Episode 184: This week on the podcast, Lu sits down with Sarah Stevens to talk about telling our own stories - why speaking up about our shame, our secrets, and our self-reflections is such a powerful force.
In 2016, Sarah left a successful, decade-long career in corporate healthcare in favor of work that better aligned with her passion and purpose. After serving for two years as a freelance consultant to small businesses and start-up nonprofits, Sarah founded The Beautifull Project – a storytelling collective that invites women back to their bodies and into a world where they belong with substance and with strength.
Sarah is a gifted storyteller with a skill for using her own experience as a woman navigating the world in a fat body to invite her audience to encounter the parts of themselves they hide away from the world – the parts they believe to be “too much”. Addressing everything from too-big bodies to a fear of failure that cripples confidence, Sarah amplifies a message that moves beyond a body positive sentiment and creates a movement that makes room for every body to tell their truth and take up space. She draws out confidence and courage. She believes in being free and full. And she will make a believer out of you, too.
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Lu Uhrich: Welcome to Episode 184 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which you can find at www.seven-health.com/184.
Real Health Radio is presented by Seven Health. Seven Health works with women who feel obsessed with and defined by their bodies. Using a non-diet, weight-neutral approach that combines science and compassion, we help transform your physical, mental, and emotional health. We specialize in helping clients overcome disordered eating, regain their periods, balance their hormones, and recover from years of dieting, body dissatisfaction, and negative body image by learning how to connect with and listen to their bodies.
We’re currently taking on new clients, so if you’re ready to get the support you deserve in healing your relationship with food and your body, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. That address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help. You can also find it in the show notes.
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Real Health Radio. I’m one of your hosts, Lu Uhrich, and today we’ll be talking with a woman I’ve come to know and deeply appreciate over the last year: my friend, Sarah Stevens.
As you’ll soon find out, Sarah is a storyteller, and she uses the power of her own personal stories to invite others to show up, speak up, and take up more space in our world. It’s my hope that her words and her wisdom will bring you closer to your own. Now let’s meet Sarah.
In 2016, Sarah Stevens left a successful, decade-long career in corporate healthcare in favor of work that better aligned with her passion and her purpose. After serving for 2 years as a freelance consultant to small businesses and startup nonprofits, Sarah founded the Beautifull Project, a storytelling collective that invites women back to their bodies and into a world where they belong, with substance and with strength.
Sarah is a gifted storyteller with a skill for using her own experience as a woman navigating the world in a fat body to invite her audience to encounter the parts of themselves that they hide away from the world – the parts they believe to be too much. Addressing everything from too-big bodies to a fear of failure that cripples confidence, Sarah amplifies a message that moves beyond a body-positive sentiment and creates a movement that makes room for every body to tell their truth and to take up space.
She draws out confidence and courage, she believes in being free and being full, and she’ll make a believer out of you, too.
Hi, Sarah, and welcome to the Real Health Radio podcast.
Sarah Stevens: Hey, Lu. Thanks for having me.
Lu Uhrich: I’m thrilled to have you here, actually. For the listeners, you should know that Sarah and I have been Instagram friends, online friends, recently took it to text friends, for a little over a year maybe.
Before recording, I was trying to figure out who the person was that connected us, because there’s somebody who slid into my DMs and was like, “you’ve got to meet Sarah. I think the two of you would get along so well.” I said, “Okay,” and I checked you out and started following you. Soon you and I were connected and becoming friends and really relating to each other, messaging to each other going, “Hey, you too? I feel less alone. I get it too. That’s how I feel. Yes, this.” A lot of it having to do with being an introvert and a deeply feeling and sensitive person in an online space and being an entrepreneur and having to do the social media stuff.
Anyway, over the course of the last 12 months or a little longer, we’ve become online besties. So it’s so fun to be here, connecting and talking together and sharing this conversation with the Real Health Radio listeners as well.
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I know a little bit about you already because we’re had a year to get to know each other, but what can you tell the listeners about who you are and what you do in the world? We’ll just start with that.
Sarah Stevens: Awesome. Yes, I do want to validate the process to getting here. It’s like this moment of “finally we’re able to have a longer conversation,” because there was always this very natural resonance for me with everything that you had to say. So I’m just excited about the conversation, too.
I am Sarah Stevens. I’m the founder of the Beautifull Project. But that’s the current professional role. Larger than that, I’m a mama. I’m a wife to a wife. I came out late in life, so I have a story around that. I’m a mom to three teenagers, which I think is significant to point out the place in parenting where I find myself. It’s a whole other thing. I remember it being so hard when they were little physically, to just meet all of the constant demands.
But this three-teenager parenting thing is next level with the invitation to know myself and be present to them differently. I was just talking to my dad this morning about making sure I’m not parenting from a place of my own fear and what that means and what that requires.
So yeah, I’m a mama. I have this amazing wife. I have a history in corporate healthcare, actually. I spent 10 years in administration in corporate healthcare. That was a really important experience for me. It taught me a lot about how to build a business and run a business. It made me an operations expert. But it also pretty much sucked my will to live over time. I started on the frontlines as a registrar in the emergency department, and I loved that. I was close to people. It is that draw toward helping, I think. Then I was promoted pretty quickly over time.
By the time I left, I was a director of multiple business units and had a seat at the table that women are supposed to want, I guess. I feel like there is this cultural command toward that. I just realized how far away I was from anything that really mattered to me, so I left that job. I resigned actually on Leap Day of 2016. I didn’t plan it. I know it sounds like some sort of narrative fairytale, but I literally resigned on Leap Day because I saw a meme, actually, ironically, on Facebook that said “What are you going to do with your extra day this year?” I was like, “I think I’m going to quit my job.”
I did that without another job. I didn’t know what was next; I just knew, “Not this. I know this is not it.” Through the process of wrapping up my work there, I was recruited to start this local nonprofit that connects women with mentors. They already had a board of directors formed, and they were looking for an inaugural executive director who could take an idea and make it into something real – which really is what I’m pretty skilled at. I’m pretty skilled at taking the idea and then translating it.
I started doing that work for them, and about a year into that, there were a lot of things that were happening. We can get more into that. But I just had this moment where I realized that I’d spent all of this time and energy making someone else’s idea real, and it was time for me to do it for myself, which is the moment when I stepped into my power to start to found the Beautifull Project.
I’m also an introvert. I have a complicated relationship with social media, as you’ve already pointed out. I am a woman in a fat body, and I’ve done a lot of healing, a lot of work around understanding myself in that context and what that means culturally. I’ve used that experience to create and hold this open space at the project.
That’s a lot of things, but that’s the summary of Sarah.
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Lu Uhrich: It’s a beautiful summary. You touched on so many things that I want to get on in the course of this interview about parenting, about the Beautifull Project. But I want to stay where we are now with you and more of your story.
Because so many people here listening to Real Health Radio are either struggling with disordered eating and eating disorders, negative body image, or they’re practitioners who work with people who are, we often like to hear the stories around our guests and their relationship with food and body. Would you mind sharing that aspect? And you can start as early as you want, from your earliest memory of food and understanding your body to what that feels and looks like now. I can ask questions along the way if that’s helpful. But yeah, give us a little insight to your food and body experience.
Sarah Stevens: I’d be happy to. My first memory – actually, in the first season of my podcast, I would ask guests, “Do you remember the first time you realized your body was different from other bodies?” I used that as an in for these conversations that I had with these women. That is where I start my own story as well.
The first time where I even realized that my body was a thing, and maybe a thing to be fixed, was when I was nine. For Christmas that year, Santa brought me a ton of workout stuff. I remember my brothers got a Walkman. It was the ’80s, and they got new tapes. I got a gym mat. I remember what it looks like. I can’t remember what I had for dinner two nights ago, but I remember the gym mat, and there was a stair stepper and some ankle weights. I remember being deeply disappointed and not really sure what to make of that, but I did know for sure that there was something different about me than my siblings.
From there, it was probably a couple of years before I really started to lean in to an obsession around that concept that my body was different and needed to be fixed. What that looked like at the time is that I ended up – I was in Weight Watchers with my mom when I was 11.
In part of my healing, I’ve asked my mom, “I’m curious about the giving a 9-year-old workout equipment and taking me to Weight Watchers when I was 11.” She has shared with me, “Sarah, for Christmas that year, that was actually all you asked for.” When it came to the Weight Watchers, she said, “All you wanted to do was be with me.” Which was really a revelation to me, because it told me that while that is my first conscious memory, I was saturated in the message already, to want it for myself.
The other piece is just to see the lineage of how woman are invited to shrink. Of course I wanted to be and do what my mom was being and doing, and what my mom was being and doing was dieting. My mom was always dieting and always walking. Walking and dieting.
So I was an 11-year-old in Weight Watchers. I often talk about the experience of the gold star at weigh-in. If you want to create a lifelong customer, give a child a gold star for losing weight.
Up until very recently, I would’ve said that I was always trying to manage a larger body. It’s only recently become clear to me that that understanding of my body as larger actually was dysmorphic. I recently saw pictures of myself in 7th grade – I do not remember myself at that size, ever. My body was always twice that big in my mind. So the reality is now, looking back, I can see that that was the beginning of a long period of deeply disordered eating. It started just with this real dysmorphic understanding of my body.
