#65.5: Dieting, Health and Fat Talk with Harriet Brown
"What is the relationship between weight and health? What is the reality, what does it mean to be healthy in terms of weight?” -Harriet Brown
This is a bonus episode of Veggie Doctor Radio that I just had to get in your ears ASAP. It ties in perfectly with my series on Intuitive Eating. The conversation around weight, size, and health can get pretty heated, but I really appreciate this author’s approach to our current drive for thinness and what it is doing to our bodies and our minds.
In today’s episode, I have a conversation with Harriet Brown, the author of Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight. I really loved this book and wanted to explore with her several topics that I feel would benefit my audience.
From our conversation you will learn:
Why she became angry when a therapist asked her to consider accepting her body.
Her own daughter’s struggle with anorexia and how this has changed her paradigm
The physical and psychological consequences of dieting
The relationship between BMI and mortality
The definition of fat talk and why we do it
Weight stigma, size-ism and prejudice
How body weight is associated with feminism
What Harriet wishes more people knew
Harriet Brown
More about my honored guest:
Harriet Brown is a Professor of Magazine Journalism at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and a sought-after speaker on college campuses around the country. She has written for the New York Times Science section, the New York Times Magazine, O, Psychology Today, Scientific American, and other publications. Her most recent book is Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement (Da Capo, 2018). She has also written Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do About It (Da Capo, 2015) and Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia, which won a Books for a Better Life Award. In 2011 she won the University of Iowa’s John F. Murray Prize in Strategic Communications for the Public Good, for her work as an advocate for those with eating disorders. She lives in upstate New York with her family.
How you can connect with Harriet:
http://harriet-brown.squarespace.com
Harriet’s Books:
Body of Truth: How Science, History and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight
Call to Action —> Consider this question: “What if you were OK with your body the way it is right now?”
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