Breaking Free from Diet Culture Toward Body Liberation
Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation, and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your somatic nutritional counselor.
Diets teach you to view your body as a project. You can tinker with what you're eating and transform your body into something different. Then fitness culture doubles down and provides the message that you can shape your body to be whatever you want it to be you just have to put up with messages like no pain no gain and a complete disconnection from your body, how it feels, and what resonates with it. There is a lot that gets sacrificed seeing the body as a project and this realization only occurs after months and years when you realize you don't know who you are anymore, how to exist in your body, or what it actually needs. Yet, releasing the habitual relationship with the body as something to change and alter will also potentially change your relationships, the environments you've been interacting with, and the conversations you engage in. It isn't that easy when everyone around you is also in their own body project to say, "hey, ya know what, I'm done working on my body." This was the exact process Savala Nolan went through to liberate her body from no longer being a project she works on.
Savala is a writer, public speaker, and professor at UC Berkeley. Her new book, GoodWoman: A Reckoning, was named a Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026 by Ms. Magazine. Her first book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body, was celebrated as a “standout collection” by the NewYork Times. Savala's writing has been featured in Vogue, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, NPR, Essence, TIME, and more. We chat about the journey of recovering from diet culture, understanding the language and psychological impact of dieting, ending the body project and facing the fears and cost of body liberation, questioning societal norms, and practical steps toward body liberation.
If you have yet to leave a review for the Satiated Podcast, please consider letting us know how much you have been loving the show or how it has supported you. Every review helps another person discover the podcast and receive somatic food and body image recovery support. Now, welcome Savala! Well, I am so excited that you are here, and really jazzed to be able to connect with you today. I've been following you on social media for a while now, and I just love everything that you put out. I've been re-sharing a lot of your posts, and so welcome, and I would love for us to get started with you sharing a little bit about you and how you got into writing your book and the work that you're doing today.
Savala Nolan 03:28
Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. It's really a gift and a pleasure to be invited into a community that someone has built. I don't take it for granted at all, so thank you for the work that you do, and for reaching out and letting me hang out in your neck of the woods for an hour. I'm really looking forward to this conversation too. So I think of myself primarily as a writer, and as you mentioned, I did just publish my second book, Good Woman: A Reckoning, which I'm so excited, Ms. Magazine named a most anticipated feminist book of 2026. I wish I had a button that said that, and I could wear it every day. I also happen to be an attorney, and I work in academia. I work at a law school, so those two things, in some ways, kind of don't go together, but a lot of my life has been, you know, mixing together things that wouldn't normally go together or don't easily go together. The way some people think about sometimes when people are in a 12 step program and they're clean and sober, they'll talk about their recovery as being the foundation of everything else in their life that functions. They're really working their recovery, then everything else is subject to kind of get rickety. That is true for me as well, but rather than thinking of, you know, being in recovery from a substance use disorder, I think of myself as being in recovery from dieting and the body project, and the sort of cycles that go along with that, because it is so often cyclical, you know, for so many of us. I consider myself someone who probably had a subclinical eating disorder for most of my life, you know. We can go into that or not go into that. I say subclinical because I was never diagnosed, even though I exhibited the behaviors and sort of ticked the boxes. I still was at a high body weight, even when I was very, very thin. I was at a high body weight, just because that's how my build is. I'm almost six feet tall, you know. So my recovery from a lifetime of dieting and body project, body shame, all of that stuff, body striving is the foundation of the work that I do as a writer and the work that I do as a lawyer, and it's the foundation of how I show up as a mom. I mean, it's the foundation of everything else that's good in my life, so it's a long way of answering your question. I got to where I am by finding my way out of the dieting that started for me when I was three or four years old, is when I was put on my first diet by my mom. I happened to be a chubby kid in a very fat-phobic family, and so it just wouldn't do to have a chubby kid, even though my natural body shape is chubby, or fat, as I would say. So, yeah, the way that I got here was by learning how to not diet anymore. When I was about 35 years old, I started that process.
Stephanie Mara 06:40
Yeah, thank you for sharing all of that. It's so interesting, the paths that we go down, like I so resonate with went on my first diet when I was 13 years old, like three is a lot younger to feel into from three to 35 is like a huge part of life, as much as I feel like diet culture is behind me, like I don't abide by its quote unquote rules, I don't listen to what it has to say, I do not live my life like that anymore. There is this, I don't know if you want to call it neural pathway that just feels so ingrained in my brain that if I even considered that it would just light right back up.
