Episode 265: My guests this week Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant, the co-founders of the Centre For Body Trust. They have a new book called Reclaiming Body Trust and we get to talk all about it.
Hilary Kinavey, M.S., LPC (she/her) has supported people who are healing from disordered eating, body shame, and the impact of weight bias and other traumas. She is the co-founder of Center for Body Trust, where her work as a therapist, educator, speaker, and writer, has been a study of what interrupts our sense of wholeness and how we can return to ourselves in a culture that profits from fragmentation. She has additional training in workshop facilitation, mind-body coaching, and radical relating. She is a sought-after speaker on topics such as weight-inclusive approaches, weight bias, and the intersections of activism and the helping professions. She offers consultation and training for organizations and professionals.
Dana Sturtevant, M.S., R.D. (she/her), is a registered dietitian who helps people divest from diet culture and move toward more compassionate, embodied forms of radical care. She is the co-founder of Center for Body Trust where her work as a speaker, educator, and trainer focuses on humanizing health care, advancing health equity, and advocating for food and body sovereignty. As a sought-after speaker and writer, Dana is a champion for compassionate, weight-inclusive models of care and offers supervision, training, and consultation for helping professionals and health care organizations.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 265 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/265.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients who are stuck in quasi-recovery restore their health and end eating disorder behaviours so they can regain their periods, sleep through the night, improve body image, and have a more peaceful relationship with food and exercise.
One tiny piece of housekeeping before I get started today. Staring in February, I’m going to be opening up my practice again to new clients. I’ll be doing more of a push with talking about it then and putting out more content at that time; I’m just getting everything prepared for that now. So just a heads up, if you’re interested and want to find out more, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/help. That’s all I’m going to say on that for now, but if you’re interested in finding out more, then go check it out.
On with today’s show. Today it is a guest interview, and I actually have two guests, Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant.
Hilary has supported people who are healing from disordered eating, body shame, and the impact of weight bias and other traumas. She is the co-founder of the Center for Body Trust, where her work as a therapist, an educator, a speaker and writer has been a study of what interrupts our sense of wholeness and how we can return to ourselves in a culture that profits from fragmentation. She has additional training in workshop facilitation, mind-body coaching, and radical relating. She is a sought-after speaker on topics such as weight-inclusive approaches, weight bias, and the intersection of activism and the helping professions. She offers consultation and training for organisations and professionals.
Dana Sturtevant is a registered dietitian who helps people divest from diet culture and move towards more compassionate, embodied forms of radical care. She’s also the co-founder of the Center for Body Trust, where her work as a speaker, educator, and trainer focusses on humanizing health care, advancing health equity, and advocating for food and body sovereignty. As a sought-after speaker and writer, Dana is a champion for compassionate, weight-inclusive models of care and offers supervision, training, and consultation for helping professionals and healthcare organisations.
I’m a big fan of the Center for Body Trust. It used to be called Be Nourished but changed its name recently. I have had Dana on the podcast before. It was lovely this time to have both of them to chat and to be able to chat with both of the co-founders. One of the reasons for this conversation is that they have out a new book called Reclaiming Body Trust, and if you listened to last week’s episode covering my favourite books and documentaries from the last year, you’ll know that I listed Reclaiming Body Trust as one of my favourites.
I loved getting to chat with Dana and Hilary about it, and the book was the focus of our conversation. Some of the things that we cover are the tree metaphor of body trust and what the roots of this are; the three parts of healing – the rupture, the reckoning, and the reclamation; the difference between self-care and self-preservation; the cycle of coping; the health iceberg and redefining what health looks like; the Beautiful Project that Hilary’s son did at school; ‘the hustle’ and what this is and why we do it; our relationship with food and moving beyond purely nutritional components; body grief; the theory of embodiment and the different dimensions of it; and satisfaction, pleasure, and desire.
I’m very grateful for the book Reclaiming Body Trust and for the chance to chat with Hilary and Dana. Here is my conversation with Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant.
Hey, Dana and Hilary. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for joining me on the show today.
Hilary Kinavey: Thanks so much for having us. We’re excited to be here.
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah, thank you.
Chris Sandel: As a starting place, I just want to say how much of a fan of your work I am and how much I really love the Center for Body Trust. It’s something that gets referenced often when I’m working with clients, so I was super excited when I saw that you guys had put out a book, which I bought and read and really love. It’s called Rebuilding Body Trust. We’re in no way going to cover everything from the book today, but I’m hoping this conversation can give listeners a taste of some of the ideas from the book and what you guys are doing at the Center for Body Trust.
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Before we dive into it, do you want to give a bit of background on yourselves, both professionally and personally, and how you came to be doing this work?
Hilary Kinavey: Sure. I’m Hilary. I’m the therapist half of our team. Dana is the dietitian. I came to this work specifically around relationship with food and body through my own relationship with food and body that was really marked by early dieting and a lot of familial conversation about bodies always being able to be improved upon and be better. There was a lot of focus on changing bodies, even though everyone was very progressive and supportive in other ways.
When I came to the counselling field, I was really surprised to notice how much this wasn’t talked about, people’s bodies weren’t talked about, and how much collusion there was in the field with diet culture and with body change conversation, and how little training there was in eating disorders.
So it was through my own lived experience and then noticing those inconsistencies in my training that brought me to really wanting to provide places for people to have these conversations about food and body that weren’t about pathologizing them and were also really honest about the impact of dieting on our wellbeing.
Chris Sandel: When you first started as a therapist, what area did you think you were going to be working in? Was there a specialisation that was calling to you at that point?
Hilary Kinavey: When I got started I thought I was going to work with youth. I was working with homeless youth and runaway youth. So these conversations were there, but they weren’t emergent. I think in the back of my mind, I always was interested in this, but it’s not what I led with – probably because I didn’t really have anyone else in the field or in my counselling programme that was doing this work, so I didn’t have that natural connection.
And then I realised it was going to have to come from me, because it wasn’t out there. And this was pre-internet, this was pre-social media, so it wasn’t that I could just tap into a community that I couldn’t see as easily. I felt like I was building it and making it as I went, and luckily found things like, eventually, intuitive eating. That was a real gateway for me.
Chris Sandel: Nice. What about yourself, Dana? I know you’ve been on the show before, but do you want to give a bit of background on you and how you came to this work?
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah. Clinically, I’m trained as a registered dietitian and picked dietetics at a time when I was getting interested in nutrition and I had met somebody who was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he was the first person I met that thought about what he ate and the quality of food that he ate and stuff. It was at a time when I had to pick a focus, and I had an elective to fill in my programme, so I decided to take a nutrition class. I fell in love with learning about the body and learning about how things work.
So I declared nutrition as my focus, knowing that a lot of the stuff I was learning in dietetics and conventional food and nutrition was not really the way I looked at food and nutrition, but believing I could do what I wanted to do when I finished my programme. This has me thinking about the recent episode of The Maintenance Phase where they talk about the United States’ Dietary Food Guide Pyramid and what a racket that was. [laughs] Our training in the field of nutrition was really steeped in that kind of stuff that’s coming out of our farm programme and food subsidies and things like that.
I knew I didn’t want to do what most dietitians did, but I also didn’t have a vision for this, certainly. And then I moved to Oregon and I worked in research on clinical trials, helping people lose weight and supposedly keep it off. The intervention worked in that people at six months, their weight was down, but at two years their weight was back up and then some. They often gained more weight and ended up heavier at two years than they were at the beginning of the study. The researchers really felt like what we were doing ‘worked’ and that people lost weight, but they were very aware that it was not sustainable for people.
I started to say things about how we can trust people’s bodies to sort out the weight, that we can’t possibly know what people’s bodies are supposed to weigh, but we can trust their bodies to figure it out, and why don’t we take the focus off of weight and help people heal their relationships with food and body? They weren’t interested in that. They’d spent 20 years on this six-month weight loss intervention; they believed that it worked. I believed that the intervention was the problem.
I also knew there wasn’t going to be a career, like an organisation looking to hire somebody to do radically different work with people. It was pretty clear I needed to start my own private practice, and that was when I met Hilary and I also discovered Health at Every Size, this growing community of people that were saying things that it was like, okay, yes, I’m not the only one who is starting to feel unethical and become disillusioned with what I was taught.
Then I also came across intuitive eating, which Hilary mentioned, and in that book, the thing that really brought it all home to me is seeing that chart early in the book that shows the dieting mind compared to the non-dieting mindset. None of the researchers I worked with believed we were promoting dieting behaviours. We were all aware that dieting didn’t work, but what we didn’t realise is that people growing up in a dieting culture have a dieting mindset, and we can call it ‘healthy lifestyle’, but when you talk to people about the mentality that they’re approaching food and eating with, they’re still dieting even when we call it healthy lifestyle. It’s from there that I met Hilary.
And I’ve also, as a person assigned female at birth, grown up in a culture where I was really socialized into racist beauty standards. They had an impact on my body and my relationship with my body – and there was somewhat of a protective effect in my household because I didn’t grow up in a household of people dieting and disparaging their bodies and disparaging fat people’s bodies.
Chris Sandel: You said there that you had this belief that the body knew what it was going to do. You had this body trust. It sounded as though that was there before you discovered Health at Every Size or intuitive eating, and that in a way just validated what you already believed. Is that true? And if so, where do you think that came from?
Dana Sturtevant: I hadn’t heard the word ‘body trust’ before, but thinking back and talking to my colleagues at the time, it was like, we can trust people’s bodies. I just knew that we didn’t have as much control as we thought we did, from my own lived experience. [laughs] I just really felt like the intervention was slapping Band-Aids on people’s lives and calling food and eating the problem when I was talking to people about how their two parents were dying and they were the primary caregiver in the sandwich generation, and then we were calling their food and eating the problem and not the fact that they were fighting with their siblings over their parents’ estate, for instance.
So I knew that there was a psychology to some of this and there were mental health aspects to this, and people’s lives were real. I just didn’t want to be contributing to their suffering, and it started to feel like I was contributing to their suffering. It was just kind of a disillusionment and starting to feel unethical that led me to want to divest, without really knowing, 17-18 years ago, what this work would look like or that we would land on the term ‘body trust’. But talking about it here, it’s like, yeah, there was something in me that knew that what we were doing was wrong.
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Chris Sandel: Talk about how the Center for Body Trust has grown and morphed over the last 18 years. What was it like when it started, and how has it evolved?
Hilary Kinavey: When we got started, Dana and I both had moved our practices to a small clinic and started running groups. We started building curriculum for that clinic and quickly realised that we weren’t in alignment with the owners of that clinic. The clinic ended up kind of imploding, and we took our groups and ran, basically. [laughs]
It started out with Dana and I sitting in rooms of people who wanted to figure out what was going on with their relationship with food and why dieting wasn’t working and why they were so unhappy in their bodies. That’s where all of this was born from, those groups. What we noticed is while people had very distinct lived experiences, there were all these themes that kept coming up around body trust that people wanted and needed to talk about.
So we worked in that way, developing our language, for many years. What started to happen was providers, like healthcare providers, started coming more and more to our groups and workshops and really had a need to do this work, but wanted a place separate from clients. Because we were all in the same community, providers needed their own space to do that. We started to notice how much providers also wanted support to do what we had done, which was to find a way to unravel a lot of the anti-fat bias and diet culture that was inherent in our training.
I would say – formerly our business name was Be Nourished – Be Nourished morphed into what it is now, the Center for Body Trust, over time as we started to develop specific trainings and programmes for healthcare providers who needed a place to do their healing work but also wanted to shift their service delivery to something that was more weight-inclusive and healing for people from diet culture itself.
Our work has always had these two arms to it, and they certainly meet in many places. The work is the same, where we are providing opportunities for healing and conversation for people in the general public who want body trust, and then we’re also providing training and support and mentoring for healthcare providers who want their work to shift, and they need to do that from the inside out.
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Chris Sandel: How does it feel like the landscape has changed over that time? It feels like we’re at a place – and maybe I’m just living in my bubble and I read all these kinds of books, but it feels like intuitive eating is much more widely known than it ever has been, Health at Every Size is much more widely known than it has ever been, but going back 18 years ago, that feels very different. It just wasn’t on the radar in the same way. So how do you see the differences?
Dana Sturtevant: I think with social media and all the flaws and negative pieces of social media, social media has been a big part of getting the word out about this work, and more people have more voices in the world because of social media. It really did a lot to push and advance this forward, I feel like. Hilary may have more to say and add to that, but I feel like that’s a big piece of it. Media used to be very controlled, and what was published and put out was very controlled by predominantly white people with other dominant identities.
So to have more freedom to communicate and share and advocate for the things we believe in and our values has really done a lot for the movement. And I feel like I had something else, but it’s gone. Hilary, what do you want to add there?
Hilary Kinavey: Similar. I think it’s very grassroots. I notice sometimes a surprise or confusion arising in me when I’m in my bubble, or my algorithmic bubble online, and I see how many people are around us and in this movement now and I’m excited, and then we go to an organisation and do training, and none of it is that evident in organisations and systems and policy. So I’m really grateful for grassroots because I think that is what is ultimately going to change these bigger structures and systems in our lives.
But it also creates a confusion for me, and I think Chris, maybe you were speaking to that a little bit when you mentioned your bubble. It’s like, boy, the world is still really not operating from this frame, and yet we feel very much not alone also, as we push this framework, this movement forward.
Chris Sandel: It’s not like there’s not a long way to go, but it does feel like there are more options for community than there were before. I would also imagine that the people who are coming to you, whether that be practitioners or more lay public, there’s hopefully more of a background knowledge already just because there is more material available online, there are more books about this. If you know where to go, there is a lot more information on this than at any other point.
Hilary Kinavey: Absolutely, yeah.
Dana Sturtevant: That’s the piece that I was going to speak to. Some of the shifts we’re seeing in health care here in the Pacific Northwest – it may be because there’s quite a few providers in the Pacific Northwest here in the United States that are really pushing for this, and more physicians are getting pushback from their patients about being weighed, and patients are setting boundaries. So there’s this curiosity by some physicians – not all, certainly, but by some physicians, and even within some healthcare organisations, they’re considering having doctors identify as weight-inclusive providers, kind of like they identify as providing trans-affirming care.
So we’re seeing this push here. And as Hilary said, weight stigma and anti-fat bias are baked into our systems. When we’ve had conversations with frontline providers about providing weight-inclusive care within a large healthcare organisation here in the States, you just see they’re all on board – well, ‘all’ is probably not fair, but many of them are on board and interested, and then they look at the policies and the procedures and all of the things that need to be rewritten, and somebody needs to go first and create some of these systems and policies and procedures that help us provide this kind of care. But there’s all of these places that they bump up against.
Because Hilary and I have been in private practice for so long, while we’re aware of those things, it really became put front and centre talking to this organisation, like, oh my gosh, there’s so much in there that they have to get out of those algorithms, so to speak, to really be able to do this. It’s exciting that we’re at a point where some people are actually talking about this – and you see how much work there still is to do.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It’s “Conceptually, I get on board, but when I look at the bureaucracy of having to do this, this is where I’m hitting a wall.”
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah, and then you have the juxtaposition of medications that are now on the market for diabetes that have a side effect of weight loss that are being prescribed. Now all these patients that don’t have diabetes are asking for these weight loss medicines, and people with diabetes can’t get them here. So you have this movement and feeling like we’re gaining strides, and then a new medication comes on the market that everyone gets excited about and we see just how vested medicine is in weight loss and how much the American healthcare system is really sold out to the diet industry.
Chris Sandel: I think at the extreme end, it has got stronger than ever before. While more people are aware of intuitive eating or Health at Every Size, the thing that boggles my mind is the fact that the carnivore diet hit the mainstream. You can have a diet where all you eat is meat, and that was not enough for people to be like, “Hang on a second, we’ve really taken this too far.” That wasn’t even a ‘we’re jumping the shark’ moment.
Hilary Kinavey: Yeah, nothing seems to do it. Nothing seems to awaken folks to the inherent harm, or how none of this works, how we keep cycling through more and more new plans and new ideas that aren’t new at all.
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah, just repacking the same stuff.
