Why Diet Culture Sucks With Christy Harrison

Don’t miss a FURIOUS FROLIC with my amazing guest, the Food Psych herself, Christy Harrison! Christy is COMPLETELY fired up about diet culture bullsh*t and all of the harm it perpetuates. In fact she’s so p*ssed off she wrote a book! Join us as we dissect the history of diet culture and reveal its bigotted roots in racist and sexist propaganda about what type of human belongs at the top of the food chain (spoiler alert: thin white men). Even the Suffragettes sucked! Christy has done some amazing detective work and quite literally, this book will change your life and get you MAD AS HELL! Do not miss this episode!

Shownotes

My guest this week is Christy Harrison, intuitive eating coach, anti-diet dietitian, and host of the amazing Food Psych podcast. She is COMPLETELY fired up about diet culture and all of the harm it perpetuates. In fact she’s so pissed about it, she wrote a book! “Anti-Diet” has just come out, and it’s wonderful to see such an awesome HAES message coming out at Christmas, a time when diet culture ramps up the pressure. And here in Australia it’s not just the Christmas pressure, it’s also summer & so we’re all being doubly pressured with those “summer body” messages. Shape shifting diet culture messages keep on being rebranded & re-sold to us, but it’s literally the same old shit sandwich, as Christy is over it! This book has been a long time coming. Christy started her career as a journalist 17 years ago, but has wanted to write a book since she was a child. This book has had a very winding path, like many parts of her career. Around 10 years ago Christy decided she wanted to write a book about emotional eating. She’d just gone back to study public health & nutrition and wasn’t feeling fulfilled creatively. But before that she worked at Gourmet magazine, where she wrote a lot about food and culture and people’s relationships with food. But Christy had a very negative relationship with food, she had been a disordered eater since the end of college. This lead into her first career in food & nutrition reporting - and it wasn’t from a place of feeling at peace or balanced around food. Christy was obsessed, she wasn’t eating enough so constantly thought about food. She kept researching & falling down rabbit holes, and wanted to make use of it. She got very interested in Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, and the politics of food. This was actually quite problematic and she writes about that in the book. Louise also remembers going through a stage of thinking that people like Pollan & Nestle were fantastic, but reflecting back she was coming at it from a disordered place - through a weight centric lens. It really caught Christy’s imagination, and she wanted to “End the o****ty epidemic”. So around 2009/2010 she started researching for the book. In many ways it did help inform her for the book she ended up writing, but it took a totally different direction. She started to research the cultural history of emotional eating. How did we get the idea of emotional eating - where does it come from? At that point Christy identified herself as an emotional eater, someone who ‘ate her feelings’ - not realising that actually it was because she was restricting herself and not eating enough. Through her research she discovered the work of Janet Polivy & Michael Herman, on the impact of restrained eating (basically they demonstrated that restriction leads to binge eating). She also came across a psychiatrist called Hilary Bruch who had some very offensive ideas on how children come to be larger bodied. Christy also discovered the book Intuitive Eating, and fell in love! It made so much sense as Christy finally saw that before she started to try to control her eating, she ate intuitively and was fine. Christy acknowledges her thin privilege which made it easier for her to accept that everything was fine before her disordered eating started. But this was the starting point for Christy’s formal recovery, and she worked wit