Christy Harrison - Intuitive Eating Dietitian, Anti-Diet Author, & Certified Eating Disorders Specialist

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Food Psych #215: The Life Thief, Part 1: How Diet Culture Steals Your Time and Messes Up Your Intuitive-Eating Skills with Kirsten Ackerman

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#215: How Diet Culture Steals Your Time and Messes Up Your IE Skills with Kirsten Ackerman Food Psych Podcast

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

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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:

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