Weight Watchers was kind of my entry, my gateway, and then the year before my freshman year in high school – I don’t know if it was triggered by this sense of “there’s a new beginning waiting for me in high school.” But it doesn’t really matter what the trigger was; I had obviously been primed for this moment, going “if I’m being rewarded for having shrunken a little, what will happen if I can shrink a lot?” I’m a very willful human being, so I started to make that happen by extreme calorie restriction and running to the point of injury.
The memory I have about that, actually – it’s all kind of blurry except for this softball coach. I was midway through the season and he pulled me aside and he was like, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but it is working. You just need to keep it up.” I was probably 14, maybe.
I showed up my freshman year in high school actually at my lowest weight I probably ever was. I remember the attention I got, which is just so clearly this sign of what I was looking for was belonging. It didn’t have anything to do, really, with my body except that I’d been taught that the way to belong is to be smaller.
Freshman, sophomore, junior year were long periods of – truly, today, I would have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. But for me, I was a three sport athlete, too, and I was a straight ‘A’ student. My parents, their marriage was in constant turmoil. There just wasn’t a lot of attention. There was a lot of “Sarah’s fine” because I always performed so well. But really, I was eating very little every day. I was a three sport athlete, so I was working out very hard. I frequently would pass out. That’s really where I was. So today, I would have been diagnosed, for sure.
The other thing about my body is that it never shrunk to the point of calling attention to it. I never got what people would consider really small. I lived like that for years. I don’t know, 3, maybe 4 years, off and on. I would go through periods where I couldn’t really sustain it, probably because I was dying, honestly. Now I look back, and I have such deep gratitude for my body’s survival instinct. It would just go through phases where I could not tolerate it anymore.
But then all of those phases were marked by pretty rapid weight gain, and then the attention that comes with that. Which often came from my house, from my mom. “Is something wrong?” Any time I would gain weight, it was “Is something wrong?” When I was thin, there was never anything wrong.
I remember going away to college and still being in that – really, it would’ve been a binge-restrict cycle. Long periods of restriction, short periods of binging, and then I would “get it back under control.” Exercise was always an enormous part of that. Obsessive.
Then I went away to college, and the first year of college, had a pretty common college experience. My mom’s not hovering over me. If I gain 5 pounds, nobody’s watching. I gained quite a bit of weight my first year and then came home, and definitely had the negative attention about that. So I went back determined to change it again, knowing that the super restrictive eating, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I met this woman – this was mid-90s. The trend then – in the ’80s, it was Weight Watchers, and then by ’90s it was five small meals, high protein, work out 6 times a week. I had this very regimented life around calories and movement. Definitely took over my life; 80% of my time and energy and attention and resource went to this strict control about what I was putting in my body and how I was moving it. Then came home for another break at college and everybody was astounded by the transformation. It just fed into that a little more.
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Then I got pregnant when I was a senior. So this went on back and forth really for most of college, and then I got pregnant when I was a senior, and that was like something flipped in my mind. All of a sudden I felt like I had permission to eat. I did not feel like I had permission to eat from the time I was 9 years old. I was 23. It’d been a long time since I felt like I had permission to eat. So that pregnancy for me was really this 9-month binge.
If I look back at the story with the fluctuations in my body, with the changing in size and shape, it was really after I had my daughter. Ever since then, regardless of long periods of restriction – again, because that still went on through my twenties and early thirties, honestly – I never really lost weight again. My body clearly hit that point where it was like “I want to survive.” And again, I can see that today as a gift, but then, it just became this heightened cycle of “I’m just not trying hard enough.”
I had three kids pretty close together, 2002, 2003, and then 2005. My life became very much about them. I look at those places, too – whereas before I would go through long periods of restriction with a short period of binging, really in those years, it was more like I couldn’t find any space or time to be attentive to myself or my own body. But then I would hit those places where I was like, “I’ve got to do ‘do something’ about this.” Then I’d go on some super restrictive diet, whatever the newest fad was. It was Atkins for a while. We could go through the whole list. Reimagined keto.
That was true through my twenties and thirties. In that process, I was diagnosed with thyroid disease and was under the care of an endocrinologist for a while. That was part of my epiphany, my moment, being under the care of this endocrinologist. This would’ve been just a few years ago. I’ve only been on this other way of living for a few short years.
Like I said, I was at that place that no matter what I tried, I could not get my weight – in fact, I continued to gain weight regardless of any effort I was putting in to restrict calories or exercise. None of it was “working.”
So I had this endocrinologist who had me in her office. She was actually a friend of mine. I used to manage her clinic. I’m also in healthcare at the time. The medical model about weight loss – I literally used to administratively run the bariatric surgery center. I would sit in on cases – and I remember sitting there thinking, “Something’s wrong with this logic. We’re missing it.” But my job was to run it administratively. We’re talking about settling claims and all of those things. So I’m saturated in that world, that’s my world, and growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to make my body smaller anymore.
But there had been this tiny break in that, and it came honestly by social media. I’m a little harsh on social media, but I can’t remember exactly how, but I got turned on to a couple of fat-positive people who were giving podcast interviews.
One was Dianne Bondy, who I love a ton. I listened to her tell her body story, and this is when I’m still in the thick of the medical model. “I have to shrink. I have to figure this out.” I listened to her talk about her experience with her body, and it was the first time in my entire life where I heard somebody say, “You don’t have to fix anything, and you’re going to be okay.” I was actually literally on the treadmill at the gym when I heard her say that. It just created this teeny tiny spark in me. This was probably 3 months before this appointment with the endocrinologist.
So I’m starting to entertain more fat-positive voices. I’m reintroduced to intuitive eating. I actually had been introduced to intuitive eating when the book first came out, but being so deeply in this really disordered eating mindset, I just used it like a diet, because technically when you’re in that space, you can turn anything into a diet. So I was reintroduced to intuitive eating in this period of time, and I was just starting to believe that maybe I didn’t have to fix anything.
I had thrown my scale away. That was actually because my wife told me I had to. I had actually quit drinking for a couple of months and got on the scale and had gained weight. This was devastating to me. Now, mind you, I felt so good having been sober for a couple of months. In the moment where I stepped on the scale and realized that I’d gained weight, all of that goodness was erased. It was in that moment where she held up a mirror to me and she was like, “Sarah, you’re throwing the scale away, because that makes no sense.” I knew she was right, so I’d thrown the scale away.
So I go to this endocrinology appointment feeling pretty resilient, like “this is going to be okay.” Got on the scale for the first time in months, and I had gained a little weight again. I had a moment at the scale where I still had to work with the voices. All of this other way of living was new to me.
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So I went to the appointment and she came in, and it was normal, beautiful banter. We went back and forth. I was feeling pretty good in so many ways, having made this major lifestyle change. She goes, “Is there anything bothering you?” I was like, “Well, I’ve continued to gain weight, but –” She interrupts me and she’s like, “I see that, and I believe that you try really hard. The reality of what’s happened with you is that all of those years of restrictive eating, combined with your thyroid disease, metabolically, you really can’t eat what everyone else can eat. But I want to help you,” and she offered to prescribe speed.
Mind you, every other thing in my life, every other component of health, was trending in this direction that made me feel whole. But her answer was speed. All of the resilience I’d built to that moment was crushed.
I remember asking her some questions, like “What’s the sustainability of that?” She said things like “Most people tell you you can stay on it for a few months. I can keep you on it for a few years if you’ll come in for quarterly liver and kidney function tests.” My liver and my kidneys were functioning delightfully at that moment. I also asked her, “Beyond that, what can I expect?” She said, “You’re going to have to live on 600-800 calories a day for the rest of your life.”
So I took the prescription. I wish I could say I had this moment where I was like, “Hey, I don’t want your crappy diet culture,” but as a person who had spent so much – I mean, I’d spent decades of my life trying to “fix” myself, and in this moment someone’s offering me a pill that could do it. That’s a pretty powerful moment.
I took the prescription to my car, and I sat in my car for a long time. All of those voices from the months past, in podcasts and online and all those things that I was looking at and considering, they were all present to me in my car that day.
But the thing that broke through to me is I thought about my teenage daughter, who at the time would’ve been 15. I couldn’t get there for myself, but when I thought about what I would want her to choose, it was so crystal clear to me. It didn’t matter what she weighed; I never, ever, ever would want her to fill that prescription. Knowing that I needed to parent by way of example. I couldn’t parent myself in that moment. I didn’t know how to do that yet. But I could find the space to go, I can model this for her, and what that will look like has to be an entirely different way of living in my body.
Actually, it was in my car that day, really, when the Beautifull Project and the idea behind it was born, because what I decided was to jump off of this path, this dumpster fire of diet culture, because this is where it landed me, in the office of a woman who sincerely loves me. I mean, honestly, she does. In her head, that’s helpful, because she had watched me try for so many years. But it had landed me in this place where the only option, in her mind, was to do harm to my body to make it smaller. I want off that train.
I knew that I would need to demonstrate new behaviors, but I also knew that my voice alone was not going to be enough in this cacophony of other voices that would tell my daughter she needs to shrink in order to fit. So I had this moment where I thought, I want to bring together a chorus of courage for her and for her friends and for all of our daughters and for ourselves and for our mothers. I want to bring together a chorus of courage that can sing to her when I can’t.
That really came in that moment when I was sitting in my car going, I’m not living this way. Not one more second.
