Falling Into Body Love, Part 3

I didn't expect there to be a part 3 to this story (here are part 1 and part 2), but recently, I discovered almost by accident that a few weeks prior, Lindy West had been a guest on Dr. Sanjay Gupta's podcast Chasing Life. As far as I'm concerned, that alone makes it an immediate must-listen. But I also love the episode's title, Lindy West on what we’re getting wrong about weight.

Source: screenshot from cnn.com

Lindy is probably best known as the author of the memoir Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman and therefore as the woman that the main character of Hulu's series Shrill is based on. But she also gained a fair amount of notoriety when, back in 2011, she wrote an essay (that eventually led to her writing the memoir) called Hello, I am Fat, which is well worth reading if you haven't already. So Lindy is basically known for being an unapologetic fat person—and an unapologetic fat acceptance/fat liberation person. 

The very fact that a mainstream, Western-medicine-educated, and famous doctor would have her on his podcast is significant. (For the thin people reading this: Western medicine is not exactly known for its friendliness to fat people.) 

Not only that, Dr. Gupta even said that their conversation was "really touching" and "challenged some of my own thinking." 

He also said, "She taught me a lot about what it looks like to show empathy and kindness no matter anyone's size." I plan to write more about that in a future post.

Also significant—in fact, it was the moment in the episode that thrilled me the most—was when Lindy shared some neuroscience that she had heard about online: 

When you speak negatively to yourself, your nervous system interprets that as a threat [Dr. Gupta vocalized agreement here] and kind of shuts down as a threat response and makes it impossible to make any changes in your thinking or in your life...it sort of slams this wall down between you and the ability to change [Dr. Gupta: "yeah"]. And so if you do wanna change your life, if you wanna change your body, if you wanna, you know, change the way that you think about yourself, the only path to doing that is to start from thinking kind things about yourself and being kind to yourself and that self criticism and being cruel to yourself will never actually lead to change....

Dr. Gupta responded, "I think they got it right so far, what I'm hearing; I agree with that."

When I heard that, I thought, "This confirms my whole approach!" I detailed this in part 2, but weeks before, I had begun what I call a body love practice—without knowing whether it was doing or would do any real good. I just figured it could not hurt...and then a few weeks into it, I encountered this episode. Wow. I am so grateful for this confirmation from the universe.

There's a lot more good stuff in this episode; I hope you'll give it a listen.