Food Psych #106: How to Stop Pursuing Weight Loss with Ijeoma Oluo

Ijeoma Oluo

Writer and activist Ijeoma Oluo shares why she gave up the pursuit of weight loss even though she had "succeeded" at dieting, how she stepped away from the scale and made peace with her size, why body acceptance is a journey and not a destination, how to help kids develop peaceful relationships with their bodies, why worrying about your weight robs you of your life, why we need to stop obsessing about our bodies, how food insecurity affects people's relationships with food, and lots more.

Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based Writer, Speaker and Internet Yeller. Her work on race, feminism,
and other social issues has been featured in The Guardian, The Stranger, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, and more. She is the Editor at Large at The Establishment. Her book, So You Want To Talk About Race, will be published in early 2018 with Seal Press. You can find her yelling on Twitter at @ijeomaoluo, and on her website at IjeomaOluo.com.

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We Discuss:

  • 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 surgery on a person’s self-image

  • The impossibility of the beauty ideal

  • Body image in relation to the scale

  • Body acceptance as a continuous process

  • Appreciating our body for its part in achieving our life accomplishments

  • Honoring our true selves

  • Finding an individualized, *truly* holistic approach to health

  • Body positivity vs. body neutrality

  • A child’s experience with their body pre-diet culture

  • Fatphobia in the medical community and in schools

  • How to shield kids from the diet mentality

  • The BMI obsession and the “childhood obesity” bogeyman

  • Thinking critically about messages we receive from authority figures

  • The need for doctors to be trained in Health at Every Size

 
Christy Harrisonijeoma oluo, body acceptance, diet culture, rejecting the diet mentality, kids, life beyond dieting, body shame, food insecurity, trauma, thin privilege, fat acceptance, fatphobia, weight stigma, social justice, beauty standards, body image, body positive, health at every size, S417