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Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. This is John DeLin back in the podcasting saddle again after too much time spent on my dissertation and on applying to internship for my psychology PhD, but I'm out and I'm back and I'm excited to have a brilliant and talented and important guest on Mormon Stories today.

Her name is, if you don't know, Lindsay Hansen Park or Lindsay Park. Lindsay is known, she's very prolific on the Mormon Internet, I think. I met Lindsay in 2012 when she was actually co leading kind of a fun run for women in the Congo, women who were abused or battered or mistreated in some way.

But she also, by that time, was a perma blogger on feminist Mormon housewives. Lindsay does a lot of cool things. She's a part of FMH. She runs the feminist Mormon Housewives podcast. They're currently doing a series on the wives of Joseph Smith, which is super cool.

She's been a part of the We're Past Church initiative, the Ordanne Women movement. She's currently working for Sunstone and for John Larson at the White Fields Education Foundation. But what we're here to talk about today, at least to begin with, is a series of very, very serious and important topics within, within Mormonism within the LDS Church, within Mormon culture.

And it has to do with body image, it has to do with eating disorders. And from there, it actually leads to several issues around faith and feminism, et cetera. But the topic today, at least to begin with, is going to be Lindsay's kind of struggle with body image concerns, bulimia eating disorders, et cetera.

It's something that we've covered on Mormon mental health a little bit, but we've never covered here on Mormon stories podcast. And Lindsay Hansen Park, we're just super excited to have you on Mormon story. So welcome.

Thank you.

I hope you don't feel like you're cheating on your other podcast.

I don't. We have an open relationship.

You're your polypodcasteus.

Yeah, I was going to make a terrible joke, but I'm not going to do that for the Mormon stories podcast. Thank you for having me.

Well, Lindsay, let's just, let's just dive right in and tell us a little bit about your, your Mormon background, your history. And then let's just talk about how that led to kind of struggling with bulimia eating disorders.

So take as much time as you want to give us a background about your life to the extent that it informs these types of issues.

Sure. And before we get started, I want to say, I guess I want to give a trigger warning for the podcast that I am going to try to talk in language that is as healthy as possible and not set off triggers for people.

But when you're talking about these issues, it's so difficult. I'll tell you a story later on about an actual church article that made my disorder worse.

And I don't want to do that sometimes in with this disorder, you can get ideas from people that you didn't have before that can leave to more unhealthy behavior. So I'm really going to try to avoid that while still sharing my experience.

And I, and I would just say, I'm John for you. I don't know if you know this, but it's really important that we, we keep away from numbers. Like we don't tell, I'm not going to tell you what I weighed when I lost a lot of weight or what I weighed before.

That stuff is really, really triggering because as disorder eating people, people who suffered that from that might know that can become like a benchmark that they're trying to get to. So anyway, so totally, totally.

That's my disclaimer at the beginning. All right. Well, thank you for we know this is serious. I've had a, you know, they're been eating disorders in my immediate family and in my extended family. And just just as another disclaimer, eating disorders are considered to be among the most severe of all diagnoses in the in the diagnostic and statistics manual that psychiatrist and psychologist use that they really aren't necessarily good standardized cure.

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