Savala Nolan 07:30
I have it too. I have it too. I mean, it's like a neural super highway. Pathway is almost too dainty a word. What I often say when I am teaching or speaking about diet culture and fatphobia, and all that, that that encompasses is that the language of dieting and body control and body shame and body goals and anti-fatness, that is like a first language for certainly women in this culture, also for many men, and probably plenty of non-binary people too, but I think the hammer absolutely comes down hardest on women, and it is like a first language, we're all fluent in it, and even if you learn another language, which you do when you divest from diet culture, you can't unlearn your first language. You know, I grew up speaking English. I could move to, oh, I don't know, Uruguay, and speak Spanish, you know, for the rest of my life. In 50 years I will still speak English. You can't unlearn your first language, and so it's not fair to expect that we wouldn't still speak diety language internally. It's not fair to expect that anyone would wipe that, be able to wipe that slate completely clean, because we're fluent. It's really less about somehow undoing all of that and never having a diety thought again, and more about practicing a second language and getting more fluent in the second language, and finding other conversation partners and ways to practice a different kind of vocabulary and grammar and syntax and all of that, so yeah, I still have that neural pathway, 100% I have it every day, every single day, and I'm very solid in my recovery, and I have it every single day, it doesn't help that, like, you can't watch five minutes of TV without seeing a GLP-1 ad, so it's like I'm in Uruguay, I'm speaking Spanish, and I'm hearing English on the radio all the time, so absolutely I'm not gonna forget it.
Stephanie Mara 09:54
I love that analogy, it's so perfect in that it brings in so much compassion into this conversation, because I know so many individuals are trying to do what you have done is to divest away from diet culture, but then it's like, but then what? And so I'm curious, when you realize, like, what you said, maybe around 35 you realize, like, I don't want to be in this culture anymore, what was your path, or what was your journey to move away from that, and what was the language that you felt like you started to learn?
Savala Nolan 10:28
Well, the very first concept that I came across was intuitive eating, but of course I imagined that it would be a good diet. Initially, it was like, oh, maybe that's the way. If I can just somehow be intuitive, I will somehow find that my intuitive appetite leads me to be several sizes smaller, you know. So, even, even when I was starting to get glimmers of a new vocabulary, I was like translating them into the old language. When I was 35 I had just had a baby, so my daughter was then, oh, about six months old, and like so many new moms I felt pressure around my body and what it looked like after having a baby, and I also was starting a new job, and I think for a lot of women there's a kind of revving up of the body project around big trips, vacations, big life events, weddings, going home to see your family, you know, anything where you're going to be kind of on display, quote unquote, can trigger a plan, and so between just having had a baby and starting a new job and moving back home after living in a different state, so moving back to my family of origin, I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to like get this shit under control. What I found was that I couldn't stay on any particular plan for very long, and the amount of time I could stay on any plan got shorter and shorter and shorter. So it was like, let's start with Weight Watchers, tried and true, you know, been on and off that thing for 30 years, maybe this is the time it'll work. That lasted a few weeks. Then I remember trying Atkins, because it seemed simpler. It's like I don't even have to think about points, I just have to not eat these categories. That lasted a few days. Then it was like, okay, I'm vegan, but by noon I was like face down in a thing of ice cream. It was like muscle fatigue. It was like, you know, when you're working out and you cannot do another rep, you can't do it. Your body cannot lift that barbell again. That's how it felt for me. I could not stay on a plan, and I remember very distinctly calling my best friend and saying to her, "What's wrong with me? What is wrong with me? I can't stay on a plan, so even at the end of the road I was still internalizing the problem. What's insane about this rigid system of control tied to ludicrous beauty standards that has no connection to my actual animal self, but what is wrong with me that I cannot stay on this plan. Very shortly after that, I hit the like true, true, true realization or reckoning that I can't diet anymore, I can't be on a plan anymore, I don't have the capacity anymore, and I mean, in a truly visceral way, the way when you have the stomach flu, you cannot eat a bag of potato chips or something. You know, it was not going to happen, but I was absolutely clueless and terrified as to what my life would be without the body project, and a lot of women can't even imagine they could sooner imagine, like going to the moon as this sort of citizen astronaut or something than living a life where the way they moved their body and what they ate had absolutely no connection to the size, shape, or weight of their body, so I went through a period of real ignorance, like socked in fog, no visibility, zero visibility about how I could live without dieting and real terror, because I believed the only thing that was keeping me from being fat was dieting, and fatness to my way of thinking then was almost a fate worse than death. I was terrified, that's how it started with like terror and totally clueless, like I had been gone to sleep in my bed and woke up floating in the middle of the North Atlantic in a little dinghy, and I very slowly clawed my way out of that by somehow I had the presence of mind to enroll in a class with the Center for Body Trust that was about intuitive eating, and that was the very first thing I did, and it grew from there.