Chris Sandel: That’s especially obvious to me the longer I’ve done this. I think I’ve been in private practice nearly 15 years, somewhere in that vicinity, and it’s been long enough that I’ve now witnessed the things coming round again. The longer you do that, it just repeats in these cycles of what is demonized and what is put up on a pedestal. It just goes round and round again.
Dana Sturtevant: And it’s wild. Here we are, 50 years into the fat acceptance movement – 50+ years, I would say – and some people are doubling down. And those of us choosing this path are still early adopters. I firmly believe in some generations, we do this work for future generations because we know permission isn’t going to come from systems any time soon. And there’s hope that – I believe someday people will look back at those that were choosing this work as like, “Wow, you really were aware of something way ahead of mainstream culture.”
But that’s why so much, when people are reclaiming body trust, you’re going to be misunderstood. People will gaslight you. They will say, “That’s not going to work.” They’re not going to understand it because you’re really speaking a language that’s foreign to a lot of people.
I think about those that might be listening to this podcast and hearing all this and just want people to know it does get easier, that you can deepen your roots into body trust, that you can feel stronger in your conviction for this work and feel more steady and able to hold your ground, as trees with deeper and stronger roots are able to hold their ground. This is the metaphor we use in the book to describe this work. We’re so much easier to control when we are fragmented and hustling.
Chris Sandel: Let’s focus then on the book. I think I misspoke in the intro and said ‘rebuilding’ body trust instead of Reclaiming Body Trust, so apologies if I said the wrong title.
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The book is divided into three sections. There’s the Rupture, the Reckoning, and the Reclamation. We can go through each of these in detail and certain parts that you cover in each of these sections, but as an overview, what are each of these three sections about?
Hilary Kinavey: As an overview, the Rupture is an explanation of what damaged, what ruptured our relationship with food and our bodies.
The Reckoning is the messy middle. Most people, we notice, would love to skip from understanding the rupture to moving straight into reclamation, but moving through the reckoning, really diving into the grief and the losses and the challenges that have persisted in our lives as a result of the rupture is really what helps us move towards making those roots deeper, as Dana talked about.
And then the Reclamation is just that: a reclaiming of our being, our trust, our bodies, our truth, our voice, our agency, after really understanding what happened.
Chris Sandel: With the tree metaphor, what are the roots or the foundations? I like how you went through each of these different areas in the book and talked about how useful they are and why they are the roots of it.
Dana Sturtevant: One thing I want to just touch on briefly is how so many people want to skip the reckoning process. “I understand how I lost trust, now let’s get to the reclamation.” I saw this meme this morning – I just pulled it up because it was hilarious, and it fits with this. It says, “They should invent a way out that is not through.” [laughs] This really speaks to how people want that reclamation. They understand how the rupture happened, and then they just don’t want to descend into the muck and do that reckoning piece.
This is work that we often say we want to have you keep coming towards it. People will straddle when they first hear about body trust work. They’ll be going to Weightwatchers meetings and reading the body trust book, and they’ll be hearing truth, but like, “No, I think I still want to lose X amount of weight, so I’m going to keep going to my meetings.” There’s a straddling piece. And the foundations of body trust are one way we feel like we keep returning to these touchstones, so to speak, to keep staying rooted in this work.
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In the foundations, at the root of the tree is where you’ll find the foundations of body trust. These are things that we realised were part of this work sitting in groups, and the things we found ourselves saying over and over again to people who found that kind of push-pull of wanting to diet but not wanting to diet.
Maybe I’ll speak to a couple of these, Hilary, and then you can speak to a couple of them.
Hilary Kinavey: Sure.
Dana Sturtevant: One is working the edges of your comfort zone. We don’t want you to be so far out of your comfort zone that you go into hyperarousal or hypo-arousal, but often the magic happens at the edges of our comfort zone. We take risks with our eating. We take risks with our practices. And to do that, we’re working the edges of our comfort zone. So that’s a big one, to take some risks and work those edges.
Another big part of this is finding community. We need to know that there are other people on the path. We’ve seen people move leaps and bounds when they come to a retreat and explore this work with others. Because this is so countercultural, still, it feels particularly important to find at least one person in your life that gets it or at least is willing to hold space and not gaslight you. But finding a community of people who support your liberation is a huge part of body trust and really can help you stay and stick with it, or keep returning.
The other one I’ll speak to is locating yourself. We say ‘locate yourself and widen the lens’. Part of our work with body trust is deepening our analysis of what’s come between us and being at home in our bodies, and recognising how our positionality and our social location and our intersecting identities really have impacted the way we engage with the world and move through the world.
Locating yourself can also mean just coming into the present moment, like when we’re having a bad body day. “Okay, wait a second, what was I doing? How was I feeling about my body yesterday?” Kind of grounding ourselves in the present moment and then widening the lens to think about, “What’s happening in my life? Why is my body the problem? I was fine about my body last night, but today I’m feeling really activated around it”, and widening the lens and seeing everything happening in our life instead of zooming in on our bodies and how we’re going to fix it.
Chris Sandel: I can speak to a couple of those in terms of some of the things you said, and then Hilary, you can mention the other ones. The finding your community piece I also think is super important. Even just when I’m working with clients one on one, me being able to say to them, “What you’re describing is so common with the people I work with” – just hearing that alone can be so helpful for someone, to feel like “Oh okay, it’s not just me.” To then take that a step further and actually meet those other people in real life and have that genuine sense of community, I do think that makes such a difference for people.
And then with the edges of your comfort zone, one of the things I often talk about with clients is I think you act your way into thinking differently rather than thinking your way into acting differently. So just having that reminder of constantly taking action – and it doesn’t have to be, as you say, where it’s so anxiety-provoking that it stops you in your tracks, but taking action so that you start to see a different way because of having those different experiences, and almost by doing it and seeing that “I was able to get through this” even when it goes terribly wrong – there’s resilience there. There’s a real learning that comes through that.
And then when I heard you talking about locate yourself, it reminded me a lot of acceptance and commitment therapy. Is that part of the training that you guys have done or how you talk about this with clients or practitioners?
Hilary Kinavey: We have a little bit of knowledge of acceptance and commitment therapy, but it’s probably not where our reference point was. I think it’s more in the finding the present moment, like ‘this moment is the only moment’ piece of that, which I think is probably where acceptance and commitment therapy is also grounded. It’s really saying, “Where am I in this moment?” It also speaks to how much of this creates a trauma response in folks or is dysregulating to folks.
Some of our work when we’re coming out and beginning to notice those different states of consciousness that we rely upon to navigate the world is noticing that we can come home, that we can take a moment and just be like, “Where am I right now? What’s happening right now? What can I focus on that isn’t the anxiety or the stress or the narrative that’s causing harm to me right now?”
Dana Sturtevant: And an early foundation of our work was Tara Brach’s work around radical acceptance. I didn’t say this when I was talking about my background, but at the time when I was working in research, I was also teaching yoga, and I had developed a strong yoga practice when I was in graduate school and having chronic pain issues. My massage therapist was like, “I really feel like if you started to practice yoga, a lot of this would not be in your body”, with certain stretches and counteracting all the work I was doing at my computer and stuff.
I just went to a gym – which is funny now; I could not imagine a Kripalu yoga teacher at a gym today. But this was in the ’90s, it was right around the time Madonna made yoga popular in the United States, so yoga wasn’t what it is today. But I was really fascinated by my experience of going to yoga for chronic pain and noticing how yoga changed my relationship with my body. I had so much more appreciation of my body. The way I felt about my body when I went into class versus when I left the class was so different, and what I thought I wanted to eat before the class was so different than what I wanted to eat after the class.
So I was really interested in incorporating some of those mindfulness and self-acceptance practices that I’d learned through yoga and radical acceptance into this work. I think that’s where there’s probably some crossover with acceptance and commitment therapy – the work Hilary and I have both done around that stuff.
Chris Sandel: Nice. So Hilary, what are some of the other roots?
Hilary Kinavey: Some of the other roots are we really return to kindness and curiosity over and over again. One of the roots is ‘look with kindness and curiosity’, knowing that a lot of what we’ve done to continue to acquiesce to diet culture is to involve our inner critic in trying to motivate us to do better all the time, and that when we are constantly harming ourselves in that way, we really are missing out on a lot of the wisdom that is innately within us.
