In Episode 13, Jivana Heyman interviews Amber Karnes about her upcoming course, Making Peace With Your Body. Amber shares openly about why she chose to do this work and how this work is intertwined in her own experience as a fat person. This conversation talks about the toxic nature of diet culture, the harm inflicted on folks in larger bodies within the medical industrial complex, and the ways dominant culture devalues folks in bigger bodies. Amber shares about how we can divest ourselves from diet culture and lean into our personal power, and what body image work has to do with social justice.

 

In this episode we dig in about:

 

• Why Amber began this work
• How Amber came to identify as fat
• How the medical industrial complex treats folks in larger bodies
• How diet culture shapes our wellness and yoga spaces. 
• How we systems of oppression influence dieet culture and our widely held beauty standards
• How we each hold a hierarchy of bodies that devalue those in bigger bodies
• How all of the devaluation of larger bodies trickles down to influence the distribution of resources 
• How fatphobia shows up in the decisions we make about food, dieting and wellness
• How much time and energy we put into trying to fix ourselves and fit into beauty standards
• How we can lean out of toxic diet culture and reclaim our personal power
• How we can heal the relationship we have with ourselves
• How disrupting toxic diet culture is a part of dismantling white supremacy and other systems of oppression 
• How Amber’s new course will work and what to expect

Today’s inquiry

Each week we’ll leave you with a powerful question. We encourage you to sit in inquiry with this question, write about it, discuss it with another community member on this path. Today, we invite you to reflect on this question:

What would you do with all the resources (money, energy, time, etc.) that you have spent on trying to fix yourself and your body if you could get it back?