Our society is sick. Diet culture, the beauty industry, and the media have sold us a narrowly defined ideal and it has warped our views on food, our bodies, and beauty. In this week’s episode, I had the privilege of speaking with the incredible Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani all about the fallout of these warped cultural messages.

Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani is an eating disorders expert physician and the Founder and Medical Director of the Gaudiani Clinic in Denver, Colorado. Dr. Gauidiani completed her undergraduate degree at Harvard, medical school at Boston University School of Medicine, and her internal medicine residency and chief residency at Yale. In 2008, she was one of the founding team members of the ACUTE Center for Eating Disorders at Denver Health and, after seven great years there, she left as its Medical Director to pursue her vision of outpatient care, founding the Gaudiani Clinic. During her years at ACUTE, Dr. Gaudiani became a nationally recognized internist for her work on the medical complications of eating disorders. She also wrote a book on this same topic, released in 2018, Sick Enough: A Guide to the Medical Complications of Eating Disorders.
Dr. Gaudiani has lectured nationally and internationally and is widely published in the scientific literature as well as on blogs. She is one of the only outpatient internists in the US who carries the Certified Eating Disorder Specialist and Supervisor designation and has received the honorable designation of Fellow from the international organization Academy for Eating Disorders.

In our time together, Dr. Gaudiani covers so many important topics, including the shocking percentage of people whom she believes have a disordered relationship with food, how diet culture has impacted the medical field, and how most doctors don’t understand eating disorders. She also talks about thin privilege, weight stigma, weight-inclusive medical care, and what a balanced relationship with food and our bodies looks like. Dr. Gaudiani’s wisdom and compassion are palpable in her work and in this episode. My hope is that her experience and insights might help us identify and shed the harmful messages we have absorbed, so we might move into a more peaceful relationship with food, our bodies, and ourselves.