It's Just a Cookie

Today I’m talking with Camerin Ross about her journey with letting go of dieting, accepting her body, and embracing mindful eating and Health at Every Size®. Among other things, we talk about how these changes impacted some of her relationships.

Camerin has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a licensed facilitator for Am I Hungry? ® Mindful Eating programs. She also completed her coach training with MentorCoach® LLC and is currently finishing the Be Nourished, Body Trust® Provider training. Camerin works from a non-diet, Health At Every Size® framework, which respects intersectional dimensions of diversity, including size, shape, and weight. Her integrative coaching model is designed to empower and support her clients in reaching their goals. Camerin works individually and facilitates groups by telephone and online video conferencing around the globe.

For full show notes and resources, visit the website.

This week I’m talking with Marcella Raimondo, a psychologist in Oakland, California who has been working in the field of multicultural issues in eating disorders for nearly 25 years. She has recovered herself from anorexia nervosa over 20 years ago.

We have a high energy exchange about living in a world where certain foods, like sugar and dairy, are highly demonized. We also talk about how frustrating it is to be around folks who constantly want to talk about how much better they feel now that they’ve eliminated “x” food from their diet. Marcella talks about how often she is the only person in her client’s lives who are telling them that it is ok to do things like eating ice cream in public. We also talk de-stigmatizing eating for emotional reasons and how to deal with diet or “health” talk (which is often a stand-in for diet talk) with friends and family.

Marcella trains in Kajukenbo at Hand to Hand Self Defense Center in Oakland. She holds a first degree black belt and enjoys the exploratory path her training gives her. Her recovery and her martial arts training inspires her dedication to multicultural body nurturance and community celebration.

Show Highlights

• The recovery process is about removing layer after layer
• We live in a world that keeps a disordered eating mindset pretty intact
• Letting the fantasy go that one day your body will be smaller leads to liberation and relief, although society will continue to tell you that something is wrong with your body
• “I am addicted to sugar,” is such a common thing she hears 
• Even if someone is eating an adequate amount of food, many times there is no enjoyment (it’s still very diet-y, or someone may stick to “safe” foods)
• Your body and mind respond to what feels like deprivation
• Getting curious about how food helps with emotions
• We all eat emotionally and always will
• Colonization made indigenous food “bad” and the colonizer’s food “good”
• Using the word “crap” to describe someone’s food is problematic when that may be what’s accessible, affordable, and familiar to them
• If someone keeps talking about how they good they feel if they’ve cut out a certain food it doesn’t sound like liberation 
• When people are depriving themselves of what they really want and need social approval for all the hard work they are doing
• All the negativity and energy behind processed food is classist: for some folks, this is their food
• Putting children on diets sets them up for a lifetime of a problematic relationship to their body
• Thin privilege allowed Marcella to experiment with different foods in her recovery without experiencing backlash from others
• Recognizing her own privilege in recovery which makes the road so much easier

Links & Resources

• For more information about Marcella's trainings, go to marcellaedtraining.com
• Gloria Lucas, Nalgona Positivity Pride
• ASDAH

This week I’m talking to Matilda St. John, the Director of Big Moves, an organization dedicated to getting people of all sizes into the dance studio and up on stage. Big Moves is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and welcomes dancers of all experience levels. When she’s not dancing, Matilda practices psychotherapy in Oakland, CA.

Matilda talks about her early love of dance as well as the body-shaming she received as a young dancer. In college, she stumbled upon fat positive zines that blew her world open. As an adult, she found her way back to dance, and reconnected with a sense of joy and play, with a dance troupe dedicated to larger-sized dancers. In this episode, she talks about all this as well as the unique rewards and challenges of being a fat dancer.

