Psychotherapist and HAES activist Hilary Kinavey shares her history of chronic dieting, the role of feminism in her recovery, how she helps her kids develop a healthy relationship with food, how romantic relationships affected her body image, why there need to be more body-positive role models for navigating aging and body changes throughout life, and lots more!  

Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC, is a licensed professional counselor and cofounder of Be Nourished, LLC. Her work encourages movement toward a radically compassionate model of healing to address internalized body shame and associated patterns of chronic dieting and disordered eating. She is the co-creator of Body Trust™ Wellness, a Certified Daring Way™ facilitator-candidate, and a transformational workshop leader. Hilary is a popular speaker on topics such as Health at Every Size®, intuitive eating, and body respect in health care communities, and a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. Find her online at BeNourished.org.

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We Discuss:

• Hilary’s relationship to food growing up, including navigating conflicting messages around food and her body

• The relationship between feminism, dieting, and diet culture, and the way in which diets are marketed as a means of power and control to powerful women

• Hilary’s diagnosis of PCOS, and how it impacted her relationship with food and her body

• The natural health and naturopathic perspective, and the ways many of the natural health recommendations are just more diets in disguise

• How when we heal our relationship with food we can approach health from a place of self-care rather than self-control

• The current medical model that equates weight and health, and the need for Health at Every Size education within the medical community

• How irresponsible and unethical it is to suggest weight loss for health when the research shows that it is nearly impossible to maintain, and how fuzzy the research on “obesity” even is

• The ways in which letting go of dieting and moving to intuitive eating can trigger a mourning process

• How our culture yearns for authenticity and human connection, how dieting prevents this connection, and how the HAES and body-positive community allows room for authenticity and letting go of shame

• How powerful it can be when we let go of dieting, find our voices, and find our power

• Hilary’s introduction to intuitive eating, including her experience with a therapist who helped her reconnect with food and her body

• Hilary’s shifting relationship with her family due to her own identity within the anti-diet movement versus their identity within diet culture

• The difficulty of engaging with people who are still indoctrinated in diet culture when you yourself have emerged from the dynamic

• A parent’s role in the development of a child’s body image, including the importance of not commenting on bodies in any capacity around children in order to foster positive or neutral body image

• Raising children in a body-neutral environment, and how to navigate teaching children HAES while also dealing with differing perspectives in other institutions such as school

• Interfering as a parent in schools that teach potentially triggering behavior in the name of health

• The eating competence model and Ellyn Satter’s work

• Relationships and body image, including the realization that the connection with our partner has little to do with the way our bodies look

• Hilary’s relationship with her body during and after pregnancy, including her difficulty reclaiming her sexuality

• The need for female role models who exemplify unabashed ownership of their own body, especially in terms of unapologetic sexuality within female aging

• Hilary’s experience as a mother and businessowner, and how her relationship with her body and herself has been challenged

• How “letting go” is a lifelong process, from eating disorders to business dynamics

• The importance of moving out of our heads and into our bodies

• The concept of body trust, and the need for clinicians to be trained in body trust for eating disorder recovery and letting go of chronic dieting

Resources Mentioned

• Appetites by Caroline Knapp

• Eating Competence by Ellyn Satter

• Be Nourished and the practitioner Be Nourished Body Trust training