Food Psych #253: Diet Culture in Black Communities and in the Church with Joy Cox, Author of Fat Girls in Black Bodies

Photographer: Khali MacIntyre

Introduction & Guest Bio:

Researcher and author Joy Cox returns to the podcast to discuss her new book, Fat Girls in Black Bodies: Creating Communities of Our Own; diet culture in Black communities and in the church; her evolving relationship with movement, and how it inspired her to co-create the Jabbie app; how to respond to internalized weight stigma and bias; and so much more. Plus, Christy answers a listener question about how to deal with your disordered-eating past following you around the internet. 

Joy Arlene Renee Cox is an ordinary person who has been given an ordinary opportunity to share stories about people much more fabulous than herself. She is a Philadelphia native, born on the blessed thirty-first day of December. Joy is a claircognizant Capricorn that thrives through connection and love, rooting for the underdogs in life to take their rightful place as overcomers. She is also a doctor, receiving her PhD from Rutgers University–New Brunswick in 2018. Her field of work is centered on fatness, identity, and social change.

Reflective of the name she bears, Joy has the cheeks to outsmile her detractors. Reflective of her work in print, she has the research to back up her claims. While the spotlight has never been a position she’d prefer to stand in, Joy does believe in speaking up and advocating for what’s right. She is the author of Fat Girls in Black Bodies: Creating Communities of Our Own, published through North Atlantic Books, and the host of the pro-fat, pro-Black podcast Fresh Out the Cocoon.

Joy has been featured in articles by the Huffington Post and SELF magazine. Joy has also been on several podcasts, such as Positive Nutrition with Paige Smathers and Food Psych with Christy Harrison. Dr. Cox is simply a conduit through which love, wisdom, and justice flow. Her pride is in her people and her values. Her strength is in her disposition and her intuition. Find her online at DrJoyCox.com.

We Discuss:

  • What Joy has been up to since her first appearance on Food Psych

  • Her new book, Fat Girls in Black Bodies: Creating Communities of Our Own (Bookshop) (Amazon)

  • How she decided on the title of her book

  • How diet culture is “repurposed” in Black communities

  • How health messages directed toward Black communities are often more about assimilation than actual health

  • How Western standards of nutrition erase different food cultures

  • The mixed messages from diet culture about food and body sizes/shapes

  • When Joy first learned that her body was “different”

  • Diet culture and weight stigma in religion, and Joy’s personal experiences of these issues in the church

  • How her evolving relationship with movement inspired her to co-create the Jabbie app

  • Body ideals as a social construct

  • Joy’s experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and weight changes

  • Noticing and responding to internalized weight stigma and bias

Resources Mentioned

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Ask Food Psych

Listener Question:

“How do I ignore diet ads and emails that I’m still receiving as a result of searches that I did when I was entrenched in disordered eating?”—Emily

We Discuss: 

  • Resources on some of the lesser-known implications of social media and other technology

  • Speaking up against the abusive practices of social media companies

  • The parallels between social media and diet culture

  • Practical tips for protecting your privacy online

Resources Mentioned: 

 
Christy HarrisonBook, Black, BIPOC, fat, fatness, community, diet culture, health, assimilation, oppression, weight stigma, weight bias, fatphobia, religion, movement, body ideals, social construct, COVID-19, pandemic, internalized stigma, social media, technology, privacy, online, anti-diet, S820