What To Do When You Miss Your Smaller Body

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! This month we’re diving into some big, hard questions, like:

• How do you mourn big body changes?

• What happens if your body size really is the reason you can’t do something you used to love?

• Does the “Health At Every Size” framework ever fail fat people?

• When is it systemic oppression and when is it just…physics?

• Or…do we all just need a Fat Day?

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In these monthly episodes we get into the GOOD stuff like:

Dating While Fat

Why all the fat influencers are getting skinny

Is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?

And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?

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Episode 163 Transcript

Virginia

This is a very complicated question. I feel like we need a lot of caveats, but I don’t even know what the caveats should be. But it’s a complicated one.

Corinne

It is. I’ve been thinking about the question a lot like since the first time I read it.

Virginia

Same. I guess I’ll just say—I encourage conversation in the comment section. We will probably not get all of this right, but we are going to do our best.

So this listener writes,

I’ve been pretty immersed in the anti-diet, Health at Every Size space for about five years now. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts and read tons of books and articles. I follow lots of body positive influencers on social media, and yet I have never seen the issue I’m facing addressed. I have been doing manual labor full time for a decade now. I started doing trail work, then wildland firefighting, and now I’ve been a climbing arborist for eight years. When I realized five years ago, I had a disordered relationship with food, I thought properly nourishing my body would make me better at my job. Instead, I gained so much weight—I went up seven sizes in just two years—that I can no longer safely do my job.

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