We believe kindness and curiosity are actually what help release us from diet culture and disordered eating, and that they’re the opposite of the ‘tough love’ that comes with diet culture. So just practicing kindness and curiosity can make a big difference in our relationship with food in general and with our bodies.
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At the same time, we also encourage people to honour self-preservation practices. We’re noting self-preservation as opposed to self-care. Self-care is something that, while I think started as a really meaningful idea, has kind of been co-opted by wellness industries. So instead, we’re talking about having a working knowledge of all the things that take care of you. Some of those things might be new practices that you’re developing and body trust practices and all these brave things that you’re doing, and some of them may be old ways of coping or numbing that also preserve you and keep you going.
We really want folks to know that all the coping they’ve done in the name of diet culture and disordered eating has come from wisdom, that that was probably what was available at the time, or folks thought they were doing the best thing they could for themselves, and that that’s meaningful. And that in and of itself counteracts some of the abusive ideas about how all of this is their fault and they should just stop and all of those kinds of things that run through our heads or come out of the mouths of our family members or doctors when we’re trying to address our bodies.
Sometimes self-preservation means that we take comfort in what’s familiar and available, and sometimes it means that we’re setting more boundaries or being brave or trying a new behaviour or a new practice, and we’re slowing our process down and all of that. We want folks to be aware of the menu of self-preservation practices that they use and feel like they can choose them based on what’s available to them, what their capacity is from moment to moment. But it also brings in a degree of acceptance of all of them.
00:40:33
And then the last foundation is the one folks attach to the most and really appreciate the most, which is we really want folks to get a C- in this work. If we’re thinking about giving ourselves a grade, which isn’t very body trust but it is relatable [laughs], we say get a C-. We want you to learn body trust kind of badly. We want you to do body trust kind of badly. We want to address the ways perfectionism is a part of white supremacy culture and really upholds diet and wellness ideals or ethos in us.
So we acknowledge that body trust and all anti-diet ideas are practices that are going to be evolving and changing throughout our life span and with our bodies as our bodies evolve and change throughout our life span. So we want folks to get a C. Don’t do this that well. It will be enough.
Chris Sandel: After reading the book, I had this conversation with a client and I could see how much she sort of exhaled. Hearing “Go for a C-” was so helpful in dismantling some of that perfectionism and the worry of “I’ve got to do it all and I’ve got to do it all now.” It’s just like, no, let’s go at the pace that is right for you and aim for a C-, and it just took that pressure off.
Hilary Kinavey: Yes. That’s what we aim to do.
Dana Sturtevant: I think it really allows people to take those risks and work on embodying this. I think there’s a lot of people who’ve listened to all the podcasts and read all of the books and can tell you all about this work, and yet when they go to sit down and eat or make a decision about food and eating, that’s where the rubber hits the road.
To really embody this means we’re practicing. I remember reading in Adrienne Maree Brown’s book, she says, “You’re always practicing something. So what are you practicing that you’re not aware you’re practicing?” When we’re new to body trust work, it takes some awareness and some effort. We don’t expect you to do it every time you sit down to eat, but is there one opportunity to practice it?
The guitar metaphor, that you can read a book and listen to podcasts about playing the guitar, but if you don’t pick the guitar up and play it, you can’t play the guitar. So we really are hoping that this book helps people embody it and bring it closer and really embody a set of practices that they get to choose from. There’s lots of choices in the book about what those practices would be to help you come home to yourself.
Chris Sandel: I think it also speaks to the fact that in the beginning, this is going to feel weird or awkward or different. I can’t remember which of the intuitive eating workbooks it’s in, but they talk about ‘write with your non-dominant hand and see what that’s like’. I think that’s a really lovely analogy for this. Your expectation should be that this feels odd to begin with because it is so different to what you have been doing up until this point. In most instances, trying to rip the Band-Aid off doesn’t really work because there is just so much that has to be changed; it needs to iterate as you go.
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah. When people pick their weight loss plan, there’s often a sense of urgency, and within two hours you know if you’re doing it right because they give you nice containing rules and ideas of what you can eat and what you can’t eat. So within two to three hours of starting a new plan, you know if you’re doing it right on some level. And body trust work is not like this. People feel like they’re flailing, they’ve lost the bumpers, almost, and they feel like “I don’t know what” – because they’re so used to the containment and the rigidity of a plan.
So I think that’s really important to let people know. Yeah, you’re so used to having someone telling you when you should eat and how much you should eat and what you should eat that when you let go of all of that stuff and you start divesting from diet culture, it’s going to feel weird to not have the containment of all of those ideas of right and wrong and good and bad. We’re trying to really divest from that binary way of thinking.
Chris Sandel: I really like the way that you talk about self-preservation as well, and that your coping is rooted in wisdom. I think it’s too easy when someone realises that diet culture isn’t something they want to be part of anymore, or this eating disorder is not something they want to be part of anymore, that there can be this feeling of “This thing does nothing for me.”
It’s like, no, no, no – this thing has been doing something for you, whether that’s something genuine or something that you thought would happen and it didn’t necessarily materialise. But to say that this is doing nothing is just not true, and what is more important is understanding what those things are so that you can learn from that as opposed to it very much being this real black-and-white thing.
Hilary Kinavey: That’s right. You’ve always been on your own side in terms of coping; it’s just that the culture is so good at pathologizing our behaviours. My field, the field of psychology, loves to name our behaviours and our coping as the problem when often the problem is very far outside of us. So this work is really about getting the problem focussed outside of the bodies of people and back onto the systems and institutions and moneymakers where it rightfully belongs.
Dana Sturtevant: I think this is where I think grief comes up and why it’s important to name grief in this work. People do have a lot to grieve, like the years wasted and the time lost and the fact that they didn’t know and they never consented to this, and they didn’t know there was another way, and they’ve colluded with harm and perpetuated harm. There’s a lot that we grieve. There was something in the way you were talking about it, Chris, that made me think about, oh yeah, this is where the grief lives.
Chris Sandel: I totally agree with what you both said at the beginning; people want to skip over the reckoning piece, and yet for me, the reckoning piece is actually where everything gets properly cemented, because you are really coming to terms with all of these things. You’re not able to hide from it. You can still go at the pace you want to go at, but it’s really starting to understand how diet culture or the eating disorder or whatever it is has really got its tentacles into all of these different areas of life and coming to terms with all of that. Without that piece, it doesn’t happen.
Hilary Kinavey: That’s right. We have to pull the roots all the way up, and it has to be more than about trying to be ‘good’ or being better. We really have to understand our place and how this functions in the world.
00:48:46
Chris Sandel: You talk in the book about the cycle. Maybe talk briefly about what that is and how it plays out.
Hilary Kinavey: The cycle is a rendering of how our behaviours have played out in a cyclical or pattern way. What’s funny about that is sometimes some of that is visible to us and some of it is not, but once folks can see it, they can’t unsee it and it’s everywhere.
When we’re talking about the cycle or mapping out the cycle with someone or a group, we start with what we’ve called the problem. For a lot of people in our culture as it is right now, that’s named as emotional eating or overeating or binging. People rarely see restriction as the problem, so they’re usually naming a behaviour that they wish they would stop because they think it’s contributing to their body dissatisfaction generally.
We name that while that behaviour is seen as the problem, usually the actual experience of doing that behaviour is either very numbing or is a huge relief, and there’s been a lot of tension building as people move towards that. When folks engage in that behaviour, usually there’s a drop into a lot of shame right after. Our technical term is we call it the ‘shame shitstorm’. [laughs] We call it that because it’s this pit that we fall into where we run all of our narratives and all of our stories and feel like the shame is actually who we really are, and that we need to do something to pull ourselves up and out of it so people don’t see how messed up we really are.
What tends to pull us out of the shame shitstorm is a plan. People try to move up and out of their bodies, back into their heads and develop a plan that’s going to rescue them from themselves, essentially – and from anti-fat bias and all these other things, but the cycle is very much an internal, personal drama that’s played out.
