tl;dr Christy Harrison of Food Psych is here to talk about pleasure, happiness, weight stigma, what it means to be anti-diet, and why trusting our hungers around food & sex is so important. Part 2 of 2!

I am so excited to share Part 2 of this 2 part conversation with the incredible Christy Harrison! If you haven’t heard Part 1, hop over and give that a listen before diving into this episode.

Christy is an anti-diet dietitian, host of the Food Psych Podcast, and she just published a book that we are exploring here called, “Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating”.

Before we get into my chat with Christy, I wanted to share a post on Tumblr by Inkdot about clothing that I wish more of us knew. The dressing room can be a fraught place for many of us – clothes never seem to fit just right, or the arbitrary sizes bring up shame. This piece about celebrities and clothes might bring some relief to those of us who struggle with finding clothing that fits our bodies.

Be Nourished’s free online Body Trust Summit is March 11-17 and it is going to be fantastic. If you like my conversation with Christy this week, the summit is 24 talks that will take you even deeper into your relationship with food, body, pleasure, and healing. Register now!

Finally, Patrons who support at $3 and above, this week are going to explore our body stories and I’m going to share a few more awesome bits from Christy’s book for us all to be in together. Hear it at patreon.com/sgrpodcast.

So back to my chat with Christy:

This week on Part 2 of my conversation with Christy Harrison we continue our exploration of many of the lies we’ve been sold, desirability politics and changing bodies, and why the problem is NOT weight but rather weight stigma and a focus on dieting.

All of this ties so so intimately to the ways we experience sex, the ways we navigate consent, how we set boundaries, and do relationship.

Be sure to send in your questions! I would love to hear from you. Use the contact form at dawnserra.com.

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook and Dawn is on Instagram.

About Christy Harrison:

Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CDN is an anti-diet registered dietitian nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and author of the book Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating(Little, Brown Spark 2019). She offers online courses and private intuitive eating coaching to help people all over the world make peace with food and their bodies. Since 2013 Christy has hosted Food Psych, a weekly podcast exploring people’s relationships with food and paths to body liberation. It is now one of iTunes’ top 100 health podcasts, reaching tens of thousands of listeners worldwide each week. 

Christy began her career in 2003 as a journalist covering food, nutrition, and health, and she’s written for major publications including The New York Times, SELF, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, Gourmet, Slate, The Food Network, and many others. Learn more about Christy and her work at christyharrison.com.

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics, and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing, and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So, welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Hey, you. Welcome to part two of my conversation with Christy Harrison all about diet culture, bodies, pleasure, and her new book “Anti-Diet”, which I really hope every single human being gets and reads because it’s amazing. If you have not heard part one of our conversations, stop this episode right now and go listen to that first. I think it’s really important to have that context before diving into this episode, because we’re going to pick up right in the middle of our conversation. Last week was Episode 296 and you can find that at dawnserra.com/ep296. And this week is Episode 297, which is the second half of our beautiful conversation. 

Dawn Serra: Something that I did not talk about last week as I was kind of grounding us in some of the questions and the data that Christy has been asking and writing about is around clothes and celebrity culture. There is a pretty important short part in the first chapter of Christy’s book that talks about clothing, and how historically for hundreds and thousands of years, all of our clothing was custom made for our unique bodies. We either sow them ourselves, or a spouse or a loved one made them for us, or if we had the means we paid a tailor or seamstress to do it. So everything was custom-tailored to our bodies, if we had a certain level of means. People who obviously were in poverty would take hand-me-downs and do their best to then tailor to fit their bodies. But what really changed things with the industrialization and manufactured clothing hitting markets, that happened right around the time that diet culture really started to take root; as more people were moving into cities as more money was being poured into health and medicine. 

Around that time, we started buying clothes that were made to these really generic measurements, which meant for lots of people – clothing no longer fit the way that it had. It was more convenient and potentially more affordable. But it also was us trying to fit our bodies into these more generic shapes and sizes. A few weeks ago, there was this really incredible post on Tumblr that was making the rounds and I saved it specifically for this episode, because I wanted to share it. I think that it is going to help so many of us feel so much better about our shopping experiences. If you’re anything like me, you have probably spent more time in dressing rooms feeling disappointed than excited about what you’re trying on. So I thought that this would be a really important thing for us to be inside of together. So Incdot wrote this:

Dawn Serra: “This weekend I was told a story which although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit, is it ever obvious is kind of blowing my mind. A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not to Wear. She was very excited because she has a plus-size body and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage. Her first question to him was this, ‘How do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?’ She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing. But when she watched What Not to Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great. And she had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success. So what gives?”

