Tagged With "Body Size"

A great discussion with writer and activist Ijeoma Oluo among other things: Ijeoma’s relationship with food growing up, including her experience with food insecurity The issues with food access for low-income people Food hoarding as a response to deprivation The impact of sexual assault on our eating behaviors The invisibility of fat bodies and the privileges of thin bodies The myth that weight loss is the cure to all ills Size discrimination Systemic injustice The impact of weight loss...

Linda Bacon, author of Health of Every Size speaks wisely about health, nutrition, social context, well-being and resilience. She says: optimizing diet is not the answer for good health . The podcast discusses: Her relationship to food in childhood, including her firsthand experiences of pursuing weight loss to gain social acceptance How diets and exercise regimens generally stop yielding weight-loss results after a certain amount of time All the ways in which our bodies fight weight loss...

If you aren't already a fan of "Dear Sugars" podcast, now is the time. Billed as "radically empathic advice," this episode takes on the tricky relationship between weight, dieting, body shame, healing and self acceptance. A must listen for women. In this episode: Her doctor categorized her as overweight when she was 5 years old. Her grandmother always introduced her as the “chubby one.” As an adult, she vacillates between moderation and binge-eating, restricting food some weeks, and gorging...

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Press Release — New Survey of California Community College Students Reveals More than Half Face Food Insecurity and Nearly 20 Percent Have Faced Homelessness March 7, 2019 Sacramento — More than half the students attending a California community college have trouble affording balanced meals or worry about running out of food, and nearly 1 in 5 are either homeless or do not have a stable place to live, according to a survey released today. Click HERE to read the press release and click HERE...

Conversations about weight can be particularly challenging for parents with adolescent kids, and insight into the characteristics of parent-adolescent communication about body weight is limited. Published in Childhood Obesity, this study from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity interviewed 148 adolescents enrolled in a weight loss camp, asking them what words their parents typically use to talk about their weight, how those words make them feel, and what words they would most want...

This op-ed writer wonders if there is a way to talk about health risk and body size while still being non-shaming and body positive. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/opinion/weight-loss-body-positivity.html?action=click&contentCollection=opinion&contentPlacement=2&module=stream_unit&pgtype=sectionfront&region=stream&rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&version=latest

"Victims of childhood sexual abuse are far more likely to become obese adults. New research shows that early trauma is so damaging that it can disrupt a person’s entire psychology and metabolism -- Women [have] said they felt more physically imposing when they were bigger. They felt their size helped ward off sexual advances from men." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/sexual-abuse-victims-obesity/420186/

Great post!! so much great info in this post. Thank you for sharing Monica! Love the social justice perspective. Wonderful resources too.

Such a great discussion! Body shame comes up very often in my professional practice, and it certainly takes time to change the "dieting mind" and to dismantle messages from diet culture that we grew up with and are so accustomed to. Definitely going to share these new definitions of health and powerful messages mentioned here!

Loved this episode. So much insight provided. Something that stuck out to me was the comment about how unnatural diets are, and how natural our common responses to diets (binging) are. I never thought of that. Other comments that stood out: "[Let's] focus on healing and focus on self care from a weight neutral perspective ...it doesn't seem to be helpful to focus on weight and it's starting to feel like it's actually harmful." "Health is not control and hyper vigilance, health is our...

Great comments, Danielle. I really liked the reframing of how we think about healthy "diets." I also liked the acknowledgement that wanting to lose weight should also be part of the conversation (referencing Roxanne Gay).

When we engage in emotional eating, we’re using food as our coping mechanism of choice to deal with whatever is inside. After all, it’s easy, accessible, and gives a perceived sense of relief—at least for a little while. The problem is, we never actually deal with the deeper emotion, sometimes rooted in ACEs. It just gets stuffed down and repressed. Then, there's the weight gain...

Food insecurity has been a significant adverse impact of the COVID-19 crisis. But for one local nonprofit, hunger relief isn’t “one size fits all.” “Our mission is to provide nutritious food to people living with critical illnesses,” shared Alberto Cortes, CEO at local nonprofit Mama’s Kitchen . The organization develops and delivers medically tailored meals to people navigating HIV, diabetes, congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease and cancer. “Our goal with our services isn’t just...

In a small patch of green space on Andry Street in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward, nine garden beds lie next to one another, each 6 feet by 9 feet, each the size of one standard solitary-confinement cell. Each garden bed grows a mix of herbs and flowers, among them pansies, stinging nettles, onions, mugwort. They are a mix of plants with medicinal properties and some that just bring pleasure to the eyes, and their growth is limited to the parts of the tiny space where a person would be free...

The right mix of nutrients revitalizes the brain that's been wounded by ACEs. Good nutrition can quickly improve mood and functioning in the present, while improving the potential to rewire disturbing memories imprinted in childhood.

As someone with an eating disorder history, the holidays, which should be joyful and exciting, can be awkward—and even destructive—as the same problems present themselves year after year: We’re expected to spend time with family members who can be jarring. We’re faced not only with an abundance of food, but also open judgments about how much (or how little) we eat. Our bodies are considered small-talk conversation starters, like the size of our waists are as banal as the fluctuating weather.

Back in 2019, we began planning to write a book, From Trauma to Resiliency, that would describe the experiences of survivors who have experienced multiple traumas and who have benefitted from relationship-based, collaborative family-school-community-based services. We asked colleagues doing amazing work in San Diego County to contribute chapters, and they shared stories of oppressed, traumatized groups of survivors that include, people who have faced abuse, war, and poverty,...

It’s 6 p.m. on the patio at Il Moro, a twinkly-lit Italian gastro pub in West Los Angeles, and Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole are intuitively eating their dinner. They start with warm, crusty bread, liberally dipped in olive oil, and then move on to salad, branzino and the penne tossed with little pillows of burrata that Ms. Resch ordered for the table. In accordance with one of intuitive eating’s 10 principles — “challenge the food police” — neither woman moralizes about the carbs. “The...

LONDON — A select group of the world’s top researchers studying obesity‌ recently gathered in the gilded rooms of the Royal Society, the science academy of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, where ideas like gravity and evolution were once debated. Now scientists were arguing about ‌‌the causes of obesity, which affects more than 40 percent of U.S. adults and costs the health system about $ 173 billion each year . At the meeting’s closing session, ‌ John Speakman , a biologist, offered ‌‌this...

How can linguistic anthropology help illuminate the connections between dietetics, fatphobia, and racism? Recently, a Twitter user wrote: “There is a fat politics movement. Come on in. The water’s fine.” Linguistic anthropology needs to “come on in,” as it were, to the fat politics movement. Specifically, we need to harness our analytical insights into the co-constitution of language, the body, and social differences to understand how people in this “fat-talk nation” produce and contest...

There were a few bad moments, over the course of a few bad months, that led me to download the weight- loss app. These will probably sound trivial to anyone who is not me, and of course they are trivial — but we are talking about bodies here, and about my body in particular, and one of the defining features of having a body is that it is a fire hose of tiny humiliations blasting you constantly in the face, never allowing you to look away, even when you most want to. One bad moment happened...

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what...

I remember watching my mother stand at the supermarket register, anxiously tugging at her shaggy dark blonde hair, repeatedly tucking it behind an ear. Her green eyes, amplified by thick glasses with rose-tinted plastic frames, scanned the running total. She’d hold an envelope open with one hand and whip out coupons like a blackjack dealer, placing them on each corresponding item to make sure the cashier scanned them together. She knew the total before we got to the checkout. She used a...