Show Highlights:

• Matilda’s dream was to grow up and be on Solid Gold
• Her ballet teacher pulled her parents aside and told them that she was too big to do ballet when she 8 or 9
• How she was actively discouraged from dancing as a little girl
• Her body was a point of contention when she was infant 
• Both her parents were chronic dieters 
• She was aware of calories for as long as she can remember
• Attending fat camp when she was 9
• Struggling with a restrictive eating disorder in her teen years
• How she stopped dancing in the years when she had the most restrictive eating disorder
• How she found fat acceptance zines in a women’s book store 
• Getting exposed to Big Moves, a fat dance troupe that started as the Phat Fly Girls
• When they dance in more mainstream shows, other dancers backstage assume they are not dancers or don’t know how to warm up
• There is a way that the members of Big Moves are kind of fat poster children because they are very active
• There is also a level of surprise, such as “How are you so big when you are moving so much?”
• How folks in her therapy practice feel like unenlightened feminists for their internalized fatphobia
• Old psychoanalytic idea that fat people are all about oral identification

Links & Resources:

• Matilda’s therapy practice
• Big Moves
• Solid Gold
• Nomi Lamm
• Marilyn Wann
• Fat Girl Zine
• Shadow on a Tight Rope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression 
• National Dance Week in the Bay Area
• Cupcake and Muffintops
• NoLose

Today I’m talking with Alan Levinovitz, Ph.D., about the surprising connection between current wellness and dieting trends and religion. Alan is an associate professor of religious studies at James Madison University, where he specializes in Chinese philosophy and the intersection of religion and science. His first book, The Gluten Lie, explores modern food fears as religious taboos. He is currently working on another book, Natural, that explains how we turn nature into God.

Alan talks about how religion offers a way to deal with suffering: why it happens, how to avoid it and how to fix it. He compares this narrative to the prevailing narrative that infuses diet and wellness culture which promises to heal all manner of physical and emotional suffering.

Show Highlights:

• Halo Top ice cream implies that there is something holy about not consuming calories which is tied up with denial of the body, a deeply religious theme
• The new secular saints are diet, wellness, and fitness gurus
• The sphere of religion’s authority is shrinking so we look to other authoritative sources like science to tell us how to avoid suffering
• People really want food to make them holy and pure although today we use the language of “optimizing” oneself
• The word holistic has been corrupted by health gurus 
• Most lifestyle changes that claim to be holistic are not holistic at all as they are only about the body
• No one knows why we suffer and die
• Some kind of narrative helps explain the randomness of suffering and death
• It’s not just that you should moderate sugar, according to current diet and wellness trends, but eliminate all sugar, which echos religious and purity taboos
• Dietary taboos can be a way to both distance ourselves from certain communities and to form new communities 
• It’s a really powerful thing to feel like you know something that other people don’t
• People need narratives and metaphorical shorthands to deal with everyday life
• Be wary whenever someone promises you a hidden, secret solution that no one else knows about
• Treating the scale like an oracle - you step on the scale and it tells you how good you are
• Ancient Taoist texts promised that if you followed a particular diet, you would have clear skin, you would live forever and you would be able to teleport, which is not much different from the promises that current day diet and wellness culture make (without the teleporting!)

Links & Resources:

• The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat by Alan Levonvitz, Ph.D.
• Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science by Alan Levonvitz, Ph.D.
• Biologist Stephen Gould
• Paul Rozin

Today I’m talking with Jeanne Courtney, a psychotherapist in private practice in El Cerrito, California, specializing in LGBTQ issues, anxiety, depression and body image from a Health at Every Size® perspective. She’s the author of a paper published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies called Size Acceptance as a Grief Process: Observations from Psychotherapy with Lesbian Feminists.

Jeanne was first introduced to the size acceptance movement over 30 years ago and we talk about what changes she has seen during that time. She also talks about how almost every woman who walks into her office, regardless of what brought them into therapy initially, eventually reveals some form of body shame. 

