3 Ways To Reclaim Your Body and Be Nourished

Hola amigos! Welcome back!

Are you fighting your body? Tune in to learn how to stop the war on your body and reclaim it for yourself! Through allowing ourselves to be nourished, we can stop the war and start thriving.

Highlights of this episode:

• What is nourishment?
• The Be Nourished approach and why it’s needed
• Embodiment and disembodiment
• Body Trust® framework
• How to reclaim your body

Episode Show Notes*: 

*this is not a transcript, but a capture of guest’s spoken word. The podcast does contain explicative language and discussions about body weight and body image.

[01:02] Introducing Be Nourished

Be Nourished is a private practice created by counselor Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC and dietitian Dana Sturtevant, MS, RD that helps individuals make peace with food through Body Trust®. Be Nourished facilitates transformational work that is focused on creating a body-compassionate and weight-inclusive world. They believe that all of us are born with instincts to nourish ourselves and that society disrupts that instinct. The founders of Be Nourished recently published a book, Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing & Liberation. The book is a holistic and powerful framework for accepting and liberating our bodies, and ourselves.

David was introduced to Be Nourished by Aaron Flores, a former episode guest.

Guest Bios:

Dana Sturtevant, MS, RD is a dietitian, educator, and writer whose work focuses on humanizing health care, advancing health equity, and advocating for body sovereignty and food justice. She is the co-creator of Body Trust®, a revolutionary framework for helping people heal their relationship with food and body.

Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC is a licensed professional counselor, coach, educator, and writer. As the co-founder of Be Nourished, her work is rooted in liberation-based healing. She is a sought after speaker on topics such as weight-inclusive approaches, weight bias, Body Trust® and the intersections of activism and therapy.

[06:10] How did the Be Nourished Approach Develop?

Dana and Hilary developed the Be Nourished approach out of disillusionment over traditional practices and jobs in healthcare and wellness. The traditional approach was not working for their clients. Dana likes looking up words in the dictionary to seek all the different meanings of a word. Nourish stood out because nourishment was more about food, it’s active and participatory.

Hilary: what robs people of nourishment is not just themselves, but from societal norms.

David: Yes, in Columbia, we say “Alimentar,” which has a nourishment concept. That’s the motto of One Small Bite, Chop the diet mentality; Fuel your body; and Nourish your soul!

Dana: Nourishment is so important and yet, most actions people take to control their bodies are more harmful than good.

Hilary: If I don’t approach my body with appreciation, there is harm. Many people are lacking proper nourishment because of the size of their bodies. The way people participant in diet culture robs them of nourishment. It’s not about blaming anyone. This is about understanding your body and your experiences so you can start nourishment.

David: Tell me more.

Dana: Our culture pushes life-style changes to lose weight and keep it off. In my experience with life-style intervention research, I saw how it was not sustainable. It was a diet, really. I noticed that complex lives interfere with lifestyle changes. When life gets hard, people lose tolerance to the “lifestyle changes.” The intervention of 6 months windles down. They blame themselves and not the plan. So when I came across the Intuitive Eating book that provides qualities of the dieting mentality and non-dieting mentality, I realized the research participants were in the diet mentality. In hindsight, this was me prescribing eating disorder behaviors without realizing it.

[17:12] The Body Must Be Reclaimed From Diet Culture

Hilary: The Be Nourished approach considers that when we are born, we are not concerned with the size of our thighs or belly. We are born with a sense of embodiment. In our culture, depression, discrimination, how we should be engaging with our bodies, how we should be manipulating our bodies, etc., is learned from our society. Our body is the site of our pain and it can be an intolerable environment after trauma. Over time, we become more fragmented and disembodied.

David: Yes, okay, that is similar to the Intuitive Eating approach that points out we are born with intuitive signals and interoceptive awareness. Tell me more about Body Trust®.

Dana: I recall a James Joyce quote that says “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” The first encounter for me of the term “Body Trust” was from Dayle Hayes, MS, RD. I learned that BMI was not intended for health, not even by its creator. Body Trust® is a radical way to care and trust your body when a society teaches us that we cannot trust our bodies. Diet culture creates floating heads from our bodies through weight control. Weight control is disembodied action.

Even with the traffic light system of foods, red, yellow, and green foods—that is just a watered-down version of calorie counting. The body is not a ridged equation. Body Trust® about getting back into that relationship with yourself, having more body connection, being more comfortable in your body, working towards body comfort, being connected to your desires, having agency around food and eating. That is something that we lose when we become disembodied, we lose access to our voice, our ways of expressing ourselves, and telling people, no, that’s not going to work for me.

This theory of embodiment is from Niva Piran, an applied psychology researcher.

[24:23] Why Do We Lose Our Connection?  

Hilary: Research shows that we start trying to fix our bodies before the age of nine. That comes from school, teachers, parents, doctors, and media. This is because our culture is more disembodied than embodied. Adolescents are objectified. There bodies are highlighted as one of the most important things about them. What if we changed to an equitable community to hold people up?

David: I’ve got like 3, 4, 5 worlds that I grew up in. I grew up with my Colombian traditions at home and the way we eat is not like the Mediterranean diet. So, how the hell does this fit into Colombian culture? I think the stories are what we need to really be able to relate and understand to what gets lost and what gets preserved.

My clients are saying something similar in their relationship to food. They think– I’m supposed to eat like Mediterranean because that is better way of eating. I can’t eat my foods, my cultural foods, because they are deemed unhealthy. That’s not right and Body Trust® and Be Nourished are about recognizing those stories.

[31:27] Be Nourished by Turn Towards Your Body

Being nourished can happen when a person turns towards their body and listens with kindness and curiosity.