Lu Uhrich: Wow.
Sarah Stevens: That’s the story.
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Lu Uhrich: It’s a good story. There are so many questions and ideas that came up as you were talking. One of them, even going back to when you mentioned you were in high school and no one would really ask you what was wrong when you were thinner because you were producing, performing in athletics and at school, and you were this idea of perfection or approaching the beauty ideal of perfection, the idea of perfection around academics and around athletics.
So nobody really asks you and no one really pays attention to whether or not you’re actually present. Because then after that, you share, “hey, probably 80% of my time, my mental capacity, my emotions, my life space, was taken up by dieting and trying to be smaller.” So you weren’t present at all. But as long as you were performing or producing or approaching perfect, nobody really bothered to ask you anything.
Sarah Stevens: Yeah. I had to work through a lot of resentment around that, particularly around my parents. We’ve had these conversations. There is still this thing that I go, why did nobody notice? We would eat together, and I wouldn’t eat. I know I wouldn’t eat for weeks. I don’t want to go into the details of that because I don’t want it to be triggering for anybody, but I know exactly what I would eat and how much.
That actually has fed today a very clear commitment that I will never, ever comment on a woman’s body. I have no idea what it cost her to get there. I just won’t do it.
I’ve had to undo that idea that I am only as valuable as what I produce, probably for my entire adult life. I’m still in positions at times where I see that I’m reinforcing that still in my life, that my presence to my life is not quite as important as the product, the thing I’m putting out into the world. It definitely started there, and I think we can definitely do better.
It’s funny, because in parenting a teenager now, I am hyper-conscious of that. There are times where I feel, am I swinging the pendulum the complete opposite direction? I might be, and I’m totally comfortable swinging it the complete opposite direction, to be honest with you, because it’s terrifyingly damaging to ignore the whole human person because what they’re producing looks so good.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, I’m with you there too, as a parent certainly, and just as a human, in saying sometimes I still get caught up in, am I preforming? Am I producing? But as a parent, it is so at the forefront of my mind that my children always know, you know what? Your grades, that’s great, whatever – are you trying hard? Do you feel fulfilled? Are you being a kind, compassionate person to yourself and others? If that’s where you’re at, I don’t really care if you get an ‘F’. [laughs]
Sarah Stevens: Yeah.
Lu Uhrich: My 8-year-old, who’s my youngest, I think he got a ‘C’ on a math test in 3rd grade this year, and big crocodile tears. One of my best friends texted me. She was like, “Warning, I’m bringing your son home and he’s crying and he won’t tell me why.” When he came home he was like, “I got a ‘C’.” I’m like, “Cool, dude. How were your friends today? Were you kind? Were you compassionate? Yeah? Okay, see you later.” He was just like, “Oh, okay.”
I’m like, “You knew Mommy wouldn’t be upset about that, right?” He’s like, “Yeah, but I’ve never gotten one before.” It was like, “Okay, well now you did.” Then my 12-year-old chimes in, “I got an ‘F’ once. It’s fine. Mom and Dad don’t get mad.” [laughs] It was just pretty funny to see.
That wasn’t something – my parents were awesome and encouraging, and my sister and I were overachievers, straight A’s. My brother, not so much. They loved us all and celebrated all of us. So I never really got that messaging of perfection so much from them as just the culture we’re in. But I try so hard to purposefully swing the other way, like you. So I totally get that, and I think that does trickle over into the things that we’re sharing and that we’re talking about in terms of bodies and autonomy and all of these other things, just making sure that our children have that voice.
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But I love so much what you said, and I was going to get into it as we talked about the Beautifull Project, but you brought it up now in this idea that sitting in that car after being prescribed speed – and again, this whole idea is that this medical professional, who you shared did have a love and an affinity for you personally, still was in that moment going, “Hey, the product, a smaller body, is more important than your presence, is more important than your liver health, your kidney health, than the fact that you’ll be clearly malnourished if you’re only having that minimal amount of calories per day. Doesn’t matter.”
We’re prioritizing the product. We’re prioritizing getting you closer to “perfection” – I always say that in quotes – not your presence. Not really being able to enjoy the world and experience food and experience laughter and relationship and human connection and movement and all of these embodied experiences you can have. But will that body you’re in look right? That’s again that message.
Then you go, “I don’t want my daughter to hear this. I want a chorus of people – it can’t be just me. I want more people around her.” I was wondering where that chorus of courage idea came from and what it meant. What I’m hearing you say is it’s the idea that raising our voices together, though we might have different stories and experiences, lifts us all up, moves us all forward.
Sarah Stevens: Yeah. It reminds me of – in some ways there’s intersection here with race. For instance, a few years ago I listened to a podcast called Seeing White. It’s a great series.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, Scene on Radio.
Sarah Stevens: Yes. Amazing. It opened my eyes to whiteness. The reason this is relevant, and I can crosswalk it here, is that I’m a white woman. I don’t see what is all around me. I’m in it. I’m in the center of it. I’m saturated by it.
The same is true when it comes to diet culture and understanding our bodies and our relationship with food. You don’t see it until the second that you do see it, and then you see it everywhere.
What’s been really important for me is to help women in all body sizes and shapes and stories to hold this space that allows them to see it and to see the way that – they may be in a thin body and have not had the same story that I’ve had, but the message to shrink in order to fit has still impacted them. I think that holding that space for that kind of a chorus, for that many voices, is actually how we turn the tide here.
But I say that and then I have moments where I’m like, this is like swimming upstream in a way I can’t even get my mind around. Because again, women are so saturated by the message that tells us to shrink everywhere. But I do believe that this is the way to do it, to bring voices together.
There will be moments, too – I still have them. I still have moments where I go – I don’t do it really on a conscious thought level. It’s more knee-jerk, where I’ll think, “Maybe that would work.” I’ll hear myself thinking that. I recently saw a freaking WW commercial that was so well-done. Honestly, I do marketing; I’m like, that’s really well-done from a marketing/revenue generating perspective. Nice job. So I’ll still catch myself in moments having this subconscious, knee-jerk reaction. I’ve done enough work now that my higher self can weigh in and go, “It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
But as women heal from the impact of diet culture, regardless of body size and shape – and it definitely has much more impact on people as you end up in larger and larger bodies, but I think it impacts all of us. Inviting all of us to the table to share in that chorus, to sing something different to each other, I just think there’s a tremendous amount of healing power in that.
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Lu Uhrich: I’m really glad that you’re bringing this up, because what we’re talking around – I recently heard the quote that diet culture depends on fatphobia to stay relevant.
Sarah Stevens: It does.
Lu Uhrich: That’s what we’re talking about right now. We’re talking in general about fatphobia and this idea that larger bodies and the people who inhabit them are bad, wrong, undesirable, these negative ideas and concepts that we as a culture have around fat bodies and fat people and how it does absolutely affect everyone.
But I’m so glad that you said “but not in the same way,” because my experience as somebody who is tall and white and thin – I used to say “average size.” No, I’m thin, which I think is a really important clarification, and it’s not one that I came to on my own. It’s one I came to over time, and then recently Your Fat Friend –
Sarah Stevens: I love Your Fat Friend.
Lu Uhrich: Recently, they wrote about this concept of, “If you say that you’re medium, what about all of us fat people? No, we’re actually the average, and the average is size 14 to 18. It’s not a size 6, a size 8. That’s not average. That’s thin.” It was just this idea of even understanding when we talk about our own bodies, why it’s so important to be clear and understand the privilege in a body.
But yeah, I’m thin, I’m white, I’m tall. I do not use assistive devices for mobility. I am healthy. I have all of these privileges that intersect with, yes, am I a woman in this world existing within diet culture that tells me, “Hey, you might not be fat, but by the way, you’d better not ever get there”? Yes. That aspect of fatphobia and weight stigma of “maybe you aren’t fat, but sell your soul to make sure you never get there,” is something that thin women do experience.
However, it’s not close to the very real, very tangible, everyday oppression that people in larger bodies encounter in just about any walk of life, in anything that they do, from employment to public transportation to restaurants to so many other places where they are oppressed and stigmatized, day in and day out. You are oppressed and stigmatized day in and day out. Which means that while we all are affected by fatphobia, we certainly aren’t all affected the same.
Sarah Stevens: Correct. That’s exactly it. I don’t know if this comes from my general temperament – I like to be effective. It’s part of my thing. I don’t even do it consciously, I don’t think, but I’m always looking for, what’s the most effective way to do this to create the largest impact? This is where I was cross-walking it with the Seeing White thing. It comes back to the people in the position of privilege really are the ones where the burden of doing the work to shift the culture – that’s where the burden sits. It doesn’t sit with people of color. It doesn’t sit with fat people.
So I want to engage the chorus to be able to start to do this work, but in order to do it, you have to help people see fatphobia, and you have to help them see how it’s actually impacted them in much smaller ways than it has for people in fat bodies. But in my experience, the human psyche works this way: you have to tell people how it impacts them first, and then they’re generally willing to listen to the rest.
That’s why I’ve structured the project the way that I have. I want all of the voices to sing a counter message to this. In order to do that, they have to be able to see fatphobia, and they also have to be able to see how it’s impacted them. And I’m also often happy to correct this idea – once they see it, then, to help them understand, “It doesn’t translate as oppression to you daily. It does to me, and this is how.”