Stephanie Mara 10:28
I really appreciate you naming the terror.
Savala Nolan 10:28
Real terror!
Stephanie Mara 10:28
Exactly. Like I feel like that transitional piece isn't talked about enough, like it's always talked about as, like, okay, you know where you're coming from, and you know where you need to go, and people suggest all these things, of like, here's how you get to where you need to go, but that transitional space of, like, you're literally taking away, like, a baby blanket from yourself that's warm and comfortable and known, even if it doesn't actually make you feel that way long term, it feels so safe to just stay there, because it's everything that you know, and, and so I love that you're bringing in this, like, actually to say goodbye and enter into the unknown of, I don't know what is next, can feel like terrorizing.
Savala Nolan 15:50
Totally, and if you suspect that you're going to gain weight if you stop controlling what you consume and how you move, and if you were still in a place where the learned hatred of fatness is what governs your thinking, because, of course, it's cultural, it's learned. Not all peoples of all places and all times have this attitude towards fatness. If you are still really invested in that, which anyone would be at the very beginning of this journey, then the idea that you might become fat or become not skinny or become, you know, whatever, gain x pounds, whatever it is, is truly terrifying. It's like an existential threat, because even when you're nowhere near the kind of eating disorder level of disordered eating, for most women, unless they have done a lot of inner work and liberating getting fat has been sort of held like a gun to their head, it's really a scary thing, and the image that comes to my mind is sometimes you'll see in movies where, like, you know, the hero is like in the jungle on some quest and they come to this rickety ass bridge that crosses like a half a mile ravine, and they have to somehow psych themselves up to make that journey. That's what it felt like to me. Maybe it would be less extreme for some people, but that's what it felt like to me.
Stephanie Mara 18:20
Absolutely, I love also that you call it a body project. It really brings in how much this has become such a cultural focus of, like, this is the project that, as a woman in this world, you quote unquote should focus on, and you were just saying liberation, and I feel like that is such a confusing journey to go on, of like, how do I liberate my body from the expectations of society when also society isn't going to make me feel safe to liberate myself?
Savala Nolan 18:54
Yeah, well, it's a bitch. I don't know if I could swear on your podcast, but yeah, I mean, you zeroed in on it. There's a scholar named Sander Gilman who studies fatness and thinness, and he says that dieting is a way that women show they understand their role in society. So, dieting, it's an odd thing, because it's very internal, right? I mean, any dieter knows, like, they are their most intense warden, they are their most intense drill sergeant nine times out of 10, the voice in their own head, what they're writing in their diary at night, you know, that kind of thing, but it's also an external performance, and it shows up as sort of like, oh, I can't have that, I didn't work out today, you know, at the family dinner table, or the kind of like, oh, I think, does this make me look fat, it's an odd thing, and that's part of what makes it so completely preoccupying, is that it's an internal sort of maelstrom that's happening inside the diet or the person struggling with disordered eating, and it's a performance that is meant to project to the world that you understand your job as a woman, and you're performing womanhood right, you're doing it right. The other thing that I think is so problematic is that even putting aside this sort of biological reality that intentional weight loss very rarely works long term, so even if you kind of take that out of it, intentional weight loss often doesn't work psychologically either. What I mean when I say dieting usually doesn't even quote unquote work psychologically for the dieter is I was never thin enough, I'd set a goal, I'd be at a size banana and my goal was to be a size grape and I'd get to a size grape and suddenly size poppy seed looked pretty good. I know very few women who were able to rest at the size grape, you know what I mean, at whatever their grape is, because then you're fighting to maintain it, and then you know it's like the finish line is always being advanced, what that means, I think, for the actual person who's engaged in the body project is again total consumption. It's internal, it's external, and the gap between more and enough doesn't ever really close, right? Because even if you hit your goal, then you're trying to maintain your goal, and shit happens. Somebody serves birthday cake, you get a bad cold, and can't go to the gym for a month or something. It's like you're never off the hamster wheel, so finding the wherewithal to not only get off the hamster wheel to reckon with the internal and the external performance and to deal with the fact that if you want to be liberated you have to trade some kind of safety that you're getting from the culture now, it's provisional safety. It's safety you can only have while you're complying, but you do have to trade some of that very often in order to really seek liberation. That is a very tall order, and all the while you're still getting external messaging about the supremacy of thinness, and you know, blah blah blah blah blah. It's a very tall order. I think it's a miracle when any woman frees herself 5%. That's worth celebrating to me.
