Create holistic practices that improve your relationship with food and explore how body image, nutrition, and intersectionality are all intertwined in the Mindful Eating Course.
Growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Chrissy King remembers feeling like she didn’t fit in. She was big, for one thing — she was 5’8” by the time she reached third grade — and she was the only Black girl in her class. There was nothing she could do about her height, she recalls thinking, but there was one thing she could control: her weight.
That became her obsession, and by age 10 she was documenting how many calories she was consuming. By high school she was all in on the Atkin’s diet. She promptly lost 30 pounds, and she basked in the praise and adulation. It was then that she decided that she wanted to permanently live in a smaller body. She was far happier in this slimmer frame.
“I was like, ‘Oh, people like me in a smaller body,’” she says. “And so that really became a focus of mine.”
That mindset led to a pattern of yo-yo dieting, and doing very unsustainable things to achieve fat loss. In her 20s, after gaining the weight back in college, King joined a gym for the first time. During her first training session, she recalls despising it and telling the trainer that she had no interest in weight training; she wanted to be skinny! But over time, King grew to feel empowered in the weight room. She thrived, and got so strong and so skilled that she graduated to powerlifting, ultimately competing on a national level.
“That’s the first time that I started to think that my body is more than just an ornament of decoration,” she says. “It has a utility of power.”
Despite the fact that King was in immaculate shape, and getting accolades for her powerlifting, she still struggled with body image. She remained hyper-focused on fat loss and weight loss; the numbers on the scale meant everything.
The turning point for King came when she went on a weekend getaway with her in-laws. Prior to leaving, she packed all of her food for the weekend to ensure that she didn’t mess up her macros and her eating stayed on point. When it was time for lunch, King and her family went to a restaurant to eat. But instead of enjoying the delicious food on the menu, King retrieved a sad wrap from her car, one that had been sitting in the cooler all day. She remembers thinking how upsetting the image was. Her family was enjoying the food, enjoying the smells, and having a wonderful time. And there was Chrissy, miserable, eating this unappetizing day-old wrap and hating every second of it.
And for what? Was it really worth it?
She decided it wasn’t — not anymore.
“That was a moment for me where I was like, ‘Oh, I have to fix something, because I'm literally going to spend the rest of my life in this spiral,” she says. “And that's when I started trying to address my relationship with body image and understand what that even really meant.”
There’s body positivity, and then there’s body liberation. There’s a difference between the two, and King is quick to point it out.
“Body positivity is the name that most people are familiar with,” the author and speaker says. “Body positivity has become more mainstream, more commercialized, more whitewashed. It's about loving your stretch marks and loving your body and embracing your cellulite. And I think those things are important, but the original movement was based in social justice, and we kind of lost that along the way.
“And there’s a hyper-focus on self-love. I'm a big proponent of self-love, but I also recognize that self-love does not protect you from experiencing discrimination in the world. Self-love very much puts the onus on the individual. Like if you just love yourself more, you wouldn't feel this way. But we live in a system of oppression that is actually also detrimental to people's mental health and well-being, and self-love can't protect you from that.”
That’s where the real body liberation work begins, King says. It’s about dismantling systemic oppression. Yes, liberation in one’s individual body is essential, but even more important is collective liberation.
These thoughts and concerns are what inspired King to write The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom. It details how those who fall outside of the Eurocentric standards of beauty are deemed less attractive, and how body image and beauty standards can only be truly understood within the context and understanding of racism, sexism, and classism.
There’s also a focus on intersectionality, which explores the idea that the way a person exists in the world directly affects how they experience the world, and that’s especially relevant when it comes to health and wellness.
We’re incredibly fortunate to have Chrissy as a visiting faculty member in our best-in-class Mindful Eating Course.
In the course, which helps students become empowered to create holistic practices that improve their relationship with food, King discusses intersectionality, our relationship with body image, and how that intersects with mindful eating in a myriad of ways.
“When we talk about eating and we talk about nutrition, it can be such a triggering conversation for folks,” King says. “What foods are good foods and what foods are bad foods? It becomes really difficult to navigate when we are trying to make what we consider healthy choices for our wellness and our health.
“And we're getting all these messages: What’s the right way to be eating, and how? What's the right way to look in our body? Body image, nutrition, and intersectionality are all intertwined. And when we're thinking about mindful eating, and how to fuel ourselves in a way that feels good and still aligns with our personal values and allows us to express ourselves fully, we have to be having all those conversations.”