Virgie Tovar Podcast: Reclaiming the Pleasure Diet Culture Stole from Us

Hot + Brave The Blog-Cast-Season 2 Episode 1: Reclaiming the Pleasure Diet Culture Stole from Us with Virgie Tovar

Like a hilarious conversation with your feisty friend who doesn’t give a f*ck.

Brave stories, hot topics, and #truthbombs that will either balm your soul or light fire to your rage.

Author and activist Virgie Tovar

Season two is all about the body and in this first episode we are joined by author and activist Virgie Tovar. During this interview we take a deep dive into understanding the many overt and covert ways in which pleasure diet culture shows up into our lives and steals our pleasure and enjoyment of food, sexuality, relationships, and more. We will give you tools to reclaim your joy and join the political conversation around fat bodies and the damage of fatphobia in our society.

Explore everything you need to know about Pleasure Diet Culture. Discover and learn with number of tips this article will provide to boost your knowledge.

 

This week featuring:                                                                                                                                                          

Virgie Tovar knows a lot about how to live a thrilling life as a fat woman of color. She is the author of 3 books: You Have The Right To Remain Fat (2018), The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color (2020), and The Body Positive Journal (2022). Virgie was named one of the 50 Most Influential Feminists by Bitch Magazine in 2018. She hosts a food-positive, body-positive podcast called Rebel Eaters Club, and is a contributor for Forbes.com where she covers plus-size fashion and how to end weight discrimination at work. She lives in San Francisco with two bunnies and a cutie pie named Andrew. 

 

Bianca Sprague feels especially passionate about creating access to quality pre & postnatal care for marginalized communities. She is an advocate for mental wellness for the entire family, and especially for the birthing parent, after suffering from PPD in silence and losing her father to suicide in 2012. She recognizes the barriers put in place for female entrepreneurs and believes that understanding the evolving online space can even the playing field for women in business.

 

 

Meg Kant has been providing support to families in Sudbury since 2015. A summary of Meg’s education and credentials include: Certified Doula through bebo mia, Honours Degree in Psychology, Certified Infant Sleep Educator through bebo mia, professional contributor to www.PregnancyAfterLossSupport.com, and professional collaborator with The Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

 

 

 

Michelle Cruz is a birthworker, and MSP alumni. Working in the birth world professionally since 2019. A passion for health and reproductive support for Black people pushed me further to investigate my own struggles and to deepen my passion. 

After becoming a parent via a challenging and unnecessary  Cesarean birth followed by a multiples birth that was the polar opposite, a passion for the birth work was solidified. With deep-rooted care for the community, Michelle utilizes her education, lived experiences, and humor to support her parents in the most precious of times.

 

Hot + Brave The Blog-Cast:

This week we kicked off our season on The Body chatting with Virgie Tovar about the insidiousness of pleasure diet culture and how the pressure to change our bodies robs us of joy.  Diet-culture is so pervasive in our society, to the point that we do not always notice the ways in which the adoration of thinness impacts our daily lives. It is the status quo; as Virgie makes clear, it is inescapable by way of both overt and covert messaging. 

The idea that thin bodies are more beautiful, that thin bodies are healthier, that thin people have a better moral virtue is seen in pop culture, heard at the grocery store, the workplace … basically, everywhere. 

We see the impact of diet culture in the fat/healthy binary that legitimizes medical and academic voices who condemn fatness as unhealthy and undesirable. This is despite tons of research that shows there is no direct correlation between weight and health. 

This week we challenge the ‘thin is healthy’ narrative that helps people hide their bigotry and fatphobia as care, rather than what it really is – discrimination. Fat people suffer from mental health issues such as depression and anxiety at higher rates, have their health issues brushed off and ignored (leading to negative outcomes) and even get paid less! 

Weight science, which is evidence based, shows that each individual has a weight set point which oscillates throughout their lives. Dieting assumes that one’s weight is mutable and can simply change; this is untrue and shown through research. Plus, anyone who has dieted knows, it’s not so simple. Our bodies are amazing! They work hard to ensure our survival. So, when we pl diet and restrict our caloric intake our bodies go into survival-mode to keep us safe. 

Diet Culture by Virgie Tovar

Virgie notes that, “in our culture, because of diet culture, that beautiful act of survival and, and resiliency is rendered as failure”. That is, we are punished for the miraculous feats of our bodies to preserve themselves. Instead, because of the medicalization of thinness, we discuss how doctors are, to put it bluntly, prescribing anorexia. They are telling us to restrict our food, to not eat and to lose weight so that we are worthy or being listened to; worthy of care. 

In challenging pldiet culture, we are learning, as a community, to love our bodies – exactly as they are. Big bodies or small bodies, jiggly bodies, bodies with stretch marks… they are beautiful. 

Learning to love your body also means learning how to accept love of your body. With fierce clarity Virgie helps guide the conversion with tools that can help us change our lives without changing our bodies. She states, “The question that … had led my life was, how does this look? And that question switched from how does it look to, how does it feel?

 

Take a listen and let us know what you are doing to start the year loving your body!

Check Fat-phobia and some Fatphobic myths

Give us five stars on your favorite podcast app, then write to [email protected] and let us know the title of your review and your mailing address and we will send you a Hot + Brave sticker! Each month we will be doing a draw from that month’s reviews for some Hot + Brave swag!

 

What else is going on at bebo mia?

Love your body!

If you were moved by this week’s topic check out our awesome upcoming workshop: “Stop Wishing Your Body Was Different: A Workshop on How to Feel at Home In Your Bod”  

With the help of our friend Virgie Tovar and her Body Positive Journal as our guide, we will meet once a week on Wednesday at 8pm EST from January 18th to February 9th. Together we will take this transformative journey to loving the skin we’re in!

 

Bookclub!

If you haven’t already, you should most definitely join us for our very first book club of 2023. 

This month we are discussing an  incredible book by the formidable Rachel Rodgers! 

She’s a lawyer, mom of 4, business owner, coach and self-made millionaire and her book will absolutely support you in changing the way you think about money – earning it, spending it, saving it – the works! 

If you’re looking to have a different relationship with money and more of it, you should most definitely grab this book and join us for book club! 

We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rodgers

We’re meeting Tuesday January 24th, 2023 at 1pm EST and you should be there!

To register, click https://bebomia.com/bookclub/! See you then!

 

Become a birthworker!

Early Bird Pricing for our spring  program is still on! Check Doula Training Program

 

Support a great cause!

The Ember Blueprint is raising funds for tuition for women in trades as well as stipends for students to provide care to under-resourced families. With over one thousand applicants in the last 5 years, it is clear that access to tuition is a barrier for women entering the trades.

 

Links and resources:

• Donate to the Ember Blueprint
• Register for “Stop Wishing your Body was Different” Workshop
• Dreaming of a Fat Christmas in Virgie’s Substack
• Christy Harrison Food Psych Podcast
• Antidiet by Christy Harrison
• You Have the Right to Remain Fat
• The Fat Studies Reader
• Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement by Charlotte Cooper
• The Unapologetic Fat Girls Guide to Exercise
• Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim
• Fat Girls Hiking
• Dietland
• Gordo: Stories by Jaime Cortez
• The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor