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The universe has good news for the lost, lonely and heart -sick.
The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.
I'm Steve Alman. I'm Cheryl Strayed.
This is Dear Sugars.
some bittersweet days with me.
I check my bell I have every day.
Oh, and the sugar you see in my way.
Dear sugars, I've been on and off diets for 25 years.
I don't think I can string two days together when I was not starting a diet, thinking about starting a diet, on a diet or falling off the wagon.
The goal of my first diet was to fit into a pair of guest's jeans.
I was in fifth or sixth grade at the time of that first diet and guest jeans were popular.
I'd fantasize about buying the jeans and wearing them to school with my shirt tucked in so that all of the kids could see the symbol on my back pocket.
I never lost enough weight to buy those jeans.
Over time, they became a symbol of what losing weight would feel and look like for me.
Guest jeans turned into a new basketball uniform to play on the team in junior high, new jeans for my first day of college, or a whole new me for law school.
After 25 years of dieting, I feel like an accidental expert.
But I'm so tired of it.
I'm tired of feeling bad about my body.
I'm tired of working towards a vision of myself that does not exist. I'm tired of thinking that I'm not worthy of love because I'm not thin.
I'm tired. I want to accept myself in whatever form my body takes.
I want to work towards health and wellness without being a slave to the scale.
I want to make peace with my body.
I simply don't know how.
I've been on the rollercoaster for so long that I don't know how to get off.
How do I do that?" Sugars, signed, dieting for guest jeans.
Mmh, when I read this letter, Steve, I felt like this woman in so many ways was telling the story of my life and the story of the lives of so many women I know.
It's just so familiar to me and so painful and exhausting.
And the problem is that I weigh too much. How do I lose weight?
And what she is saying to us, and I congratulate you dieting for guest genes for recognizing this, is that the problem is that you are a slave to a system that has lied to you.
You are a slave to a system that has said you should be ashamed of your body and you're not okay how you are.
And I have to say the minute that I even start to talk about this, I start to think that I don't know that I believe that I can ever be free of this.
I actually don't. Immediately, the little voice in my head says, you'll be free when you lose the weight and then you can accept your body.
This is something that's repeated all through my life in spite of all of the other amazing, great, strong things in my life.
My feminism and my confidence and my brashness and all of those things that I think a lot of people associate with me.
And yet still there's always this thing inside of me that I should be skinnier and I could be if I were a better person.
What I flashed to was the beauty myth, the Naomi Wolf book.
And here's what she has to say, a consequence of female self -love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth.
Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification.
If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs.
If she loves female in this, she champions its rights.
It's true what they say about women.
Women are insatiable, we are greedy, our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place.
If the world were ours to, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care.
These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands, payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, et cetera, the force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want in bed and in the world.
And you go, well, there it is.
This isn't some coincidence that we've wound up with a culture that is constantly making women feel terrible about themselves.
It's by design. That's right.
And I think that everywhere we turn, we are undermined.
Even in this age of feminism is popular now, right?
This idea of empowering girls and women, and yet everywhere we turn, we're actually undercutting ourselves and each other in ways, large and small.
And never was this made more alive to me than when I had this experience right before Wild was published, about six months before Wild was published.
I got a phone call from my publisher and they said, great news, Vogue Magazine wants to run an excerpt of the book.
And this is as you know, a big deal.
This was before Wild Was Wild.
So this was going to be an enormous coup for me as a writer.
And the reason that they'd chosen to excerpt the book in their March issue of Vogue, is that it was their powerful women issue.
Okay so they wanted to feature women who inhabit and embody power.
And they chose me. and they said we're going to run an excerpt and we're going to come to Portland and do a photo shoot, full body photo shoot.
And I remember exactly where I was standing when I got this phone call.
I was with my kids in a park in Southeast Portland, pushing them in swings.
And my very first thought was I'm going to try to delay the photo shoot for as long as possible because I need some time to lose weight.
So this was August. We put the photo shoot in November I promised that I wouldn't eat anything between August and November.
That's the radical diet, the no -food diet.
Because I was a size 12.
And you can't be a size 12 and be in Vogue magazine.
And guess what happened.
It turned out I ate things.
I was hungry. I needed to eat.
It happens. Vogue arrived.
I was exactly the same weight as I was that day that I was standing in the park.
and they put me in all these clothes and they did me up and really styled me beautifully.
And we went and did this photo shoot and I felt pretty and people were walking by and they're like, what's going on?
And I would do like Vogue photo shoot, you know, to the passers by and they would do a double take, you know?
And it was one of those things where I thought, okay, we took thousands of pictures literally.
I was like some of them are going to be nice.
And what happened is that the issue appeared, and it actually appeared the day after I revealed my identity as Sugar, at the party where you introduced me.
You said, sugar is Cheryl Strayed.
And we were just high.
Remember how, what a high point that was?
And the next day, I'm in the San Francisco airport with my husband, we're flying home.
And Ryan says, Oh my god, you know, your issue of Vogue is out.
And we go and we grab the magazine and we page through it because they won't let me see the picture before, you know, it's published.
And we open it up and there is a picture of me that immediately my husband says, is that you?
Because we were not sure.
Yep. Do you remember that image?
Of course I do. I saw it, I will shock our listeners by revealing that I'm not a regular reader of Vogue, but maybe I saw an image online or something and I said, that is so effed up.
That is not Cheryl.
They made you look like an android.
I know. It was so obvious.
I guess if you know what you look like that it wasn't you It was some they airbrushed away your Cheryl straightness.
Yeah, they made me skinny They gave me a boob job and some weird face job, right the face.
They actually made me uglier than I But they made me thinner and it was so Amazing for me at that moment in my life here.
I am in my mid -forties I've been working all my life for this moment And what they did is they corrected me, they made me obedient.
They said, you know what?
We're gonna feature you as powerful, but we're gonna make you skinny first because that's how you have to be.
And what was really interesting for me is like, I was so embarrassed about it.
It caused a little scandal, like Jezebel did a piece about it.
I was getting all these calls from the press because people noticed that they had photoshopped me like that.
And but what they were very directly saying is you are not enough.
You are not okay as you are in your size 12.
So what does that say to me?
What does that say to all of us?
What does that say about their idea of female power?
And I wanna dig into all of this because I would like to say like, oh, that experience woke me up and I said, screw all of you, I'm gonna be who I am.
It woke me up. It also, it didn't stop me from, the cycle that I've been in essentially all of my life, which is, I have my skinny phases, which is not very skinny, it's about a size 10 or 12, and then I have my fat phases, which is about a size 14 or 16, where I am right now.
And I feel good when I'm at one phase, though it's never thin enough, and I feel bad when I'm at the other phase.
And I know that this is not an unfamiliar cycle for so many women.
You're describing Erin's life.
I literally am so blind to it.
Men have their own set of anxieties about body image stuff that's enforced by the culture, but we were essentially blind to the kind of pressures even though we were a part of enforcing them and Erin to her it's there is a perpetual voice inside her head that says yeah Five more pounds and it will be right and the irony is she was skinny really skinny once when she was abjectly depressed she was not eating Yeah, she was totally mentally and emotionally unhealthy and psychically unhealthy and even then she looked in the mirror and thought Another five pounds.
Yeah So, I read that letter from Dieting for Guess Jeans and the end of the year was drawing to a close.
And this is, like a lot of people, I often think about what's ahead, what do I want to do in the next year.
I make resolutions.
And in the final days of the year, I was thinking, one more time, I'm just going to lose the weight and get to a weight that makes me feel happy and good.
And I'm going to stay there.
And I'm not going to fail this time.
And I was on the Internet and I saw this headline, it said 10 reasons not to focus on your weight in the new year.
So I thought, I'll just give it a read.
And it presented ideas that really, they seem so simple, but were shockingly new to me.
And what I saw in many of those ideas is that there were a revelation and that if I could actually not just read them, but actually hold them, that maybe I could change.
that I could stop being a slave to this cycle.
Right. And to the scale.
Yeah. So our guests today on the show wrote that piece.
And they're in the studio with us.
We have Hilary Kanavy.
Hi. Hi. And Dana Sturdivant.
Hi, there. We're so glad to have you here.
Now can you both maybe introduce yourselves a little bit.
Tell us a bit about what you do and who you are and how you came to write that article and all of that stuff.
Well, Dana and I share a business called Be Nourished, and we've worked together for the past 13 years.
