The impact of diet culture on health can have long and lasting effects. Today’s guest, Sam Gwazdaukas, was first introduced to the diet culture mindset as a child and continued to struggle with it for years to come. The messaging she received was to lose weight, be smaller, eat less, workout more, and this caused her to become obsessive, restrictive, and out of control with both food and exercise. Sam shares her journey from then to now and displays the radical mindset shifts that helped heal her relationship to health. This episode is a prime example of how diet culture can take over our life and yet we can still overcome it with time. Sam shares fitness and body confidence content on her instagram and continues to shed light on the dangers of obsessive health. 

In this episode we discuss:

• The impact of diet culture on youth and adults
• How ‘health’ shifts when diet culture is involved
• The pressure to change body shape and size
• How media influences our health standards
• The isolation of disordered eating
• How to identify what’s normal behavior vs disordered eating
• Reclaiming your life after an ED
• The starvation and surplus mindset
• Why words and comments matter
• Questions to ask yourself in recovery

Connect with Sam on IG @thesamplan and I’m @emilyfeikls and @letsthrivepodcast