I am Sarah Jane Case and this is Anya Graham and Coffee.

Hi friends. Happy Monday. I hope your weekend treated you well. Today we're going to begin

a two-part series on health without self-hate. How do we prioritize feeling healthy without

succumbing to diet culture? But first, today's rose bud and thorn. My rose right now

are the azaleas. I just think they're magical. They're so beautiful. Watching them kind of come

to life every spring is breathtaking. My thorn is going to be pretty vague, but I had a pretty rough

start to the morning, got some stressful news, not pumped about it, can't really talk about it,

but that's my thorn. My bud is now that the garden is set up, I can't wait for these little baby

plants to fully form and to get to the harvesting stage of all of these veggies and herbs.

Okay, so as I mentioned in the intro today, we are beginning what will be a two-part series

on health without succumbing to diet culture. And today I want to introduce a few specific

concepts to you. Now some of you will be relatively familiar with these and others may be hearing

them for the first time, but either way, I don't think we can really move on to part two of the

conversation without today's episode. So I want to dive in deep with you. So if the goal of this

series is to help you choose health without succumbing to diet culture, it would probably be helpful

to discuss what diet culture even is. Diet culture is an eating messaging and honestly the overarching

cultural belief that thinness, appearance, and shape are indicative of health and or are more

important than overall health and well-being. It prioritizes restricting calories, it normalizes

negative self-talk, label certain foods as good or bad. As people subjected to diet culture,

we are conditioned to believe that not only does thinness and dining equate to health,

but that the pursuit of health makes one person morally superior to another, and that thinness

takes priority over health. Diet culture is such a large part of our society that it causes us

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