I'm a psychotherapist, I'm a counselor, and I've been helping people sort out their relationship to their body and dieting and disordered eating for about 20 years.
And Dana and I share a passion for really revising the way we look at bodies and the way we interact and have relationship with our own bodies and food, so.
Yeah, when we met we knew we wanted to offer something different.
And you're a nutritionist. I'm a dietitian and I had worked in a in the dominant weight paradigm for many years and started to become disillusioned, which with what we were doing because the majority of people regained the weight after they lost weight.
And I was a health care provider who believed I was promoting healthy lifestyles.
I was not a health care provider who thought they were promoting dieting behaviors, but we asked people to weigh themselves regularly, we asked people to track their calories.
We asked people to do eating disordered behaviors under the guise of health, and I started to feel unethical.
I also noticed that it didn't seem to matter how much weight people lost. They still didn't like the size and shape of their body.
And you both have spoken to that.
And I thought I can trust people's bodies to sort this out if we can just focus on healing and focus on self -care from a weight neutral perspective.
People's bodies are going to sort this out.
It doesn't seem to be helpful to focus on weight.
And it's starting to feel like it's actually harmful.
And so I started my practice and that's when I discovered a growing community of healthcare providers who were concerned about the war on obesity.
And then I discovered intuitive eating.
And in that book, they talk about the qualities of a dieting mind.
It's focused on judging a day of eating as good or bad or thinking of foods as good or bad.
Using exercise to compensate for food and solely exercising for the sake of cosmetic fitness, not really for metabolic fitness.
You fit into those guess genes, right?
Exactly, yeah. I mean I'm going to guess that when you hear this letter, dieting for guest genes.
This is so familiar to you as well, right?
This is like everyone that's ever walked in our office.
That's right. And there is that shame piece.
Let's talk about this this sense of I keep trying and I keep failing.
I think dieting and the idea that weight loss is good and we can all do it and So -and -So down the street did it, you know, all this is so pervasive that we're missing the truth about dieting, which is that up to 95 % of people regain the weight that they lost, you know.
So it's you can lose weight on many plans, but sustaining weight loss is virtually impossible, and so when when folks take a trip around that dieting cycle, they tend to never blame the plan, right?
The plans are always supposed to work and I'm the failure, right?
And the thing is that we don't really understand that, you know, when we diet, when we restrain food and when we restrict food that there's a really really strong psychological and physiological mechanism that kicks in that our bodies are not very fond of dieting in general.
Will you talk with us a little bit about just the terminology?
We've talked about a few phrases but especially around overweight, fat, obese, the various terms that people wrestle with to describe bodies that have become, in and of themselves, complicated?
Yeah. Part of the movement, Fat Acceptance Movement is to reclaim the word fat and strip it of its negative or pejorative connotations.
We don't use the terms overweight and obese in our work, these are terms based on the BMI, the body mass index. The BMI was never intended to be used to say if you're healthy or not.
And we cannot look at somebody and know if they're healthy or not.
So you're gonna hear us say, fat people, fat bodies, you might hear us say larger body people, people at the higher end of the weight spectrum, people at the lower end of the weight spectrum, to be more neutral than these terms. Most people are more comfortable saying, you know, referring to themselves as overweight than fat, but, you know, we don't use these terms for those reasons.
And that's only because we associate fat, as you said, with just like a pejorative word. or, oh my gosh, did you call me fat?
Whereas if somebody says you're skinny or slender, that's praise, right?
And what you're saying is we're gonna detach those value judgments from those words.
So the question I have for you that I think is one that I've heard a lot of people ask, you know, whenever we talk about essentially saying, okay, we're not gonna have this dieting mindset, that we're not gonna encourage calorie restriction or exercise, like you say to obliterate what you ate or any of those things.
These are so deeply associated with, I think what most people think of as being healthy.
It's really hard for me to see what, you know, what is the other thing?
Is it just eating whatever you want, whenever you want, and doing exercise?
I mean, is it, this kind of like, unhealthy, screw it kind of diet plan that's not a diet plan, what is it?
Unfortunately, I think the culture that we live in normalizes dietary restriction.
while pathologizing any overeating.
And if we can say at times that undereating is normal, we can say at times that overeating is normal.
