Podcast appearances and mentions of lucy aphramor

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing!In the early days of the pandemic studies were rushed out and highlighted in the media claiming that higher-weight people were at higher risk of COVID death. I wrote about the issues with this in my previous blog, as did Christy Harrison, Paul Campos and others.Now an umbrella review has been published. This is a review of existing systematic reviews and metanalyses.Quick background. A systematic review (SR) starts with a research question, creates inclusion criteria for evidence, and then attempts to gather and summarize all of the available empirical evidence that fits the inclusion criteria. A meta-analysis (MA)  is the application of statistical methods to the results of the studies collected by the systematic review. An umbrella review (UR) synthesizes all of the available systematic reviews and meta-analyses about a broad research question, typically taking into account not just the findings of the SRs and MAs, but also the quality of evidence within them. This is important because if the SR/MAs include poor quality studies, then they risk poor quality summary/analysis/conclusions.So, this study “Risk of bias and certainty of evidence on the association between ob*sity and mortality in patients with SARS-COV-2: An umbrella review of meta-analyses” by Silva et al, 2023 looked at systemic reviews with meta-analyses (SR-MAs) “to evaluate the risk of bias and the certainty of the evidence of SR-MAs on the association between ob*sity and mortality in patients with SARS-CoV-2.”They begin that:“Poorly conducted SR-MAs can lead to inaccurate illustrations of evidence and misleading conclusions, leading to limited applicability.”Then point out that:“There are concerns that in the panic to provide answers to help administer the COVID-19 pandemic, SR-MAs are being conducted without many of the keystones of robust methods”They sought to answer two questions with their UR: 1. What is the quality and certainty of evidence on the association between ob*sity and mortality in patients with SARS-CoV-2?2. What is the magnitude of the association between ob*sity and mortality in patients with SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated by SR-MAsThey reviewed 24 SR-MAs from multiple countries. Ultimately they found that, while most SR-MAs did show an association between being higher weight and COVID mortality, there were serious questions as to the quality of the research that led to those conclusions.They found that “most SR-MAs had critically low quality, and…the certainty of the evidence was very low.” In fact, in terms of certainty of evidence, 21 of the 24 SR-MAs were classified as “very low.” In terms of quality, 66.7% of the SR-MAs were “critically low quality,” and 29.2% were “low” quality. Only one of the included SR-MAs reached the “moderate” quality level and it DID NOT find a significant link between being higher-weight and COVID mortality.The UR author's explanation for this is that the pandemic created the need for fast information (which is, of course accurate) but that in the rush to get data “many of the keystones of robust methods are being forgotten.” I would add that, as we often talk about in research reviews here, when it comes to weight science, the keystones of robust methods are often thrown out the window regardless of how much time the authors have to conduct their research (Lucy Aphramor has an excellent piece about this.) For example, this has happened before. During the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, fat people had poorer health outcomes (and researchers and media were quick to jump on the bandwagon of assuming that fat bodies were the cause the and trying to figure out what about fat bodies caused this.) It turns out the actual issue was that fat people were systematically treated later with antiviral medication than thin people. Per a study on the subject (Sun et. al. 2016) “After adjustment for early antiviral treatment, relationship between ob*sity and poor outcomes disappeared.”The findings of this UR are, of course, a far cry from all the headlines claiming that being higher-weight created higher risk and from the subsequent programs and suggestions that fat people have an obligation to become thin (despite no evidence that that is even possible) as part of COVID mortality prevention. Unfortunately, when it comes to research, the media, and public health policy anti-fatness is often published, often enacted, and rarely questioned.Frustratingly, even the UR authors in their introduction section uncritically buy in to the pathologization of body size, and the blaming of health issues/deaths on higher-weight bodies rather than, at the very least, acknowledging the confounding variables of weight stigma, weight cycling, and healthcare inequalities. Still, perhaps there is some clarity in the fact that these findings come from researchers who seem to be fully invested in the anti-fat paradigm.Finally, I want to point out that healthcare inequalities, including everything from practitioner bias to lack of accommodating equipment (blood pressure cuffs, hospital beds, etc.) as well as medications, dosing, and clinical best practices that are created for thin bodies that may not work as well/at all for fat bodies (for example, around respirator use) can create worse outcomes for higher-weight people (which typically are subsequently blamed on their body size.) This does the most harm to those at the highest weights and those with multiple marginalized identities. Further, I was part of a broad-based coalition that re-wrote California's Care Rationing Protocols (the guidelines for what to do when there aren't enough resources to treat all patients) to remove weight stigma, ableism, and racism. Still the guidelines are not law, even in California, and it is permissible in many cases for those making rationing decisions to use BMI as a reason to deny care in rationing situations. For these reasons and more, I think that the continued treatment of higher-weight people as higher-risk/higher-priority for vaccines and other treatment remains appropriate.Did 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

Estudios revelan que el 95% de las personas que hacen dieta recuperan éste peso (1) y que las dietas no tienen beneficios para la salud a largo plazo (2). Quisimos hablar sobre lo que realmente es el enfoque antidieta y puedas resolver las siguientes preguntas: ¿Cómo surge el movimiento antidieta? ¿Qué sí es y no, el enfoque antidieta? ¿Me puedo cuidar sin hacer dieta? ¿Puedo confiar en mi cuerpo al no hacer dieta? ¿Cómo no hacer dieta si no controlo mi ingesta de alimentos? ¿No hacer dieta es darme por vencido? ¿Este enfoque sirve para bajar de peso? ¿Estoy mal si quiero hacer dieta? Te dejamos la liga de los episodios mencionados: E11 T1 Tu cuerpo habla de crianza libre de cultura de dieta. E12 T1 Tu cuerpo habla de los años a dieta en la infancia E13 T1 Tu cuerpo habla de creencias alimentarias en la infancia con Lupita Rozada E31 T2 Tu cuerpo habla de trauma y alimentación con Ana Arizmendi. Y la lista de libros recomendados: Antidiet de Christy Harrison. Al diablo con las dietas de Caroline Dooner. Health at every size de Lindo Bacon. Intuitive eating de Evelyn Tribole y Elyse Resch. Body Respect de Lindo Bacon, Lucy Aphramor.  Inscríbete a nuestro webinar gratuito

I read. A LOT.  Both physical books and audio books.The past few years I've consumed over 100 books per year.  It's been on my mind to share some of the books I read with you, because I've love to pass on some of the life-changing magic.In this episode I am sharing my top 5 Non Fiction and 5 Fiction books for 2022.Link to my GoodReadsLinks to my Top 10 books on Amazon:The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonia Renee Taylor  Body Respect Lindo Bacon, PhD & Lucy Aphramor, Ph.D., R.D.  Don't Pass It On by Christina Stai   Discovering the Inner Mother by Bethany Webster  What Happened to  you by Oprah & Bruce Perry  FictionThe Maidens and The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides Stolen Tongues by Felix Blackwell The Lunar Chronicles  by Marissa MeyerThe Wheel of Time Series by Robert Jordan and Brandon SandersonSupport the showMentioned On The Show The Emotional Eating RevolutionFood freedom is possible! You don't have to struggle with your emotional eating any longer. This 12-week program will transform your relationship with food and having you feeling more confident. Click the link for more info... the next round begins Feb 1, 2023Want to receive weekly(ish) emails from me? Sign up hereInstagramFacebook

TRIGGER WARNING: This episode is a really heavy discussion about discrimination and racism.  Please take your self-care into account and skip this episode if necessary.  I promise I won't be offended.  If you've been a long time listener you know I don't have authors on the show (or at least it is really rare), but I've made a big exception in this case because of the topic matter.  Dalia Kinsey's book is written specifically for the QTBIPOC community.  It discusses the marginalization and discrimination that QTBIPOC people face in wellness spaces.  While I am cis-gendered and white, I realize that this is an important topic and one that deserves a spotlight.  I brought Dalia on because we need to be hearing these voices.  You may also recognize Dalia's name.  Dalia Kinsey has been on the show before.  We discussed Body Respect by Lindo Bacon and Lucy Aphramor.  In that discussion, Dalia talked about writing a book and Decolonizing Wellness is the full circle to that discussion!  I was sent a digital copy of the book and it is truly spectacular.  Here are a few of the things we discussed:The full circle momentWhy this book is importantWriting about traumaYou can't buy your way out of racismRacism is everywhereQTBIPOC stress and why it is harmfulThe problem with Gone with the WindCentering yourself and honouring your emotionsWhat decolonizing wellness meansThe importance of helping people answer, "but how?" when it comes to self-lovePositive thinking has its limitsWhat transformation does this book support?What allies can get out of this bookKeep reading everyone!Dalia's LinksDalia's websiteDecolonizing WellnessFat Girl Book Club LinksYour Better Body Image ChecklistFB groupPatreonFat Girl Book Club Pod IG