The plan can be a bunch of different things. The plan might have at one point been doing a very specific diet programme or plan, and they morph over time from that into being much more ideas about compensatory behaviour, like “Tomorrow I will do XYZ to make up for this experience.” Sometimes the plan can even become like “I’m going to do that body trust thing, I’m going to do that intuitive eating thing”, but it’s an idea that is meant to be a rescue.
The plan can last anywhere from, in the beginning stages, a few months to a year, to by the time people have been doing it a while, it lasts 30 seconds to 10 minutes. [laughs] I’m laughing not to make fun of that as much as I’m laughing to say, gosh, that’s really how it goes. People don’t often know that we lose tolerance to dieting over time. The diets we used to be able to pull off, our bodies, our minds are unwilling to do over and over again. And that is a sign of health. That is a sign of wellbeing if we and our bodies aren’t willing to participate in starvation or restriction or restraint over and over again.
The other thing that we want to make clear, and the next point in the cycle, is what tends to interrupt the cycle – why we think we can’t pull them off: because life gets in the way. As Anne Lamott says, life gets lifey. Inevitably. When life is getting hard, it’s normal, because life is hard, and there aren’t any plans that are really made to be able to put up with how much comes up in our lives. It’s normal for life to get hard. It’s normal to have financial struggles or to fall in and out of love or to go through a move or to have conflict or to have loss. We can’t predict when these things are happening, and our diets are not supposed to be stronger than these real situations that happen in life and change us.
So life happens, and then we can see that we end up working our way back towards the behaviours that we use to cope, compensate, destress, numb out. Usually we come back around to those because when we are going through stressful times, we have this odd reaction as humans, which is to tighten the reins on ourselves, to make things harder than they need to be instead of approaching ourselves with kindness and spaciousness.
00:53:55
So that’s the cycle as a circle. What we like to do is investigate ways to break the cycle or make changes to the cycle that are relatively simple, initially. The places where we often see people doing that or willing to do that is, one, in trying not to make a plan. So considering life without planning. Or if that doesn’t work for folks, we also say ‘the only plan is for radical self-care’. Radical self-care means from the roots, so what do you really, really need? What do you truly need, not “What do I need to do to myself to become better?” “What can I do for and with my body instead of to and on my body?” Planning for no plan is the simplest way to say that, though.
And then the other place is after the behaviour happens, like the binge, the emotional eating, etc., that happens, we accept that that’s going to happen. We accept that we’re going to have these eating experiences – one, either because they’re normal and expected and a reaction to not having enough to eat, or because that’s how we’ve coped for a long period of time, and we’re going to continue to cope that way, even if we’re working on healing too. It’s very common that when people are working on healing their relationship to food and body, the behaviours stick around for a long time even though emotionally they’re shifting and healing and changing. So that’s another place.
Those are the two most common and easiest, I think.
Chris Sandel: I think just understanding the cycle as a starting place – the power of awareness to notice, “Okay, there is this cycle that is going on and I can track that this is what’s happened over the last 10 years, 20 years”, whatever the time scale has been, so that when these things do start to come up, even if you are still doing the behaviour, the ignorance is bliss. There is some level of consciousness and awareness that is then there connected to it.
And I really like the ‘life is getting too lifey’ comment. When I read it in the book, that made me laugh. It also made me think of – there’s the Mike Tyson comment – and I think this is possibly out of context, but he said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” And I think life a lot of the time punches people in the face, and no matter what you thought you were going to do before that, things drastically change.
Dana Sturtevant: Yes, and these plans that we make are so rigid that they’re not flexible enough to deal with what life throws our way.
Chris Sandel: I do also like the addition there of there are times when it is useful to follow a plan when that is in service of supporting your body. I recently had Johanna Kandel on the podcast, and she was talking about – she’s recovered from an eating disorder, and when she feels that things are overwhelming or life’s getting more difficult, she will pull out her old recovery plan and recovery eating plan, because she’s like, “That really supports me in those moments as a reminder and keeps me more grounded while I get through that difficult point.” So having no plan unless the plan is going to be genuinely supportive for you.
Dana Sturtevant: Most people’s plans are not to get enough to eat; most people’s plans and the types of plans we’re talking about in the book are the plans to restrict and restrain your eating and not get enough to eat. Certainly there’s some discernment, and we say that early in the book. Please consider context, nuance, discernment – that’s a Randi Buckley quote – when you’re reading this, because there can be a time and a place for the kinds of plans people get in eating disorder treatment to help them get enough to eat. Certainly some people may find that leaning on those plans when they notice that they want to restrict and that they’re in a period of their life where they may lean on old coping patterns, a meal plan to get enough to eat can certainly provide some structure for folks in those situations.
00:58:46
Chris Sandel: Another part of the book, you talk about the health iceberg, which I really loved as an analogy and how it’s explained. Do you want to share that with the listeners?
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah, the health iceberg is an image that we used from – I think it’s Mari Andrews. But really, the ways we have been trained to think about food and eating as really rigid and perfectionist. The ways we’ve been trained to think about health, it’s like we live in this healthist culture where if you get sick, it’s your fault, is the common rhetoric. People think that if we just eat healthy – and so often people, when it comes to people’s health, think about diet and exercise. What are you eating and are you getting enough physical activity?
The health iceberg shows that our health is way more complicated than our individual personal lifestyle choices. The social determinants of health actually have a far greater impact on your health and wellbeing than anything you’re eating or the exercise you’re doing. But health care really relies on personal responsibility rhetoric to get out of – with this belief that if people just ate healthier, their healthcare costs would go down. Research actually shows that 5% to 25% of the differences in healthcare outcomes are related to lifestyle behaviours – living in poverty, not getting paid living wages. We don’t have universal health care in the United States, so health care is a privilege, it’s not a birthright here. Exposure to toxins.
This idea that we can tell a lot more about a person’s health by their zip code than by any lifestyle, behaviours, or BMIs that we have. This is another place where that ‘locate yourself and widen the lens’ can really come in. We want people to really widen the lens when they think about health and what impacts health.
Chris Sandel: You made reference to some research looking at the Mediterranean diet and that the Mediterranean diet only helped once you had other socioeconomic factors in there, and if you didn’t, it didn’t really make much of a difference. Over here in the UK, there’s been a Marmot Review, and then there was another report that was 10 years on from that, and basically that was looking at all of the different social determinants of health and how much they had an impact on health. It was a review that was aimed to the government, to help them to make various changes that would genuinely help to improve the health of society.
I’ve read through both of those reports, and so little is about food and movement. The vast majority of it is about living wages, is about having better houses that aren’t leaking and all of these different things that people just don’t even think about when they’re typically talking about health. I think something along the lines of you can look at where someone lives based on the tube map and you can pretty much estimate what their average lifespan will be. And this is just because of what happens when you’re living in certain areas.
Dana Sturtevant: And segregation and red-lining and the ways, especially – I just think about the United States – that’s a big part of it too. Why Black women have higher poor birth outcomes is because of racism, and yet we seem to have a crisis of imagination when it comes to people’s weight that we don’t see that the way fat people are treated in society, and the stigma and the impacts of that stigma on their health and their wellbeing, have a far greater impact on their health and wellbeing than anything they’re eating.
And concern trolling is something that many fat people experience. “It’s not your weight; I’m worried about your health.” Well, talking to me like this is impacting my health, I like to say. [laughs]
01:03:17
Chris Sandel: Hilary, you talked about The Beautiful Project, which was something that your son did at school, and I thought this was a really lovely story. Do you want to share that?
Hilary Kinavey: Sure. This was in preschool, and my son had a preschool teacher who was such an out-of-the-box teacher and so experiential. The teacher himself had a daughter around preschool age and was noticing how much commentary came her way about beauty and princesses and defining beauty for her, and his observation of his daughter was that what she was attracted to and what she was finding beautiful were very different than what was being prescribed. And yet what was being prescribed was having an impact on what she was noticing in the world and what she was starting to be attracted to.
