Here are four podcast episodes to listen to if your goal is raising anti-diet kids who are free from diet culture, weight stigma, and eating disorders.
Diet culture is a set of beliefs that promotes intentional weight loss, thin bodies, and limited and privileged ways of eating. Basically, it says that fat bodies are bad and thin bodies are good, that everyone should pursue a thin body, and that there are “good” foods and “bad” foods. Today’s diet culture tries to say it’s focused on health (not weight), but the truth (it’s really about weight) is never far from the surface.
Diet culture is “normal” in our society – it’s everywhere. But in healthcare the word “normal” also means “healthy.” And dieting is not healthy and is strongly linked to eating disorders. Families dealing with an eating disorder need to focus on recovering from diet culture as soon as possible and adopt a non-diet, Health at Every Size® approach to health.
But recovering from diet culture is hard. After all, it’s deeply ingrained within all of us. From birth, we are indoctrinated into diet culture. So here are four podcast episodes I recommend for parents who want to understand diet culture and a non-diet approach to health.
Sonya Renee Taylor: What if You Loved Your Body?
We Can Do Hard Things Podcast with Glennon Doyle
Jan 11, 2023
Radical self-love is our sense of our inherent divinity.
Body positivity that doesn’t involve the politics of demanding that marginalized bodies be treated positively is worthless.
Control is the opposite of love. We only control what we don’t trust.
You have to acknowledge that you bought the lie. Of course you did. Everybody sold it to you. As an act of defiance and liberation I no longer have to listen to it.
The expectation of a system of body shaming and body terrorism is that you will pass it on.
The gift of this moment is that we have the tools and mechanisms to dispel the lie of body supremacy.
How to Eat Intuitively in 2023 (with Andrea Wachter)
The Happiness Lab Podcast with Dr. Laurie Santos
S6 E2 Jan 7, 2023
We don’t let outside voices tell us what to do when we’re navigating other bodily needs, like when to go to the bathroom, or whether it’s a good idea to put on a sweater if we’re feeling cold. We just listen to our bodies to find out what they need to do to feel good.
So many of us have been hypnotized and seduced to believe that we need to be a certain body size and weight to be happy and healthy.
We’re not born thinking food is good or bad. We get programmed. But we have an inner knowing of what we need.
If diets worked, they would have worked by now.
I wanted peace of mind and wellness more than I wanted to be a certain weight or size. I took a vow to tune into my inner voice instead of the diet committee.
This paradigm is about feeding yourself and treating yourself respectfully and allowing your body to unfold into the body that nature intended for you.
“Glorifying Obesity” And Other Myths About Fat People
Maintenance Phase Podcast with Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes
Jan 3, 2023
Fat people are accused of “glorifying obesity” for doing things like going to an event, wearing clothes, and eating food. In other words: living their lives in the body they live in.
We live in a wildly fatphobic society. Of course we believe people “should” be thin. But the premise should not be that it means we should all pursue thinness. It means we should explore anti-fat biases and assumptions.
It is worth interrogating where your beliefs come from, what it allows you to believe about yourself, and what it allows you to believe about people who are fatter than you.
Most of us are very bad judges of our own biases. Most likely you have anti-fat bias, but you don’t realize it because it feels bad to know that.
Don’t go around assuming why fat people are fat (because you’re probably wrong).
Fat people are not “fixer uppers” who need diet and fitness recommendations.
Let’s solve the problem of anti-fatness.
Fat people deserve dignity.
How to Tell if Your Resolution is Rooted in Diet Culture (with Christy Harrison)
Burnt Toast Podcast by Virginia Sole-Smith
Jan 5, 2023
Diet companies market their products heavily in the New Year because it’s their most important sales period. The whole idea of dieting in the New Year is not something we do by ourselves – it’s a response to strategic and revenue-driven advertising and marketing campaigns.
It can be hard to set health resolutions without slipping into diet culture The key is to constantly ask yourself why you are doing something. And if it comes down to changing your weight or body size, that’s diet culture, not health.
At the same time, moving your body more, meditating, and prioritizing feeding your body is all great. You just want to watch the reason for why you’re doing it because diet culture is so pervasive.
Diet culture says that small bodies are good and larger ones are bad. It also elevates some foods while demonizing others. And it promotes weight loss as a way to attain higher status and moral virtue.
Research shows that any sort of diet, whether it’s wellness or a traditional diet, the weight loss effects certainly don’t last beyond about the 3-5 year mark and up to two thirds of the time, people end up regaining more weight than they lost.
Parent support for raising diet-free kids
Let me know if you’d like to schedule a coaching session to discuss how to raise a diet-free kid, or at least start changing the patterns that worry you most.
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Published by Ginny Jones
