Episode 218: This week on Real Health Radio I'm chatting with Anna Sweeney. We chat about her diagnosis with MS at age 15 and how this has impacted on her life. We also cover disability, body acceptance, eating disorder recovery and Instagram.
Anna Sweeney, MS, RD, LDN, CEDRD is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian, who provides nutrition care using a non-diet, Intuitive Eating, and Health at Every Size paradigm. Anna is an expert in providing care for individuals struggling with eating disorders, disordered eating, and body image concerns. Over the last decade, she has served in a supervisory role at multiple eating disorder treatment centres, including the position of National Director of Nutrition Services for Monte Nido.
Anna is also the owner of Whole Life Nutrition Counseling in Concord, MA, where she works exclusively with clients with eating disorders, disordered eating, or an interest in intuitive eating. Anna is passionate about nutrition, balance and wellness and works to empower her clients to trust their own body wisdom.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 218 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at seven-health.com/218.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel, and today it’s another guest interview. My guest is Anna Sweeney.
Anna is a certified eating disorder registered dietitian who provides nutrition care using a non-diet, Intuitive Eating, and Health at Every Size paradigm. Anna is an expert in providing care for individuals struggling with eating disorders, disordered eating, and body image concerns. Over the last decade, she’s served in a supervisory role at multiple eating disorder treatment centres, including the position of National Director of Nutrition Services for Monte Nido.
Anna is also the owner of Whole Life Nutrition Counselling in Concord, Massachusetts, where she works exclusively with clients with eating disorders, disordered eating, or an interest in Intuitive Eating. Anna is passionate about nutrition, balance, and wellness, and works to empower her clients to trust their own body wisdom.
I’ve been aware of Anna’s work for the last couple years, having heard her on various podcasts, and more recently I’ve been seeing what she’s been doing on Instagram and seeing how great she is at doing Instagram, so I was excited to get her to come on the show. As part of this episode, we chat about Anna’s background. A lot of this revolves around her diagnosis with MS at age 15 and how that has progressed. We talk about what MS is and how this has affected Anna’s life over the last couple of decades, leading to the point she’s at now, where she is a disabled person.
We talk about the idea of body acceptance and what this has meant for Anna as she continues to constantly have the rug pulled from under her as her body continues to change. We talk about Anna coming out about her disability because she wasn’t always talking about it, and now it’s really a focal part of her message. We cover how she got into working as a dietitian and her desire to specialise in eating disorder recovery. We also cover the wonderful work she’s doing on Instagram and the sense of responsibility that she feels about this.
I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too. I’ll be back at the end with a couple of recommendations of things I’ve watched recently, but for now, here is my conversation with Anna Sweeney.
Hey, Anna. Thanks for joining me on the show today.
Anna Sweeney: I’m so delighted to be with you, Chris.
Chris Sandal: You are doing such an amazing job on Instagram, and I’ve been through so much of it this morning in preparation for this call. There really is a lot I want to go through with you about you and your story and all the work you’re doing. I’m really excited for this.
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As a starting point, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on yourself – who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing, just as a starting place?
Anna Sweeney: Sure, I’d be delighted. My name’s Anna. Hi, everyone. I am an eating disorder registered dietitian and I have had the good fortune of working at all levels of eating disorder care. I now am exclusively in outpatient private practice, and as you were saying, I spend some amount of time on Instagram and have been really fortunate to create a community there.
I feel like my calling on this planet has been to be an eating disorder dietitian. I feel very fortunate to have fallen into that role. Now I’m able to take all the experiences that I’ve had and bring my message to the relative masses, which is nothing in comparison to the diet industry. I am but one voice, but I’m not going anywhere.
I am a Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor. I practice from a Health at Every Size, social justice oriented paradigm, and I also happen to be a full-time disabled person.
Chris Sandal: Let’s start with the full-time disabled person piece. You were diagnosed with MS in your teens?
Anna Sweeney: I was 15 years old. In retrospect, I was 12 when I had my first flare. So I’m very, very, very adept at having MS. [laughs]
Chris Sandal: You said from age 12, really, so what led up to this? What symptoms were you getting that made you think “I need to get something investigated”?
Anna Sweeney: I grew up in South Dakota, and my father told me – my dad is from the Boston area; his father was diagnosed with cancer, and my dad told me that we were moving to Massachusetts. I was 12 years old. Life moves at a different rate in South Dakota, a little bit faster, and I was told that we were moving, but I couldn’t tell anyone for 30 days because of something regarding his job.
The stress from that resulted in my developing this very bizarre, tingling numbness feeling on my abdomen. It wasn’t interfering with any part of my life; it was just like, “Huh, this is really weird. I wonder what this is.”
Chris Sandal: Kind of like shingles, but on the front?
Anna Sweeney: Not painful at all. It certainly didn’t look like anything. It’s just there was this tingling numbness on predominantly the front right side of my trunk. It ultimately went around the entirety of my trunk girdle, from front to back. As I moved through the acute stressor of reconciling the fact that I was moving, the symptoms resolved and things went away and we just moved on.
When I was 15, I was playing basketball at my friend John’s house and – I will say this without any challenge – I am not a particularly athletic person. I fake-dunked a basketball on a very lowered hoop. I had – actually, this is another South Dakota story: I was pushed off tractor tires that were on the playground. These are the things we played on. There were tractor tires and I was playing tag, and one of my friends pushed me off. I dislocated both of my shoulders out the back when I was in third grade. So I have weak shoulders.
I thought that I had done something weird to my shoulder when I was dunking the basketball because I lost some feeling and control in my right hand. My mother’s father was a GP and he said, “You know, Nancy, take your daughter to a neurologist. Just make sure she hasn’t done nerve damage to her shoulder.”
Fast forward, I go to an outpatient Children’s Hospital clinic and I couldn’t feel pitchfork vibration on my left big toe. I was then pointed in the direction of an MRI – which fortunately the technology has come a long way in 20 years, but in the midst of the MRI that was taking forever, I asked the tech what was taking so long, and he said something to me along the lines of “We’re trying to rule out MS.”
I lost my mind, because it was the first I had heard of this.
Chris Sandal: Did you know what MS was at that stage?
Anna Sweeney: I did because one of my mom’s very good friends in South Dakota – and she’s still there – has MS. The way her multiple sclerosis presents to her, what my mom told me stories about, was like “It feels like having a pinecone in your bladder.” That has not been my experience, but that was the only frame of reference I had for MS. So I knew a little bit, but I actually knew nothing.
