Episode 229: This week's guest on the podcast is Sigrún Daníelsdóttir. We talk about her eating disorder and recovery from it, weight stigma and weight discrimination and how, because of Sigrun’s activism work, the City of Reykjavik updated their human rights policy to include weight as a protected category.
Sigrún Daníelsdóttir is a clinical psychologist and for most of her career has worked with children and adolescents with eating and body image problems, both within treatment and prevention settings. Her current position is as project manager for mental health promotion at the Directorate of Health in Iceland.
Sigrun started the Body Respect movement in Iceland, which focuses on promoting body satisfaction and respect for body diversity through various forms of social activism and advocacy. She is the organizer of various awareness-raising events, like the annual celebration of International No Diet Day in Iceland
She is also the co-founder and former president of the Icelandic Association for Body Respect and the Icelandic Eating Disorders Association. And because of Sigrun’s activisim, following the Weight Stigma Conference in Reykjavik in 2015, the City of Reykjavik updated their human rights policy to include weight as a protected category.
00:00:00
00:05:05
00:09:20
00:14:40
00:22:18
00:26:10
00:32:30
00:39:10
00:43:55
00:52:11
01:01:32
01:07:10
01:13:48
01:19:05
01:25:38
Links
00:00:00
Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 229 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at seven-health.com/229.
Just a note before we get started. I’m currently taking on new clients. I specialise in helping clients overcome eating disorders and disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and negative body image, overexercise and exercise compulsion, and regaining periods.
If these are areas you struggle with and would like to have help and make them a thing of the past, please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is seven-health.com/help, and I’ll include that in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I am a nutritionist, and I specialise in recovery from eating disorders and disordered eating and really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.
Today on the show, it’s a guest interview. My guest is Sigrun Danielsdottir. Sigrun is a clinical psychologist and for most of her career has worked with children and adolescents with eating and body image problems, both within treatment and prevention settings. Her current position is a project manager for mental health promotion at Directorate of Health in Iceland.
Sigrun started the Body Respect Movement in Iceland, which focuses on promoting body satisfaction and respect for body diversity through various forms of social activism and advocacy. She is the organiser of various awareness-raising events, like the annual celebration of No Diet Day in Iceland. She’s also the co-founder and president of the Icelandic Association for Body Respect and the Icelandic Eating Disorder Association. Because of Sigrun’s advocacy and activism following the Weight Stigma Conference in Reykjavik in 2015, the city of Reykjavik updated their human right policy to include weight as a protected category.
As part of the intro to this podcast when I’m speaking with Sigrun, I outline what we’re going to cover, so I won’t repeat myself here. You’ll hear that in a moment. But I will just say that I really enjoyed this conversation, hearing about Sigrun’s own eating disorder and how she overcame it, and also the incredible work that she’s doing in Iceland.
I will be back at the end with a couple of recommendations for you, but for now, here’s my conversation with Sigrun Danielsdottir.
Hey, Sigrun. Welcome to the show. Thanks for chatting with me today.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Thanks for having me.
Chris Sandel: I want to give you a little insight into how we are talking today. This will also point towards one of the topics or really the main topic that I want to cover as part of the show today. Around this time last year, I recorded a podcast with the researcher Dr Jeffrey Hunger. Do you know who he is?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I do.
Chris Sandel: His research focus for many years has been about weight stigma and the physiology and the psychological impacts that this has on the body, and a lot of it draws on the research around social identity threat. As part of the conversation that we had together, he spoke about Iceland and changes in policy or legislation that have been passed around weight discrimination there. He said he didn’t really know much about it; that wasn’t his area of expertise, so he didn’t go into it in any great detail.
Then towards the end of last year, the end of 2020, someone left a comment on my site underneath that episode and they said if I wanted to find out more information about Iceland and the activism over there and the changes with the policy with weight discrimination, I should invite you onto the podcast. Up until that point, I had not come across your work. I didn’t know who you were; you were a new name to me. So I started doing some googling and searching on PubMed and ResearchGate, and I was really pleased with what I saw in terms of what came up. It became apparent that I did need to reach out to you and have you on here so we could have a conversation.
I’ve never heard you on a podcast before and I only know little bits about what you’re doing based on the research and what I can pick up from LinkedIn, so I’m really excited to chat with you today and find out more about you and what you’re doing as well as the research.
So that’s a bit of an intro. I want to talk about the changes in policy and the activism you’re doing over there, and also chat about you as a person. How does that sound?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: That sounds terrific. Thank you.
00:05:05
Chris Sandel: To start off with, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on yourself – who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that sort of thing?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I’m a trained clinical psychologist. I started my career in children and adolescent psychology/psychiatry. I was working in a national child and adolescent psychiatric unit and outpatient care where I soon became involved with the eating disorder treatment team.
I always had a keen interest in eating disorders and body image because I had my own history with those types of issues. When I was studying to become a psychologist, I began reading a whole lot of research and gathering information and got involved with an international professional organisation called the Academy for Eating Disorders where I got to know people who were discussing and writing about the critical lens, so to speak, towards the diet culture and the sociocultural factors that shape our views regarding our bodies.
That was really the first time that I had ever encountered any kind of criticism in that direction. We’re all raised with the notion that this is just a self-evident truth: that bodies are meant to be slim; if they’re not, there’s something wrong with them, and you can fix it by going on a diet or managing your behaviour in some way. So that was the first time I really got to thinking about the unfairness of it all and what drives this emphasis in our culture and what we can do to change it.
When I got involved with eating disorder treatment, that became more and more a pressing interest in me, to get involved in some sort of activism, because each and every person that I met with a history of eating disorders and a young person struggling, it was always something that this person – something happened or it was really a learned behaviour and a learned attitude. That is so unfortunate. Why are we teaching our kids to hate their bodies? Why are we teaching them that their bodies are wrong? Why are they facing all of this pressure?
My involvement in activism evolved from there, around maybe 2005, 2006, 2007. At that time in Iceland, there really was no public dialogue on these types of issues. There was no open public criticism of the diet culture, awareness around these kinds of issues. It was really a struggle for me at the beginning to figure out where to start, who to join forces with and how to begin this kind of dialogue with the community.
Through my involvement with activists and professionals in the body image and eating disorder fields on an international level, I got to know the International No Diet Day, which is May 6th every year and was started by an English woman, I believe, in 1992 or something like that. That sounded to me like something that was doable in Iceland. I can manage to organise one day a year that is going to be devoted to raising awareness and starting this critical dialogue around the diet culture, around weight bias, around these pressures that we are forced to live with.