Hello, and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!Today, I am so so thrilled to be chatting with Ragen Chastain, who is a professional speaker and writer, trained researcher, and co-author of The HAES Health Sheets. Ragen is also a multi-certified health and fitness professional, and a queer fat woman. Ragen, thank you so much for being here!RagenThanks for having me. I love your work so much. I’m giddy as a school girl! VirginiaRagen and I have been in each other’s orbits for a very long time. We were talking about something that we worked on where the website doesn’t even exist anymore. RagenVirginia gave me my very first paid freelance work in this space. She was leaving a platform and recommended me, so she’s been supporting my work, and just be an awesome leader in her own right, for a long time.VirginiaThat’s very lovely of you to say. When I first found your work in the mid-2000s you were extremely patient with my learning curve. For folks who don’t know, Ragen created the beloved fat activism blog Dances With Fat. She is now writing a Substack called Weight and Healthcare. So let’s start with that, Ragen. You have this amazing blog, you’ve been doing it forever, you have, I don’t even know, 1000 posts there. What inspired you to also say I need a newsletter?RagenI started Dances With Fat in 2009. There are a little over 1800 posts on there now. In the same year, I started doing talks for healthcare professionals around working with higher weight patients: Best practices, weight, stigma, weight science, health care. I wrote about that on Dances With Fat, but recently I’ve started to do more of that work and to do it at a higher level, and when I’m talking with a VP of a major healthcare group, sending them to Dances with Fat is not ideal, even though I’m very proud of that blog. It’s not quite the the thing that they’re looking for. I knew about Substack and I knew about Burnt Toast, so I reached out to Virginia, who helped give me a sense of how Substack worked. It seemed like a really good platform for this type of work. I got a little logo made from Toni Tails, a little researcher Ragen icon, and then put together some of the posts from Dances With Fat that were classics. Now I’m going to be writing new stuff, as well. VirginiaI sort of love the idea of healthcare CEOs going to Dances With Fat. It gives me a lot of joy. But it’s a smart activism strategy to have it all in one place. We’re recording this, I should say, right after your first launch week. So you’ve been putting up a lot of pieces that I will be linking to forever. You are covering these really fundamental questions that can be kind of exasperating, like, “This question is coming up again?” But for people who are new to challenging this huge paradigm, you do have to start with these fundamental questions and grapple with stuff. One question people often ask is, “Isn’t obesity a disease?” So, walk us through it, Ragen.RagenThis is something that has been coming up more and more, this idea that just existing in a fat body is a chronic lifelong health condition for which people should get treatment. This has been pushed for a while now by people who sell dangerous and expensive “treatments” for weight loss. I first started seeing it happening in the most insidious way, with organizations that claim to be advocacy organizations—like the Obesity Action Coalition—but that are actually well-funded by diet drug manufacturers and weight loss surgery purveyors. For the diet drugs, for example, their product doesn’t work long term. People gain the weight back as soon as they go off the drugs. So the drug companies say, “Oh, well, it’s a chronic and lifelong condition, then we can just keep them on the drugs forever,” which is exactly what Novo Nordisk is doing, and why they’re pushing this so hard right now. It also expands their market to every fat person alive. That helps them with what is their golden goose, which is insurance coverage. They can’t get insurance to cover these things because they’re expensive and because they don’t work. So by saying, “Oh, well, it’s because you haven’t let us do it long enough,” they are expanding their market. But that it doesn’t make any sense, and here’s why: Thin people get all the same health issues that fat people do. So, being thin can neither be a sure preventative nor a sure cure. That’s just not how that works. This idea that if fat people experience a health problem more often than thin people, then obviously their body size is the problem and making them thinner is the solution is not a science-based conclusion. We have to look at what are the confounding variables that could be causing this? And in this case, weight cycling, weight stigma, and healthcare inequalities are well researched for their negative impacts on fat people’s health. And this idea of fat being a chronic condition increases those three things. I want to be super clear, there is no shame in having a health condition. There is no shame in seeking treatment. The shame here is trying to make simply existing a pathologized condition for which people can sell dangerous treatments that risk people’s lives for an outcome that isn’t shown to be positive. It’s actually shown to be harmful a lot of the time. So, the AMA studied this. They had their Committee on Science of Public Health study whether or not being fat should be a disease and the committee came back and said no. And the AMA said, “Okay, well, thanks for your time, but we’re gonna go ahead and declare it a disease anyway.” VirginiaI just want people to really take that in. The American Medical Association’s committee that was asked to study that question, should we medicalize weight higher body weights, said no, the evidence does not support that. And the AMA said, Okay, so we’re gonna do it. RagenYeah, it’s a “let me just take a minute to bang my head on the desk and then I’ll complete this post that I’m writing” sort of situation.It’s important because this seems so science-y and medical-y, right? BMI is an equation and that’s math and math is science. We have these words like “obesity” that pathologize body size, and that can sound really legitimate, right? But then you start digging and learn that Body Mass Index is just a complicated ratio of weight and height that is racist in its origins. Sabrina String’s Fearing the Black Body and Da'Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast are books I recommend to everyone to read about this and other racism and body size intersections. The term obesity comes from a Latin word meaning “to eat until fat.” This is not science. It’s a term that was created to pathologize bodies. It was invented for that purpose. The AMA saying, “Oh, yes, this is this constitutes a chronic health condition or disease,” sounds very science-y until you find out that the actual science had to be ignored to make that happen.VirginiaYes and this “chronic lifelong condition” we’re talking about, the treatments that they are pushing actually exacerbate the condition, because the condition is living with weight stigma, living with social inequities around health care, all of these other issues that these treatments further. Fat is not a chronic lifelong health condition.RagenIt really isn’t. It’s gotten out that intentional weight loss interventions fail the vast majority of the time. The majority of the time weight loss has the opposite of the intended effect, right? People gain back all of their weight and up to 66% of people gain back more than they lost. But the response wasn’t, “Hey, there’s a mountain of evidence that shows that there are better ways to support the health of fat people than trying to make them lose weight.” The suggestion was, “Well, then let’s do it harder, and more and more dangerously.” And that’s what we’re seeing with the pharmaceuticals. That’s what we’re seeing with the surgery. We’re getting healthcare for fat people based on the premise that it is acceptable to kill fat people in an effort to make them thin.VirginiaAnd yet they’re saying we need to get insurance coverage for these things, even though they don’t work. They frame that as an example of the stigma. They’re like, “Look, it’s so misunderstood that the insurance companies won’t even pay for these treatments that these people desperately need.” They don’t see the inherent disconnect there. RagenI’m going to say they aggressively don’t see the disconnect, possibly negligently, purposefully don’t see it. They’re saying, “We don’t want to stigmatize fat people, we just want to eradicate them from the earth and make sure no more ever exist.” That’s not an anti-stigma message. It’s a profitable one. One of the things that frustrates me is the way that they are co-opting the rhetoric of anti-weight stigma, which the fat liberation community has spent so long trying to get out there, and then using that to sell even more dangerous intentional weight loss methods. It is super gross.They are creating weight stigma and then selling their dangerous product as a “solution.” It’s this idea that if you don’t want to be oppressed, you should change yourself to suit your oppressors.VirginiaThat’s what I want my kids to learn: Make the bully like you better.RagenGive them your lunch money, and maybe they’ll stop beating you up! It’s not a perfect comparison, obviously, but as someone who is both queer and fat and who came out in the mid-90s in Texas, I see parallels between that and this idea of just doing whatever dangerous thing you need to do to make yourself straight, so that you don’t experience homophobia; this idea of changing yourself to move yourself out of the oppressed category, rather than fighting oppression. I spent years fighting my body on behalf of weight stigma. Weight stigma is real and weight stigma does real harm, including to me, but now I fight weight stigma on behalf of my body.VirginiaThat’s a really helpful framing. You took one for the team by taking on one of the most common and irritating troll comments around fat activism: That all these fat people are a drain on the system because they’re costing us so much money in terms of tax dollars in health care. This is an argument that hits me really personally, not around weight, but I have a daughter with a chronic heart condition. I wrote a piece for Slate about the fact that we had $3 million in medical bills before she turned three years old. That’s why universal health care is essential, to help families avoid destroying themselves financially to save their children. The number one troll response I got was: “She’s a drain on the system. Some kids aren’t meant to live.”RagenIn the piece I tackle that from two aspects: The reality and then if it were true that fat people are this drain on the system. The first thing I always do when somebody comes at me with this “my tax dollars” argument is I say, “Well, I want to see your yes/no tax list.” They say, “What yes/no tax list?” And I say, “Oh, the one that shows all the things your taxes pay for broken down into what you do and don’t want to pay for, and the interventions you’re involved in for everything you don’t want to pay for.” This isn’t about their tax dollars. This is about trying to find a justification for their fat bigotry. This is what they’ve arrived at that people sort of find acceptable. Like, “Oh, well, I’m paying for their health care.” But that’s what civilized societies do, right? I am paying for the health care of people who jumped out of helicopters wearing skis and people whose attempts to climb mountains are dramatically unsuccessful. I want to do that. Anytime you say, “Okay, this group of people who we can identify by sight is a drain on society and we should eradicate them to make things cheaper for everyone,” you have gone down a bad bad road. This is a straight up eugenics argument. We have to really recognize that. I find that people who want to say this about me don’t want other people to be doing it to them. Whether they are a raw foods vegan or a keto or paleo person, they believe that they’re right, and they are not interested in other points of view. This is where it really starts to break down. Who gets to decide for all of us? If somebody finds that, for example, a raw food vegan diet is the most healthy, do we all have to do that? VirginiaAnd do we all have to do that in order to access healthcare? What do we owe in order to access healthcare?RagenExactly. This is a really dangerous argument that’s being made by people flippantly, in many cases, just to justify discriminating against fat people, just to justify their weight bigotry. They don’t follow it to the end of where that goes. So that’s really dangerous. And also, fat people pay taxes, too. My taxes go to fund a government war on “obesity” that makes my life terrible and has negative impacts on my health. In general, this argument, when you scratch the surface even a little bit, just becomes a thin veil for fat bigotry that is unsupportable by any kind of evidence.VirginiaAnd ableism! It’s saying that the only people worthy of health care are people who are making virtuous choices that we approve of or who won the genetic lottery and don’t really need health care. What strikes me when it’s levied against fat folks is that it’s often because people are blaming people for their body size and assuming that it’s your lifestyle that led to this, as opposed to the fact that people just come in different body sizes. With something like my daughter, you can’t say, “The baby’s responsible for her heart condition, but we still don’t want to pay for it.” Either way, it becomes this ableist thing to say some lives are more valuable because they have this genetic luck. RagenThere are a lot of places where the intersections of ableism and healthism and fatphobia come together, and this is certainly one. One of the things that is also frustrating is that the idea of body size as a choice is obviously really problematic, but even if we believed that that was true, also a choice is playing sports, which cost billions of dollars in sports injuries every year that are completely unnecessary. Research shows that moderate walking gives us the health benefits that can come out of movement, so nobody needs to be playing sports.VirginiaI love this so much as someone who just hates sports.RagenI’m someone who loves sports and who does ridiculous fitness-y things. Just to be super clear, health and fitness, by any definition, is not an obligation, not a barometer of worthiness, not entirely within our control. There is this good fatty / bad fatty thing, so I always want to be clear that completing a marathon or having a Netflix marathon are morally equivalent activities. I’ve done both, so I can tell you for sure. So, it’s not about that, but I enjoy fitness. I’m also aware that when you go to a triathlon or when you watch the CrossFit Games and people have an exoskeleton of physio tape, that’s a lot of injuries that people don’t need to have in their lives, but they’re choosing that lifestyle. Shaq got knee surgery even though he for sure caused his knee problem and was going right back to the lifestyle that caused it. The NFL was created to risk people’s short and long term mental and physical health in the hopes that one day their team will score enough points to get a shiny piece of jewelry. You’re allowed to do that, but let’s not act like it prioritizes health because it doesn’t. This is a whole group of people purposefully not prioritizing their health and the average player is broke by two years out of the league. VirginiaAnother piece I love is where you break down why diets fail. A line that really jumped out to me, in your piece, is “the entire basis of prescribing weight loss for greater health is built on the decidedly unscientific premise that if we make fat people look like thin people, they will have the same health outcomes.” RagenWhen I did my original literature review of weight loss, looking for the best diet, I was still in diet culture, but my background is research methods and statistics and I’d never really researched this. I had been yo-yo dieting for years. I decided to read every study and break it down and find the best diet. What I found was that, as you said, there wasn’t a single study were more than a tiny fraction of people were succeeding at long term, significant weight loss. The thing that really blew me away was that there wasn’t a single study that showed that the people who were successful had better out health outcomes or similar health outcomes to thin people. That study doesn’t exist, in large part because there aren’t enough people who are successful to commission such a study.VirginiaIt’s hard to do research on unicorns.RagenThe National Weight Control Registry tried it, they’ve got 10,000 successes since 1994. There have been over a billion attempts, but okay. What they found were just some commonalities among outliers. 98% of the people who have lost 30 pounds and kept it off for a year ate breakfast. They don’t know how many of the other billion also ate breakfast. VirginiaA lot of us eat breakfast without successfully losing weight. RagenHad I turned in the study plan of the National Weight Control Registry research in my freshman year research methods class, the dean would have been telling me, “There are a lot of majors here and I think you should choose another one because you don’t understand this at a pretty basic level.” We know that cis male pattern baldness is highly correlated with cardiac incidents. So it would be like if they stopped there and said, “We have to get these people to grow hair” And when their initial attempts didn’t work, they were like, “We need more dangerous ways to grow hair! Drugs and surgeries and a war on baldness!” That is exactly what they did when it came to weight and health. They simply stopped and those who didn’t stop are getting ignored. Lucy Aphramor did an incredible paper about the validity of the research within dietetic articles. It’s a great piece and I recommend it for people who are trying to look into this. VirginiaI’m thinking of a doctor I saw when I was six months postpartum and my baby wasn’t sleeping through the night. The doctor was concerned about my weight. She was like, “Oh, well, I walked an hour a day when I had a newborn.” And I was like, “That’s nice for you, but I have a job and two children and I don’t have an hour to walk. If I had an hour to walk, I would sleep.” It’s just not realistic. A friend of mine was just telling me that she’s pursuing treatment for various medical conditions and the guy was like, “Intermittent fasting will solve all your problems.” And she’s like, “I am parenting and working full time, during a pandemic. I have two chronic conditions. Starvation is not a great way for me to go.” The way that diet and fatphobia show up in the healthy habits conversation feels really problematic to me. It ends up becoming another form of shame and stigma. What can we do, as patients, to advocate for ourselves in these conversations? RagenOne way to go is to try to bypass it. My magic question is, “What would you recommend to a thin person in this situation?” Often that bypasses some of the fatphobia and some of the recommending of healthy habits just because they believe if you did them, you would lose weight. I was at a regular physical with a new doctor and at the end he said, “I just need you to do something for me and it’s going to be so hard. So hard. But if you can do it, it is going to change your life.” And he said, “I just need you to start walking ten minutes a day.” And to his credit, ten minutes a day is reasonable! He didn’t say you have to walk an hour, like your doctor said. But I was training for my first marathon and I had done eighteen miles the night before. So I told him that and said, “I’d be glad to do ten minutes a day because I’m going to claw back a lot of time that way, but I don’t think it’s going to meet my goals at all.” And he said, “Look, you don’t have to lie about it if you’re not going to do it.” So one thing to always know is that this isn’t your fault. This shouldn’t be happening. You can’t make a doctor practice ethical, evidence-based medicine. I also teach ego management techniques—because I live in LA, I can fire a doctor a day, and I will, there there are tons of them around—but if someone lives in a rural area and there’s only one doctor, they have different options. So you can say things like, “oh, I’m actually already doing a weight loss diet, and I’ve lost some weight, but it hasn’t really helped.” This doesn’t have to be true, by the way. Then you say, “What would you do for a thin person? Let’s try that as well.” Like, “Sure, I’m gonna take this diet advice you’re giving me and I can’t wait to put food in baggies of certain caloric amounts. I’m super excited. But in the meantime my cousin had this and she was given this medication.” When a thin person gets an evidence based treatment for their symptoms and a fat person gets a diet, it delays them getting that evidence based treatment for who knows how long. Probably forever, because that diet isn’t gonna work. So, unless the doctor says, “Okay, this isn’t working, I’ll give you the treatment,” it can delay treatment forever. The person maybe doesn’t go back. This is just one of the ways that these healthcare inequalities impact fat people’s health. Just to be clear, don’t do the diet. And I also want to be clear that lying to your healthcare practitioner is not ideal. Ideally, you wouldn’t need to do that. The fact is that weight stigma in healthcare forces fat people to make some really difficult choices that we shouldn’t have to make. This is one of them. In the past when I needed care and was not been able to get it, I said, “I already lost 75 pounds. It hasn’t helped at all. What else is there? What else do you have?” That was, in that moment, effective. Suddenly I’m somebody who is compliant and deserves ethical, evidence-based care. But what they recommended was also recommendable ten minutes before, when I was just fat. Our choices are often not ideal.VirginiaIt’s frustrating because you are then stuck needing to play into that “good fatty” stereotype. But if that gets you the treatment you need and it’s a way to preserve your mental health through the shitty ordeal, then it’s worth doing.RagenA lot of privilege goes into this too. Not just good fatty privilege, but like as a white, cisgender, currently able-bodied, currently neurotypical person. For those with multiple marginalizations, for those who are higher weight, these solutions are less effective because of intersectional oppression and because of the greater oppression that higher weight people face. That’s a your-mileage-may-vary-due-to-oppression -situation.VirginiaThe HAES health sheet website that you’ve put together, is a phenomenal resource for folks. Ragen worked with Dr. Louise Metz and Tiana Dodson, who are amazing as well. They’ve put together this whole library of different health conditions and information on the weight inclusive approach to this health condition, as opposed to the weight-loss-centered approach that many doctors take. If you’re preparing for a medical encounter, this is a great place to go and prep yourself for what’s to come. So we’re gonna wrap up with our recommendation segment. It can be about a product anything and experience you’ve had recently so, Regan, what have you got for us?RagenI have for you Latoya Shauntay Snell’s Running Fat Chef podcast. Latoya Shauntay Snell is this incredible, Black, fat, disabled athlete and activist. She put together this podcast with different athletes talking about the intersections of weight stigma and fitness in the athletic world and how to overcome that. I love all of her work, and her podcast is incredible.VirginiaThat sounds phenomenal. I will definitely be subscribing and downloading immediately. That’s an awesome recommendation. Mine is a little more out of left field, given the whole context of our conversation, but very much in the field for the context of my life right now. It is a parenting book I’m finding very helpful called Why Is My Child in Charge? by Claire Lerner. If you have a preschooler or a toddler who is often trying to be in charge of your life this book is great. I am not a big fan of parenting writing, which is weird to say since I get labeled as parenting writer, but it’s true. Melinda Wenner Moyer, who’s a friend and parenting writer I love, actually loaned me her copy because I was texting her about various tantrums happening in the house. Lerner frames parenting as understanding that you cannot control your child’s behavior. So your job is not to persuade them to agree with every rule you make or to get them to change their minds about stuff, but actually to keep providing the framework they need to be loved and nurtured without needing to stay up an hour past bedtime and ruin your life.It actually applies to a lot, like what we were just talking about with doctors, you can’t change their minds either. It’s a useful message for going through life. I’m not here to change other people’s behavior. I’m just here to set my boundaries and set the framework I need to function. It’s been very helpful for me with a certain four year old at the moment. (Virginia Note: I finished the book after recording this episode and sadly, cannot recommend the chapter on mealtimes. But the rest is still great!)RagenI feel like I need to read it for my little Maltese. We named him after three drag queens and he acts like it. Don’t name your dog after three drag queens.VirginiaWe also have a dog whose behavior I cannot control, but I can control the framework. Alright Ragen, where can Burnt Toast fans find more of your work?RagenSo my newsletter is Weight and Health Care. You had mentioned the HAES Health Sheets and then Dances with Fat. I also do a monthly workshop and the one coming up is on dealing with fatphobia at the holidays. We will be talking a lot about how we can’t control their people’s behavior but we can control our reactions and boundary setting. If you go to Dances with Fat, you’ll also find all of my social media and past writing outside of the healthcare sphere. VirginiaAwesome. Ragen, thank you so much for doing this.Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast! Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. 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

