body, and the provider made an assumption that because they’re fat, they must have had trauma, without even assessing or asking questions. And then there’s clients who do connect their fatness to trauma, and so they have gone to therapy, wanting to talk about their trauma history, and sometimes also starting out in therapy saying, and I would like to lose weight, or just not even focusing at all on body size, but just wanting to talk about their trauma. And what happens is that therapists then say, “Well, yes, we can work on your trauma. And if we work on your trauma, then you’ll lose weight.” Because if we’ve decided that eating in response to trauma lead to weight gain, then the belief is, if we heal your trauma, then your eating is gonna change, and you’ll release the weight. That’s the word that comes up.VirginiaThat phrase is really yucky.RachelIt seems to be the one that my clients hear quite frequently. People are in fat bodies for endless reasons. There are so many different reasons, and we don’t need to know them in order to know that promoting weight loss is harmful. It doesn’t matter if somebody is fat because of trauma, or for any of the other reasons that influence body size. It’s not like diets differentiate, that one diet says, okay, this person had trauma, so, this diet is effective.VirginiaI can totally see the trauma diet becoming some new creepy trend on Instagram: Intermittent fasting to heal your inner child or something.It’s just so missing the point because it’s not helping people work on, you know, processing what’s really happened to them or figuring out what they really need. It’s like solving this problem that’s, as you say, possibly related, possibly even completely unrelated, and not actually a problem at all. And giving them this other thing to focus on and then measure their “success” based on whether they can control it or not. RachelI think it’s so important to name really clearly that fatness is not the trauma. Weight stigma is a trauma, and clients have all kinds of other traumas that they’re coming in with. But fatness is not the trauma, and trying to you know “fix fatness” is actually re-traumatizing. So if somebody is coming in, and a therapist is saying, '“Okay, I’m going to help you with your trauma, and I’m going to help you lose weight,” they’re actually re-traumatizing somebody who’s already been through significant trauma.VirginiaSo where do you think that sort of line of thinking in the provider community is coming from? I mean, why? Why is that an accepted practice when it’s so clearly causing harm? RachelIt’s an important question. I think some of it is that providers are still being trained in really stigmatizing programs. I don’t think people are learning about the impact of anti-fat bias and weight stigma. I think, unfortunately, a lot of providers haven’t done their own work around it, so they may still be trying to suppress their own weight or still trying to diet in their own life. As providers, we’re always going to be in process. It’s not that, you know, as a therapist, you suddenly get to this place where you’ve worked through everything.But I think if we haven’t done our own work around weight stigma and our relationship with our body, then we are likely to harm clients that are coming in wanting to address those issues. I think the trauma field still supports this, I think some of it comes from the eating disorder field. But I think a lot of it comes from the trauma field. If you read some of the main books about trauma, this narrative is written about, and they are not HAES-informed books. So if you don’t already have some footing in Health at Every Size, and you’re looking for a trauma book to read, or to learn about, that narrative is going to be reinforced.VirginiaIt also makes me think about how much our internalized vision of healthy or recovered or happy is intrinsically linked to thinness, so if someone achieves weight loss—however temporary that’s likely to be, and no matter what they have to do in order to achieve it—we’re going to view that as “success,” because that narrative is so embedded in our culture. And we’re not going to look deeper than that, we’re not going to see that that isn’t actually dealing with the underlying issues.Do you think there’s a degree to which the underlying stuff feels harder, you know, that it’s that work that might be scarier to people? And going on a diet feels like, well, this is what I can control. So let me do that.RachelAbsolutely. I mean, I think that all of us have been socialized to believe that weight is under our control. And that if we can just find the right diet and lose weight, then it’s going to solve other problems. And there’s so many providers who reinforce that.VirginiaAnd the science that’s getting done is reinforcing this, too. I mean, I was looking at a couple of studies that were done recently on adverse childhood experiences, and they are all trying to document this phenomenon. One is called “Adverse childhood experiences are associated with an increased risk of obesity and early adolescence.” (I apologize for using the O-word, I’m quoting the fatphobic research.) And there are several others I’ll link to in the transcript. It seems like the goal of this research is to say, we should worry about childhood trauma because people might get fat from it, as if that is the outcome we’re worried about, not the trauma.I’m curious for your thoughts on that research, I think we see the similar thing happening in research on childhood poverty and childhood hunger. Like if fat is the outcome, then it’s really bad.RachelI think that we want to believe that research is objective and neutral. And the truth is that it’s not. The questions that are being asked in these research studies are inherently biased. And so they are asking a question that they think they know the answer to. I would love to sit down with somebody like Deb Burgard or somebody who’s really great at pulling through statistics, because just glancing at this research, I’m not sure that there’s actually a difference between the percentage of kids who are in higher weight bodies in this study where they’re connecting it to adverse childhood experiences, and just the percentage of kids who are in higher weight bodies in general.VirginiaOh, that's interesting. Yeah.RachelSo I’d be really curious for somebody who’s really great at statistics to kind of pull all of that apart.VirginiaYeah, because if it’s like we’re trying, what it feels like, in a way is that they’re looking at the “childhood obesity epidemic.” They’re saying kids are in bigger bodies now, let’s find this explanation for it. And then that’s a way of pathologizing the fact that kids come in different sizes. Then you’ve decided, all those kids are traumatized or broken in some way. Now, you’ve explained it to yourself. Just yeah, that’s a pretty fatphobic way of going about the problem.RachelRight. And it’s like you said, I mean: You’re identifying fatness as the problem, like, how about if we identify the problem is that so many kids have childhood trauma? This idea that, a kid’s coming in and identifying that they’ve had a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and the thing that these studies are worried about is fatness?!It’s just so harmful. And it’s scary that this is how we’re responding to kids’ body size and to trauma, that the thing that these studies are focused on and asking questions about is how do we make kids not be in bigger bodies? And ignoring like, how do we protect kids from being physically and sexually abused? VirginiaRight, right. It’s a really similar thing that played out in childhood hunger research, which was like, in order to get funding and attention on childhood hunger and childhood poverty, there was a huge effort to document the connections to higher weight. And it’s like, do I really need to explain to you, that you should care about kids being hungry? You needed some other outcome—you needed to make it about fatness? In order to care about this problem? We couldn’t just care about feeding hungry kids? It’s mind blowing. And it feels very similar.This also feels very tied to the older conversation about whether “obesity” should be classified as a disease. And, a lot of folks who were in favor of that argued that it would reduce stigma, if we could understand high body weight as a “chronic condition” because you would understand that it was beyond people’s control, and they needed intervention and support. That has definitely not been the result of classifying obesity as a disease. We know that it has only furthered weight stigma, and it feels like a similar parallel here that if we’re trying to understand weight as always trauma related. You could argue that that’s a way of increasing empathy. But it doesn’t seem like that’s how that conversation plays out.RachelYeah, I am fascinated by this kind of line of thinking. I really am curious about who thought it was a good idea to classify body size as a disease. And like, how they convinced themselves that that was actually going to decrease stigma or not pathologize people. I understand the narrative they’re telling themselves but I would love to dig deeper and really pick apart like, what actually is going through their mind when they thought that that was a good idea.Of course labeling body size as a disease was not going decrease stigma. I think, first of all, it contributes to the idea, like when we think disease states, we think of something that requires treatment. And so then you’re reinforcing that body size needs some sort of intervention. So naming it as a disease is not going to reduce the stigma in the culture, like we actually have to address the stigma and not try to find creative ways to describe body size, and pretend that that’s actually going to be the thing that’s beneficial. We have to find ways to reduce stigma. I’m just sick in general of our need to pathologize these expected and typical responses to being in a body, and being in a culture that harms bodies. I think this happens with lots of different diagnoses. I don’t think this is unique to labeling body sizes as disease, but I think we’ve just got to get away from pathologizing people and name the problem in the culture and you know, in the environment, instead of saying that body size is the problem.VirginiaCompletely agree. And on the other side of this conversation, what we sort of started touching on in the beginning that I just want to hit on quickly, before we wrap up, is that it makes it harder for people to talk about what’s happened to them, because they’re worried if they own their full story, that they’re going to be pathologized for their weight. And I do sometimes feel within the Health at Every Size community, we don’t do a great job of making space for this story, right? Because we’re so quick to fight against the pathologizing. Then I hear from folks in fat bodies that feel like, I’m not allowed to be a fat person with health problems here. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that, because I’m sure you sort of see that tension, often.RachelTotally. And it makes sense to me, I understand why that’s the reaction from the Health at Every Size community. When you’ve been oppressed for so long, and there’s such a difficult time holding nuance within the larger environment, that anytime there’s a narrative, that there’s a fear it’s going to increase oppression or marginalization, of course, people want to defend and protect against it. So it makes a lot of sense to me. But what it does create is this reinforcing of stigma and it silences people. And we want to do the opposite within the Health at Every Size community, we want everybody’s story to be able to be told. So I think we have to be able to hold space for these conversations. Because, one, they’re true, right? Like this is real. These narratives are true and real. There’s a ton of nuance within the research around, you know, fatness and health conditions that we need to be able to talk about. And when we don’t talk about them, we prevent people from getting help with the things that there actually are interventions for, and weight loss is not one of them. If somebody in a fat body can’t talk about whatever health conditions they might be dealing with, then how are they going to get appropriate interventions for whatever those health conditions are? So we’ve got to be able to talk about it. VirginiaThat makes total sense. And I am so grateful for how you articulate this nuance. Thank you so much for your work and for being here.RachelThanks for having me on for these hard conversations.Virginia They are hard but they’re really important and I hope it helps people feel more seen in their own experiences and more like they can own their stories.Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do so. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much for being here. And please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding it to a friend.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe. And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. I’m barely on Facebook anymore, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast! This is a newsletter where we explore questions, and sometimes answers, on fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture and the author of The Eating Instinct, and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. I am so thrilled today to be chatting with Aubrey Gordon. Aubrey is the author of What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat. She is @yrfatfriend everywhere on social media, and the co-host of the very beloved Maintenance Phase podcast. Aubrey, welcome.Aubrey Thanks so much for having me, it’s a delight to talk to you. As always. VirginiaI’m delighted, and I know my readers are going to be so delighted. So I’m bringing you on to talk about the concept of thin privilege, because I think, this is a concept that’s very hard for folks to wrap their brains around. Whenever I talk about it on social media, it inspires a lot of angry comments, a lot of defensiveness, and just a lot of feelings that come up around this concept. I’m hoping we can unpack that, and discuss how parents can explain thin privilege to our kids. Because part of the problem is that people haven’t heard of thin privilege, and now they’re grown up. So let’s start with the basics. What is thin privilege?AubreyI would say thin privilege is how folks benefit from a proximity to thinness. So whether or not you feel like you yourself qualify as “being really thin,” the closer you are to looking thin, the more thin privilege you get. Congratulations! And that includes many fat people, right? I have more thin privilege at about 350 pounds than someone who’s fatter than me does. The idea is that the closer that you get to thinness, the more you actually don’t have to think about your body or your size in terms of how other people relate to it and treat it. You may think about it quite a bit internally, but most of your struggles with your body relate to internal challenges and not to institutions rejecting you, or individuals treating you differently.So, someone with more thin privilege than me might not have to worry about strangers on the street shouting “hey, fatso” at them. Or they might not have to worry about whether or not a doctor will agree to treat them. Or they might not have to worry if they get on a plane, will they be allowed to stay on that plane, or will they be escorted off the plane without a refund and without recourse. It doesn’t mean that folks in smaller bodies don’t have challenges to work through with relationship to body image. I think it’s really important to note that thin privilege is about how other people treat you, not how you feel about your own body. So you can still have profound body image struggles, but that doesn’t change how other people treat you, even with body dysmorphia, even with eating disorders, even with whatever you’re working with. Other people still perceive you as a thinner person and treat you as a thinner person, regardless of how you perceive yourself.Virginia I think that distinction between your own emotions about your body versus how the world perceives your body is crucial. And that’s what makes it hard for folks who feel like, “I’m miserable in my body, so how can I have thin privilege?” But it’s all the things you just said, it’s that you can move through the world freely, even though you might be tormented in some way by your body.AubreyIt can be upsetting and call up defensiveness in the same way that talking about any kind of privilege can. As someone who has grown up white and middle class and remains white and middle class, I have been told consistently throughout my life that my accomplishments are my own. I haven’t really had to look at the ways in which the wind is at my back, right? And the ways in which structures are built to support me specifically as a white person and a middle class person. And I think this is a similar thing. It doesn’t mean that you’re less accomplished. It doesn’t mean that you don’t struggle with your body image, it doesn’t mean that anything inherent about you has changed. It just means becoming more aware of the ways in which the world receives your body.VirginiaSo I was reading some of your writing about this (and I’ll link in the transcript to all the many fantastic articles you’ve written on thin privilege [like this one and this one], and one statistic that really jumped out at me was that just under 50 percent of American adults tried to lose weight between 2013 and 2016, according to the CDC. And you noted that white people and people with higher incomes were the most likely to be engaged in weight loss efforts, meaning that those of us with particularly pronounced privileges are the ones most likely to be engaged in activities to try to reduce our size. Is thin privilege something that already privileged people are actively seeking out?Aubrey Absolutely. Part of that, to my mind—there’s less research on this, this is all just me spitballing—but, to my mind, that is tied to the very explicit history of racism broadly, and anti-Blackness in particular. It’s tied to how we think and talk about fatness and fat people. It’s also tied to our relationship between class and fatness. Overwhelmingly, we are met with these media caricatures of fat people as being poorer than thin people, we are met with caricatures of fat Black folks, particularly as being the most abrasive of fat people, right? And most domineering or least intelligent or whatever—it sort of supercharges any of our existing associations with a community. So, yes, thin privilege is something that we seek, and it’s something that we seek in order to escape the ways that we actually do see fat people being treated: frankly, significantly worse than thin people. So folks will feel defensive of and disconnected from a sense of their own privilege, while at the same time on some level, kind of consciously cashing in on it or trying to figure out how to gain more of that privilege.Virginia I was talking to Deb Burgard about this a few years ago, and she said, a lot of the body positivity movement is small fat women trying to get their white privilege back, trying to move themselves back up the ladder, in a way. The intersection of all of this is fascinating, and uncomfortable. It’s hard to look at how we’ve benefited from these systems.AubreyI also think the hard thing about bodies is that we do live and operate in a culture that makes absolutely all of us feel like garbage in our bodies. Like 100 percent of people. It’s set up so that all of us feel bad. And part of the challenge is that we conflate how we feel about our bodies and how we’ve been made to feel about our bodies, with how much privilege comes with being in that body. And we’ve got to do a better job of disentangling those things, which will allow us to actually honor both of them more.Virginia Let’s talk about thin privilege with kids. I see this coming up in a couple different ways. One example that I talked about recently on social was a friend shopping for softball pants for her 8-year-old daughter, and finding that her daughter can’t wear the same uniform that her peers are wearing.AubreyThat’s so—listeners cannot see my face. But it’s a sad, bummed face. VirginiaI was a thin kid. I never had to think about whether the uniform would fit me. Or how that becomes a barrier to participation. If you’re the kid wearing sweatpants when everyone else is wearing the uniform, you don’t feel like you can play the sport in the same way. What other ways do you see thin privilege show up for kids?AubreyI think a big one is the built environment. For me in middle school and high school, those desks with a chair attached were like a real special kind of hell. I couldn’t flip the desk down, I would just have to sort of like, sit in the chair with the desk flapped up, which was like a little flag waving like, “Hi, everybody. I’m the fat kid. Hello! Look over here.”So I would try and write on my knee. And my notes were kind of garbage. It just made things—not insurmountable, but it was more difficult than it should have been.It is rare that schools or teachers are outfitting schools—and the same can be true of parents at friend’s houses—with furniture, knowing the weight capacity and that sort of thing. I ended up opting out of a lot of playdates with friends and physical games. I remember going to laser tag, and there was a point at which I stopped going, because I thought the laser tag vest thing wasn’t going to fit me anymore. So I stopped going to friend’s birthday parties. There is sort of a social isolation element that comes with all of this stuff. And I think, you know, it never would have occurred to me at the time. But boy, oh, boy, like just a thimble full of awareness from anybody’s parents could have gone just miles and miles and miles.VirginiaWhat should that look like? A lot of my readers are parents. Some of them are parents of fat kids, a lot of them are parents of thinner kids or kids with degrees of thin privilege. How do we talk to our kids about this concept? How can we be more mindful of exactly what you’re saying: thinking through the logistics of the birthday party, thinking through the logistics of the sports team, or whatever it is to make environments more inclusive for kids?AubreySo I come to this conversation, not as a parent, but as a very proud and engaged aunt. So a grain of salt from a guy who’s not taking care of kids around the clock. But I do think that talking to your kids about, “Do you think everybody can do this? Do you think everybody would be comfortable doing this? Who do you want to have there? Oh, I’m not sure if this kid could do that.” I think this works around size, I think it works around disability, I think it works on a lot of stuff.I have, as you can imagine, been very open with my niece and nephew both about what I do and what I write about, and why it matters. And I felt nervous about it, because it feels sort of “controversial” or high stakes or something to talk to kids about body stuff. But as with talking to kids about trans issues, or race, or disability, or any sort of social issue, they are totally down. And it has opened up this vein of conversation that I don’t think I would have had with them. My niece, who’s now 14 will come to me and be like, “My friend is constantly telling me how fat she feels, and I’m actually fatter than her, so it feels really bad to me. But I don’t want to take away how she’s feeling, but also she calls her little brother ‘fat’ as an insult.” So we have these pretty rich conversations to unpack all of those competing things.Because when you just sit down with a kid and you’re like, “Listen, man, sometimes people are fatter than other people. And sometimes people are mean to people who are fatter than other people or think that they don’t deserve the same things. And so we’re going to do a little looking out for fat people. What do you say?” That’s pretty much it and I don’t actually know a kid who isn’t moved to be a helper. So just tapping into that goes a long, long way.VirginiaI’ve found that in talking to my own kids about body size, they can use the word fat in this very unaffected, natural way that is so beautiful to me, as someone who had to go through the process of reclaiming it. It’s like, this won’t be something you have to reclaim. This will just be a word for you. Oh!AubreyI feel like the conversations that I have with folks who are parents is with parents who are not fat, raising kids who are not fat, right? And they’re really nervous that they’re going to have the thin kid who’s calling everybody fat.The way that I’ve handled that is to just be like, “Hey, this is a totally neutral word. Some people get their feelings hurt by it. So check in with people about what words they’re okay with. And then if they're okay with it, you can use it, it’s fine.” Creating even a sliver of daylight between what the word itself means and how people experience that word, can help kids navigate that. We do this all the time with words related to your private parts. There are lots and lots of times that we’re sort of teaching kids about when and whether words are appropriate. And this is another one of those.Virginia I also think you can talk about bodies in a really positive, normal way, and also teach your kids that we don’t talk about the bodies of other people, just like we don't touch the bodies of other people without their consent. If your 5 year old yells it out in a grocery store, that’s a great opportunity to say, “Hey, you know, we don’t actually yell out people’s physical characteristics in public, because you just don’t know how that’s gonna land. But it doesn’t mean that their bodies are bad. It just means that we respect that people’s bodies belong to them.”AubreyI think a totally neutral parallel is: You don’t show up at a party unless you get an invitation to that party. It doesn’t have to be like loaded and heavy. You don’t take a book from the library, if you haven’t checked it out and made sure it’s available. There are lots and lots and lots of ways that we check on something first before we go ahead and do it.VirginiaThose are great examples. So steering away from kids for a little bit: You talk a lot about fat people having these different levels of thin privilege, and why it’s so important to articulate the difference between what I as a size 16 experiences versus what you experience. And that’s something that the body positive space, the Health At Every Size space, we haven’t always been great at doing that. The small fat ladies like myself have done a lot of damage, and we have some karma to work off. So I have a question from a reader that’s actually a little more about health privilege than thin privilege, but I think they’re very related and I would love to get your take on this.She writes: “I’d like there to be more conversation about fat people who do have chronic health issues that medical professionals insist are brought on by how we eat or how we move, particularly diabetes, which is the dirty word of our culture right now. So many people dealing with this health issue are given poorer care because of the fatphobia of their doctors. Having this disease is like an open invitation to be judged and demeaned. The discourse stressing that it’s possible and even likely to be perfectly healthy and fat, while true, leaves out those of us who aren’t ‘perfect’ or ‘healthy in this paradigm. This is more of a screed than a question.” AubreyThere’s so much to unpack and I’m so deeply glad that this person wrote in about this, because this is a thing that I feel extremely passionately about. When we’re trying to defend ourselves against anti-fat bias and anti-fat attitudes and behaviors, the thing that is most tempting and the easiest to do is to grab on to the closest other privilege that we have, and go: I might be fat, but I eat really healthy and I shop at the farmers market; or I might be fat, but I workout all the time, and I have a gym membership; or I might be fat, but I’m perfectly healthy, and my blood work is probably better than yours. All of which makes sense as a desire to defend ourselves.When we do that, what we’re saying is that fat people who are disabled and chronically ill are not deserving of the same things that we’re deserving of. That’s not necessarily our intention when we say those things, but that is the function. It sends a really clear exclusionary message, in the same way that when thin women tell me that body positivity is only for people who are happy and healthy, which is sort of code for, like, not fat, right? So, not you, everyone else can feel okay about their bodies, but not you, is sort of what we’re doing when we say that we’re perfectly healthy. And we’re reinforcing the idea that our perception of someone else’s health is acceptable data to use in deciding how to treat that person. And it is, I would argue, categorically not.I mean, what we know about diabetes is that it is—well, I should start out by saying, what we don’t know about diabetes is almost everything. Just to be real clear: Everybody everywhere is walking around out in the world, like, “Oh, you just have to not eat sugar and not get fat and you won't be diabetic.” Currently, the research is reckoning with, do you get fat because you’re diabetic, or are you diabetic because you’re fat. And there’s some data showing that your body might actually hang on to fat, as it becomes insulin resistant, pre-diabetic and diabetic, right? So we might actually be thinking of it in a completely backwards way. We also know that it’s linked to the stress of experiencing discrimination. So all of that judgment about being diabetic, or maybe becoming diabetic, is rooted in ableism. It’s rooted in these kinds of misconceptions. I’m starting to dive into that research now, and I’m realizing the degree to which that is all categorically false. We are all walking around with this weird false sense of superiority like we’ve all outsmarted diabetes. And anyone who has been forced to take that deep dive knows that that is not the case. We think of it as an earned fate, and we talk about it as something that fat folks should have thought about before they got fat and stayed fat.VirginiaIt all ties back to this belief that we have to dismantle that fat is a behavior. That this is all a choice, that it’s all an option that you checked off on a list of like, yes, I will take fat and I will take diabetes.But attaching moral virtue to things that have to do with your genetic and socioeconomic and other lotteries of life really just doesn’t make sense.AubreyThere’s a sociologist named Robert Crawford, who coined this term in the 1980s called healthism, which is about the ways in which we seek out these signifiers that we are people who are seeking health, so we can perform that for people. I would say we are in a real boom time of healthism. Like people are Instagramming their celery juice, they’re wearing athleisure clothes everywhere. People are opting for things like Peloton and Equinox, right? And all of these see-and-be-seen things are very class coded. They are not just a way of saying I’m healthy, but a way of saying I’m healthy and I have disposable income. So it’s worth thinking about creating a sliver of daylight between what is your actual current health status, and what are the things that you are either judging other people on or seeking to be judged on in a particular way, positive or negative? That feels really important for all of us, regardless of size, and regardless of ability.VirginiaThat leads me to my last question. Another reader wrote in and asks: What do I do as a thin person to be an ally in all of this? I think when we’re talking about thin privilege, that’s an important piece of it. But she also says, when I talk to my friends in bigger bodies, do I acknowledge my privilege? Or is that unnecessary? This question also comes up from people who want to post about, like some workout achievement, but the performative aspect of that makes it really icky. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on some of that.AubreyI’m also curious to hear yours. I would say, in talking to friends, and folks that you have close social relationships with, ask them how they want to talk about it. And then do those things. Ask them what kind of support that they want and need and do those things. If they say, God, I’m getting ready for a doctor’s appointment, and I feel really nervous about it, you can say, what makes you feel nervous? Do you want me to go with you? Do you want moral support? Should we check in afterwards, and like get cocktails so you can decompress? What would be helpful? I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to already know what the right thing is, and to know how to read somebody else’s mind. And there’s enough difference in experience and desire here to be able to say, what’s helpful here? What are the words that you use to describe your body? What are the words you’d like me to use? Do you want to talk about this stuff? Do you never want to talk about stuff? You tell me. I think just opening up that conversation is a really great starting point.The other thing I would say—I’m in my office right now, Virginia can see it, there is a guest bed behind me. We just replaced the bed frame. I made weight capacity a priority for it. It’s our guest bed and I found a really inexpensive bed frame that is rated for up to 1000 pounds. So now I know, whoever comes to see us, they can stay in our guest bed. So thinking about stuff like that, like when you’re in the market for chairs, or for a bed or whatever, being mindful of like, does this chair have arms? How close together are they? Could somebody fit into these? What’s the weight capacity? Do I know who it’s built to fit? It will make it harder, but it’ll make it harder in a way that it’s already hard for fat people.VirginiaClothing is my other one on this. Something great that thin folks can do is support brands that are somewhat inclusive. I mean, it’s impossible to support brands that are fully inclusive, because they don’t exist, but to whatever extent that’s possible. I had an unpleasant interaction yesterday with a small fat woman who was asking for, oh, where should I look for summer dresses, and I suggested some plus size brands, and she was offended. She was like, “I mean, I’m not that big. I don’t need that.” And I thought, oh, I can’t talk to you about this anymore. I’m putting up a boundary, we’re done. Because, it’s okay, you can be at the smaller end of a clothing line just as much as you were otherwise at the upper end of the clothing line. Why is that somehow a problem for you?AubreyI think this actually gets us right back to thin privilege. That is someone who, in that moment, was like, “You are aligning me with fat people, I know how people think about and treat fat people, I will be over here with the thin people, thank you. How dare you.”VirginiaEven though I’m barely fitting into these clothes, and I’m complaining because I don’t have good options. But I’m going to be over here, you know, cramming into that size 14 or whatever.When it comes to talking about personal experiences, I do think there’s an argument for people not performing workouts on social media. And certainly not performing weight loss on social media, because you just don’t know who that’s going to be triggering for. And if you’re talking about your struggles, maybe don’t talk about it in the “I feel fat” way. Because that’s saying, I don’t want your body, and that’s really harmful to people.AubreyI also think asking for consent about that stuff is important, too. Like, “I’m having a bad body image day, are you up for talking about it?” Getting consent both for fat folks, for people with eating disorders, for all manner of folks, is a helpful thing. And doing that in a way that checks yourself in the process, not just for the person that you’re talking to, but also for your own perception. Like “I’m having a really hard time finding clothes that fit,” and “I know people who wear larger sizes than I do, and I can’t imagine what it’s like for them. This is so frustrating, right?” So at least you are in the process acknowledging the experience of either the person that you’re talking to or fat people more broadly. It broadens the conversation, even if you’re talking to another thin person, to reintroduce the awareness that you ideally have, but maybe don’t carry with you into those conversations. I will say there are, on a personal level, few things more frustrating to me than when a thin person sees me—a thin person who feels badly about their own body—and will go, “Look how fat she is, she must feel terrible, I gotta tell her all of my insecurities, and all of my bad feelings about my body.” Which then translates to me as, okay, this person hates their body and they must be absolutely repulsed by mine. So then it’s like, oh, great. Now everyone feels terrible. What have we accomplished here? Everyone feels worse? Cool.The other thing that I would say on the body image front is that there’s actually quite a bit of research into negative body talk. When we talk about our own bodies in a negative way, when we talk about other people’s bodies in a negative way, we think of that as being a thing that like, expels and gets rid of, and vents a lot of that.Virginia...and bonds us to other people...AubreyYeah, and bonds us to other people. The research actually shows the exact opposite, that it worsens our own mental state, it weakens our relationships, it leads to less sexual satisfaction, it leads to weaker friendships, it leads to all of these things, just when we talk about it, not how we feel to begin with. But when we give it more air time, it expands to fit the space that we give it. And it doesn’t only impact us when we talk about it, anyone within earshot experiences those negative outcomes. So I think it’s also worth thinking about body shaming as a pollutant. What’s the pollutant that you’re putting into the environment? Is it in a well ventilated area? Does everybody know that it’s being polluted? Like, how do you want to go about this? I also just think this is another one, sort of like the diabetes stuff, where we are pretty sure we know how this works. And the research shows us that it is in fact, you know, maybe the opposite.VirginiaThat thing you thought was so helpful is making everything worse.Aubrey For you and for people that you care about.VirginiaTo bring it back to parenting, that’s why the number one advice I give parents is please do not narrate your own body stuff to your kids, you are directly passing that baggage on to them at that point.AubreyAbsolutely. And I think it’s important for parents to note, there’s been a teeny tiny bit of research on this, you probably know it better than I do at this point, that it is actually just as powerful a negative force for kids to hear their parents talk negatively about their own bodies as it is to hear their parents talk negatively about their bodies. Your kid is not distinguishing between when you say that they are too fat versus when you say that you are too fat, or when you say that their thighs are hideous, or when you say that your thighs are hideous. Whatever the things are, right? Those have the same impact. That’s really tough to hear. It was really tough for me to learn. It feels so hard to be like people are honestly struggling, and the impacts are still tough.VirginiaOn the flip side, there is also a nice study (that I wrote about here), which showed that when parents who are struggling stopped talking, the kids did better. It’s nice to know there’s something you can do and that you can find a therapist or somebody else with whom you can have that conversation and your child is not that person in your life.AubreyOr a friend who consents, or whatever the framework needs to be, just like a consensual relationship that is about that thing. Totally take it there. It doesn’t mean you have to never talk about it. It just means being more mindful about when and whether and with whom?VirginiaWell, I could talk to you all day about this, but I know you have an appointment. Thanks so much for joining us!AubreyThank you for having me! This was a treat. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