But I knew that I hadn’t hurt my shoulder. I knew this was a bigger deal than something orthopaedic, and I was clever enough to know that this was now a really big deal. By the time I left the MRI and got back to my house, which was probably about a 10-minute drive, my legs felt like they were on fire. I had weakness in my right hand and this burning sensation in my legs.
My mom and dad and I went to Children’s Hospital Boston in the morning. I spent the morning in the emergency room at Children’s, got a spinal tap, and then was taken up to the ninth floor, had five days of steroids, and felt totally like myself at the end. Then I was taken into a library on that floor and told that I had these really beautiful bright spots in my brain. Then the diagnosis was official.
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Chris Sandal: Wow. We’re going to be mentioning MS a bit, I would imagine, through this conversation. For people who don’t know what that is, can you just explain it so that everyone’s on the same page?
Anna Sweeney: Sure. Multiple sclerosis is a disease of the central nervous system where myelin, the protective sheath that covers nerve cells, is identified by the body – my body is attacking the myelin sheath.
When I try to describe this to folks, I think about you plug in whatever is charging your computer right now, and the plastic that’s covering the wires, picture that as the myelin. If you took away the plastic coating that covers the wires that go from your computer to the plug in the wall, you would be able to see the wires visibly, and plausibly the conduction would not be as clear. That’s what’s happening to my brain and anyone who has multiple sclerosis. The nerves are not protected. That means that nerve conduction is not complete and messages get missed.
Chris Sandal: Are there different types?
Anna Sweeney: There are different types of MS. I was originally diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. This is the way that most people are diagnosed. Relapsing-remitting MS means you have a flare, and then you’re treated with, most commonly, SoluMedrol, a really heavy-hitting intravenous steroid, and you go back to normal. You don’t lose function; you take this one finite flare experience and then you close the door and keep moving on.
For many people, that’s their experience with MS. They have one acute experience and then they’re either held stably in that space or they have persistent flares. I flared 13 times. I was treated with IV steroids 13 times in the context of my high school experience.
Chris Sandal: Wow.
Anna Sweeney: Then we move on to what is called secondary progressive MS. When someone is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, they’re either diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS – so you have this flare, you’re treated with steroids, everything goes back to normal – or primary progressive MS, where you have a flare, you might be treated, the treatment doesn’t work, and you just get worse and worse and worse.
More commonly than not, people start with relapsing-remitting and then advance to what is called secondary progressive MS, where now my MRIs, with and without contrast to show active flares, I no longer have flare activity and I’m acquiring disability regardless of what I do.
Chris Sandal: In terms of me thinking about MS, the one that I always think of is The West Wing. That is my point of reference for MS because I think that was where I first heard of it. I mean, I’d heard of it before, but that was the most visual way I’d seen it demonstrated or thought about it at any great length.
Anna Sweeney: I actually met Bradley Whitford at an MS organisation in Boston. My family has been associated with fundraising in this space, and Bradley’s wife actually has MS.
Chris Sandal: Wow, I did not know that.
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You said when it was originally diagnosed, it really hit you, and you had a friend of your mother’s who had it, so you had some concept of what it was. How was it then, comprehending all this? Because I think as a kid, there’s somewhat this feeling of being invincible and you don’t really ponder death or aging or disease. Did that childlike naïveté completely disappear?
Anna Sweeney: No. I will say, forever and ever and ever, everyone has always said, “You’re so old for your age.” There are a million reasons why I have been precocious since I was a little person. But I was diagnosed with MS when I was 15. I didn’t actually do any real research about the disease until the year after I was diagnosed.
But to be frank with you, I think the most traumatic experience I had in high school was learning how to give myself shots. That experience was really unpleasant, but now I would be awesome at it if that were an option for me. But I behaved like a high school kid. I drank and I misbehaved. I lived like I was a young person. I knew I had this big disease, but it’s really impossible to be 15 and conceptualise myself a decade, two decades down the line and think, “Oh shoot, this is for real.”
Chris Sandal: Yeah. What kind of a child were you in high school? What group were you hanging out with? What was your identity like in high school?
Anna Sweeney: I did very well in school. I really like school and learning. But I was a popular kid and, as I said, I didn’t have an athletic identity, but I had a very large social group. My dearest friend and I – she had some high school trauma things happen, and we came together as these two people with big picture crises. I drank a lot when I was in high school and did all of the normal high school rebellious things. Never got in trouble. I mean, I was a good kid doing normal adolescent things.
Chris Sandal: How were your friends about it in high school? How did you deal with it with your friends? I don’t know how much you were showing symptoms at that stage, but I think sometimes there’s that tendency to make fun of yourself or self-deprecate. Was that going on?
Anna Sweeney: To be really honest, Chris – I will never forget when I was originally diagnosed, when I was in the hospital for those five days, I received countless cards. One of my friends had made this very large “Get Well Soon” card – which is kind of a funny joke to give to someone with a chronic illness – but it was signed by all of the really attractive senior boys and these people that I thought didn’t know who I was. But I got a lot of accolade, and I was really held very gently when I was first diagnosed.
The challenge that I faced as high school continued was the fact that every time I had a subsequent flare, I was taken back to Step 1. The acute fear response happened for me, but my friends didn’t arrive in the same way in subsequent flare experiences. This is one place that I really have a lot of empathy for my clients with eating disorders, where they are acutely met with extraordinary concern at the beginning of their stories and then it just becomes part of an identity. It’s like “Oh, well, Anna has an IV in her arm. That’s sad, but we now just know. Anna has MS.”
Chris Sandal: Kind of normalises the experience, but not necessarily in a good way.
Anna Sweeney: The diagnosis became old hat for everyone except for me.
Chris Sandal: When did it start becoming old hat? Or is it not ever going to start becoming old hat?
Anna Sweeney: I didn’t actually start to develop any persistent disability – and I’m very fortunate, I have to say. I have met a number of people in the course of my life with MS, and multiple sclerosis shows up for folks differently. I have met a number of people who are in physically normal bodies who have lost significant cognitive ability. I feel really fortunate that the cognitive parts of my brain have been spared by this illness at this point.
It’s really interesting; living with a progressive illness and a progressive disability is very challenging. I would not call any of this boring or old hat anymore. I’m totally in it, all the time.
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Chris Sandal: So how did you end up becoming a dietitian? What was the interest there?
Anna Sweeney: Truthfully – I was diagnosed with MS when I was 15. My baby sister – who was not a baby anymore; Katie was 13 when I got my diagnosis. I think for the first year of my family knowing that I had this chronic illness, my mom and dad were really, really focused on me. In the context of the first few years of my living with multiple sclerosis, my family, as I said briefly, we were associated with an association in the Boston area that was trying to fundraise and research MS.