And we tend to think of binge eating as, the binge is the problem and the restriction is trying to be good.
And there is no restriction or restraint without an equal or opposite binge for many people.
That's a very normal experience is to have this backlash eating happening.
And we want people to know that they're doing the right thing.
You know like, that's a normal reaction for their bodies to have. It's actually a sign of health.
It's actually a sign of wellbeing, not to be able to diet and wanting food.
But we see restriction, I mean we congratulate people.
Yeah. I know when I've had a day like that I'm like, good me.
But a lot of people find themselves doing what they call emotional eating or binging by the end of the day because they've been trying to be good so much all day that they've ended up really hungry and our bodies are remarkably clever about making sure they get what they need.
And when you step back and think about how many messages we get throughout the day about restraining or restricting something that's so natural to us, it can kind of make you feel a little nuts.
LS It feels important to say too that there's no one meal.
There's no one day of eating that has the power to heal or kill us.
That makes us you know gain or lose weight or get a nutrient deficiency or get cancer, right?
It's what we do consistently over time.
and it's usually that shame spiral while the person is eating the cake.
And then this thought is, okay, so tomorrow I'm not going to do this.
As you said, you know, I made this plan.
I was going to like not eat until this vogue shoot.
And then you know what happened?
I got hungry. That's right.
Like two hours later, the diet lasted two hours.
And so, you know, when we pull the reins in tight, there's this natural reaction to swing over here.
And then the pendulum swings back over to the rigidity.
And we're about finding the middle path where we're not over in rigidity and perfectionism and we're not over here in the screw it plan.
And one of our colleagues, Deb Burgart, says we go from dieting to donuts to discernment.
Okay, that's good. It's a big kind of word, discernment!
I think it's hard to trust, right, that we're gonna find the discernment because we've had so little experience with it.
I mean most of us have been indoctrinated into dieting culture before we could consent, right?
Like when we ask people that come to our office how when they learned their body was a problem like before the age of 10 for most of the women that we work with.
So we've been at this before we could even choose it, right?
So the idea that our bodies can be involved in the choice, that our bodies kinda know what they want, that we don't have to control them is kind of the essence of the healing work.
We call it body trust, actually, at BeNourished.
But this has this big parallel to where you all started from, which is this is the idea that women's bodies need to be controlled, right?
And then all of us are kind of unleashing our inner oppressors and controlling our bodies, thinking that somehow by controlling the size of them that we're going to be more correct, that we're going to be more healthy, that we're going to be a better person somehow.
And health is none of those things.
Health is not control and health is not hyper vigilance, right?
Health is our spiritual well -being, our emotional well -being, our relationships to others, our relationship to ourself and all of that stuff is drastically affected by this relationship to food and body.
Oh, so much! The wrongs we must right.
The fights we must win.
The future we must secure together for our nation.
This is what's in front of us.
This determines what's next for all of us.
We are Marines. We were made for this.
You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries.
You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns.
McDonald's breakfast comes first. Dear sugars, I'm a 36 -year old woman who has been categorized by doctors and society as overweight since around the age of five.
There was a period of one year in my 20s that I lost a significant amount of weight and went from a size 22 to an 8.
I was a size 8 for about 3 glorious days, and eventually ate my way to an 18.
During the last 10 years, I've vacillated between a size 14 and probably should be wearing a 20, but refuse to go above an 18.
All my life, I've struggled with moderation.
I don't eat sugar for two weeks, and then when it's someone's birthday at work and I a piece of cake?
It's a struggle for me not to dive into a spiral of cake eating.
I was made fun of in my childhood.
It wasn't just other kids either.
My own grandmother introduced me to people as the chubby one.
She said I had such a pretty face, it was a shame I couldn't be thin.
She told me that I'd better lose weight or I'd never have a husband.
In spite of this, I can honestly say there have been periods of time in the last 10 years that I've felt sexy and proud to have my photo taken.
I was working out and eating healthy when I felt this way, no matter the label on my jeans.
But after a period of this more healthy lifestyle, the holidays or a stressful life event occurs and I take comfort in a giant canister of cheese balls or a gallon of ice cream.
I lose myself for days, weeks, or months in a haze of eating whatever type of greasy and sugary foods I can get my hands on.
