Speaking With a FORMER Body Positive Advocate..

all right so sarah thank you so much for coming on the live stream coming on the channel uh again we've tried to get an interview set up a long time ago like months ago and it didn't happen but we're finally able to get it together now um with everything kind of going on i figured like we just i was like we need to figure it out and so i know that we've we've shared dms in the past and so i'm just kind of curious just to start off the the interview so people kind of understand like where you're coming from because i think that it's really hard right now because there's people that say they are health at every size and there's people that say i'm body positive and there's people that say i'm fat acceptance then there's like so it's really difficult to really understand i guess someone's kind of where they're coming from so i would love like i know it's maybe like an elevator pitch of like who you are what you stand for and what you do online yeah absolutely so hi everybody uh my name is sarah i call myself a self-love mentor i'm a writer i'm an event creator and my biggest goal in life is for people to know that at any size any age any weight you are always capable of creating some kind of positive change in your life so that you can live a life that is fueled with joy and love from the inside out um i have been called a representative of many communities before but like many people i felt i've never really fit in so what i say and what i will say completely unapologetically and open here i don't consider myself to be a fat advocate even though for the last three years i've run the only truly body inclusive personal growth event in the market and i absolutely believe in empowerment for all bodies i don't even consider myself to be a figure in body positivity anymore because my observations about the body positive community have made me uncomfortable with being associated and because i have someone who have lost weight in the past i've been slightly ostracized and escorted out of the community um i don't consider myself to be a proponent of health at every size although i have read healthy at every size and i think the book is actually shocking and if more people read the book and what it actually said versus how the movement has been extrapolated upon by people in other communities they would be mind blown thought the book was actually really great but there were a lot of holes in it um what i want is for everybody no matter where you are in life no matter how scared you are that you're broken no matter how much you are worried about the things that have weighed you down in the past you are capable of creating change and i believe in personal transformation i believe in healing i think diet culture is i believe that conscious waste weight loss should be accessible to people who want to partake in it and really i believe in changing lives that it works for you so i would say more about liberation and empowerment than a desire to fit into a pre-prescribed movement because i think as we're all observing some of the movements out there are so divisive that i no longer wish to associate with them and have it for years yeah and i that was awesome you did a great job there i was i was like well okay all right cool uh you know exactly what you're going to say um you know i i've been running events for three years um and i've been a speaker and a writer and you know i'm a little older so i don't want to say i have less [ __ ] to give but i'm less concerned with being popular than i am right now about being truthful and i just genuinely believe that if you speak your truth from a place of love and authenticity that there will be people who need to hear what you have to say and i think there's an entire generation of people um women that that want to find a greater version of themselves without demonizing who they are now or where they've been and how can we offer that to them how can we offer people self-forgiveness and self-love and empowerment without demonizing the path in the journey up to that point i love that and so what i mean there are so many things that i want to ask just from that intro so the the first thing and i think that this is this is something that i've personally struggled with so i am asking as someone that's genuinely curious so you you basically kind of what i heard when you said you are not a proponent of health at every size but you have read healthy at every size and you think the book is great and you really um but i i think that that is a really important distinction and i think maybe in the past i have struggled to separate the two and i think i think for for good reasons because once i started talking about this it was immediate attacks that i was getting and i was just like what the heck is going on here yuri by the way it is really scary and uncomfortable to be on the end of that stuff especially if you're someone who wants to be liked or um you know maybe you've had some codependency or self-esteem stuff like you want to be a pleaser and you don't want to rock waves and stuff and it's it's hard to do that so yeah so like what would you say in your i guess it would be your experience would be the main difference between health at every size and the maybe like the tenets or what the book is actually trying to put out there i think that's a wonderful question and by the way i i almost think this is an entire freaking conversation on its own like like like i'm in the middle that's the issue right that's the issue with all of this stuff i think is all of the the little things we might touch on today is like they are gigantic things yeah you're huge and here's the problem the problem is that we as a people maybe not you and me but we as a people are really only comfortable with binary thinking right we want easy answers we want to know what categories we fit into um critical thinking for yourself the intern taking in of information and internalizing it and understanding it for yourself is not something that people are really into these days so so many people are looking for the comfort of binary thinking and to be honest most of this stuff is all nuanced and it all requires a level of empathy and self-awareness that that fear doesn't work with right so you know first off it's the acknowledgement that people other than you have a different experience in their body and your truth and your reality may not be the reality and truth that works for somebody else for example there are so many uh many women but also men who come to the body positive community from the eating disorder recovery community and they come from restrictive eating disorders and their truth which i don't understand but i absolutely have to hold space for is that food restriction of any kind is the opposite of freedom so liberation for them means removing the shackle and the fear of eating okay for somebody like me where over consumption was a way for me to handle my coping mechanisms and my eating and my pain um it's the the freedom is in the huh the freedom is in the liberation from using food as a coping mechanism as opposed to the restricting it right but those are diametrically opposed views so we're talking about 2p2 groups of people who unless they're innately interested in being empathetic to the other they will never agree because what i view as food freedom what i view as necessary for my body to feel free when i'm 39 years old and 375 pounds and unable to move is intrinsically the opposite of what somebody who is 107 pounds and and trying to have the courage to eat a piece of cake and i don't say that lightly like i say that like you know nothing is the same everything is nuanced and until you are willing to get out of your head and realize that not everybody comes from the same story as you um it's not gonna work and and to be honest when i read this book like i was like okay i have to read this book because me personally on a personal level have been really attacked by people who call themselves supporters of health at every size in the past i've had a really big challenge with it and i'm like okay i gotta read this book and really see what it's about and i found myself blown away at what linda bacon actually wrote versus how people have extrapolated it and and to be honest this book the health in every size book really does suggest that people live in a way that is healthful to them it suggests movement it suggests you eat uh real foods mostly plants it suggests you care and nurture your body um and what i found is that this this book in specific and next time if i know we're going to talk about it if we can do this again i'll pull up some like real quotes this book fails to address the the needs of super fats very large bodies that are facing medical issues because of their weight or those people for whom mobility has become a problem this book to me really seems to address more slender bodies or uh larger persons for whom mobility and health has not yet become a challenge and where i want to fill in the gap of the conversations that i see is how do we offer people who know they are no longer comfortable in their body where their mobility is now impacting their quality of life how do we offer those individuals a way to create change that's not rooted in shame and that's rooted in healing and love and transformation because the way that this community the community that i feel like i've been a part of in my body is gonna have different needs than somebody who's 20 pounds and just you know one wants to lose 20 pounds in order to feel a little bit you know yeah more desirable does that make sense yeah no no absolutely i'm still working through the words this is i mean man this conversation already just from the start is like i'm i really am really glad that we're doing this um that's why i'm like dude you and i we there's so much we have in common and i've always i've always loved um your willingness to see nuance which i think is so important so you know i'm always down to chat with you yeah and so the thing that i've i've said many times and i i'm seriously like everything i say if i if you feel like maybe it's a little bit off or or you you can offer a better uh line of thinking or a better point of view please okay so i'm i really want to hear that but um for me i've said many times with the the health at every size movement i'm like a lot of the a lot of the uh like the advice they give and like the advice that i see like a lot of these dietitians and nutritionists on instagram give i'm like this 1 000 if someone is struggling with not eating enough or they have been over restricting their entire life and they're really trying to you know try intuitive eating or they're trying to not track everything in like i'm like all of this stuff this will change that person's life like this is for that person but i'm like i feel like the people that come from you know where i was where you were where you know super fats or whatever word is correct like where people are coming from literally like you said your mobility is becoming a problem or you're like for me a big thing i was 20 when i lost the weight so i wasn't necessarily i didn't have mobility issues but my anxiety about like my anxiety about my mortality was sky high like i was seriously afraid right and so for me like those tenants of just you know um i know we're kind of getting off track but like as far as like just eat for whatever your body wants like eat eat whatever like try to be intuitive about it i'm like that wouldn't have helped me at the time like i would that wouldn't have been again it definitely would have helped someone in the other position but so that's kind of always been one of my i don't even want to call it a critique but that's something i've always said it and so i'm just kind of curious what you think about it so let me let me like active listen that back to you in a way that i think will help will help crystallize some words for it okay what what i said when we when i literally first picked up this book is that this book has a lot of great stuff in it but it doesn't apply to every single specific example or every specific backstory and i think part of the challenge with all with so many of these movements is that they don't allow for nuance and they don't allow for different persons of different backstories and different challenges to adjust for them okay so i'm i'll be 42 on saturday right thank you yeah i'll be 27 all over again i'm 27 right now actually oh i'm not gonna play [ __ ] you uh you know listen when i was 27 and plus size i was closing nightclubs in las vegas dancing all night and i was probably 295 300 pounds right my body was in a much different place right but by the time i was 35 or 36 years old i was literally shrinking my life to fit what my body was capable of and i don't know if you can understand this and i certainly hope well i don't i don't want other people to understand it but maybe other people who are watching you know can relate the idea of saying no to doing activities because you're concerned about the walk from the car to the restaurant of you know walking into somebody's party or house and immediately looking for where the chair is um or if you can fit in it or if you can well i mean yeah that's sort of a given i mean for me my challenge was was also that my um there was so much just stress on my joints and my knees that my my knees would just buckle out like i i could be walking at target and my and i would just buckle my legs would buckle or i was a singer in a semi-professional choir and we would be walking to the stage and i fell i literally fell while singing christmas music in my choir and and it just it just got to the point where like i was saying no but what really drove me to change and to to make change to start making change was not even the physical reality of my body because i had just gotten so used to it right like i was i was getting so used to it what really was starting to scare me um was this emotional idea that everybody was living life and i was watching it go by me um everybody was experiencing life and i was watching other people from inside my apartment and i wanted real love and i wanted vacations and i wanted healthful intimacy and i wasn't at a place where i i could even understand what that was or had any experience with it so i started at this top level of just trying to get my body out of pain and beginning there allowed me to go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and you know um one of the things i teach when i work with people is that you got to start where it [ __ ] hurts the most and if you start where it hurts the most and you keep going with honesty and with honesty and the willingness to be uncomfortable and you keep digging for people like me and i don't know for you but i know for for people like me there can be a tremendous association between your weight your self-care trauma from your past your ability to care for yourself what you're able to see you know um habitual self-abandonment and so that's why a traditional diet will never work because if you are truly only focused on reducing a number and you are somebody that has an emotional relationship to food or somebody who has unadjusted trauma that's poking out into the other ways or if you are a chronic self-abandoner which i've been then it doesn't matter how much weight you lose because you will inevitably gain it back because you will not have done um the healing work it takes to readjust the entire parameters of your life i know we just got off on a massive tangent and i'm really [ __ ] sorry about that because you did ask me a question no no it's totally fine i mean i that was great so i mean just to piggyback off that one of the things you said and this is something i've said literally from the very beginning of my channel was when i was at my heaviest i felt like i wasn't living i was just existing and like that to me was i i remember like i used i skateboarded all the way up until like i i never stopped really you know what i mean like i continue but i just remember like i would skate with friends and we would go like half a mile and they're going and i'm like i can't go any longer you know and like there was just so many little things and i wasn't even i was under 20 years old at that time right and so i i totally understand where you come from there so i actually have a question for you because i think this is very interesting because one of the things i mean not one of the things my main goal with my channel is i want to help those who want to lose weight right that's the first thing they have to want to lose weight that's the most important thing but then i want to help people who want to lose weight lose weight and keep it off in a healthy and sustainable way right like that's that is my goal i'm not saying you have to get shredded and compete in bodybuilding shows but if you're especially if your mobility is becoming an issue all of those things we were talking about so i'm curious because i'm sure you've worked with a lot of people as well like what does that look like if you were able to just kind of like this is what i would i'm not going to say recommend because i'm not saying that you're telling other people to do this but in your mind what does that look like that's a really big question uh so let me let me break it down into a couple different things um first off the number one thing that i teach and i want people to realize for themselves is that they are more powerful than they realize they are uh the second thing that well not the second thing but but one of the other things i want them to know is that if if they are in a challenging place with their body and if they feel that weight loss is something that they want to pursue i want people to get really honest with why um i i support conscious weight loss but i think that i also think that a lot of the times especially women uh when people are saying they want weight loss they actually want something else okay so what i start to what i'm starting to talk about now but what i really believe is that there's a difference between diet culture as a value system conscious weight loss as an action and personal transformation which is really spiritual growth and an uncovering so you know my channel and my work is not about weight loss i do talk about uh what conscious weight loss can be okay but really it's about how do you deal with the [ __ ] that is really keeping you from living the life that you want to be and and being the most empowered version of you um so i think you know listen i'm not gonna say anybody can lose weight uh weight loss itself is science although it's very emotional for so many people it's relative science so if somebody comes to me and says they want to create change in their life what i really want to know is what they want to feel in their life what do you want to feel in your life don't tell me i want to be a size 10 tell me what you want to feel and then go after the things in life that create those feelings because if you are genuinely working to connect to higher self with self love and i'll define that for you in one second so we're on the same page if you are genuinely working to your highest self you will fall into alignment so i really talk about self love which overlaps a lot with body positivity but self love is the thing that i really really stand behind but here's what i call self-love self-love to me is not bath bombs and getting a manicure all those those things are lovely love love is any thought any action any belief anything you do that connects you to your greater and highest self repeat any thought any action anything you do that connects you to your higher and greatest self and what is your higher and greatest self your higher and greater self is somebody who feels fear but is not controlled by it it is the most authentically powerful version of you that is humanly possible now that will evolve as you evolve right so what you do and what you need to do to serve your highest self will evolve as you evolve but self love is not always easy in fact sometimes the most self-loving things that you can do are also the most painful and we as a people tend to want to be comfortable we don't really want to deal with the hard stuff right so self-loving things can be everything from um i'm not spending money and i'm not going to starbucks right now because i'm on a really big budget to i'm gonna cut off this relationship with this guy who i'm kind of sleeping with who's not really showing up for me but he makes me feel good but he doesn't really respect me but really when he leaves it makes me feel like [ __ ] and i know this is not serving me but i'm kind of addicted to it like to learning boundaries between you and your parents or you and your loved ones are you in social media self-love can be yo i think social media is cool but when i scroll through it i end up feeling like [ __ ] because i'm seeing all these people that aren't giving me authentic messages that relate for me self-love means learning how to advocate for yourself so if somebody comes to me and is really looking to to to feel more joy and to live the kind of life that they know they want to live the big question is what is it that you want how do you want to feel and and what kind of a self-loving life can you create because unlike a diet which you can start and middle and end i don't have any scrunchies here i usually do this unlike a diet which is a straight line start middle and end self love is a scrunchie it just goes on and on yeah so you're basically saying am i committing to living a self-loving life or am i just looking for a start middle and end because you're 27 right now how you grow and self-care and the [ __ ] that you the obstacles that you grow into they're gonna change every year so you're either on this ride or you're not am i committed to living a self-loving life what what will serve my highest self right now is it realigning with food is it realigning with body is it healing past trauma for me when i began it it was 100 focused on body and you know i was around when when i started i was really heavy i was probably like 3.75 but the fittest i've been as an adult when i was i don't know 38 years old i was you know leg pressing over 700 pounds and doing um six flights of stairs holding 50 pounds of weight in 53 seconds but i was also the most co-dependent i'd ever been right i was 275 pounds of beast but my entire perception and self sense of self was tied into what my lovers and my partners thought of me and frankly into proving my worth on social media so that evolution of self-love is having the honesty and the courage to say okay right now serving my highest self means i have to focus on my body right now it means i have to heal my my hurt it means i have to do this and it's the it's it's the willingness to just be along for the ride of whatever it means in this chapter to serve yourself yeah man so many good things in that like when when with weight loss and stuff because so something that i deal with a lot is people will ask me questions of um how fast can i lose x amount of weight right and when when i hear that question i'm like uh it doesn't matter and you're not ready probably you know not in like a i understand where people are coming from because they just want to get it off and like a lot of the stuff like all the shows we've watched and stuff have conditioned us to think that you can lose weight super fast and it's good but as cheesy as the uh the saying is lifestyle change like i i really think that holds a lot of weight because for me like now it's not like people think i i think people believe that i am literally like always stressed out about food stressed about stressed out about gaining my weight back like i feel like there's no way i'll be able to keep this off and i think a lot of that's because of the the 95 of diets fail kind of number that's out there everywhere you know and for me i'm like it's it's literally not a problem for me anymore as far as like i never think i'm gonna get to 360 pounds again it just doesn't happen you know and i don't mean to say that to sound cocky it's just literally that's how i feel and for me that's what i want for everyone that's here in the chat right now listening everyone that's going to watch this video later that's where i want people to get you know and so for me it's gotten to be really i mean just being honest like it's gotten to be really frustrating because now it's almost gotten to a point where i feel like if i even say that i am getting you know messages i'm having people say things about me and i really i'm just like i i can understand where some people are coming for i know i'm rambling but i think you're cool i can understand where some people are coming from with you know a lot of weight loss can be incredibly detrimental and it absolutely can take you down a very dark path trust me i've been there like i know how that is but to say that because something has the capacity of being this thing i don't think that's the same thing as all of it is this thing right well you know first off what we're talking about right now goes back to literally the way we began this conversation which is the fact that this is about nuance and empathy okay um and i say this with absolutely nothing but respect for you and everything that you've done you're a 27 year old man so your relationship to your body and food will be or may be different than somebody else's right i i mean i'm gonna be honest i don't know your weight gain story i don't know you i don't know that well enough and it's not for me to know right but i know for many people the relationship that they have to their body comes from unresolved pain or trauma that becomes the norm in life so even you saying those things you know i think you have the opportunity as a thought leader to be really aware of the fact that other people's experiences may be different than yours okay so for example for me even even if and when i'm in a place with my body where i feel super comfortable and mobile and fit i know that for the rest of my life i will have to be more mindful and aware of food than other people i also know that i'll have to be more mindful and aware of how i might use intimacy as a coping mechanism right and and we live in this life and somehow we think that we're promised that a everything is always going to be fair and b everything is always going to be easy and pain free and the reality is is that all of us have different makeups and it's not always going to be fair and it's not always going to be easy and we are not promised a pain-free life what we are is offered a chance to connect to ourselves in a way that we get better at dealing with discomfort so my my um encouragement to you is like your crazy wacky old aunt here just to kind of like remind you that your experience is awesome for you and there are people who 100 percent will vibe with that there are also people who have a completely different relationship to weight and food than you and have been heavier for 15 or 20 or 30 more years worth of [ __ ] that they're processing and dealing with and that's why none of this is simple and that's why none of this is cut and dry and this is also why a lot of people don't want to have these conversations because they're sticky and they're messy and you know i've tried many times to have conversations with eating disordery recovery influencers and some that i'm wonder that i'm friends with are are really open to talking and a lot of them blocked me on instagram because they don't want to hear that my reality is different from theirs so i think again again and again the opportunities that we have are to say how is my truth my truth and understanding that my experience may be different than somebody else's um but you know if somebody came to me and asked me how they would lose weight i wouldn't even i mean i wouldn't answer them that's not that's not what i what i want to teach you know um i do believe in conscious weight loss but it's not it's not the message and the thrust of where i think i can be beneficial and helpful to people you know what i do want to talk to you is somebody who wants to lose weight but they don't want to do so in a way that they've absorbed themselves in diet culture how do i really heal myself and how do i really heal the relationship that i have to my body and find a greater version of me and wrestle with all of this stuff how do i how do i find this in myself without the external value system that diet culture smashes on us how can i create my own internal value system for my own growth that i'm all [ __ ] about hands down yeah so this actually this goes into what my next question was kind of i think kind of perfectly so um i i definitely do want to say that i i do try to understand where people are coming from but like anyone i'm definitely not perfect at it and there's some times where i get frustrated and i'm like i don't care like what they're saying is i just you know so i definitely can improve on that but hold on let me just defend you and say i'm not attacking you yeah yeah yeah i think you're like a good dude and and you are only limited by your experience and what you encounter and grow and talking to people like me and talking to people who are different will all expand your horizons so i was not in any way shape or form no no i didn't i didn't feel that way at all um okay so i'm kind of gonna switch a little bit uh but again it was kind of it kind of goes into what you were just talking about so one thing that i am very curious about is why do you feel like there are more uh women that seem to be i don't know the right way to put this but like maybe affected by diet culture or more prone to being part of like the health of every size movement because like for me from my perspective i have seen very very very few men that have uh taken up the mantle of health at every size and been like you know saying a bunch of stuff and and the reason i ask is because i get comments a lot of people being like you just hate women and you're always making videos about women and my response is like it's not because i'm seeking out women to like i'm i want to attack women it just seems to be the and i we're not i don't want to bring up anyone in particular but i'm just saying like the the people that i end up responding to tends to be women so i just feel like from my point of view it seems like there are more women in that space than there are men and i'm just kind of curious what your thoughts about that might be well there are more women in the personal growth and wellness space in general than there are men okay um so i don't know that this is reflective specifically of this as much as it is in general first off um let's acknowledge that men although there is more openness about social construct and social pressure historically men experience nowhere near the amount of social pressure to conform or look a certain way than women do completely different ballgame the entire you know our economic structure in this country is is almost dependent on selling you stuff to improve right i mean that's that's a really surface level comment but men on the whole do not face the same amount of uh pressure to look a certain way age a certain way be a certain way but what was made yeah i'd agree with that for sure men okay second off um and this is one of the things that i really love seeing change is that historically we don't see men feeling safe to participate in conversations of vulnerability in general and i think there are many men who struggle and deal with body image stuff but they don't feel okay to talk about it they don't feel safe they don't feel in community to do so they feel that it makes them less of a man to be vulnerable and or sensitive and we're not encouraging men to have conversations about self-abandonment body acceptance and empowerment which is why there are uh male figures out there that i [ __ ] love like jordan syett who really do a wonderful job of talking about mental health and creating places for both women and men to address mental health in their journey um and the importance of that but yeah i think i think that that's a challenge i think that's a problem i think that there are i think that men manifest pressure and and carry it differently than women and it's a lot more societally acceptable for women to um uh you know be vulnerable share feelings talk um and i and i also think historically to be fat and a man was no big deal yeah you know i don't remember where i heard this once and it's probably [ __ ] but who knows i remember when like i was reading some stats about online dating and a woman's worst fear when she was online dating was that her dude was going to be like a serial killer or was going to like date rape her and a man's worst fear was that his date was going to turn out to be fat right um so you know when we say that people really dislike fat people or that society really dislikes heavier people i tend to think there's a lot less tolerance and acceptance of heavier women than there are um for heavier men just in general so yeah yeah i mean those are all things that i've you know through other conversations that that have come up and i i would i would agree with all those things like i i've had conversations with my girlfriend she's also lost a lot of weight she's lost 130 pounds and she um she a lot of like things we talk about is just like the kind of like the policing right like a women have dealt with more uh like policing of their bodies just as like you should be this you should be that you should be blah blah blah blah right and it's interesting for me because i even see it in my like if we look at my analytics on my channel like i literally as a dude right i literally have 74 a woman audience and that is not normal for a guy like it's just not but it is but it is when we think about who consumes content and how they consume content right like who who are audiences that are participating in the conversation in general yeah yeah it's just it it definitely it all it all really makes sense to me and like for me i think even even in the just weight loss space in general like when i there's not as many men that post about their weight loss as women do like if we look on like instagram and stuff like that um and that it's just always been that something that's been interesting to me because even even if we talk about like when i make posts about my loose skin like there wasn't anyone doing that before i was doing it you know not not like i was the first one but it was like it just wasn't a thing you know and i mean there really wasn't anyone talking about loose skin before i kind of started talking about it um and and so i don't know it is it is really interesting and i would i would agree with with all of those those points now i do kind of now another question i have and i i don't want to make this too long we've already been talking for over 35 minutes but um one thing that i am seriously interested because i feel like you i mean with one of the problems i've had with a lot of this stuff is people um use these words um diet culture is one of them and they'll say it's diet culture and then everyone's definition of what that is is different right and that's been really hard for me and so that i mean that's the example that i'm actually curious about so like when you say diet culture because i'm genuinely interested because you seem like you know a lot about this stuff like i i guess i i would ask what do you think it is and then maybe if you could would you explain maybe what you think other people uh maybe like the health at every size movement the larger area maybe you'd completely agree with it but like what would they maybe say it is sure and and by the way your question illustrates one of the challenges in having these conversations is that for the most part there are so many different definitions and interpretations of things that you know it's like you don't remember abbott and costello who's on first what's on second right like people could be talking about the exact same thing and be using entirely different words right um so you know i have this essay that i'm writing right now literally about the difference between diet culture weight loss and personal transformation and what i say is yo in order for us to even have these conversations we got to get on the same page with what our verbage is yeah and that's again a really big problem because so many people who participate in these conversations are coming loaded with fear so they're not coming with openness and empathy they're coming with reality their defensiveness right and one of the things that i say and i just really genuinely believe this is you can either live a loving and an open life or a defensive life you cannot live both at the same time and if you are living a defensive life you will live life in a reaction to others around you and if you are willing to live life more vulnerably you can co-create the experience you have now that's getting into like woo-woo personal gross [ __ ] which is like the land that i live in a lot but that's one of the problems right is that everybody's talking about different things the definition that i really like for diet culture comes from chrissy harrison who's a name you're probably really familiar with who's really outspoken in the anti-diet community um but the idea is that diet culture i believe is a value system it is a system of belief and that system of belief does several things now i'm not giving you like the annotated i'm just giving you like the casual colloquial version one it values thinness over anything else it places finn as the ultimate goal in life those who are thinner than others are more valuable it demonizes certain ways of eating using words like good food bad food clean food junk food right it it adds value remember diet culture is about value so it adds value to ways of eating over others it adds value to the pursuit of thinness to the pursuit of wellness culture versus actual wellness which i believe is something entirely different um and it's a way to sort and filter who the valuable people are and who are not the valuable people right so that's a major generalization but when you think of diet culture think about it being a system of beliefs and that system of beliefs is insidious and ingrained in everything that happens in society to the point that it makes it really [ __ ] hard to separate the two it really makes it hard to separate diet culture from the beauty industry from weight loss from the wellness industry right which is why i really want to encourage people to cultivate their own critical thinking and ask their own questions but diet culture is a value-added system that demonizes certain bodies certain ways of eating certain ways of caring for self and um uh raises up and uplifts and you know i'm word farting on what i want to say but like turns into a superhero the pursuit of thinness the way that we eat that supports thinness the wellness of thinness the the um the beauty and the physicalness of thinness over anything else did that make any sense yeah no no i totally i totally understand that and like i i totally like agree with that like one of the things i've always i've always been like you know diet culture like from what i've understood and it was very similar to that would be like i'm i'm on the same boat you know like i think that just pursuing weight loss like all you care about is i want to get the number on the scale down i want to get the number on the scale down i want it like i think that that is not a good way to go about it and so i do think that diet culture is a problem i guess for me i've struggled with like because everyone again has so many different kind of definitions but i really appreciate you kind of um expanding on that here's what i here's what i just want to encourage you and again like i know this makes me sound like a cranky old lady um men and younger men tend to have a different relationship to to food and body than women do or older women right like they're entirely it can be an entirely different different thing so one of the reasons that weight loss can be so cut and dry for men because it really could be as simple as reducing calories or caloric intake whereas for somebody who has a more trauma or pain-based relationship to food it's you can't just tell them to cut calories because they can cut calories but that doesn't address the hurt that got them to the point where they felt that they don't deserve anything different or better in life right it's a it's a much different it's a much different ballgame right um uh i think that chrissy harrington's uh definition of diet culture is is the the best that i've seen and i refer to it i know that our beliefs are not um aligned but i think she does a great job of of describing what diet culture is yeah and one thing that i wanted to to ask is so one thing that i say a lot when i when i talk about you know when i decided to start losing weight or whatever was that i i literally like i felt like i loved myself enough to change right and one of the one of the things i hear a lot um from people that maybe disagree with me is that um trying to change your body in like any way is because like they i feel like it's become like if you try and change your body it's because you must have hated what your body was at that point right and like it was like there was this self-hatred that led to the change and for me and like again i'm just curious about what your thoughts about this are like for me it was it really was the exact opposite like it really was like again i was 20 years old and i had those thoughts my mortality was always on my mind and i was like this again like i said earlier i wasn't living like i really felt like i wasn't living i was existing and i was like if i want to live you know as and and that's obviously a very broad term but if i want to live my life instead of just exist in it i felt that losing the weight was a very important piece of that puzzle again these these weren't my thoughts at the time i was a 20 year old dude that just wanted to lose weight really let's be like as far as what was going on in my head but looking back on it now i can put those pieces together and understand that for me i did not feel like i was like i hate myself so much i need to make a change and i'm just kind of curious what your thoughts are on on all that um yeah well first of all i think that's a that's a great question and a great statement um and again i think this has a lot to do with perspective and where you were in your life and your path and who you were and where other people are and again the understanding that different people are going to come from different perspectives um i think that the majority of people in life who do make change do so from a place of shame and from a place of fear and not from a place of love they do so because they hate their arms they do so because they don't want to wear a swimsuit with their kids they do so because they they want to wear the certain clothes they do so because they don't want to be disgusting and gross right like i believe many people many women who are driven to diet culture are consciously or subconsciously doing so as a reaction to something else in life okay for example how many people out there go on a big huge diet after they break up with someone right these are all super common things when you make decisions or create change from a place of fear it's never going to lead to loving lifelong sustainable change when you are creating change in your life based on a reaction of what somebody else is doing or what somebody else has done to you or how you are internalizing life that is never self-loving self-loving is turning around and saying what am i feeling right now how do i want to feel in life what do i need to do to feel that way it's not doing something in a reaction to somebody else right and i think most people are living life and they could have a wonderful life like that to be honest most people go through life not mindfully and most people go through life subconsciously making choices so let's just let's just i want to get on the same page with some terminology here because this is really important when i think about when we think about growth and stuff conscious thought and subconscious thought okay our conscious thoughts are those that we are aware of and mindful of as they are happening our subconscious thoughts are what is so ingrained in us that it is the fiber of how we breathe in and out okay so do you use spotify or do you use pandora spotify okay so spotify lets you pick your playlist pandora gives you a playlist based on all the [ __ ] you've listened to in the past so let's just say like you want to be getting it on with your girlfriend and you're like you're like really in the [ __ ] mood and you put pandora on and like some [ __ ] sad music comes on because at one point in time you were like pissed off