And it does to me, but I’m also still in – I’ve seen the meme that talks about what’s the difference between small fat, medium fat, and superfat. I’m probably in the medium fat. I can still get on an airplane. It’s uncomfortable, but I don’t have the experience that our superfat and infinifat friends have. That’s the other piece. When we gather in the project, if there’s something I’m hypersensitive to, it is the fact that we’re here to hold space and not silence each other. You have to sit here and listen to her. Hear her.
That is funny. Women have a hard time just listening sometimes. We want to fix things real quickly, or tell them what worked for us. But man, there’s so much to be gained from just the silence and the presence to another person.
And I’ve watched it happen. I’ve watched people in small fat or thin women have this moment, the awakening of seeing diet culture everywhere. One of them texted me this morning. It’s her 40th birthday. She goes, “Hey, I’m having Old Town Cookies for breakfast.” I was like, “Take that, diet culture!” Because 6 months ago, this women would’ve been at the gym at 5:30 in the morning on her 40th birthday. That awakening for her, I am confident, will translate to her willingness to show up for the fight for people in fat bodies.
But the work of freeing all of us from diet culture has to still take place. It just is the way that it works.
Lu Uhrich: That’s so true, and you’re onto something there, because human psychology would say we often personalize things that are systemic, but we can’t first see it and address it until there’s that personal aspect of it.
Which is why so often, when diets fail, people who have been restricting for years and all of a sudden their bodies are fighting back for survival like yours did go, “What’s wrong with me?” No, nothing’s actually wrong with you. Something’s wrong with the culture that told you you had to get smaller. Something’s wrong with the idea that we can constantly control our bodies. But those are systemic ideas. Those are collective ideas and messages. That’s not about you. There’s nothing wrong with you. But so often, that’s what we do.
I see it in what you’re sharing, too. Once we can personalize it and go, “Okay, yeah, why am I restricting and binging at whatever body size I am? Why do I always feel like I need to be a little bit smaller? Why am I waiting to go on vacation until I lose X amount of pounds? Why aren’t I approaching this person that I’d like to have as a romantic partner until I look a different way?” Whatever size body you’re in, it’s fatphobia.
Sarah Stevens: Exactly.
Lu Uhrich: That’s the why behind it. Weight stigma is the why behind it. Again, whether you’re afraid of being oppressed or you already are, you’re still experiencing it in some way, and yet – and I’ll just repeat it over and over again because it’s so important to me – and yet those of us who are in thinner bodies, those of us who have more and more intersections of privilege need to be the ones who are listening more, and then taking what we hear from listening and going out and advocating. But we don’t need to talk all the time.
Sarah Stevens: Agreed.
00:45:50
Lu Uhrich: It’s that balance. I’m wondering how you find that balance between the storytelling for people who are more privileged in different ways than others. What does that look like tangibly when women are gathering together?
Sarah Stevens: What it’s still looking like is some trial and error, especially because the in-person component of the project has really just been about maybe 6-7 months. I’m learning as I go about how to structure the conversation.
At first I was like, “Let’s just have an open conversation,” and that was okay-ish. But those systems of oppression and people’s lack of awareness around it just played in. I don’t even fault the individual in that. You’re literally a cog in a system of oppression. You don’t see it. Of course you don’t. I can’t just invite you and go, “You’re going to see it.”
So I’ve started to structure the time together a little bit differently to hold up a mirror – they don’t necessarily know this is exactly what I’m doing, but to hold up a mirror for them about the ways that fatphobia has impacted them. I wouldn’t say it that way, but then they start to move into that conversation, to extract things from themselves.
But then I really do get to facilitate, honestly. I am conscious of doing it gently, but also being sure that the people most marginalized in the room are heard first. I get to have control over that. Which is why I haven’t scaled the idea, honestly, because I’m not interested in causing more harm than good. Until I can figure out how to train people to do that, for now, we’re fine where we are just having those conversations.
But I think it requires first self-awareness of your own privilege. I’m constantly seeing more of the layers of privilege I have, even in this mid-fat body. Being aware of that and then being willing to just be quiet. Just be quiet. And there’s so much – I said this the other night; in January, I asked women to record – in fact, you did one for me, thank you – record a short video to talk about the two things they weren’t going to change in 2020 about themselves.
The thing I was astounded by is just how when you ask a woman, “Hey, tell me a little bit about this,” they just crack upon with the most stunning, wise, brilliant, kind things. I want to continue to create space to do that, but then also, it’s up to me to be attentive to how we curate that and making space for people in marginalized bodies. You have to listen.
But then, you absolutely nailed it – and I say this over and over too, particularly also about race – the burden of the fixing is not on the person in the marginalized body. The fixing – you’re in the club. It comes from the position of privilege. Now you have to advocate for something different. I definitely send them out of here with that message. Self-awareness first, but then do something with what you know.
Lu Uhrich: Right, and what you have. There’s certainly social capital involved in a certain body type, a certain appearance. The more social capital you have from your thinness, from your closeness to the beauty ideal in whatever ways that looks like, the more opportunity you have to make change, to at least be heard.
I think about just recently now – this podcast won’t actually probably air until February, but just last week, which of course I made noise about, Jillian Michaels made comments about Lizzo’s body. There was a thin, white woman sharing her opinion – and she has everything to gain by distancing people from Lizzo’s body, by being healthist and somehow correlating diabetes to Lizzo’s body. She has everything to gain by doing that because it perpetuates the fatphobia that keeps her industry going, that puts money in her pockets, that gives her a job. So of course she’s doing that.
But the people that need to speak up, and thankfully, many of the people who did speak up – and honestly, I’d love to say it was of their own volition, but everything that people like me have learned, we’ve learned from fat feminists, really. We’ve learned from fat liberation. And we’re still learning, and I’m still getting it wrong. But hopefully I apologize when I do and can learn and do better.
But thankfully I did see so many people in thin bodies and so many fitness professionals and so many people who champion intuitive eating and Health at Every Size go, “This is wrong, and I’m going to use whatever platform I have and I’m going to say something about it.” To me – and I think you’ve already said this in this interview – sometimes you feel like you’re just swimming upstream, like is this ever really going to change? But in those moments I was like, ooh, look what’s happening. Nobody’s letting her just say this stuff without pushback.
At the same time, why is it still happening? But it’s because we, the people who have more of that social capital, have to be the ones to push back again and again and again until it’s just absolutely unacceptable. Like you said, we have to do that by listening, and then by taking what we hear and going out into the world to advocate – something that is way easier said than done, but I’m so glad that so many people are doing it.
For listeners who are in whatever size body they’re in who are experiencing restrictive eating, eating disorders, negative body image, binge eating, anything like that, yeah, let it start with you. Get the help that you need. Work through your own ideas about bodies and about food, and then allow that to open you up to others’ experiences.
Part of the work I do in coaching, I’m always bringing in Health at Every Size, fat positivity – not just body positivity. The idea of weight stigma and what it does and how it’s affecting everyone. Because I don’t know that we can heal individually without knowing all of those things, but I also think we do have to be in the path of healing individually to heal the greater culture.
Sarah Stevens: Yes, exactly. I can’t say it any better than that.
00:52:30
Lu Uhrich: What I want to know before we move on to the TED Talk, the Beautifull Project in more detail is you said just the past few years, you didn’t fill the prescription, you didn’t go the route of minimal calories and consuming a drug to make you smaller at the same time as it harmed your body and broke down your vital organs. You said no to that and chose instead the path towards body acceptance and towards intuitive eating.
What did that look like? Because I know you said “the first time I did intuitive eating, totally made it a diet,” which is very common. But what changed this time, and how did you begin to make that shift?
Sarah Stevens: It definitely started that day in the car. I came home and told my wife about the experience, and before I was even done talking about it, she was like – it’s interesting to watch someone else be a fierce advocate for you, and then to let that penetrate you in some way. That was the experience. I saw how angry she was at even the suggestion. I hadn’t found any anger yet. I was still climbing out of a hole of shame, but going, “I’m not going to take this.”
So there was something about her being a fierce advocate – and my wife is in a pretty truly average size body. We have very different bodies. So to see her advocate that way was this initial awakening.
The truth is, in the beginning I didn’t know what to do. I’d spent – that would’ve been literally 30 years of my life being either on a diet or in between diets. In the absence of any rules, I remember some of the first things were permission to eat. In particular, permission to eat certain things that had been restricted my entire life. Permission to eat macaroni and cheese out of a bowl instead of hovering over the pan and shoveling in four bites real quickly. I won’t ever forget the first bowl of macaroni and cheese I sat down to, like sat down at the table.
So for me, it was general permission to eat. I would be doing a disservice to your audience if I didn’t talk about the extraordinary fear that I had in the absence of external rules. I continued to lean into resources that exist in the virtual world, which I can’t overstate my gratitude for. Everybody who’s doing this work in your audience, keep going. I was saved by it in so many ways, by the free resources.
We don’t have locally – well, actually, as I’ve done more of this work and gotten some more visibility, I have found a couple of local intuitive eating dietitians and some folks who are doing this work. There’s literally maybe a handful, five total, and they’re in surrounding areas. So in the beginning I relied heavily on virtual resources to start to heal and have any idea around – I mean, it’s a whole new vernacular. It’s a new way of thinking, being, speaking.