That’s really how I got involved in this kind of fight for body respect in Iceland, and things developed from there.
00:09:20
Chris Sandel: There’s a lot there that I want to go back through. One of the things you talked about was your own history with an eating disorder. How was food growing up for you, and what was it like in your household?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I think probably my household was really typical. My experience as a child was that I was living in a world where things were very straightforward when it came to food and weight. You shouldn’t be fat, and that was not something that people in my home believed any more than everybody.
When I was around maybe eight, nine years old, I started to gain weight, which to this day I have no idea why. Maybe it was just preparation for puberty. My body just decided at this point in time that it wanted to gain a little bit more of a fat reserve. That was a really traumatic experience for me because immediately, I found such an avalanche of negative feedback from my environment. All of a sudden, my body became a focus of negative attention from peers and friends, parents of friends. My friends’ siblings would say something nasty to me when I was over there playing.
If and when things like this would come up at my house, my parents’ response – which is really understandable given where we were at that time in the ’80s – was to give me advice on how I could change. Really affirming the fact that it was my body that was wrong, and that was the thing that needed to change.
From around eight or nine years of age, I began developing a really resentful relationship with my body. I remember feeling disgust and shame just looking at my body. I wanted to hide it, feeling very self-conscious going swimming or doing anything that would involve bodily exposure.
These thoughts and really the desire to change and become thinner had been evolving for many, many years when I finally, around the age of 12, had I guess the mental capacity to go on an organised diet. When I was nine or ten, as a young kid, I just didn’t have the cognitive resources to figure out how I would go about dieting, but when I was around 12, I could organise a regime and follow it. I had this agenda to make my dream of becoming thin and acceptable be realised.
I succeeded exceptionally well. [laughs] I developed anorexia from that fairly quickly. Over a period of a few months, I had become really, really thin and was admitted to hospital soon before my 13th birthday.
Chris Sandel: Did it start out where in the beginning you were dieting and you started to get praise, and then you crossed some threshold and people were like ‘Okay, now this is a problem’?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Oh yeah. I was ecstatic. Just looking at only the feeling part of it, it was probably the happiest I’ve been in my entire life. I’ve never experienced such intensity of happiness and victory. I managed to completely turn my life around from being this – I felt like I was a pariah – into becoming a rock star. For the first time, at school dances I was asked to dance by boys. I could see people looking at me with acceptance or admiration.
So I definitely felt the sense that I had transcended into this group of accepted or applauded people. It was really strange to me that so soon after that, the messages changed and people were starting to criticise me again for now being too thin, worrying, saying ‘This has got to stop’. I became very, very resentful because I felt that I had finally succeeded and they wanted to take it away from me and turn me into the old Cinderella again.
00:14:40
Chris Sandel: When you were then sent off to treatment, were you very resistant to that?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Yes, in the beginning. But then I could see that in fact I was really ill, so I tried to get better. I don’t think I was a really difficult patient, but I was struggling. This was just the beginning. I would struggle over the next maybe 12 years, on and off, because I was trying to master how I could not have an eating disorder but still be thin. That was really a difficult problem to solve. I didn’t completely recover until I got pregnant with my daughter at the age of 24.
Chris Sandel: What was it about the pregnancy or having your daughter, or what was it about that experience, that then helped you – you said ‘I wanted to recover but I also wanted to be in a thin body’. For some people who recover, that’s where they end up, but it’s not because of a choice; it’s more just that that’s the luck of the draw. How did you maybe not even reconcile those two things, but how did you get to a place where ‘Okay, I’m now more accepting and able to get to a place of full recovery’?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I think in the beginning with the pregnancy, something about the pregnancy helped me let go of the whole idea of being thin. I guess deep down inside, I thought ‘Now I’m pregnant, and it’s unrealistic to think I’m going to be thin while pregnant’. So I just put that aside for now, like ‘I’m pregnant and I’m going to eat and take care of the baby’.
But at that time I had already started my university degree to become a psychologist, so at that time I had already begun to read a lot of things. The seeds for critical thinking around body image, around the pressure to be thin and everything, had been planted already.
To this day, I think this was probably one of the most significant things, because then it turned out that I was carrying a daughter. That really stuck it in that ‘Okay, I have this history, and I know the societal pressures and the way we are taught to think about our bodies is really wrong and twisted and harmful, and now I’m going to bring another girl into this world’. That forced me to really go the extra length with recovery.
I always maintain that an eating disorder is really just like an ideology. It’s like a cult religion or something because it is really based on how you think about yourself, your body, bodies in general. It’s really difficult to maintain an eating disorder unless you have a particular mindset, a particular set of beliefs – for example, that a thinner body is a more beautiful body, it’s a better body; being fat is undesirable, disgusting. These were the kinds of cognitions that I really began to disentangle and challenge within myself when I was carrying and then having my daughter.
Chris Sandel: I’ve talked to other clients and I’ve also talked to other guests on this podcast who’ve had a similar experience where pregnancy was one of the big things that helped in terms of their recovery. For some of those people, or maybe even the majority of those people, part of it as well was the wonderment at what the body is capable of. There’s just this awe of noticing ‘This thing that I’ve been despising or working against now is growing this human being within me’. That realisation and that experience for a lot of them was what helped to make that shift, or at least a part of it. Did that play a role for you?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: No, I can’t really say that. Not at that time. I was actually really horrified by my pregnant body and post-pregnancy body. I felt like a domestic animal. [laughs] It was very, very organic when for most of my life I had trained myself to look at my body more like a one-dimensional, thin, clean, not really organic entity. Then it changed into this really, really, really – like the bodily functions that take over, the body really shows its strength and its willingness to do what it has to do and to survive and to do all these magnificent things that the body does in pregnancy and in breastfeeding and everything.
But I think I was too young and too early in my recovery to appreciate that at the time. I did it with my later pregnancies. Then I could really revel in the experience of being pregnant. But I wasn’t really there at that time. It was more like a sense of responsibility that sparked me in the beginning. Just a huge sense of responsibility and duty towards my daughter to get out of this vicious cycle – and then later on, to do something to change the society that she would end up growing up in.
