#208: Media, Wellness-Diet Culture, and the Power of Language with Maxine Ali, Linguist and Body-Image Researcher
Food Psych Podcast with Christy Harrison
Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDS
4.7 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2019
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Body image researcher, writer, and linguist Maxine Ali joins us to discuss why wellness culture is really about privilege, not health; racial objectification and how it contributes to feelings of disembodiment; how to recognize when diet culture is co-opting non-diet language; the power of language in changing the discourse on health and wellness, and so much more!
Maxine Ali is a linguist and body image researcher, with a BA (1st Class Hons) in English Language and Linguistics, and a MSc in Medical Humanities from King’s College London. Maxine’s research interest is how the language of health impacts body image, self-concept and identity.
Having begun her career as a health journalist at the height of London’s wellness boom, Maxine experienced first-hand the perils of diet culture and its destructive physical and psychological effects. In 2017, she left her job as a wellness editor to obtain an MSc in Medical Humanities, examining the role of disembodying language in female experiences of eating disorders, obesity and disability in her thesis. Drawing on her background in linguistics, she began using her platform to dissect the language of wellness and lift the lid on the toxic hidden messages around food, health and body image. Find her online at MaxineAli.com.
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Food Psych, a podcast about intuitive eating, health at every size, body liberation, |
| 0:06.8 | and taking down diet culture. |
| 0:08.8 | I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and I'm an anti-diet registered dietitian and certified |
| 0:12.8 | intuitive eating counselor, offering online courses and programs to help people all over |
| 0:17.2 | the world make peace with food. |
| 0:19.3 | Join me here every week as I talk with interesting people from all walks of life about their relationships |
| 0:24.0 | with food and their bodies. |
| 0:25.9 | By the way, on this podcast we bleep out diet culture stuff like weight and calorie numbers, |
| 0:30.9 | but we don't censor swear words or other adult language, so listener discretion is advised. |
| 0:55.9 | Hey there, welcome to episode 208 of Food Psych. |
| 1:04.3 | I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and today I'm talking with Maxine Ali, who's a body image researcher, writer, and linguist. |
| 1:11.1 | We talk about why wellness culture is really about privilege, not health, racial objectification, |
| 1:17.1 | and how it contributes to feelings of disembodiment, how to recognize when diet culture is co-opting |
| 1:22.4 | non-diet language, the power of language in changing the discourse on health and wellness, |
| 1:27.7 | and so much more. |
| 1:29.0 | It's such a great episode, and I cannot wait to share it with you in just a minute. |
| 1:33.3 | And it really will be just a minute because there's no listener question in this week's episode, unfortunately. |
| 1:38.2 | I just had a major computer malfunction yesterday and today, and I'm still picking up the pieces. |
| 1:43.4 | I actually even got a new computer because my old computer crashed, and I thought that was the heart of the problem, |
| 1:49.2 | but it turns out there's other problems with my drop box and sinking, and all my files are just inaccessible. |
| 1:56.1 | It's kind of a nightmare over here. |
| 1:57.6 | So I'm going to get to it quick this week, but next week we should be out of the weeds with all these technical difficulties, |
... |
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