So he did this project with the preschool class where he would take them on long adventure walks, and he would teach them how to – he would say, “What is beautiful?” or “Pick out something that’s beautiful”, and the class would bring back these items over the year and fill the classroom. At some point in the year, there was an event where parents got to come, and he explained the project to us. When we looked around the room, with my very conditioned-to-certain-beauty-standards eye, it did not look beautiful to me. [laughs] It was mud and garbage and bugs and dead leaves and just stuff that kids found on their walks. But they had brought them back and contributed to this collection because in that moment, when he prompted them to find beauty, this is what they found.
It was kind of a stunning moment for me at re-organising and thinking about what beauty is for me, and I began to notice how when I notice beauty, it’s usually a very embodied moment. It’s not necessarily the prescription of looking at a beautiful starlet on a movie. It’s really what is capturing me and pulling my attraction at the moment, and it can be really anything. I’ve begun to feel really sad that our understanding of beauty as human beings has been so prescribed.
It also brings me down this thought process of who we are attracted to has been largely prescribed to us as well. We don’t believe that, often, but it’s very much true. It’s made me think about over the years how many people and connections I may have missed out on because of this prescription that I’ve internalised.
All of this around beauty is very body trust oriented, meaning our bodies already have a reaction and a knowledge of beauty that we may or may not notice if we’re pulling from what we’ve been conditioned into.
Chris Sandel: How did that then continue on with your son? Did that little project make any kind of indelible mark on him?
Hilary Kinavey: [laughs] I wonder. I think so. Both of my sons got to have this experience at different times, which was lucky that we had the same teacher. They’re very curious and open to what’s around them. We live on a small lake – we’re fortunate to do that – and they’re always eager to notice what’s around them, and their attractions are very much their own, like what they notice, what they see. So I still see that in them.
My older son is a teenager now, and I’m noticing the pull of TikTok and his own idea about what makes him attractive is getting very prescribed, so it’s sad to see this departure coming in where it hasn’t really been in his consciousness till now.
Chris Sandel: I think maybe just being a teenager, I don’t know how you avoid that in this culture.
Hilary Kinavey: No, you can’t.
Chris Sandel: The hope is just once out the other side, some of that then comes back.
Hilary Kinavey: That’s what we’re hoping for around here. [laughs]
Dana Sturtevant: It’s like a rite of passage.
Hilary Kinavey: Yeah, we miss him already. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: But it was interesting thinking about the culture and how much of an impact it has. I went swimming with my son – I can’t remember how long ago it was, but we needed to buy some goggles there, and the lady behind the counter was like, “Oh, I’m sorry, we’ve only got pink.” He was like, “Yeah, pink’s fine.” He hadn’t learnt that pink was not a colour that boys should have as part of their goggles, and he was completely okay with that.
He also has pretty long hair, and everyone mistakes him for being a girl. So we say to him, “Everyone normally calls you a girl” and he’s like, “Yeah, I know.” I was like, “Does that bother you?” He’s like, “No, it doesn’t.” I wonder how long that will be true for.
Hilary Kinavey: Yeah, my younger son is the same in both of those ways. He can still hang in there. It’s harder when kids tease, but when adults make mistakes he doesn’t care too much.
01:09:07
Chris Sandel: You talk in the book about ‘the hustle’. What is the hustle?
Hilary Kinavey: The hustle is all of the ways we’ve developed to try to acquiesce of the culture’s ideas of how we should look and who we should be. It’s this idea that our lives are about achieving something or perfecting ourselves or improving ourselves. The hustle is a word Brene Brown uses in some of her work, which is where I started thinking about the word more, I think. She equates it with the hustle for worthiness.
What I’m aware of in that is then that it’s a hustle away from our shame. And shame is a complicated idea because shame is an emotional experience, but it’s related to the dominant culture and not meeting expectations. It’s kind of a post-colonial emotion, in a sense, and it’s about becoming something better all the time.
So when we’re talking about ending the hustle, we’re talking about ending these pursuits that are rooted in cultural frameworks or ideas that have never been ours or were never meant to be ours, and some of those are around perfectionism, some of them might be around health and reckoning with ideas of health that Dana talked about and you talked about before, but also that health is not something that we achieve. Health is something that we work with and understand and live with over time. We’re talking about our ideas about how able-bodied we are and how we reckon with the idea that we may not be healthy or able-bodied our whole lifespan.
The hustle is really about all the ways we try to move away from our innate humanity and the struggle that comes with innately being human, and how we actually come home to our imperfect, ever-changing lives.
Chris Sandel: Have either of you read Four Thousand Weeks, the book?
Hilary Kinavey: Mm-mm.
Dana Sturtevant: No.
Chris Sandel: I’m blanking on the author – Oliver Burkeman. I read it this year, and it was one of the best books I’ve read in a really long time. He’s someone who was an efficiency writer for The Guardian – efficiency in terms of how you do inbox zero, and very much on board with the Tim Ferriss ‘4-hour workweek’ type mentality of thinking about things, and productivity hacks and everything. And he came to this awakening of like, “I’ve been doing this now for 10 or 15 years and it has not made my life better at all. If anything, I have more emails, I’m more stressed.”
So his whole thing became a complete 180, and it became quite Buddhist-like and philosophical and just looking at like, we have a finite amount of time on this planet, and we are not going to be able to do everything we want to do, and we need to become pretty aware of that fact and embrace that, and stop trying to do everything and stop trying to be everything, and really look at, “What is really important to me?”
Obviously, some people have more scope of being able to do that than others, but I think the message was a really useful one, no matter who you are. I think there can be some reflection of like, “How do I spend my time? How do I spend my time worrying? Where do I put my focus?”
Hilary Kinavey: Now that you mention it, I’ve heard about this quite a bit. I’m going to add it to my list. This is really about an unlearning and a moving away from the things that we thought were inherent because the culture said so. That unlearning, like you’re saying – and maybe like this author experienced – can bring us closer to ourselves and clearer about what’s most important to us or what brings us joy or what brings us pleasure.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. He never in the book talked about food or diet or anything, but hearing his story of how productivity and attempting to refine that to an art form just didn’t do anything for him and he had that realisation – if you substituted the word ‘dieting’ for every time he said ‘productivity’, it would still be the same story.
Hilary Kinavey: Interesting.
01:14:25
Chris Sandel: One of the other parts you talk about in the book is the connection to our food outside of its purely nutritional components and how much this is lost. And maybe Dana, you can speak to this, because I think this is often what happens within dietetics.
Dana Sturtevant: Yes. I mentioned healthism, and we talk about nutritionism in the book. The ‘ism’ on there really implies an ideology, not solid science. And so much of what is touted as nutrition science is actually personal food philosophy. One thing that nutritionism does is dumb food down to its nutritional components and robs food of its meaning in the way food connects us to our culture and our heritage and our ancestors.
We really want people to have a more critical view of the whole field of nutrition, that it’s a relatively young science, that there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we know, and that there’s really no one way of eating that’s right for every person. That’s something I really want listeners to hear: there’s no magical way of eating that’s going to make bad things never happen.
Human beings like to feel in control. We don’t like not knowing. I think because so many people have – well, not so many – because we all have a relationship with food, we all need food – some of us do not like that requirement and like to exist as if we do not have that requirement, that we’re beyond the need of food. But we all have a relationship with food, so there’s a lot of healthcare providers, helping professionals, and laypeople who spout off all this food information with no background whatsoever, and people just eat it up like it is the truth. What most people are hearing out there is far more about their personal food philosophy than anything rooted in solid science.
The more I look at the field of nutrition, the more disillusioned I become with it. Certainly there’s a time and a place for medical nutrition therapy, there’s health conditions, when people have certain chronic illnesses, there are some ways of eating that could help them manage those conditions. But most of what’s out there is an over-focus on nutrients, which is particularly confusing to people. By the time people show up in my office – I don’t do clinical work anymore, but when people used to show up in my office, they were so confused because they’d been on every diet, and at a certain point they start to conflict with one another. One’s saying eat the carbs, the other one’s saying no carbs. Some are high protein, some are vegan. So people get to this place where everything feels off the table.
Chris Sandel: I think it reduces food down to nutritional components when actually that’s not the only parts of a meal. There is so much to value from having a really great relationship with food or to be able to experience having a meal with other people or all of these other things that aren’t about how much B1 or B2 is in this particular food. I think that people forget that. I also think there’s so much anxiety and worry around food; like, how much is the nocebo effect having an impact on the kinds of reactions that people get when they’re eating?