The news media are a major source of diet culture BS. Every day there's an apparently "inspirational" story in which diverse bodies are shrunk down to diet culture's version of acceptability. We're literally brainwashed into viewing increasingly disordered, bizarre and downright dangerous behaviours as "#inspirational". Join me and my guest, anti-diet warrior and coach Summer Innanen as we present some truly epic examples of "SHITSPIRATION" from Australia and Canada. You will not believe how ludicrous they are! Grown up humans are supposed to be #inspired by a 'doubledown diet' which reduces calorie intake to almost nothing, a BARBIE DOLL (I am not joking), and....a Malamute? You have to hear this to believe it, it's next level #ridiculous. Trigger warning for this episode - very explicit language and we're discussing diet, calorie counts, etc, in (critical) detail. This one's not for the faint hearted! But if you're ready to get your rage-o-meter cranked up to ALL FIRED UP, this episode's for you! Show Transcript Louise Adams: Oh, Summer, thank you so much for coming on the show. Summer Innanen: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here with you. Louise Adams: Tell me, what's firing you up? Summer Innanen: Well, I saw an article recently in Women's Health, and it's about... it's supposed to be like a, you know, quote unquote 'weight loss inspiration story'. And it's about a woman who had a very significant weight loss experience by doing a very disordered diet. And I think what fired me up so much about it was not just the content within it, which I'm sure we'll you know, dissect and talk about it. But the fact that in 2015, in December 2015, Women's Health came out and it was a huge... we got a lot of headlines, a lot of publicity around the fact that they were taking the words, 'bikini body' and 'drop two sizes' off of their covers. So they sort of made this like quasi- body- positive stance. Like, 'hey,  we've heard you, our readers. And we've heard that, you know, you don't like us sort of using this very patriarchal, sexist language'. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like I remember at the time this was shared, like even people within the sort of anti-diet community were sharing it, saying 'this is great, like nice to see a major publications sort of making these changes' and then, you know, to, to look and see here we are five years later and it's the same shit. Louise Adams: It's back. Summer Innanen: Worse. Like I would argue what this what's contained in this article is so terrible from the perspective of promoting disordered eating and like really what this person is talking about is like, the way that they eat to me sounds like a, like an eating disorder, which obviously like I'm not here to diagnose or go... Louise Adams: it's disordered eating practices. Right? It's promoting starvation. Summer Innanen: Yeah. So it's a combination of keto and intermittent fasting. So it's like keto isn't bad enough on its own. So it's like, we're going to make intermittent fasting onto it. Louise Adams: It's an unholy marriage. Summer Innanen: It is honestly, and that's like, for me, I think why I was so fired up about it too, is because when I sort of reached the end of the line with my own disordered relationship with food, I was doing, I was trying to...attempting, it would only last like three days...to do something kind of similar. And it's what absolutely destroyed my body. Like just... like put me into amenorrhea, even with like a higher body weight percentage, and like completely disrupted my hormones. And when I work with clients, I see the same kind of behaviors really being kind of the end of the line for a lot of people. Like the one that really, really kind of messes up their head and their physical, like their actual, you know, physiology a lot worse than other diets that they have done previously. Louise Adams: Oh, this is an awesome thing to get completely fired up about because like we have Women's Health magazine here, which is... it's not health, it's women's starving magazine. They did no such thing as  like...to tell us that they're not going to do the 'bikini body', but how gaslighting to say, 'Oh, we're not going to do that anymore. Hello, here's something  worse'. And like to use that kind of little bit of that... they just wanted the publicity of that. 'We want to perform the idea of body positivity, but like, hell no, we're not actually going to stick to that'. Summer Innanen: Yes, yes. Louise Adams: It's going to go back to this apparently inspirational behaviour of this lady. Who is doing the very thing that tipped you into like a severe eating disorder? That's so disturbing. Summer Innanen: Yes. Yes. And, you know, they give a outline of what she eats in a day and as I think, as I emailed you before, I was like, that's kind of what I eat for breakfast. Like, it's the same amount of calories that I consume for breakfast. Like, that's it. And I remember being in that frame of mind where you would read a magazine and they would sort of show like, 'oh, here's what somebody eats in a day'. Or 'here's what a celebrity eats in a day'. And I remember always feeling like, so ashamed because I ate so much more than that. And I was always like, 'what's wrong with me? Like, why can't I eat as little as this?' And you know, I just can't believe that stuff is still being put out there, like that the author of that piece didn't think like, 'Hey, this might really promote an eating disorder.' When it's that blatant! Literally... Louise Adams: my dog eats more than that. When it's that blatant and there's, you know, throughout every article that we're going to talk about today is...oh, except the last one. There's literally no critical thought. Or even appreciation of the damage that's being spread by these, like it's full on evil messaging as far as I'm concerned, dressed up as inspiration. That the fact that a journalist...journalists, as far as I know, are trained to be critical thinkers and, and yet it's like that goes out the window when it comes to these apparently inspirational stories. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. Like there's absolutely no consciousness at all. That's what I felt like. Cause you know, it's just, it was one of those things. That's, it's almost like when I first read it, I was like, it's almost too ridiculous to believe this is...that they actually publish this as something that's supposed to be inspirational. But it's to me like, you know, I think the readership probably skews a little bit, you know, on the younger side, you know, maybe more like 20 to 30 age group or younger, probably teen, a lot of teenage girls and you know, to be reading that at such an impressionable age and to think 'oh, this is how...this is what I should be doing'. Which is essentially like starvation as well as like malnutrition and just something that would put such a high amount of both physical and mental stress on your body, that would really create like long lasting damage. Yeah, both biologically and psychologically. Louise Adams: And that's, that's who I see, you know, my clients are the diet casualties, people who have had these experiences and then...you know? Dieting like this, crash dieting...because this is, this lady is on a severe calorie restriction. And then she's added intermittent fasting, which basically means you're only allowed to eat for six hours a day and squish in your tiny little bits of food into six hours. Like when you really think about that, that is so many levels of fucked up and she's saying, 'oh, it's so good'. And I feel for her being in that diet head, And who knows maybe an eating disorder head, but there's  ...the payoff is so great for her because the weight loss like that, the whole article is about her trying to shift the last bit. And she's still got a way to go. And her poor body, if her poor body could talk would be going, 'I'm starving. I'm slowing down this cause it's getting dangerous'. And she's like, 'right, I'm going to double down using the halo of intermittent fasting', which is starving. Summer Innanen: Yes. Yeah. And the other thing too, that stood out to me, well, two things. One is the amount of caffeine that she talks about drinking in terms of hydration. Cause it says, like, what really works for her. It's like, 'I'm really hydrating'. And it's like so much coffee and green tea. And I'm like, if I had that much caffiene I'd be, I don't even know what I would be doing. Louise Adams: That's a question I ask when I'm seeing people with eating disorders, like, what are you drinking? Because quite often when you get an eating disorder, you will drink caffeinated stuff to kill your appetite. So, she's calling that hydration. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then the other thing too, is that she uses the language of 'food freedom' to talk about how she feels, because  she says you know, 'food is really just food. It's not good or bad. I don't obsess about it anymore'. And it's like, really that could be pulled from any sort of anti-diet playbook, which is what we want, but it's so counter to what she's actually doing. And I think that it kind of shows like when you're really into, like, when you' re really kind of overtaken your mind, you're sort of riding this, this buzz or this wave where it does feel like that. But, you haven't woken up to how you really are looking at things that way. And you really are, you know, like if you're tracking every calorie, which is what she says she was doing... Louise Adams: How is that freedom? Summer Innanen: Yeah. That's not freedom. And that's, that's like, maybe she's sort of, you know, like kidding herself. She's at the sort of like, kidding, 'I'm kidding myself' phase. Like, it's like, you know, most of us when we were sort of dieters were like, 'well, no, no, no, I'm doing it for my health. Like I'm doing no, this is for my health', but really underneath it's, you know, there's, there's some other stuff going on, but I hate it when they kind of steal, like they sort of co-opt the language of intuitive eating and co-op the language of the anti-diet message and really use it to promote something that's so restrictive. It just makes... Louise Adams: You know who came to my mind when you were saying that is Rebel Wilson. Summer Innanen: Yes Louise Adams: she's an Aussie actor and has always been in a larger body. Apparently like her kind of whole catch phase for 2020 was that it was her 'year of health'. Summer Innanen: Yes! Louise Adams: But the behaviors are restriction and starvation and over-exercise, but she's masking that in the language of 'I'm so healthy now'. Like, 'I don't think about food anymore. My habits are so great', but it's the same thing. Summer Innanen: Exactly. Exactly. Louise Adams: Worlds apart from what the anti-dieting and intuitive eating stuff is actually about. Summer Innanen: Yeah. And, and like, it's not their fault. Like, I don't like talking about this. I'm not, I don't want to like, shame this, this woman at all. Louise Adams: As an individual, no. Summer Innanen: Or Rebel Wilson. It's like, but it's really about. You know, the it's really about the culture diet culture, and just the fact that we feel as women and more, you know, more specifically that we have to go to these extremes to really like, you know, show our, our worthiness as humans, like in our value. And like, Rebel Wilson is so talented. Louise Adams: I know, so funny. Summer Innanen: She's an awesome actress. And now it's like, everyone's just talking about her body and her weight loss. And it's like, it takes away from all these other amazing things that she's done. Louise Adams: And when it's really uncritical, as well. It's like, why is she so much better now than she's small? That just reinforces the diet culture message and keeps stories like the woman you talking about going. It's like, I can get all this attention, uncritical, positive attention, but it's like, we're not seeing what's right in front of it. Like we are teaching and promoting women in this case did a really, really sick eating disordered and stuff under the flag of health. Summer Innanen: And that is like, supremely unhealthy. Yeah. Yeah. It's so frustrating too, because you see all these positive changes happening in the way of, you know, women becoming more liberated or just having, you know, bigger voices taking up more space. And yet it's just like the same old shit is still there as it relates to our bodies and our value and, and... Louise Adams: There's such an uptick too, in January, isn't there. Summer Innanen: Oh yeah. It's a predictable tsunami of the weight loss. The walls of relentless inspiration, whether we want it or not. It's just, it's here. ESpecially with the pandemic, you know, because everyone, a lot of people have...maybe their bodies have changed a little bit, which makes a ton of sense because we're under a lot of stress or just life changes that have happened. So I think that, you know, depending on where you live, if there's still a lot of restrictions, which I was saying to you before, like there still is here. Dieting gives you like a bit of hope, almost like weight loss gives you a bit of hope. In this time when maybe some of us are feeling a little hopeless or just like really kind of sick of, sick of the isolation and everything else. And so I wouldn't be surprised that maybe your body's changed a bit during quarantine. I wouldn't be surprised if this year really you see like just a lot more people really engaging in dieting as a way to cope with the emotion, emotional discomfort of living through a pandemic. Louise Adams: That is a really good point, isn't it. Dieting can be a bit of a lifeline. It can feel like it, like something familiar to do in a scary time. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Some sense of control, some sense of like, you know, hope, something else to focus on other than like the fact that there's a lot of horrible things happening in the world. Yeah, absolutely, a hundred percent. And I just, I, you know, I've heard it from people that I work with just feeling more urges to diet lately. And I think that, yeah, it's just something to be mindful of. If anyone listening is experiencing that too, like I think it's pretty normal to be experiencing more of those urges, but hopefully you can... Louise Adams: LIsten to today's episode and get your bullshit detector back. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't drink the Kool-Aid it's not actually going to help. Louise Adams: It's not control! Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Louise Adams: It's so interesting because like, Canada is very similar to Australia, culturally in lots and lots of ways. And it's funny...not funny. It's not funny. Cause like, you're talking about really disturbing uncritical weightless articles. And we've got them here in Australia too. And I really want to talk to you about the lady who lost weight, because she wanted to look like Barbie. Yes. And Summer Innanen: I, so you said that to me, I honestly, it was like, okay, this needs to be a tabloid. Like this can't be like a real, and, and then you told me that it's actually a very legit publication. Louise Adams: Yeah. Oh, I'm so ashamed of ourselves. So, this is on Nine News. Channel Nine is Murdoch press and it's, you know, one of it's a huge...it's the number one news platform in Australia for news. I want to say news, right? News. Okay, exciting. And in this news, I'm just using air quotes.  It's this story from late gen a Barbie fan has dropped a whopping blah-blah-blah kilos in a bid to look like a favorite doll. And it's a story about a lady called...a 35 year old lady called Kayla. Who's apparently battled with her weight since she was seven, and has done all of the diets in the book and… Like, I just, I can't even, because yes, Nine News is promoting this as, as awesome. This lady that the article is...littered with her dressed as Barbie. She's a full grown female adult woman dressed as Barbie. And the whole story is about how she's had a gastric sleeve and, and is also starving herself, post gastric sleeve, and now she's very happy and...like I just, I mean, I can't get this article out of my head because it's on a major news platform also. I've just realized it was on the TV on a morning show. She now lives in Las Vegas pursuing her Barbie lifestyle. And I'm not criticizing Kayla herself whatsoever, but what I'm criticizing is the news. Which, by the way, I've also found out isn't even news, because this is from Jan 2021. When I'm Googling, to send you the article. THis article actually came out in June last year, it's old, it's not, it's old. It's not news. But it's been rehashed - guess why, it's January - it's Diet season and then some, you know, money hungry gastric sleeve doctors, and some people who want to sell their diets saying 'let's get her on TV, and uncritically throw this... it's an appallingly ridiculous idea that we need to look like a doll in order to reach the pinnacle of our existence. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like, you know, there were, I don't even...there were so many things wrong with this piece. Louise Adams: It's hard to know where to start. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Okay. Well, let's start with when she was a kid, because she talks about how, you know, 'it didn't matter how hard I tried or what side I was on. I could rarely shift the weight or I would lose some and then regain double'. And it's like, well, yeah, that's what diets do. And so, this poor girl probably had her parents putting her on diets, which we know she did actually. Louise Adams: It says 'my obsession with Barbie began as a child and has continued into my adult life. I used to have over 200 dolls as my parents use them as an incentive to go on a diet and lose weight'. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. Which is so messed up. Louise Adams: That just made me want to cry. Yeah. Because as a parent to, bribe your a child with a Barbie doll, like the poor thing, she's seven. I know. And I don't know, that's at least 200 diets, isn't it? Summer Innanen: Well, exactly, like how horrifying is that? So, her metabolism is probably been so altered and she has no sense of her own  instincts on what actually, you know, feels good for her. And her parents basically instilled like this belief that like you're better or you're good or you're more worthy when you lose weight, And like, to think about the damage that that would do to someone's self-worth and their body image and the way that they feel it. Yeah. Yeah, right. Louise Adams: Cause it's...I see this as a real heartbreaking story and I cannot understand how this is inspiration. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. It's so awful. It reminds me of the there's this book. I don't know if you've ever read it. It's called 'The Heavy' and it's about a mother who puts her daughter on a diet and it's...it's a memoir written from the mother's perspective and she keeps putting her, she can't figure out why her daughter can't lose weight. She keeps putting her on diet after diet, after diet. And like, it just reminds me of that because the parent is...has so much  internalized fat phobia and their own disordered relationship with food that then they pass down to their kids. And like, that's what I see. I'm sure you see all the time with the people that we work with is that what our parents did, which they kind of were doing out of this like, protection. They wanted to protect us by helping us lose weight or commenting on our body or restricting food...actually completely backfired and made us feel like we, you know, we weren't worthy of their approval, of love, like of our own existence, unless we looked a certain way unless we lost weight, unless we ate a certain way... Louise Adams: All contingent on weight, which is it's insane because a weight is not under our control. And when we do the diet thing, all we guarantee is a slowed metabolism and weight regain. And she even says in this that she would lose it, then lose weight and then regain like that. Plus some, which is, we know that's perfectly normal as a response to starvation her. And cause her parents obviously have that internalized weight stigma, and she has it, you know? This is a story about her internalized weight stigma and how, you know, rather than kind of pushing back or being able to push back against it. She's really drunk the Kool-Aid. Summer Innanen: Yeah, yeah. And again, they highlight what she eats in a day, which is like, why, why these places do this is like, beyond me, because... Louise Adams: Well, they go into so many stereotypes too. Cause like it's the, it's the traditional thing like, 'Oh, before I had my gastric sleeve, I was a bad person and I ate terribly'. And ignoring the fact that perhaps her, part of her weight issues was to do with the diets themselves. Summer Innanen: Right? Louise Adams: Yeah. So that's ignored and so about...'it was definitely 100% my personal fault' quote unquote, 'that my body was large and I ate terribly but now I eat great'. But, what we see actually, like when you look at that, what she used to eat, she used to starve herself all day and then eat at night. Summer Innanen: Right? It's like, well of course you're going to binge at night. If you starve all day, that's no surprise there. You're going to be so hungry. You'll eat anything that's not locked down. And then what she eats now is like, it's so dangerous. It's like such a low amount of food and... Louise Adams: And says, 'I ate,'...I'm going to read some numbers here so trigger warning. Cause it's just, I just want to get across the point of how restrictive it is. She's had 80% of her stomach removed, and then she's saying 'I eat 90 grams of protein a day, 10 grams of carbs and five grams of sugar'. Everyday. Summer Innanen: Do you know what...10 grams. That's not even a banana. Right? 10 grams of carbs. Like that's like, that's like what? Like a few baby carrots or something like that? Louise Adams: There's no actual veggies. Breakfast is a protein shake. Lunches, chicken or beef with cheese, dinner is chicken or steak or a protein shake. And the snacks, cashews or walnuts. Like there's there's no fruit or veggies. Poor thing. In a stomach which is 80% removed, amputated. Summer Innanen: And can't be reversed. They also say that, which is another thing. Louise Adams: And it says this article has the hide to say 'she now has a good relationship with food'. Summer Innanen: Yes. I highlighted that too, because again, it's like, co-opting this language of food, freedom and, and using it in like a place where it's like clearly a very disordered. Louise Adams: How is that a good relationship with food? Summer Innanen: Yeah, it's sad. Louise Adams: And works out seven days a week. Summer Innanen: That, right. That was the other thing that really stood out because also extremely unhealthy to be, to be doing something like that. And you just sort of wonder, like what's going to happen to this individual. You know, and they may be riding the sort of like validation of having a significant weight change and getting the publicity and feeling really good about that. Louise Adams: But, you know, as we all know totally done it, you know, as a psychologist, she's finally saying to her mum, 'look, I am the Barbie doll'. I just...it's heartbreaking. I totally get why she's doing it. Summer Innanen: Right. Louise Adams: But I find it an incredibly sad story. Summer Innanen: I know, and I feel bad for her as a child. Louise Adams: I feel like I'm kind of alone in seeing her as a really sad story. Summer Innanen: No, it's really sad. It is really sad. And it's, and it's this idea like, again, it's like this idea that it's our fault, like, and it's a kid's fault if they are in a larger body instead of thinking, 'okay, well, this is just, you know, genetics'. Louise Adams: Here's my child, here's my kid. Give her a barbie doll, for fuck's sake, if she wants one. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Not to earn it by restricting food or whatnot. To put all the onus on her and to, you know, that she had to earn it by losing weight, earn Barbie dolls by losing weight. Like, it's so sad. And yet it's being like, you know, applauded and praised and... Louise Adams: It's sickening. How like diet culture, it's weight loss at all costs. And this is an extreme example of the costs, but I mean...2015,  right? Women's Health magazine is talking about, 'Oh, we see the harm done by diet culture. We see that talking about women as if they're a bikini body and stuff is not cool anymore. Well, we're going to stop doing that'. But now, like we just talked about like two really extreme articles promoting starvation. Like there's no problem here. And we've gaslit ourselves to the point where these things are being called lifestyle changes or health behaviors. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Louise Adams: We're talking about stuff that's much, much worse than the good old diet industry days. Summer Innanen: Right, right. Yeah. It seems to have gotten a lot more extreme, hasn't it? Like it's, it's something that has, it's always sort of been extreme, but it seems to be even more....I guess now the extremism is normalized. Louise Adams: Yeah. And it's mainstream. It's like pro-ana used to be pro-ana, cause we could see it as being different to what the world was. Summer Innanen: Exactly. Exactly. Louise Adams: Yeah. Someone said to you, I only ate in a six hour window and I don't eat any vegetables or fruit or carbs. We're like, 'Oh, you're so healthy. How do you do it?' Summer Innanen: Yes. Yes. 