In the beginning, that looked like blanket permission to eat. My relationship with movement is still kind of complicated, because I do sincerely love moving my body and I always have, but then some of the spaces are still so triggering. But then I crave some of the endorphins. It’s still a little complicated.
But in the beginning what that looked like was “I’m only going to do movement that I feel good when I do it.” It was yoga. It was just yoga, which for me was next to nothing compared to how I used to behave in relationship to movement. So I practiced a lot of yoga and gave myself permission to eat. I think in the beginning, that probably still looked a lot like binging because my body didn’t know what to do with that. [laughs] It was like, “You’re going to take this away again, right?”
There were lots of conversations with my body – and by that, I mean literally laying a hand on my belly and one over my chest, where I would remind myself that I wasn’t going to take it away again. There was a lot of that embodiment, seeing my body as me, but also as her, and having a relationship there and promising to care, like mutually care for each other. That all happened in the first year.
Then I started to see things that didn’t feel good in my body and things I wanted to change, like how often I avoided sitting down at the table to eat, and how much I wanted that experience. I actually ended up having my appendix and gall bladder removed, emergently, at the end of the first year, which slowed me down drastically – which was actually really good. It slowed down also the experience of eating.
I had this one day, I made this bowl of soup and I’m at home by myself recovering from surgery, and I lit a candle, because it was quiet enough for me to do that, and I had this – it was like a homecoming. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like coming home. That hasn’t lasted all the time, but there was this real moment of mutual nourishment between my body and myself. I cried over the soup. I’m not a big crier, but there was a lot of weeping over that soup with that candle. I realized that that was what I wanted more of, that present experience.
This is true in general, but the disconnect, the dissociation with everything about my body and my body’s cues and everything, had been true up until that point. Presence to hunger without being afraid of it was huge in my healing.
Fullness for me, I’m still working with that. I read this meme recently that talked about this idea that of course you have grief around fullness, and that hit me really hard. I read it and instantly felt the emotion of that. I haven’t completely explored that. I’ve actually recently found an intuitive eating dietitian locally that’s been recommended to me by some of the women who come to some of the live Beautifull Project events. I think I might start doing some work around grief about fullness, because it obviously resonates, but it’s buried so deeply that I can’t even tell you what I’m sad about. I just know that I am.
It’s been a process, honestly. It’s just a process of learning and then being gentle with myself and having a ton of grace when I find myself in other thought patterns or other old behaviors.
I wrote once on Instagram about having gone back to the gym and gotten on the elliptical and how that was like going back to my first ex-girlfriend, like thinking it’s going to be different this time. It wasn’t different. Figuring out, then, what that does look like – because my body does love to move, and I’m so profoundly grateful for its ability to move, still.
It’s still a process. I think that’s been the most important learning for me. Unlike a diet, where it’s Monday and you start, and then there’s an endpoint or something, this, like every other relationship in my life, is a relationship that will take time, and there will be moments that will require forgiveness, and then there will be moments of tremendous joy. I’m just really trying to continue to stay present to that. I’m now in an actual relationship with my body, and if I look at the way that I’m in relationship externally, I can learn a lot from that about how I want to do that here.
Lu Uhrich: That’s very good, and I’m glad that you brought that up. For so many listening, that is one of the hardest things about becoming an intuitive eater, recovering from obsessive exercise or restriction or disordered eating.
It’s this idea that “But when I had rules and some ‘expert’ to tell me what to do and when to do it and how much to eat or how much to move and on what days and in what ways, there’s safety there because of the structure.” But also, it feels easy at first. It’s easy until your body’s like, “No, we want to live. We’ve got to stop doing this.” Then, as you shared in your experience, the metabolism does some things to conserve energy, and your body no longer is going to respond the way it used to to a diet. I always tell people, dieting’s really easy at first and hard later.
With intuitive eating and body acceptance, it’s really hard at first, and super easy later. It’s not to say you never have negative body image days. It’s not to say you’re never like, “What am I hungry for?” or “Wow, I ate to the point of discomfort here.” That’s human. That’s just being a human. It’s not to say those things never happen.
But it’s really, really hard at first to just be in the experimentation and the curiosity and the wonder of what does it even mean to sit down and let myself eat, to give myself permission, to think I’m worthy enough to eat food because I’m hungry, or because it’s delicious, or because I just want to? What does it mean to do that? How does it feel? How does that translate into my life? That takes time to work those things out and to refine that relationship with food and body. But then you have that momentum, and you have that connection, like you said, where it’s the relationship, and that gets pretty smooth.
Now, you’ve always got to check in. If we talk about personal relationships, my husband and I have been married for almost 15 years. There’s not necessarily this newness. I can read him like a book most of the time. So a lot of the time, it’s just so easy. We have this dance that we do in life and in our partnership where things are easy and we just go in stride, and sometimes we hit bumps and sometimes we have arguments or disagreements, and that’s all okay. But it’s way easier. I know him so much better than I did when we first began our relationship in college, when we were in our early twenties. It’s just a totally different thing.
Knowing that about my very personal relationship, it’s easy then, to translate that to our body relationships and go, no wonder it’s hard at first. We’re just getting to know each other. But of course it’s going to be simpler later, because that communication is going to be so much smoother, and we’re going to understand each other. There’s going to be more of a flow between me and my body.
Sarah Stevens: What’s astounded me as of late is that if I start to pay attention to the cues that my body gives me around hunger and fullness and movement, it actually tells me a lot of things about a lot of things. It is profoundly wise, in ways that I didn’t even know.
Just a couple weeks ago, I was trying to make a professional decision, one direction or the other. The entrepreneurial life can be complicated. [laughs] I wanted to choose the more secure path because I like security and safety, because I’m a human being, and we like to feel secure and safe. I was looking for some external ways to do that, and my body was almost instantly responsive. Like, I woke up and I was grieved before I was even awake at considering this choice. By the third day, my neck had gone out. I couldn’t turn my head. I was like, I’m literally out of alignment.
My body just astounds me at how wise and responsive it is. Now that I’m willing, first of all, to stop starving it, I’m willing to hear it, and I want to be in relationship with it. It’s very obvious to me that it’s what it wanted all along, actually. I’m just happy I showed up to the game, because it’s pretty good here.
Lu Uhrich: I’m glad you showed up too.
Sarah Stevens: Thanks.
01:05:00
Lu Uhrich: Speaking of showing up, I think that’s a great transition to your TED Talk, which is really about being seen. I have to say, Chris is the founder of Real Health Radio, and when I talked to him about “I want to have my friend Sarah on, check her out,” I sent him your TED Talk – which we will link in the show notes, because I want every listener who is able to take a look at it. But I sent it to him and he’s like, “Oh my goodness, yes, bring her on. She’s so awesome. I just watched that and we’ve got to talk to her.” So just so you know, we’re big fans of you here at Real Health Radio.
Sarah Stevens: Thank you.
Lu Uhrich: And huge fans of this TED Talk, which was really about – it was called “Stripped: The Art of Being Seen.” I don’t want to give the ending away, because I think the ending is so powerful, what you say and what you do. But if you want to talk about it a little bit to the listeners, we could go from there.
Sarah Stevens: Yeah. It’s so funny, because I always get torn about that too. Do I disclose the ending and take away the surprise element of it? I won’t. We’ll just leave it out there as a teaser. You want to watch it till the end.
But that talk is interesting because when I applied, I wasn’t entirely sure – TED is a whole thing, by the way. The audition is a little intense because it has to be 3 minutes and succinct enough to capture people’s attention, but also deep enough to let them know what you’re talking about. Then the process to prepare for TED is also very intense.
But I had an idea, and basically the idea was I think the thing that makes us most powerful is the thing that we’re trying to hide away from the world. I thought about that in my own experience – I’ve already alluded to it – how much time and energy and resources I spent for three decades of my life trying to shrink my body.
I often will talk about how one of the genesis moments of that talk came from the movie What Women Want. Do you remember this movie? Mel Gibson?
Lu Uhrich: Yes, I do.
Sarah Stevens: There’s that part where he first realizes that he can hear women and he’s running through the park, and there’s this group of women who are running counter to him, and he can hear everything they’re thinking. They’re thinking all sorts of things about how to care for the people around them, but then there’s one woman in particular who’s saying, “One piece of toast, 90 calories. A pat of butter, 45 calories.” She’s calculating calories in her head.
I love that scene because it really is a tiny window into the kind of mental energy it takes to be committed to shrinking your body. So I had this moment where I was like, what if I took 10% of that, 15% of that? What would’ve happened if I had applied it to something else? Where could I have taken up space if I wasn’t so concerned about what people would think when they saw me?
That was at this body size and every body size for three decades, so it had become abundantly clear to me it was actually never about the size of my body. The obsession remained.
I thought about the fact that most of us are walking around doing that. There’s something under the surface that we go, “What if they find out?” So I structure the talk so that really the talk is an invitation for us to understand that maybe that is exactly where our power lies, and how we find it is to step into it and choose to take the power back by going, “This is all of who I am. I can stand in that place, and now can we get about the rest of our lives?”
