Welcome to Food Psych, a weekly podcast about intuitive eating, health at every size, and body liberation.

I'm your host, Kristi Harrison, and I'm a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor.

Join me as I talk with interesting people from all walks of life about their relationships with food and their bodies.

Hey there, welcome to episode 112 of Food Psych. I'm your host, Kristi Harrison, and today I have an amazing guest for you.

Someone I've been wanting to have on the podcast for a very long time, and we finally made it happen.

I have Jess Baker on the show today, and for those of you who don't know Jess, she is a writer, blogger, and speaker who has a blog called The Militant Baker,

and a wonderful first book called Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls.

And she's just fantastic. She's a really powerful speaker in this space, and she preaches the importance of body autonomy, self-love, mental health, and strong coffee.

And she's really here for intersectionality, and standing up for everyone in this world to have respect and to feel valued regardless of their size, shape, gender, ethnicity, ability, age, or health records,

which I really love. I think she's a powerful voice for intersectionality in this movement, and she also has some great perspective on some of the nuances of body liberation.

She talks about why she likes the term body liberation rather than body positivity, and so we got into that, and we also got into some of the nuances of these conversations that have been going on recently around body autonomy, and people's rights to do with their bodies, whatever they want, and how to square that with the ideals of this body liberation.

So I can't wait to share our conversation with you in just a moment. It's a really good one. And before I do, I want to answer a listener question from this week, so you can submit your own questions at chrisdharrison.com slash questions, and I should say a quick disclaimer before I answer it that these are intended for informational and educational purposes only, not to diagnose or treat any medical condition.

Question comes from a listener named Caitlin who writes, thank you, thank you, thank you for this podcast. It has literally changed my life. I think I'm doing pretty well with intuitive eating so far, but I'm really struggling getting started with intuitive movement.

In the past, I have enjoyed, and they mentioned some gym type forms of fitness. I won't say them here to avoid triggering anyone. I've enjoyed those forms of fitness, but always use them to quote get a good workout.

And I want to try them again, but I'm afraid it will trigger those thoughts since like, you know, diet mentality thoughts, even thinking about it makes me a little anxious.

Do you have any suggestions for how I could start getting back into these activities without triggering myself or alternative non gym activities I could try cannot afford a membership at the moment other than yoga.

So this is a great question and it's definitely very common for people to have this experience of, you know, feeling like you could easily be triggered back into using movement as an instrumental exercise as opposed to joyful movement.

Right, because if you've had that kind of relationship with movement in the past, the wiring in your brain to do it again can be very strong.

And so the first thing I would say is don't push yourself to do these forms of movement until you're ready. And maybe that means walking away from them for a long time or potentially for the rest of your life.

Like if you are triggered back into the diet mentality and feel like you're using certain forms of activity as compensation or to justify your eating.

That is going to be a process to sort of undo the entanglement of certain forms of activity with those thoughts.

And especially when it comes to gym based activities because the gym is sort of designed for instrumental exercise, right, like that's its purpose.

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