Show Highlights:

• Her introduction in the size acceptance movement in the 1980’s
• How she was skeptical at first and then came to see how feminism intersected with body size
• Lesbian feminists led the way early on in the movement
• There is a body shame epidemic, rather than an obesity epidemic
• A nurse in an oncology department congratulated her dying wife on her weight loss that was due to cancer
• Intellectual insight around body oppression doesn’t necessarily lead to emotional change
• Size acceptance as a grief process; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance
• Part of size acceptance is accepting that rampant size discrimination exists.
• Shifting anger at the self to anger at the world’s fatphobia
• The overlap between how fatness and queerness gets conceptualized
• The narrative that sexual orientation can be changed, or is indicative of emotional problems is similar to the discourse around fat bodies
• Disordered eating of all kinds isn’t always visible
• How under-eating always gets privileged 
• Body hatred messages being passed down from generation to generation
• How doctors get stumped when you ask them to explain the science of how exactly weight loss will help your health

Links & Resources: 

Jeanne Courtney’s website

Size Acceptance as a Grief Process

Today, Charis Stiles and I discuss how connecting to your body can be a portal to heal not just food and body image issues, but to heal all of your life. She uses somatic practices and re-parenting techniques to help her clients move through emotional and physical pain and leads us through a 3-minute affectionate breathing exercise about two-thirds of the way through this episode. You might want to be sitting down in a quiet place to get the full benefit from this loving practice!

Charis Stiles, LCSW is a fat-positive therapist in the Bay Area, specializing her practice in Healthy at Every Size® (HAES), insecurity and self-worth issues, living with chronic illness, and gender identity. She graduated UC Berkeley with a Master's in Social Work, and has taught workshops and classes for San Jose State University, Bay Area Legal Aid Association, and SFSU Summer Institute on Sexuality, among others. In addition to her therapeutic practice, she is an energy worker (Reiki II Practitioner) and certified in expressive arts therapy. She lives in Oakland with her temperamental cat, Lenore, where she works towards collective (fat) liberation while growing strawberries on her balcony.    

Show Highlights

• The challenges of living with chronic illness and pain
• Many people who deal with chronic illness are advised to restrict foods and how she helps them balance this tension
• How hard it is to tune into your body when you experience a lot of physical pain
• Using compassionate touch with yourself to self-soothe
• The power of naming the pain or discomfort in your body
• Knowing that emotional and physical sensations can be temporary
• Learning how to accept the diversity of our bodies 
• How it was for her working with a very thin therapist who had a real blind spot about fat oppression
• Her recognition that she might be the only person in someone’s life who is communicating a HAES® message
• The way her chronic illness helped her reconnect to her body
• How to use intuitive movement with emotions and pain
• Looking at the role of restriction in all areas of life
• Moving away from perfectionism 
• How she works with folks scared of getting or staying fat
• Externalizing fears around fatness
• What does your fear of fatness mean?(That no one will love me, that I will always be alone, that I won’t be worthy and respectful of good treatment?)
• Dieting can be a way of controlling difficult emotions
• How do you structure your life without that diet or exercise regime to structure yourself?
• What are the bigger longings that you have?
• Learning to take pleasure in life in all its forms

Links & Resources:

• Be Nourished
• Get on the waitlist for the Cookie Revolution course
• Charis Stiles Psychotherapy

Dr. Shelia Addison joins me to discuss her personal journey around body acceptance as well as her clinical work with folks in a variety of marginalized bodies. 

Raised by a feminist single mother in the Midwest, Dr. Sheila Addison, LMFT was taught early on that women deserve equal opportunities. In her training as a Marriage and Family Therapist, Dr. Addison expanded her perspective on social justice to include intersections of gender, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, weight, and more.  She earned her Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy from Syracuse University where she developed and co-taught one of the first academic courses covering LGBT issues in family therapy. Currently, she heads Margin to Center Consulting which encompasses her private practice and supervision and cultural competency trainings for mental health professionals. She provides diversity and inclusion support, including the Ally Skills Workshop, to corporate, academic, and community clients. She lives in Oakland, California where her private practice, focused on couples and relationships, is also located. In 2018 she was named “Best Psychotherapist in the East Bay” by the East Bay Express.