In this episode, Sarah discusses the complexities of weight stigma and the impact weight bias has on our healthcare system. Becca then tells the story of a registered dietitian (!!!) who becomes the leader of a religious weight loss cult. This is the story of Gwen Shamblin Lara and The Weigh Down Diet.Want to learn more about weight stigma? Body respect: What conventional health books get wrong, leave out, and just plain fail to understand about weight by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor. Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating by Christy HarrisonFood Psych podcast with Christy Harrison For all links and references visit our website. This is an independently produced podcast and your support means a lot to us. Please rate, review, and follow wherever you listen! If you would like to contribute to our show, you can do so on our Patreon page. Follow on Instagram and Twitter @unsavorypodcastFollow Sarah & Becca on Instagram @sarahdoesnutrition and @thenutritionjunky This podcast was produced by Geoff Devine at Earworm Radio.Follow Geoff @ewradio on Instagram or visit earwormradio.com. Thanks for listening! Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"There's a huge misconception that when we look at someone its an automatic indicator of how healthy they are"Welcome, Rachel Jones,  one of my former clients who is a stay at home mom of three.  Rachel was diagnosed with a Chronic Kidney Disease (IgA Nephropathy) at the age of 26.  She has also struggled with being overweight almost her whole life and when she met me, her main focus was to get the weight down.  What happened instead was to change her mindset around the obsession over weighing herself and the "number" on the scale.  Today, Rachel's kidney disease is in remission.  She has combined her love of vegan/plant-based cooking and photography after receiving a food photography scholarship.   Rachel is hoping to spread the message that plant-based/vegan eating is accessible, abundant and beautiful.  This is an amazing conversation that could have continued for hours.   It is an episode full of information and pearls of wisdom and Rachel's passion and enthusiasm are infectious.  I know you will love her as much as I do. Resources from this episode: "How Not to Die" by: Dr. Michael Greger, MD  "More than a Body" by: Drs. Lindsay and Lexie Kite, PhD"Body Respect" by: Dr. Linda Bacon, PhD & Dr. Lucy Aphramor, PhD, RDIf you want to connect with Rachel, visit the following:Instagram: @myvegaliciouskitchenIf you want to connect with me, visit the following:Instagram: @plantcenterednutritionWebsite: plantcenterednutrition.usFacebook: Plant Centered Nutrition

This week I wanted to discuss what Unconditional Permission To Rest is and why it's so important for our relationship with exercise. I touch on the fear and guilt that people feel around rest and ways to overcome that. Books mentioned: Body Respect by Lindo Bacon & Lucy Aphramor, Food Isn't Medicine by Dr Joshua Wolrich, Train Happy by Tally Rye Become Train Happy Trouper of the week

Lindo Bacon, Ph.D. is a scientist, author and so much more. They are gifted at taking science and psychology and bringing it forward through storytelling in a way that even I can understand. They have written Body Respect (co-written with Dr. Lucy Aphramor), Health At Every Size, & Radical Belonging. In a world where everyone is either in or out, accepted or not, Dr. Bacon shows us a new way to move and engage the world with Radical Belonging.

Listen in for our first author's special with best-selling author, speaker, scholar, and body liberation advocate, Dr Lindo Bacon. Lindo is the author of Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, co-author alongside Dr Lucy Aphramor of another best-selling book Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, or Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight, and most recently, Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming It for the Better. For more on Lindo: https://lindobacon.com Let us know what you think:  https://twitter.com/car_UWE    To find out more about CAR:  www.uwe.ac.uk/car    Remember, if you found this episode useful, please rate us on Apple Podcasts – it really DOES help.

With guest Shira Lile from Hello Life! Where we talk about: Hello Life, a Cowlitz County organization that provides peer support to people who struggle with eating disorders or negative body image; Contact: hellolifeservices@yahoo.com, helloliferecovery.org, or text or call 971.770.0680 Love Your Body by Jessica Sanders; The Self-Love Revolution by Virgie Tovar; Body Respect by Lindo Bacon and Lucy Aphramor;   Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch; The Body is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor; Radical Belonging by Lindo Bacon; Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison; The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner; Shrill by Lindy West; Dietland by Sarai Walker; Land Whale by Jes Baker; Embody by Connie Sobczak; Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings; What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon; Untamed by Glennon Doyle; Daring Greatly by Brené Brown; Behind the Before and After:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTY_hCTmI98 https://bookriot.com/best-body-positive-books/ and more!

