You're listening to Well Now, Sleyts Podcast on Health and Wellness. I'm Dr.

Kavita Patel. And I'm Maya Feller. This week we're tackling one of the biggest debates in the wellness space, Diet Culture.

Diet culture is all around us and it's a reflection of so many of our social struggles around

class, gender, and race.

In a moment, we're going to talk to someone who's made it her mission to dismantle diet

culture and seek out body liberation for both herself and all of us. But before we do that Maya let's just talk you

and me about the different ways diet culture has shown up in our lives and I think that

it would be fair to say that when I think of my first experience of diet culture, it was,

honestly, I couldn't help it concentrate on the word die, because that's how it felt.

Every time I thought about a diet which I from the moment I think I went through puberty I had always kind of felt like I should be on a diet because that's what society expects of many especially people who identify as

women and every time I would engage in a diet whether it was to go to prom and try to fit into a prom dress. I always came back to like I felt like a part of me just would die a little bit. So my experience, the word culture didn't even enter into it because it just felt like torture, felt like denying myself something,

and it really now I've grown to understand. It felt like I had to override just I would say generations of eating patterns

instead of trying to understand like what can I do around me to just make better choices and not see it as a diet?

What about you, Maya?

I mean, Kavita, that resonates with me so much, but I think when I was younger, I never even thought about the word culture and I think the

diet part was just so implicit it was everywhere. It was like all around us and I think about being 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and that every single one of my girlfriends was on a diet,

talking about going on a diet or figuring out

how to lose weight in some way shape or form,

whether or not it was, you know,

through totally unacceptable measures,

but it was normalized.

And I think now as an adult I look back at those previous behaviors that were

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