Chris Sandel: The way you described it there in terms of this sense of duty – was it about actually getting yourself out of that situation, or was it ‘I need to be able to act in a way that means this isn’t passed on, so if I’m going to talk to myself badly, I’m going to make sure I don’t do it in front of my daughter’? It was less about you actually recovering and more about ‘I need to do what I can so that she isn’t aware of this and she has a better experience than I did’?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: All of these things. I wanted to be really whole and sincere, I guess, or something like that. I’m not sure what the best word would be. To be truly embodying this kind of healthy attitude towards weight and food and everything, but also, I just wanted to be mentally okay and not preoccupied with these things just so that I could be a happier person and a better mom. And a better role model, of course, as well. That was a huge factor.
00:22:18
Chris Sandel: From a practical standpoint, what did that look like? How did you improve your body image? Because it’s one thing to say ‘This is what I want for my daughter and this is what I want to happen’, and then I guess it’s another thing to make that reality. How did you make that a reality?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: When I look back, it looks like I was just performing cognitive therapy on myself for maybe over a year or a few years. I was constantly critically examining my assumptions, my attitudes. That’s where I logically came to the conclusion that it’s impossible for me to pursue thinness and get rid of my eating disorder at the same time. It’s just logically impossible.
I managed to put that aside. It was a personal realisation to see that as the beginning and the end of all of my suffering, this desire to be thin. I was able to really look at that critically. Why do I want to be thin? Where did I learn that? Why is it so important? Was I really happier when I was thinner? For a short period, yes, I did get a lot of attention and positive social feedback, but most of the time I was really miserable.
Also, what helped me a great deal was the injustice of it all. I was able to see the pure injustice of the fact that – why should I be condemned to hating my body and to have this really horrible life that was plagued with insecurities and obsessions and never really finding peace, just because I was born to have a particular type of body? And I’m not really naturally in a heavier body; it was just a short period of time where I was a bit on the plump side. But it was enough to release this negative attention from society that made me think, ‘This is unacceptable. I can’t be like this. I have to change it’.
But just in general, why should we treat people so differently depending on what kind of body they live in? I could see that as a fundamental injustice at the same level as racism or homophobia or any kind of social injustice where you treat people badly and cause them a lot of misery for being who they are.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. You said it was a couple of years in this kind of introspection and challenging some of your cognitive thoughts and beliefs. Was this a thing you were doing on your own, or were you in therapy at that stage? Or were you working with a treatment team? What was it like at that point?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I was doing it on my own, really, at that time. But as I said, I was studying to become a psychologist, so I had a lot of tools at my disposal, and I had been in therapy before, various types of therapy. So it wasn’t like I was coming at this out of thin air. But no, I wasn’t in therapy at that point.
00:26:10
Chris Sandel: With the study of psychology and being a psychologist, what was your intention with that in terms of what did you think you would be working in afterwards? What area were you interested in?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Oh, body image and eating disorders, definitely.
Chris Sandel: Okay, you went in with that intention.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Absolutely. It’s very common for people who are early on in recovery. When they have figured it out for themselves and they have seen the light and they know what needs to change, they want to liberate the whole world. That was definitely part of it for me.
And I’m grateful I was able to hold that in check until I had the professional and the personal maturity to be guided by the academic knowledge and evidence-based practice rather than just charging on. I think that’s also something we have to be careful about. All of our stories are unique. What worked for me doesn’t necessarily work for somebody else, so we have to be mindful that people are coming at this from different angles, I guess, and with different histories. It’s not really about having everybody take the same road as you did.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I work with disordered eating and eating disorders and people who have a history with dieting, and I have experienced none of those things. I’ve been very, very lucky to grow up in a body that is accepted by society, but also grow up in a household where there wasn’t talk of dieting and food wasn’t a big deal.
I think in some ways, it can be a strength because when I’m coming at this with clients, there isn’t personal experience biasing the way I do things. It’s not that I’ve been in treatment and now everyone I talk to goes the way that I went in treatment because that’s what I found was really helpful. So I think sometimes for me, I feel like that can be a benefit. And it’s not to say I don’t have biases; I think we all do. But I definitely don’t have that personal experience bias that has meant that I see things only through one lens.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Exactly. It is a tricky thing to be able to have your history. It can provide you with a very valuable perspective. You know how it is, you know how it feels. But like you say, it can also cause a bias that you maybe automatically assume that things were similar for the person you’re working with, when they may have been completely different.
Chris Sandel: With your wanting to work in psychology, did you also know that you wanted to work with kids and adolescents because of your own experience, and that had been when it affected you? Was that always known, or you didn’t know that was the age you’d work with?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I think I was really open to anything at that point. I just applied to where there was an open position. But definitely working with eating disorders, working with kids is really – I mean, you’re coming at the problem very early on, whereas if you’re working with adult treatment, you’re probably going to be working with people who’ve been very, very ill for a long time. Just a longer history of illness can be more of a struggle towards recovery, whereas if you’re working with somebody who’s only been ill for a few months, the road back is shorter, I guess.
Chris Sandel: Well, if they want to take that road back, I think. So much of it is about the willingness of the individual and what they want to do, which is so much of the difficulty with this stuff. It doesn’t matter how much I think it would be a great idea for someone to change and how much damage I’m seeing that this is causing; if someone else doesn’t see it that way, then there’s not a lot that can be done.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Exactly. But when you’re working with kids, you also have the advantage of having the opportunity to work with the family and with the parents. So you’re able to create more of a recovery supporting structure around the person who is struggling.
Chris Sandel: Am I right in assuming you now work for the Iceland government in some capacity?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: No, not really. I work at a government institution. I’m working at the Directorate of Health in Iceland. The directorate is an institution that – I’m not sure of the proper word in English, but it belongs to the Ministry of Health, but it’s not part of the government.
Chris Sandel: Like an advisory committee?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Yes. They provide advice for government and the public as well. But it’s not really inside the government.
Chris Sandel: Were you in that role when there was the change to the policy? The one I made reference to at the start.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I was working there, but the work that I did on the policy was not part of my job at the Directorate of Health. I’ve always maintained a personal commitment to social change in this respect, and I’ve maintained that irrespective of where I’m working at any particular time. So no, I wasn’t doing that on behalf of the Directorate or as part of the Directorate, but yes, I was working there at the time.
00:32:30
Chris Sandel: We’ll come back to the Directorate, I think. Let’s talk now about the policy. Before we started chatting, I referred to it as legislation and you corrected me. So let’s go through, what is the policy that came in with Reykjavik in relation to weight and weight discrimination?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: That journey towards Reykjavik city putting body diversity on the agenda for their human rights policy is a fun and rather beautiful story, actually. It’s an example of how things can work out when everything works well, when everything goes so smoothly and change happens really effortlessly and positively.