My aunt works in the – I don’t even know what to call it – the industry of making independent films. So we created a documentary called Finding Our Way, and it featured me and five other young people with MS. My mother was interviewed at one point in the documentary saying something about Katie mentioning to my mom, “What do I need to do, Mom, for you to see me right now? Do I need to start doing intravenous drugs? Do I need to have unprotected sex? I’m still here.”
All of these things I’m piecing together in retrospect, of course. When I was 17 and I was a senior in high school – maybe 18 – I needed to return something to the mall. I was taking my sister with me. Her journal was open on her bed, and it said, “Well I guess I have an eating disorder.” I proceeded to put my sister in the car – not put her there; she got into the car willingly – and I yelled at her for 20 minutes. “What are you doing, Katie? You’re so brilliant, you’re so beautiful. Everybody loves you. You’re so good at sports. Why would you do these things?” Having no understanding of what it meant to have an eating disorder because I am very privileged to have never experienced a dysregulated relationship with food or body, so it was very new to me. I berated my sister for a really long time, and we got into the mall and Katie ran away from me.
At that point, my original dream – I was going off to college; I wanted to be a sports broadcast journalist. But then I lost the ability to wear high heels and I had been started on new medications. I was not feeling well when I was away at school. I ended up transferring colleges to come back to be able to temporarily live at my parents’ house, and when I returned after having been gone to college for about a month, I came home to a sister that I didn’t recognise physically or emotionally at all.
I decided then that I wanted to be – I took my first nutrition class and I said, “I love this and I want to be an eating disorder dietitian.” I graduated from college in two and a half years. I’m so grateful that I did what I did, but the whole time I was saying “I want to do this before I can’t do this,” of course never really knowing that there would be a time that I would have a physical limitation. But I knew immediately that I wanted to be an eating disorder dietitian to tell my sister that people get better.
And she has, and so many of my clients have too.
Chris Sandal: Wow. You talked about finding her journal and then berating her in the car. Was the berating about “I’ve got MS and this isn’t a choice, but what you’re doing is a choice”? Obviously that’s not actually the case, but at that point, is that how it felt to you?
Anna Sweeney: Actually, I don’t believe that I brought any of my story into it. From where I sit, and if my recollection serves – because again, at that point, Chris, my MS was present but it really didn’t affect my day to day anything. I was just worried about Katie.
But I also had what I understand now to be an uneducated understanding of what eating disorders are. And to be frank, this is a place that I think a lot of people feel quite a lot of shame around not knowing exactly how to support their loved one. If we are privileged enough to not have personal experience with an eating disorder, it makes sense that we don’t know. It makes sense that we might feel angry or frustrated or want the people that we love to just get better. I was young, but I didn’t want my sister to suffer.
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Chris Sandal: Totally. As you’re going through dietetics training, at no point have we talked about your upbringing in terms of food, so how present was that? How much of a focus was going on in your childhood and in your adolescence with food?
Anna Sweeney: I’ve lived a privilege life in that food has never been a thing that I’ve really thought very much about, to be quite frank with you. There’s always been enough food, and I am not a particularly picky eater. I was certainly raised in – again, South Dakota as context – I definitely had a more crunchy granola house than most of my friends. But food was never really spoken about in a way that was dogmatic or good or bad.
But I remember my mom taking me to a natural food store and getting me a honey stick as a treat, which is a tasty treat, but also kind of a bizarre sweet to give to a young person.
When I was first diagnosed with MS, my first neurologist, who then went on to become a research neurologist, which I think was a better fit, said, “Anna, stop eating saturated fat.” Very briefly, I went through a phase of trying to be really, really, really, really adherent to that rule. I lost a little bit of weight as an adolescent, which is never a thing that is indicative of anything good, and then I got bored of eating what was then – and probably now is a lot better – but not particularly tasty foods. I just got bored and went back to eating the way that I eat.
Chris Sandal: With all that, then, when you did go off to study, how was it learning about food? My assumption from knowing what you do now is that a lot of what you were taught, you now disagree with. So how was it learning that paradigm about food?
Anna Sweeney: This is a funny thing, because I think back to my dietetic education – and this is brief, but the only time – actually there’s a second time. But the only time really in my life where I have been disconnected from food or from my body, the only time that I have been preoccupied by food, was in classes where I was meant to track what I was eating and calculate things based on the dietary equivalencies of whatever it was I was consuming.
I lied on 24-hour recalls, thinking the people around me were going to be judging me, like “Holy moly.” And everything that I was taught was from such a weight-centric paradigm. I didn’t really learn anything about feeding oneself for health promotion, although my Master’s degree is in health promotion. The way that I was conventionally trained, health promotion really was about weight loss, and like “How do we help our clients live in the smallest bodies possible?” Which I think is changing. General education around that I think is shifting – and not quickly enough.
Chris Sandal: Yeah. But is it also shifting then more to the sort of orthorexic type way of viewing food, where we might not be saying that everyone has to lose weight the way that we were, but we’re now talking about how healthy it is to eat blueberries or whatever it may be, and very much seeing it through that lens?
Anna Sweeney: Again, it’s been such a time since I’ve been out of school, I don’t know how people are now being trained. The scary thing to me when I really think about it, Chris – everyone walks around with a computer in their pocket now, so the ubiquity of nutrition ‘information’ or ‘wisdom’ that’s available on the internet – and it is all about the myriad of ways that you can enhance your life and your diet and your lifestyle by means of what is exclusively privilege and putting on a pedestal one particular way of eating, which is kind of like Instagram-worthy food. Like bright colours.
Yes, I think a lot of what we are contending with now is more about what pop culture is ascribing as health-promoting as compared to what human bodies are actually seeking.
Chris Sandal: You talked about there was some point in your teenage years when you weren’t eating saturated fat, and there was some idea of “I’m trying to eat in a certain way to help with the MS.” Did that then reappear at any point during your dietetics studies because there was some new information or some new way that you were thinking about things because of what you’d been taught, where you’re like “Maybe I can change some of this by eating X, Y and Z or cutting out X, Y and Z”?
Anna Sweeney: Again, when I was in college, I wasn’t thinking so much about MS because I lived in a physically able body. My brain was still functioning the way that I needed it to academically, and I was not particularly disabled.
I will say my mom – both of my parents are biology majors; neither of them do anything with biology now. But my mom was very interested in healing me with nutrition. I can’t count the number of dollars that have been spent going into talking to naturopaths, talking to Ayurvedic specialists, talking to acupuncturists and healers of all different ilk.
My mom bought me a juicer when I turned 20, and there was this whole idea about giving your digestive system rest when you are in the midst of a flare. I never really did any of those things. And again, because of the way that I was raised – and again, privilege – I happened to eat by choice a lot of the ways that are now accepted as general food wisdom. A lot of things that I consume are already in line with what pop culture elevates.