It's only when my pants are nearly impossible to button are when the only way I can breathe is to unbutton them to sit that I force myself to lose weight.
And then the pattern starts all over again.
This is not the life I want.
I want to be happy with my body and accept it no matter what size is on the tag of my shirt.
I don't want to live a life of restriction, and I don't want my life to revolve around food.
There's a movement sweeping social media, body positive.
I follow Instagram accounts of curvy models, women who willingly have photograph taken in various states of undress.
They don't photoshop away the rolls or cellulite.
They preach about wearing whatever they want.
They encourage women of any shape and size to embrace their appearance and not let society or a fashion designer tell you what type of clothing you should wear.
I love to eat just like the women I follow on Instagram who declare a deep love for their curves and a varied menu of healthy and unhealthy foods.
I take great pleasure in the sweet contrast of cold vanilla ice cream on a warm, gooey brownie.
Sometimes, I look at the model's poutine body acceptance, and wonder what they go through offline.
Are there times they deny themselves what they want for a plain salad?
Work out for two hours a day?
Can they eat a piece of cake Monday and not do it again for two weeks?
I've been in therapy, I've kept journals and food blogs.
I went into debt with a personal trainer.
I'm still struggling.
I don't know how to be okay with myself in the present, I struggle with how to be body positive after years of being told it's wrong to be my size and weight.
I struggle to accept my body when I feel like the world around me can't accept my body as is.
It seems like in order to accept my body, I need to be mentally okay with it, and the only way I can be mentally okay is to change my body, which is only accepting it with conditions.
The idea of body acceptance seems fake if I first have to lose weight and get to a certain size to attain it.
I hear criticisms about the body positive movement that it promotes obesity and says it's okay to be unhealthy.
I don't want to agree with that mindset, but it's tempting sometimes to say screw lowering my cholesterol and buying clothes in the non -plus -size department.
I'll just be miserable in my body and risk health problems to avoid the stress of restrictive eating and feeling bad about my choices in restaurants.
Sugars, is there such a thing as unconditional body acceptance?
How can I become healthy and happy in my body while not depriving myself of the pleasures of food?
Signed, body negative." The genes, guys.
I want to tell you and all of our listeners, we got so many letters about this subject and I can't...
Like genes were always mentioned.
And as a woman, I have to say I get that.
There were certain genes and they only get to belong to certain people with really skinny butts Did you guys relate to that Yeah, it's really common when people even when they hear us speak about this they hear a truth it resonates deeply, and then there's But first I want to lose Xxx amount of weight and then I'll do this then I'll do this healing work And some of our clients even will say, I'm just waiting for you to tell me that there's a different set of rules for people like me.
But it's always, what are the rules?
Along with reading The Beauty Myth, the Naomi Wolf book, I also read Hunger by Roxanne Gay, which is a really beautiful searing memoir.
And she raises a question that I was really curious to have you guys speak to.
At one point she says, I'm going to quote from a couple different passages, But they're getting at the same basic quandary.
She says to be clear the fat acceptance movement is important affirming and profoundly necessary but I also believe that part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven't reached a place of peace and unconditional Self -acceptance and then she goes further and says I also want to lose weight I know that I'm not healthy at this size, you know, she struggled with high blood pressure more important I'm not happy at this size and And that is a kind of paradox that that book poses.
How do you sort of rectify those two conflicting goals, self -acceptance and I think, actually, I would feel happier and healthier if I was at a lower weight?
I'm not sure I experience this as conflicting.
I think that we have to take a few steps back when we're thinking about that question because when we say health in this culture, we don't really know what we're talking about.
Everyone has a different idea, right?
I'm sure there's doctors listening that would love to tell me exactly what they think health is, but I also don't think that they could go to their colleagues and get any agreement on their definition.
Certainly, we could be talking about blood pressure, but we also know that when people live in stigmatized bodies, whether they're brown bodies or large bodies, that they're experiencing so much stress and so much stigma, and we know that that has a health effect.
And somehow, we never end up talking about the social determinants of health.
We simply focus on health behaviors and that is a problem.
Wow, yes. Absolutely, I see that.
I also wonder what you make of Roxane Gay saying, I believe that part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven't reached a place of peace and unconditional self -acceptance.