This came about in 2015 when I was hosting the International Weight Stigma Conference, which was started by a British researcher and activist named Angela Meadows. If you want to have an interesting person to interview, I would recommend also talking to her.
Chris Sandel: I haven’t had her on the podcast, but thank you for the name. I will look into it. I’ve heard her name before, but I haven’t looked into having her on the podcast. Thanks for the reminder.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: So she founded this International Weight Stigma Conference, and we got to know each other at a symposium in the UK a few years earlier. She’s always looking for interesting international venues for her conference, so we decided to collaborate and have the conference in Reykjavik in 2015.
2015 was also the 100-year anniversary of Icelandic women’s suffrage, so there was a lot going on within the country, both within the government and within Reykjavik municipality, to celebrate this milestone, 100 years since Icelandic women were allowed to vote.
When we were looking for sponsors for the conference, we also sought sponsorship from the city of Reykjavik. I think it was probably helpful to have, because that is also very much a feminist issue. Women are hit harder with weight bias and everything. They were keen to jump on and become sponsors for the conference. Because of their sponsorship, we invited them to both attend the conference and to give a short opening speech at the conference.
So we had members from the Reykjavik Human Rights Council at the conference and there was an opening to – I’m not sure that these particular people had really thought about weight bias before, or at least not attended a whole conference about weight bias. So we had the opportunity of raising this awareness within the Human Rights Council of Reykjavik city about weight bias as a particular important issue for social justice. And it just happened to be around the same time that they were revising the Reykjavik human rights policy.
As a follow-up to the conference, I was thanking them for their contribution, ‘hope you had a good time and you found it enlightening’, and then just mentioning, ‘I realise that as it stands at the moment, there’s no mention of weight in the Reykjavik human rights policy’. They responded really, really positively. ‘Yes, you’re right. We should change that and we should definitely put this on the agenda’.
Then they invited me to become a part of the process to include weight in the revised policy. It happened very, very quickly and effortlessly, and just like a dream of this kind of structural change. It is really only about the willingness. It doesn’t take more than that. You see the problem, you want to do something about it, and you unite forces to bring it about. At least when it comes to things like policy and legislation, it is really just, do you think that this is an important issue? Do you want to make any kind of structural changes? Then you can do it, if you have this kind of willingness.
Chris Sandel: And as you said, the stars aligned so that they were able to be at the conference as the human rights thing was up for looking at again. It’s great that it all happened in that way.
So what is the difference between it as a policy versus it being a legislation? How would it impact things differently?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Legislation is passed through parliament, through a vote. It’s something that is a much more complex and lengthy process. You have to have politicians who are willing to put it forth as a bill, and then you have to have enough consensus in parliament for it to be passed as a law.
Whereas a policy is really just this local authority, which is the city of Reykjavik. They themselves decide to set their own rules or set their own ‘This is the way that we are committed to working. We want to provide our citizens with services that are free of bias and discrimination. As an employer, we want to have our workplaces free of bias and discrimination’. So they set these things as ground rules for themselves rather than something that they are demanding their citizens do, like a law would do.
Also, if you have a legislation, then you as a person, if you do experience discrimination, you can seek justice through the courts, which you could not do with simply a policy.
00:39:10
Chris Sandel: So the policy is more having an impact on how the local authority of Reykjavik behaves as opposed to businesses that are in Reykjavik have to follow this.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Right, absolutely. But in Icelandic society, municipalities run lots of the schools. Most schools in Iceland, both preschools and primary schools and lower secondary schools, are run by the municipalities. They are public schools and the municipalities manage them. For example, when they have a policy that very clearly states that we should make sure we are free of weight bias and that people are not discriminated against, they are also creating these kinds of expectations for all of the schools, for all of the social services. They organise transport and build environments.
So it really has the potential to have a lot of reach into the everyday life of the citizens of Reykjavik. Even if it’s not a law, I do think it has the potential to really make a difference, but it also depends on how well it’s followed up.
Chris Sandel: What was the reaction of Iceland as a whole or Reykjavik more specifically when this policy was brought in?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I’m not actually really sure how many people keep track of these kinds of things. Probably for the average citizen, they may not even know about the policy. But hopefully within the Reykjavik City Council and all of their councils and committees and service fields, they are following up with the policy, they are educating, for example, their employees, who work in all these different venues – in child protection, in social services, in transport, in schools – about what’s involved in the policy and what’s expected of them as a result.
They have really specific things in the policy, such as that they don’t want any kind of educational material in schools to have weight biased content, or that within workplaces, they want to create a working environment that is free of any stereotypes around weight. You would think, for example, that this would make sure that health-promoting efforts within schools or workplaces are free of weight bias or a weight focus, and focusing on just health in general instead and things like that.
Chris Sandel: Has that actually translated to be the case? I was doing some reading around this, and I think there was a sugar tax or something brought in as part of this, and then the Directorate made a comment around bringing in the sugar tax and how that could be a help in terms of tackling weight or obesity – I can’t remember what the language was. That kind of language seems in contrast to what the policy is recommending.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: The Reykjavik city policy would not necessarily do anything to change how the health system works, for example, because the health system doesn’t belong to the municipalities.
But yes, you’re right; I can sense, and I’ve felt a growing awareness and willingness, both from government officials and health professionals and practitioners and providers, to move away from the weight focus in, for example, public health messages. But there is an undeniable tension between people who think that we should focus more on weight and obesity per se and the ones who think that we shouldn’t. It’s just an ongoing struggle, I guess, within the health sciences and the health practitioner fields. People do not agree on what’s the best approach.
00:43:55
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Has there been any talk about this moving from just being a policy to then being something that is legislation? Have they brought it up in discussion, or that’s a long way off?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I don’t think there has been any real talk of passing a law against weight discrimination per se in Iceland, no. In the Association for Body Respect in Iceland – a few years back, there was a lot of work going on in changing the Icelandic constitution. It was something that was sparked by the financial collapse of 2008, where there was a huge demand for the public to have a new constitution that more firmly will address a lot of things that are not addressed in the current constitution. A national council was established, and they worked on making amendments to the constitution.
One of our demands in the Icelandic Body Respect Association was that if we were going to review or revise the constitution, we should include weight in the listing of several different kinds of human characteristics and things that we know are stigmatised in human existence of gender and sexuality and age and disability and the whole list of things that people need legal protection from when it comes to discrimination. We thought it was very self-evident that if we were going to revise this, we needed to add weight to this list.