Dana: we teach individuals to observe through a neutral lens. People are used to berating or belittling themselves. Curiosity and compassion can give us more data about ourselves.

Hilary: We ask questions like, what if everything I’ve been doing is about survival? How do we approach ourselves to make sense of our story?

David: Yes! We do things because we are told to and start ignoring our bodies. A client told me that he avoided the venting machine at work because he shouldn’t have unhealthy food in it. This is ignoring our body’s hunger, which isn’t any better for us.

[35:53] Be Nourished Through Body Trust® and Reclaim Your Body 

David: Tell us about your new book, Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing & Liberation.

Dana: This book was formed out of our Body Trust® community, so it has a narrative arch. First is the rupture, the reckoning and the reclamation. In the rupture, we are grieving the illusion of control, the thin ideal. There is kind of a death of a dream. That follows into the reckoning of the harm we have done through our eating patterns and our identity as an eater.

The fact is food is something human bodies require, regardless of how hard we try to not be part of that requirement. And then the reclamation, the final section is about how do we move forward.

David: that’s awesome. I think Brene Brown also said there’s part one, part two, and part three. And part two is the messy middle. That’s the stuff you got to really work on. So, I love that you’re bringing up reckoning.

Dana: Many providers, not just dietitians, out there that cross their scope of practice because they have their own personal food philosophy. They are often just projecting it onto people. That’s why reckoning with the harm done is needed. It’s recognizing the collusion we have done, or the waste we proselytized, and brought people over to that way of harmful thinking.

We also just talking about how the future is fat for you. You are going to live a fat life most likely. And, what is that? What does that mean? It’s interesting to watch how many of them experienced a lot of relief from that. There is a lot to grieve too and you get a lot of pushbacks from that.

The reclamation part is about coming home to the body, it’s like entering the wilderness with Savala Nolan. So, we are leaving like this area of the body where it’s mapped by the mind and we’re entering uncharted territory, right? We are letting go of all of the tools and the roadmap that diet culture has handed us. We are navigating the world of food and eating, movement, and relationships with new tools because the old tools don’t work.

The wildness is a helpful metaphor because people often feel like they’re flailing when they let go of the dieters’ tools. It’s like they are giving up land. Where am I? What am I? A diet tells you immediately if it’s working but Body Trust® you don’t know for months if you’re doing it right or wrong because there is no right or wrong.

Hilary: We give people more tools to work with because dieting language is not helpful for this journey.

[49:08] Body Trust® is Not Settling, It Reclaims Your Body

Hilary: Of course, people questioning this method. There is a percentage of people who are ready and teachable. Our teacher, Erica Hines told us, we focus on people who are reachable, teachable, and ready, not people who want to debate and exhaust us.

David: I think I heard it this way in martial arts, the teachers ready to teach when the students ready to learn. What do your clients teach you?

Dana: I am always impressed how people survived so beautifully. I’ve learned that the wisdom is always in the room and that if I am willing to sit with people and give them space to think and talk about these things, they already know so much of what they need to know.

David: Yes! We also teach our clients we are in the same line with our clients. We talk about being like an Obi Wan from Star Wars or a sherpa leading someone up the mountain. This kind of work is similar to a psychology approach called dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT work.

[59:12] Reading for Nourishment  

David: I’m curious what you both like to read.

Hilary: I’m reading a book called The Disordered Cosmos. I think Health At Every Size®, intuitive eating, and in the fat acceptance movement, there’s always people asking for proof of everything. There’s something in physics where they’ve all just agreed to believe something because it helps understand, helps us understand everything else.

We need a collective reckoning with just deciding that what we believe about fat bodies is probably incorrect and harmful and that we can all just agree that acceptance and affirmation of fat bodies is the best thing for all of us to move forward.

David: Great. I think Sonya Renee Taylor speaks about this in her book on radical self-love.

Dana: I’m reading Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir. It has stretched my understanding of eating disorders by stretching our imagination to what it is like. His life story into places that have been missing from the common narrative.

[01:04:18] One Small Bite for Reclaiming Your Body and Be Nourished

David: What would you say is one small thing that listeners can take away with today and get started on something? Maybe a practical, tangible, thing that is small enough that can move them in that direction of body liberation, weight inclusive, and Health At Every Size®.

1. Shift Away From Self-Blame

Hilary: Whatever predicament you’re finding yourself in, around food and body, whatever feels so challenging or insurmountable has not been your fault. I would really encourage you to keep talking and working through your story and restoring your story and telling it to people who trust your body already and not giving it away to people who don’t. Until you feel like you trust that story so intimately that no one else can take it from you ever again.

2. Cancel Diet Culture on Social Media

Dana: I would say to do an audit of your social media. Unfollow, mute, and unfriend the people who uphold dominant cultures, ideals of bodies, food, and nutrition. Silence them for a month and see how that feels.

3. Provide Yourself with Nourishing Media

Dana: Curate your social media feed with fat positive accounts and accounts that give you messages that reinforce this, because the minute you turn this podcast off, you will get a message that what we’ve talked about here is wrong.

And you know, that there’s so much more out in the world that reinforces that stuff that we really need regular messaging. Consider doing a heady exploration by reading these books mentioned. So, if you’re on social media, that would be my first thing is to do an audit and to unfollow unfriend people who give you toxic messaging and start to follow people who reinforce what we’ve talked about here.

Resources:

Be Nourished website: https://benourished.org

Body Trust book: Reclaiming Body Trust

One Small Bite: Anti-Diet Stories that Empower You To Build a Positive and Secure Relationship with Food

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Chop the diet mentality; Fuel Your Body; and Nourish Your Soul!