And I think this speaks also to body negatives question where she's saying how empowering it is to see this woman on Instagram in a bikini even though she's a size 22, or whatever, you know, any of those experiences, and yet inside still feel that, you know, what Roxanne describes or what this letter writer is saying, but, you know, I still feel kind of body negative.
She says - How do you - Yeah, I don't know how to be okay with myself in the present.
And it's a big statement, but it's basically the kind of statement that I'm sure your clients are walking in with.
Well, I think that's where we all start from on this journey, right?
And the fat acceptance movement is a beautiful movement about body oppression and most of us who have experienced a lot of body shame, who have had disordered eating, who have experienced a tremendous amount of weight stigma have healing work to do.
It's like trauma work, right?
Right. It is, actually.
And so I think, you know, in this quote that you're reading of Roxanne's I think she's saying, what is the path, right?
Because fat acceptance can be part of the path for some people, you know Seeing all these folks out there modeling how to claim their bodies is really powerful But sometimes we have other work to do before we can get there right and when I read Roxanne's book I thought it was so powerful and I also felt like it's the story of like What is it really like to live and occupy a large body in this culture and we never hear those stories?
You know we always have to hear them through the arc of like triumph right or the arc or the before and after.
Yeah or it has to be like this narrative that includes dieting culture yeah and what if we just heard the story right yeah and so that's where we think we need to start from.
So so what are some practical things you would tell me if I came into your office and said, okay I want to get off the you know the cycle.
Yeah I think you know one is a powerful thing we often tell people is this is not your fault and not broken.
That the things that you've been doing to try to control the size and shape of your body have created this relationship with food in your body.
When people are in this pattern of dieting they believe they need to try harder.
They believe it's about willpower.
And this is not about trying harder.
This is about trying different.
We pretty sure you've tried really damn hard, probably harder at this than almost anything in your life.
And if it was about trying harder, like you probably would have been there.
This is about trying different and recognizing that you've been investing in a failed paradigm.
And so we start by putting thoughts about weight on the back burner so we can start to turn towards ourselves and towards our bodies and to look and listen with kindness and curiosity.
So much of the shame and the blame and the bias is internalized.
And so part of understanding our body story is externalizing that shame that blame and starting to get pissed off at the people who put you on your first diet, the doctor who pathologized your body.
Most women start dieting when they gain the 15 pounds needed to start their first periods, and instead of our culture saying that's normal and natural weight gain, we pathologize it, and actually the entry into and the exit from reproductive life are the highest -risk times of eating disorders for women because of the natural, healthy weight gain that comes in these periods of time.
I mean, I think that that's the root of everything we're talking about here, which is that a story has been told to us that isn't true, that doesn't serve us and we don't even have the terminology for change.
I don't even know how to think about disengaging, for example, with well, how much do I weigh?
Like, I can't let that go.
And I think more to the point what I mean by that is, the higher weight is a negative feeling and the lower weight is a positive feeling.
Like to let that story go would be a very, very advanced move for me and for most people.
And I'm curious about, you used this term, weight neutral, which I think is all about telling a different kind of story about weight essentially, right?
What does weight neutral mean?
So we use weight neutral just in reference to self -care.
We ask this magical question.
If you knew that weight would never be a problem again, that you would have all the lovers, and all the respect, and all the peace, what would you wanna do to take care of yourself?
It seems like a very simple, magical question.
It's quite remarkable for people who have really suffered to try to figure out what they would do for themselves that has nothing to do with weight change.
And most commonly, I think the answers we get to that question are, I would buy clothes that fit.
I would have more sex and I would move more.
Move more, meaning exercise, yeah.
There's another aspect of this that I want you to speak to, if you would, a little bit in body negatives letter in particular.
There's a powerful undercurrent it's about the pleasures of food, the sensual pleasures of food.
That ice cream, the warm gooey brownie, and the cake, And, but it has a, a kind of compulsive cast to it.
It's as if, it's almost like she's describing a substance abuse.
I can't just have one drink.
It's, it's either a cake spiral or nothing.
But I'm curious what you say to people about if they're being weight neutral and they're thinking about the things that will bring them happiness and harmony and enjoy, what if that is a brownie and, uh, you know, ice cream?
Yeah. If I remember, she heard her body was a problem since the age of five, so she's probably not had a ton of permission for pleasure around food and eating.