'Let me put you in my magazine. You're a success story'. But I wonder if like, if either of them took, you know, assessments on whether or not you have an eating disorder or disordered relationship with food, you would most likely see that they would probably check most of the boxes in terms of the things that they would say that they're thinking and doing as it relates to...you know, the behaviors, but I was going to say as well, it also just shows how weight stigma plays a role here. Because if this was an already thin person eating this stuff, you know, we as....there might be more people sort of calling this out as like very disordered or an eating disorder, but because they were in larger bodies and they went to these extreme measures to get in a smaller body it's applauded and like, that's the influence of weight stigma. It's like, we prescribed these eating disorder behaviors to people in larger bodies that we would diagnosis an eating disorder and somebody in a smaller body. Louise Adams: Yeah. that's Deb Burgard's point, isn't it. That's so like... Summer Innanen: Yes, exactly. Thank you. Cause I was like, I'm saying this and I'm like, I can't remember....thank you. Louise Adams: I know, it's such a slam dunk awesome quote because it's exactly what's happening here. Summer Innanen: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Louise Adams: You know, I wonder, I literally wonder, like what you're saying about, if it was someone smaller, would, would the media alarm bells ring. Because I'm thinking, well, if that was Gwyneth Paltrow's day in a plate, we'd probably still be going, 'Ooh, isn't she cool?' Summer Innanen: You know what, you're right. And I saw that recently because Aaron Flores who hosts the Dieticians Unplugged podcast, he posted...I think it was via Glamour magazine. It was like what Kelly Ripa eats in a day. And it was the same thing. It was like, she was basically talking about how she eats dust. But...it was honestly very similar to what the first, the girl in the Women's Health magazine was talking about eating in a day. And so, you're 100 percent right. So, so maybe my point is... Louise Adams: I do think it's viewed differently. But I actually think that we're getting to the point where like it's competitive, not eating is at such extreme levels that we're not, it's only the people in the eating disorder industry who are going, 'hello, what the hell', like it has become so unfashionable to eat like a grownup. Summer Innanen: Yeah, yeah. Eat like a grown ass adult is what I say exactly. Exactly. Yes. I remember. I remember in the one that the Kelly Ripa, when she says, like, she called it...'my first chewable food of the day is around like 11:00 AM' or something, like that was the way that she described it. And I just, I remember commenting on it when Aaron and I was like, I can't believe she just used the expression, my first chewable food of the day. Like if, if that's not a red flag that you're describing the way you eat stuff, using those terms. And I don't mean to laugh. It sounds like a laughing at someone with a disordered relationship with food, but it really is horrifying. Just how normalized and then praised and applauded that is. Louise Adams: Like, 'oh, oh no, it's any 10 o'clock. Should I be chewing? Oh my God'. Summer Innanen: Yes, exactly. And I just, and again, like, I just remember always looking at those things and feeling so ashamed and always just being like, why can't I do that? Like, why can't. And thank goodness, my body couldn't do that because it was the reason why I didn't actually have like a full blown eating disorder and instead was just a chronic dieter. Louise Adams: We really need to stop this. We really need to stop listing what people like in a day. It's ridiculous. It's kind of like comparing what we eat to each other, it's encouraging  externalization of eating behavior? We cannot continue to do that. Like really, the articles about 'what I eat in a day' should just be followed by the phrase 'is going to vary every single day', and it's none of your damn business'. Right. Summer Innanen: Yes. Yes. That's the headline right there. Louise Adams: Right. Eyes on your own plate. Does it matter? It's not a fricking competition. It's not like we're going like, 'ooh, what my poo looks like every day. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe that's where we are  we going? Comparing physical functions. We just need to stop. It's so true. You kind of quid pro quo's me with, like, I came up with the Barbie ridiculous story and you came up with a whopper from Canada. Summer Innanen: The dog? Louise Adams: Yeah. Summer Innanen: So, this was on the CBC. So CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Company, it's like our major national news network. And like, that's the one place I go when I want to get unbiased, like just straight up, really factual news. And they have this article that they posted called 'meet Woody a massive Malamute, serving up weight loss inspiration for the new year'. I just couldn't believe this was on the CBC and it's literally like this story, this weight loss story of a dog that like dropped half its weight and also had like shared it on social media as a way to inspire others to, you know... Louise Adams: Other dogs? Summer Innanen: No, no, no. Oh no. Humans. Louise Adams: This is a new low, eat like a dog. Summer Innanen: This is... Louise Adams: Oh my God. It says, 'If you're looking for inspiration to meet your new year's resolution to trim the fat, look no further'. Summer Innanen: Exactly. Yeah, no, it's to inspire humans. Louise Adams: Oh, please stop inspiring me. Oh my God. Summer Innanen: It's such a cute dog though. I just, as a side note, he's a really, really cute dog, but you know, this has come up. I don't know if you've been...you've probably been asked this question too before, but people will say like, well, you know, why is it okay to put pets on diets, but not humans? Do you have a good answer for that? By the way? Before I was going to say what I say. Louise Adams: I don't think I have actually had that question put to me. Summer Innanen: Oh, you haven't? Just me. I've gotten that. Louise Adams: Why is it okay? I don't, I don't know if it is okay. Like, I haven't looked at the weight loss research for dogs, but I'm assuming it's going to be physiologically similar to humans. Right? I don't know. I don't know. Summer Innanen: I don't know. My answer is like, we're not dogs. Like we aren't dogs, dogs aren't influenced by like diet culture. Like dogs don't have fat phobia., cause they're not like looking at thinner dogs everywhere and thinking like, 'I'm not good enough because I don't look like that'. Like they're... Louise Adams: Oh my God, you're reminding me of poodle science, you know, ASDAH's awesome little  video. Which is like, it's illustrating what body diversity is like, you know. But in weight science it's like, all the poodles are in charge and they're telling everyone, all the breeds of dogs to like, they like 'be like me, be like the poodle', but like a starving mastiff will never be the same as a poodle. Summer Innanen: Right, exactly. Yeah. One of the first like, quotes that I said many years ago was 'we're not Golden Retrievers'. We're not all meant to look the same. It's one of the things that I still say to this day, because it's true. And you know, in this article, like it's a pretty basic...they're just restricting the dog's food and making the dog exercise. But this idea that like we're similar at all. It's just so, it's so backwards to me because it completely ignores the culture that we live in. And like the fact that we are emotional being...dogs are emotional beings too. Yes. I will give you that. I love dogs. But they don't have the same. Not living in like a patriarchal society. They're not exposed to sexism. Like they're not, they're not exposed to fatphobia like, I don't think they're internalizing those charts at the vet that have like pictures of the different dogs with the big classifications like we would be. They don't feel ashamed when they step on the scale. Louise Adams: There's no diet culture in dogs, but there's diet culture in the humans that own them. And you can hear that in this article, can't you? Because it's like...actually it's everywhere. Like this sentence, 'he once weighed double what he should have'. How do you know what he should? He's a fucking Malamute. Summer Innanen: Yeah, yeah. Louise Adams: 'Should have'. So, we've decided what he should weigh and we starved him down there. And then, Pam Hedgie, who's the foster mom, apparently she's known for doing this. Starving the dogs so that they're adoptable. Now, that is awful. And...but the woman she's like, totally like lost it. She puts it on social media and...here we go. She says, 'humans have something to learn from dogs. They're so willing. I think that's the most amazing part about them. They don't get down, they get up everyday, they're happy to go to the park. And it has to be hard work. It can't be a breeze, but they're so happy and willing to do it. We could all learn a little bit about that'. I'm sure what he likes going for walks. Yeah, but I'm also sure that if Woody could talk, he'd say 'why are you starving me?' Summer Innanen: Yeah. I think it's, again it's like, you know, it just shows, 'okay, you have to do something extreme to be healthy'. Whereas really it's like, of course the dog wants to go out and play. And if we just let them do that by letting them tell us and get them outside, and they listened to their bodies, kind of like humans do..then you wouldn't have to, you know...It's not like this, like... 'oh, you should work out every day and you have to like push yourself through'. It's like dogs are naturally hardwired to kind of want to be that way anyways. And so long as we give them an environment where they can do those things, then they're going to be healthy regardless of their size. And that's, that's sort of similar to humans in a way. Louise Adams: His health is not even mentioned.  Like it'e literally just his size. And this assumption that he has to be half his size. Like we don't even know it was here actually just a larger dog in good health? We don't even know how old he is? Summer Innanen: No, you're right. You're right. Because yeah, because malamutes are huge to begin with anyways. Louise Adams: Yeah. Well, I've got a Great Dane and like big dogs, the big dogs. And like, my vet, there is no correct weight. And like, I love my vet because my vet is like full of body diversity. It's like, there's a great big range in Great Danes. You can have smaller Great Danes and big Great Danes.  And they're all Great Danes. Summer Innanen: That's so refreshing. Wow. Louise Adams: Thank you. I'm in the right place. Summer Innanen: People used to criticize my dog all the...my dog might, we lost my dog a few months ago. People used to like stop me on the street and like...not me actually, they would always do my husband for some reason. Cause they probably saw the look on my face and was like, 'I'm not going to say anything'. They would say like, 'what are you feeding your dog? Like your dog is too big' because we had a pug and he was really big and he was just naturally. Really big. He'd always been really big and like, vets were always totally fine with him. We never had a vet say, 'hey, you know, you gotta watch this weight' or anything like that. But, you know, people in the street would stop and comment. And I remember just saying to my husband, I was like, 'I swear if someone did that to me, I would just rip them to...', I don't know why they always stopped him. Louise Adams: Yeah. Actually now you say it. I get that about my Great Dane, Dolly. Her name is Dolly Pawton. It's so cute. They stop us and they're like, Oh, what is, what does he ate? Oh, first of all, they say 'he', cause obviously a big dog is always a 'he'. 'What do you feed him? He must eat you out of house and home.' This dog eats, you know, not as much as my boxer that I used to have. So there's assumption about size and what they eat. Let's look to our dogs,  right? No as inspirational weightless stories, but as diversity right in front of us. Summer Innanen: Yes. Louise Adams: And connection. Summer Innanen: And how we just love them regardless of their size. Louise Adams: I know. Like, poor old Woody, he's not more oveable now he's starved into submission. Summer Innanen: It's so silly to me that they would use that as a story of inspiration. Must've been a slow news day in Canada. Like you don't have a pandemic going on, I don't know why. Louise Adams: The sad point is that it appears that Woody has more variety in his diet than the Barbie lady. Summer Innanen: Oh yeah, at least he's eating lots of fruits and vegetables. I know. Oh my gosh. Right. Louise Adams: God. So, we've arrived at our last. Article, which is an interesting one in Good Housekeeping. That's just come out. Jan 29th, 2021. 'The unbearable weight of diet culture', which...it's such an exciting article cause it's really long, really in-depth, and it's talking about this whole idea of diet culture. In the intro, it says this: 'throughout 2021, Good Housekeeping will be exploring how we think about weight, the way we eat and how we try to control or change our bodies in our quest to be happier and healthier. While Good Housekeeping also publishes weight loss content, and endeavours to do so in a responsible science backed way, we think it's important to present a broad perspective that allows for a fuller understanding of the complex thinking about health and body weight'. So, kind of cool. Summer Innanen: Kind of reminded me of the Women's Health 2015 publicity. What I do like about this article, I will say, is Judith Matz and Christy Harrison are quoted quite a bit through it. Louise Adams: And Sabrina Strings. Summer Innanen: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Which I thought was great because they tied in that component too, like the race component. And I thought it was one of those articles that you could probably send to a family member or a friend that didn't understand why you were doing Intuitive Eating or that had questions about it, but you didn't really know how to give them the information in a way that was a little more palatable. And I thought that this article was one of those things that you could totally pass along to them. It's easy to read, makes a lot of sense, kind of hits all the main points.  It's one that I'll probably bookmark for people. Louise Adams: It's nice too as evidence that the wider culture is taking the whole concept of not dieting and looking at the Health At Every Size sort of stuff seriously. Summer Innanen: Yes. And actual people who are in the space instead of like the people who are in between who talk about this stuff yet still promote weight loss, you know, like the sort of like, you know, Geneen Roths of the world and whatnot. So, I thought it was really great that they actually had a lot of, like a lot of like really well-respected experts weighing in and some good links and things like that, but there was still a little problem with it. Did you want to talk about that or do you want me to talk about it? Louise Adams: So it's at one point it says, look like it's all this awesome, awesome and stuff.  And then it  says, loo... they're talking about how the media in particular can promote dieting, and it says 'even Good housekeeping's own article on 1200 calorie diets is a tricky juxtaposition. The article aims to serve the approximately 40,500 people who search for 1200 calorie meal plans on Google every month. Despite the 2015 study that shows this number of calories falls within the realm of clinical starvation'. And that's, that's been changed... Summer Innanen: It has actually, because I... Louise Adams: I think it said something about the Holocaust before? Summer Innanen: Okay. So I have it, cause I cut and paste it into a document. It says, this is what used to say. It says, 'It's the most popular article here on Good Housekeeping's own website, about 1200 calorie diets that netted over 2 million search users in 2019 alone. Our second most read story of the year, despite the fact the number of calories falls within the realm of clinical starvation. In brackets - Holocaust concentration camp prisoners were fed 1,250 to 1400 calories per day'. So, that's really interesting that they changed it. Louise Adams: They've watered it down, haven't they? They've removed a bit of culpability. Like, cause that example of like in a concentration camp, you would get more food. Summer Innanen: It reminds me of the Minnesota starvation study, which, which was around like 1500... Louise Adams: 1500. Summer Innanen: 1500 calories a day. Louise Adams: And they all went around the twist from that over six months. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly.  Exactly. Louise Adams: I'm so glad you cut and pasted that. Summer Innanen: Yes. So that, and then the other big thing is they still link to the goddamn diet. Like they still link to it. They link to the 1200 calorie day diet. Like it's like they're saying, 'okay, we're exploring this'. And then they're linking to the thing that is probably the most like harmful triggering thing that you could put in that article. Louise Adams:  'We're not actually going to stop doing it because it's the second most popular thing we do'. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Louise Adams: That is so fucked up. Summer Innanen: It's like these publications want to explore these topics and they admit that they're complicit and they get publicity because of that, they get a bit of applause and then they continue to uphold and perpetuate the same dangerous stuff. Louise Adams: Get off the fence, Good Housekeeping. Get the splinter out of your ass. Take the article down. Summer Innanen: Yeah, take it down, take it down. If you want to, you know, put your money where your mouth is... but they don't, they want to keep taking other people's money. And then you were telling me this was the article that people were opening and then they were seeing weight loss advertisements, right? Was it this one? Louise Adams: Yeah. So I was saying chats and people like reading the article, but in between the text of the article, were getting sold weight loss stuff. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. Louise Adams: I mean, geez. I mean, can we, at some point stop the fence sitting and stop performing the recognition of diet culture as harmful and, and start actually stopping the harm. So we protect little kids, like little miss Barbie. Summer Innanen: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Louise Adams: And we stop the metabolic and physiological harm. If nothing else, you know. People are so worried. In the article, Good housekeeping. It's talking about how more people are dieting than ever before. Did you see ...'In November, 2020, the CDC, Centre for Disease Control, reported that more people are actually dieting now compared to 10 years ago', you know? Dieting, even though no one's dieting, more people are dieting than in 2010. And we are in massive trouble from the perspective of psychological damage and also from the perspective of long-term metabolic damage. And if I hear one more person bang on about diabetes, insulin resistance, you know, metabolic problems from being fat and they haven't kind of put the pieces together about actually, maybe it's the people who are dieting because it's the dieting that's doing that kind of physiological damage. You know, we need to wake up. So Good Housekeeping aren't just able to politically fence it because it sells sharticles and sells hits on their harmful website. We've got to. If we care  about health, let's start caring about it. Right, right. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that historically Good Housekeeping's always had like, you know, advertisements for Slim Fast and like diet, weight loss drugs in their magazine. And so I, you know, I would wager  I guess, that that's still going to be there. And, you know, I think the reason why diets have probably gone up like over the last 10 years is because it's all shrouded in health now. Louise Adams: Yeah, it's 'not dieting' Summer Innanen: Like everyone thinks that, yeah. It's like, this is our quote unquote 'healthy lifestyle'. Louise Adams: 'I've got a good relationship with food'. Summer Innanen: Right. And it seems, it's almost seen, like positioned as more empowering versus restrictive. And so like, more people are buying into it, but like you said, it's all the same bullshit when you look at it. Louise Adams: Just wrapped in glitter. Summer Innanen: Right, exactly. It's like that meme that the HAES student doctor says, it's like the poo emoji called 'diet' and then like in glitter, it's like 'lifestyle change'. It all, you know, it all upholds fatphobia. And dangerous dieting. And quick weight loss. And this idea that... Louise Adams: And a massive industry. Let's not forget that this is all a bloody huge  industry. It's...what is it? 600 billion in the States every year. Summer Innanen: Yes. Louise Adams: Yeah. This is a business and the media is in the business of keeping these businesses going. And even when they admit it, they don't stop it. Summer Innanen: Well because they would lose their sponsors. And, and then it would, I mean, it would all probably collapse. So it's a tough  situation. It's a tricky situation. I don't think it's an easy fix. I think you have to really stand out. You have to be willing to say like, 'okay, we're going to really be, you know, these are our company values and we're going to, you know, stand, actually stand by them regardless of what the fallout is from that'. But I mean, my hope is that more people are going like, you know, would support those messages. Cause I think there are, there's also a growing population of people who are sick of it and who are, are tired of that crap and who know that diets don't work. Louise Adams: Yeah. I think the pushback is happening. It is maddening when we see stuff nearly, nearly get it. And then kind of, whiplash straight back into it, but we keep pushing. We keep these voices going and the voices are getting louder and louder and more diverse and more strident. And I think, you know, 2021 January has been the usual bullshit tsunami, but I hope that this conversation for the listeners helps get the bullshit detector flashing. Push back against this whole idea that insane levels of starvation are somehow healthy. And you know, what we can do is like articles, comment on articles like that. I haven't read too many of the comments on that article, 'The unbearable weight of diet culture', but I did see the usual shit fight starting underneath. Summer Innanen: I did too. Louise Adams: 'Oh my God, you're  killing people'. Summer Innanen:  I know, that's going to happen. That's going to happen. But you know what, like good on them for at least publishing that and getting it out there. And let's hope that five years from now, they're not, they're still standing by those things and not totally changing. Although I think I might be...I'm going to be cautiously optimistic on that one. Louise Adams: Uh, I mean, it's so crappy when you go to that little bit about the 1200 calorie diet. It says 'follow this and you will feel satisfied and drop all the weight', which is exact opposite of what we've just spent like half an hour telling you. Yeah. Summer Innanen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like enough for maybe a seagull or something, but not a human being. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's...I'm still like, I'm just still in amazement that they took out the reference to the Holocaust concentration camp prisoners, because I think that, that was like, that was such a huge thing to say that...but maybe it was because then they didn't want to take down the 1200 calorie-a-day article. And so therefore they... Louise Adams: Interesting too that they hid the idea that this is our second most read article. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Louise Adams: That's pretty huge. Summer Innanen: It really lowered the number of people who had requested it or looked for it, or what did you say?  It was like 45,000? Louise Adams: It was annually rather than by the month. Like it's just kind of interesting that they tapped in...they altered that part of the article. Which is kind of the bit, which says this is the bit where complicit with. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, have media literacy. Louise Adams: Yeah. Oh my God. But thank you so much for coming on and unpacking the crappy diet culture stuff that's circulating in our countries. Summer Innanen: Thank you so much for having me. I loved chatting with you. I loved, yeah, just kind of dissecting all this stuff. Yeah. Louise Adams: All the rage. So thank you for getting it off your chest and thanks for coming on. Summer Innanen: Thank you so much, Louise.   Resources Mentioned in the Show: (Major trigger warning - all of these sharticles discuss weight loss in excruciating detail !!) The lady who lost weight to look like Barbie Woody the Weight loss guru Malamute The horrendous Keto plus fasting diet that claimed to be inspiring us (the same method that spiralled Summer's eating disorder) The Good Housekeeping article "The unbearable weight of diet culture" Find more about the wonderful Summer Innanen here Summer's wonderful podcast Eat The Rules  