“His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits, when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored. And the same goes for everything on What Not to Wear: jeans, blazers, dresses – everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles. He pointed out that, historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or have their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses. You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on. Nothing on the show or in People Magazine is off the rack and unaltered. He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit. That’s how celebrities have genes that magically fit them all over. And the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or right up or slouch down or have four yards of extra fabric here and there.” 

Dawn Serra: “I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing. But, to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it. Because I have curves from here to hell-yeah. Some things don’t fit right and the world is just unfair that way. I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. It’s so obvious, and I can’t believe I didn’t know this. But no one ever told me. I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes. No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t shirt and having it altered to fit her. 

“I sat there after I was told the story and I really thought about how hard I’ve worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tags of my clothes. How hard I’ve tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed. I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to. No one told me it wasn’t supposed to. I guess I just didn’t know. I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit. I thought about that. And all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong”, who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything. And it never, ever did. This is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.”

Dawn Serra: “I thought about all of that. And then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste the years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong. So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while. But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only cool clueless people who didn’t realize this, but maybe we’re not. Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans and didn’t know why.” 

Those words were by Inkdot on Tumblr. And I really thought that that was important. We have so many images of celebrities in clothes that look right off the rack. But even those casual wear is custom tailored to their bodies. It was funny because when I saved this post, I mentioned to Alex – and most of you probably don’t know that Alex actually has experience as a tailor. So when we were chatting about this post, I told him how my sister once told me that she had all of her jeans custom-tailored to fit her and how weird I thought that was at the time, like it was just so extra of her. She told me it cost $15 to have her jeans altered to fit her just right. But at the time, I was so ashamed of my body and my size, that I would have never allowed someone to measure me and to help me create a better fit. Alex was laughing at me and talked about the thousands of alterations that he’s done and what a huge difference even small little snips and tucks can make in the way clothing looks on us. 

Dawn Serra: So I wanted to share that considering the context of this conversation that Christy and I are having last week and this week, if you have long struggled to feel good in your clothes, because what you find in stores just doesn’t fit, maybe if you have the financial means or if you’ve got the skills, or if you’re willing to learn the skills; take some of your clothing into a tailor and see what happens if they’re customized to your body. One of my very favorite clothing places is an online clothing store called Eve Shakti and they carry sizes from zero to 32. But they will custom make any item of clothing on their website to custom measurements for either the same price or $10 more as their pre-made clothing. You can literally send them every single measurement and then they will make a dress or a topper pants to exactly those measurements. Maybe some of us will feel a little bit less bad and self-conscious about clothing and fit, if we know that that’s an option. 

On to this week, Christy and I are going to some amazing places in the second half of our talk. At the end of the interview, you’re going to hear me talk about how Christy and I are going to go record our Patreon bonus but that’s not dropping this week. Because I was super impatient and could not possibly wait, it dropped last week. So the bonus Christy and I recorded is the bonus for Episode 296. You can hear that at patreon.com/sgrpodcast if you support at the $3 a month and above level.

Dawn Serra: This week, I am going to be exploring a little more from the book. I pulled out some epic stuff. We are going to get to be inside of that and some questions a little bit more. So if you want to tune in for that patreon.com/sgrpodcast for Episode 297. Then next week, it’s back with more questions from you. I’ve got questions about vaginal discharge, about whether sex toys can lead someone to wanting group sex. I’ve got a question from an 81 year old all about cheating on his wife with Alzheimer’s and so many other things. So if you’ve got a question for me: something you’re feeling stuck around, ashamed around, curious about – write in to me, dawnserra.com. There’s a contact form. I love hearing from all of you even the questions that are tough or frustrating. It leads to such incredible things. You can hear more about that on last week’s episode. But this week is part two of my chat with Christy Harrison. So let’s jump in.

