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

I'm your host, Kristi Harrison, and I'm an anti-diet registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor, offering online courses and programs to help people all over the world make peace with food.

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

Hey there, welcome to episode 142 of Food Psych. I'm your host, Kristi Harrison, and today I'm talking with Kayla Bluna, writer and fat activist who writes a lot about gender and body politics.

We talked about how gender identity intersects with fatness, how to tolerate the desire for weight loss, why representation matters, and so much more.

It's a really, really good conversation, and I can't wait to share it with you in just a few minutes.

But first I'll answer this week's listener question, which is from a listener named Laura, who writes,

Hi Kristi, you use the term ThinPrivolage a lot on your podcast, and while I understand how fortunate I am to be in a place where fat shaming isn't something I have to endure on a daily basis, I still carry a lot of guilt whenever this term is used.

I'm finally weight restored after 12 years of anorexia, and I'm dealing with an extreme amount of body animosity, but I'm still considered thin by society standards.

Can you please go into a little more detail about why you use this term, what it truly means, and how I can participate without feeling like a hypocrite?

Thank you so much for everything you do.

So thanks Laura for that, that's a really great question, and before I answer I'm just going to give my usual disclaimer, which may not totally apply here anyway, but just in case these answers are for informational and educational purposes only, and aren't a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

So yeah, this is a great question, and it's something a lot of people ask me, and something I've thought a lot about myself as someone who does this work, helping people make peace with food while living in a thin body myself.

The first thing to remember though is that people of all sizes experience body shame.

So you don't need to feel guilty for having trouble accepting your body just because you're on the smaller end of the size spectrum, because that is very, very common.

Fat phobia affects all of us, and it instills a fear of fat, whether or not we're actually living in larger bodies.

So I talked about this in a little more depth with Sarah Harry and with Lisa Dubriel in their episodes, that's episode 139 and episode 140.

So I'll link to those in the show notes so that you can check those out, but just to say like it's very normal and very common in our society, unfortunately, for people of all sizes to have internalized body shame and internalized fat phobia.

And that's one of the reasons why size discrimination is such a problem because it does affect everyone.

So that being said, you know, living in this world in a smaller body versus a larger one definitely does have its differences, and weight stigma is very, very real.

So this is where thin privilege really comes in. So thin privilege is not something that bars you from body shame or internalized fat phobia, right? You can have thin privilege and experience internalized fat phobia like you're talking about.

But thin privilege does protect you from most forms of external fat phobia and also from weight-based discrimination.

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