I think we’ve taken something that is very complex and tried to simplify it, and we’ve also ignored these things that feel a little bit squishy in terms of like eating with people is really helpful for you, or eating with people where it feels like it’s an enjoyable meal, irrespective of what food is being eaten is really helpful. There’s these parts that we really miss that are really important for people’s health.
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah, and the table is often where we first experience belonging. If we’re in a household that has a lot of anxiety and conflict at the table, that’s going to impact our relationship with food.
I also was thinking about this earlier and I didn’t mention it, and then you just said something that made me think of it. As I was listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast talk about the Food Guide Pyramid and critique it, one thing that didn’t come up – and I was kind of surprised by it, because they talked about how much the food industry is like the meat industry impacted; when they saw the pyramid and the meat was at the top and small, they were like, “Oh my God, you can’t tell Americans not to eat beef.”
So one of the ways that the food lobbies have worked is they want us talking about nutrients, because when you tell Americans to eat less saturated fat, they don’t know what that means. What it originally said was ‘eat less red meat’, but then the meat industry lobbied so that we talk more about nutrients, because when you say ‘eat less saturated fat’, that doesn’t mean anything to people and you’re not pointing out specific foods. So then you have all these people learning about nutrients and ways those of us in nutrition science think about food, and I don’t think it’s helpful to people to really focus on individual nutrients and talking about food in terms of saturated fat and your macros and all of that kind of stuff. Food is way more complex.
The other thing I was thinking about as you were talking, Chris, was lycopene in tomatoes and how they found that eating a diet with lots of tomatoes seems to reduce risk of prostate cancer. So what does a supplement company do? They take the lycopene out of the tomato and they sell it in a supplement. And what they found is when you take the lycopene out of the tomato, it doesn’t have the benefit. There’s something about eating the lycopene in the tomato that benefits.
We think we can just pull these things out and give people a magic pill, which promotes capitalism and industries, instead of just eating food. [laughs] So that’s just another example of how nutritionism and the focus on individual nutrients really creates a lot of confusion in people as they’re navigating the world of food and eating.
Chris Sandel: Also, one of the other things you talk about in the book is how much the foods you eat match up to the kinds of foods that have been studied. If you’re from a white European background, then it’s more likely that the kinds of foods that are recommended as part of a dietetics course are going to be the things that people are speaking about. But if you’re coming from a different background, they don’t even know what your foods are. It just gets dismissed, like, “No, you need to start to move away from those traditional foods and move into these because we understand these better.”
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah. I still need to do a deeper dive into the background of the field of nutrition and dietetics, but it was born out of white women in the field of home economics. Like if you go to study nutrition at Oregon State University, it’s in the College of Home Economics. I can’t even believe they still have a freaking College of Home Economics. But the field was dominated, and still is dominated, by white women.
One of my learning edges is learning the history of the field, but there’s a lot of whiteness and white supremacy in our nutrition, like very Eurocentric eating recommendations. Sade Meeks from GRITS Inc. was pointing out in a training I did with her how when you look at the Mediterranean, it includes countries like Turkey, but Turkey has Brown people. So they focus on Italy and the Eurocentric parts of the Mediterranean and leave out countries that have Black and Brown people when they are part of the Mediterranean, too. That’s just one example of how whiteness and white supremacy shows up in the field of dietetics and nutrition.
01:23:47
Chris Sandel: I know you’ve referenced this already in terms of the body grief piece, but this is something I keep coming back to with clients, and I think it’s such a helpful framing to talk about this work and for them to understand the things that come up when doing this work. Do you want to talk a little about this?
Hilary Kinavey: Grief is a huge part of healing. It’s a piece of that reckoning that people don’t necessarily want to do, and it’s one of the things that tends to have people wanting to jump over the deep dive, because grief is very hard to be in and something that some us aren’t all that familiar with. But there has to be a reckoning with all that’s happened, and there has to be a reckoning with what you’re releasing. And often grief is associated with that.
In groups and circles, when we ask people what they’re grieving as they turn towards body trust and heal their relationship with food and body, they’re grieving the time spent and the money spent, sometimes, trying to change their bodies. They’re grieving the loss of thin privilege sometimes. They’re often grieving a sense that they’re never going to have the ‘big reveal’ or they’re not going to arrive somewhere where everything is perfect and together.
This grief process is in every step of the work. When we tend to sublimate or ignore grief, we often get stuck. We can’t necessarily move forward. So grief itself is the reckoning, in a way, because we have to let go enough to say, “I’m sitting in this pain that I can’t immediately remedy. I’m going to allow myself to feel this ambivalence about moving forward.” Because many people come to us from a place of knowing, “I don’t really want to go back to what I was doing, but I’m not sure about how to move forward, and I’m not super excited about this either.” [laughs] I think that’s the intuition about the grief and the letting go.
One thing I like to make sure we say is that on the other side of the reckoning is a lot more joy and self-acceptance and peace and community and trust and life. So it’s worthwhile, and yet none of these phases that we describe in our framework are linear. We bounce between them as our lives change and we evolve. Grief shows up again and again, is my point.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, we go through different things. We age. There will be different situations that mean that grief arises again. I think when I brought it up with clients and talked about this, as bizarre as it sounds, there can almost be a relief when I mention that because they’re like, “Oh, that makes sense.” Because there can almost be this feeling of, “Why am I feeling this way? It doesn’t make sense I’m feeling this way. I understand this intellectually. It just doesn’t seem to fit.” And then when we talk about grief, they’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” It might sound bizarre, but there is this relief that can come with that realisation.
Hilary Kinavey: Yes.
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah, it’s not something they would name until you name it, and then when they have a name for it, it almost reveals a path through where there’s some willingness to make space for it, because it does resonate so deeply.
01:28:03
Chris Sandel: There’s a quote in the book that I really love. You say, “We believe that what we call body image work should be fat affirmation work in eating disorder recovery.” Talk a little about this. And I am 100% in agreement with you on this.
Hilary Kinavey: We’ve just come to feel that body image work is not really what’s happening and not what needs to happen. Body image work feels like a replication of The Self-Improvement Project, like ‘it’s time for you to now feel better about your body’. I think in all of disordered eating and anti-diet circles, what we’re actually trying to uproot is the anti-fat bias that has permeated the way we’ve done everything.
Body image work hasn’t been shown to be that helpful anyway, but what is helpful is really expanding our ideas of what is acceptable, attractive, beautiful – understanding that fat people have always been here and always will be here, and understanding that fatness is an acceptable, lovely, beautiful way also to live a life.
So we are really wanting people to expand their ideas of what’s acceptable instead of just focussing on feeling better about their own body.
Chris Sandel: For me, even if I continue to call that ‘body image work’, or the same with using ‘self-care’ instead of ‘self-preservation’, it needs to take on board all of those qualities that you’re talking about.
Hilary Kinavey: Yes, exactly.
01:29:47
Chris Sandel: You also talk about the developmental theory of embodiment and the five dimensions as part of this. Can you explain this a little bit for the listeners?
Dana Sturtevant: Like five, six years ago I started to geek out on this word ‘embody’, like what does this word mean? It’s being thrown around more and more today, and yet it’s kind of an elusive term.
Years ago, I started reading more and listening to podcasts. Tara Brach had a three-part series on embodiment and this idea that when we’re entering the body – when we think about embodiment, one way to think about it is like we’re moving through the world like a floating head, completely disconnected from our body. That would be disembodiment, where you’re more connected to your head and your brain. I mean, we’ve had people in groups say, “I wish I didn’t have a body. I love my brain, I’m very smart, but I just wish I didn’t have to deal with this.” So there’s this phenomenon of this floating head.
When we’re thinking about embodiment, one thing we’re thinking about is how do we get below the neck? And when we enter the body, it’s like entering the wilderness. We’re leaving this area that’s really mapped and controlled by the brain and entering wild, uncharted territory where the tools you’ve been using to navigate diet culture are no longer useful here.