Then we found a lot of resistance, very much resistance. You could see it from online comments, for example, to whenever the press would be covering this demand from us that we should include weight in the constitution. People would be commenting. Radio shows, people expressing their views. There was a lot of talk that this was really irresponsible, that freeing people from discrimination would be equal to saying that everybody should just go ahead and gain as much weight as possible and things like that.
It was really interesting and informative and enlightening to see how many people think that maybe discrimination is actually very helpful, and it’s irresponsible to alleviate discrimination because somehow that would discourage people from improving their health or whatever.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It’s interesting with that, because I’ve gone through a number of the research papers that you’ve either written or been part of putting together, and it feels like it kind of depends on what the question is being asked for how people think about it.
I think there was a paper where you were looking at bullying for adolescents, and I think it was in the US, but it could’ve been other places as well. It was that basically bullying connected to weight was the most prevalent of all types of bullying and a very high percentage of people then thought it should be stopped and that people should step in to try to help out, whether that be teachers or parents or all of these different people. So when seen through that lens, it feels like people want this to stop.
The other example, and I think this came from another paper as well, was if someone themselves, as an adult, receives bullying or weight stigma, it doesn’t seem to have much of an impact in terms of changing their beliefs. But if they’re noticing that’s happening to a friend or a sibling or another family member, that seems to move the dial more for people thinking, ‘Hey, this is something we need to stop’.
It was just quite interesting when I went through the research that how you phrase or frame the problem can really impact on how people think about it.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Yeah, definitely. I think it has a lot to do with the way that weight has been framed as an issue of personal responsibility. Everybody agrees that as a child, you’re not responsible for your life; you need adult protection. So if a child is being bullied, yes, we should stop that. However, if you’re an adult and you’re receiving negative feedback, maybe you should just do something about the problem, so to speak, yourself. I think that plays a lot into it and also may in part explain why we think that weight bias is some kind of motivational factor or even a necessary factor for health improvement.
It places the responsibility of being stigmatised or being mistreated within the person who is suffering themselves. It’s their responsibility to do something about it, not society or the weight bias views that drive these kinds of injustices.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and I think that component that this is something that you can change if you really care about it, or this is something that is within your control, does have a really big impact.
I know you did some research as well looking at this, and it’s interesting because even when you can start to get people to come round to the idea that maybe weight isn’t as in control as the general society thinks it is – that actually, this is something that can be outside of someone’s control – even when that belief can start to change, a lot of the prejudice still remains.
I just wonder if it takes longer than any intervention as part of a survey or whatever to really make the difference. If someone believed that it’s out of someone’s control and that happened over a period of 10 years, then maybe their prejudice would shift. But in a momentary situation as part of a study, it doesn’t. Or even if that starts to shift, we’re then going to start to see some other layer further down that’s connected to disgust or something else that is actually the real driver with a lot of this.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Yeah, and where does it begin? Are we raised in a society that regards heavier bodies with disgust and disapproval, and we’re all born into this kind of world and this is just something that we pick up, these are views that we are socialised into believing, and then we make up rationalisations for these kinds of biased views afterwards?
You look at a fat person and you think ‘yuck, disgusting’, and then you rationalise it and say ‘It’s just that I’m worried about heavier people’s health and that they need to do something. They need to behave better or they need to be more mindful of their health’. It’s really an after-the-fact explanation that we sell ourselves rather than something that’s actually driving the feelings of blame and disgust and whatever it is that is at the heart of weight bias.
00:52:11
Chris Sandel: It definitely feels like that. And like with so many things within the way that we behave and the way that we think and all of that, it’s complex. I don’t feel like there is going to be one lever that if we can just change this one thing, then everything is going to be different. It feels like it’s going to be a real multi-pronged approach and something that is going to then take time.
I think one of the papers as well looked at the fact that even when legislation is changed, it can then still take a long time for people to catch up with that legislation, and that legislation can be interpreted in some other way to then match up still with the common beliefs that people have. But with enough time, legislation can actually be quite a helpful vehicle or changing people’s beliefs and the way we are as a society.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Absolutely. It goes both ways. Social change can precede legislative change, and legislative change can set the stage and can strike the proper tone, however we would describe it, that can ignite changes and views.
We actually did a paper on that a very short while ago, when I was working with the aforementioned Angela Meadows and Daniel Goldberg from America and Marquisele Mercedes. We had a paper in the Fat Studies journal about this very thing: the factors we need to consider when it comes to legislative and policy change, and the different roles that we can take towards that, or in what way we can use laws to change public opinion versus laws happen when enough people in the society believe that something should change.
Chris Sandel: What did you find from that, looking at historical cases? What was the outcome?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: We found that it can be a different process. It’s not entirely – for example, the scenario we had in Reykjavik in changing the policy there, it was best case scenario and not necessarily something that can be replicated. It’s really complex to look at how social change happens.
It can be described as the window for change. Sometimes it’s simply a question of having the right people being united at the right place at the right time, but definitely I think activism is going to play a huge part in this movement toward social change. Not a lot is going to happen until we have enough people in society who can really recognise the inherent injustice in the way that we see and treat higher weight bodies.
And to see it on par with social injustice in other arenas. A lot of people have difficulties accepting that weight bias is inherently not different from racism or from misogyny or homophobia. People think these are the real social injustices or real prejudices that we should fight against, whereas weight bias is not really a thing. It’s just common sense belief about heavier people. We’re still working towards having weight bias recognised as a social injustice.
That was something I was really pleased to see in the Reykjavik human rights policy: it explicitly states that. It says something like the city of Reykjavik recognises weight stigma – I don’t remember the exact wording – as a type of social injustice, and it should be combatted as such.
Chris Sandel: Interestingly, even the other examples you gave in terms of racism or homophobia, even though they are all social injustices, at different points did we recognise them as social injustices. If you’re looking at homophobia, that is more recent than it would be for racism. So it’s more that at a population level, our thinking about weight just hasn’t caught up in the way those others have now.
And if you look at all the other versions of stigma, it’s taken a long time to get there. It’s only in fairly recent memory that two men or two women can get married. So I think there is a feeling of this is going to take a while.
I was thinking about something that’s not even in the same realm, but just how long it can take in terms of public opinion – something like drink driving. I think the first laws over here in the UK for drink driving were in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until 1967 I think that they had an actual drink driving limit. Some of that maybe came in because of advancements in technology in terms of testing blood alcohol levels, but you then think about from then until now, how society’s thought around drink driving has been changed. We even talk about driving under the influence of being tired as an issue now.
