Resolved: Your Anti-Diet New Year
After the holiday season ends, messages urging folks to buy gym memberships, revamp their diets and “get back on track" ramp up. But as research shows: dieting does not work. So, what can folks do to build better connections with food, movement and their bodies? Embodied explores the answers to these questions and provides listeners with tools for thinking about individual and systemic ways to push back on the more than $70 billion dollar industry that promotes thinness and weight loss as the key to health and happiness.
Episode One: Deconstructing Diet Culture
Wednesday, January 5 at 8 p.m
In this episode, Anita unpacks the science that props up diet culture with a registered dietician and certified internal medicine physician. They trace diet culture’s history as far back as ancient Greece and talk through some of society’s moralistic arguments against fatness. Anita also learns from an historian, an ultrarunner in a larger body and a transmasculine physical trainer’s assistant who’s working to make fitness spaces more inclusive.
Episode Two: Relearning How to Eat
Wednesday, January 12 at 8 p.m.
In this episode, Anita explores intuitive eating: an approach to food and health that encourages tuning into your body’s signals about when, what and how much to eat. Anita talks to a neuroscientist about how our brains respond to dieting, and then two registered dieticians walk her through the 10 principles of intuitive eating, which include honoring your hunger, challenging the food police and practicing gentle nutrition.
Episode Three: Becoming Body Neutral
Wednesday, January 19 at 8 p.m.
In this episode, Anita examines a new framework for thinking about our bodies that is gaining traction: body neutrality. It’s a concept that focuses on who you are aside from your body and what rights your body deserves no matter how it looks. Anita talks with fat activists about their differing perspectives on the term and how it fits into the history of the fat acceptance movement. She also hears from a psychotherapist about how body neutrality can be a tool for raising kids to have healthier body image.