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If I can fast forward a little bit, about five years ago maybe, at this point, I became aware – and I’m sorry that I’m fast forwarding well past college, but about five years ago my disease was progressing in a way that I really felt uncomfortable. I wanted to do something because I thought there was a thing that I could do.
This book was published and a doctor wrote about how she healed herself of progressive MS, which is not a real thing, but I was really excited. I dug into her book and I dug into all of the research around anti-inflammatory eating, and for the first time in my life, minus that short time in high school, I followed someone else’s food rules and ate in a way that was entirely against my values as a human and led me to eat in a way that was counter to everything intuitive to me. And at the end of it all, wouldn’t you know, I still had MS.
Chris Sandal: Part of me asking some of these questions as well – my wife has rheumatoid arthritis and was diagnosed two and a half years ago. It occurred through her becoming pregnant. A couple of months after our son Ramsay was born, she was not in a good way at all. Could barely walk, could barely pick him up. Was in constant pain. There were other things going on at the time as well with her health, but yeah, we had a really shitty time of it for quite a while.
She was just doing a ton of research and was trying to figure out, “How do I change this through all various different means?” Tried lots of things from a food-based perspective. Probably in a similar vein to you in terms of all the anti-inflammatory type stuff. We’re two and a half years on, and I can say that categorically nothing changed from her dabbling in all this food stuff.
Probably in the same way for you, myself and her are both really good intuitive eaters. We have really amazing relationships with food, where food just feels so easy. We enjoy food, but it’s just food. To go down that road where you’re really starting to tinker with things and go against your own intuition and to be eating in this way – it felt so disconnected.
Anna Sweeney: The horrible thing about this experience for me and for so many others – and it sounds like your wife as well – maybe not your wife, but there was this sense of such extraordinary disappointment. Like, “This worked for Terry Wahls; why isn’t it working for me? Did I not do this well enough?”
It’s the second sword. I already have this chronic illness, and then I’m eating and following all of these whack-a-doo rules, and I’m not getting better. Like, “Shoot, I should be doing differently. I should be doing more.” I’ve had conversations with other people who say, “Anna, even if I wanted to, I can’t afford to eat in this way that might heal me.”
I don’t wish ill will on anyone, but I think that it is very unfair when people talk about healing autoimmune conditions with food. Of course, if someone’s allergic to a thing, don’t eat that thing. But outside of a straight allergy, I think that we can do such a more gentle and effective job in helping people take care of themselves that is not about following some random person’s recommendations.
Chris Sandal: Totally. From my perspective on her and her healing and where she’s at, reducing stress has been the thing that has made the biggest difference for her.
Anna Sweeney: Yep.
Chris Sandal: We are very lucky to have been able to have done certain things that has made that doable. But that, for me at least, hands down has the biggest impact, bar none.
Anna Sweeney: Yeah.
Chris Sandal: How was it for you during that experience, then? You’re working with eating disorder clients, you’re promoting Intuitive Eating; was there this – I don’t know if it’s cognitive dissonance, but was there this weird feeling of “This doesn’t feel like what I’m normally about”?
Anna Sweeney: Before I made the decision to go on this protocol – and at the time, I was working in a residential eating disorder facility, and one of the things I really love doing is eating with my clients. In the time of a pandemic, I can’t really do that, but I love, love, love, love, love being a good food role model. I love being able to share my normal relationship with food – not to suggest that everyone is going to be as excited or exuberant about food as I am. That’s not the end goal. But I know that my being able to be normal with food has been really helpful and healing for some people.
So before I did any of this, I happened to be a part of a clinical supervision group that I’ve been a part of for the last almost 10 years with some of the most lovely dieticians in the Boston area, and I actually took it to them before I made any decisions because it felt so out of order with the way that I am on the planet. I said, “Ladies, can you help me with this? I want to do this thing, but I also acknowledge that it’s going to mean that I’m living in these dual places where I’m not talking to my clients about the things that I’m eating and I’m not necessarily sharing the same foods that we once did. Can I still be an effective dietician?”
Of course, they all said, “We understand. You have to do this thing. If it can help you feel better, God bless.” But what an interesting thing to have the awareness of the fact that following this protocol was going to take me so far away from the way that I now eat and the way that I encourage my clients to eat. I knew that cognitively it really wasn’t right for me, but I felt like I had to do something.
Chris Sandal: Yeah, I totally get that. When Ali did this, I said, supportively, “If you’re going to do this, I will do it with you because I can’t be just eating all the regular things that I eat and then you’re watching me and feeling miserable. So I will do this with you.” And about two weeks in, she’s like, “You need to stop. You are not a nice person when you’re eating in this way. This is not helping me one bit. Go back to what you usually do.”
Then, thankfully, she got off doing that as well, and we’ve gone back to how it always was.
Anna Sweeney: Yeah.
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Chris Sandal: When you were starting, at what point did you discover Intuitive Eating?
Anna Sweeney: I’m very fortunate to be in the Boston area. It’s such a Health at Every Size-rich place. I read Intuitive Eating – this is when I could still sit in the backyard. I, irresponsibly, was sitting in the backyard in a bathing suit, tanning, and reading the book. I think I read the second edition about a decade ago.
At the time, I was working on an inpatient unit. Obviously, there is not a place where I can apply principles of Intuitive Eating, or I couldn’t with my clients. But it felt really wonderful to have this book that underscored all the things I’ve ever done with food. And as a person with thin privilege, I hadn’t had to contend with diet culture bullying me – except for that one time that I tried to heal myself of MS.
I don’t even remember how many years ago I decided to become an Intuitive Eating Counsellor. It just felt like the next right step in my career because it really underscores so much of the work that I do because I exclusively work with folks with eating disorders.
And in the 10 years that I was working at higher levels of care, when I was asking people, “What is your long-term treatment goal or nutrition goal?”, almost everyone said, “I want to be an intuitive eater.” Not necessarily understanding all of the idiosyncrasies that phrase encompasses, but that should be a gold standard. That should be where we are looking to get our clients back to.
So I think it was the combination of this really Health at Every Size-rich community and – I actually can’t tell you specifically what make me decide that that was the next right step, but to be a Health at Every Size practitioner, and to be an eating disorder practitioner, meant that I needed to throw away most everything that was conventionally taught about food and nutrition and go back to the drawing board. And Intuitive Eating is a beautiful drawing board to start from.
Chris Sandal: When you learnt about it, were you trying to bring it up with the places you were looking at? If so, what was the reception like when you did?