We’re talking about over the span of 80-90 years that it took us to really change how we thought about alcohol consumption and driving a car. I know it can feel like these things aren’t analogous, but maybe it’s going to take a really long amount of time for that to sink in as society starts to really understand the implications with this and see it for what it is.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Exactly. It may sound strange, but it can feel very discouraging when we think about, for example, how long ago we started to focus on racial injustice or gender injustice, and this is still where we are. But I also find it very encouraging to think back and to see that views in general have changed significantly and tremendously and importantly.
It’s also very interesting to look back at, because in all of these examples, we have had similar rationalisations. When women were automatically thought of as lesser than men, people also tried to gather all kinds of rationalisations for that biased view. They would point out that ‘women’s brains are smaller than men’s, so they have no business going to school’ or ‘they are emotional and not capable of serious or complex decision-making’ or whatever. They always try to rationalise the types of views. All of these references to…
Chris Sandel: Valid explanations about why it is so.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Yeah. These views were not really the reason that we had these biases, but they were used as justifications for them. That’s what we’re doing with weight as well. We don’t like heavier people, we think that they are lesser than thinner people, and then we try to rationalise it.
Also, it points out that even though legislation can play an important part in changing things, it’s definitely not enough. All of these very big changes for social justice have always happened through intense, longstanding activism. And that’s something we need to have more of when it comes to weight. We need to have a very large international movement, the same as we had with women’s rights. It has to happen within each and every country and over a long time.
01:01:32
Chris Sandel: I know you talked about the Directorate and you working there. What is your role with the Directorate, and what are you doing there?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: My role at the Directorate is not really very weight-related. I’m working there as a part of the Public Health Department, and my focus is mental health in general. Everything that I’ve done in the field of body image or activism or things like that has been mostly what I’ve done as a person.
But I do feel that there is a pretty good consensus within my division in how we want to do things, so we are not arguing every day about how we should approach the issue of weight. I’m very happy that I’m working with people who see things very similarly, and we are very committed to working towards public health from a social justice perspective.
When you look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we are thinking about sustainability for the Earth and for the human race in terms of three major areas. We want to have economic sustainability, we want to have environmental sustainability, and we want to have social sustainability.
Social sustainability demands of us to be very mindful and work towards having a society that does not marginalise people, that does not waste human resources by pushing people to the edges of society, not allowing people to realise their potential, holding them down in various areas. This is really the way that we try to work. I mean, things are never perfect in any arena, but this is very much the commitment that I feel from my colleagues that I work with on a day to day basis.
Chris Sandel: That’s awesome. That sounds great. In practical terms, what does that then look like in terms of the kinds of interventions you’re suggesting or the kinds of campaigns you’re creating in the realm of mental health?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: For example, it means that instead of directing the messages and the responsibility for change to the individual, we are very much also working with social structures. We’re working, for example, with schools, workplaces, municipalities as a whole, in setting the stage for health and wellbeing.
We know that the social environment where we spend each and every day really shapes both our behaviours and attitudes, and it’s really difficult to sustain, for example, individual change when it comes to regular exercise or reducing stress or whatever it is if the environment and the structure where you live does not support that.
For example, if you’re overworked and you have a big family and your life is filled with duties and stress and even maybe poverty in addition, how can you be expected to put in regular exercise or to prioritise that when your problems are of a much more intense and different type? If you’re having problems feeding your family, the fact that you’re not eating five portions of fruits and vegetables a day may not be your highest focus in life.
So we try to do more of empowering, enabling, facilitating approach to health.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I totally agree. It is a luxury to be able to focus on long-term health. To think about, ‘What do I do to prevent Alzheimer’s in my seventies or what do I do so I’m not going to have heart attacks in my seventies’ or whatever it may be, that is a luxury that comes about by having means, by having time, by having enough space to be able to do that. The reality is, for the vast majority of people, their focus is on ‘How do I get through today?’ or ‘How do I get through this week?’ or ‘How do I have enough money to pay the rent at the end of the month?’
It’s much more fighting fires and just trying to survive as opposed to thinking about thriving and thinking about long-term health.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Exactly. Of course, health literacy and awareness and information is important, but if all of the other forces that shape your life do not support you in moving in that direction, having all this information doesn’t do you any good and may in fact even increase the stress in your life, because you’re constantly being told to do something and you have no ability to do it.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
01:07:10
Sigrun Danielsdottir: But also, I think it’s wonderful to witness this social justice perspective coming into mainstream public health work more and more. That’s awesome and very positive to see that.
But also, for example, with the weight focus, a lot of people, professionals or even governments throughout the world have this idea that to tackle a problem, you have to address it head-on. So reducing smoking, you have to talk about the dangers of smoking, make everybody aware of the dangers of smoking. Or teenage drinking or drug use or whatever.
But often, the successful approaches in public health don’t necessarily involve focusing on whatever it is that you have labelled as the problem. For example, in Iceland, over the past 20-30 years, we have seen a dramatic decrease in adolescent drinking. That kind of change has not come about by going into schools and talking to kids a lot about alcohol, talking constantly about ‘alcohol is bad for you’ or ‘drugs are bad’ or whatever and focusing on drugs and alcohol as a constant thing, but rather working with the factors that influence adolescent drinking. Working with parental supervision, participation in sports and recreational activities, organised activities after school, not allowing unsupervised parties.
So you can actually do a lot regarding a particular public health issue without ever even mentioning the issue. For a lot of people, it may seem counterintuitive, but this alarming approach to health is not really a necessary component of positive change.
I was talking to my colleague about this a short while ago, and he’s working in tobacco prevention. He was saying that in Iceland, since 1974, the attitudes of teenagers towards smoking, the extent to which they believe smoking is dangerous, hasn’t changed in 40-50 years. But their behaviour, their actual smoking behaviour, has almost been eliminated. It’s very rare today for adolescents to pick up smoking. But they’ve always thought that it was dangerous; it was just not the most important factor in whether or not they would begin to smoke.
So the demand for an intensive negative focus on weight doesn’t really resonate with other types of public health efforts that we have seen where we have very clear examples that this kind of focus is not really necessary. And in fact, when it comes to weight, at least I believe that it does a lot of harm. I think the research very much supports that.
The added complexity when we’re talking about weight is that weight is not even a behaviour. You can decide whether you want to start smoking or not, and if you don’t like smoking and you don’t want to begin to smoke, then you simply don’t do it. Whereas you can have the view that you don’t like to be fat and you want to avoid it, but you can still be fat because fatness is not dictated by what you believe or what you want. It’s not a behaviour that you can just decide to engage or not to engage in.
