Our world is built with stories.

Sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other.

The liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart.

Today's story, that is bad.

So almost two months into this quarantine now,

and I know that I'm not alone in the fact that I've put on a few LBs during this quarantine.

You know, not being able to go to the gym, the reduced movement, the extra pancake breakfast and late-night snacks

have all become part of my newly fashioned quarantine body.

And I know that I'm also not alone in feeling that on some level these extra pounds on my body are somehow a bad thing.

That this extra fat is something that I'll be able to, you know, fix when we are done with quarantine.

Because like you, I live in this culture where we are bombarded on every side with this story that fat is bad

from the depictions of who is beautiful in our media to the diet ads on all of our timelines and all of our billboards and magazines and everything else

to the practice of getting on the scale at the doctor's office, which I never thought twice about until we recorded this episode, by the way.

But it's all around us. We're taught that a thinner body is a healthier body, a more beautiful, acceptable body.

And that story that we swim in affects everything. It affects the way we eat, the way we think about ourselves.

We feel ourselves the way we feel our own bodies, the way we shop, the way we connect to one another, experience our lives.

And like so many other fundamental myths that impact the way we experience our lives, most of us rarely take the time to really pull this story apart and ask if it's even true.

Is it actually true that fat is bad? Or maybe are there some other reasons why this story has become so commonplace in our society and in our minds?

Today, Hillary McBride and I are going to be talking with Christy Harrison, who's a certified intuitive eating counselor and the author of the book, Entide Diet. Welcome to the Largest Podcast, everybody.

I'm curious if you have some insights into where we even got this story around weight stigma.

Like what is going on that we have believed that fat is so bad? Because from my preliminary readings, the bias against fat existed long before the research that correlated size and other health concerns.

So what do you have a sense of what was going on there and how we got here?

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