There's no-one on the planet like my awesome friend Dr Lindo Bacon! It's been more than 4 years since we got to hang out drinking wine in a hot tub in the Napa Valley, and even though we can't see each other in person, I am SO HAPPY to kick off the new year and a new season of the All Fired Up podcast with them! Do not miss this fiercely loving wisdom from Lindo, who has NAILED the problem with self-love and is calling for a revolution - not of self-care but of BELONGING! We don't need to fall in love with our bodies - we need to work on healing our entire society, we need radical change - EQUALITY, and JUSTICE, and we need to ALLOW DIVERSITY! Basically, if all humans are welcome - if all humans belong - we can heal. Lindo has come a long way since their first book Health At Every Size, and we had an awesome conversation about how their perspective has changed - and all about their fabulous new book "Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better). This is a not-to-be-missed episode!! Show Transcript   LOUISE: Thank you so much for coming on the show, Lindo. Welcome. LINDO: Oh, I’ve always wanted to do this, Louise. It’s always such a pleasure to hang out with you. LOUISE: I know! LINDO: So, I can’t believe we haven’t done this sooner. LOUISE: I can’t believe it either, but I’m so excited we’re talking about your new book as the reason to have you here. But I’m just…I’ve got so much to say and talk about, but it is so awesome to get to chat to you. But, you know, before we kick off…it’s been like over four years since…because we hung out in like, live, when I came in 2016 which was just before Trump got elected. LINDO: Oh, is that the timing? Yeah? LOUISE: Yeah! And now I’m talking to you just a couple of days after that whole period’s ended and we’ve got a new president. Isn’t that weird? LINDO: It is. I remember just relaxing in a hot tub with you in the Napa Valley, which is wine country in California, talking about the election. LOUISE: I know, I know, right? What a wild memory now, thinking of…the fact that I can’t even get on a plane. LINDO: Yeah, so…present tense, what are we talking about today? LOUISE: Yes, so I want to know what is firing you up at the moment? LINDO: What’s firing me up…lately I’ve been listening to all this ‘body positivity’ and what’s getting me is that everybody is preaching this ‘self-love’ message. And self-love, yeah, it’s a gorgeous thing and I wish it for everybody. But there’s this idea that that’s what’s going to save us, and we have to do all the internal work on ourselves. And it makes the whole ‘body liberation’ journey very individual. And that’s not what it’s about, because we can love ourselves fully and completely, and then we walk into a world where people tell us there’s something wrong with us. Whether it’s that we’re too fat, or we’re denied an opportunity because of our skin colour. So, I want people to know that as beautiful as self-love is, it’s not enough to save us. We also have to be working on social change. Because we’re individuals in a context, and if we forget the context then we end up blaming ourselves that we can’t love ourselves, and then it becomes problematic. But it’s hard to love ourselves in a culture that doesn’t support us. LOUISE: Absolutely. LINDO: That’s what’s on my mind right now. LOUISE: Yeah, this is so absolutely necessary, and this is very much your book. LINDO: Can I tell you a very funny thing? I was very proud to see that Radical Belonging, my book, is selling well. And it’s jumped up on Amazon’s best seller list. LOUISE: Really? LINDO: Yeah, it’s near the top of Amazon’s vest seller list. But here’s the thing, it’s the self-help best seller list. And I explicitly have a chapter in there that’s titled something like ‘why self-help is not enough’. You know? Just trying to get away from that. But it makes me laugh, I’ll take it, you know? I’m glad the book is getting around, and I’m glad the book is getting around to people who are interested in self-help. So that it can help to expand their horizons a bit. LOUISE: It helps them hopefully to abandon self-help and start changing the world. Oh wow. You have led this whole…I wouldn’t say body positivity, I’d talk about Health at Every Size®, HAES®. You’ve done three books, you’ve done ‘Health at Every Size’, which a lot of people refer to as one of the original textbooks of HAES®. And you did Body Respect, which was co-authored with Lucy Aphramor, and then Radical Belonging is your third book. And like all of us, it’s such a process, this HAES® perspective. I’m interested to ask you how things have changed for you since you first wrote HAES®, up until now. That’s a big question. 15:48 LINDO: It is. I’ll keep it short, because there’s a short and easy narrative that ties the three books. And that’s that…first of, you didn’t imply this, but I want to just announce it for the audience because there’s a big misunderstanding that people tend to think that I started the Health at Every Size® movement, and I did not. Health at Every Size® was around long before I had ever entered the scene. And my book, I think, helped to popularise it quite a bit. And so, that’s probably why I got that reputation. Anyway, that first ‘Health at Every Size’ book, I’m still proud of it. I think it’s an important book and I get a lot of feedback that it’s changed people’s lives and given professionals a totally new framework for approaching weight. So, I am still proud of it. But in retrospect, what I see is that it was very much a self-help book. It really put the emphasis on individual change. And all that stuff is valuable, but there are also a lot of limitations to it. I mean, one is that it means it’s a very privileged book because there are a lot of people that just don’t have access to being able to eat nutritiously and eat the foods that they want when they want, and they might have a job that doesn’t give them food breaks except during prescribed times so they can’t really respond to body cues, or they’ve got to learn how to make adjustments to that. Or, you know, they might be living in poverty and have difficulty taking care of themselves in that way. So anyway, there’s a lot of class privilege that’s involved in being able to make individual choices. Another problem is that we know that that stuff doesn’t play that huge of a role in our health anyway. I’m not going to deny that eating nd exercise don’t play some role in our health, they do. But research shows that all of our health behaviours combined probably only play 25% of the role in our health. LOUISE: And that’s mind-blowing. LINDO: It is. And the really big thing about your health is about how you’re treated in the world. You know? What we call the social determinants of health. So, I regret in some ways that I wrote a book that was so catered to privileged people without knowing it, and put the emphasis on things…well, I mean, it is helpful for people to learn the skills and strategies of self-help if they can, but not to put that stuff in context also means that there’ll be a lot of self-blame when people don’t get all the health results that they’re hoping for. LOUISE: Yeah, so if you can’t do it, then that’s your fault? LINDO: And if you don’t get a result… LOUISE: If you’re health’s not improving you must be doing something wrong. LINDO: Yeah. I mean, if you still have diabetes after changing your diet and exercising, you’re doing something wrong. Or even if you get, you have diabetes and you’re not eating so nutritious, right? I still don’t think there should be self-blame. Anyway, that’s why I was really happy to have the opportunity to kind of approach it again. And the second time I worked with Lucy Aphramor and we made all those connections, and we started talking about the interplay between the social determinants of health – things like racism, and sexism, and ablism, and how they intersect with our health and our opportunities to change our life. LOUISE: Yeah, that was an incredible book and an incredible change in emphasis from the first, because I came to your training in Seattle… LINDO: Yeah, I remember that. It was the first time we met. LOUISE: Yeah. It was like, five days of diving into all of that, the social determinants of health and thinking about oppression and thinking about stuff I had never thought about. And when I came home from that trip…I had an online program at the time, like a…to help people, based on HAES® principles. And when I came home from that trip, I literally took the whole thing down and shredded it and did it again. And came up with Untrapped, which was a co-work with all of the other people who helped, because of that, that shift in emphasis…and it was mind-blowing, and just phenomenal. 20:30 LINDO: It’s interesting too how much it resonates with people, because you’re telling them ‘your story mattes’. Who you are plays a role, like, your history and what’s happened to you plays a huge role in your attitudes towards exercise, your attitudes towards your body, and how you’re treated in the world is just so, so important. Once people start to see that they’re seen, it opens up possibilities for them to come up with an individualised approach to how they want to live their life, right? Rather than following somebody else’s rules. LOUISE: Yeah, and it also sort of opens the door for social justice and really sort of taking seriously things like inequity and oppression and trauma. Here in Australia, the Aboriginal population have diabetes rates much, much higher than the white population, and of course the weight science researchers like to talk about ‘that’s because of the size of our Aboriginal population, we need to make everyone lose weight and it’s going to go away, it’ll be magic”. It’s just such bullshit to think of things that… LINDO: That’s the first thing they say, is they blame it on weight. And then the second thing they tell people to do is to diet and exercise. Even that has been shown to have limited effect on changing diabetes outcomes. But you know, what the real research is showing is provide people with more opportunity, so they have higher paying jobs, so they’re not so stressed out. Treat them better. Stop oppression. That’s how we make a dent in diabetes. LOUISE: Yeah, right? So, what a huge realisation that maybe the solution here isn’t with individual behaviour but with social change. LINDO: Right. Which again, si not to suggest that individual behvaiour change doesn’t do anything. It does. But to change the emphasis a little bit, to give people more agency in the world. LOUISE: Yeah, and more respect. LINDO: Yeah. LOUISE: Which was the name of the book, Body Respect. LINDO: Yeah. So, it was really fun to have the opportunity to write that book with Lucy Aphramor. That book was meant to be short, to the point, very concise to that people could really see the arguments clearly. And we didn’t do nearly as much storytelling as I did in my first book. This was a very different book. It was meant to really sell to people this idea of what we called in the book ‘Health at Every Size’. I think there’s still some debate as to whether that’s what people were calling Health at Every Size® at the time, or whether that was just ideas that we wanted to be Health at Every Size®. LOUISE: Interesting. LINDO: But anyway. I’m not so sure about that. But regardless, the book to me was a really important transition, and much of what’s in the book, believe it or not, I’m still very much behind. You know? I think it really…it’s last…maybe four or five years since we’ve published it. I think we’ve really grown into the ideas in Body Respect more. LOUISE: Yeah. As a HAES® community, you mean? LINDO: Yes. Exactly. And then the progression as far as the third book goes, there’s very little emphasis on…I don’t use the term Health at Every Size® often. LOUISE: Yeah, I’ve noticed. LINDO: And in part that’s because…I think there’s so many other people right now who are helping to define and grow Health at Every Size®, and I want to step back a little bit and let other people…or not ‘let’, but so that other people can emerge and there can be wider perspective. And I also don’t feel like I want to be responsible for a movement. Like, I’d rather just talk about what’s important to me and not be so closely assigned responsibility around something that is so much bigger than me and is not me. 25:04 LOUISE: Yeah, there’s so many voices and so many people and so many perspectives that need to be heard. LINDO: Right. And Health at Every Size® is a community idea. And also, I’m not so interested in physical health as much. LOUISE: Interesting. LINDO: Like, yeah, I think it’s important, but it’s not my focus. My focus is more on love and community. Maybe I should have said that in terms of what’s firing me up. I think we’re recognising more than ever how much we need each other, and that’s what I want to do. I want to forge those bonds. I find that the more that I connect with my vulnerability and expose myself in the world, the more I get seen by everyone and I can find my pockets where I get respected and valued, and that’s what feeds me. Having that kind of support, of unity. And it’s not so much that I get seen, but the richness of seeing other people too, in all their uniqueness. LOUISE: All of their states of health. Yeah. LINDO: So, belonging seems to be the thing that’s captured me more, and why I wrote about that in my last book. LOUISE: Yeah, belonging. And it’s such a beautiful word. LINDO: It is. LOUISE: What’s…what does it mean to you? What does belonging mean? LINDO: Belonging to me is about that unconditional love. It meant that I can expose the stuff that I might not be so proud of in myself, and yet I’m still loved and validated and seen and appreciated, and people will sit with me through that, right? And that gives me opportunity to make change, or not. But that’s a very different idea to what our culture offers up to people. Like, it says…it kind of sets normal standards and it tells you that you belong if you match up with that. If you’re thin enough, for example, you belong. If you’re cisgender, you belong. And so many people feel that they don’t have the same ability or opportunity ot be appreciated in the world. LOUISE: So, it’s like diet culture would say there’s conditional belonging. LINDO: Right, right. LOUISE: And you’re saying radical belonging, we all belong. LINDO: Right, radical. LOUISE: Radical, meaning like, we don’t need to fit into boxes. LINDO: Right. So, it’s two things there. It’s about not needing to fit into boxes. What that means is we take on social justice issues, because we have to value everybody in this world. And then the second thing is just recognising that humans are vulnerable, we get scared, we make mistakes and inviting all of that humanity into the picture too. LOUISE: Yeah, welcoming that. LINDO: Yeah. LOUISE: It is, it’s so beautiful. This book is so beautiful. It sort of fills you up. I’m interested, what led you to write Radical Belonging? LINDO: When I started writing it, it wasn’t because I had this idea in mind of a book I wanted to get out. In fact, it actually started just as a personal journal. And at first, I was basically just writing my gender identity, and looking at the obstacles over the years, how I overcame them. And I’d say that that first writing was something that was very painful, and it certainly wasn’t something that I wanted exposed to the world, because it was all about my pain. But when I looked at it, I also realised that I’ve developed to much resilience over the years. The stuff that I got japed for when I was a kid…my parents hated that I liked to wear clothes that were meant for boys, they wanted me to wear dresses. When I wore dresses, I always just felt like I was doing drag, right? My parents always just shamed me for that, saw it as something that was really wrong. Never could I go out in public dressed the way I wanted to dress. LOUISE: That’s awful. LINDO: Right. And I have to realise that I got through all of that stuff, you know? Maybe, sure I had to develop an eating disorder to figure out how to…you know, food got me through some of those difficult times. LOUISE: But that’s coping strategy, right? It did get you through. LINDO: Exactly, right. So, I was able to kind of rewrite the book and look at how I saved myself, and not just through the eating disorder but how I learned other skills to kind of manage discomfort, so I no longer needed the eating disorder or the substance abuse that I also went through when I was younger. And recognising that I had developed so many skills to kind of transform the challenges that I was given. And then I went back, and I looked at the book, and was able to look at it through my scientific lens. To recognise that hey, there’s a biological reason why I was reaching for food. And I could recognise the way that trauma kind of lodges in your body, or in my body. You know? And how that participated in a distrust of other people, and hypervigilance that I kind of carried with me in adulthood and kind of a… 31:08 LOUISE: That’s the legacy of trauma, that hypervigilance. That fracturing of trust. LINDO: And that inability to kind of sit with discomfort. So, I could kind of put the science to it and show how trauma played out physically in my body and resulted in a lot of behaviours. And then I could also look at the part two to that, how I developed strategies that kind of rewired  my brain so that I got better at tolerating things, and didn’t have to jump to coping behaviours. And I could fill in all of the science for what you can do to kind of save yourself. LOUISE: Yeah, that’s what I love about the title. It’s ‘how to survive and thrive in an unjust world’. So, not just survival. LINDO: Right, and come out happy and having fun. You have difficult times too, but learning how to just accept them and get through them. LOUISE: Resilience is a remarkable thing. Humans are like, we’re pretty tough. LINDO: We can be. But you can always keep getting better at it. LOUISE: Yeah, and that’s what this book is all about. It’ like, how to do that. LINDO: And then the big recognition that I had through all of that is one of the reasons why we develop all of the coping challenges is because we really want to be loved and appreciated by other people. And when we get rejected, it hurts. And so it makes sense that we develop an inauthentic self to kind of protect ourselves in the world. It makes sense that we kind of run away from relationships and get scared. But once you recognise that it’s all about fear of connection, because connection is what saves us. Right? I mean, that’s the irony. We’re scared of something because if we don’t get it, we can’t survive. Right? So the more you can develop the courage to kind of jump into relationships, and be with people, and be vulnerable… LOUISE: And authentic. LINDO: Yeah. LOUISE: And that’s what you’ve done! By writing the book and putting it out there, that’s the ultimate of what you’ve done. LINDO: Yeah, I put myself out there. I showed the world who I was and asked to be seen in the way that I haven’t been seen previously. LOUISE: And I think that’s one of the loveliest things about this book, is that we get to meet you. LINDO: Thanks, that’s sweet. LOUISE: Alongside the science. But the ‘you’, the human, everything that you’ve been through was… LINDO: Thank you for that. And I think that the storytelling in the book and the vulnerability does make it a lot more readable and fun. I think too that one of the things that I was really looking for was using myself so that other people could see themselves, too. And I was really proud when Ijeoma Oluo who wrote the introduction to the book…she was a stranger to me and I just sent her the book and asked her if she’d read it, and it just moved her. And I asked her to write the foreword and…she’s a black woman, she’s an activist and what she said was that in every chapter she was able to see herself. To me, that just made me cry. That was what I was shooting for in the book, to use myself to open up the possibility that other people can see themselves and think about similar stories. And I write other people’s stories into the book too, to help that process along. But it was really beautiful, because Ijeoma had so many different social identities than I do, and yet she saw herself so profoundly there. LOUISE: That’s extraordinary. LINDO: That to me was a marker of success, you know? That I’d been able to somewhat universalise this book across our different social identities. 35:28 LOUISE: Yeah, you do. And you also speak about so many just human things that we don’t really think about. Like, how much avoidance we engage in, for example. Like, if we’re feeling shame about friends, or things that are going on socially, how much we hide. There’s so many little snippets in the book that you can relate to, like “oh, I’ve done that! I’ve done that” and we don’t really hear about this. It’s really human. LINDO: Right, right. LOUISE: What was it like to come out at trans in the book? Because, you know, in your community everybody knows you and knows you as Lindo for a long time. But this book’s just come out. What’s that been like from that perspective? LINDO: Well, it’s a huge relief. It’s interesting to use the word ‘come out’, because… LOUISE: I wasn’t sure what to say. LINDO: I know, and I’m never sure what to say either. Because I’m not sure that my gender identity has ever changed since birth. I think most people are much more gender fluid than I, they’re much more playful about it. But my gender identity has been the same. So, it’s not like there was a ‘coming out’ period, or a change that happened. I think the problem is though that we live in this world where people just assume a gender binary. And so, everybody has tried to put me into this package that was never ‘me’, and except for in childhood when I really tried to be feminine because my parents, it was important to my parents, I never was ‘woman’ that people saw me as. And being genderqueer, it’s not an easy box for people to put you into. People see me and they just make an assumption about who I am. And I think that shifted over time, physically I look a lot different now, but not enough to always push me out of the like, like what people think of in terms of gender presentation. Not enough to necessarily push me out of a category where people are making the assumption…like, making the assumption that I’m a woman. For example, if you’re hearing audio right now and my voice is definitely what most people attribute to ‘woman’, and so on the phone everybody just misgenders me automatically. But anyway. Having this book out, I’m telling people ‘don’t do that’. So, before it made sense to me that people would make the wrong assumption, but now I’m not allowing for that anymore. Like, I’m just out there and asserting myself. So, I guess that just, might feel different. LOUISE: Yeah, and that’s what you’re talking about in the book as well. Not just the act of self-love but acts of social justice and sticking up for yourself. You’ve got many examples in the book of when you’ve tried to do that and make changes, and that’s part of body liberation, right? LINDO: Sure, yeah. LOUISE: Super cool. So, one of the really fascinating bits of the book, from the science perspective, is when you start talking about the brain on trauma, and how experiences of oppression and exclusion particularly actually impacts our brain. Can you talk a bit about that? LINDO: Sure. It was totally fascinating to me to learn that when you experience rejection, that it’s the same areas in your brain light up as when you experience physical pain. LOUISE: Wow. LINDO: Yeah. All these times socially we’re excluded, we’re told we’re not enough, we’re told there’s something wrong with us, we’re told we’re too fat, all of these things lodge in our brain and after a while the brain changes and adapts to this. We call this ‘high allostatic load’, when you’ve had repeated experiences of…I’ll call it trauma, or…actually, why don’t we call it microaggressions. You can read the book to come up with distinctions there. But repeated experiences of microaggressions add up to trauma in your brain, and after a while your body comes to expect all of these things. And what that means is that you’re going to have a higher level of anxiety, be more fearful when you go into different circumstances, because you have experiences of rejection in the past. And people develop a hypervigilance, get depressed, we talked about this a little bit earlier. Your body adapts and this becomes your go-to response, this kind of fear being in the world. And it also contributes to things like Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease risk. Which explains why marginalised people are much more likely to get many chronic diseases and to die earlier than people who are given more social and economic privilege in the world. 41:00 LOUISE: Yeah, that is so important and so overlooked. LINDO: Right, and it’s interesting to see how physical and biological it is. That it’s not that the individual isn’t trying hard enough in the world, it’s that the world is trying to… LOUISE: The world is being hard for the individual. LINDO: I think we’re always kind of focused on the negative stuff, but the amazing thing is that we always have the opportunity to rewire our brain so that we don’t have to be as hypervigilant in the world and distrustful. There are plenty of strategies we can employ that are going to help our brain to sit with discomfort more readily, and to tolerate not knowing things and going into unfamiliar environments, etc. There are a lot of things we can develop, and probably one of the most beautiful and most powerful is that our friendships can help us to develop a physical resilience that’s going to make us more able to handle life when it gets hard, and more happy in the world. LOUISE: So interesting, so connection can help. LINDO: Yeah, connection is probably one of the most important things, and it can help you to feel more safe in the world, so that you’re more able to kind of venture out and take risks. LOUISE: So, it’s really important to find your people. LINDO: It is. And it’s really important to learn how to do vulnerability, right? Sometimes you need to be protected in the world, and that makes sense because the world isn’t safe. But if you can find safe places where you can truly be yourself and you can get appreciation for that, and love for that, the more you can develop that, the more it can give you a sense of peace that’s going to allow you to move more freely and happily through the world. LOUISE: Yeah. And it’s those people, like I’m thinking of…you’re an example of someone who has that. Connection, community, support. And with that resilience, you can write books like you’re written and put them out there and have these conversations. LINDO: I know, and I appreciate that. I know a lot of people couldn’t put this kind of vulnerability out, that it would be too threatening to them. LOUISE: Yeah, if they don’t have a community or a connection. LINDO: I appreciate that I am so bolstered by other people that it allows me…it protects me, it allows me to do this. And I think in some sense that’s why I feel a responsibility to do the kind of work that I do, because I have so much privilege and… LOUISE: But also, in your bubble…not bubble, but in your community, it’s an inclusive community too, right? There’s attention to Black Lives Matter, there’s gender diversity, there’s all those kinds of things. I’m not at all saying that social justice is working over where you live, but there’s efforts and there’s attention and there’s a sense of preparation, and that social change is important as well. LINDO: Right. I mean, my world would be so boring and unimaginative if everybody looked like me and acted like me. And the way we get excitement in your life is having that kind of exposure to people in all their glorious uniqueness. LOUISE: Yeah, we need to build that. LINDO: And it’s interesting, because I wish the larger corporations would recognise how much creativity they’re losing out on by only hiring certain people who fit a certain mould. You know? Like, you can recognise for example that people who are neurodiverse and might…that everybody sees the problem through a different lens that’s going to allow them to have some kind of unique perspective. And I think that corporations would benefit from like, having so many different perspectives to find what really works well in the world, you know? You think about, if you’re not going to hire fat applicants you have so many fewer applicants to choose from. You’re not going to find the best people. 45:45 LOUISE: Yeah. You’ll probably some very hungry people if they’re dieting, too! LINDO: Yeah, so the more we open up to all the different expressions of humanity, it only benefits us. LOUISE: It really does, and that’s such a lovely way of looking at it. We need to be really welcoming diversity in all areas, in all walks of life. It’s a totally different way of thinking. LINDO: And we do it not because it’s the right thing to do, but because there’s also…we benefit from it. It’s not that we’re helping other people… LOUISE: Yeah. It’s like, it’s evolution too, isn’t it? I few get rid of diversity in any ecosystem, it suffers. LINDO: Exactly. LOUISE: Bring in the glorious diversity and see what can happen. Can you tell us the story, because there’s this awesome story you tell in the book about the gym? LINDO: About the gym. Sure. You know, I haven’t read the book in a while, so I’m going to have to remember which of many stories…but I think it was going into the gym on a day that I was feeling particularly irritable. And there was a new guy that was checking everybody in. so, I do my fingerprint ID, I don’t know, maybe it was a phone ID…I don’t remember. Anyway, I guess my name pops up on the screen and he says, “have a good workout, Miss Bacon”. And it just bummed me out. Like, I had…I was going to the gym to kind of get in a better space. And to be hit right away with being misgendered, it just hit me hard and I kind of snapped at him. I don’t remember what I said. And he got all defensive and said, “that’s what the computer told him” and he was blaming it on the computer. LOUISE: The computer! LINDO: And also he couldn’t quite understand, like I looked like a woman to him, he didn’t understand wht he had gotten wrong. And unfortunately, we’re having this dispute and another worker walked up and was more sensitive, and was able to kind of get the guy to back down and explain that you can’t always know somebody’s gender identity by looking at them and we need to be open minded, and helped me through it. But then while I was working out at the gym, I was just obsessing on it. Iw as just so angry. This was just one more time when… LOUISE: it’s not the only thing, it’s another pain. LINDO: Exactly. Like, he triggered a lifetime of feeling misgendered. And it meant that I couldn’t let go of that, and it kind of spun out into somewhat of an anxiety attack. And anyway, I learned form that, right? And one of the ways I took back my power was by complaining at the gym and my…the end result of that was that they actually changed some of their policies, and that helped me to feel more empowered and respected. The fact that people adapt and change… LOUISE: That’s awesome, that’s such a massive change if out of one panic attack that message of pain in your body drove you into action. LINDO: Right. And another funny part of that story is that at first, just me protesting wasn’t getting far enough. So I just got together a few friends and we just made up a fake organisation. We called ourselves something like ‘Social Justice Advocacy Corps’ or something. LOUISE: Oh my God, that’s brilliant. LINDO: And we kind of threatened a social media callout. And I think the fear of something bigger was really what motivated them to listen. LOUISE: Really? Okay. 50:00 LINDO: So, I think that, that’s an important statement. Build communities so you can get support around this. LOUISE: Yeah, create an organisation. LINDO: Exactly, take it…if you can’t do it. LOUISE: Lean in, get a bit of pressure on them, because people these days might not respond to one person, but if you are a representative of an organisation or if you have social media… LINDO: And I think that more and more, they’re recognising that people are angry that trans folks don’t have equal rights. They’re angry at racism. So it now is a liability for a corporation to be seen in that light. LOUISE: Isn’t that cool? It’s no longer cool to be exclusionary and it has to be attended to. LINDO: So, we certainly have a long, long way of change ahead, but I think that the playing field’s a little bit different now. LOUISE: Yeah, well there’s strength in numbers, as you’re saying, and there’s an increased recognition. Isn’t it incredible to think about what the world might look like in another generation with this kind of change? It’s incredibly hopeful. LINDO: And I know that when I was a kid, I wasn’t even able to imagine ‘trans’ because I hadn’t ever seen a trans person that I was aware of. So, it didn’t even enter my mind as a possibility. But that’s not true of this next generation, at least the generation of kids that live in areas of the United Sates surrounded by that kind of imagery… LOUISE: The inclusion, yeah. LINDO: Kids are more able to find their gender identity and recognise it, it doesn’t have to be the one that was assigned to them at birth. There’s just a lot more creativity that’s possible. LOUISE: I know, exactly. I totally agree with that. I think it’s going to be just this source, amazing source of creativity. If people’s brains aren’t always bound up with that trauma and that kind of confusion, trying to stick yourself in a box that doesn’t fit, there’s so much ability to create and evolve. Yeah. There’s going to be so many cool things come out of this. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. Where can we get the book? It’s here in Australia now, I think. LINDO: Oh, it is? That’s exciting, because I think there was a little delay getting it to Australia. LOUISE: Thanks, Covid. LINDO: Covid-related problems. I’m pretty sure people can get it anywhere books are, these days. LOUISE: Yeah. And there’s an Audible version? LINDO: The Audible version comes out on February 15th, so it’s not out yet. LOUISE: But that’s only a few weeks’ time. And are you reading the book? LINDO: I am not. LOUISE: You’re not reading the book, okay. That’s okay. LINDO: But there is a really wonderful narrator, I spent days and days listening to people to come up with the perfect voice. LOUISE: Oh, how did you come up with that? What was the perfect voice for the book? LINDO: Oh, I wanted someone who could radiate compassion at the same time that they had passion, and really could find when to use one and when to use the other. LOUISE: Cool. LINDO: Yeah, there’s someone that’s really amazing that did it, so I feel good about it. LOUISE: That’s so good, I’m a big fan of Audible lately as reading in Covid for some reason has gotten really hard for lots of people. LINDO: I’m the same way, and I’m out going for walks a lot, and I just listen to books. LOUISE: This is a lovely book to listen to whilst walking, I’m definitely going to do that. LINDO: Excellent. Enjoy. Lovely talking with you. LOUISE: Thank you so much, you’re the best. Thanks. Well, I promised to give you an uplifting start to 2021, and there you are. You don’t get much more uplifting than Dr Lindo Bacon. Thank you so much, Lindo, for coming on and sharing your wonderful book and your vision of what we can achieve if we work together and work more on belonging and just how healing that is. Just a wonderful book, wonderful human. Go out and get it, everybody. And if you want to find out more about Lindo and all of the work they’re doing, head to lindobacon.com website or Instagram, @lindobacon, or on twitter @lindobacon. Some wonderful stuff that is coming out from Lindo, and some wonderful community work in relation to this book. So, go check out the website and find out more there. Okay, so we’re come to the end of the first podcast for 2021. I’m really enjoying myself talking to you, and I’m just really glad to be back. And I’m looking forward to our next episode, which will come out in a few weeks’ time. So, look after yourself, everyone. In the meantime, listen to your body. Think critically. Push back against diet culture. Untrap from the crap!    

