How to Stop Obsessing Over Your Body and Eat Sanely in a Toxic Culture | Virginia Sole-Smith

Plus, provocative and practical ideas about actually enjoying exercise, the real relationship between weight and health, the problem with weight loss, the morality of food, feeding your kids, and who "the real bad guy" is.

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Virginia Sole-Smith is the bestselling author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. She also writes the Burnt Toast newsletter, hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast, and frequently contributes to The New York Times and other publications.

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In this episode we talk about:

• The actual connections between health and body size
• The severe limitations of many of the most popular approaches to weight loss
• Nuanced strategies for disentangling from diet culture
• How to exercise without a hidden agenda of trying to wrench your body into a specific shape
• The idea that food doesn’t have a moral value
• The relationship between men, exercise, food, and diet culture
• How our kids are getting caught up in diet culture, and what parents can do about it
• What her smartest critic would say about her contentions
• Her take on Ozempic

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Related Episodes:

• Dharma teacher Cara Lai on mindfulness and exercise
• Jud Brewer on “The Hunger Habit”
• Evelyn Tribole on “The Anti-Diet”