Carolyn Moore is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker offering counseling in her San Francisco office and by video.  Her work focuses on positive body image from a feminist perspective, incorporating intuitive eating and Health At Every Size principles.  She also helps highly independent people learn how to receive and create more satisfying connection in their lives. 

Carolyn and I discuss her path towards embracing her larger body and how early exposure to feminist critiques of beauty standards for women helped her. Carolyn also explores the pivotal role reclaiming physical activity played for her. We talk about self-love, sensuality, nudity, and touch and how these can help in healing.

 

Show Highlights:

• Honoring grief and pain and the trauma of being in a larger body
• Shifting the focus from the outside in to the inside out
• 3 main pillars in therapy: healing, development, and liberation
• HAES as liberation work
• How she learned about feminism and dismantling beauty standards before she was even fat
• Making changes from self-love vs. self-hate
• How important it was to be in the fat community with other women
• How she works with a swim coach who never mentions weight-loss, ever
• What a relief it is to find a swim coach who gets it so she doesn’t have to do the emotional work of educating
• Figuring out what you love about movement
• How she reclaimed the word exercise for herself
• How she loves representing the image of a fat athlete
• Clothing-optional spaces have helped with her healing
• Sensuality and pleasure are an important piece of liberation
• Fat women have more orgasms during sex
• To be a fat woman having sex means you had to do a certain amount of work to get there
• It was revolutionary to experience pleasure from touch, rather than to think about touch as pleasuring others
• Your ability to say no enables your ability to say yes
• Advocacy is needed when going to doctors
• Carolyn reads a manifesto from her client called “Rebirth, an Easter story”
• How her healing path and her friend’s healing path from anorexia were exactly the same
• Letting go of weight loss frees up a lot of energy
• Liberating yourself from diet culture has to be a conscious choice

 

Links & Resources:

 

• Learn more about Carolyn’s work at www.CarolynMooreCounseling.com
• Miriam Cantor: size positive somatic worker in San Francisco
• BumbleBee Fitness: fat women training for Bay to Breakers
• Ragen Chastain
• Kabuki hot springs in San Francisco
• HAI: Human Awareness Institute 
• Marilyn Wann: Fatso
• Shrill
• Mary Oliver (“What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”)
• Jes Baker – The Militant Baker