Dawn Serra: Then you have this other quote that just hit me so deeply because I had never seen it really phrased this way. I think it speaks so beautifully to this, too, because so much of the reason that we’re afraid to move in the direction of our pleasure is because we think it’s going to make us unhealthy or prove we’re out of control or that we have no willpower, whatever it is. The quote was, “Pleasure and nutrition are highly correlated. The people who let themselves eat whatever they want, take pleasure in food and care less about nutrition, tend to have improved nutrient intake and consume a greater variety of foods, which is a positive nutritional indicator than dieters.” That’s the antithesis of the story we get from all the magazines and all the health websites, and all the bloggers and influencers of if we’re just allowed to take pleasure and to be present, and not worry about all the numbers, and the amounts and the quantities and the servings, we actually end up making choices that really, truly nourish us and serve our bodies.

Christy Harrison: I know isn’t that wild? It’s mind blowing when you think about it that everything our culture is telling us, everything the medical community is telling us, and the media, the health media and wellness media is telling us is so antithetical to what actually brings us true wellbeing. If we could just let go of all that noise and block it out, and let ourselves take pleasure and enjoy the foods that we enjoy and explore new foods that we might enjoy… I mean, it would help our overall wellbeing so much, our mental health would be greatly improved and is greatly improved when people are able to let go of those rules, but also our physical health. Our physical health benefits. It’s funny. There’s research also looking at what people actually eat, how much of certain foods and, of course, the foods that diet culture labels junk foods or off limits are ones that are often of interest to nutritional researchers, “Do people eat more of these ‘bad foods’ when they’re intuitive eaters?” And the answer is no. 

Actually, I mean, there’s definitely that period that pendulum swinging back or what I sometimes call the “honeymoon phase”, where you feel like you can’t stop on certain foods because they had been off limits to you and so you’re going to town on them for a while. Over time, people who are intuitive eaters are actually eating more of those supposedly bad or off limits foods, than people who are not intuitive eaters; and that when you’re allowing yourself to eat those foods and taking pleasure in food, it’s not resulting in an all pizza, all cake whatever menu. Because the thing is when you’re thinking in terms of pleasure and when you’re allowing yourself to follow your pleasure, you really do notice the nuances more. 

Christy Harrison: You notice, I think, this happens a lot with the clients that I see who do go through a “honeymoon phase” and are like, “Well, I guess this week, it’s just all brownie batter and that’s all I’m going to eat,” or whatever. And they do it for a while and then they’re like, “I’m really sick of this, actually. It doesn’t taste as good. It’s not satisfying once I know and have really reassured myself that I have the capacity that I’m allowed to eat this whenever I want, however much of it I want. It’s never going to be taken away again.” It sort of loses that luster. It loses that compulsive quality. Then you can drill down into like, “Is this actually the flavor that I want right now?” “Is this actually the type of food I want right now?” “Am I hungry for more food or am I hungry for a different texture or temperature or…?” All these nuances of flavor and texture and pleasure with food that we can notice and recognize like, “Okay, I’m really not in the mood for a donut right now. What I actually want is a cupcake or what I actually want is a meal. What I actually want is a salad.” The salad comes back as something that can actually be pleasurable, that can actually be chosen for its own merits for a lot of people. Not everybody likes salad actually. I’m not a huge fan of salad but, whatever. 

Dawn Serra: A really good one. 

Christy Harrison: Yeah. I am a huge fan of a really good salad at a restaurant because something with the dressing like chef made dressings. Oh, I can’t. So yeah, if you’re really listening to and honoring your pleasure, you will choose a variety of foods and you will not be stuck in this constant compulsive state with one type of food.

Dawn Serra: It also really makes me think something that I am still unpacking and part of this is because I am in a larger body. I do experience weight stigma very regularly, especially when I’m out in public is the performativity of it all. So many of us are so concerned with getting it right and proving to others that we are good and that we’re “trying” whatever we’re trying to be healthy, and the performance of wanting external sources to tell us how to be in our body. It makes me think about… There’s so many fads right now around cutting out sugar, cutting out gluten, cutting out carbs, and all these promises that come with it around not only shrinking your body, but improving your health and all of these ways. 