The news media are a major source of diet culture BS. Every day there's an apparently "inspirational" story in which diverse bodies are shrunk down to diet culture's version of acceptability. We're literally brainwashed into viewing increasingly disordered, bizarre and downright dangerous behaviours as "#inspirational". Join me and my guest, anti-diet warrior and coach Summer Innanen as we present some truly epic examples of "SHITSPIRATION" from Australia and Canada. You will not believe how ludicrous they are! Grown up humans are supposed to be #inspired by a 'doubledown diet' which reduces calorie intake to almost nothing, a BARBIE DOLL (I am not joking), and....a Malamute? You have to hear this to believe it, it's next level #ridiculous. Trigger warning for this episode - very explicit language and we're discussing diet, calorie counts, etc, in (critical) detail. This one's not for the faint hearted! But if you're ready to get your rage-o-meter cranked up to ALL FIRED UP, this episode's for you! Show Transcript Louise Adams: Oh, Summer, thank you so much for coming on the show. Summer Innanen: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here with you. Louise Adams: Tell me, what's firing you up? Summer Innanen: Well, I saw an article recently in Women's Health, and it's about... it's supposed to be like a, you know, quote unquote 'weight loss inspiration story'. And it's about a woman who had a very significant weight loss experience by doing a very disordered diet. And I think what fired me up so much about it was not just the content within it, which I'm sure we'll you know, dissect and talk about it. But the fact that in 2015, in December 2015, Women's Health came out and it was a huge... we got a lot of headlines, a lot of publicity around the fact that they were taking the words, 'bikini body' and 'drop two sizes' off of their covers. So they sort of made this like quasi- body- positive stance. Like, 'hey,  we've heard you, our readers. And we've heard that, you know, you don't like us sort of using this very patriarchal, sexist language'. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like I remember at the time this was shared, like even people within the sort of anti-diet community were sharing it, saying 'this is great, like nice to see a major publications sort of making these changes' and then, you know, to, to look and see here we are five years later and it's the same shit. Louise Adams: It's back. Summer Innanen: Worse. Like I would argue what this what's contained in this article is so terrible from the perspective of promoting disordered eating and like really what this person is talking about is like, the way that they eat to me sounds like a, like an eating disorder, which obviously like I'm not here to diagnose or go... Louise Adams: it's disordered eating practices. Right? It's promoting starvation. Summer Innanen: Yeah. So it's a combination of keto and intermittent fasting. So it's like keto isn't bad enough on its own. So it's like, we're going to make intermittent fasting onto it. Louise Adams: It's an unholy marriage. Summer Innanen: It is honestly, and that's like, for me, I think why I was so fired up about it too, is because when I sort of reached the end of the line with my own disordered relationship with food, I was doing, I was trying to...attempting, it would only last like three days...to do something kind of similar. And it's what absolutely destroyed my body. Like just... like put me into amenorrhea, even with like a higher body weight percentage, and like completely disrupted my hormones. And when I work with clients, I see the same kind of behaviors really being kind of the end of the line for a lot of people. Like the one that really, really kind of messes up their head and their physical, like their actual, you know, physiology a lot worse than other diets that they have done previously. Louise Adams: Oh, this is an awesome thing to get completely fired up about because like we have Women's Health magazine here, which is... it's not health, it's women's starving magazine. They did no such thing as  like...to tell us that they're not going to do the 'bikini body', but how gaslighting to say, 'Oh, we're not going to do that anymore. Hello, here's something  worse'. And like to use that kind of little bit of that... they just wanted the publicity of that. 'We want to perform the idea of body positivity, but like, hell no, we're not actually going to stick to that'. Summer Innanen: Yes, yes. Louise Adams: It's going to go back to this apparently inspirational behaviour of this lady. Who is doing the very thing that tipped you into like a severe eating disorder? That's so disturbing. Summer Innanen: Yes. Yes. And, you know, they give a outline of what she eats in a day and as I think, as I emailed you before, I was like, that's kind of what I eat for breakfast. Like, it's the same amount of calories that I consume for breakfast. Like, that's it. And I remember being in that frame of mind where you would read a magazine and they would sort of show like, 'oh, here's what somebody eats in a day'. Or 'here's what a celebrity eats in a day'. And I remember always feeling like, so ashamed because I ate so much more than that. And I was always like, 'what's wrong with me? Like, why can't I eat as little as this?' And you know, I just can't believe that stuff is still being put out there, like that the author of that piece didn't think like, 'Hey, this might really promote an eating disorder.' When it's that blatant! Literally... Louise Adams: my dog eats more than that. When it's that blatant and there's, you know, throughout every article that we're going to talk about today is...oh, except the last one. There's literally no critical thought. Or even appreciation of the damage that's being spread by these, like it's full on evil messaging as far as I'm concerned, dressed up as inspiration. That the fact that a journalist...journalists, as far as I know, are trained to be critical thinkers and, and yet it's like that goes out the window when it comes to these apparently inspirational stories. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. Like there's absolutely no consciousness at all. That's what I felt like. Cause you know, it's just, it was one of those things. That's, it's almost like when I first read it, I was like, it's almost too ridiculous to believe this is...that they actually publish this as something that's supposed to be inspirational. But it's to me like, you know, I think the readership probably skews a little bit, you know, on the younger side, you know, maybe more like 20 to 30 age group or younger, probably teen, a lot of teenage girls and you know, to be reading that at such an impressionable age and to think 'oh, this is how...this is what I should be doing'. Which is essentially like starvation as well as like malnutrition and just something that would put such a high amount of both physical and mental stress on your body, that would really create like long lasting damage. Yeah, both biologically and psychologically. Louise Adams: And that's, that's who I see, you know, my clients are the diet casualties, people who have had these experiences and then...you know? Dieting like this, crash dieting...because this is, this lady is on a severe calorie restriction. And then she's added intermittent fasting, which basically means you're only allowed to eat for six hours a day and squish in your tiny little bits of food into six hours. Like when you really think about that, that is so many levels of fucked up and she's saying, 'oh, it's so good'. And I feel for her being in that diet head, And who knows maybe an eating disorder head, but there's  ...the payoff is so great for her because the weight loss like that, the whole article is about her trying to shift the last bit. And she's still got a way to go. And her poor body, if her poor body could talk would be going, 'I'm starving. I'm slowing down this cause it's getting dangerous'. And she's like, 'right, I'm going to double down using the halo of intermittent fasting', which is starving. Summer Innanen: Yes. Yeah. And the other thing too, that stood out to me, well, two things. One is the amount of caffeine that she talks about drinking in terms of hydration. Cause it says, like, what really works for her. It's like, 'I'm really hydrating'. And it's like so much coffee and green tea. And I'm like, if I had that much caffiene I'd be, I don't even know what I would be doing. Louise Adams: That's a question I ask when I'm seeing people with eating disorders, like, what are you drinking? Because quite often when you get an eating disorder, you will drink caffeinated stuff to kill your appetite. So, she's calling that hydration. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then the other thing too, is that she uses the language of 'food freedom' to talk about how she feels, because  she says you know, 'food is really just food. It's not good or bad. I don't obsess about it anymore'. And it's like, really that could be pulled from any sort of anti-diet playbook, which is what we want, but it's so counter to what she's actually doing. And I think that it kind of shows like when you're really into, like, when you' re really kind of overtaken your mind, you're sort of riding this, this buzz or this wave where it does feel like that. But, you haven't woken up to how you really are looking at things that way. And you really are, you know, like if you're tracking every calorie, which is what she says she was doing... Louise Adams: How is that freedom? Summer Innanen: Yeah. That's not freedom. And that's, that's like, maybe she's sort of, you know, like kidding herself. She's at the sort of like, kidding, 'I'm kidding myself' phase. Like, it's like, you know, most of us when we were sort of dieters were like, 'well, no, no, no, I'm doing it for my health. Like I'm doing no, this is for my health', but really underneath it's, you know, there's, there's some other stuff going on, but I hate it when they kind of steal, like they sort of co-opt the language of intuitive eating and co-op the language of the anti-diet message and really use it to promote something that's so restrictive. It just makes... Louise Adams: You know who came to my mind when you were saying that is Rebel Wilson. Summer Innanen: Yes Louise Adams: she's an Aussie actor and has always been in a larger body. Apparently like her kind of whole catch phase for 2020 was that it was her 'year of health'. Summer Innanen: Yes! Louise Adams: But the behaviors are restriction and starvation and over-exercise, but she's masking that in the language of 'I'm so healthy now'. Like, 'I don't think about food anymore. My habits are so great', but it's the same thing. Summer Innanen: Exactly. Exactly. Louise Adams: Worlds apart from what the anti-dieting and intuitive eating stuff is actually about. Summer Innanen: Yeah. And, and like, it's not their fault. Like, I don't like talking about this. I'm not, I don't want to like, shame this, this woman at all. Louise Adams: As an individual, no. Summer Innanen: Or Rebel Wilson. It's like, but it's really about. You know, the it's really about the culture diet culture, and just the fact that we feel as women and more, you know, more specifically that we have to go to these extremes to really like, you know, show our, our worthiness as humans, like in our value. And like, Rebel Wilson is so talented. Louise Adams: I know, so funny. Summer Innanen: She's an awesome actress. And now it's like, everyone's just talking about her body and her weight loss. And it's like, it takes away from all these other amazing things that she's done. Louise Adams: And when it's really uncritical, as well. It's like, why is she so much better now than she's small? That just reinforces the diet culture message and keeps stories like the woman you talking about going. It's like, I can get all this attention, uncritical, positive attention, but it's like, we're not seeing what's right in front of it. Like we are teaching and promoting women in this case did a really, really sick eating disordered and stuff under the flag of health. Summer Innanen: And that is like, supremely unhealthy. Yeah. Yeah. It's so frustrating too, because you see all these positive changes happening in the way of, you know, women becoming more liberated or just having, you know, bigger voices taking up more space. And yet it's just like the same old shit is still there as it relates to our bodies and our value and, and... Louise Adams: There's such an uptick too, in January, isn't there. Summer Innanen: Oh yeah. It's a predictable tsunami of the weight loss. The walls of relentless inspiration, whether we want it or not. It's just, it's here. ESpecially with the pandemic, you know, because everyone, a lot of people have...maybe their bodies have changed a little bit, which makes a ton of sense because we're under a lot of stress or just life changes that have happened. So I think that, you know, depending on where you live, if there's still a lot of restrictions, which I was saying to you before, like there still is here. Dieting gives you like a bit of hope, almost like weight loss gives you a bit of hope. In this time when maybe some of us are feeling a little hopeless or just like really kind of sick of, sick of the isolation and everything else. And so I wouldn't be surprised that maybe your body's changed a bit during quarantine. I wouldn't be surprised if this year really you see like just a lot more people really engaging in dieting as a way to cope with the emotion, emotional discomfort of living through a pandemic. Louise Adams: That is a really good point, isn't it. Dieting can be a bit of a lifeline. It can feel like it, like something familiar to do in a scary time. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Some sense of control, some sense of like, you know, hope, something else to focus on other than like the fact that there's a lot of horrible things happening in the world. Yeah, absolutely, a hundred percent. And I just, I, you know, I've heard it from people that I work with just feeling more urges to diet lately. And I think that, yeah, it's just something to be mindful of. If anyone listening is experiencing that too, like I think it's pretty normal to be experiencing more of those urges, but hopefully you can... Louise Adams: LIsten to today's episode and get your bullshit detector back. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't drink the Kool-Aid it's not actually going to help. Louise Adams: It's not control! Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Louise Adams: It's so interesting because like, Canada is very similar to Australia, culturally in lots and lots of ways. And it's funny...not funny. It's not funny. Cause like, you're talking about really disturbing uncritical weightless articles. And we've got them here in Australia too. And I really want to talk to you about the lady who lost weight, because she wanted to look like Barbie. Yes. And Summer Innanen: I, so you said that to me, I honestly, it was like, okay, this needs to be a tabloid. Like this can't be like a real, and, and then you told me that it's actually a very legit publication. Louise Adams: Yeah. Oh, I'm so ashamed of ourselves. So, this is on Nine News. Channel Nine is Murdoch press and it's, you know, one of it's a huge...it's the number one news platform in Australia for news. I want to say news, right? News. Okay, exciting. And in this news, I'm just using air quotes.  It's this story from late gen a Barbie fan has dropped a whopping blah-blah-blah kilos in a bid to look like a favorite doll. And it's a story about a lady called...a 35 year old lady called Kayla. Who's apparently battled with her weight since she was seven, and has done all of the diets in the book and… Like, I just, I can't even, because yes, Nine News is promoting this as, as awesome. This lady that the article is...littered with her dressed as Barbie. She's a full grown female adult woman dressed as Barbie. And the whole story is about how she's had a gastric sleeve and, and is also starving herself, post gastric sleeve, and now she's very happy and...like I just, I mean, I can't get this article out of my head because it's on a major news platform also. I've just realized it was on the TV on a morning show. She now lives in Las Vegas pursuing her Barbie lifestyle. And I'm not criticizing Kayla herself whatsoever, but what I'm criticizing is the news. Which, by the way, I've also found out isn't even news, because this is from Jan 2021. When I'm Googling, to send you the article. THis article actually came out in June last year, it's old, it's not, it's old. It's not news. But it's been rehashed - guess why, it's January - it's Diet season and then some, you know, money hungry gastric sleeve doctors, and some people who want to sell their diets saying 'let's get her on TV, and uncritically throw this... it's an appallingly ridiculous idea that we need to look like a doll in order to reach the pinnacle of our existence. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like, you know, there were, I don't even...there were so many things wrong with this piece. Louise Adams: It's hard to know where to start. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Okay. Well, let's start with when she was a kid, because she talks about how, you know, 'it didn't matter how hard I tried or what side I was on. I could rarely shift the weight or I would lose some and then regain double'. And it's like, well, yeah, that's what diets do. And so, this poor girl probably had her parents putting her on diets, which we know she did actually. Louise Adams: It says 'my obsession with Barbie began as a child and has continued into my adult life. I used to have over 200 dolls as my parents use them as an incentive to go on a diet and lose weight'. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. Which is so messed up. Louise Adams: That just made me want to cry. Yeah. Because as a parent to, bribe your a child with a Barbie doll, like the poor thing, she's seven. I know. And I don't know, that's at least 200 diets, isn't it? Summer Innanen: Well, exactly, like how horrifying is that? So, her metabolism is probably been so altered and she has no sense of her own  instincts on what actually, you know, feels good for her. And her parents basically instilled like this belief that like you're better or you're good or you're more worthy when you lose weight, And like, to think about the damage that that would do to someone's self-worth and their body image and the way that they feel it. Yeah. Yeah, right. Louise Adams: Cause it's...I see this as a real heartbreaking story and I cannot understand how this is inspiration. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. It's so awful. It reminds me of the there's this book. I don't know if you've ever read it. It's called 'The Heavy' and it's about a mother who puts her daughter on a diet and it's...it's a memoir written from the mother's perspective and she keeps putting her, she can't figure out why her daughter can't lose weight. She keeps putting her on diet after diet, after diet. And like, it just reminds me of that because the parent is...has so much  internalized fat phobia and their own disordered relationship with food that then they pass down to their kids. And like, that's what I see. I'm sure you see all the time with the people that we work with is that what our parents did, which they kind of were doing out of this like, protection. They wanted to protect us by helping us lose weight or commenting on our body or restricting food...actually completely backfired and made us feel like we, you know, we weren't worthy of their approval, of love, like of our own existence, unless we looked a certain way unless we lost weight, unless we ate a certain way... Louise Adams: All contingent on weight, which is it's insane because a weight is not under our control. And when we do the diet thing, all we guarantee is a slowed metabolism and weight regain. And she even says in this that she would lose it, then lose weight and then regain like that. Plus some, which is, we know that's perfectly normal as a response to starvation her. And cause her parents obviously have that internalized weight stigma, and she has it, you know? This is a story about her internalized weight stigma and how, you know, rather than kind of pushing back or being able to push back against it. She's really drunk the Kool-Aid. Summer Innanen: Yeah, yeah. And again, they highlight what she eats in a day, which is like, why, why these places do this is like, beyond me, because... Louise Adams: Well, they go into so many stereotypes too. Cause like it's the, it's the traditional thing like, 'Oh, before I had my gastric sleeve, I was a bad person and I ate terribly'. And ignoring the fact that perhaps her, part of her weight issues was to do with the diets themselves. Summer Innanen: Right? Louise Adams: Yeah. So that's ignored and so about...'it was definitely 100% my personal fault' quote unquote, 'that my body was large and I ate terribly but now I eat great'. But, what we see actually, like when you look at that, what she used to eat, she used to starve herself all day and then eat at night. Summer Innanen: Right? It's like, well of course you're going to binge at night. If you starve all day, that's no surprise there. You're going to be so hungry. You'll eat anything that's not locked down. And then what she eats now is like, it's so dangerous. It's like such a low amount of food and... Louise Adams: And says, 'I ate,'...I'm going to read some numbers here so trigger warning. Cause it's just, I just want to get across the point of how restrictive it is. She's had 80% of her stomach removed, and then she's saying 'I eat 90 grams of protein a day, 10 grams of carbs and five grams of sugar'. Everyday. Summer Innanen: Do you know what...10 grams. That's not even a banana. Right? 10 grams of carbs. Like that's like, that's like what? Like a few baby carrots or something like that? Louise Adams: There's no actual veggies. Breakfast is a protein shake. Lunches, chicken or beef with cheese, dinner is chicken or steak or a protein shake. And the snacks, cashews or walnuts. Like there's there's no fruit or veggies. Poor thing. In a stomach which is 80% removed, amputated. Summer Innanen: And can't be reversed. They also say that, which is another thing. Louise Adams: And it says this article has the hide to say 'she now has a good relationship with food'. Summer Innanen: Yes. I highlighted that too, because again, it's like, co-opting this language of food, freedom and, and using it in like a place where it's like clearly a very disordered. Louise Adams: How is that a good relationship with food? Summer Innanen: Yeah, it's sad. Louise Adams: And works out seven days a week. Summer Innanen: That, right. That was the other thing that really stood out because also extremely unhealthy to be, to be doing something like that. And you just sort of wonder, like what's going to happen to this individual. You know, and they may be riding the sort of like validation of having a significant weight change and getting the publicity and feeling really good about that. Louise Adams: But, you know, as we all know totally done it, you know, as a psychologist, she's finally saying to her mum, 'look, I am the Barbie doll'. I just...it's heartbreaking. I totally get why she's doing it. Summer Innanen: Right. Louise Adams: But I find it an incredibly sad story. Summer Innanen: I know, and I feel bad for her as a child. Louise Adams: I feel like I'm kind of alone in seeing her as a really sad story. Summer Innanen: No, it's really sad. It is really sad. And it's, and it's this idea like, again, it's like this idea that it's our fault, like, and it's a kid's fault if they are in a larger body instead of thinking, 'okay, well, this is just, you know, genetics'. Louise Adams: Here's my child, here's my kid. Give her a barbie doll, for fuck's sake, if she wants one. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Not to earn it by restricting food or whatnot. To put all the onus on her and to, you know, that she had to earn it by losing weight, earn Barbie dolls by losing weight. Like, it's so sad. And yet it's being like, you know, applauded and praised and... Louise Adams: It's sickening. How like diet culture, it's weight loss at all costs. And this is an extreme example of the costs, but I mean...2015,  right? Women's Health magazine is talking about, 'Oh, we see the harm done by diet culture. We see that talking about women as if they're a bikini body and stuff is not cool anymore. Well, we're going to stop doing that'. But now, like we just talked about like two really extreme articles promoting starvation. Like there's no problem here. And we've gaslit ourselves to the point where these things are being called lifestyle changes or health behaviors. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Louise Adams: We're talking about stuff that's much, much worse than the good old diet industry days. Summer Innanen: Right, right. Yeah. It seems to have gotten a lot more extreme, hasn't it? Like it's, it's something that has, it's always sort of been extreme, but it seems to be even more....I guess now the extremism is normalized. Louise Adams: Yeah. And it's mainstream. It's like pro-ana used to be pro-ana, cause we could see it as being different to what the world was. Summer Innanen: Exactly. Exactly. Louise Adams: Yeah. Someone said to you, I only ate in a six hour window and I don't eat any vegetables or fruit or carbs. We're like, 'Oh, you're so healthy. How do you do it?' Summer Innanen: Yes. Yes. 'Let me put you in my magazine. You're a success story'. But I wonder if like, if either of them took, you know, assessments on whether or not you have an eating disorder or disordered relationship with food, you would most likely see that they would probably check most of the boxes in terms of the things that they would say that they're thinking and doing as it relates to...you know, the behaviors, but I was going to say as well, it also just shows how weight stigma plays a role here. Because if this was an already thin person eating this stuff, you know, we as....there might be more people sort of calling this out as like very disordered or an eating disorder, but because they were in larger bodies and they went to these extreme measures to get in a smaller body it's applauded and like, that's the influence of weight stigma. It's like, we prescribed these eating disorder behaviors to people in larger bodies that we would diagnosis an eating disorder and somebody in a smaller body. Louise Adams: Yeah. that's Deb Burgard's point, isn't it. That's so like... Summer Innanen: Yes, exactly. Thank you. Cause I was like, I'm saying this and I'm like, I can't remember....thank you. Louise Adams: I know, it's such a slam dunk awesome quote because it's exactly what's happening here. Summer Innanen: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Louise Adams: You know, I wonder, I literally wonder, like what you're saying about, if it was someone smaller, would, would the media alarm bells ring. Because I'm thinking, well, if that was Gwyneth Paltrow's day in a plate, we'd probably still be going, 'Ooh, isn't she cool?' Summer Innanen: You know what, you're right. And I saw that recently because Aaron Flores who hosts the Dieticians Unplugged podcast, he posted...I think it was via Glamour magazine. It was like what Kelly Ripa eats in a day. And it was the same thing. It was like, she was basically talking about how she eats dust. But...it was honestly very similar to what the first, the girl in the Women's Health magazine was talking about eating in a day. And so, you're 100 percent right. So, so maybe my point is... Louise Adams: I do think it's viewed differently. But I actually think that we're getting to the point where like it's competitive, not eating is at such extreme levels that we're not, it's only the people in the eating disorder industry who are going, 'hello, what the hell', like it has become so unfashionable to eat like a grownup. Summer Innanen: Yeah, yeah. Eat like a grown ass adult is what I say exactly. Exactly. Yes. I remember. I remember in the one that the Kelly Ripa, when she says, like, she called it...'my first chewable food of the day is around like 11:00 AM' or something, like that was the way that she described it. And I just, I remember commenting on it when Aaron and I was like, I can't believe she just used the expression, my first chewable food of the day. Like if, if that's not a red flag that you're describing the way you eat stuff, using those terms. And I don't mean to laugh. It sounds like a laughing at someone with a disordered relationship with food, but it really is horrifying. Just how normalized and then praised and applauded that is. Louise Adams: Like, 'oh, oh no, it's any 10 o'clock. Should I be chewing? Oh my God'. Summer Innanen: Yes, exactly. And I just, and again, like, I just remember always looking at those things and feeling so ashamed and always just being like, why can't I do that? Like, why can't. And thank goodness, my body couldn't do that because it was the reason why I didn't actually have like a full blown eating disorder and instead was just a chronic dieter. Louise Adams: We really need to stop this. We really need to stop listing what people like in a day. It's ridiculous. It's kind of like comparing what we eat to each other, it's encouraging  externalization of eating behavior? We cannot continue to do that. Like really, the articles about 'what I eat in a day' should just be followed by the phrase 'is going to vary every single day', and it's none of your damn business'. Right. Summer Innanen: Yes. Yes. That's the headline right there. Louise Adams: Right. Eyes on your own plate. Does it matter? It's not a fricking competition. It's not like we're going like, 'ooh, what my poo looks like every day. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe that's where we are  we going? Comparing physical functions. We just need to stop. It's so true. You kind of quid pro quo's me with, like, I came up with the Barbie ridiculous story and you came up with a whopper from Canada. Summer Innanen: The dog? Louise Adams: Yeah. Summer Innanen: So, this was on the CBC. So CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Company, it's like our major national news network. And like, that's the one place I go when I want to get unbiased, like just straight up, really factual news. And they have this article that they posted called 'meet Woody a massive Malamute, serving up weight loss inspiration for the new year'. I just couldn't believe this was on the CBC and it's literally like this story, this weight loss story of a dog that like dropped half its weight and also had like shared it on social media as a way to inspire others to, you know... Louise Adams: Other dogs? Summer Innanen: No, no, no. Oh no. Humans. Louise Adams: This is a new low, eat like a dog. Summer Innanen: This is... Louise Adams: Oh my God. It says, 'If you're looking for inspiration to meet your new year's resolution to trim the fat, look no further'. Summer Innanen: Exactly. Yeah, no, it's to inspire humans. Louise Adams: Oh, please stop inspiring me. Oh my God. Summer Innanen: It's such a cute dog though. I just, as a side note, he's a really, really cute dog, but you know, this has come up. I don't know if you've been...you've probably been asked this question too before, but people will say like, well, you know, why is it okay to put pets on diets, but not humans? Do you have a good answer for that? By the way? Before I was going to say what I say. Louise Adams: I don't think I have actually had that question put to me. Summer Innanen: Oh, you haven't? Just me. I've gotten that. Louise Adams: Why is it okay? I don't, I don't know if it is okay. Like, I haven't looked at the weight loss research for dogs, but I'm assuming it's going to be physiologically similar to humans. Right? I don't know. I don't know. Summer Innanen: I don't know. My answer is like, we're not dogs. Like we aren't dogs, dogs aren't influenced by like diet culture. Like dogs don't have fat phobia., cause they're not like looking at thinner dogs everywhere and thinking like, 'I'm not good enough because I don't look like that'. Like they're... Louise Adams: Oh my God, you're reminding me of poodle science, you know, ASDAH's awesome little  video. Which is like, it's illustrating what body diversity is like, you know. But in weight science it's like, all the poodles are in charge and they're telling everyone, all the breeds of dogs to like, they like 'be like me, be like the poodle', but like a starving mastiff will never be the same as a poodle. Summer Innanen: Right, exactly. Yeah. One of the first like, quotes that I said many years ago was 'we're not Golden Retrievers'. We're not all meant to look the same. It's one of the things that I still say to this day, because it's true. And you know, in this article, like it's a pretty basic...they're just restricting the dog's food and making the dog exercise. But this idea that like we're similar at all. It's just so, it's so backwards to me because it completely ignores the culture that we live in. And like the fact that we are emotional being...dogs are emotional beings too. Yes. I will give you that. I love dogs. But they don't have the same. Not living in like a patriarchal society. They're not exposed to sexism. Like they're not, they're not exposed to fatphobia like, I don't think they're internalizing those charts at the vet that have like pictures of the different dogs with the big classifications like we would be. They don't feel ashamed when they step on the scale. Louise Adams: There's no diet culture in dogs, but there's diet culture in the humans that own them. And you can hear that in this article, can't you? Because it's like...actually it's everywhere. Like this sentence, 'he once weighed double what he should have'. How do you know what he should? He's a fucking Malamute. Summer Innanen: Yeah, yeah. Louise Adams: 'Should have'. So, we've decided what he should weigh and we starved him down there. And then, Pam Hedgie, who's the foster mom, apparently she's known for doing this. Starving the dogs so that they're adoptable. Now, that is awful. And...but the woman she's like, totally like lost it. She puts it on social media and...here we go. She says, 'humans have something to learn from dogs. They're so willing. I think that's the most amazing part about them. They don't get down, they get up everyday, they're happy to go to the park. And it has to be hard work. It can't be a breeze, but they're so happy and willing to do it. We could all learn a little bit about that'. I'm sure what he likes going for walks. Yeah, but I'm also sure that if Woody could talk, he'd say 'why are you starving me?' Summer Innanen: Yeah. I think it's, again it's like, you know, it just shows, 'okay, you have to do something extreme to be healthy'. Whereas really it's like, of course the dog wants to go out and play. And if we just let them do that by letting them tell us and get them outside, and they listened to their bodies, kind of like humans do..then you wouldn't have to, you know...It's not like this, like... 'oh, you should work out every day and you have to like push yourself through'. It's like dogs are naturally hardwired to kind of want to be that way anyways. And so long as we give them an environment where they can do those things, then they're going to be healthy regardless of their size. And that's, that's sort of similar to humans in a way. Louise Adams: His health is not even mentioned.  Like it'e literally just his size. And this assumption that he has to be half his size. Like we don't even know it was here actually just a larger dog in good health? We don't even know how old he is? Summer Innanen: No, you're right. You're right. Because yeah, because malamutes are huge to begin with anyways. Louise Adams: Yeah. Well, I've got a Great Dane and like big dogs, the big dogs. And like, my vet, there is no correct weight. And like, I love my vet because my vet is like full of body diversity. It's like, there's a great big range in Great Danes. You can have smaller Great Danes and big Great Danes.  And they're all Great Danes. Summer Innanen: That's so refreshing. Wow. Louise Adams: Thank you. I'm in the right place. Summer Innanen: People used to criticize my dog all the...my dog might, we lost my dog a few months ago. People used to like stop me on the street and like...not me actually, they would always do my husband for some reason. Cause they probably saw the look on my face and was like, 'I'm not going to say anything'. They would say like, 'what are you feeding your dog? Like your dog is too big' because we had a pug and he was really big and he was just naturally. Really big. He'd always been really big and like, vets were always totally fine with him. We never had a vet say, 'hey, you know, you gotta watch this weight' or anything like that. But, you know, people in the street would stop and comment. And I remember just saying to my husband, I was like, 'I swear if someone did that to me, I would just rip them to...', I don't know why they always stopped him. Louise Adams: Yeah. Actually now you say it. I get that about my Great Dane, Dolly. Her name is Dolly Pawton. It's so cute. They stop us and they're like, Oh, what is, what does he ate? Oh, first of all, they say 'he', cause obviously a big dog is always a 'he'. 'What do you feed him? He must eat you out of house and home.' This dog eats, you know, not as much as my boxer that I used to have. So there's assumption about size and what they eat. Let's look to our dogs,  right? No as inspirational weightless stories, but as diversity right in front of us. Summer Innanen: Yes. Louise Adams: And connection. Summer Innanen: And how we just love them regardless of their size. Louise Adams: I know. Like, poor old Woody, he's not more oveable now he's starved into submission. Summer Innanen: It's so silly to me that they would use that as a story of inspiration. Must've been a slow news day in Canada. Like you don't have a pandemic going on, I don't know why. Louise Adams: The sad point is that it appears that Woody has more variety in his diet than the Barbie lady. Summer Innanen: Oh yeah, at least he's eating lots of fruits and vegetables. I know. Oh my gosh. Right. Louise Adams: God. So, we've arrived at our last. Article, which is an interesting one in Good Housekeeping. That's just come out. Jan 29th, 2021. 'The unbearable weight of diet culture', which...it's such an exciting article cause it's really long, really in-depth, and it's talking about this whole idea of diet culture. In the intro, it says this: 'throughout 2021, Good Housekeeping will be exploring how we think about weight, the way we eat and how we try to control or change our bodies in our quest to be happier and healthier. While Good Housekeeping also publishes weight loss content, and endeavours to do so in a responsible science backed way, we think it's important to present a broad perspective that allows for a fuller understanding of the complex thinking about health and body weight'. So, kind of cool. Summer Innanen: Kind of reminded me of the Women's Health 2015 publicity. What I do like about this article, I will say, is Judith Matz and Christy Harrison are quoted quite a bit through it. Louise Adams: And Sabrina Strings. Summer Innanen: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Which I thought was great because they tied in that component too, like the race component. And I thought it was one of those articles that you could probably send to a family member or a friend that didn't understand why you were doing Intuitive Eating or that had questions about it, but you didn't really know how to give them the information in a way that was a little more palatable. And I thought that this article was one of those things that you could totally pass along to them. It's easy to read, makes a lot of sense, kind of hits all the main points.  It's one that I'll probably bookmark for people. Louise Adams: It's nice too as evidence that the wider culture is taking the whole concept of not dieting and looking at the Health At Every Size sort of stuff seriously. Summer Innanen: Yes. And actual people who are in the space instead of like the people who are in between who talk about this stuff yet still promote weight loss, you know, like the sort of like, you know, Geneen Roths of the world and whatnot. So, I thought it was really great that they actually had a lot of, like a lot of like really well-respected experts weighing in and some good links and things like that, but there was still a little problem with it. Did you want to talk about that or do you want me to talk about it? Louise Adams: So it's at one point it says, look like it's all this awesome, awesome and stuff.  And then it  says, loo... they're talking about how the media in particular can promote dieting, and it says 'even Good housekeeping's own article on 1200 calorie diets is a tricky juxtaposition. The article aims to serve the approximately 40,500 people who search for 1200 calorie meal plans on Google every month. Despite the 2015 study that shows this number of calories falls within the realm of clinical starvation'. And that's, that's been changed... Summer Innanen: It has actually, because I... Louise Adams: I think it said something about the Holocaust before? Summer Innanen: Okay. So I have it, cause I cut and paste it into a document. It says, this is what used to say. It says, 'It's the most popular article here on Good Housekeeping's own website, about 1200 calorie diets that netted over 2 million search users in 2019 alone. Our second most read story of the year, despite the fact the number of calories falls within the realm of clinical starvation. In brackets - Holocaust concentration camp prisoners were fed 1,250 to 1400 calories per day'. So, that's really interesting that they changed it. Louise Adams: They've watered it down, haven't they? They've removed a bit of culpability. Like, cause that example of like in a concentration camp, you would get more food. Summer Innanen: It reminds me of the Minnesota starvation study, which, which was around like 1500... Louise Adams: 1500. Summer Innanen: 1500 calories a day. Louise Adams: And they all went around the twist from that over six months. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly.  Exactly. Louise Adams: I'm so glad you cut and pasted that. Summer Innanen: Yes. So that, and then the other big thing is they still link to the goddamn diet. Like they still link to it. They link to the 1200 calorie day diet. Like it's like they're saying, 'okay, we're exploring this'. And then they're linking to the thing that is probably the most like harmful triggering thing that you could put in that article. Louise Adams:  'We're not actually going to stop doing it because it's the second most popular thing we do'. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Louise Adams: That is so fucked up. Summer Innanen: It's like these publications want to explore these topics and they admit that they're complicit and they get publicity because of that, they get a bit of applause and then they continue to uphold and perpetuate the same dangerous stuff. Louise Adams: Get off the fence, Good Housekeeping. Get the splinter out of your ass. Take the article down. Summer Innanen: Yeah, take it down, take it down. If you want to, you know, put your money where your mouth is... but they don't, they want to keep taking other people's money. And then you were telling me this was the article that people were opening and then they were seeing weight loss advertisements, right? Was it this one? Louise Adams: Yeah. So I was saying chats and people like reading the article, but in between the text of the article, were getting sold weight loss stuff. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. Louise Adams: I mean, geez. I mean, can we, at some point stop the fence sitting and stop performing the recognition of diet culture as harmful and, and start actually stopping the harm. So we protect little kids, like little miss Barbie. Summer Innanen: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Louise Adams: And we stop the metabolic and physiological harm. If nothing else, you know. People are so worried. In the article, Good housekeeping. It's talking about how more people are dieting than ever before. Did you see ...'In November, 2020, the CDC, Centre for Disease Control, reported that more people are actually dieting now compared to 10 years ago', you know? Dieting, even though no one's dieting, more people are dieting than in 2010. And we are in massive trouble from the perspective of psychological damage and also from the perspective of long-term metabolic damage. And if I hear one more person bang on about diabetes, insulin resistance, you know, metabolic problems from being fat and they haven't kind of put the pieces together about actually, maybe it's the people who are dieting because it's the dieting that's doing that kind of physiological damage. You know, we need to wake up. So Good Housekeeping aren't just able to politically fence it because it sells sharticles and sells hits on their harmful website. We've got to. If we care  about health, let's start caring about it. Right, right. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that historically Good Housekeeping's always had like, you know, advertisements for Slim Fast and like diet, weight loss drugs in their magazine. And so I, you know, I would wager  I guess, that that's still going to be there. And, you know, I think the reason why diets have probably gone up like over the last 10 years is because it's all shrouded in health now. Louise Adams: Yeah, it's 'not dieting' Summer Innanen: Like everyone thinks that, yeah. It's like, this is our quote unquote 'healthy lifestyle'. Louise Adams: 'I've got a good relationship with food'. Summer Innanen: Right. And it seems, it's almost seen, like positioned as more empowering versus restrictive. And so like, more people are buying into it, but like you said, it's all the same bullshit when you look at it. Louise Adams: Just wrapped in glitter. Summer Innanen: Right, exactly. It's like that meme that the HAES student doctor says, it's like the poo emoji called 'diet' and then like in glitter, it's like 'lifestyle change'. It all, you know, it all upholds fatphobia. And dangerous dieting. And quick weight loss. And this idea that... Louise Adams: And a massive industry. Let's not forget that this is all a bloody huge  industry. It's...what is it? 600 billion in the States every year. Summer Innanen: Yes. Louise Adams: Yeah. This is a business and the media is in the business of keeping these businesses going. And even when they admit it, they don't stop it. Summer Innanen: Well because they would lose their sponsors. And, and then it would, I mean, it would all probably collapse. So it's a tough  situation. It's a tricky situation. I don't think it's an easy fix. I think you have to really stand out. You have to be willing to say like, 'okay, we're going to really be, you know, these are our company values and we're going to, you know, stand, actually stand by them regardless of what the fallout is from that'. But I mean, my hope is that more people are going like, you know, would support those messages. Cause I think there are, there's also a growing population of people who are sick of it and who are, are tired of that crap and who know that diets don't work. Louise Adams: Yeah. I think the pushback is happening. It is maddening when we see stuff nearly, nearly get it. And then kind of, whiplash straight back into it, but we keep pushing. We keep these voices going and the voices are getting louder and louder and more diverse and more strident. And I think, you know, 2021 January has been the usual bullshit tsunami, but I hope that this conversation for the listeners helps get the bullshit detector flashing. Push back against this whole idea that insane levels of starvation are somehow healthy. And you know, what we can do is like articles, comment on articles like that. I haven't read too many of the comments on that article, 'The unbearable weight of diet culture', but I did see the usual shit fight starting underneath. Summer Innanen: I did too. Louise Adams: 'Oh my God, you're  killing people'. Summer Innanen:  I know, that's going to happen. That's going to happen. But you know what, like good on them for at least publishing that and getting it out there. And let's hope that five years from now, they're not, they're still standing by those things and not totally changing. Although I think I might be...I'm going to be cautiously optimistic on that one. Louise Adams: Uh, I mean, it's so crappy when you go to that little bit about the 1200 calorie diet. It says 'follow this and you will feel satisfied and drop all the weight', which is exact opposite of what we've just spent like half an hour telling you. Yeah. Summer Innanen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like enough for maybe a seagull or something, but not a human being. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's...I'm still like, I'm just still in amazement that they took out the reference to the Holocaust concentration camp prisoners, because I think that, that was like, that was such a huge thing to say that...but maybe it was because then they didn't want to take down the 1200 calorie-a-day article. And so therefore they... Louise Adams: Interesting too that they hid the idea that this is our second most read article. Summer Innanen: Yeah. Louise Adams: That's pretty huge. Summer Innanen: It really lowered the number of people who had requested it or looked for it, or what did you say?  It was like 45,000? Louise Adams: It was annually rather than by the month. Like it's just kind of interesting that they tapped in...they altered that part of the article. Which is kind of the bit, which says this is the bit where complicit with. Summer Innanen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, have media literacy. Louise Adams: Yeah. Oh my God. But thank you so much for coming on and unpacking the crappy diet culture stuff that's circulating in our countries. Summer Innanen: Thank you so much for having me. I loved chatting with you. I loved, yeah, just kind of dissecting all this stuff. Yeah. Louise Adams: All the rage. So thank you for getting it off your chest and thanks for coming on. Summer Innanen: Thank you so much, Louise.   Resources Mentioned in the Show: (Major trigger warning - all of these sharticles discuss weight loss in excruciating detail !!) The lady who lost weight to look like Barbie Woody the Weight loss guru Malamute The horrendous Keto plus fasting diet that claimed to be inspiring us (the same method that spiralled Summer's eating disorder) The Good Housekeeping article "The unbearable weight of diet culture" Find more about the wonderful Summer Innanen here Summer's wonderful podcast Eat The Rules  

Flaws of the body positivity movement :/ CONTENT WARNING: body dysmorphia (throughout), eating disorders (11:58), verbal abuse (27:30) Comment your favorite part of your body

¿Cómo es una consulta de psicología bajo el enfoque de Salud en Todas las Tallas? En este episodio me acompaña la Doctora en Psicología Haica Rosenfeld para hablar sobre:· Qué es el enfoque de Salud en todas las tallas· La gordofobia en la salud mental· Cómo incorporar este enfoque en la consulta de psicología/psicoterapia RECURSOS SOBRE SALUD EN TODAS LAS TALLAShttps://www.sizediversityandhealth.org Hilary Kinavey y Carmen Cool (2019): The Broken Lens: How Anti-Fat Bias in Psychotherapy is Harming Our Clients and What To Do About It , Women & Therapy, DOI: 10.1080/02703149.2018.1524070 Tracy L. Tylka, Rachel A. Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrún Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, Rachel M. Calogero, "The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluat ing the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss", Journal of Obesity, vol. 2014, Article ID 983495,18 pages, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/983495 CONECTA CON HAICAhttps://www.instagram.com/drhaicarosenfeld/https://www.haicarosenfeld.com SOMOS HAEShttps://www.instagram.com/somoshaes/ Episodios del podcast para complementar:139 – Salud en todas las tallas con Ana Lucía Filippi147 – Confianza corporal con Lilia Graue168 – Nutrición incluyente con Raquel Lobatón229 – Movimiento en todas las tallas con Mónica González CURSOS Y TALLEREShttps://campus.psicoalimentacion.com CITAS DE NUTRICIÓN Y PSICOLOGÍAhttps://www.psicoalimentacion.com/clinica TIENDA ONLINEhttps://www.psicoalimentacion.com/tienda FORMACIÓN PARA PROFESIONALES DE LA SALUDhttps://www.psicoalimentacion.com/profesionales CONECTA CONMIGOInstagram @anaariz http://bit.ly/33MLEsTFacebook @AnaArizmendiFanPage http://bit.ly/2Z7GNniYouTube http://bit.ly/2XYWI6n

