Season 6 finale! Fellow anti-diet dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor Katherine Metzelaar joins us to discuss orthorexia within the health-and-wellness field, the cultural shift that made it seem cool to eliminate foods, mourning the loss of community and connection when you stop dieting, why growing up with a peaceful relationship with food doesn’t guarantee a lifetime of immunity against diet culture, and so much more! Plus, Christy answers a listener question about how to deal with physical discomfort like thigh chafing and waistbands digging into your belly. 

Katherine Metzelaar, MSN, RDN, CD is a Seattle-based Dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor who is passionate about inclusive healthcare for all bodies. She is the owner and founder of Bravespace Nutrition, a private nutrition practice that helps women, both virtually and in-person, to create peace with food and their body free from rules, dieting, and perfectionism. Through the use of a client-centered, therapeutic, non-diet approach, she helps women and womxn to recover from disordered eating, eating disorders, and body image challenges. In addition to her practice, Katherine is the founder of Body Image Badass: Compassion, Connection, Embodiment, a body-acceptance group that works to create community and a safer space for women to talk about the challenges of what in means to exist in a world that seeks to control and oppress women’s bodies via dieting and body-shaming. When not at work, you can find her checking out the local foodie scene, dancing salsa, and in the pursuit of finding the best latte in town. Find her online at www.bravespacenutrition.com.

We Discuss:

• How participating in sports can nurture your relationship with food

• Why Katherine told herself at a very young age that she would never go on a diet and how that changed when she went to college

• Katherine’s struggle with orthorexia

• Katherine and Christy’s shared experience of finding connection with other women through dieting

• How connecting over diets builds a conditional sense of belonging, and how that changes when you stop dieting

• Mourning the loss of community, connection, and identity when you move away from diets

• Why growing up with a peaceful relationship with food doesn’t guarantee a lifetime of immunity against diet culture

• The cultural shift that made it seem cool to eliminate foods

• The link between perfectionism and idealizing diets

• Katherine’s formal nutrition education that helped her liberalize her relationship with food

• Orthorexia within the health-and-wellness field, particularly naturopathic medicine 

• How The Wellness Diet fails to consider the reality of food insecurity 

• The importance of making intuitive eating more inclusive to people struggling with food insecurity

• The surprising ways people responded to Christy’s post about inflammation

• Taking diet culture out of how we understand “wellness” 

• The privilege of being able to interpret and critique health and nutrition research

• The financial burden of training to be a dietitian 

• Working in a fatphobic environment while practicing as a Health at Every Size® provider

• Katherine’s new YouTube channel that will further spread the anti-diet message

Resources Mentioned

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

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

• My online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals

• Help spread the anti-diet message by subscribing to the podcast

• Christy’s forthcoming book, Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating

• Katherine’s website, Facebook, and Instagram.

• Katherine’s new YouTube channel

Listener Question of the Week

How do I merge the two desires of having freedom with food and wanting to change my body’s size? How does diet culture affect the way you want to change your body’s size? Can you permanently shrink your body? How can you better tolerate the physical discomfort that may occur with weight changes? How does internalized fatphobia affect the way you want to change your body?

Resources Mentioned:

• Buzzfeed’s roundup on tips for dealing with sweaty thighs 

• Girlfriend Collective

• Undersummers

• Superfit Hero

• Universal Standard

• Sonya Renee Taylor’s Food Psych interview

• Ragen Chastain’s Food Psych interview

• Pre-order Christy’s book

• Intuitive Eating Fundamentals