Food Psych #123: How to Accept Your Body and Yourself with Corissa Enneking

Corissa Enneking

Blogger and activist Corissa Enneking of Fatgirlflow joins to talk about learning to like yourself and your body, the current state of plus-size fashion, the impact of mental-health struggles on eating behavior, healthism and its various forms, the long and winding road to recovery, fatphobia in the medical community, her experience in the body-positive blogosphere, the value in just getting through each day, and much more! PLUS, Christy answers a listener question about eating intuitively on a budget.

Corissa is a body-positive blogger, activist, and plus size lifestyle expert from the Midwest. She is the creator of Fatgirlflow.com, a lifestyle blog that aims to celebrate our lives and our bodies as we are right now.

Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, to start your intuitive eating journey. You can also text "7STRATEGIES" to the phone number 44222 to get it on the go :)

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We Discuss:

  • Corissa’s relationship with food growing up, including the impact of scarcity

  • How a parent’s relationship with food impacts the children, even if adults try to hide their diet behaviors

  • Healthism, and the myth that exercise can cure all ills

  • Corissa’s experience with disordered eating and her struggle with an eating disorder

  • The impact of mental health on Corissa’s eating behaviors, including anxiety, agoraphobia, and panic attacks

  • Recovery as a non-linear and ongoing journey

  • How damaging the portrayal of eating disorders in popular media can be for those suffering in larger bodies

  • Fatphobia and weight bias in the medical community

  • Corissa’s winding journey to find treatment resources

  • The body positivity community on tumblr

  • Reclaiming our goodness and embracing liking ourselves, even just a little bit

  • The birth of Fatgirlflow and deconstructing plus-size fashion rules

  • The power of consumerism in creating a bigger variety of plus-size options

  • Fat acceptance

  • The dismal reality of the current plus-size clothing options

  • Accommodating and learning how to navigate our bodies, rather than trying to change them

  • Rejecting our cultural understanding of health, and acknowledging that health isn’t a moral obligation

  • Decoupling ability from perceived happiness

  • Mortality, healthism, and fitness culture

  • Why diet culture is a life thief

  • How values can inform our life choices

  • The power in just surviving through another day

 

Resources Mentioned

Some of the links below are affiliate links. Affiliates or not, we only recommend products and services that align with our values.

 

Listener Question of the Week

How do we deal with restriction when it relates to how much we can spend on food? How can we rethink our budget to make more room for intuitive eating? How does guilt on spending money about food undermine your intuitive eating journey? Is there a way to parse out where the diet mentality is still influencing our choices? How do we plan ahead to try and reduce our spending while still honoring our internal cues?

Guest Userdiet culture, life beyond dieting, plus size fashion, eating disorder recovery, intuitive eating, disordered eating, healthism, health at every size, ableism, the life thief, mental health, body positivity, body acceptance, body image, fatphobia, weight stigma, fat acceptance, S517