Bernie Salazar has been a student of the body kindness philosophy for over two years. But early on in his practice, The Biggest Loser was still a popular show and Bernie was still trying to make sense of what it meant to be healthy. Though he was deeply concerned about the well-being of the contestants,… [Read More]

In the last segment of our series featuring readers sharing their powerful stories, we hear from two trauma survivors, one who was abused and spent most of her life with an undetected eating disorder and one who experienced trauma from dieting on weight watchers, including needing two back surgeries from running injuries sustained while being… [Read More]

Happy New Year! We are talking with readers about how they used Body Kindness as a way to break free from years of dieting and body shame. Tune in and get inspired as you contemplate your next step in healing your relationship with food, movement, and self care. You can’t hate yourself healthy but with… [Read More]

Happy Holidays! We are closing out 2018 by talking with readers about how they used Body Kindness as a way to break free from years of dieting and body shame. Tune in and get inspired as you contemplate your next step in healing your relationship with food, movement, and self care. You can’t hate yourself… [Read More]

The first historical study of diet books, Dr. Adrienne Rose Bitar’s book Diet and the Disease of Civilization examines how four popular plans — Paleo, biblical, primitive, and detox diets — reflect and shape our social world. Bitar categorized 17,000 diet books based on their titles. All of them, from Paleo to the “biblical diets”… [Read More]

You already know that it’s not easy to make changes to your habits. At all. It requires serious effort and a compassionate mindset as you try, mess up, and try again. In the next episode of our “body kindness for beginners” Learn and Grow series, Bernie and I discuss what is usually missing from the… [Read More]

Weight stigma, problems with our culture and the biases we carry about higher weight people harms their health. One pathway is through internalized stigma that elevates a person’s worry and anxiety about how they will be treated by the people and the physical spaces in this world (think comfortable seats – or the right to… [Read More]

Psychology research in terror management theory has shown that when people are primed with thoughts of mortality, their behaviors change, but not necessarily in helpful ways. Tune in as I talk with dietitian Michelle Alison (the Fat Nutritionist) about how she was able to extrapolate Ernest Becker’s research from the 1980s to today’s diet culture… [Read More]

In the first of a short series looking at research and weight stigma, I talk to Dr Jeffery Hunger, a postdoctoral scholar in Health Psychology at UCLA. As a social and health psychologist, Dr. Hunger is interested in using insights from psychology to understand and ultimately improve the health of stigmatized groups (e.g., heavier individuals,… [Read More]