Food Psych #215: The Life Thief, Part 1: How Diet Culture Steals Your Time and Messes Up Your Intuitive-Eating Skills with Kirsten Ackerman
Fellow anti-diet dietitian and podcaster Kirsten Ackerman joins us to discuss how diet culture steals our time and energy, why intuitive eating is the default mode (and how diet culture robs us of that innate skill set), how to recognize true self-care versus diet culture’s version, why there’s so much unchecked privilege in weight-loss marketing, and so much more! Plus, Christy answers a listener question about how to avoid falling into restrictive eating and diet-culture thinking when you have a genuine medical condition like celiac disease.
Kirsten Ackerman is a Fat-Positive Registered Dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. She practices from a Health at Every Size® approach and works with clients to help them heal their relationship to food and body in order to support them in living full and meaningful lives. Find her online at TheIntuitive-RD.com.
We Discuss:
How Kirsten’s mother’s dieting and having a larger-bodied sibling affected her relationship with food and her body growing up
Thin privilege, and how it can protect against dieting
How fat-shaming is harmful yet normalized
How diet culture conditions us to rely on external sources of nutrition and body information, instead of trusting our inner cues
When Kirsten started to manipulate her eating and try to lose weight
How dieting affected her athletic performance
How restriction is often at the root of many of the “health” concerns touted by wellness culture
Why screening for disordered eating should be done in medical appointments
Why training for healthcare providers needs to change
Weight-stigma research, and how it often perpetuates stigma in and of itself
How Kirsten’s disordered eating motivated her to become a dietitian
How diet culture steals your time and energy
Why the message of “If I can do it, so can you,” is harmful
Body temperature as an analogy for body weight
Why diets don’t work
Reframing our bodies’ physiological response to restriction as a survival mechanism versus a barrier to weight loss
Why weight loss is an unrealistic goal
When dieting becomes your identity
Dieting as a coping mechanism
Reframing intuitive eating as something to return to and practice, as opposed to another diet
Self-care, and the roles of intuitive eating and rest
How Kirsten shifted her practice toward Health At Every Size
How her previous experience working at a bariatric-surgery clinic has influenced her work today
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
Pre-order my forthcoming book, Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating, and be eligible for exciting bonuses
Help spread the anti-diet message by subscribing to the podcast
Aaron Flores’s work, and his Food Psych episodes #65 and #204
Body Respect by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor, and their Food Psych episodes #42 and #135
Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after The Biggest Loser competition (TW: o-words, specific numbers, fatphobic language)
Kirsten’s podcast, Intuitive Bites
Listener Question of the Week
How do you learn to let go of fear around food, and not fall back into restriction, when a medical condition limits your intake? Which medical conditions require avoiding certain foods? How is celiac disease diagnosed? Why is it important to work with a medical doctor (MD) for chronic condition diagnoses? Why can “optimizing” health be harmful rather than helpful? How can unconditional permission to eat work for someone with celiac disease? What is the difference between “eating gluten-free” and “going on a gluten-free diet?”
Resources Mentioned: