12: Nourishing A New Narrative with Jessica Wilson

Today I’m joined by dietitian and activist Jessica Wilson to discuss her new book It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies - a book that uplifts and celebrates Black women.In the episode we talk all about what drove Jessica to write the book and why we need to re-centre the experiences of Black women in our conversations about bodies and eating disorders. Jessica shares some of her critiques of intuitive eating and body positivity, and why white supremacy isn’t the root of diet culture, but the whole damn tree. Plus, lots of Lizzo chat and great Snacks. Can I Have Another Snack? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Find out more about Jessica here.Follow her work on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Sign up to the Raising Embodied Eaters workshop here.Subscribe to my newsletter here.Here’s the transcript in full:Jessica: And so, so quickly it became diet culture has racist roots. And that was the concession. Like, we need to talk about both of these things in anti-diet spaces. And the way that we're gonna do it is say that diet culture, you know, make it really like this tree analogy. Uh, and then just happens to have racist roots.Whereas I see white supremacy as the tree, it's what's sticking up out of the ground. It's what we can see. It's what is, you know, ruling and governing and decides, you know, who is able to fit under its branches. And I, you know, shrinking ourselves via, maybe that's the connection to diet culture there, is one way people are trying to seek shelter under this, you know, umbrella, this tree of white supremacy.INTROLaura: Hey team, and welcome to another episode of Season Two of Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast, where I'm asking my guests who or what they're nourishing right now and who or what is nourishing them. I'm Laura Thomas, an anti-diet registered nutritionist and author of the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter.I can't wait to share today's conversation with dietician and activist Jessica Wilson, who is also author of the forthcoming book, It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies. I've linked to this book in the show notes because you need to go and pre-order it immediately. So in this conversation you'll hear Jessica and I discuss her new book. We'll talk about some of the ideas that she presents in the book, like how the body stories and narratives of Black women are raised and silenced in conversations about health, wellness, and body positivity. Jessica tells us about why if we distill difficulties with food down to just the thin ideal, we end up missing a lot of the complexity of how Black women are told to be figuratively and literally smaller as a matter of survival. We talk about how intuitive eating and rejecting diet culture don't address systemic issues like anti-fatness and anti-blackness. And they perpetuate the idea that we need to find individualistic solutions to systemic and structural violence. We talk about how white supremacy and anti-blackness isn't at the root of diet culture, but how, in Jessica's words, it's the whole damn tree. We talk about Lizzo and respectability, resilience and toxic body positivity, and loads and loads more. I think I'm gonna be unpacking this book for a long time to come, and I'm just so grateful to Jessica for writing it and I think as a white person, I mean, my opinion doesn't really matter here, but I feel like it's important to sit with the discomfort and the critiques and reflect on the ways that I've perpetuated some of these harmful systems and narratives. And if you're a white person in this space, whether for personal or professional reasons, you need to get this book and also sit with that discomfort.So again, It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Stories of Black Women's Bodies, and it's available to pre-order now and it will be out on the 7th of February. The pre-order links are in the show notes. It goes without saying that we talk about themes around anti-blackness and enslavement and anti-fatness. So if you're a black person or a fat person, please take care of yourself if you choose to listen to this conversation.All right, before we get to today's conversation with Jessica, I just want to share that I'm gonna be running my Raising Embodied Eaters workshop again in February. It will be a 90 minute workshop. Completely online and you will be sent a copy of the recording afterwards to watch back. We'll talk about how kids’ embodiment gets disrupted by diet culture, and what this has to do with feeding. We'll discuss why we need to throw the rule book out of the window and let them have ice cream before broccoli, and how we can help build trust in our kids to get what they need. I'll offer a framework that can help you feel more relaxed about mealtimes, whilst encouraging kids to have autonomy. We'll talk about how providing supportive structure can encourage ch...