There's no-one on the planet like my awesome friend Dr Lindo Bacon! It's been more than 4 years since we got to hang out drinking wine in a hot tub in the Napa Valley, and even though we can't see each other in person, I am SO HAPPY to kick off the new year and a new season of the All Fired Up podcast with them! Do not miss this fiercely loving wisdom from Lindo, who has NAILED the problem with self-love and is calling for a revolution - not of self-care but of BELONGING! We don't need to fall in love with our bodies - we need to work on healing our entire society, we need radical change - EQUALITY, and JUSTICE, and we need to ALLOW DIVERSITY! Basically, if all humans are welcome - if all humans belong - we can heal. Lindo has come a long way since their first book Health At Every Size, and we had an awesome conversation about how their perspective has changed - and all about their fabulous new book "Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better). This is a not-to-be-missed episode!! Show Transcript   LOUISE: Thank you so much for coming on the show, Lindo. Welcome. LINDO: Oh, I’ve always wanted to do this, Louise. It’s always such a pleasure to hang out with you. LOUISE: I know! LINDO: So, I can’t believe we haven’t done this sooner. LOUISE: I can’t believe it either, but I’m so excited we’re talking about your new book as the reason to have you here. But I’m just…I’ve got so much to say and talk about, but it is so awesome to get to chat to you. But, you know, before we kick off…it’s been like over four years since…because we hung out in like, live, when I came in 2016 which was just before Trump got elected. LINDO: Oh, is that the timing? Yeah? LOUISE: Yeah! And now I’m talking to you just a couple of days after that whole period’s ended and we’ve got a new president. Isn’t that weird? LINDO: It is. I remember just relaxing in a hot tub with you in the Napa Valley, which is wine country in California, talking about the election. LOUISE: I know, I know, right? What a wild memory now, thinking of…the fact that I can’t even get on a plane. LINDO: Yeah, so…present tense, what are we talking about today? LOUISE: Yes, so I want to know what is firing you up at the moment? LINDO: What’s firing me up…lately I’ve been listening to all this ‘body positivity’ and what’s getting me is that everybody is preaching this ‘self-love’ message. And self-love, yeah, it’s a gorgeous thing and I wish it for everybody. But there’s this idea that that’s what’s going to save us, and we have to do all the internal work on ourselves. And it makes the whole ‘body liberation’ journey very individual. And that’s not what it’s about, because we can love ourselves fully and completely, and then we walk into a world where people tell us there’s something wrong with us. Whether it’s that we’re too fat, or we’re denied an opportunity because of our skin colour. So, I want people to know that as beautiful as self-love is, it’s not enough to save us. We also have to be working on social change. Because we’re individuals in a context, and if we forget the context then we end up blaming ourselves that we can’t love ourselves, and then it becomes problematic. But it’s hard to love ourselves in a culture that doesn’t support us. LOUISE: Absolutely. LINDO: That’s what’s on my mind right now. LOUISE: Yeah, this is so absolutely necessary, and this is very much your book. LINDO: Can I tell you a very funny thing? I was very proud to see that Radical Belonging, my book, is selling well. And it’s jumped up on Amazon’s best seller list. LOUISE: Really? LINDO: Yeah, it’s near the top of Amazon’s vest seller list. But here’s the thing, it’s the self-help best seller list. And I explicitly have a chapter in there that’s titled something like ‘why self-help is not enough’. You know? Just trying to get away from that. But it makes me laugh, I’ll take it, you know? I’m glad the book is getting around, and I’m glad the book is getting around to people who are interested in self-help. So that it can help to expand their horizons a bit. LOUISE: It helps them hopefully to abandon self-help and start changing the world. Oh wow. You have led this whole…I wouldn’t say body positivity, I’d talk about Health at Every Size®, HAES®. You’ve done three books, you’ve done ‘Health at Every Size’, which a lot of people refer to as one of the original textbooks of HAES®. And you did Body Respect, which was co-authored with Lucy Aphramor, and then Radical Belonging is your third book. And like all of us, it’s such a process, this HAES® perspective. I’m interested to ask you how things have changed for you since you first wrote HAES®, up until now. That’s a big question. 15:48 LINDO: It is. I’ll keep it short, because there’s a short and easy narrative that ties the three books. And that’s that…first of, you didn’t imply this, but I want to just announce it for the audience because there’s a big misunderstanding that people tend to think that I started the Health at Every Size® movement, and I did not. Health at Every Size® was around long before I had ever entered the scene. And my book, I think, helped to popularise it quite a bit. And so, that’s probably why I got that reputation. Anyway, that first ‘Health at Every Size’ book, I’m still proud of it. I think it’s an important book and I get a lot of feedback that it’s changed people’s lives and given professionals a totally new framework for approaching weight. So, I am still proud of it. But in retrospect, what I see is that it was very much a self-help book. It really put the emphasis on individual change. And all that stuff is valuable, but there are also a lot of limitations to it. I mean, one is that it means it’s a very privileged book because there are a lot of people that just don’t have access to being able to eat nutritiously and eat the foods that they want when they want, and they might have a job that doesn’t give them food breaks except during prescribed times so they can’t really respond to body cues, or they’ve got to learn how to make adjustments to that. Or, you know, they might be living in poverty and have difficulty taking care of themselves in that way. So anyway, there’s a lot of class privilege that’s involved in being able to make individual choices. Another problem is that we know that that stuff doesn’t play that huge of a role in our health anyway. I’m not going to deny that eating nd exercise don’t play some role in our health, they do. But research shows that all of our health behaviours combined probably only play 25% of the role in our health. LOUISE: And that’s mind-blowing. LINDO: It is. And the really big thing about your health is about how you’re treated in the world. You know? What we call the social determinants of health. So, I regret in some ways that I wrote a book that was so catered to privileged people without knowing it, and put the emphasis on things…well, I mean, it is helpful for people to learn the skills and strategies of self-help if they can, but not to put that stuff in context also means that there’ll be a lot of self-blame when people don’t get all the health results that they’re hoping for. LOUISE: Yeah, so if you can’t do it, then that’s your fault? LINDO: And if you don’t get a result… LOUISE: If you’re health’s not improving you must be doing something wrong. LINDO: Yeah. I mean, if you still have diabetes after changing your diet and exercising, you’re doing something wrong. Or even if you get, you have diabetes and you’re not eating so nutritious, right? I still don’t think there should be self-blame. Anyway, that’s why I was really happy to have the opportunity to kind of approach it again. And the second time I worked with Lucy Aphramor and we made all those connections, and we started talking about the interplay between the social determinants of health – things like racism, and sexism, and ablism, and how they intersect with our health and our opportunities to change our life. LOUISE: Yeah, that was an incredible book and an incredible change in emphasis from the first, because I came to your training in Seattle… LINDO: Yeah, I remember that. It was the first time we met. LOUISE: Yeah. It was like, five days of diving into all of that, the social determinants of health and thinking about oppression and thinking about stuff I had never thought about. And when I came home from that trip…I had an online program at the time, like a…to help people, based on HAES® principles. And when I came home from that trip, I literally took the whole thing down and shredded it and did it again. And came up with Untrapped, which was a co-work with all of the other people who helped, because of that, that shift in emphasis…and it was mind-blowing, and just phenomenal. 20:30 LINDO: It’s interesting too how much it resonates with people, because you’re telling them ‘your story mattes’. Who you are plays a role, like, your history and what’s happened to you plays a huge role in your attitudes towards exercise, your attitudes towards your body, and how you’re treated in the world is just so, so important. Once people start to see that they’re seen, it opens up possibilities for them to come up with an individualised approach to how they want to live their life, right? Rather than following somebody else’s rules. LOUISE: Yeah, and it also sort of opens the door for social justice and really sort of taking seriously things like inequity and oppression and trauma. Here in Australia, the Aboriginal population have diabetes rates much, much higher than the white population, and of course the weight science researchers like to talk about ‘that’s because of the size of our Aboriginal population, we need to make everyone lose weight and it’s going to go away, it’ll be magic”. It’s just such bullshit to think of things that… LINDO: That’s the first thing they say, is they blame it on weight. And then the second thing they tell people to do is to diet and exercise. Even that has been shown to have limited effect on changing diabetes outcomes. But you know, what the real research is showing is provide people with more opportunity, so they have higher paying jobs, so they’re not so stressed out. Treat them better. Stop oppression. That’s how we make a dent in diabetes. LOUISE: Yeah, right? So, what a huge realisation that maybe the solution here isn’t with individual behaviour but with social change. LINDO: Right. Which again, si not to suggest that individual behvaiour change doesn’t do anything. It does. But to change the emphasis a little bit, to give people more agency in the world. LOUISE: Yeah, and more respect. LINDO: Yeah. LOUISE: Which was the name of the book, Body Respect. LINDO: Yeah. So, it was really fun to have the opportunity to write that book with Lucy Aphramor. That book was meant to be short, to the point, very concise to that people could really see the arguments clearly. And we didn’t do nearly as much storytelling as I did in my first book. This was a very different book. It was meant to really sell to people this idea of what we called in the book ‘Health at Every Size’. I think there’s still some debate as to whether that’s what people were calling Health at Every Size® at the time, or whether that was just ideas that we wanted to be Health at Every Size®. LOUISE: Interesting. LINDO: But anyway. I’m not so sure about that. But regardless, the book to me was a really important transition, and much of what’s in the book, believe it or not, I’m still very much behind. You know? I think it really…it’s last…maybe four or five years since we’ve published it. I think we’ve really grown into the ideas in Body Respect more. LOUISE: Yeah. As a HAES® community, you mean? LINDO: Yes. Exactly. And then the progression as far as the third book goes, there’s very little emphasis on…I don’t use the term Health at Every Size® often. LOUISE: Yeah, I’ve noticed. LINDO: And in part that’s because…I think there’s so many other people right now who are helping to define and grow Health at Every Size®, and I want to step back a little bit and let other people…or not ‘let’, but so that other people can emerge and there can be wider perspective. And I also don’t feel like I want to be responsible for a movement. Like, I’d rather just talk about what’s important to me and not be so closely assigned responsibility around something that is so much bigger than me and is not me. 25:04 LOUISE: Yeah, there’s so many voices and so many people and so many perspectives that need to be heard. LINDO: Right. And Health at Every Size® is a community idea. And also, I’m not so interested in physical health as much. LOUISE: Interesting. LINDO: Like, yeah, I think it’s important, but it’s not my focus. My focus is more on love and community. Maybe I should have said that in terms of what’s firing me up. I think we’re recognising more than ever how much we need each other, and that’s what I want to do. I want to forge those bonds. I find that the more that I connect with my vulnerability and expose myself in the world, the more I get seen by everyone and I can find my pockets where I get respected and valued, and that’s what feeds me. Having that kind of support, of unity. And it’s not so much that I get seen, but the richness of seeing other people too, in all their uniqueness. LOUISE: All of their states of health. Yeah. LINDO: So, belonging seems to be the thing that’s captured me more, and why I wrote about that in my last book. LOUISE: Yeah, belonging. And it’s such a beautiful word. LINDO: It is. LOUISE: What’s…what does it mean to you? What does belonging mean? LINDO: Belonging to me is about that unconditional love. It meant that I can expose the stuff that I might not be so proud of in myself, and yet I’m still loved and validated and seen and appreciated, and people will sit with me through that, right? And that gives me opportunity to make change, or not. But that’s a very different idea to what our culture offers up to people. Like, it says…it kind of sets normal standards and it tells you that you belong if you match up with that. If you’re thin enough, for example, you belong. If you’re cisgender, you belong. And so many people feel that they don’t have the same ability or opportunity ot be appreciated in the world. LOUISE: So, it’s like diet culture would say there’s conditional belonging. LINDO: Right, right. LOUISE: And you’re saying radical belonging, we all belong. LINDO: Right, radical. LOUISE: Radical, meaning like, we don’t need to fit into boxes. LINDO: Right. So, it’s two things there. It’s about not needing to fit into boxes. What that means is we take on social justice issues, because we have to value everybody in this world. And then the second thing is just recognising that humans are vulnerable, we get scared, we make mistakes and inviting all of that humanity into the picture too. LOUISE: Yeah, welcoming that. LINDO: Yeah. LOUISE: It is, it’s so beautiful. This book is so beautiful. It sort of fills you up. I’m interested, what led you to write Radical Belonging? LINDO: When I started writing it, it wasn’t because I had this idea in mind of a book I wanted to get out. In fact, it actually started just as a personal journal. And at first, I was basically just writing my gender identity, and looking at the obstacles over the years, how I overcame them. And I’d say that that first writing was something that was very painful, and it certainly wasn’t something that I wanted exposed to the world, because it was all about my pain. But when I looked at it, I also realised that I’ve developed to much resilience over the years. The stuff that I got japed for when I was a kid…my parents hated that I liked to wear clothes that were meant for boys, they wanted me to wear dresses. When I wore dresses, I always just felt like I was doing drag, right? My parents always just shamed me for that, saw it as something that was really wrong. Never could I go out in public dressed the way I wanted to dress. LOUISE: That’s awful. LINDO: Right. And I have to realise that I got through all of that stuff, you know? Maybe, sure I had to develop an eating disorder to figure out how to…you know, food got me through some of those difficult times. LOUISE: But that’s coping strategy, right? It did get you through. LINDO: Exactly, right. So, I was able to kind of rewrite the book and look at how I saved myself, and not just through the eating disorder but how I learned other skills to kind of manage discomfort, so I no longer needed the eating disorder or the substance abuse that I also went through when I was younger. And recognising that I had developed so many skills to kind of transform the challenges that I was given. And then I went back, and I looked at the book, and was able to look at it through my scientific lens. To recognise that hey, there’s a biological reason why I was reaching for food. And I could recognise the way that trauma kind of lodges in your body, or in my body. You know? And how that participated in a distrust of other people, and hypervigilance that I kind of carried with me in adulthood and kind of a… 31:08 LOUISE: That’s the legacy of trauma, that hypervigilance. That fracturing of trust. LINDO: And that inability to kind of sit with discomfort. So, I could kind of put the science to it and show how trauma played out physically in my body and resulted in a lot of behaviours. And then I could also look at the part two to that, how I developed strategies that kind of rewired  my brain so that I got better at tolerating things, and didn’t have to jump to coping behaviours. And I could fill in all of the science for what you can do to kind of save yourself. LOUISE: Yeah, that’s what I love about the title. It’s ‘how to survive and thrive in an unjust world’. So, not just survival. LINDO: Right, and come out happy and having fun. You have difficult times too, but learning how to just accept them and get through them. LOUISE: Resilience is a remarkable thing. Humans are like, we’re pretty tough. LINDO: We can be. But you can always keep getting better at it. LOUISE: Yeah, and that’s what this book is all about. It’ like, how to do that. LINDO: And then the big recognition that I had through all of that is one of the reasons why we develop all of the coping challenges is because we really want to be loved and appreciated by other people. And when we get rejected, it hurts. And so it makes sense that we develop an inauthentic self to kind of protect ourselves in the world. It makes sense that we kind of run away from relationships and get scared. But once you recognise that it’s all about fear of connection, because connection is what saves us. Right? I mean, that’s the irony. We’re scared of something because if we don’t get it, we can’t survive. Right? So the more you can develop the courage to kind of jump into relationships, and be with people, and be vulnerable… LOUISE: And authentic. LINDO: Yeah. LOUISE: And that’s what you’ve done! By writing the book and putting it out there, that’s the ultimate of what you’ve done. LINDO: Yeah, I put myself out there. I showed the world who I was and asked to be seen in the way that I haven’t been seen previously. LOUISE: And I think that’s one of the loveliest things about this book, is that we get to meet you. LINDO: Thanks, that’s sweet. LOUISE: Alongside the science. But the ‘you’, the human, everything that you’ve been through was… LINDO: Thank you for that. And I think that the storytelling in the book and the vulnerability does make it a lot more readable and fun. I think too that one of the things that I was really looking for was using myself so that other people could see themselves, too. And I was really proud when Ijeoma Oluo who wrote the introduction to the book…she was a stranger to me and I just sent her the book and asked her if she’d read it, and it just moved her. And I asked her to write the foreword and…she’s a black woman, she’s an activist and what she said was that in every chapter she was able to see herself. To me, that just made me cry. That was what I was shooting for in the book, to use myself to open up the possibility that other people can see themselves and think about similar stories. And I write other people’s stories into the book too, to help that process along. But it was really beautiful, because Ijeoma had so many different social identities than I do, and yet she saw herself so profoundly there. LOUISE: That’s extraordinary. LINDO: That to me was a marker of success, you know? That I’d been able to somewhat universalise this book across our different social identities. 35:28 LOUISE: Yeah, you do. And you also speak about so many just human things that we don’t really think about. Like, how much avoidance we engage in, for example. Like, if we’re feeling shame about friends, or things that are going on socially, how much we hide. There’s so many little snippets in the book that you can relate to, like “oh, I’ve done that! I’ve done that” and we don’t really hear about this. It’s really human. LINDO: Right, right. LOUISE: What was it like to come out at trans in the book? Because, you know, in your community everybody knows you and knows you as Lindo for a long time. But this book’s just come out. What’s that been like from that perspective? LINDO: Well, it’s a huge relief. It’s interesting to use the word ‘come out’, because… LOUISE: I wasn’t sure what to say. LINDO: I know, and I’m never sure what to say either. Because I’m not sure that my gender identity has ever changed since birth. I think most people are much more gender fluid than I, they’re much more playful about it. But my gender identity has been the same. So, it’s not like there was a ‘coming out’ period, or a change that happened. I think the problem is though that we live in this world where people just assume a gender binary. And so, everybody has tried to put me into this package that was never ‘me’, and except for in childhood when I really tried to be feminine because my parents, it was important to my parents, I never was ‘woman’ that people saw me as. And being genderqueer, it’s not an easy box for people to put you into. People see me and they just make an assumption about who I am. And I think that shifted over time, physically I look a lot different now, but not enough to always push me out of the like, like what people think of in terms of gender presentation. Not enough to necessarily push me out of a category where people are making the assumption…like, making the assumption that I’m a woman. For example, if you’re hearing audio right now and my voice is definitely what most people attribute to ‘woman’, and so on the phone everybody just misgenders me automatically. But anyway. Having this book out, I’m telling people ‘don’t do that’. So, before it made sense to me that people would make the wrong assumption, but now I’m not allowing for that anymore. Like, I’m just out there and asserting myself. So, I guess that just, might feel different. LOUISE: Yeah, and that’s what you’re talking about in the book as well. Not just the act of self-love but acts of social justice and sticking up for yourself. You’ve got many examples in the book of when you’ve tried to do that and make changes, and that’s part of body liberation, right? LINDO: Sure, yeah. LOUISE: Super cool. So, one of the really fascinating bits of the book, from the science perspective, is when you start talking about the brain on trauma, and how experiences of oppression and exclusion particularly actually impacts our brain. Can you talk a bit about that? LINDO: Sure. It was totally fascinating to me to learn that when you experience rejection, that it’s the same areas in your brain light up as when you experience physical pain. LOUISE: Wow. LINDO: Yeah. All these times socially we’re excluded, we’re told we’re not enough, we’re told there’s something wrong with us, we’re told we’re too fat, all of these things lodge in our brain and after a while the brain changes and adapts to this. We call this ‘high allostatic load’, when you’ve had repeated experiences of…I’ll call it trauma, or…actually, why don’t we call it microaggressions. You can read the book to come up with distinctions there. But repeated experiences of microaggressions add up to trauma in your brain, and after a while your body comes to expect all of these things. And what that means is that you’re going to have a higher level of anxiety, be more fearful when you go into different circumstances, because you have experiences of rejection in the past. And people develop a hypervigilance, get depressed, we talked about this a little bit earlier. Your body adapts and this becomes your go-to response, this kind of fear being in the world. And it also contributes to things like Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease risk. Which explains why marginalised people are much more likely to get many chronic diseases and to die earlier than people who are given more social and economic privilege in the world. 41:00 LOUISE: Yeah, that is so important and so overlooked. LINDO: Right, and it’s interesting to see how physical and biological it is. That it’s not that the individual isn’t trying hard enough in the world, it’s that the world is trying to… LOUISE: The world is being hard for the individual. LINDO: I think we’re always kind of focused on the negative stuff, but the amazing thing is that we always have the opportunity to rewire our brain so that we don’t have to be as hypervigilant in the world and distrustful. There are plenty of strategies we can employ that are going to help our brain to sit with discomfort more readily, and to tolerate not knowing things and going into unfamiliar environments, etc. There are a lot of things we can develop, and probably one of the most beautiful and most powerful is that our friendships can help us to develop a physical resilience that’s going to make us more able to handle life when it gets hard, and more happy in the world. LOUISE: So interesting, so connection can help. LINDO: Yeah, connection is probably one of the most important things, and it can help you to feel more safe in the world, so that you’re more able to kind of venture out and take risks. LOUISE: So, it’s really important to find your people. LINDO: It is. And it’s really important to learn how to do vulnerability, right? Sometimes you need to be protected in the world, and that makes sense because the world isn’t safe. But if you can find safe places where you can truly be yourself and you can get appreciation for that, and love for that, the more you can develop that, the more it can give you a sense of peace that’s going to allow you to move more freely and happily through the world. LOUISE: Yeah. And it’s those people, like I’m thinking of…you’re an example of someone who has that. Connection, community, support. And with that resilience, you can write books like you’re written and put them out there and have these conversations. LINDO: I know, and I appreciate that. I know a lot of people couldn’t put this kind of vulnerability out, that it would be too threatening to them. LOUISE: Yeah, if they don’t have a community or a connection. LINDO: I appreciate that I am so bolstered by other people that it allows me…it protects me, it allows me to do this. And I think in some sense that’s why I feel a responsibility to do the kind of work that I do, because I have so much privilege and… LOUISE: But also, in your bubble…not bubble, but in your community, it’s an inclusive community too, right? There’s attention to Black Lives Matter, there’s gender diversity, there’s all those kinds of things. I’m not at all saying that social justice is working over where you live, but there’s efforts and there’s attention and there’s a sense of preparation, and that social change is important as well. LINDO: Right. I mean, my world would be so boring and unimaginative if everybody looked like me and acted like me. And the way we get excitement in your life is having that kind of exposure to people in all their glorious uniqueness. LOUISE: Yeah, we need to build that. LINDO: And it’s interesting, because I wish the larger corporations would recognise how much creativity they’re losing out on by only hiring certain people who fit a certain mould. You know? Like, you can recognise for example that people who are neurodiverse and might…that everybody sees the problem through a different lens that’s going to allow them to have some kind of unique perspective. And I think that corporations would benefit from like, having so many different perspectives to find what really works well in the world, you know? You think about, if you’re not going to hire fat applicants you have so many fewer applicants to choose from. You’re not going to find the best people. 45:45 LOUISE: Yeah. You’ll probably some very hungry people if they’re dieting, too! LINDO: Yeah, so the more we open up to all the different expressions of humanity, it only benefits us. LOUISE: It really does, and that’s such a lovely way of looking at it. We need to be really welcoming diversity in all areas, in all walks of life. It’s a totally different way of thinking. LINDO: And we do it not because it’s the right thing to do, but because there’s also…we benefit from it. It’s not that we’re helping other people… LOUISE: Yeah. It’s like, it’s evolution too, isn’t it? I few get rid of diversity in any ecosystem, it suffers. LINDO: Exactly. LOUISE: Bring in the glorious diversity and see what can happen. Can you tell us the story, because there’s this awesome story you tell in the book about the gym? LINDO: About the gym. Sure. You know, I haven’t read the book in a while, so I’m going to have to remember which of many stories…but I think it was going into the gym on a day that I was feeling particularly irritable. And there was a new guy that was checking everybody in. so, I do my fingerprint ID, I don’t know, maybe it was a phone ID…I don’t remember. Anyway, I guess my name pops up on the screen and he says, “have a good workout, Miss Bacon”. And it just bummed me out. Like, I had…I was going to the gym to kind of get in a better space. And to be hit right away with being misgendered, it just hit me hard and I kind of snapped at him. I don’t remember what I said. And he got all defensive and said, “that’s what the computer told him” and he was blaming it on the computer. LOUISE: The computer! LINDO: And also he couldn’t quite understand, like I looked like a woman to him, he didn’t understand wht he had gotten wrong. And unfortunately, we’re having this dispute and another worker walked up and was more sensitive, and was able to kind of get the guy to back down and explain that you can’t always know somebody’s gender identity by looking at them and we need to be open minded, and helped me through it. But then while I was working out at the gym, I was just obsessing on it. Iw as just so angry. This was just one more time when… LOUISE: it’s not the only thing, it’s another pain. LINDO: Exactly. Like, he triggered a lifetime of feeling misgendered. And it meant that I couldn’t let go of that, and it kind of spun out into somewhat of an anxiety attack. And anyway, I learned form that, right? And one of the ways I took back my power was by complaining at the gym and my…the end result of that was that they actually changed some of their policies, and that helped me to feel more empowered and respected. The fact that people adapt and change… LOUISE: That’s awesome, that’s such a massive change if out of one panic attack that message of pain in your body drove you into action. LINDO: Right. And another funny part of that story is that at first, just me protesting wasn’t getting far enough. So I just got together a few friends and we just made up a fake organisation. We called ourselves something like ‘Social Justice Advocacy Corps’ or something. LOUISE: Oh my God, that’s brilliant. LINDO: And we kind of threatened a social media callout. And I think the fear of something bigger was really what motivated them to listen. LOUISE: Really? Okay. 50:00 LINDO: So, I think that, that’s an important statement. Build communities so you can get support around this. LOUISE: Yeah, create an organisation. LINDO: Exactly, take it…if you can’t do it. LOUISE: Lean in, get a bit of pressure on them, because people these days might not respond to one person, but if you are a representative of an organisation or if you have social media… LINDO: And I think that more and more, they’re recognising that people are angry that trans folks don’t have equal rights. They’re angry at racism. So it now is a liability for a corporation to be seen in that light. LOUISE: Isn’t that cool? It’s no longer cool to be exclusionary and it has to be attended to. LINDO: So, we certainly have a long, long way of change ahead, but I think that the playing field’s a little bit different now. LOUISE: Yeah, well there’s strength in numbers, as you’re saying, and there’s an increased recognition. Isn’t it incredible to think about what the world might look like in another generation with this kind of change? It’s incredibly hopeful. LINDO: And I know that when I was a kid, I wasn’t even able to imagine ‘trans’ because I hadn’t ever seen a trans person that I was aware of. So, it didn’t even enter my mind as a possibility. But that’s not true of this next generation, at least the generation of kids that live in areas of the United Sates surrounded by that kind of imagery… LOUISE: The inclusion, yeah. LINDO: Kids are more able to find their gender identity and recognise it, it doesn’t have to be the one that was assigned to them at birth. There’s just a lot more creativity that’s possible. LOUISE: I know, exactly. I totally agree with that. I think it’s going to be just this source, amazing source of creativity. If people’s brains aren’t always bound up with that trauma and that kind of confusion, trying to stick yourself in a box that doesn’t fit, there’s so much ability to create and evolve. Yeah. There’s going to be so many cool things come out of this. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. Where can we get the book? It’s here in Australia now, I think. LINDO: Oh, it is? That’s exciting, because I think there was a little delay getting it to Australia. LOUISE: Thanks, Covid. LINDO: Covid-related problems. I’m pretty sure people can get it anywhere books are, these days. LOUISE: Yeah. And there’s an Audible version? LINDO: The Audible version comes out on February 15th, so it’s not out yet. LOUISE: But that’s only a few weeks’ time. And are you reading the book? LINDO: I am not. LOUISE: You’re not reading the book, okay. That’s okay. LINDO: But there is a really wonderful narrator, I spent days and days listening to people to come up with the perfect voice. LOUISE: Oh, how did you come up with that? What was the perfect voice for the book? LINDO: Oh, I wanted someone who could radiate compassion at the same time that they had passion, and really could find when to use one and when to use the other. LOUISE: Cool. LINDO: Yeah, there’s someone that’s really amazing that did it, so I feel good about it. LOUISE: That’s so good, I’m a big fan of Audible lately as reading in Covid for some reason has gotten really hard for lots of people. LINDO: I’m the same way, and I’m out going for walks a lot, and I just listen to books. LOUISE: This is a lovely book to listen to whilst walking, I’m definitely going to do that. LINDO: Excellent. Enjoy. Lovely talking with you. LOUISE: Thank you so much, you’re the best. Thanks. Well, I promised to give you an uplifting start to 2021, and there you are. You don’t get much more uplifting than Dr Lindo Bacon. Thank you so much, Lindo, for coming on and sharing your wonderful book and your vision of what we can achieve if we work together and work more on belonging and just how healing that is. Just a wonderful book, wonderful human. Go out and get it, everybody. And if you want to find out more about Lindo and all of the work they’re doing, head to lindobacon.com website or Instagram, @lindobacon, or on twitter @lindobacon. Some wonderful stuff that is coming out from Lindo, and some wonderful community work in relation to this book. So, go check out the website and find out more there. Okay, so we’re come to the end of the first podcast for 2021. I’m really enjoying myself talking to you, and I’m just really glad to be back. And I’m looking forward to our next episode, which will come out in a few weeks’ time. So, look after yourself, everyone. In the meantime, listen to your body. Think critically. Push back against diet culture. Untrap from the crap!    

Hello! Welcome to one of my favourite episodes.  Please enjoy this blast from the past:On this episode I chatted with Dalia Kinsey and it was a doozy of a conversation. We covered classism, racism, sexism, weight stigma and thin privilege. This was a loaded interview that I enjoyed so much. Dalia is filled with spunk and enthusiasm that made this conversation informative and entertaining. We covered:-Dalia's Health at Every Size journey-The training required to be a registered dietician-Inequality for women in terms of pay-How the dietician training props up diets culture, classism and privilege-Our cultural feel of becoming fat-How thin privilege, fat phobia and weight stigma affects us all-How Dalia first heard about HAES-How health behaviours are not the driving factors in health outcomes-How telling people to diet goes against Do No Harm-The difference between correlation and causation-Why we don't need permission from others to do anything and instead need to be prioritizing ourselvesLinks:Body Respect by Lindo Bacon and Lucy Aphramorhttps://www.amazon.ca/Body-Respect-Conventional-Health-Understand/dp/1940363195/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Body+Respect&qid=1580783859&s=books&sr=8-1Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Reschhttps://www.amazon.ca/Intuitive-Eating-Revolutionary-Program-Works/dp/1250004047/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Intuitive+Eating&qid=1580783895&sr=8-1Fat is a Feminist Issue by Suzie Orbachhttps://www.amazon.ca/Fat-Feminist-Issue-Susie-Orbach/dp/0883659875/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QWJ1JMRBTNRK&keywords=fat+is+a+feminist+issue&qid=1580783930&sprefix=Fat+is+a+F%2Caps%2C239&sr=8-1Dalia's Intuitive Eating Sheethttps://www.schoolnutritiondietitian.com/guiltfreeDalia's Podcasthttps://www.schoolnutritiondietitian.com/podcastDalia's websitehttps://www.schoolnutritiondietitian.com/#home-sectionResources page on my website for studieshttp://iwishiwereme.com/resourcesJorden Harbinger's podcasthttps://www.jordanharbinger.com

Kira Furie earned her BS in Biological Sciences and her BA in Dance, graduating from UC Santa Barbara in 2018. She spent time dancing professionally in New York City and is currently working on a research project with an Addiction Medicine MD based in Los Angeles, California. Her interdisciplinary background, personal experience with injuries, yoga teaching, and research have given her a specific interest in Integrative Medicine, which she hopes to implement in her future medical practice. On this podcast, Megan Hall interviews Kira about the series of injuries that led to her interest in physical therapy and later to medicine. Influenced heavily by the prevalence of eating disorders and the Health at Every Size movement, Kira discusses her current plans to bring prevention and wellness aspects to medical practice, while promoting a body-positive environment. She also describes “thin privilege” - an aspect of the current medical system that many of us take for granted. Here’s the outline of this interview with Kira Furie: [00:01:23] Kira's background and interest in medicine. [00:05:27] An untreated hip injury leading to more problems. [00:10:40] Video: Brené Brown on Empathy. [00:11:10] Psychology and yoga. [00:12:39] The Minimalists Podcast. [00:13:47] Sports and Performance Psychologist Simon Marshall, PhD.  [00:14:20] Prevention. [00:14:43] Jeffery N. Wilkins, MD, Addiction Medicine Specialist in LA. [00:15:17] Primary vs. Secondary Prevention. [00:17:34] Lack of connection as the greatest factor leading to addiction. [00:19:00] The importance of connection; Podcasts on social connection: Building Compassionate Communities to Improve Public Health, and Maintaining Social Connection in the Era of COVID-19, both with Julian Abel. [00:19:37] Health at Every Size (HAES). [00:19:51] Book: Intuitive Eating, 4th Edition: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. [00:19:57] Book: Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand About Weight, by Linda Bacon, PhD. and Lucy Aphramor, PhD. Read the intro to the book. [00:21:11] Lindo Bacon (formerly Linda); Review: Bacon, Linda, and Lucy Aphramor. "Weight science: evaluating the evidence for a paradigm shift." Nutrition journal 10.1 (2011): 9. [00:23:22] Thin privilege. [00:25:19] Body Mass Index (BMI) as a health marker. [00:26:40] People in "overweight" category live longer; Study approved by CDC: Flegal, Katherine M., et al. "Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight, and obesity." Jama 293.15 (2005): 1861-1867. [00:28:14] Looking ahead as a future physician. [00:32:41] Physicians for Ancestral Health.

On this episode I chatted with Dalia Kinsey and it was a doozy of a conversation. We covered classism, racism, sexism, weight stigma and thin privilege. This was a loaded interview that I enjoyed so much. Dalia is filled with spunk and enthusiasm that made this conversation informative and entertaining. We covered: -Dalia's Health at Every Size journey -The training required to be a registered dietician -Inequality for women in terms of pay -How the dietician training props up diets culture, classism and privilege -Our cultural feel of becoming fat -How thin privilege, fat phobia and weight stigma affects us all -How Dalia first heard about HAES -How health behaviours are not the driving factors in health outcomes -How telling people diet goes against Do No Harm -The difference between correlation and causation -Why we don't need permission from others to do anything and instead need to be prioritizing ourselves

With pressure coming at you from your peers, the media and the digital world, today’s episode explores the causes of negative body image and the role that reframing your own internal dialogue can play in shifting your perspective. @womenshealthuk #projectbodylove https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/project-body-love/ Further reading: Shrill by Lindy West; Hunger by Roxanne Gay; Body Positive Power by Megan Crabbe; Body Respect by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor; The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf; Big Girl by Kelsey Miller

Radical dietician Lucy Aphramor joins Tally, Zanna and Vicky to discuss her views on why health can be about much more than just our weight or BMI, and why social factors could also play a part. Public Health England figures show 63% of adults in England were classified as overweight or obese in 2015, and the Royal College of Physicians has called for obesity to urgently be recognised as a disease. To find out more - including a BMI calculator - head to the NHS website here: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/bmi-calculator/

Jenn and Andrea share some life updates, comment on recent news articles and answer listener questions related to Health at Every Size (HAES™️) advocacy, managing kids' requests for sweets, and navigating cravings in the process of relearning Intuitive Eating. Show notes: Smash the Wellness Industry in The NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/women-dieting-wellness.html What Does Intuitive Eating Even Mean The Cut: https://www.thecut.com/2019/06/what-is-intuitive-eating-a-guide-to-intuitive-eating.html Nike UK Plus Size Mannequin: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/06/235033/nike-plus-size-mannequins-controversy HAES Research: Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift (Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor): https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-10-9 Books: - The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor: https://www.amazon.com/Body-Not-Apology-Radical-Self-Love/dp/1626569762 - Landwhale by Jess Baker and Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls by Jess Baker : http://www.themilitantbaker.com/ - You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar: https://www.amazon.com/You-Have-Right-Remain-Fat/dp/1936932318 -Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World that Want to Shrink You by Sofie Hagen: https://www.amazon.com/Fat/dp/0008293872/ref=sr_1_1?crid=30JAOR817GCPJ&keywords=happy+fat+sofie+hagen&qid=1564404744&s=books&sprefix=happy+fat+%2Cstripbooks%2C144&sr=1-1 - Hunger by Roxanne Gay: https://www.amazon.com/Hunger-Memoir-Body-Roxane-Gay/dp/0062420712/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UV4887G1BPZ4&keywords=hunger+roxane+gay&qid=1564404581&s=books&sprefix=hunger+rox%2Cstripbooks%2C145&sr=1-1 To take to your healthcare provider's office -- Health Care Providers: Providing Sensitive Care for People of All Sizes (PDF from Linda Bacon's website) https://lindabacon.org/HAESbook/pdf_files/HAES_Providing%20Sensitive%20Care.pdf Division of Responsibility, Ellyn Satter Institute: https://www.ellynsatterinstitute.org/how-to-feed/the-division-of-responsibility-in-feeding/ Blog post on Intuitive Eating and Cravings: http://www.streetsmartnutrition.com/faq-cravings/

Lucy Aphramor and I talk about her path to becoming a radical dietitian, how nutrition affects health, the costs of society’s anti-fat messages & much more! The post Change the Health & Justice Conversation with Lucy Aphramor appeared first on Anne-Sophie Reinhardt.

