Rethinking Body Image and Nutrition in CrossFit
The CrossFit Podcast
CrossFit LLC
4.3 • 757 Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This marks the eighth episode of a special CrossFit Podcast collaboration with the CrossFit Medical Society.
CrossFit Podcast producer Maggie Mullen steps out from backstage for a raw, unfiltered conversation about body image, nutrition, and the culture of CrossFit. From her early days as a competitor and fueling to perform, to finding balance, Maggie opens up about food neurosis, body dysmorphia, and an alternative view of diet culture.
This episode digs into the tension between discipline and obsession, aesthetics and health, and what it really means to chase your best self inside the gym and out.
TOPICS INCLUDED
- How CrossFit reshaped Maggie’s relationship with food and body image
- Body positivity vs. fat shaming — and finding a “third way”
- The role of CrossFit in building self-awareness and resilience
- CrossFit as moving meditation and mental health therapy
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Community Highlight
Duncan Seawell is a clinical psychologist and the president of Forging Youth Resilience (FYR), a nonprofit helping gyms open their doors to kids who otherwise couldn’t access CrossFit.
He launched a Steve’s Club chapter in Denver in 2015 and helped shape FYR into what it is today: a network of 20 active clubs reaching thousands of youth, from foster care to incarceration to kids just trying to find their place.
FYR partners with schools, gyms, and foster homes to deliver trauma-informed CrossFit, covering coaching, transportation, and nutrition. But its heart is FYR Camp, a week-long mountain retreat where kids train, hike, and sit in nightly circles to share their stories.
“It’s sort of a group therapy light context,” Duncan says. “One kid says, ‘I’ve been through this,’ and another says, ‘Me too.’ The power of that connection is amazing.”
As Duncan puts it: “Kids are growing unhealthier in all kinds of ways — physical, mental, metabolic. The solution is prevention. Our job is to make sure no kid is kept out of a gym because of money.”
Know someone you think deserves to be highlighted? Nominate them here.
Share Your Thoughts: Email us [podcasts@crossfit.com].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are going to ask you to be trying to get stronger, to be trying to get more discipline, to be trying to maybe change your body composition in a way that serves you better. I always say, like, I don't care what you weigh. I care what you can do with it. Like, there's no way in at CrossFit. Like, it's not like sports, like wrestling or, you know, I came from Olympic weightlifting. It's like, I don't care what you weigh. It doesn't matter. But I care. You should have weight classes. |
| 0:22.2 | Hot take. It's like, I don't care what you weigh. It doesn't matter, but I care. Running should have weight classes. |
| 0:23.1 | Hot take. |
| 0:32.5 | The game is rigged and not in your favor. |
| 0:37.0 | You've been sold the idea that health insurance has your back, but you're not a person to that. |
| 0:38.2 | You're a number, a stat. It was never about your health. It's about their profit margins. But there's |
| 0:44.3 | another way. It's community care. A health care system powered by the same values that may |
| 0:49.1 | crossfit more than just a workout. A community that helps each other, covers each other, |
| 0:53.9 | and rises together |
| 0:54.7 | through sickness and life's most unexpected challenges. It's time to rethink health care |
| 0:59.4 | to stop relying on the system that's failed us. They sell sick care. We power health. |
| 1:04.8 | Community care. For more information, visit crossfit medical society.com. |
| 1:09.6 | cauliflower. I have a bag. Yeah, because you go to get your veggies in. Just a little bit, though, because I couldn't get too full because I eat two cups of rice. Two cups of rice. Okay, so a quarter cup is 11 for us. So it's like 88 grams of carbs. It's not like insane. Okay. Were you training a lot? Yeah, that's when I was competing. Yeah. And this was like |
| 1:28.1 | post-workout? Carbathoding kind of meal. No, no, no, not even. This was like going into a rest |
| 1:35.2 | day. Oh, you know, got to reload those glycogen stores. It was all fucked up back then. |
| 1:41.8 | Yeah. And okay, what else with competitive days? What were you doing for up back then. Yeah. And, okay, what else, competitive days? |
| 1:46.4 | What were you doing for nutrition back then? |
| 1:48.9 | I tracked my macros from 2015 until 2019. |
| 1:56.1 | Like, religiously, you can look at my fitness pal and it's all in there. |
| 1:59.8 | And did you care about a micronutrient |
| 2:01.6 | in the slightest? I didn't know what a micronutrient was. Okay. So as long as we- It's all macros. Hit that protein, those carbs, iron, copper, zinc, doesn't matter. B-12, fuck it. But to be fair, though, it's not like I was eating like a trash panda. I still had decent quality, but like micronutrients didn't mean anything to me. No, no. And then what were your |
| 2:21.1 | macros back to that? Panda. I still had decent quality, but like micronutrients didn't mean anything to me. No, no. |
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