Psychiatrist and body-acceptance advocate Stefani Reinold joins us to discuss weight stigma in the medical field, how to handle the body-image issues that emerge in pregnancy and postpartum, why accepting your body is so hard in appearance-focused environments, her experience in Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals course, and so much more! Plus, Christy answers a listener question about how to let go of restriction and accept your body size.

Stefani Reinold is a Psychiatrist, mother of two, and women’s mental health advocate. She completed her psychiatry residency training at George Washington University in Washington, DC. While at GWU, she trained in the renown Five Trimesters Clinic specializing in perinatal mental health, infertility and loss. She has presented nationally and internationally on the topics of eating disorders, body dissatisfaction and body image in pregnancy and postpartum. She is an advocate for Health at Every Size and anti-diet clinical practices in the medical field. Her most recent passion project is “Not the Typical Mom,” a blog, podcast and community about the not so typical, but all too common issues of motherhood and encourages mom to escape the stereotypes and banish mom guilt. Find her online at StefaniReinoldMD.com.

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Give your wardrobe an upgrade with MM.LaFleur by going to MMBento.com. Use the code PSYCH at checkout and MM.LaFleur will donate 10% of profits to GlobalGiving.

We Discuss:

• Stefani’s relationship with food growing up, including experiencing food in abundance, being preoccupied with her body in childhood, and the introduction of food scarcity due to financial restrictions

• How gymnastics affected Stefani’s body image and relationship with food

• Equating self worth with appearance, and the pressure on femme folks to strive for the beauty ideal over intellectual pursuits

• Stefani’s experience with an eating disorder, and the ways in which colleges and Greek life are breeding grounds for disordered eating

• How eating disorder awareness events can often encourage disordered eating rather than encourage recovery

• The consequences of mental health stigma and the effect of untreated mental illness

• How romantic relationships can help our body perceptions, promote recovery, and encourage unconditional acceptance of self

• Stefani’s experience with body preoccupation in relation to pregnancy and fertility

• Stefani’s exploration of intuitive eating, the discovery of different Health at Every Size professionals, and her experience with Intuitive Eating Fundamentals

• Letting go of the weight loss goal

• The dire consequences of healthism and weight stigma, and the problems with bariatric surgery

• Stefani’s experience in her public health education, and how focused it was on the “obesity epidemic”

• Thin privilege and learning to see the weight bias in the world

• The need to consider mental health when considering holistic health status, and the higher value we place on body size than on quality of life

• Taking mental health medication and how to discuss potential weight gain from the medication with clients

• The demonization of Western medicine

• Weighing side effects of “natural” remedies vs Western medicine

• The problem with “clean eating” and “natural food” detoxes

• Navigating out of the honeymoon phase in intuitive eating and finding food neutrality

• Why gentle nutrition and balance in eating choice is at the end of the intuitive eating journey

• How diet culture steals our time and our energy

Resources Mentioned

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

• Intuitive Eating, 3rd ed. by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

• Isabel Foxen Duke

• Julie Duffy Dillon

• Lindsay Stenovec

• Kai Hibbard’s Food Psych Podcast episode

• Body of Truth by Harriet Brown

• Alan Levinovitz’s Food Psych Podcast episode

• Emily Fonnesbeck

• Jessi Haggerty

• Stefani’s Instagram, website for professional connections, online program for food and body image, archive of online resources, and Facebook

• Submit your questions for a chance to have them answered on the podcast!

• Join my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals, which includes monthly listener Q&A podcasts and access to my private Facebook support group.

• Manage your wedding registry with Zola! Receive a $50 credit towards your registry by going to zola.com/psych.

• Ready to learn how to cook, make movies, and more from the masters? Just in time for the holidays, MasterClass has launched the All-Access Pass – a thoughtful gift for the home cooks or lifelong learners in your life. Get it at MasterClass.com/FOODPSYCH.

• Give your wardrobe an upgrade with MM.LaFleur by going to MMBento.com. Use the code PSYCH at checkout and MM.LaFleur will donate 10% of profits to GlobalGiving.

Listener Question of the Week

How do we face the fear of weight gain? Is there a way to break free from restrictive eating, internalized fatphobia, and tying our self worth up in our body size? What is the impact of diversifying our social media feed? What is the meaning behind weight gain for us as individuals? Would our food choices be different if they came from a place of desire rather than control? How does reflecting on diet culture as The Life Thief help us liberate ourselves from dieting?