Niva Piran’s work was something we came across when we were talking more about embodiment. Somebody at one of our talks came up and said, “Have you looked into Niva Piran’s research?” When we stumbled upon Niva Piran’s research, it was like a whole language opened up for us in terms of how we talk about embodiment. One thing we love about Niva’s work is she really has identified how the culture writes itself on the body and how our social identities, our social location, our privileges, and our marginalization, these kinds of things really impact the way we engage with the world. So she has a sociopolitical view on embodiment, which we really appreciate.
Out of her research, listening to people’s body journeys – we call them body stories, she calls them body journeys – are five dimensions of the experience of embodiment, one being body connection and comfort versus body disconnection and discomfort.
Agency versus restricted agency – and agency includes physical agency, the capacity to act independently and make your own decisions, and it also includes voice. Especially those of us who are assigned female at birth, we’re really socialised to go underground and lose access to our own knowing and our voice and our ability to speak up when injustice is happening. That’s huge with people choosing body trust: the ability to set boundaries and say ‘no’ and ‘not now’ and ‘that doesn’t work for me anymore’. So part of what we’re reconnecting to is our voice as well as our physical agency.
And then desire, owning desire versus disowning desire. We loved what Esther Perel said in a talk I attended. She said, “Desire is owning the wanting, and in order to own the wanting, there needs to be a self that feels deserving of the wanting.” So often, when clients come to me, they don’t even know if they like what they’re eating. I’ll say, “Do you like what you’re eating?”, and “What the hell does that have to do with it?” is usually their comment. [laughs] But they don’t even know. They can’t even answer that because for so long it’s not been about what they want; it’s been about what’s the ‘right’ thing.
Chris Sandel: There was a great quote that “pleasure is a measure of our freedom” which I thought really summed up this desire piece so well. You have to have or feel like you have a sense of freedom to be able to lean into that, because without that, you are unable to discover, “Do I really like this food?” because it feels like that’s not even the right question.
Dana Sturtevant: Yeah, there’s permission for pleasure in this work, and there’s a whole chapter on allowing for pleasure and satisfaction. Satisfaction is so different than being full, when we just look at food as a place we might experience pleasure – which I know growing up in a dieting culture, we tend to pathologize pleasure and desire.
So part of coming home is understanding what foods really are satisfying to us, like they hit the spot, and can we touch on satisfaction at least once a day, where we get something to eat that’s like “ooh, that was so good”? When we eat food that’s satisfying, food tends to take its place in our life where it’s not so front and centre. It’s there, it’s part of our life, it’s part of our joy, but we’re not spending 70% of our day thinking about it.
That ‘pleasure is a measure of freedom’ concept comes from Adrienne Maree Brown. We highly recommend her work, and the book Pleasure Activism particularly talks about that understanding pleasure as a measure of freedom. Because when we look at, in the culture, who is allowed pleasure and who’s not – and we just had this American harvest feast over here, and there’s so much rhetoric around being ‘good’ and keeping your eating reined in. People really struggle to allow themselves pleasure when they’re eating that meal.
Chris Sandel: Just on the satisfaction piece, what I’ve found with clients is the more that someone is able to allow satisfaction, often the easier it is for them to reach that point, whereas the more it’s off-limits, the more it has to be much more specific. I can eat a meal that feels very functional but still get a level of satisfaction from it because there’s not so much hanging on that one meal. It’s just another meal; I’ll get to eat again in a couple of hours. There’s a different relationship with that versus where there are all these rules around what you can and can’t eat, and even when I eat something that I enjoy, there’s the guilt or the shame mixed with it. It’s hard to have these very clean feelings around it.
Dana Sturtevant: I think one thing you’re naming is how when we really restrict pleasure, and satisfaction is something we only experience occasionally, it puts a lot of pressure on that meal to do it. When we have experienced satisfaction more consistently, we can make do with a meal that’s not so satisfying. It’s a tall order to think we can touch satisfaction every time we eat, but when we make do with what’s available because that’s what’s available and we don’t have time or the privilege of going to seek something else out, as long as our bodies know there’s some satisfying stuff coming our way, it’s much easier to navigate that.
01:37:55
Chris Sandel: There’s a quote in the book towards the end talking about “If you lost trust in another relationship in your life, what would you need to be in place to rebuild this?” I think, again, this is a really nice way of framing things and is something I talk about a lot with clients. What are some of the ideas that come up connected to this? Do you want to speak on this idea for a little bit?
Hilary Kinavey: We acknowledge that when we lose trust in other relationships, we don’t just decide to trust them now. I think that’s the energy sometimes people bring to this practice, like “I’m doing body trust now.” [laughs] What we find is that of course there needs to be a process of moving towards body trust. Trust is rebuilt in all relationships with small, consistent acts over time.
Folks are really building trust by practicing and building practices for and with themselves that are truly theirs. We aren’t as interested in prescribing the practices as we are supporting people in finding ways to combat the perfectionism and idealism that has marked dieting culture and has kept their practices from being something that felt nurturing to them and also something that actually works for them or fits into their lives.
So when we’re practicing, it can be a lot of little things. When people go on a diet, they often are aware if they’re doing it right within a couple of hours. When people are engaging a healing approach like body trust, it’s more unravelling. It’s more uncertain. There’s no certainty that you’re doing it right. So what I do think we can anchor to is those foundations we talked about earlier, and also, “What am I practicing right now that feels good?”
Maybe I’m practicing not making a plan. Maybe I’m also practicing setting some boundaries with someone in my life about not talking to me about dieting anymore. And maybe I’m practicing allowing myself not to move if I’ve had a relationship with movement that’s been compensatory and punishing. Maybe I’m also practicing telling people when I’m struggling or suffering.
There’s all these little things that we do over and over again that start to change us and change the way we feel in our bodies and in relationship to ourselves. I’ve said for a long time that body trust work is truly about building a relationship with yourself you can stand to be in for a lifetime, that maybe even you want to be in for a lifetime, instead of having a self that is constantly a performing and perfecting version of self.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I really like that as an analogy. Also, with all the examples you gave there, this work is so much broader than just food. It’s, “How do I truly take care of myself with everything that life is going to throw at me? How do I be kind and caring and curious and all of these things, whatever is going on?” Not that you’ll always do that to the best of your abilities. It is aim for a C-. But I do think taking the blinkers off where this isn’t just about food, this is like, “How do I do life?”
Hilary Kinavey: Exactly.
Chris Sandel: This has been a wonderful conversation. I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of everything covered in the book, so I don’t want listeners to think that we’ve covered everything. It is by no means even a small part of what is included in the book. Is there anything we didn’t touch on that you guys want to mention?
Dana Sturtevant: I think the only thing I want to mention is as people are listening to this, this isn’t your fault. Things can be different. Your body is not a problem or a project to be solved. And your struggle is what connects you to humanity, not separates you. That’s the piece I really wanted to highlight. It’s an important part of self-compassion and that idea of looking and listening with kindness and curiosity as we tend to develop this narrative that “I’m the only one who…” That’s why exploring this work in community can be so powerful, because you realise, “Oh, I’m not the only one who…” and your struggles are what make you human. That’s what connects you to humanity, not separates you.
Chris Sandel: I love Tara Brach’s work on this, and I also really like Kristen Neff’s stuff as well. She talks about not forgetting that we are human and being in touch with that common humanity.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where should people go if they want to find out more about the work that you guys are doing?
Hilary Kinavey: You can find us at https://centerforbodytrust.com. We’re also on Instagram and Facebook. I think Twitter days – we don’t use it much anyway – are limited. [laughs] But yeah, find us. Particularly on Instagram is where we’re most active right now. We look forward to seeing you there.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I’ll put those links in the show notes. Thanks again for coming on the show. This has been great.
Hilary Kinavey: Thanks so much for having us.
Dana Sturtevant: Thank you, Chris.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant. I highly recommend the book Reclaiming Body Trust, and I know it will be one that I use and recommend a lot with clients this year.
That is it for this week’s show. As I mentioned at the top, in a couple weeks I’m going to be starting with new clients again. If this is something you’re interested in, you can go check out www.seven-health.com/help. I’ll be back next week with another episode. Until then, take care of yourself.
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