It was Beautifull Project specific in many ways, because I talk a lot about my experience in a fat body, but as is customary for me, I want the invitation to be broader. I didn’t want it to just resonate with people in fat bodies, although that was very important to me, but I talk in there about how what we’re all craving is freedom. In fat bodies, in thin bodies, in black and brown bodies, we’re craving the experience of being free, and I think part of how we get there is to stand in it and go, “This is who I am. Now what else is available to me, now that we’ve gotten past that part where I’m terrified of what you’re going to think when you see me?”
The irony of it is that it has actually generated this speaking career that’s starting to launch, your introverted friend. [laughs] That’s ironic to me, that that’s the direction this is headed. I’m grateful for it, and I understand that I do have a particular skill with words on a stage. When I get into that space, I actually do know how to take it up. But if just left to me, I probably would’ve spent the rest of my life behind my keyboard.
But I’m also pretty excited and grateful that it resonates the way it does, because it does seem to actually resonate with people, period. It does seem to accomplish the thing that I had hoped it would. And actually, to that end, I want to tell you one specific story.
When I did the performance – because TED really is a performance. I’m pretty sure it was probably 40 to 80 hours of actual prep. You’re only on stage for 15 minutes, but there’s no teleprompter. You’ve got to nail that thing. You’re usually pretty nervous.
So there was a guy in the front row – and actually, you can see him on the video. When I open up the talk, I use the word “fat” right away. I start talking about people in enormously fat bodies. As I’m using it, I can feel him, and he’s shifty in his seat. He’s clearly uncomfortable. In one of the opening scenes, I use a slide from the Adipositivity Project. If you don’t know the Adipositivity Project, you should. It’s this really great photojournalism project that showcases and celebrates people in fat bodies. It’s beautiful.
I use this slide, and now I watch him get increasingly uncomfortable. He leans forward in his chair and puts his head down. At some point I say something, and he laughs, but it’s not funny. So he’s that uncomfortable that he’s not really able to completely not verbalize.
I’m running parallel tracks of delivering this once-in-a-lifetime moment, and I’m conscious of this tall, thin, white guy in front of me who is so uncomfortable with what I have to say.
Not to give away the end – I’m not going to – but as the talk progresses, it requires more and more vulnerability from me. I realize that I’m going to have to do this with this guy right in front of me. It was a very clear, direct invitation for me to step into my power for my own sake, to remind myself that in this moment, I am safe because I keep myself safe here.
So I finished the talk, and it was right before intermission, so we all broke for intermission. I went outside to get some air. I come back in, and this guy makes a beeline for me. I wasn’t sure – I was still pretty raw, and I really wasn’t necessarily in the space to defend anything. I’m pretty withdrawn when he gets to me. He actually puts his hand on my shoulder, and I’m like, “Thanks, don’t touch me.”
Lu Uhrich: “Why are you touching me?” Yeah.
Sarah Stevens: “Why are you touching me?” And he said, “I just need a second of your time.” I’m like, here we go, some thin guy wants to talk to the fat woman, and I’m not in the mood for it. He said, “You are the real deal, kiddo.” I was confused. He said, “I spent my life as a firefighter, and I had no idea that I had developed this really awful, dangerous bias about people in large bodies, because in my experience it was harder for me to move them.”
He talked about it from his own lens and he said, “I will never, ever understand people in large bodies the same way. You changed the way I understand people in large bodies and what that experience is like for them in this culture.” This guy asked me for a hug. He was like, “It’ll never be the same again.”
That moment for me – because ultimately, I want people in fat bodies to feel seen by my work, but I really do – I’m after the conversion story of the thin white guy. He’s the guy – that’s a big deal to me, that he could understand the experience of people in fat bodies enough, again, to see fatphobia and to go, “That’s not okay with me, and here’s how I was living in that.”
Yeah, the talk was amazing and transformative and terrifying. When it dropped on YouTube, I thought I was going to bomb it for weeks. But it has definitely changed my life, and I’m hopeful it changes people who see it.
Lu Uhrich: It’s so good. Of course, like you said, a lot of it you’re talking about your body and being seen and relating this to – in your own mind, not in your talk – the Beautifull Project.
01:14:50
Lu Uhrich: But then you said, and I know in the talk, you do challenge people, “Be seen. Show up. Take up space, whatever it is in your life or in your world.”
Besides showing up in our bodies, what are some other examples that you’ve seen where people are just wanting, even if they don’t know they’re desiring – because even when you’re saying “I’m an introvert, your introvert friend is now going to be this speaker,” part of me is like, yeah, but this is what you challenge people to do. To just show up and be seen. So what are the things that you’re seeing other people be challenged to expose of themselves, and in doing so, create their own healing?
Sarah Stevens: That’s so good. I have a lot of affinity for a narrative perspective. We’re always writing these stories from our history and our present and our future. Some of them are more fact-based and some of them aren’t.
I actually use other examples in the talk that I think are really indicative of what you’re talking about. Not only was I afraid of being seen in my fat body, but I also was 33 years old when I came out. I mean, I spent a very long time with that reality, convinced that if people saw me that way, I wouldn’t be loved or belong, all of that. I also talk about how for years, I was terrified that people would find out that I lost my home to foreclosure at the end of my first marriage, because that means something. I don’t know what I think it means, but it means terrible things about me. So I spent all of this time hiding those truths about myself, and in reality, if I just say them out loud, then we go, “Okay, moving along.”
I’ve watched other women in particular in this work – the thing I see most often is that once they start to take up some space in their bodies, they also start to use their voice a little differently. There’s definitely this connection between silencing and hunger, and I haven’t quite figured it all out yet. I’ve just been watching. But one of the things that I’ve seen consistently, particularly through the project, is women being invited to take up space and then they go, “Here’s the truth about my story.”
There was an entire season of the podcast that was the survivor season, where some women disclosed these unbelievable stories of survival for the first time. Then they’ll talk about what it’s like to have the truth outside of them. I often say that the truth takes up space wherever it lands. If it’s inside of us, it’s no less true; it’s just taking up space in me. I want to put it out in the world.
It can look like stories of survival. The other thing that I’ve watched women do is really give voice to their ambition, which I also love. I’ve had women text me and say, “I was in this board meeting and it was so obvious that my opinion wasn’t welcome, and I just thought, I’m going to take up some space here.”
That phrase, “take up space” – I do think it starts in our body, though. I don’t ever want people to lose that connection. I don’t think that we can really be stepping into our truth and our power and our space in one area and still obsessively shrink in our body. I think it has to start there. Like, I get to be embodied and real and whole and human, and now I’m going to go out into the world with that.
Lu Uhrich: It’s interesting. Maybe it happens in tandem for some people, because I know off-air, you and I were talking about a faith deconstruction that I had, and having similar experiences going to the colleges we did, and then changing since then.
For me, it was actually using my voice in that way to deconstruct things, to advocate for other people. I told you, knowing what I know now, I wish I would’ve actually said, “I’m advocating for me here.” But I wasn’t. I was advocating for other people. The same way you were like, “I’m not filling this prescription because I wouldn’t want my daughter to.” Sometimes the only way we get to self-compassion is through understanding how we would advise someone else that we love, or how we would treat someone else that we love. That was my experience too.
But actually, I felt simultaneously in using my voice, in taking up space, in getting out of spaces that didn’t support me and the people that I loved, that’s when I started finding more of a home in my body too. So it was happening at that same time. I don’t know if I could tell you what came first, the chicken or the egg there, but it felt like, yes, the two had to go hand in hand. There was no way for me to continue using my voice and rebelling against things that I’d constantly been told should be another way, and not also take that rebellion to the way that I’d been told to eat and the way that I’d been told to look and the way that I’d been told to move. So I hear what you’re saying. It’s definitely resonating there.
Sarah Stevens: I think that’s a really good point. I agree. I don’t think it is first, now that I think about it. I think the reason I say that is because I think women are going to be so naturally likely to go, “I’ll take up space over here, but do you really want me to dismantle fatphobia? Because that’s really uncomfortable.” I never want women to divorce the two. They have to coexist. It is not either/or. It really is a both/and, and the expansion of yourself in every way. It has to be invited in every way.
To your point, it trickles. You start one place, and then you can’t unsee it. I know I’ve said that like a hundred times, but once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and you cannot unsee the intersection everywhere.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah. In our house we always say you can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube.
Sarah Stevens: Oh my God, I say that all the time too.
Lu Uhrich: That’s because we’re best friends. [laughs]
Sarah Stevens: I know. [laughs]
Lu Uhrich: But yeah, exactly, you can’t separate the two. We’ve got to show up. We’ve got to show up for ourselves in so many ways and tell our stories.
01:20:50
I want to move this into the Beautifull Project, because you’ve talked about how it became a thing. It became a thing in your car after being prescribed speed to become smaller, and knowing that you wanted more voices to support – at that time you were thinking of your daughter, but support all of us in pursuing our own healing, in showing up, in being individuals. You do that through storytelling. Why storytelling? Why is that so important?
Sarah Stevens: I think that circles back to one of the points we made about the human psyche and our need to understand it in context of ourselves. Any truth, we will internalize things generally so long as they fit a construct that we have, or at least can relate. The fastest way there, in my opinion, is story. We hear ourselves and each other, and then we also are able, I think, to be expansive in our understanding. We can go, “Gosh, that resonates and that resonates, and here’s where she’s different, but here’s where we’re the same.”