Really, it’s not about listening to yourself and having the nuance to really trust that, to experiment, to try different things. Maybe get it wrong sometimes, really get it right sometimes. But it’s about checking those boxes of like, Am I doing it right? Does everybody else think I’m doing it right? Do I look like I’m doing it right? And how so often when it comes to sex and relationships, that’s something else that happens, right? People want to seem like they’re good in bed. They want to know the right techniques to do all the things because they don’t want to feel awkward and unsure, and to have to really check in and have conversations because that’s vulnerable. So, they want those shortcuts, those answers, the one right way, the listicle of three things. So much of that is really tied up in this place, too, of performativity.

Christy Harrison: Yes, so true. I feel like it’s been… I’m glad you named that being in a larger body brings its own level of that and its own nuances with that because I think the reality is we live in such a weight stigmatizing culture. Diet culture inculcates weight stigma in all of us and being out in public in a larger body eating food is a really – that’s a minefield. It’s a potentially political act when you decide to go with what brings you pleasure and that is opposite to what diet culture would say you “should be eating” and can bring with it a lot of experiences of weight-related micro-aggressions or macro-aggressions, subtle and not so subtle looks and comments, and ways that people treat you around food. 

There’s also the the thing of… a lot of clients of mine in larger bodies also express that if they’re truly choosing something for pleasure and they’ve gotten through that “honeymoon phase” of intuitive eating, where they’re able to start noticing desires for foods that were once deemed “good” by diet or that are still deemed “good” by diet culture, but were once deemed good in their minds and they have a craving for that type of food when they’re out in public. Then there’s this sort of push pull of like… “Ugh, people think I’m trying to lose weight.” And the comments that might come from that.

Dawn Serra: “Good for you.”

Christy Harrison: Yeah. “Good job eating those vegetables.” Whatever.

Dawn Serra: “Fuck off.”

Christy Harrison: Seriously, fuck off. Why do people feel empowered to comment on someone else’s food choices or body size or what they’re buying in the grocery store? It’s just not okay.

Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. I also think one of the things that’s super normalized when we’re thinking about the ways that diet culture infiltrates all areas of our life is exactly what you just said around the entitlement that we feel to comment on other people’s bodies. And how all of us, in big and small ways, have been indoctrinated inside of a culture that from the youngest of ages told us, certain bodies are more desirable. Certain bodies are better, certain bodies are sexier, and who we should be either aspiring to be or aspiring to be with. And the ways that that can play out inside of our intimate relationships in not wanting our bodies to change because we’re afraid we’re going to be rejected, and feeling like we don’t have ways to really deal with the realities of being in bodies that do change. 

Our bodies change sizes and abilities for all kinds of different reasons. But diet culture really tells us we’re entitled to comment on people’s bodies, we’re entitled to being with people who have certain bodies because that makes us more lovable by default, and also, that we’re owed – that we’re owed a body that never changes.

Christy Harrison: Right. It’s like, yeah, unfortunately– I would love that. I would love it if we could all have bodies that never changed and just stayed the way that we wanted them forever, to be able to do the things we want to do and keep us going through life. But that’s just not reality. That’s just not how our bodies work. Bodies are meant to change. They will always change no matter what you do. There’s really, so little control we have over our bodies, which I know is a scary thing to think about sometimes, especially in situations of chronic illness or a disability that is coming on or illness that is gradually reducing your ability in certain ways, or aging, which is gradually reducing your ability. But I think the fighting against the natural changes that happen in our bodies creates so much more stress and so much more pain and actually can worsen the physical health outcomes that we experience versus learning to accommodate the changes that are happening in our bodies, and accommodate the new abilities or disabilities that we might experience throughout life. 

I love your point about the fact that we’re not owed a certain type of partner or that we think that a certain type of partner and a certain size, body, or shape of body is going to give us status, right? I think a lot of this conditioning that we have around who is desirable, is coming from the diet culture belief that says, “Thinner bodies have higher status.” “Thinner bodies are worth more.” I think in patriarchy, too, a lot of cis hetero patriarchy… A lot of cisgender men and hetero men think of partner choice or conditioned to think of partner choice, anyway, and subconsciously even – not consciously thinking of this but I think are unconsciously conditioned to think of partner choice in terms of status, in terms of whose bodies have they’ve been told are desirable, and whose bodies are going to make them more desirable to be seen with. That dynamic still plays out in a lot of subtle ways in people’s partnerships.