Anna Sweeney: Yes, and I think it would be very different now if I were still working in facility. But I think when people started talking about Intuitive Eating as a common vernacular – and still to this day, there’s this very big misunderstanding that Intuitive Eating is “eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full” and that’s it.
I think that it was hard – I’ve been very privileged to work in facilities where I have been promoted and I have been heard. Even as a young person, I have been directors of departments and held national titles. I think in some ways, because of my relative youth as compared to my peers, things weren’t necessarily heard or able to be held in the same way that they might be now. Also, I am just a lot more assertive at this stage in my life than I was when I was a younger version of myself.
If I could go back, I would pull in many more components of Intuitive Eating a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot earlier in the treatment process. I think there is a belief that Intuitive Eating is only for people when they’re all the way recovered from their eating disorders, where in fact different principles of Intuitive Eating are applicable from Day 1.
Chris Sandal: Yeah, totally. And even the ones that aren’t so applicable in terms of hunger and fullness, you can say, “At this stage they might not be reliable as feedback, but let’s start to notice them,” and see what you do notice. It’s not that you have to depend on them, but by all means start to appreciate them and see how hunger appears for you in your body and what happens when you go longer without having a meal – not necessarily intentionally, but just be aware.
Anna Sweeney: Yep. Just notice. “What does this feel like?”
00:49:12
Chris Sandal: At the moment, are you working solely in outpatient now? What makes up your work now?
Anna Sweeney: Yes. I am so privileged to have a full private practice. Again, I work exclusively with folks healing from diet culture, eating disorders. All of my clients have eating disorders, but eating disorder recovery is not a thing that’s happening in a bubble. I’m very privileged to have my private practice, and I’m also very privileged to work in a place where I’m being reimbursed by insurance for virtual sessions, given the state of the world right now. I’m very, very fortunate in that regard.
Chris Sandal: Did you get to a place where you realised, “I don’t enjoy the residential side of things?” How did you end up in the outpatient place? Or were you thinking about running your own facility?
Anna Sweeney: I’ve had a private practice since basically the beginning of my time as a dietitian. My husband’s best friend is a dietitian, and she had just had her first child when I became an R.D. I joined her outpatient practice. I was only seeing a handful of eating disorder clients at the time, but basically since the very beginning of my career, I’ve had an outpatient practice. I’ve always wanted to have my foot in another clinical realm.
I actually really loved – in some ways it was the most rewarding – and I say that because in a residential facility you get to see these relatively monumental shifts from the day of admission to the day of discharge. If someone gets to stay for a long enough period of time, there’s really beautiful work that happens. I was able to witness the whole thing.
I would never have left my job as a residential dietician had I not acquired a disability that made it impossible for me to get into the house. When I left my post as a residential dietitian, I was promoted to a national position supporting other eating disorder dieticians within the organisation I was working for.
None of the sites were actually accessible, so it became very clear that truly, if I was going to effect change, I needed to be able to work on the ground with the people that I was supporting, and I was not in a position to do that. So I took myself out of that ring. The clients that I had in my private practice are in some ways, right now, still the same people that I had several years ago when I left that residential facility. Some are obviously different.
But I’m very lucky that I stopped being able to do one part of very rewarding work and lucky that I had – I think about this often. I feel very lucky that I was not in a disabled body at the start of my career because if I were, I don’t think there’s any possibility that I would’ve been given the opportunities that I’ve had. And now that I am here, I feel very grateful for all of the opportunities that I have been given, and I am happy to be able to serve a smaller population in my private practice and a much larger population on the internet, which is wild.
Chris Sandal: That experience of doors metaphorically being closed to you because there wasn’t access, was that what then led to you starting to talk about your disability? Because I know prior to that, you hadn’t been sharing so much about it. Is that the thing that caused that shift?
Anna Sweeney: Yes, very much. Actually, I only started talking about my disability in 2017. Everything is funny in retrospect, but I was not that disabled then. I was at an international conference in Vegas and I told people to look for me in a scooter, and I can’t tell you the number of people who looked over me or talked about me as though I wasn’t in the same space as them. I experienced becoming invisible for the first time in my life.
Because of that experience, I made the decision to very assertively start talking about my experience as a disabled professional and sharing the things that I’m learning, because as a person who has not been disabled for the entirety of my life, there are things that I am learning that had I not become disabled, I would’ve never known. When you don’t look at a person who is in an ‘other’ body, whatever the ‘other’ means, you render a person invisible. You’re not being polite. I didn’t know that until I actually had people not look at me.
I certainly can’t parse my identities out anymore. It feels really important to speak to the many reasons why people choose to follow me.
Chris Sandal: After that conversation and with the decision to speak up and address it, did that feel like a really big deal? Were you really unsure of how it would go?
Anna Sweeney: To be honest with you, I was so angry, Chris. I was so disappointed because we are a community – particularly in Boston, and I would like to say as an eating disorder community – that is intended to be inclusive and is intended to be a little bit tuned into or at least curious about experiences that we don’t necessarily have personal experience with.
To have some of the most prestigious eating disorder practitioners in the United States truly walk past me as though I was invisible – I was so hurt. I had a grief phase, and then I was angry, and then I called Rebecca Scritchfield and I said, “Let’s talk about this.” Actually, I think Christy Harrison was the first podcast. I think I called Christy and asked if I could talk with her about that experience.
I feel really fortunate that people are taking my words around this and I believe are actually changing the way they interact with folks that live in different bodies.
00:57:35
Chris Sandal: In some senses now, does it make it easier for your clients to relate to you because it makes you more relatable, like they can visibly see the thing that you’re living with every day and that you can’t do anything about it, and helping them feel like “She must understand body image struggles or body acceptance”? Earlier on, when they knew nothing about what was going on, there were all these other assumptions about how much of an easy ride you had.
Anna Sweeney: Yes, for certain. When I first became disabled, I remember – this is very early on, but I had a cane, and I used to hide it behind my chair so that my clients ‘wouldn’t know’ that I was in fact a disabled person.
Now, if I were in my office, my big walker is the first thing that you see when you walk into a room if that’s what you choose to focus on. The thing is, I live with extraordinary privilege of most every privilege that there is, and my thin privilege has, I believe, in some ways made it potentially challenging for some folks to necessarily feel all the way comfortable in space with me.
I know for certain that my living in a disabled body does make it a little bit easier to be with me in space. I am a much better clinician because of the experiences that I have and have had. I believe modelling the ways that I take care of myself, modelling the ways that I am unabashedly disabled, makes me more approachable.