Weight is a human characteristic, so it has much more in common with things like skin colour or sexuality or any kind of other human characteristic rather than being always compared to a type of health behaviour like exercising or smoking or sleeping or whatever.
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting; when you talked about going into schools and talking to kids about smoking or drugs or alcohol, I had this flashback to being a kid. I don’t know if this was an Australia-wide thing or a Sydney-wide thing or a New South Wales-wide thing, but when I was at school, they had this puppet guy that would come, and it was Healthy Harold. I think it was a giraffe or something.
It was some little performance to tell you about the dangers of drugs, and the giraffe would turn up and he was hungover the next day or he’d been doing drugs. It was just so bizarre in terms of what it was trying to teach you, because what I came away thinking was ‘I don’t quite get it. He feels so terrible; why would he ever do drugs? There must be something good about doing drugs because otherwise you wouldn’t do it’. The kind of fear-mongering with it and the message didn’t quite add up because it didn’t feel like I was getting all of the information with it.
I drank a lot as a teenager – when I say I drank a lot as a teenager, I would drink when I would go to parties as a teenager, and I wonder if some of that was spurred on by having this inane puppet show when I was a child telling me about the dangers of alcohol.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Definitely. We know that for some kids who are already interested, this kind of scaremongering can actually increase their interest. ‘Hmm, maybe something cocaine is something I should try’ or whatever it is.
The point is that often what we think intuitively is needed in public health action isn’t really the best approach.
01:13:48
Chris Sandel: I know in your bio as well, you talk about promoting body satisfaction and that being something that is of interest to you. Is that something that is an interest outside of your work, or is that actually coming up as part of the work that you do for the Directorate in terms of mental health?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: It is a part of what I want to do personally and professionally. For example, when we’re working with schools, we want to promote positive body image because we know that positive body image is protective when it comes to mental health, it is protective when it comes to increasing physical activity. Having a healthy relationship with food is connected to positive body image. So this is definitely something we want to promote when we are working with health promotion in schools.
I think actually, the way I experience the changes that have happened, for example over the past 15 years or something like that in Iceland, I do feel that people who are working with kids are increasingly very much aware of the importance of a healthy body image.
I’ve not seen studies on this when it comes to teachers’ views or school nurses’ views or something like that, but the sense that I get just living in society and being often in conversation with these types of professionals is that this is really an uncontested – everybody agrees that this is how we should approach kids.
But like we talked about earlier, it can be more complex when dealing with adults, because then you get this kind of ‘they just need to realise they need to do something about themselves’. Then the personal responsibility factor kicks in, and then we start to hear views that it’s not really helpful for adults in higher weight bodies to like their bodies or to feel comfortable with themselves. They should want to change.
Chris Sandel: Which just makes no sense to me. Irrespective of how big or small their body is, the person who feels good about themselves, has body appreciation, they’re going to be the ones that are most likely to be doing the things that are better for supporting their physical health, their mental health, and health across the board.
I recently had Fiona Willer on the podcast, and she was talking about her thesis for a PhD, and one of the things she’s found as part of that is the metric that best stacks up for indicating whether someone is going to be healthy and have healthful behaviours is body acceptance. It’s the thing that will move the needle more than anything else. That, for me, feels like common sense.
And it feels like common sense probably because of the work that I do with clients and noticing that, as that starts to change, how much easier it is for them to be able to say ‘I’m going to listen to my body from a point of hunger and fullness’ or ‘I’m going to listen to my body and follow what it’s telling me is a satisfying meal or a satisfying food or a satisfying way to move my body’. It just helps with body trust, for so many different reasons.
It is really frustrating when I see that we’ve adopted the other approach of like ‘if we can make people feel shitty about themselves and shame them, then they’re going to start to really want to take care of their health’. I just don’t see that that’s ever going to happen.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Right. We are seeing ever-growing research precisely about the intense harms of, for example, internalised weight bias. When people are actually starting to believe the biased assumptions about bodies like the ones that they have and they internalise these types of views, yes, it’s definitely not helpful and creates a lot of harm.
I think also the growing research base when it comes to just the physiological, not to mention the social and psychological, effects of weight bias and internalised weight bias is going to be really informative over the coming years in eliminating all doubt that any actions that are going to promote negative views around higher weight bodies are a very harmful and ineffective approach to health and wellbeing.
01:19:05
Chris Sandel: My final question is, you’ve been doing research for a long time in this field; you’ve been working in this field for a long time. I’m just wondering, if you were to come up with a plan or some ideas for solutions that would help in terms of changing society’s views, what would be the things you’d be recommending?
And this isn’t to necessarily help overnight. It could be that ‘If we did this for long enough, in 10 years or 20 years or 50 years, I think we’re going to be in a different place’. Are there a handful of things you think will make a really big difference if we can just get them occurring, whether that’s legislation or otherwise?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Like if I had three wishes or something like that? [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Yes, exactly. [laughs]
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I would want us to focus even more than we do now on the social determinants of health. I think they have been really neglected and they are really the major drivers of inequalities in health, in wellbeing, in quality of life.
That to me, when I started working in public health, was a real eye-opener in terms of how much of the factors that we have no control over whatsoever – whether we’re rich or poor, whether we belong to a stigmatised minority group or whether we’re in a privileged social group, whether we’re a man or a woman, the neighbourhood we live in – all these types of things are so important. I would like to see them addressed much more seriously in health discourse and health actions.
I would like to see, of course, legislation on weight bias or weight discrimination. It’s mind-baffling, I think to anyone, to wrap their heads around the fact that with this hugely prevalent type of social injustice, we have so few countries that have actually forbidden it. We’ve made it so difficult for people we know are facing discrimination in their workplaces, in their studies, as a service user, and they have no legal venue to seek justice. So yes, of course we should have that.
And then I am looking forward to seeing a growing social movement when it comes to weight. I think that is really what is needed at the end of the day. We need to have a movement of the scale that we saw when it came to racial justice, when it came to women’s rights or rights when it comes to sexuality. We’ve seen this kind of social movement when it comes to mental health, when it comes to disability. But we haven’t really seen it when it comes to weight, and we really need that, just so we can have this kind of shift in the way that the general public thinks about weight and sees heavier people. We need to have this kind of movement.