Deb plays with her food. Download our starter pack at RebelEatersClub.com

Psychologist, fat activist, and Health At Every Size (HAES)® co-founder Deb Burgard returns! We discuss why HAES and weight management can’t co-exist, the social-justice roots of HAES, how weight stigma intersects with other oppressions, the politics of weight science, and so much more. Plus, Christy answers a listener question about how to navigate the food-shaming and fearmongering that’s often present in the world of food justice and environmental conservation. Deb Burgard, PhD, FAED (Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders), is a psychologist and activist from the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in concerns about body image, eating, weight stigma, and relationships. She is one of the founders of the Health at Every Size model, the creator in the mid-1990's of the BodyPositive.com website, and the host of the Show Me the Data listserv, building communities where people can find each other and the resources to resist weight stigma, especially in medical and psychological treatment. Her activism includes working with healthcare providers to integrate an understanding of the social determinants of health and creating interventions that address structural oppression and support stigma resistance. She can be found at conferences sparking impromptu dance parties in the pool. Christy's new book, Anti-Diet, is now available wherever you get your books! Order online at christyharrison.com/book, or at local bookstores across North America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, to get started on the anti-diet path. If you're ready to break free from diet culture once and for all, join Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course. Ask your own question about intuitive eating, Health at Every Size, or eating disorder recovery at christyharrison.com/questions. To learn more about Food Psych and get full show notes and a transcript of this episode, go to christyharrison.com/foodpsych.

This episode is fairly far ranging in topic and trying to pinpoint every topic was too daunting. We discuss philosophy, medicine, compassion, engaging with patients on a human level and more. Deb Burgard is such a thoughtful person who has taken a lot of time to really think about the topics surrounding not just fatness, but also social justice and how to make the world a more compassionate place. It starts with each of us individually, but I think it helps to listen to Deb and take in her joyous wisdom. I hope that you enjoy listening to her as much as I enjoyed making this episode with her.   Deb Burgard, PhD, FAED, is a psychologist and activist from the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in concerns about body image, eating, weight stigma, and relationships. She is also one of the founders of the Health at Every Size(r) model, the original BodyPositive.com website, and the Show Me the Data listserv, building communities where people can find each other and the resources to resist weight stigma, especially in medical and psychological treatment.  Her activism includes working with healthcare providers to integrate an understanding of the social determinants of health and creating interventions that address structural oppression and support stigma resistance.  She can be found at conferences sparking impromptu dance parties in the pool.  Resources: Poodle Science link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H89QQfXtc-k www.bodypositive.com BodyPositivePhD on IG, Twitter   FB group for doctors: Health At Every Size Doctors

Eating disorders specialist and activist Dr. Deb Burgard joins us for a conversation about incorporating a Health At Every Size® perspective and activism into parenting, the truth about weight loss and dieting, and how to help your child build body trust and connect to their inner wisdom. Get our ABC Guide to Body-Positive Parenting. Read the full show notes for this episode.

In this episode, Jill considers the concept of a ‘healthy weight'. Via an excerpt from an essay by Deb Burgard, Jill describes how the Health at Every Size (HAES) Movement determines health, why weight is not a factor, and critical questions we should all be asking when it comes to weight and its connection to health.

With the holidays comes many social gatherings that are often centred around food. For some this may be filled with joy, but for others, this may cause a lot of stress and anxiety around eating or body image. That’s why this week, I’m speaking with Dr. Andrea LaMarre on eating disorder recovery and health ay any size. Based out of Guelph, Ontario, Andrea is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Propel Centre for Population Health Impact at the University of Waterloo. She recently earned her PhD at the University of Guelph, where she studied eating disorder recovery from the perspectives of people in recovery and their supporters. In this episode we speak about experiences of eating disorders and recovery, and Andrea breaks down some of the common assumptions surrounding these experiences – about what an eating disorder looks like conventionally, what bodies and experiences are legitimized and which are often left out, and ways in which researchers like her are challenging the social, cultural, and psychological barriers to accessing recovery. She’s doing incredibly important work with thoughtful and engaging approaches for communities, and I think it’s important to speak more to the diverse ways disordered eating can manifest in our lives and bodies - particularly during times of the year where we have less control or agency over what we eat. Listen to the episode in the player above, or download on any major platform! Get Social with Andrea: Twitter: @andrealala Instagram: @andrealamarre Website: www.andrealamarre.com  Some of the many folks whose work has inspired Andrea:  People who do work on dismantling body oppression: Deb Burgard: http://www.bodypositive.com/ Desirée Adaway: http://desireeadaway.com/ Sonya Renée Taylor: https://www.sonyareneetaylor.com/ Virgie Tovar: https://www.virgietovar.com/ Be Nourished: https://benourished.org/ Nalgona Positivity Pride: https://www.nalgonapositivitypride.com/ Marcella Raimondo: http://www.marcellaedtraining.com/ Carmen Cool: http://www.carmencool.com/ Karin Hitselberger: https://themighty.com/u/karin-hitselberger/ Corbett O’Toole: https://www.corbettotoole.com/ Kaley Roosen: https://twitter.com/kaleyroosen?lang=en Carla Rice: http://www.carlarice.ca/ Cocimientos: http://nedic.ca/provider/9895-cocimientos   Some eating disorder scholars who inspire me: Rebecca Lester: https://artsci.wustl.edu/faculty-staff/rebecca-lester Helen Malson: https://people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/HelenMalson Karin Eli: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/people/540 Paula Saukko: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/socialsciences/staff/paula-saukko/  

Strap yourself in for a wild ride on the rollercoaster of yo-yo dieting! My guest is utterly fierce HAES psychologist and eating disorder specialist Deb Burgard @BodyPositivePhD who is DISEMBOWELLING a new study which claims that yo yo dieting is actually really good for you. You will not believe how shaky this science is, or the lengths that Deb went to in order to sniff out the truth! Join us for a fabulous rant about the evils of the weight cycling industry, mouse research, dodgy science, cake icing, white supremacy, and more!   Show Notes   The fabulous Deb Burgard is fired up about the weight scientists desperately trying to legitimise the failure of dieting by using mouse research to justify weight cycling. The vast majority of people who diet put the weight back on. The evidence to support this is extremely robust - Level “A” evidence according to the National Health & Medical Research Council. We are as sure that people will put weight back on as we are that smoking causes lung cancer. The evidence just doesn’t get any stronger in research! But the weight loss industry has profited from selling the hope of long term, permanent weight loss, and it has even convinced us that when we fail, it’s us that’s the failure, not the product itself! It’s probably one of the largest gaslighting industries in the world. It’s hard wired in us to regain weight, it’s a normal process of our bodies returning to homeostasis. We are supposed to have size diversity. Weight suppression is a pathology, not an achievement. But we only recognise it as a pathology in thin people, and we completely miss it in larger people. Higher weight people with exactly the same illness (AN) won’t get the diagnosis as easily (or at all!) as a thin person with AN. We prescribe for fat people what we diagnose as eating disordered in thin people. Deb is renowned for standing up and calling things as she sees them. She’s not afraid to call out the weight cycling industry and challenge the paradigm! Deb has seen people for 30 years, she’s seen how people suffer at the hands of diet culture. Larger people with lives worth living, the casualties of this idea that they’re supposed to spend their life pursuing thinness. For Deb, pursuing diet and weight loss is a giant waste of time which we can’t get back. No-one should have to lose years of their lives dedicated to this project of weight loss, which science shows us won’t work. Deb wants everyone to divest from the weight cycling industry, because it’s a death industry. We need all hands on deck to dismantle weight-centric business models. It’s a white supremacy model, based on oppression. Deb has been around for a long time, she grew up absorbing the atmosphere of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, and for a long time she has fought for social change. Getting together and fighting battles really does and can change the world. When we wake up and realise that it’s not us, but the world that is wrong, and we come together as a community, we become strong. Looking at diet culture nowadays is kind of like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where you’re standing there looking around for the other people who can see that he’s naked! We need each other. We need to know that other people think like this! Deb has a big community of people, both locally and online, and this community has helped her to find and use her voice, and to gallop the HAES movement forward. This is how we got started on today’s topic: in a chat room, a new study came out on mice which showed that mice who weight cycled - ie the mice who went off and on diets - lived longer than mice who stayed fat. The paper concluded that people should still try to diet, even if they will put it back on, because presumably the same effect would generalise to humans. It’s a really irritating way to interpret the failure of dieting - that even though diets don’t work, we should just put up with weight cycling and yo yo diet all of our lives, because the less time spent being fat, the better. Weight science history - at first, it started out aiming to make fat people not fat anymore. But when that didn’t work, the aim became 20% weight loss, that didn’t work, so they went to 10%, and that still didn’t happen, so now they’ve dropped the definition of weight loss ‘success’ to 5% and even less - not because science shows benefits there, but because humans just don’t lose that much weight in weight loss studies.* People like Paul Ernsberger have been turned away from studying weight cycling and actively discouraged. The Look Ahead study is often talked about as an example of ‘proof’ that people can lose weight & keep it off, even though that study was stopped early because it turned out that making people lose weight didn’t actually reduce their risk of having a heart attack. Deb talks about how people in this study were older, and even the control group were losing weight. Also, the people in the intensive lifestyle intervention group were subjected to intense pressure, and knew they would be weighed every year, so everyone made a big effort in the 6 months leading up to the weigh in. So this is actually a study of weight cycling, not a triumph of effortless lasting weight loss. Behind the scenes, people in these studies talk about how much bullshit goes on. When people are not weighed and just provide answers, they know what the researchers want to hear, and there's shame about weight regain too. Deb loves to really dig into the research studies, to go beyond the headlines and abstracts and really ask the question - what did they do here? In the mouse study, it is a particular strain of mice that were studied. Deb went & spoke to people who know more about mice research than she does, including the authors. The study concluded that weight cycling in mice was a good thing. There’s a few issues here. Paul Ernsberger speaks about the unique properties of species like mice. They are basically a food supply for predators. When there is a lot to eat, they don’t need to turn on their genes to make them live longer, because they’ll be able to quickly procreate and make lots of offspring. When there’s not a lot of food around, these genes in the mice switch on, allowing them to live longer and procreate later, ensuring that they will continue to exist as a species. As an apex predator, humans do not follow this pattern and do not display this type of change. So right there, there’s reason to doubt that whatever we see in mice when they are deprived of food will be similar in humans. So mice research in this area really doesn’t generalise well to understanding humans. The other interesting point here is how these mice were fed in order to produce ‘obesity’. The study says they were fed a high fat diet. Paul Ernsberger says that it is probably more accurate to say that the mice were fed the equivalent of cake icing! For breakfast, lunch and dinner. Even the most extreme human diets don’t mirror this type of diet. So interestingly, even when mainlining cake icing, ⅓ of the mice didn’t get fat, so they were eliminated from the study. As Deb points out, in humans, many of those at higher weights are not like that because they’re all eating fast food. They’re just larger people. So the mice who started small and became big through force feeding are really different to the human population who basically have multiple reasons that they may be larger. So of the ⅔ of the mice that were left, a huge number of them got a condition called ulcerative dermatitis and either died or had to be euthanised. This was more than 200 animals out of 500. But the authors are using their lifespans to argue for weight cycling? It is possible that the mice who were being fed only the cake frosting diet were getting sick and dying, so now we have a completely confounding factor here. How did this paper get through? Deb has asked the author but really didn’t get an answer, apparently another paper is coming out. Basically, the weight cycling mice were given a break from the relentless cake icing feeding, and it may very well be that break from a horrible diet which was related to their longer lifespan, not weight cycling. So Deb went to the company that bred the mice, and asked how long their lifespan was. The average lifespan of this strain of mice was apparently well below what all of the mice in the experiment lived for! So all of the mice in this experiment - including the ones who were always fat - lived longer than the average lifespan for this strain. This fact was not mentioned in the paper. New headline - “cake frosting prolongs life if it doesn’t kill you?!” A well fed population, a population with good nutrition, means we change - our puberty happens earlier, it also means we are heavier. And yes, this change brings different health challenges. There’s definitely a health disparity between higher weight people and lower weight people. This may be about fat cells driving things. But also, If you’re treated poorly it’s going to have an effect on your health. And we have very good evidence that larger people are not treated well. So it is plausible that there is an interaction between all of these factors - structural oppression, weight stigma, health care inequities - with our biology - and to ignore all of these factors and focus only on the narrow physiology is another case of the Emperor’s new clothes. Some people would argue that all of the rat and mice studies are impacted, because they are social animals but in experimental conditions they all live separately. Researchers really want to be doing research follow ups for longer than they are right now, but grant money and structures don’t support such models. We absolutely need more research to understand the whole phenomenon of weight cycling in humans, given that most of us will weight cycle. But it’s not an area which is heavily researched. Many weight loss studies don’t last long enough to cover a whole weight loss/regain cycle - they stop the research at the end of the weight loss period, and don’t look further. There is a real issue in research in weight science of not following people for a minimum of 5 years, which really should be the standard. Short term weight loss research really is a waste of time and money. We should do less research, but do it for longer time periods, to gather meaningful information. The harms of interventions are also not being captured in current research models, even though Stunkard was saying it back in 1959! Speaking of harms not being captured, researchers in the eating disorder field are planning to present at the ICED conference in 2019 saying that dieting in adolescents doesn’t lead to eating disorders! This will no doubt be based on research with flaws like we’ve mentioned. It’s really sad how the diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder completely misses the restriction part. Those of us who work with people with binge eating issues know how restriction shows up - in a feeling of guilt after a binge, in experiencing thoughts about restricting food, and in restrictive behaviours - but it’s just been disregarded by the powerful people who were in charge of creating the diagnosis whose weight bias stops their ability to imagine that fat people could also be restricting! Our eating disorder criteria is tragically bound to weight biased understanding of eating disorders. It’s sad that the people in power had so little understanding of the phenomenon they were describing. It’s back to white supremacy again. The drive to make some bodies have more worth than other bodies is evil. If we don’t understand this history, we will repeat the mistakes. Food insecurity also impacts on all of this. People who publish research on binge eating disorder who trumpet about how their intervention not only led to a reduction in eating disorder symptoms but also to weight loss, are missing the point. They are embroiled with the eating disorder and not seeing the bigger picture. You’re just at the bottom of the diet cycle. But many researchers are so weight biased that they don’t understand that people with this disorder can not binge for months. They are capable of restriction. Restriction is part of the problem! If you’re too good at restriction you’re going to run into trouble one way or another. what we think of as success is actually part of the problem, if you just look at the psychology of this. Back in the days when homosexuality was considered an 'illness', Evelyn Hooker presented psych test batteries to psychiatrists and asked people to pick out who was gay from examining the tests. She showed them there was no difference between psych results based on sexuality. Here’s another way of thinking - if we presented eating disorder experts with a list of behaviours of something a client was doing, and asked them to determine if the person had an eating disorder. If people agree that it is an eating disorder if a person is thin, but not if a person is fat, this is a problem. It’s not ‘tips’ from the weight control registry, it’s a disorder! Science is supposed to be about stepping back from our presuppositions. We need more people who think critically, ask questions, and push back. We need to recognise our bias. It is part of science to come up with alternative hypotheses. It can be difficult to get access to the training in order to critique studies, but thinking critically is a time-honored tradition of all people resisting oppression.   Resources Mentioned: The NH&MRC slide from the fabulous Fiona Willer: *A really good study which talks about the history of % weight loss targets The mouse study on weight cycling The Look Ahead study Find out more about Deb here and here