• Using anti-oppressive and feminist practices in her work
• The psychotherapy world still has a very conventional, very medicalized view of larger bodies
• Restricting, self-policing, denying and disconnecting from the body are all things that are encouraged in women and those assigned female at birth
• Her introduction into fat acceptance with the fatshonista blog
• The more images she saw of people in larger bodies the more her perspective started to shift in terms of how she viewed her own body
• A television show on ABC called “Huge” and how that show helped change what looked “normal” to her
• Helping clients view their bodies with more neutral descriptions
• Helping clients shift their “inner eye” when they assess their bodies
• How we view our bodies is relational and social
• Her clients teach her as well and this is her favorite part of being a therapist
• If your body changes, what else will you be self-critical about?
• Letting go of the fantasy of body change actually can help folks maintain health-promoting behaviors
• Health is multi-dimensional, rather than just being about what the scale says
• Asking yourself “How does it feel to live in my body?”
• The disability rights movement helps us acknowledge that not all bodies have the same access and potential
• People of color and black feminists theorists show us how body possibilities are racialized 
• Intentionally having images of higher weight bodies on her website

Huge

Shrill

Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health by Glenn A. Gaesser

Junkfood Science blog

Health At Every Size by Linda Bacon

www.cookierevolution.org

Dr. Sheila Addison, LMFT

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

Abby Krom, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles, CA. Abby specializes in anxiety, perfectionism, and disordered eating. In addition to seeing individual clients, she presents on these topics in corporate and community settings. 

Listen in as Abby and I discuss how she grew up surrounded by dieters and dieted for many years herself. She talks about how perfectionism dovetails with constantly trying to lose weight and exercise harder. Abby talks about finding joyful movement, accepting her body as it is and letting go of the fantasy of how happy she would finally be when she reached the “after” of the "before and after" narrative that diet culture constantly sells.

• Anxiety and perfectionism are common in disordered eating and chronic dieting
• Many of her clients haven’t heard that diets don’t work, rather they think they aren’t trying hard enough
• The diet mentality was rampant when she was growing up
• When she was 10 a doctor told Abby her weight was out of range for her age
• She started Weight Watchers with her mom when she 10
• She still knows how many points a food is, even though she left Weight Watchers years ago
• Food became this area to conquer when she didn’t feel good about other parts of her life
• We have this culture of "before and after" and Abby was dying for the "after" when she would be happy and free and all the guys would like her
• How she had a dietician who told her she should look in the mirror and be disgusted by the fat on her body
• Intuitive eating really lines up with mindfulness, but that doesn’t mean you have to be mindful all the time. It’s not about being perfect!
• How she changed her relationship with exercise from one of punishment to one of attuning to the needs of her body
• How letting go of rigidity with movement helped her experiment and figure out what feels good on any given day
• How her mom’s dieting behavior really influenced her 
• Not joining in diet talk with her friends
• How no longer pursuing weight loss can shake up a romantic relationship

Abby’s website

Embrace Film

Today I’m talking with Aaron Flores, a registered dietician nutritionist and certified Body Trust provider based out of Los Angeles. Aaron works with individuals healing from disordered eating and runs groups specifically geared towards men. He is also the co-host of the popular podcast Dietitians Unplugged.

Listen as Aaron discusses his shift from focusing on weight-loss to embracing the principles of Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size, how to enjoy eating, and movie metaphors to help you in your own recovery.

Show Highlights: 

• How Aaron left behind years of dieting
• People need to stop blaming themselves for their bodies
• Many folks have been subjected to intense oppression around their bodies
• Running a weight-loss program for the VA
• How he straddled weight-loss and Health at Every Size paradigms for a long time
• How he identifies as fat and brings that into his work
• Healing can begin when we name the impact of weight stigma and fatphobia
• His group work with men and how frustrating it is to be asked about the male body image experience as if there was just one experience of being in a man’s body
• Discovering the satisfaction factor
• Eating what’s enjoyable
• Asking yourself what you like about certain foods
• You need to let the rebellious part of you eat what it wants
• “Am I doing this right?” is such a common question from folks recovering from dieting and eating disorders
• Health at Every Size is not just a book, it’s a social-justice movement
• How the word “health” can exclude people

Links & Resources

Dieticians Unplugged podcast

Aaron Flores’s website

Intuitive Eating website

Health At Every Size by Linda Bacon

Shilo George