Dawn Serra: I think one of the things that listeners of the show have heard me read a number of questions over the years from people who either are experiencing shame because their partners have said, “I no longer find you attractive or I’m less attracted to you because your body has gotten bigger or changed.” Then also the people who are noticing that that kind of stigma is coming up inside of them about their partner’s body changing. Something that I appreciated so much that you just made so clear and with such a tidal wave of evidence was around the harm of weight stigma and a negative body image on our health. Right now, the current wellness culture that we’re inside of insists that the reasons we judge people and comment on their bodies is because we’re concerned for their health. And when we really look at the data, so much of what you laid out around inflammation and health risks, it’s like weight cycling and weight stigma are actually what are leading to negative health outcomes, more than being a higher weight body. 

You were talking about how if we really do want to reduce chronic inflammation and change health outcomes for people, we need to reduce weight stigma, make it acceptable to be in a bigger body, offer support. Also, you mentioned that body image is a much stronger predictor of health than body size. I’d love to hear a little bit more about the data and the studies because we really have it backwards. That dieting is healthy, that going on a diet and then, “Oh, I fell off the wagon so I’m going to go back on the diet,” that that’s the right thing to do, that weight cycling and also that telling people were concerned about their health and stigmatizing them is a tough love way that we’re going to make them better. The data shows the opposite. 

Christy Harrison: Oh, complete opposite. Yeah. So I mean, I think that tough love piece is so fascinating, too. Because when you look at studies that are the barest – the seemingly most innocent levels of weight stigma, where it’s telling someone that there is a lot of health risks associated with being in a larger body, and that you should “eat right” and exercise to get down to a lower weight; so that you can be healthy, which is very basic diet culture 101 kind of stuff. Even that has been shown in experimental settings to increase people’s levels of weight stigma, because it’s… No matter how compassionately the message gets delivered, it’s still saying that being a larger body is bad and that it’s a health risk, and that you should be doing something about it. The truth is, yes, there is an association between larger body size and poor health outcomes. But the association does not mean causation. Correlation does not mean causation. In fact, what is likely causing those outcomes that we see in people in larger bodies is weight stigma and weight cycling, which are so much more prevalent in people in larger bodies, because they’re stigmatized. 

Of course, people in larger bodies are stigmatized for their size in this culture that believes smaller bodies are better, and enacts that belief in so many different ways and so many walks of life. Then weight cycling, which is basically the inevitable outcome of efforts at weight loss for the vast, vast majority of people. Up to 98% of people lose weight and then regain it within five years. Actually, not only just regained the weight, but up to two-thirds of those people regain more weight than they lost. So in the long term, people are set up for weight cycling. Diets just do not work in the long run. So almost the inevitable outcome of any diet is going to be weight cycling and that has its own independent health risks. 

Christy Harrison: In some research, weight cycling has been found to explain all of the excess heart risk that we see in people in larger bodies and can explain a lot of the access risk for lots of other conditions too like heart disease– I said heart disease already. Diabetes, mortality, certain forms of cancer, certain other health conditions that are blamed on body size. It’s like we blame these things on the body size itself, not looking at what does body size enact in our society? What’s the experience of being in a larger body in our society? What does that do to people? Because it’s the weight stigma and weight cycling. Weight stigma also, again, independent risk factor for diabetes, heart disease, mortality, a whole laundry list of things that get blamed on weight itself. 

Actually, weight stigma has also been shown to be a greater risk to health than what people eat. So when we’re, policing our partners’ food choices under the guise of helping their health, but we’re doing it in this, pretty much it’s impossible to not police someone’s food choices in a weight stigmatizing way. All food policing has this subtle sidecar side order of policing with it, right? So if we’re doing that, we’re actually going across purposes. We’re actually not helping their health in the way that we are intending to, because we’re keeping on weight stigma, which is a greater risk factor than what they’re eating. In a lot of cases we do, I mean, I hear from so many clients, too, that they’re concerned about their partners’ health or their partner is concerned about their health because they gained weight or because they are eating in a certain way or their partner have other ideas about what people “should be eating.” I think it’s really telling that the science actually shows that weight stigma and weight cycling are likely greater risk factors than anything you could eat or anything you could weigh, and that we need to get off each other’s backs about this. And this is very true of the medical community as well. 

Christy Harrison: Doctors need to get off our backs about body size and stop telling larger-bodied patients, they need to lose weight. Stop prescribing elimination diets for everything under the sun. Stop telling people to cut out sugar. It is not useful and it’s actually harming people. Not only is it increasing weight stigma and often weight cycling, too, but it also increases people’s risk of disordered eating. Disordered eating is another thing that’s a really negative health impact – has a negative health impact. People with disordered eating have higher levels of depression, anxiety, digestive disorders, some forms of cancer, and of course, mortality, right? That’s the worst of all possible outcomes of disordered eating. So, all of these things – we’re trying saying that it’s about health or saying that telling people to shrink their bodies or eat differently is to support their health and in fact, it’s doing the exact opposite. 

I think we need to get real about why that is because I think in a lot of cases, the health rationale is papering over a deeper fatphobia. Deeper idea that being fat is just bad. It’s just wrong. When I present this data to people to fellow healthcare professionals on weight stigma and weight cycling, and I’ve done PowerPoint presentations with lots of statistics and numbers and evidence. Sometimes at the end, the people who are really invested in diet culture, just can’t get around the idea that, “Yeah, but it’s just bad. It’s just not good for people’s bodies to be “carrying” extra weight.” It’s a very deep seated belief. And I think it’s hard to break through that even with the evidence that it’s actually weight stigma that’s doing the harm.

Dawn Serra: I think about that a lot because I think this comes up, one, with concerned trolls who are commenting on social media. But also with professionals like doctors, if I and even in our personal lives, because most of us at this point have tried to control our bodies in some way: to shrink them, to make them shaped a certain way through going to the gym – all these things. There’s a lot of grief that comes up when we realize we’ve been causing harm. And if I believe all of your statistics as a doctor who has been prescribing weight loss and gastric bypass and elimination diets for the past 5, 10, 15, 20 years – the level of harm that I now have to admit I have potentially caused the hundreds and thousands of people I have potentially made worse. To grapple with that is really fucking hard and to protect ourselves from what that might mean and how I might not be the person that I thought I was, it’s easier to just say, “No, your data must be wrong.” 

I think that’s true for people who have spent a lifetime dieting. If it’s true that this lifetime of dieting, certainly I spent my first 35 years doing that. Well, maybe not 35. I didn’t really start dieting ‘tilI was 9, but still. My 26 years of dieting – I mean, there was a lot and there still is a lot of stuff that I have had to grapple with around the ways that I abandoned myself. The ways that I betrayed my body, the ways that I actively enacted violence on myself and everyone around me by prescribing to them ways of being that aligned with where I was at the time. I mean, that brings up a lot of shit and a lot of people listening may not have the support or the emotional tools to be able to really grapple with that. So it’s self protective to say, “I can’t let this in. It hurts too much.”

Christy Harrison: Yeah, such a good point. It really is so painful to come to terms with that. I think depending on where you are in your own recovery, your own healing, in the amount of weight stigma you’ve experienced in life, it can feel really unsafe to give up the belief that weight loss works and that eating a certain way is going to protect your health and give you control. Because, we are all grappling for control in this world. We all want some semblance of being okay. I think when your sense of stability and okayness has been challenged by experiences of weight stigma or by experiences of chronic illness, it’s really hard to come face to face with the idea that the thing you were promised would save you is a lie. 

The same with medical providers, I think, healthcare providers of all kinds go into the field because they want to help people and they’ve often invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in their training to get there, too, like I shared in the book. I think oftentimes people are heavily heavily invested in the belief system that they’ve been inculcated in in their medical training which is diet culture’s belief system. And the longer someone practices and goes on in their career and the more of a name for themselves they make, the more financially they have at stake for making a big U-turn. I think the harder it can be to really admit this information. So yeah, I totally understand people’s resistance to it and I was resistant, myself, too. 

Christy Harrison: As I share in the book, I first heard about Health at Every Size – HAES, 10 years ago and was very resistant to it. The friend who introduced me to it was a fellow journalist who… I was in the midst of my career transition from journalism to nutrition, but I was still doing freelance writing and editing on the side as I was in school and was heavily invested in my career – in my initial shift into the nutrition career, I was really looking to help “end the obesity epidemic”, which is just cringe worthy to think about now. But that was my framing back then and that’s where my head was at then. 