Chris Sandal: What was your approach before? I’m just thinking, I know in some circles they’re very big on disclosure. Carolyn Costin is very big on if you’ve had an eating disorder, talk about that with the person you’re working with and bring your lived experience into the room. And then there’s the other end of the spectrum where it’s like, nope, be detached. It’s just about the person who’s sitting there; what you bring to the room or your backstory is not so relevant. I just wanted to know, what was your default with that, and has that changed?
Anna Sweeney: Originally, I was working in an inpatient facility, and I was actually discouraged from talking about my MS – which, as a young practitioner, not necessarily knowing how effectively I would’ve held the space or my clients to have a response to that, I don’t know that that was wrong. And then working in a space where I was allowed to be disabled and allowed to talk about my body experiences changed the way that I worked on inpatient residential. It changed the way I interacted with my body.
But I will say I became disabled working in a residential facility, and I spoke very negatively about my body in front of my clients, really thinking that because I had MS and because I was disabled, my experience was so far removed from anything that they would relate to that it wouldn’t be damaging.
I think one of my favourite lessons, or a lesson that I am most grateful for, was actually hearing from my clients, “Anna, it doesn’t help us and it doesn’t help you when you say all these things about your ‘stupid leg’. It makes it more challenging.” I had given myself this pass because it was like “You’ve got MS. You’re disabled. They have a different body image experience than you do. It’s okay. Be really unkind and talk negatively about yourself.”
Because I got feedback from one of my clients, I actually created a Shit Talk Jar. I had a jar in my car, and every time I said something negatively about my body, I put money in that jar, and then ultimately every time I had a negative thought about my body, I put money in that jar. This was a long-term neuroplasticity experiment. I ended up donating quite a lot of money to a local eating disorder treatment facility when I was finished with the use of that jar.
But I changed the way that I spoke about my body in a way that I think is really quite practical and helpful, not just for folks with chronic illness or chronic disability. I feel very fortunate to have had compassionate clients who have given me education about how to be a better earth suit inhabitant.
01:03:20
Chris Sandal: What are other ways you’ve moved through the grief process? Again, this might not be something that ends; I think I’ve heard you talk about grief is a process that doesn’t have an endpoint. But I guess the grieving and also the acceptance piece. You wrote an article for Self magazine, which I loved, and there was a quote where you said “Living in a body with changing abilities is rather extraordinary. It’s a little bit like having the rug pulled out from under you when you least expect it, but over and over again.” Given that that is your experience, what are the things you’ve done to get okay with that or be able to accept it?
Anna Sweeney: Well, I will say I think it depends on the day. [laughs] I say that offering myself quite a lot of grace and a lot of compassion there. I think we are sold a false bill of goods when people talk about body positivity as though that is a final destination or a place that we all need to land.
I actually really dislike that as a landing place. Particularly because body positivity wasn’t made for – I suppose it was made for disabled folk, but it’s not made for thin white women.
That aside, really good therapy and thoughtful conversations about grief being a process that is allowed to just persist, and allowing myself to feel really sad when I have less pleasant body days and allowing myself to feel pleasantly surprised when I have days where it feels a little bit easier to be in my body.
I actually didn’t know that it was possible to be both in my body and very invested in day to day functionality just because life is very different and a bit more challenging in a disabled body – and ‘a bit’ is not the right language. It’s a lot more challenging.
I also just have so much gratitude for the fact that I live with privilege in that my disabled experience is much more pleasant than it is for folks who don’t have the emotional support that I do and folks that don’t have the resources that I do. It actually makes me very sad and frustrated. I feel very privileged, but I also feel angry and a little heartbroken that things are made more simple for some and not all. That feels very unfair.
So I grieve and I give myself space to grieve, and I also take time to celebrate when things are worthy of baby celebration
01:07:07
Chris Sandal: Definitely. How do you think about acceptance? How would you define acceptance? If someone’s listening to this like, “Okay, I’ve heard this term, I get this as a concept and I get what you’re saying, but I don’t really understand it or know how to get on board,” how would you define it?
Anna Sweeney: Perfect. May I tell you another story?
Chris Sandal: Sure.
Anna Sweeney: Perfect. I am a very clever human, and I think that I am pretty logical and pragmatic. I’m trying to think of the years – the years don’t really matter here, but backstory: in high school I really loved high heels. I think I wore high heels most every single day from my sophomore year to my senior year. I wore heels in college and in grad school. And then I lost my ability to wear high heels probably during my dietetic internship.
I had put high heels on this list and said, “If I want to be respected as a professional, if I want my peers who are quite a lot older than me to give me any space and time, I need to be wearing high heels. If I want to look attractive as a female, I ought to be wearing high heels.” I had this really lovely collection of shoes.
For the sake of conversation, I’m just going to say in 2012, I probably stopped being able to walk long distances in high heels. My husband and I would go to a restaurant, and I would walk from the car to the table and then back to the car and then I would take my shoes off. Fast forward to a place where I’m only wearing high heels when I’m in my office or only wearing high heels when I’m in my house. Then I stopped being able to wear them altogether, but I didn’t stop buying them. I would go into the shoe department and see these lovely shoes, and “Oh my goodness, I really want to put this on,” and sometimes I would take a few steps in the shoe department. Sometimes I would just put a shoe on my feet, look at my foot and say, “This is so pretty. I would really like to have it.”
So 2012, I stopped being able to wear high heels. I don’t think I stopped buying them until probably the middle of 2013. And I didn’t get rid of my shoes until probably the middle of 2014. This is just based on all of the ‘shoulds’ that I had built up around high heels. Again, I’m a very sane person, but those are not a series of sane choices, either monetarily or emotionally. I was creating this ‘should’ dynamic. “You should be a person who wears high heels because,” blah, blah, blah.
The way that I liken body acceptance now – I don’t have to like the reason that I’m sitting in my chair and not floating. I don’t have to like the concept of gravity. I might want to float right now, but alas, we are on the planet Earth, where there is gravity, and we sit and we don’t float. Similarly, you don’t have to love a body. I think that body love is a prerequisite for nothing.
If we are able to practice acceptance of the here and now, “What is this body moment that I’m having right now?”, we don’t have to love it. But if we are present with the mindfulness in the moment, we can be generous with ourselves. We don’t have to buy shoes that don’t fit. This is obviously a massive metaphor, but buying shoes that don’t fit us is not in service to our best selves. Acceptance does not have to be a thing that you enjoy.
But there’s nothing protective. When I would lead a conversation with or walk into a room and say, “Ugh, my stupid leg!” or “Ugh, I can’t believe I’m wearing flats!” or whatever ridiculous thing I would say, all I was doing was making myself feel badly and making the people around me uncomfortable, trying to fill in the next gap.