Right, she was the chubby one from early on.
Yeah, from a really young age.
And around the time we are women particularly, there's a time in our development where our focus shifts from our own desires to our desirability.
We're no longer interested in what we want, we're interested in being wanted.
And so some of this work is around getting back in touch with our hunger cues, simple hunger cues and fullness cues.
But we talk about hunger, and we talk about appetite, and hunger is different from appetite.
Appetite is, what do I want?
Hunger is, my body needs food.
Appetite is, what sounds good?
What do I really want?
And so you can walk away from a meal feeling full and not at all satisfied.
And you can walk away from a meal feeling really satisfied and not maybe particularly full, but done, because it was so good.
Sometimes when I tell people, I want you to notice if you like what you're eating.
Does it taste good?
And they look at me and they go, why would you ask me that?
Well, isn't that interesting that you even have the reaction to this question that I'm asking.
Like, do you like what you're eating?
I think what I'm hearing from both of you a lot is consciousness, is being awake to not just the hunger, but also what's behind this hunger.
Okay, we're talking about a woman who's been wounded for a long time by this story that she's been told about her body.
And so then I think what you're suggesting, Dana, and this is my observation for you, body negative, is if you can find, via some healing, if you can find that place where you are feeling stronger in your sense of your body as being you know your home and not your enemy.
That some of that I guess compulsive or that desire for food that then does become a sort of unhealthy negative cycle will actually fall away because part of that negative cycle is filling that hole where the wound is, right?
Is that kind of the idea of some of the healing work that you're doing?
Is not just trying to teach people like this is how you eat the way, but maybe the proper way can't be learned until you heal?
Yeah. And there's a reason why we picked body trust for our work.
We didn't pick body love because it's a pretty tall order given the culture we live in, and we kind of fall in and out of love with our bodies.
Body respect is available almost immediately.
Just start noticing how your body shows up for you every day, regardless of how you treat it.
You know, Those of us practicing body acceptance are not immune to bad body days.
Somebody who's practicing body trust does not get hooked by bad body days.
Somebody who's practicing body trust goes, what the hell is going on in my life where right now I'm really upset about my body when yesterday I was totally fine.
I went to bed last night and actually looked in the mirror and thought I look pretty good.
And then eight hours later I wake up and I'm disgusting.
what has changed because my body has not changed in eight hours.
So when we have bad body moments, we recommend like pulling the lens really wide, because when we have bad body thoughts, we tend to zoom in and go, okay, what's my plan?
And so when we're practicing this work, we keep the lens really wide.
We think, what would I be thinking about If I weren't thinking about my body?
What might I be stressed out about?
What am I maybe struggling to control in my life that I want to project onto my body.
And then we resist the urge to make a plan.
Getting comfortable, you know, usually it means for me getting into a pair of pants that feels good, usually means taking my bra off, like something, but getting comfortable.
And then the plan is to listen.
It's fascinating, Cheryl, I don't know if you have this experience, but we're sitting there going, okay, so what's the plan?
And the plan is stripping away the plan and refusing to make a plan and doing things that don't feel like a plan at all.
Yeah, I mean, we're peeling back a little layers.
I mean, we have to acknowledge that the way we've been taught to see beauty has been utterly conditioned.
I mean, the idea that I would not find my body beautiful is disastrous.
But you know, there is hope, I want to believe that.
Honestly, Hilary and Dana, your words have offered me a great amount of hope.
And when I was thinking about this episode, I looked up and my 12 and a half year old daughter was sitting there and I said, Bobby, do you like your body?
And she gave me this quizzical look and she said, of course.
And I said, do you think that I like my body?
And she said, yeah, of course.
And a little flower in me bloomed and another flower in me died Because I was so happy that she thought that, that that's how I felt.
And I was sad that she wasn't exactly right.
But what I felt is that I have at least mothered her as if.
And I think that that's always what we give to the next generation.
And you know, what I want to say to our letter writers, too, they're right here with us.
I mean, the fact that they've even written these letters saying, I'm done with this, like I want there to be a different way.
I want to heal. You've already begun that, I think.
Dana and Hilary, thank you so much for coming and talking to us.
Thank you. It's great to have you on.
It's a pleasure. Thanks for having us.
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