This friend who worked at a magazine was actually Health at Every Size advocate and his editor assigned him a package on “childhood obesity”, and he was like, “I can’t do this. I can’t, in good conscience, edit a package like this. Can you take it on as a freelance gig and I’ll write a dissenting piece for the package.” So we worked together on those pieces and he argued for HAES and gave me a lot of research to look at, and books to read. And they sat on my shelf and read for a couple of years because I just couldn’t get my head around it. It was just so antithetical to everything I thought I knew at the time and everything I was invested in in my career change, at that point, and all that I had learned up until that point, and written about in my career as a journalist. It was a lot. It was very confronting. Yeah, I completely understand the difficulty of taking in this information. I’m just so glad that I finally was able to and that it was a steady drip of things that helped change my perspective and shift me in a direction towards Health at Every Size. But, I could have just as easily got into Bariatrics or something and not had that experience.

Dawn Serra: So there’s one last thing that I’d love to explore with you a little bit before we wrap up and then go record our patreon bonus for patrons, and it’s not something that necessarily was in the book. But I’m sure you’ve encountered, and it’s something that I’ve encountered a couple of times. It’s this: I have had a couple of people in my community – the Explore More community and also some friends who they have lost a significant amount of weight for a variety of reasons, because we’re talking about multiple people. And they’ve managed to maintain that smaller body for a number of years at this point. So they are “a success case” in the eyes of diet culture. I found that specifically with people who have done that kind of journey, where they spent a lifetime weight cycling and going through all the diets and then finally – for several of them I know it’s because they then made a career out of exercise. But, now they’re at a point where they’re in a smaller body, they’ve maintained a smaller body. And there’s this particular vehemence around resisting body positivity, fat activism and there’s this, “I did it. So everyone else is the failure and I want the privilege that I bled for.”

There’s this particular kind of clinging that I’ve noticed and some people who worked so hard for so long. Now they finally achieved that peak privilege, and they cannot reconcile the fact that this isn’t true for 98% of the population. I’d love to hear a little bit more if you’ve encountered that in your work and any observations you have around that, “Well, I became a billionaire, so everyone else can.” And there’s no recognition of privilege and access, marginalized identities, and the fact that 98% of people can’t do it. But there’s this really unique anger around, “But I’ve done it. So it’s on everyone else if they can’t.”

Christy Harrison: Yeah, I’ve seen that too. It’s really interesting, that vehemence and that sort of digging in your heels and opposing Health at Every Size and body positivity at every turn. Because I get it. If you’ve clawed your way out of what felt like the mire of weight stigma and the weight cycling you’ve had to endure, and you got to this place of achieving the dream. Like, this is the dream that sold us in diet culture and you did it. You did it by basically turning your life upside down. Oftentimes, I mean, the people that I see who are in that 2%, those unicorns that are able to lose weight and keep it off long term are the people who are making a career of it; are the people who think about food 24/7, make spreadsheets, obsess about everything they put in their mouths, track their food, don’t miss their workouts, eat the exact same way on vacation or on holidays, and never deviate from this very rigid plan that they have for themselves. So they’ve invested so much – so much blood, sweat, and tears has gone into this change. 

So I get the feeling of like, “I fought for this, I did this. I don’t want to have to give it up. Because what do I have?” What do you have at that point, if you’ve invested so much of your time in something that now we’re telling you is not valuable or is not necessary, that you can actually let go and just give up all this work that you did and let yourself be. Let yourself settle into the way that you’re actually meant to be without fighting to suppress it. I can see why that would feel so infuriating to someone who has done all that work. I think that diet culture sells us the idea that weight is within our individual control. It really is not. At least 70% of our weight is genetic, that other 30% is determined by things that are oftentimes outside of our individual control, too, including how our mothers ate when we were in the womb, whether they were deprived of food, whether they had an eating disorder, whether we had enough food to eat as a child. There’s all these different things that that come into play.

Dawn Serra: Racism, classism, all the things.

Christy Harrison: Poverty, right. Exactly, all of it. Experiences of discrimination that may… 

Dawn Serra: Trauma.

