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 113 of Food Psych. I'm your host, Kristi Harrison, and today I'm talking with Sonya Renate Hailler, an amazing activist in this body image space that I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time.

She is the founder and radical executive officer of the body is not an apology,

a digital media and education company that reaches over 1 million people each month in 140 countries with their articles and content focused on the intersection of bodies, personal transformation, and social justice.

I talked with Sonya about intersectionality and what that really means to her.

We talked about radical body love versus mainstream body positivity and how the movement has been co-opted as it's grown.

We also talked about dealing with weight gain and grappling with weight stigma during the intuitive eating process and living in diet culture and learning to navigate this body negative world as anti-diet activists and so much more.

It's a really rich, really wonderful episode, and I can't wait to share it with you all in just a moment.

First, I want to answer this week's listener question. This comes from a listener who writes,

I'm struggling with anxiety and do feel better when I'm eating healthier foods, but I feel that I slip into orthorexia because of my anxiety and black and white thinking.

Yeah, that is such a good question and I think this trips many people up, especially people who deal with orthorexia, which is defined as the unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

I use the term healthy in air quotes a lot of the time because that's a loaded term.

People put a lot on the term healthy and conversely the term unhealthy, right?

There's so much moral value that is loaded onto those terms in this culture that we live in, which right now diet culture has taken the form of healthism.

The idea that you're only valuable or your moral value comes from being healthy, quote unquote, and being healthy is defined in a very narrow way in this society that we're living in right now,

which usually ends up meaning some version of thin, privileged, able to afford things like green juice and smoothie bowls and Instagram about them, right?

So oftentimes young as well, tech savvy, educated, white, right?

So these sort of oppressive definitions of health that don't actually encompass true holistic health, right?

And we've talked on the podcast before about how the term holistic health, quote unquote, has gotten used to mean just physical health actually.

It was Alan the Venevates who made that point first in his episode.

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