at your breakup and so you decided to like get drunk and listen to nickelback right that's that's like man that's not the feeling i want to be feeling in my life that's my life subconsciously reacting those are your subconscious thoughts andorra is your subconscious thought spotify is like i want to have the greatest [ __ ] night and i'm going to lay it down and it's going to be like [ __ ] magic mike up in here and you choose your playlist right that shit's all like i don't know whatever yeah like usher or whatever jojo fine yeah but you're subconsciously creating the experience that you want to have in life okay diet culture is the majority subconscious it is so ingrained in the fabric of our life and our thought process that it is how we we move about life and we are not even mindfully aware of that i believe many people who pursue weight loss do so although they believe it is their choice and it is their choice they are doing so driven by subconscious methods uh motives that they're not even aware of whereas if you're choosing to live a most self-loving life and you want to hike or you wanna have enough energy to play with your kids turning around and saying yo i'm 45 i can't play with my [ __ ] kids i want to do something that allows me the freedom to show up for my kids that's proactively creating your experience in life does that does that kind of address your question at all yeah i i i i do understand that but i'm just for me i guess the the i i guess i was more kind of curious about when people i guess where where people's minds are coming from when they say like any any type of change that you make like to your body at all is negative and right i've i've heard that you're fixed yeah that's that's fear that's a lack of empathy for example if you know in the roots of body positivity the roots not saying where it is now but the roots of the body positivity industry comes as an offshoot of fat acceptance from the 60s 70s 80s right so the original intentions of body the original intention of body positivity was for it to be a socio-economic movement that empowered fat bodies for visibility and over the years that's changed um i think that again because it's binary thinking people are saying all forms of changing your body is bad getting lip fillers is bad changing your hair color is bad but they're like ah let me let me back that up because it's because it's hypocritical people are saying like if you change the size of your body or you want to change the size of your body you're not being body positive yeah but you want to get botox it's cool yeah that's a better way to explain kind of the question that i had yeah yeah um i think that that's i think that that's fear-based um and i think you know i think that that's all fear um and i think that that happens a lot and i think it's [ __ ] hypocritical excuse my language and i think the reason that we like we have an opportunity to talk about body liberation versus um body positivity because body liberation is going to look like different things for a lot of people and at the end of the day none of this [ __ ] matters doesn't matter what movement you subscribe to doesn't matter if you don't subscribe to any movement what matters is that you do what works for you and you are mindful and present enough in your life to understand why you are making the choices that you are making you know um when i i you know i was 29 years old at post breakup and i did this super strict diet program called hmr and i remember you know going to home depot and picking up a bag of rock sand and holding it because i was super excited that i lost 40 pounds um and that that diet was the most was so super diet culturey and did nothing to actually heal me or teach me about food or teach me about my body or teach me about appreciation um yeah i really wish i had a pithy answer for you there i'm sorry i want to have one but i will just say that i observe the same thing i think it's hypocritical i think it comes from a lack of empathy i think it comes from um a lack of tolerance and i think it comes from fear i just i really do think it comes from fear anybody who does something different than you or different than you would do is therefore invalid and or wrong and and i think that movements that really pay attention on excluding people as opposed to uplifting or empowering are challenging and the body positivity community is not a community it's exceptionally divisive and i stopped trying to be a representative of the community a long time ago um and you know just trying to use the voice to find a different perspective yeah awesome well i mean i think that's a good place to end it we've been talking for almost an hour now but yeah i'm sorry i meander when i talk no no no it's great so do i so um i'm obviously i'm gonna link every like every where people can find you um what's like your website your instagram again i'll put it in the description but just so people that are watching right now can go and find you yeah um i'm sarah sapporo you can find me at sarahsapporo.com or sarah support on instagram uh listen you know i just want to see you live a life that makes you feel [ __ ] great from the inside out wherever you are and do it from a place of love awesome well thank you so much i seriously this has been great yeah thank you i'm ready to by the way when you want to dissect this together let's do this it'll be great yeah i i definitely as we were talking i was like all right well i need to i'll probably do the audio book because reading for me has been a struggle since i was a child but um i'll definitely i definitely need to actually listen to it so i remember when i read it i was like who can i talk to about this because like i feel duped i feel duped because i feel like everybody's told me what this book is about and it's not what it's about and i want to talk to it because this book is actually yeah i'll do that i promise that's my homework okay all right thank you guys for hanging in and listening i appreciate it thank you so much seriously i hope you have a great day yeah talk to you soon obey the warning signs and when there are flashing lights or wig wags don't attempt to cross until they come to a complete stop

Channel: ObesetoBeast

Views: 114,574

Rating: 4.9406266 out of 5

Keywords: john glaude, body positivity, obesetobeast, sarah sapora

Id: 0bqtKD-QhR0

Length: 56min 12sec (3372 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020