Christy Harrison: Trauma, right. Turn to food to self-soothe as a child when you don’t have any other options for self-soothing through trauma. All of that can impact your body size and is not within your individual control, and our bodies really fight to maintain the weight that they’ve settled at. So even if you have a traumatic experience and maybe end up developing binge eating as a result, and maybe gain some weight through that process, which not everyone does through binge eating, but some people do. Your body is actually going to fight valiantly to maintain that weight that it settled at. 

As is the case in diet culture, you can’t have binge eating disorder or binge eating period in diet culture without these restrictive ideas coming in. Because, it’s sold all of us that it’s such a bad thing to gain weight and such a bad thing to binge eat. So of course, we go into restrictive mode in response to it. So that restriction actually tells the body to fight for its life and to hang on to every ounce that it can so that it doesn’t have to go through another famine, because there’s clearly famine afoot, so we gotta fight to maintain ourselves. So it can result in your body staying larger and defending that higher weight, and that is protective. That is your body trying to survive. 

Christy Harrison: I think that that idea that we don’t have individual control over our weight– 98% of us don’t anyway and those 2% of people who do are basically organizing their entire lives around food and exercise and body size in a way that is very similar to, has a lot of parallels with, anorexia nervosa. In some cases, perhaps many cases, it may be a version of anorexia. A person in a larger body can have anorexia that never brings them into an emaciated state, never puts them in that “underweight category” on the BMI chart. They may even be still in a larger body, but they’ve suppressed their weight, and they’re considered “normal weight” now. So they’re applauded or deemed as a success story, but actually are suffering from anorexia. That is the case, unfortunately, for some of these unicorns as well. People don’t like to talk about that, I think, because I think people who are these supposed success stories are so committed to it and have put in so much effort; like you said, that it’s really hard to acknowledge the toll it’s taking and the disorder that it might be creating. 

I quoted in the book, I was going through my iTunes reviews for the podcast and came across this one where this person said, “I’m in the 5%,” or, “2% to 5% of people who is able to lose weight and keep it off for a number of years. I’m not a unicorn, but guess what? I found this podcast by searching for binge eating in the search bar here.” Yeah, that’s right. That was their quote. and I was just like, “Wow, wow. Wow.” That sums it up, I think, pretty well. Because the people that I’ve seen, who are in that unicorn category, tend to have to fight harder and harder and harder over the years to maintain that weight loss and their bodies are actually– even though their bodies seem to be preternaturally able to maintain a lower weight where most people’s bodies wouldn’t. Their bodies still are trying to push them towards survival, still are trying to get back to where they want to be. 

Christy Harrison: So I think it’s just… I have a lot of compassion for people who are in that place of fighting it and feeling like they’ve worked so hard to get here. And I think that it’s incredibly weight stigmatizing the way that some of them frame their “success”, saying that it’s just about hard work and willpower and that, I got here so you should be able to too.” Enacting all these horrible stereotypes about larger body people that predate any of this that are at the root system of diet culture. It’s just not true. It’s just not true that people in larger bodies, just because a few percent of people can shrink their bodies long-term, means that somehow everybody can. That’s just not true.

Dawn Serra: I could talk to you for days and hopefully someday we’ll be in person again, and we can. But so much of the work that you do is really about wanting to give people options so that their lives can be about connection, joy, pleasure, satisfaction, meaning, and choice, and diet culture steals those things from us and/or limits it. For people who want to get the book, tuned into your podcast, learn more about the work that you’re doing, because it’s so precious. How can they find you?

Christy Harrison: Thank you so much. It’s always so great to talk with you, too, Dawn. I love this conversation. So people can find me on my website, which is christyharrison.com. That’s my central hub for everything about the podcast, the book, all the work that I do. Come on over and check it out. You can also listen to my podcast, wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Mine is called Food Psych and it’s food (space) psych.

Dawn Serra: I will have those links in the show notes so everyone can just click through and follow along. Christy and I are going to go record a little bonus for you Patreon supporters. So thank you. Christy, thank you so much for being here with us and being so generous and all of your work and your ideas. This was so fun.

Christy Harrison: Thank you, Dawn. This is a blast.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them a vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses.

As you look towards the next week, I wonder, what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?