EP #1135: Reclaiming Body Trust for Ultimate Self-Care

Send us Fan MailLisa is joined by Hilary Kinavey, M.S., LPC and Dana Sturtevant, M.S., R.D. the creators of the Center for Body Trust to talk about their book, RECLAIMINGBODY TRUST® A PATH TO HEALING AND LIBERATIONHilary Kinavey, M.S., LPChas supported people who are healing from disordered eating, body shame, and the impact of weight bias and other traumas. Her work, as a therapist, facilitator, educator, speaker, and writer, has been a study of what interrupts our sense of wholeness and how we can return to ourselves in a culture that profits from fragmentation. She has additional training in workshop facilitation, mind-body coaching, and radical relating. She is a sought-after speaker on topics such as weight-inclusive approaches, weight bias, Body Trust®, and the intersections of activism and the helping professions. She offers consultation andtraining for organizations and professional groups.  Dana Sturtevant, M.S., R.D., is a registered dietitian who helps people divest from diet culture and move toward a more compassionate, embodied form of radical self-care. Her work as a speaker, educator, and trainer focuses on humanizing health care, advancing health equity, and advocating for body sovereignty and food justice. As a sought-after speaker and writer, Sturtevant is a champion for compassionate, weight-inclusive models of care and offers supervision, training, and consultation for helping professionals and health care organizations.Informed by the personal body stories of the hundreds of people they have worked with, RECLAIMING BODY TRUST delineates an intersectional, social justice−orientated path to healing in three phases: The Rupture, The Reckoning, and The Reclamation. Throughout, readers will be anchored by the authors’ innovative and revolutionary Body Trust framework to discover a pathway out of a rigid, mechanistic way of thinking about the body and into a more authentic, sustainable way to occupy and nurture our bodies. Highlights from the book & interview include:·        The body mass index has racist origins and was never intended to be used as a measure of health. It was developed by a mathematician in the nineteenth century to look at the distribution of weight across a population of white people. It is being used to stigmatize and pathologize people’s bodies. BMI is not a vital sign.·        There’s no evidence- based treatment for high body weight that leads to sustained weight loss two to five years out.  The most consistent effect of weight loss at two years is  weight gain.·        There is research to show how weight stigma, racism, and other body- based oppressions, as well as other social determinants of health, have a far greater impact on our health and well- being than personal lifestyle behaviors. The truth is, lifestyle factors (health behaviors) actually account for 5 to 25 percent of the differences in health outcomes.·         If we really care about people’s health, we need to be fighting for things like racial justice, access to non- stigmatizing health care, living wages, clean air, and more.·        Body Trust is about healing your relationship with food and body, not perfecting health behaviors. Body Trust helps people develop sustainable self- care behaviors instead of all the yo- yo dieting, yo- yo fitness, and weight cycling that diet culture enables, and research shows, negatively impact health. People are not required to pursue health to be deemed worthy of love, respect, and belonging.