I also think that the piece of story that’s super important to me is something that I said before as well: story requires a teller and a listener. It’s a two-party thing happening. If I can invite us to listen, every place I can possibly invite us to listen, I’m going to do that.
Also, story is how we’ve communicated forever. The caveman writing things on the walls of the cave. It’s how we understand ourselves. It becomes a mirror to us.
Also, right now I’m learning about ways to be expansive in storytelling. It doesn’t just have to be either you sit down at a blog or behind the microphone at a podcast. There are so many ways that humans, particularly women in this case, are skilled at storytelling, but they might do it through different mediums.
So I think it’s an expansive way. I think it’s a way that invites a two-party relationship; that is, a teller and a listener. I also think it’s a deeply powerful way for people to understand themselves and the world around them.
01:23:00
Lu Uhrich: That brings a question to my mind, which is how are we defining listening, or what does listening look like in the context of this storytelling? There’s some people who may be better skilled at listening than others. I’ll say in my own life, if I’m thinking about when I feel safest telling my story or sharing those parts of me, it’s with people who are clearly invested in my story and supportive. What does listening look like in this storytelling collective of yours?
Sarah Stevens: That’s a great question. What struck me there is what you said about the component of safety, how that has to play in. The truth is that that is a one-on-one thing that I do with the storytellers. I am good at this.
I don’t know why – well, it doesn’t matter; maybe it’s just for this. But one of the things that women will say after they’ve sat with me, particularly on the podcast, and particularly in Season 2 that was all about survival stories, they would talk about the experience of feeling safe with me. Then when those things are launched into the world, I’m still a buffer in some ways between how people may or may not react to the story that they shared.
So I think that when it comes to the virtual components, the listening, what I would ideally love is for people to feel heard and whole. One of the things I say often is that people heal when they’re heard. That experience has been true for me. So what I want from the listeners is just the same thing I work to create very consistently, which is just hold space for people. Just the invitation to hold space for another person and let their words sit between you and change you, often. But the act of holding space, which means I don’t have to do here, fix here.
I can’t tell you how often I have to remind people in the live events that we don’t need to give advice to each other. It is compulsive. People will talk about being in pain, and the woman across the table will be like, “Let me tell you about who you should go see.”
I think that listening is an active reality. It is active, but it doesn’t mean it’s verbal. It doesn’t mean it’s fixing. It is an act to hold space and just let another person be seen and heard and helped heal in that. I try to create that environment by modeling it myself.
Lu Uhrich: That’s really good. I like what you said there about not offering advice. I have a private Facebook community for people around mending their relationship to food and body, and sometimes we’ll have threads where I just want to hear what’s on people’s hearts or what they’re feeling right now and where they’re at.
I put a disclaimer. In any post where I’m asking for people to share where they’re at, I’ll put a disclaimer: “Let’s celebrate each other. Let’s show validation and presence for each other. Please don’t advise unless someone specifically asks for advice.” Because of course, if somebody wants to be advised, that’s different. They’re consenting to the onslaught of information and ideas. But otherwise, I’m very clear: don’t advise. Just validate. Just honor. Just celebrate. But you don’t have to fix someone.
I think it’s good for those of us who identify as women to be reminded that we don’t have to fix everyone and everything. It’s also good to feel when we share that there aren’t people just primed and waiting to jump in to fix us.
Sarah Stevens: I’ve learned over time, mostly by way of my own inclination to fix, that most of that is actually about me and the fact that I’m uncomfortable holding space for discomfort. That’s harder. It’s harder when the person across from you is in pain or where it’s difficult. This was hard for me to admit, because I’m a fixer of things, so it was very difficult for me to get underneath that and go, “I actually think the root of this is because I’m uncomfortable with your discomfort.” Which is probably why we feel so shorted when people start fixing us.
My wife and I have a thing that we’ll say: “Is this a listening time or a fixing time?” Sometimes we need a clear cue. “Do you want me here with suggestion or don’t you?” I just make sure that in the project, it’s really never a fixing time, because we’re dealing with a collective of storytellers. Nobody’s necessarily more or less qualified to give advice. I want to be careful about us heading down that road without qualification to do so. I do think there’s tremendous healing in just the act of having space held for your truth.
01:28:15
Lu Uhrich: Are there any stories that shouldn’t be told? Maybe “shouldn’t” is not the right word, but are there any stories you’d advise people to hold more closely?
Sarah Stevens: Yes. That’s such a good question. I actually have an example of this. In the second season, the survivor season, some of those interviews got to me by way of referral from other people because they heard about the season and they were like, “I know this survivor. It’d be great for her to tell her story.” This happened more than one time, actually, so I don’t have to be too specific to identify the person if they might be listening.
There were a handful of interviews that during the process, it was very obvious to me that they were still in process and doing the work. And we’re all in process and doing the work for our life. That’s a reality. But particularly in my opinion when it comes to trauma, I just think that one of the acts of committed nourishment we can give to ourselves is that promise of protection that you’re safe, that you can keep it private to do the work for as long as you need to do it.
There were times where I would sit across the mic from a survivor and just know it. To put this out into the public sphere would actually be to sensationalize her pain, and I can’t do that. So I had to have some difficult conversations that in some situations actually I think were painful for the person, because they were like, “No, I really want to amplify it.” But I feel a sense of responsibility because they’ve asked me to hold this. I’m not saying I’ll never air it, but while you’re still clearly in PTSD spaces, I think that’s a disservice. But I think it was wonderful to hold space for just she and I.
That’s the thing. It’s not that you need to swallow it or silence it; it’s the where and the how. I think the first rule in that is, do I feel safe doing it? Only you can answer that.
What was interesting for me is I did this whole survivor season, and then in the last episode – this was not the plan when I launched the season, but in the last episode, after this whole year of sitting with survivors, I decided that it was time to publicly talk about my own experience surviving sexual assault.
This is a memory that I didn’t actually have until probably 5 years ago. In this situation, I felt like these other women had led in this way that invited me to share from a similar space. So I shared it on the podcast as the last episode of the season and then really had a pretty intense reaction to that and realized that I had in some ways broken my own cardinal rule. I never asked myself if I felt safe enough to share it publicly. Had I, I probably would have said “not yet.”
It put me into a position that I had to do the intense work in therapy for a few months after that, and I feel much more safe and grounded now talking about it. But I think in this culture where we put everything out, or we feel like we should be putting everything out into the public sphere, the only guardian that you have available to you is yourself in that, the question of “Am I safe to do it here?” The answer is going to be yes in certain situations. It doesn’t always necessarily mean that you need to shout it out over a podcast.
I think there’s just a lot of individual discernment. That’s a very long answer, but I think it’s individual discernment. I tell women all the time who show up at the live events, “You don’t have to say a word while you’re here.”
Lu Uhrich: I like that. For me personally, it’s validating, and I’m hoping for many of the listeners it’s validating. I know I have my own stories that I still hold tightly, and I’m a pretty vocal and open person. I live my life relatively unashamed. I’m not ashamed of this story and its related trauma, but I still don’t totally know how I feel about it. So I’ve decided to hold it closely, even though there’s been opportunities in podcasts and other situations to share it publicly. Not ready to do that. But I love how you said you can still tell your story. It’s almost like know your audience, and choose the audience that you feel safest with. And I’ve been able to do that, thankfully, because of loving friends and family.
But for anyone else who’s listening, I think that’s so validating to hear you don’t have to share your story in a TED Talk. You don’t have to share your story publicly on the Beautifull Project or in Beauty, which is the podcast that’s associated with your Beautifull Project. But you can still share it and be heard and have loving listeners.
I think the other thing I always tend to tell people is I don’t want to hear somebody else’s story. Now, where people’s stories intersect our own, it’s okay to talk about our experience in that story. But telling other people’s stories is another place where I’d just so much rather hear from that person when they’re ready, so that they have the consent and the autonomy around their own stories instead of hearing it through someone else.
Sarah Stevens: Yes, and I think that a performative invitation, just by way of the platform that social media creates, I think we’ve started to feel this need, like “I’m supposed to be authentic and vulnerable, right? Doesn’t that mean I’m supposed to share everything on the most public platform?” No. You still have to care for you. No one else can do that for you.
Being in tune enough with asking – and you just nailed it. It’s not that the truth needs to be swallowed or silenced. It’s that you share it in places that are safe. Maybe a podcast feels safe. That’s awesome. Maybe you record it and then you hear the preview and you’re like, “That does not feel safe and I’m not ready.” Make sure you’re working with people who are willing to hear that too.
But remember, it belongs to you. Your story is as real as your body is, and it belongs to you, not to anybody else. I can’t overstate that invitation to take up space that way and go “Here’s my boundary and I’m just not ready, and that is okay.”
01:35:05
Lu Uhrich: We’re getting close to the end of our interview, and I’m not surprised that I didn’t touch on nearly half of the things that I wanted to talk about with you. But all the things we talked about were so good.
I do want to talk a little bit about parenting and raising children. We did touch on it, but I think this is going to inform all of us, because we’re all just humans; we’re just different ages. But what does it look like to you to cultivate this idea of storytelling and showing up and owning your truth with teens, with kids?
Sarah Stevens: Oh gosh. I just had this conversation this morning. I go through phases where I feel very secure and certain about the path I’ve chosen as far as parenting and the relationships with my kids, and then other times where I’m like, huh, I wonder how that’s going to turn out. Actually, in both cases, I’m always wondering how it’s going to turn out.