To me, body acceptance is not about saying “I love and revere every part of this earth suit experience.” Of course not. But it is about being present with the what is in this moment, because there’s nothing about this moment that is going to improve – or, in a lot of ways, change at all, but certainly not improve – by being unkind.
Chris Sandal: I agree with that in its entirety. It’s not to say you can’t say “If I had a magic wand, I would change all of these different things.” But it’s the reality of “I don’t have a magic wand, and me thinking in this way is creating an unenjoyable experience.” And it’s not that the world outside isn’t hostile or isn’t causing issues based on your level of ability or your weight or looks or for lots of different reasons. There are definitely outside forces that can make life more difficult because of that.
But you then have the double whammy of you’re doing that on the inside as well, so it’s not just in those experiences from outside. You’re creating that on a day to day basis. It means that, yeah, your life is not as enjoyable as it could be if there was that level of acceptance of like “I don’t necessarily like this, but I’m not going to constantly beat myself up about it.”
Anna Sweeney: Yeah. I think the constant berating of self, oftentimes people do it to make other people feel more comfortable. I would enter spaces apologising for myself before I even got there. It didn’t change my body. I still had MS. I still had a disability. It just made me feel worse. We don’t have to do that to ourselves.
Chris Sandal: I think the difference maybe for other people – for you with MS, that’s more of a permanent state, whereas for other people there’s a feeling of “This doesn’t have to be a permanent state. I’m going to almost berate myself into changing my body somehow.” So, especially if you’re then verbalising that, it can almost be like “I know that I’m unacceptable, but I’m telling you that I’m going to change this. I’m going to make myself acceptable,” and beating someone to the punch on that.
Anna Sweeney: Yep. This is all about self-protection. That actually I think is the part of wellness culture that I hate the most. The falsehood around the ease with which folks have the ability to augment or make malleable their bodies.
Bodies really, really, really prefer homeostasis, and when we, by virtue of being uncomfortable in someone’s body or by virtue of a recommendation from a doctor or by virtue of teasing from a parent or a friend or a loved one, make choices to attempt to make it easier to live in one’s body, of course that’s what you’re going to do. That makes so much sense. I wish dieting really came with the fine print of like “This is going to mess with your mind really, really significantly, and for most humans isn’t going to be effective. And it’s not because you’re not good at it. It’s because your body wants you to persist.”
Chris Sandal: Totally. I think that is where people get to eventually. It’s just you’re wanting to speed up that process and be like, this is the truth: it’s unlikely that it’s going to be successful. I would say even the times when it is ‘successful’, it’s not successful in the way that people think it’s going to be. It’s then “I’m having to keep up all of these behaviours, and this isn’t particularly enjoyable.”
If I think back to what happened with Ali, if that had actually really helped her, changing her eating that way, on the surface it’s like, “Great, this is healing it.” But the next layer down to that is like, “Now I have to eat in a way like this that is very restrictive, that is unenjoyable, that is incredibly difficult, for the rest of my life.” You’re then in this place of like, “What is this trade-off? Is it really worth it as a trade-off?”
Anna Sweeney: Right.
01:17:10
Chris Sandal: As I mentioned at the very start, you are doing amazing things on Instagram. When did you start focusing on this?
Anna Sweeney: I’ll say two things. I’m a creative person. I really love to make art, and I love to write. But as my hands are a little bit different than they used to be, I take a lot of joy in creating, even making graphics for Instagram. I was looking back actually yesterday – I don’t know why – I started my Instagram account in 2013. It’s really only been since a little bit after 2018 I started getting more active on Instagram.
Now Instagram has taken on a totally different – there are so many different reasons that affirm my coming back. I have been so privileged to have created this Inaccessible Views experience on my page.
Probably two and a half years ago, I mentioned missing being able to be in nature, and now we’re in our sixth highlight, which means 600+ photographs and videos of places that a person who doesn’t have an able body – pictures and videos from all over the world are being collected on my behalf. But it is so much more global than that. People who don’t have the economic flexibility to take long weekends off to go hiking, or in the midst of the pandemic, I just want to see some nature. It has been such a gift.
I feel really lucky that social media has made it possible for me to speak about things that I think are where my clinical and therapeutic expertise lie, but also has allowed me to show up as a human in a way that I truly didn’t know would be received as generously as it has been. I just feel so privileged.
Chris Sandal: Yeah. You’ve got this really lovely mix of sharing your own personal story and struggles and being very open about your disability and raising awareness around that as well as then really great content for someone who is in recovery from an eating disorder, or even is on the diet rollercoaster and wanting to get off there. Just really great positive messages around that.
Also, not just positive, but real life. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. There is some real good reality as part of your posts.
Anna Sweeney: I really appreciate that because one of my goals – I am a very positive person, but one thing that I feel really proud about is my ability to navigate the English language. Sometimes that means that I’m saying things that are more assertive and more directive and more unpopular opinions, and that’s okay.
We are up against what is going to soon be a $100-200 billion industry that is diet culture. We have relatively small voices, but it’s really important to me that the way that I show up is actually in a pretty assertive fashion. And I do that for a couple of different reasons.
One, if I’m speaking to someone who has an eating disorder, their eating disorder brain is really, really assertive. If I am more lackadaisical and a little bit less direct, I think the message gets a little cloudy. And I’m not really interested in being less than sharp and really clear in my messaging.
I also know my writing style is pretty pointed. It’s not going to be for everyone, but I try to be as generous as I can be. As I have somehow gotten quite a number of followers, I’m also pointing people towards social justice issues that are really meaningful to me that have, in some ways, everything to do with what I do for a living. I lose a lot of followers when I post things that are seemingly political – which is excellent. That’s okay.
Chris Sandal: Do you get lots of posts from people who are up in arms and upset with you for posting that stuff? Or they just leave.
Anna Sweeney: They just leave. Some of them comment and say “I’m really disappointed in you,” and okay. I don’t need to be for everyone. But I feel as though I have this following, and if I am not speaking to issues that are in one way or another pertinent to everyone, I think I am not doing humanity any good. And it’s very much not my style to be silent about things that are really meaningful.
Chris Sandal: I have a huge amount of respect for what you do on social media. I’ve never got my head around social media properly. I think I have some limiting beliefs around this in terms of my writing style, and I think you are very direct. You’re quite punchy in terms of the way you write up. I do two-hour podcasts because I like more rambly longform. Even with blog posts, my stuff is always quite long because I’m not some wordsmith, but give me enough time and I can cover a topic. I’ve just not been able to really get into Instagram.