Chris Sandel: I agree with you on all three of those. This has been wonderful, Sigrun. Where can people be going if they want to find out more about you?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I don’t have a webpage or anything like that. I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with some amazing people on several types of research projects and papers, so people can look my name up in research databases.
I did write a children’s book that may be of interest to people who have kids or are working with kids. This book is available on Amazon and it’s called Your Body Is Brilliant in the UK and Your Body Is Awesome in the US. Maybe people would want to look at that. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Chris Sandel: If they’re the best places – as I said, I found all of your articles by searching through ResearchGate, so I can put the link to that as well, and also the book in the show notes. For what age is the book helpful? For what ages would you recommend that if parents are wanting to get it for their children?
Sigrun Danielsdottir: I’ve heard feedback from readers – it’s difficult to set – I guess any age. But from my perspective it was written for a younger audience, so maybe 3 to 7 or something like that. I thought about it as a book that parents would read with their kids, or at least be involved if they are beginning readers. The illustrations and the wording is geared towards the younger age group. But it’s just a fun picture book, so it could be appropriate for anyone, I guess.
Chris Sandel: Cool. I have a three-year-old, so I will be purchasing the book and we can read it together.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Perfect.
Chris Sandel: Thank you so much for your time and for coming on the show. I’m really glad someone left a comment on the podcast so I was then aware of your work and we could do this today.
Sigrun Danielsdottir: Thank you so much as well. Thank you for having me. It was really interesting to talk with you today.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Sigrun. She really is an incredible human being and is doing fantastic work. I’m so grateful I got to speak to her, and hopefully at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be able to talk about legislation changes that have occurred for Iceland as a whole, not just changes to the policy for the city of Reykjavik.
01:25:38
There are a couple of things – actually three things – that I want to mention or recommend you check out.
The first is a documentary called Framing Britney Spears. It was a documentary I’d heard mentioned on a number of podcasts and I was really intrigued about. It’s all about Britney’s career and how she has been impacted upon by the media and also the controversy surrounding her conservatorship, where her dad has control of all her money and largely what she is and isn’t allowed to do.
When you watch her life and it presented as part of the documentary and what she had to deal with with the press and the paparazzi, it’s no wonder she has struggled with mental health issues. I don’t think anyone can survive the kind of scrutiny she was under. And when she did start to crack, the intensity just increased.
It reminded me of a South Park episode from many years ago that they’d done on this topic when Britney Spears, as part of the episode, tried to commit suicide. She shoots off half her face but still remains able to function and walk around and everything, and the paparazzi continue to follow her and hound her. It just shows how relentless it was. I just thought that was such a great episode to show what was really going on and how much it was affecting her.
It also reminded me of Amy Winehouse and the Amy Winehouse documentary called Amy, which is also incredible, where you see this person who starts to struggle with drugs and addiction, and then the paparazzi and the press scrutiny intensifies, and it becomes a real large part of the downfall.
If ever I needed reminding of why I don’t want to be famous, it’s definitely documentaries like this, and especially the Framing Britney Spears documentary. I would highly recommend checking it out. Over here on the UK, it’s available on Sky and on NOW TV. I’m not sure about the rest of the world.
The next documentary is called Tiger and is all about Tiger Woods. It’s a two-part documentary looking at the rise and fall of Tiger Woods as both a golfer and then off of the golf course, and the fall being when he was found to be cheating on his wife with multiple women. It was a huge story back in 2009. More recently – this is rather timely because Woods is back in the news now because he’s been in a car accident, and quite a serious car accident, and there’s a potential that he won’t walk again, let alone play golf again.
I’m a huge fan of golf, so this was always going to interest me, but I watched it with Ali, my wife, who couldn’t care less about golf, but she found it incredibly interesting and gripping just hearing the story.
Tiger first started swinging a golf club before he was age one, and he was on The Mike Douglas Show with Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart at age two. So to say that he was a prodigy is really an understatement. But the documentary shows how his natural talent was then turned into what it would become because of the ruthlessness of the training instilled by his dad, but really by both his parents.
You get to see everything he was put through to become the golfer he became and everything he had to give up because of that and how he had this public image about who he was and who he had to be and how constricting this was, and how different it was to who he was really behind closed doors.
It was interesting seeing interviews. He’s not interviewed specifically as part of the documentary, but they show footage of other interviews he gave as part of it, and there would always be this real distance with him. He would be like a robot; he’d never really give a genuine response or a response that had much depth to it. There would always be this feeling of mystery, of not really understanding who he was or what he was really about. But I think this documentary does a really good job of answering that.
I highly recommend checking it out, and that’s the case even if you have no interest in golf. I think you’ll still enjoy it. Many years ago as one of my favourite books, I mentioned Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. There are lots of similarities here with this documentary. Again, even if you have no interest in tennis – and I’m not that interested in tennis – I found Andre Agassi’s book, Open, to be phenomenal and well worth a read. So I would highly recommend checking that out as well as the Tiger documentary. It’s on NOW TV and Sky over here. It was produced by HBO, so anywhere you can get HBO, I would imagine you’d be able to watch it.
The final recommendation is music-related. I have a rather eclectic taste in music and listen to a real mix of things. I’m a huge fan of electronic music, and during lockdown, with the inability to go to festivals or to club nights, mixes on Soundcloud or Mixcloud are about as good as it gets.
One of my favourite DJs is a guy called Job Jobse, who is a DJ from Amsterdam. A couple of weeks ago he released a mix called ‘Onderweg Naar Morgen’, which he describes as a fictional soundtrack for better days. It’s three hours long, and I’ve really had it on repeat since discovering it. I will hit play, listen for three hours, it finishes, and then I start again.
Unless I’m speaking with clients or editing a podcast, I always work to music, and this is a simply amazing mix to work to. So if you’re into electronic music and you like music to work to, then I cannot recommend this highly enough. I will put a link to it in the show notes, but you can search for it by searching his name. It’s Job Jobse. If you go to his Soundcloud page, it will be the most recent mix at the top.
That is it for this week. As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you want help with an eating disorder or disordered eating, with chronic dieting, with body dissatisfaction or negative body image, overexercise or exercise compulsion or getting your period back, then I would love to help. You can go to seven-health.com/help for more information.
That is it. I will be back next week with another episode. Stay safe, and I’ll catch you soon.
Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page.
Also, please leave an honest review for The Real Health Radio Podcast on Apple Podcasts! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.
Policies
Social
Copyright © 2012 – 2023
seven-health.com · All Rights Reserved.
Share
Facebook
Twitter