I think part of the leveling process for me was exactly what you just said: we’re all humans, just different ages. Really seeing my kids as autonomous people, that changed everything. I wasn’t raised that way, not even a little bit. I definitely felt like my worth came from what I produced and that it was my job to stabilize an otherwise unstable family. So I’ve parented counter to that in many ways.
What that looks like in our house is what other people probably might see as pretty permissive, but I invite the truth always. Always. There is nothing that we cannot walk through, and the truth takes up space where it lands. I tell them that all the time too. You don’t have to swallow it, whatever it looks like.
What’s challenging about that is that it’s kind of countercultural. Also, my wife is 14 years older than I am, so she actually was raised in a different generation of parenting. It’s been an enormous shift for her. In the beginning, it was actually a huge – there was some definite difficulty around the parenting issue because I was like, I’m not a hippie parent. [laughs] I’m just a parent who thinks these are whole human beings, and they’re not an extension of me, for God’s sake. They are their own person. What I want to do is gently hold up a mirror to the person they’re becoming and let them know that they’re seen here and that they’re loved here.
Then I think that there are occasional moments where I’m like, um, is that going to be okay? [laughs] But I will tell you things like my teenage daughter, prior to this shift for me, we had a very difficult relationship. Alannah’s getting ready to turn 18 actually next week. We share the same birthday, which is pretty awesome. I actually launched the project on my 40th birthday and her 16th birthday as a gift to her.
Lu Uhrich: Awesome.
Sarah Stevens: Yeah, it was awesome. She made me a personalized blanket for Christmas with pictures of us on it, and I was like, I am literally the luckiest mom in the world. I use those things as indicators of whether or not we’re on the right track.
But really, I want to invite all of who they are to live in our home for as long as they want to be there. We had to have conversations, similar to what you and I had talked about before about kindness and compassion. Those things are far more important to me than anything else.
My youngest child, actually, he’s in a very thin, athletic physique. He’s just naturally that way. It’s interesting because he’s the kid who’s most fatphobic. When my TED Talk dropped, he struggled a lot with the idea that this was in the public sphere and what people would think. But in our house, we have space for that conversation. It’s not going to help me to silence Gabe. It’s only going to help if I invite him to talk, so we can talk through these things, to keep asking him to come back to the table, to unravel exactly what it is there that he’s afraid of. He’s also 14, so there’s a lot of social pressure at 14.
But I invite all of them, because that’s how I want to be invited.
Lu Uhrich: Absolutely. I was just having a really great conversation with a friend yesterday where we were talking about the idea of inviting our children towards us versus pushing them away and what that looks like. So much of it is communication, dialogue, and making space for them to be who they are and to work out who they are. I mean, I didn’t know who I was at these ages that our children are right now.
But I had the space to learn that, and I had the space to try things on and to question, and it’s something that I’ve so valued. My parents really allowed us to be critical thinkers and to hone those skills. Doing that meant a lot of conversations, like the ones you’re having. Like, “Mom, why is this on YouTube? I don’t know how I feel about it.” Those are the sort of conversations we need to be able to have to work through our hesitations and our frustrations. So that’s really valuable advice and insight that you’re giving.
01:40:40
As we’re wrapping up, what would you say to the listener who says “I think I do want to take up more space. Yeah, maybe I am craving to be seen and known, not because of what my body looks like or how efficiently I can count calories or how great I am at the gym, but because of who I am or the stories that I hold within me”?
What would you tell a listener in terms of those first steps they can take towards telling their story? Because again, it’s not always going to be a TED Talk. It’s not always going to be a post on social media. What can they do to start accepting and then articulating their own stories?
Sarah Stevens: I think it starts with know yourself first. Before I could externalize all of this, I had to know myself. In the TED talk, I talk about how that started for me actually with – for me it was a very embodied experience, staying with my body long enough to find something to love there. I talk a lot about the experience of my reflection, and how I’d spend so much of my life looking at myself and quickly looking away because I couldn’t stand to stay with it, because there was a lot of pain on the front side of it. everything I was conditioned to think about myself is what I thought.
But what I found is that if I stayed with myself – in my situation, it was really staying with my actual, literal reflection. I would start with the judgment and the criticism, but if I stayed, it would just move through me. Because it wasn’t of me anyway. Never belonged to me. For me, the knowing myself started in that experience of knowing what I actually look like. I didn’t know. I hated pictures, I hated all of it. It was all part of the same package.
So I got very familiar with what I physically look like. That was part of my experience. Then I started to find safe places and people to share those things with. I think that’s the next step, to gather the others. I am grateful and deeply privileged by the people who surround me. I’m hopeful that most people have somebody. So after the know yourself, it’s the gather the others.
Then from there, I think the rest of it just unfolds. I can’t overstate the first part. Become familiar with you. Whether it’s laying your hands on your belly and feeling the judgment and letting it sit and then move through you – whatever it is. But for me, I go right to the place that I’m most likely to avoid. I think real acceptance is actually right underneath the thing that we’re loathing. It’s the thing that I’m most afraid the world will see. Love is buried right under it, but I have to stay there.
That’s really the first step, in my opinion, to finding your story and telling your story. Know yourself first.
Lu Uhrich: For people who are listening that might not be body-related, there sometimes can still be places in our body where we can feel our grief or our trauma, our story, the parts of us we haven’t yet exposed.
The other thing is if it’s not really embodied at this point, you can journal for yourself, or even just meditate on it or talk to yourself about those parts of you that you don’t necessarily want to expose because you’re ashamed of, and begin bringing that up out of the ground, out of burial and into the fresh air in whatever way that looks like.
What about when the fear comes, or the insecurity, or the shame that “I want to go run away and hide, I’m done, I don’t want to tell my story anymore”? How do people move through that?
Sarah Stevens: First thing is I think that there is some wisdom at times to stepping back a little. The discernment – I’ve had times where I’m like, “I’ve had enough expose – I feel like I walk around naked all the time. I don’t want to walk around naked all the time. So I think there is some important – I don’t want to invite people to just discount fear. There are times where I think that if we’re paying attention, maybe what we’re saying is we do need a little retreat for some self-care.
That being said as a cautionary component, I really think fear is like a compass to me now. If I’m afraid of it, I’m probably supposed to walk that direction. I don’t have to sprint at it. I can take small steps, slowly if I need to. But I’ve learned, particularly over the last 3 years – really starting with that decision to leave a corporate career that had a paycheck. That’s a real terrifying thing. What I learned is that there’s freedom on the other side of fear.
But I didn’t know it before, because I never was really willing to walk through it. I would always stop short of it and go “I’m afraid to look.” What I discovered in that process, and what’s true for your audience, I’m confident: we really are far more capable than we know. We just are. But you have to build the evidence. I talk often about how confidence follows courage. Courage is first, always. It’s only after I’ve done something that I know I can do it.
It is that part, there is just that initial step into the unknown. But also, to know that you’re not alone. This is why the chorus is so important to me. I don’t know how we spread it to scale that everybody knows, but I’m going to keep trying, because there is something about our need for real connectedness that’s at play here too. Facing fear like that is much better when you’re not walking by yourself.
I have an immense amount of compassion for people who feel alone. Start somewhere. Maybe it is in a virtual space, in a group where people have like experiences. Maybe that’s where you start to feel seen. But I can tell you walking through fear is much easier when you know that there’s somebody witnessing, observing, and maybe walking with you.
Lu Uhrich: Wow, those are really powerful words to end with. I think I’m going to leave it there. For all the listeners who want to take in more of what you have to offer, who want to learn more about the Beautifull Project and everything else that you’re doing in the world, where can they find you?
Sarah Stevens: The project exists primarily on a website. It’s www.thebeautifullproject.com, and it’s “beautifull” with two L’s because the Beautifull Project is an invitation to be full. From the website, you can actually navigate all of the things, but we’re also on Facebook and on Instagram.
We are actually going to change the name of the podcast, which is a major rebranding thing, primarily because I’ve discovered that sometimes I get a little too creative with naming conventions and then it gets confusing. [laughs] We’re just going to call it the Beautifull Project Podcast for Season 3. That launches – actually, by the time this airs, it will have launched.
Season 3 is the mamas and the makers. It’s about how women are a creative force in the world. It’s an invitation to understand how we take up space by what we make. It’s been an incredible season to host. So that’s on Apple and also on Podbean. The website, Facebook, and Instagram. Yeah, that’s it.
Lu Uhrich: Perfect. We’ll put all the links to everything that you just shared in the show notes, so listeners will be able to find it there. Sarah, thank you so much, first and foremost for being my friend and being my person that I found on the internet who is just such a kindred spirit to me. I so appreciate you. But thank you also for sharing your time and your wisdom and taking up space here on the Real Health Radio.
Sarah Stevens: Thanks for giving me the chance to share, Lu.
Lu Uhrich: Well friends, that’s all for this week’s show. Please be sure to head over to the show notes if you want to watch Sarah’s moving TED Talk or check out the Beautifull Project.
And, as I mentioned at the start of this episode, Seven Health is again taking on new clients. If you’re interested in working together and looking for a safe place to tell your own story and heal your own relationship with food and body, or if you simply want to find out more, head over to www.seven-health.com/help.
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