And I think part of it is I can’t do everything. So I’ve decided if I’m going to do a weekly podcast, this takes up many, many hours a week, and when I write blogs, it takes up many hours. I can only do a finite number of things, and if I want to do Instagram well, I don’t have those hours in the day. Or something else has to fall by the wayside. So I’ve slowly come to that place of just like “You’re not going to do well on Instagram, and that is completely okay.”
Anna Sweeney: To be frank with you, when I first started my website a million years ago, I had this dream plan of writing blog posts and thinking that was the more effective way to grab people. Fast forward, and my hands don’t work quite the same way as they always have. Typing is not as easy as it once was.
I dictate my Instagram posts mostly the night before I post them. I don’t have a backlog of posts; I just say the things I want to say and I post them. I don’t have to type anything. It is a bit of a shortcut for me, but I’m very grateful.
Chris Sandal: Do you think that changes the way that the posts come out, or the way your writing comes out, because you’re speaking it as opposed to typing it and that does something different to the way that your brain forms sentences or uses words?
Anna Sweeney: I think if I were writing and I were writing longform – to be truthful, I actually appreciate being pretty direct in my messaging. I appreciate being clear and concise with regard to the language I use.
I think my writing style has shifted, whether it’s a longform something or more Instagram length. I think I have the ability to be a bit more – I don’t think I struggle with verbosity, but I have the ability to perhaps be a little bit more gentle in my language choice if I’m writing something that is longform. But I actually prefer, for the moment anyway, the way that I am writing at this moment.
Chris Sandal: Well, it’s very effective and you’re doing a great job. This has been wonderful. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you were hoping we were going to chat about today?
Anna Sweeney: No, this has been so wonderful. Thank you so much, Chris. I am so delighted.
01:27:54
Chris Sandal: Okay. The final question is just where should people go if they want to find out more information about you?
Anna Sweeney: Please come find me on Instagram because that is where I hang out. I am @dietitiananna. I would be so, so happy to see you there.
As another aside, when the pandemic started, I initiated what is now Virtual Connection. This is an hour of time every Monday that I donate – and I actually think even after the vaccine is here, whenever that is, I think I’m going to continue to do it because I’ve been able to connect with people in a really lovely way, and I have a crew of other exceptional Health at Every Size dietitians and therapists that are part of the Virtual Connection community during the week as well.
So if you are looking for a little bit of additional pandemic support, please come hang out with me. 3:00 Eastern Standard Time on Mondays. Obviously, everything is saved to my page, but I would love to see you on Instagram. And if you write me a direct message, I’m pretty good at responding. I don’t have a social media manager. It’s just me, so it might not be quick, but I’ll get to you.
Chris Sandal: Perfect. I’ll put that link in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for this. This was wonderful.
Anna Sweeney: Thanks, Chris.
01:29:35
Chris Sandal: I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Anna Sweeney. She really is doing great work in the field of eating disorder recovery, and her Instagram is awesome, so please do check it out.
I have a couple of recommendations that I want to make. Ali and Ramsay were recently away. They went up to Scotland for a week without me, so while they were away, I ended up watching quite a lot of TV and movies and documentaries. It was nice to have some much-needed rest and downtime alongside work.
In all of this viewing, there were two highlights that really stood out. The first is a documentary called My Octopus Teacher. I’d first heard about this when I was listening to a podcast with David Farrier. He was on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. David Farrier is a New Zealand journalist and also a documentarian.
If you’ve never watched the documentary Tickled, then you need to. It’s possibly my favourite documentary of all time just because it’s so bizarre, and where it ends up is not what you’re expecting when you start. David Farrier was the creator of that documentary, so when I heard on the podcast that he recommended My Octopus Teacher, I took note of it. Then a couple of days after listening to that, one of my clients also recommended it and said that she thought it was wonderful and that I would like it. And I really did.
It’s the story of a South African guy who is also a documentary filmmaker, but he’s having a midlife crisis and he’s really burnt out and not sure what he wants to do, so he starts swimming in the sea again. He finds that it starts to help his mental health. At some point while swimming in this new area of the sea, he discovers an octopus, so he then goes back the next day and he sees it again, and he decides to start going every day, and this then becomes a documentary. It’s about the relationship that he develops with the octopus – which I know sounds very strange when I say it like that, but it really is this beautiful story.
It’s shot magnificently well and looks stunning. It’s narrated and edited well. It’s one part David Attenborough style documentary about the wonders of the sea and learning about all the different aspects of the octopus and the octopus lifecycle, and probably there’s lots of things in this documentary that have never been caught on film before. So it’s half that, and then the other half is all these relationships – the relationship the guy has with the octopus, with his son, with his own life.
I don’t want to oversell it and you feel let down, but I really enjoyed it. Part of that could be because it was this really sweet story and felt rather feel-good, and this is in stark contrast to a lot of the stuff I normally listen to or watch. But yeah, I was really impressed in how it was shot and how it was done. It’s called My Octopus Teacher and it is on Netflix.
The second documentary is called Accidental Courtesy, and it’s about Daryl Davis. Davis is an American blues musician, and he’s played with many of the greatest blues and rock and roll people to have ever lived, but he is also an activist. He’s Black, and since the 1980s has befriended many members of the KKK. Over 200 of them have now given up their robes and left the Klan.
Daryl Davis is just this special human being. The documentary shows him meeting with different Klansmen or different people in hate groups, white supremacist groups, some who are still in these groups, some who have already left. It shows a lot of the conversation he has with them.
Why I liked this so much was we’re at a point where things are so polarised, and it feels like we are as divided as ever. Davis showed that even at the most extreme ends of views, people can change, and he does this by talking to them and challenging the things that people say, but also finding common ground and common interests and common humanity, and being patient about this.
For many of the people who went on to leave the KKK, it took them many, many years, but he continues to speak to them during this time. He helps them if they need assistance. He tells a story of one of the KKK leaders calling him up and saying that they’d been unable to rent a van to be able to go to a rally and Davis says, “Here, you can borrow my van.” You can just see that over time, the cognitive dissonance becomes too much. They’re being treated so kindly by this Black man, they’re inviting him to their daughters’ weddings, they’re going on holiday with him, and at some point they see that the prior beliefs they’ve had, they can’t keep them up anymore.
This is by no means the only way that activism can work or the only way that society can get to a better place. There’s lots of different ways of doing this. But in a time when it feels like we’re unable to talk to someone who votes differently from ourselves or who has different beliefs about guns or abortions or whatever the highly charged issue is, it is rather incredible to see how powerful conversation can be. It’s called Accidental Courtesy. It’s on Amazon Prime in the UK, and it’s definitely worth a watch.
And that is it for this week. I will be back next week with another show and we’ll catch you then. Have a good week, stay safe, and I’ll see you soon.
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