Lucy Aphramor on disrupting narratives, how relationships with food can serve as a vehicle for deeper work, & redefining the default for "good Dietitian."   What interrupts our access to our body story – what is permissible and accessible? How can we provide a space where “I am OK” is available? Relational ways of connecting using a variety of frameworks using metaphors and stories Assumptions that are made through the dominant medical framework The importance of validation & enquiry When people discover it for themselves, then I help theorise it How we can support people to understand their own story The “health” narrative is so powerful that people will erase their own story Supporting people to take their own story seriously Food, eating and body are the vehicle for the deep work…. Being guided by values Being able to sit with our own discomfort, stepping away from “fixing” What defines a “good Dietitian” If “fixing people” and “telling people what to do” is a strong part of our professional identity, and if I want to be a “good Dietitian” then that will be our default….. Acting with integrity and acknowledging when we’ve got it wrong Self compassion is for everyone, including us! How Lucy weaves in self compassion Disconnection stops compassion from flourishing What does "The Magic Biscuit" say to you? Honouring story as a powerful way of connecting Visibility, and taking risk Walking away is always a walking towards..... The practice of taking choices...... Creating three examples as a way to move away from the binary Lucy's dream Dietetic course!! Expand the definition of what it means to be a Dietitian, "do" Dietetics How we can understand how trauma shows up - and why it's pivotal    Link to The Magic Biscuit More About Lucy: www.lucyaphramor.com

Emotional eating is this week's subject. Listen to Rachel Swann talk about why diets don't work and how to eat mindfully. Rachel is an Emotional Eating and Body Confidence Coach based in Leeds. Her personal experience of making the connection between her emotions and how she used food as a coping mechanism has led her to support others.  She has a background in hypnotherapy, counselling and Reiki among other skills. https://rachel-swann.com Rachel Swann Rachel recommends the book Body Respect by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor:

¿Confías en tu cuerpo? En este episodio me acompaña la Dra. Lilia Graue experta en alimentación consciente, imagen corporal y salud en todas las tallas, para compartirnos: • Qué es la confianza corporal • Por qué nos desconectamos de nuestro cuerpo y aprendemos a desconfiar de él • Consejos puntuales para recobrar la confianza corporal • ¡Una práctica guiada para reconectar con nuestro cuerpo! Conecta con Lilia en: https://mindfuleatingmexico.com RECURSOS ¡Descarga la Escala de Hambre y recursos para cultivar la confianza corporal! Haz clic aquí https://mindfuleatingmexico.com/podcast-ana-arizmendi/ Libro: “Body Respect: what conventional health book get wrong, leave out, and just plain fail to understand about weight” de Linda Bacon y Lucy Aphramor https://benourished.org TEDTalk “Escuchar a la vergüenza” de Brené Brown https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame INSCRÍBETE AL TALLER AMA TU CUERPO http://www.dequetienehambretuvida.com/amatucuerpo Información: info@dequetienehambretuvida.com

Beth shares her interview with Anna Guest-Jelley of Curvy Yoga. They talk yoga, diets, fitness, and body positivity. Body Positive Books: Curvy Yoga: Love Yourself & Your Body a Little More Each Day by Anna Guest-Jelley Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance by Rosie Molinary Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Linda Bacon Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body (and quiet that critical voice!) by Connie Sobczak The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor Yoga and Body Image: 25 Personal Stories About Beauty, Bravery & Loving Your Body by Melanie Klein and Anna Guest-JelleyTo support the show and get access to regular bonus content, please visit our Patreon page. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Aaron and Glenys were so excited to speak to Radical Dietitian, Lucy Aphramor.  She discussed her journey from traditional dietitian to one who is trauma-informed and emphasizing self-care instead of health behaviors and her new passion, poetry.  As a Radical Dietitian, she's focusing on deep roots of what causes judgement, war and shame. Her use of language is inspiring and we hope that you find Lucy's work as inspiring as we do.   http://lucyaphramor.com/dietitian/ http://lucyaphramor.com/poet/ More about Aaron: www.bvmrd.com More about Glenys: www.daretonotdiet.com  

In this episode, Tabitha talks to the wonderful Rachel Millner about fat-phobia in schools: BMI report cards School dinner policing Health at Every Size Body Diversity Fat-phobia  How to trust kids to eat Here is a list of useful books from Rachel Ellyn Satter- Any of her books Amanda's Big Dream by Judith Matz Body Respect by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor (this is a more general book-not specific to kids, but gives a really good foundation of Health at Every Size® Shapesville by Andy Mills Your Body is Awesome by Sigrun Danielsdottir Kathy Kater's “health bodies” curriculum Born to Eat by Wendy Jo Peterson How to Be Comfortable in Your own Feathers by Julia Cook Todd Parr- has several books https://www.amightygirl.com/

Lucy Aphramor, anti-diet dietitian and co-author (with Linda Bacon) of Body Respect, joins us to talk about Health at Every Size, why we need to be weight-inclusive instead of just weight-neutral, the social determinants of health, the importance of having a trauma-informed focus as a healthcare provider, her struggles with body image in the context of gender identity and sexuality, the importance of prioritizing emotional safety, and so much more! PLUS, Christy answers a listener question about how to handle arguments that stopping emotional eating automatically leads to weight loss. Lucy Aphramor is an award-winning radical dietitian and critically acclaimed performance poet aka The Naked Dietitian. She practises the weight-equitable approach Well Now that advocates health-gain and body respect for all. Her co-authored book Body Respect, written with Linda Bacon, explores many of the key concepts of Well Now. She subsequently developed Well Now theory to be compassion-centred, trauma-informed and justice-enhancing. Lucy is interested in starting conversations that build a fairer world -and the role of story in this -and co-founded Dietitians for Social Justice with Fiona Clarke. Find her online at lucyaphramor.com. This episode is brought to you by Storyworth. Get $20 off a subscription with our special URL, storyworth.com/psych. Give your wardrobe an upgrade with MM.LaFleur by going to MMBento.com. Use the code PSYCH at checkout and MM.LaFleur will donate 10% of profits to GlobalGiving. Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, to start your intuitive eating journey. If you're ready to give up dieting once and for all, join Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course! Fellow health & wellness pros, join Christy's newest online course, Master Your Anti-Diet Message! 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.

Aaron and Glenys talk to Dr. Linda Bacon, professor, researcher, acclaimed international speaker, and author of the two best-selling books, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, or Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight, (co-authored with Dr. Lucy Aphramor), and Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight. Dr. Bacon is changing lives through her teaching, research, writing, and transformative workshops and seminars. In this episode, we talk about her experience teaching from a weight inclusive perspective, creating brave spaces, self-compassion, and building community.   www.lindabacon.org www.lindabaconspeaks.com   More about Glenys www.daretonotdiet.com More about Aaron www.bvmrd.com

This episode is a follow up to Episode 14 with Lucy Aphramor. I asked if you had questions for her and some wonderful questions were posted on Instagram. Here are some of the answers. Enjoy!   Questions answered in this Bonus episode:  jilllepire Is it ever okay to try to change your physical body while being body positive? If so, how does one do that without being sucked into diet mindset? wee_foodies I’d love to hear more from her around the evidence base on the biological impact of weight stigma and ways to challenge the “tackling obesity” conversation in public health. wanderingdjinn Does Lucy have a script for confronting one's parents about the damage they've done by commenting on one's weight and appearance almost daily, starting at a very young age? I've let go of a lot of my anger towards them and I'm in a better place, but I worry that they're continuing to make weight-related comments to my much younger cousins, and will start on my nieces in a couple of years, if they haven't already. I really feel I should speak up to protect them, at the very least by no longer hiding all the self-destructive things I've done as a result of the self-loathing for which they planted the seeds. My fear, of course, is that they won't believe me, will insist they were in the right, and that I was/am just being too sensitive. fatbodypeace Will those poems in print somewhere? littletulipsco l'd like to know how Lucy thinks we can build our self compassion in really practical ways (like a list that I can follow!) And also if it's okay to want to lose weight. It feels like if you were fully accepting of your body you *shouldn't* want to change it. But I was at a kindful eating workshop with Lucy and she was all about questioning *should* self talk. Does that make sense? Thankyou!            

Weight Stigma, and stigma in general, is a intricate and complicated subject that permeates the society we live in. We are all affected in some way by stigma, whether we are the subject of stigma, perpetrators of stigma, or both. Stigma also has a significant effect on long term health, making it an important subject for medical professionals to address personally and systemically. Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor described 7 myths about weight stigma in Body Respect. We will be using the myths as an outline and expanding on them with our own ideas and examples.

EB014  The Radical Dietician - Lucy Aphramor  Lucy Aphramor is the Radical Dietician and the Naked Dietician. She believes we must fundamentally change the way we talk about health. In her Well Now approach, social justice and equality become the center and beginning of every conversation about health. For example, how can we talk about food and exercise without talking about access? Her approach integrates social factors, pays attention to trauma, and supports people to improve their overall wellbeing. The Well Now approach has effectively helped people of all shapes and sizes manage health conditions such as heart disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), high blood pressure and so much more. Additionally, she has effectively helped hundreds of people overcome body shame, eating disorders, and depression by staying committed  to promoting respect, dignity, and equality for all.  Lucy was the figurehead at the Health at Every Size movement and is co-author of the book Body Respect with Linda Bacon.  She joins me today to discuss her current model - Well Now - and what has inspired her to become a dietician. She shares her insights on how the stress of prejudice can play a role in health, how she brought the Health at Any Size approach to the National Health Service, and the impact historical trauma can have on health and so much more. This episode also uses clips from Lucy's poetry performance, The Naked Dietician.   “Telling your story to a caring witness has a metabolic impact... that switches off the stress response.” - Lucy Aphramor  This Week on the Every Body Podcast:  The importance of looking at all parts of a person’s story struggling to overcome an eating disorder  Studies that show that our health behaviors are between 5% to 25% of the difference in health inequalities  Why finding a way to bring social justice into the healthcare system is important  How changing the language around weight loss and weight correction can impact body positivity and self-esteem challenges around the world  How thinking about well-being from a justice, power, and historical trauma lens can impact the way we think about health  How Well Now helps people get away from the binary mindset about what’s healthy and what’s not healthy  Conversations that need to be happening in our society  Where she believes intervention needs to start    Connect with Lucy Aphramor:  Well-Founded  Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight book by Lucy Aphramor and Linda Bacon  Poetry Work  Rate, Share, & Inspire  Thank you for joining me this week on the Every Body podcast. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show and leave a review to help us spread the word to Every Body!    Don’t forget to visit our website, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and join our mailing list so you never miss an episode!       

In this episode, I talk to Watershed Wellness - Portland Naturopathic Doctor DeAun Nelson about what brought her to Naturopathic medicine, what gets her excited about practice and how you can connect with her. But the podcast really takes off when we delve into Dr. Nelson's favorite topic - weight neutral healthcare and Health At Every Size (TM). You'll hear some basic definitions, discussion about weight stigma in healthcare (and beyond) and a few hints about what future podcast discussions might bring with Dr. Nelson. Relevant WW content The myth of the Body Mass Index/BMI Health at Every Size at Watershed Wellness Relevant books Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon Body Respect by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor (this is a newer book and has updates to the movement in it) Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Trible and Elyse Resch The Health Trap by Chris Sandel, nutritionist (great, short book with great explanations about how undereating can cause health issues...it is on Kindle Unlimited too) Relevant Podcasts The Reclaiming You Podcast with Sarah Vance.This is more of a ditch the diet podcast and she does not mince words about how she feels about the diet industry. She also talks about body positivity and reclaiming body compassion. Dietitians Unplugged with Glenys Oyston and Aaron Flores.Great discussions about diets, HAES, food, culture, etc with two Dietitians. Great interviews too. Every Body with Daria Matza. Host started out as a documentarian who is now using this podcast to explore HAES and the non-diet world. Great interviews!

Do you feel shame around your relationship with food and your body? Are you worried about disclosing your eating behavior to a current partner or loved one? Do you find yourself thinking about food all the time? Listen now for some concrete solutions to overcome these barriers to food peace. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. This episode is brought to you by Pursuing Private Practice Masterclass. Ready to start doing things your way and kiss the corporate world goodbye? Details here and remember the super secret discount code BOSS for 10% off. Episode's Key Points: Shame is so common in the eating disorder experience!! Antonia Hartley joins to help tackle this letter writer's struggles... Eating disorders make us feel so alone and isolated, but there are many people dealing with the same issues. Insight and awareness are vital to finding recovery and healing, but it can only take you so far. It's important to work with a dietitian or other eating disorder professional to find lasting recovery and make changes! Finding a Health at Every Size dietitian to work with is SUPER important to make sure you're in a safe environment to find help. If you're thinking about food all day long, definitely inquire if you're eating enough! Sometimes restriction is physical or mental, and adequacy with food is very important!! If you're bingeing, it's likely that you're NOT getting enough, no matter what size you are. It's NOT as simple as calories in, calories out. Our metabolism is MUCH more complicated than that! Sometimes there is fear in letting go of our eating disorder because there is a small part of us that feels these diet rules are serving us in some way... but they're not! "Honesty is the antithesis of eating disorder behavior." - Antonia Relationships are SO important in eating disorder recovery! Be honest with those you love, and set the boundaries around triggers. Eating behaviors can be a messenger for our emotions or our needs... listen to them! If you're in a situation where someone in your life is consistently triggering you, don't be afraid to bring them into a therapy session with you to parse out exactly what you need from them as a loved one. Remember, we live in diet-culture world, so give your loved ones some time to adjust to this new way of life! Be aware of your own internalized fat stigma when exploring recovery. You weren't born with food rules!! These are LEARNED behaviors and "truths." Checking back in with your treatment team post-recovery is SO important! Remember, we live in a world that hasn't recovered from its own eating disorder, so having a supportive community around you is essential for maintaining recovery. On feminism: Feminism is for everyone, not just women! Ending sexism is good for everyone. Ending weight stigma helps everyone! Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Start your private practice! Click here and use code BOSS to get 10% off Jennifer McGurk's Pursuing Private Practice Masterclass. Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor mentioned in this episode Jessica Setnick Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks ---> This week's Food Peace Syllabus addition Find Antonia on Instagram and Twitter! Eating Disorder Dietitian Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series.