Strap yourself in for a wild ride on the rollercoaster of yo-yo dieting! My guest is utterly fierce HAES psychologist and eating disorder specialist Deb Burgard @BodyPositivePhD who is DISEMBOWELLING a new study which claims that yo yo dieting is actually really good for you. You will not believe how shaky this science is, or the lengths that Deb went to in order to sniff out the truth! Join us for a fabulous rant about the evils of the weight cycling industry, mouse research, dodgy science, cake icing, white supremacy, and more!   Show Notes   The fabulous Deb Burgard is fired up about the weight scientists desperately trying to legitimise the failure of dieting by using mouse research to justify weight cycling. The vast majority of people who diet put the weight back on. The evidence to support this is extremely robust - Level “A” evidence according to the National Health & Medical Research Council. We are as sure that people will put weight back on as we are that smoking causes lung cancer. The evidence just doesn’t get any stronger in research! But the weight loss industry has profited from selling the hope of long term, permanent weight loss, and it has even convinced us that when we fail, it’s us that’s the failure, not the product itself! It’s probably one of the largest gaslighting industries in the world. It’s hard wired in us to regain weight, it’s a normal process of our bodies returning to homeostasis. We are supposed to have size diversity. Weight suppression is a pathology, not an achievement. But we only recognise it as a pathology in thin people, and we completely miss it in larger people. Higher weight people with exactly the same illness (AN) won’t get the diagnosis as easily (or at all!) as a thin person with AN. We prescribe for fat people what we diagnose as eating disordered in thin people. Deb is renowned for standing up and calling things as she sees them. She’s not afraid to call out the weight cycling industry and challenge the paradigm! Deb has seen people for 30 years, she’s seen how people suffer at the hands of diet culture. Larger people with lives worth living, the casualties of this idea that they’re supposed to spend their life pursuing thinness. For Deb, pursuing diet and weight loss is a giant waste of time which we can’t get back. No-one should have to lose years of their lives dedicated to this project of weight loss, which science shows us won’t work. Deb wants everyone to divest from the weight cycling industry, because it’s a death industry. We need all hands on deck to dismantle weight-centric business models. It’s a white supremacy model, based on oppression. Deb has been around for a long time, she grew up absorbing the atmosphere of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, and for a long time she has fought for social change. Getting together and fighting battles really does and can change the world. When we wake up and realise that it’s not us, but the world that is wrong, and we come together as a community, we become strong. Looking at diet culture nowadays is kind of like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where you’re standing there looking around for the other people who can see that he’s naked! We need each other. We need to know that other people think like this! Deb has a big community of people, both locally and online, and this community has helped her to find and use her voice, and to gallop the HAES movement forward. This is how we got started on today’s topic: in a chat room, a new study came out on mice which showed that mice who weight cycled - ie the mice who went off and on diets - lived longer than mice who stayed fat. The paper concluded that people should still try to diet, even if they will put it back on, because presumably the same effect would generalise to humans. It’s a really irritating way to interpret the failure of dieting - that even though diets don’t work, we should just put up with weight cycling and yo yo diet all of our lives, because the less time spent being fat, the better. Weight science history - at first, it started out aiming to make fat people not fat anymore. But when that didn’t work, the aim became 20% weight loss, that didn’t work, so they went to 10%, and that still didn’t happen, so now they’ve dropped the definition of weight loss ‘success’ to 5% and even less - not because science shows benefits there, but because humans just don’t lose that much weight in weight loss studies.* People like Paul Ernsberger have been turned away from studying weight cycling and actively discouraged. The Look Ahead study is often talked about as an example of ‘proof’ that people can lose weight & keep it off, even though that study was stopped early because it turned out that making people lose weight didn’t actually reduce their risk of having a heart attack. Deb talks about how people in this study were older, and even the control group were losing weight. Also, the people in the intensive lifestyle intervention group were subjected to intense pressure, and knew they would be weighed every year, so everyone made a big effort in the 6 months leading up to the weigh in. So this is actually a study of weight cycling, not a triumph of effortless lasting weight loss. Behind the scenes, people in these studies talk about how much bullshit goes on. When people are not weighed and just provide answers, they know what the researchers want to hear, and there's shame about weight regain too. Deb loves to really dig into the research studies, to go beyond the headlines and abstracts and really ask the question - what did they do here? In the mouse study, it is a particular strain of mice that were studied. Deb went & spoke to people who know more about mice research than she does, including the authors. The study concluded that weight cycling in mice was a good thing. There’s a few issues here. Paul Ernsberger speaks about the unique properties of species like mice. They are basically a food supply for predators. When there is a lot to eat, they don’t need to turn on their genes to make them live longer, because they’ll be able to quickly procreate and make lots of offspring. When there’s not a lot of food around, these genes in the mice switch on, allowing them to live longer and procreate later, ensuring that they will continue to exist as a species. As an apex predator, humans do not follow this pattern and do not display this type of change. So right there, there’s reason to doubt that whatever we see in mice when they are deprived of food will be similar in humans. So mice research in this area really doesn’t generalise well to understanding humans. The other interesting point here is how these mice were fed in order to produce ‘obesity’. The study says they were fed a high fat diet. Paul Ernsberger says that it is probably more accurate to say that the mice were fed the equivalent of cake icing! For breakfast, lunch and dinner. Even the most extreme human diets don’t mirror this type of diet. So interestingly, even when mainlining cake icing, ⅓ of the mice didn’t get fat, so they were eliminated from the study. As Deb points out, in humans, many of those at higher weights are not like that because they’re all eating fast food. They’re just larger people. So the mice who started small and became big through force feeding are really different to the human population who basically have multiple reasons that they may be larger. So of the ⅔ of the mice that were left, a huge number of them got a condition called ulcerative dermatitis and either died or had to be euthanised. This was more than 200 animals out of 500. But the authors are using their lifespans to argue for weight cycling? It is possible that the mice who were being fed only the cake frosting diet were getting sick and dying, so now we have a completely confounding factor here. How did this paper get through? Deb has asked the author but really didn’t get an answer, apparently another paper is coming out. Basically, the weight cycling mice were given a break from the relentless cake icing feeding, and it may very well be that break from a horrible diet which was related to their longer lifespan, not weight cycling. So Deb went to the company that bred the mice, and asked how long their lifespan was. The average lifespan of this strain of mice was apparently well below what all of the mice in the experiment lived for! So all of the mice in this experiment - including the ones who were always fat - lived longer than the average lifespan for this strain. This fact was not mentioned in the paper. New headline - “cake frosting prolongs life if it doesn’t kill you?!” A well fed population, a population with good nutrition, means we change - our puberty happens earlier, it also means we are heavier. And yes, this change brings different health challenges. There’s definitely a health disparity between higher weight people and lower weight people. This may be about fat cells driving things. But also, If you’re treated poorly it’s going to have an effect on your health. And we have very good evidence that larger people are not treated well. So it is plausible that there is an interaction between all of these factors - structural oppression, weight stigma, health care inequities - with our biology - and to ignore all of these factors and focus only on the narrow physiology is another case of the Emperor’s new clothes. Some people would argue that all of the rat and mice studies are impacted, because they are social animals but in experimental conditions they all live separately. Researchers really want to be doing research follow ups for longer than they are right now, but grant money and structures don’t support such models. We absolutely need more research to understand the whole phenomenon of weight cycling in humans, given that most of us will weight cycle. But it’s not an area which is heavily researched. Many weight loss studies don’t last long enough to cover a whole weight loss/regain cycle - they stop the research at the end of the weight loss period, and don’t look further. There is a real issue in research in weight science of not following people for a minimum of 5 years, which really should be the standard. Short term weight loss research really is a waste of time and money. We should do less research, but do it for longer time periods, to gather meaningful information. The harms of interventions are also not being captured in current research models, even though Stunkard was saying it back in 1959! Speaking of harms not being captured, researchers in the eating disorder field are planning to present at the ICED conference in 2019 saying that dieting in adolescents doesn’t lead to eating disorders! This will no doubt be based on research with flaws like we’ve mentioned. It’s really sad how the diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder completely misses the restriction part. Those of us who work with people with binge eating issues know how restriction shows up - in a feeling of guilt after a binge, in experiencing thoughts about restricting food, and in restrictive behaviours - but it’s just been disregarded by the powerful people who were in charge of creating the diagnosis whose weight bias stops their ability to imagine that fat people could also be restricting! Our eating disorder criteria is tragically bound to weight biased understanding of eating disorders. It’s sad that the people in power had so little understanding of the phenomenon they were describing. It’s back to white supremacy again. The drive to make some bodies have more worth than other bodies is evil. If we don’t understand this history, we will repeat the mistakes. Food insecurity also impacts on all of this. People who publish research on binge eating disorder who trumpet about how their intervention not only led to a reduction in eating disorder symptoms but also to weight loss, are missing the point. They are embroiled with the eating disorder and not seeing the bigger picture. You’re just at the bottom of the diet cycle. But many researchers are so weight biased that they don’t understand that people with this disorder can not binge for months. They are capable of restriction. Restriction is part of the problem! If you’re too good at restriction you’re going to run into trouble one way or another. what we think of as success is actually part of the problem, if you just look at the psychology of this. Back in the days when homosexuality was considered an 'illness', Evelyn Hooker presented psych test batteries to psychiatrists and asked people to pick out who was gay from examining the tests. She showed them there was no difference between psych results based on sexuality. Here’s another way of thinking - if we presented eating disorder experts with a list of behaviours of something a client was doing, and asked them to determine if the person had an eating disorder. If people agree that it is an eating disorder if a person is thin, but not if a person is fat, this is a problem. It’s not ‘tips’ from the weight control registry, it’s a disorder! Science is supposed to be about stepping back from our presuppositions. We need more people who think critically, ask questions, and push back. We need to recognise our bias. It is part of science to come up with alternative hypotheses. It can be difficult to get access to the training in order to critique studies, but thinking critically is a time-honored tradition of all people resisting oppression.   Resources Mentioned: The NH&MRC slide from the fabulous Fiona Willer: *A really good study which talks about the history of % weight loss targets The mouse study on weight cycling The Look Ahead study Find out more about Deb here and here

Deb Burgard, PhD, FAED* is a psychologist and activist from the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in concerns about body image, eating, weight stigma, and relationships. She is also one of the founders of the Health at Every Size(r) model, the original BodyPositive.com website, and the Show Me the Data listserv, building communities where people can find each other and the resources to resist weight stigma, especially in medical and psychological treatment.  Her activism includes working with healthcare providers to integrate an understanding of the social determinants of health and creating interventions that address structural oppression and support stigma resistance.  She can be found at conferences sparking impromptu dance parties in the pool.    Fellow, Academy for Eating Disorders   Links:    Poodle Science video                 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H89QQfXtc-k Review of HAES lit paper:          https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2014/983495/    www.sizediversityandhealth.org The Association for Size Diversity and Health.   "What Is Wrong with the War on Obesity?"   http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244018772888

  Hey there, lovely radicals... podcast time! In today's episode of the "Life. Unrestricted." podcast, I bring to you the absolutely amazing Dr. Deb Burgard, a FAED (Fellow for the Academy of Eating Disorders) from the San Francisco Bay Area. I had the great pleasure to talk to her a few months ago. Deb is a psychologist and activist specializing in concerns about body image, eating, weight stigma, and relationships. She is also one of the founders of the "Health at Every Size" model, as well as the very original Body Positive website "bodypositive.com", and the "Show Me the Data" listserv, building communities where people can find each other and the resources to resist weight stigma, especially in medical and psychological treatment. Her activism includes working with healthcare providers to integrate an understanding of the social determinants of health and creating interventions that address structural oppression and support stigma resistance. Deb has a PhD in psychology, and has been licensed psychologist ever since 1993. In the early nineties, she was the director of Clinical Services as Woodside Women’s Hospital, and after the mid-nineties, after having started working in private practice, she was also the supervising psychologist at the Santa Clara University Counseling Center. Since 1997, she has been working exclusively in private practice where she helps clients with eating disorders, weight and body preoccupation, sexuality, depression and relationship concerns. I’m very happy to say that, in the time since we spoke, Deb has been rewarded with the "Frances. J. Bonner" award for her outstanding work in the field. Today, Deb talks about: – Why she never lost touch to that part of her that felt joyful and carefree about her body – What she remembers about her mother’s relationship to food and diets – Why she started questioning our culture’s "assignment to become thin" fairly early on – Why most people almost automatically take on the "body project" and assume it’s their "duty" to invest all they can into it – What made her realize that she didn’t have to do this anymore – Why most therapists never address the body and food issues of a client – What the "cult of thinness" promises and never delivers – Why we tend to blame bad things that happen to us on our looks/bodies/weight – What the medical model fails to acknowledge when it comes to health – What constitutes the most important factor in a person’s health – Why stigma and oppression are detrimental to a person’s health – Why she believes this continuous assignment "to be thinner" amounts to a misspent, lost life – What made her observe that "we prescribe to fat people what we recognize as disordered eating in thin people" – What working with eating disorders has taught her in relation to how this society’s views on weight/weight-loss might be, indeed, backwards – How she approached data and studies related to weight-science – Why she calls dieting "weight-cycling" – Why she calls eating disorders "disorders of the pursuit of weight-loss" – Why eating disorders often get mis-classified, or missed altogether, when weight is used as the main criteria for the diagnosis – How people who are eating highly restrictively (and suffering severely), are almost always either complimented for their "efforts", or their malnourishment is missed, because people tend to not believe them when they say how little they actually eat – What the Minnesota Semi-Starvation experiment proved about the effects of caloric deficit (through dieting, restricting or overexercising) on people’s physical AND mental health – How she explains the logic of size diversity – Why people recover from disordered eating and eating disorders much faster and much more completely with a weight-neutral approach – Why communities where people can support each other in resisting this culture’s fixation on weight together is so important in recovery – How we can work on our resiliency to stay strong in a world that promotes disordered eating – The cost of conformity versus the opportunity to live your truth – Some of the history of the weight-loss industry and why/how it has come back with a vengeance after having being exposed as a failing concept in the nineties – Why most weight-loss studies only hold up because they only track people’s weight-loss for less than 2-5 years, so "it looks like they have been successful" – Why she is optimistic that this weight-inclusive paradigm will eventually persist over the old weight-normative approach – Why the faster people stop cooperating with and participating in our society’s imperative on "weight-loss at all costs", the faster the paradigm will change – Why it takes each and every one of us speaking up about our experience with weight-suppression to make a harmful system change – Why recovery is an "authenticity task", leaving behind the "conformity task"... ... And so much more! Find out more about Deb (including her email address) here: https://sizediversityandhealth.org/haes-expert.asp?id=56 Here’s the link to the "Health at Every Size Blog" of the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH): https://healthateverysizeblog.org/ Here’s the link to the original, award-winning body image website "Body Positive": www.bodypositive.com Here’s the link to "Adios Barbie": http://www.adiosbarbie.com/#results Here’s the link to "The Body Is Not An Apology": https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/ Here’s the link to "Trans Folx Fighting Eating Disorders": http://www.transfolxfightingeds.org/ Here’s the link to the (fantastic!) "Poodle Science" video of the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=poodle+science&spfreload=1 Here’s an interesting article about the "Minnesota Starvation Experiment": http://www.refinery29.com/minnesota-starvation-experiment Please consider supporting the podcast with a donation by becoming a "Patreon"; so that I can keep producing it. Thank you! Here's the link: https://www.patreon.com/lifeunrestricted Aaand if you want this sort of badassery come to your phone automatically, please DO subscribe on iTunes (Apple): https://itunes.apple.com/ch/podcast/life.-unrestricted.-podcast/id1130713233?mt=2 or on Stitcher (Android): http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=93987&ref   ********* Don't forget!********* Make sure to join my tribe and meet some of the most supportive, loving and kind people of all shapes and sizes, including great coaches and leaders! We’re right over here at: http://www.lifeunrestricted.org/join/

This week we’re talking with Deb Burgard, one of the founders of the Health at Every Size movement. The psychotherapist, author and activist discusses weight stigma in the healthcare system, pursuing joyful movement, size oppression and the exclusion of fat bodies from eating disorder treatment, her discovery of fat activism and feminism, how to find joy and healing, and much more! PLUS, Christy answers a listener question about how to keep yourself nourished in a stressful work situation. Deb Burgard, PhD, FAED, specializes in body image, eating, sexuality, health, and relationship concerns. She has helped bring into the world the Health at Every Size model, the www.BodyPositive.com website, Great Shape: The First Fitness Guide for Large Women, and numerous book chapters and research articles. An activist and an internationally known speaker trying to change the forces that create oppression and barriers to health, she trains clinicians to integrate social justice concerns into their treatment models. She can be spotted at conferences hula hooping, and dancing in the pool, as her overarching goal is to bring back recess for all. To learn more about Food Psych and get full show notes for this episode, go to christyharrison.com/foodpsych. Ask your own question about intuitive eating, Health at Every Size, or eating disorder recovery at christyharrison.com/questions. Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, to start your intuitive eating journey. You can also text "7STRATEGIES" to the phone number 44222 to get it on the go :) Join the Food Psych Facebook group to connect with fellow listeners around the world!  

Glenys and Aaron let it all out as they discuss a show that epitomizes our diet culture, NBC's "The Biggest Loser". They start by reviewing an article in the New York Times that reviews some of the latest research on how contestants' metabolisms have yet to recover even six years after being on the show.  Glenys and Aaron also discuss this article from the New York Times about why you should never diet again.  Lastly, they were so happy to quote one their favorite HAES® colleagues, Deb Burgard in this great article.  Take a listen to this very important episode -- it might be the one you need to hear before you consider going on your next "diet"