Stephanie Mara 18:54
Absolutely, I love that you just broke that down, that like, can we even celebrate 5% body liberation, because to give a middle finger to the culture can feel so like we're talking about terrifying when the context of what your body lives in is going to be different from person to person, depending on if they're even in an environment around people that are going to celebrate that and uplift that and embrace that, or if they are actually going to feel even more shamed and ostracized and marginalized, and so it is an important thing to be like, hey, let's also look at the context of your life, of like, how terrifying is this going to be within your window of tolerance, like, how much of that can you like navigate that's not going to completely immobilize you in your life?
Savala Nolan 20:02
Yeah, and it's different for everyone. I mean, I happened to be married at that time when I was 35 and kind of starting to find my way out. I happened to be married to a man who was very supportive, but there are men out there who were like, if you gain 20 pounds, I'm gone. So not everyone is dealing with the same sort of playing cards here. There's absolutely environments where it can be more difficult, and I think the performance of the Body Project is actually a source of bonding and friendship for plenty of women, and what happens when you stop doing the dance. I had a work birthday party, maybe a month ago or something, and I brought in these pastries from this incredible French bakery, like, you might as well fly to Paris. I mean, you know what, they're so good. This place always has a line out the door. Anyway, I laid down the credit card, brought in some pastries to celebrate this birthday party, and it happens to be all women, you know, a dozen women or so. What do you think every single woman said when she saw the pastries?
Stephanie Mara 20:26
Oh, I can't have that. Or, oh no, thank you. I would really have to go to the gym after this.
Savala Nolan 20:33
Yeah. Or thank God I had my tennis lesson this morning. Or...Thank God? I mean, that's so I usually just keep quiet in these moments. You don't have to fight every battle, but it was like this is a birthday party. These are fabulous pastries, you know. So, at some point the 10th person came in and said something like that, and, and I said, oh, you know, let's, let's not do that, let's just enjoy the pastries, you know, we don't have to earn them, and you know, I said something kind of like that, and you could have heard a pin drop, it was like a record scratch in that room, and I was thinking about it afterwards, and I was like, it's because I made the space illegible, nobody could quite understand what was going on in that moment. I wasn't legible as a woman at a party, and there was this kind of like where everyone had to quickly analyze and recalibrate when before it had just been this sort of thing that we do. We're all doing the dance, lift your right foot, lift your left foot, we all know the dance. You knew what they said, and you weren't there, right? We all know the dance, so there's a cost. There is also potentially a cost in terms of, like, your best friends, your sisters, your moms, you know. If this has been something that has been used to bond you, and you know, just because something bonds you doesn't mean it's good. Super glue will bond you to something. Not all mechanisms of bonding are good.
Stephanie Mara 26:46
Oh, I love that. And I can even notice, like, some anger come up in me as you're talking about the game. Like, I, I've always really hated those games. I'm like, can't we just be like authentic and real here, and like, I want to like bypass the game, but like, you're speaking to it can feel really ostracizing and lonely when you want to be the only one not playing the game, and you're around people who are still in it, maybe don't even know that there's another quote unquote game that could be playing, or you know, that they get to write the rules.
Savala Nolan 27:23
Yeah, they don't have the second language yet.
Stephanie Mara 27:25
Yeah.
Savala Nolan 27:26
I sometimes think my experience with the body project, it just was so extreme. You know, I was a toddler put on a diet, and my mom meant well, but things got real kooky. I mean, I think in, let's see, in second grade I had to, like, announce my weigh-in results to the class on Monday morning. It was meant to kind of create incentives, you know, but that's bananas right now. Granted, this was 1987 so it was very different era in terms of these things, although we may be heading back in that direction right now, you know. I don't know. Other kids were actively encouraged to, like, kind of help me in the lunch line, quote unquote, and be like, Savala, you don't want the lasagna, just get the salad on your tray, all of which is to say I had such an extreme experience with this that it's like I truly cannot speak my first language anymore. I don't care what the supposed benefits are. The supposed benefits are completely outweighed for me by the risks and the harms and the provisional acceptance that I would get if I were to say lose x amount of pounds and become what society might call thin, the provisional acceptance is nothing, I mean it's nothing compared to the power and the spaciousness of just liking who I am as a fat woman, there's no comparison, zero, and being able to model for my daughter just liking who I am and not treating my body as a project, like not for love or money, could you pay me or get me to go on a diet again, even if I would be more acceptable to society in some ways. So, it could just be that my experience was so intense that at this point it's like, yeah, no way, never ever. I'm sure there's people out there who have a milder brush with this, and so it doesn't feel so bad to be engaged in the body project from the cradle to the grave, but for me, absolutely not. No way, that river has run absolutely dry.
Stephanie Mara 29:55
Yeah, there's something that you speak to, I believe, in your book around how like both kind of physically and emotionally, like you were trying to make yourself smaller, but it never actually led to wholeness, and so I'm wondering if you can speak more to that, and like what did body liberation actually look like for you in real time?
Savala Nolan 30:19
I think what it looked like in real time was the ability to leave a bad marriage and being able to write two books and publish them, and that sounds, it sounds like I'm being a little flip, but I'm really not. The thing is, there is a real difference in what you can do when you are truly at home in your body, not just at home because you've got it all under control, you know, you're white knuckling it, and so you're at home, and not just at home because you've, like, you're complying with HOA rules for how you know what color the tulips can be, not like that, right? I'm talking about something that is more earthy, feral, unmodified, unregulated. When you can be at home in your body, the way, like your cat is at home in her body, right? Unmodified, unregulated, primal things become possible that are not possible when you are white-knuckling it, and when you don't like sitting inside of yourself. I mean, I should say here, my experience, you don't go from like a lifetime of the body project to then let's say gaining x number of pounds. If you do, as you liberate yourself from the body project and immediately living it, you have to re-educate yourself, you know what I mean. I don't mean to skip over that part. My biggest fear was that I would gain weight, and I did gain weight, and there's a million possible reasons for that, but I had to see and own and witness my grief and my angst about that before I could get to the other side, to the like, oh, this is fine. Wow, I thought an atomic bomb was gonna go off in my life, and instead everything is bursting into bloom. It's fine, it's totally fine. I don't mean to skip over that, but what, as you do the work, whether it takes six months or six years, and you can sink into your body a little more easily, and with less outside intervention constantly rattling the walls, I think that you can start to see things like, oh, this marriage is emotionally abusive, and I'm going to leave. That's in practical terms what that looked like for me. And as far as my books go, my books are very personal, they're very embodied, and I just simply couldn't have written them from a body that I was trying to control and didn't like, I just couldn't do it. I could not have. You may have heard me say this, you know, because we have a connection on the social media world, but it's like, if you've ever renovated your home, even a non-fun renovation, like we have to yank out these pipes that are leaking, you know, not like, oh, new marble bathroom or whatever. It's a nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare. Every second of it is a nightmare, and you can't friggin wait until it's over. It's not as pleasant to be in your home while it's being renovated. Well, I think you know women's bodies are under constant renovation. We are very numbed out to the impact of that, because it starts so young, 13, 10, 8, 6, 3. We're very used to the dust and the hammering and the rattling. A lot of us do not even know what a peaceful, quiet home looks or feels like. We just think this is just how it is, you know. This is just my house under renovation all the time. In fact, there is a huge cost, but you can't always see it until you step out of it, and the benefit of stepping out of it is like, oh, I don't have to have my house under renovation all the time, and so I can actually be here and live my life. Does that make sense?
Stephanie Mara 34:52
It absolutely does. It actually makes me go back to a period many, many years ago, even before covid happened. My husband and I found mold in a house that we had, like, just bought and needed to, like, completely gut, like, so much of the house. It was the most wrenching, dysregulating, horrible experience, to the point when it was done, we didn't want to live there anymore, and we actually sold it and moved.
Savala Nolan 35:21
Oh my god.
Stephanie Mara 35:22
So like, I really, on a visceral level, like, understand what you're talking about is like, how, when our bodies are under constant construction, how dysregulating that is. We don't want to be here, we don't want to stay with this body, but what you're talking about is like, if we can, like, say the construction is done. We need to now enter into a place of safety, to like, even as you were talking about landing in your body, I like allowed my feet to like sink into the floor a little bit, and I'm like, oh yeah, like that's what that feels like, like rooted in yourself.
Savala Nolan 35:58
Fucking great, it's great, it's absolutely great. I just think with women it's like if your kids are raised in a home that's always under renovation, they don't know any different. And unfortunately, girls, we're probably witnessing our moms renovating from almost day one before we're verbal, we're in the energy field of our moms trying to bounce back from pregnancy, you know, before we're verbal. So I just think women, most women, have no idea how intense the renovation energy is, because they're really used to it, they're really used to it. They've never had peace and quiet in their body, or they had it fleetingly, you know, until they were nine, and some aunt said something at a barbecue about whatever their shorts or what they put on their plate.
Stephanie Mara 36:57
Yeah, you know, it makes me think of as you were describing, like you even said, I know this sounds flip, which I don't agree with that at all, of what you were describing, of that when we feel a sense of safety and are living more, and maybe that parasympathetic nervous system response, that's where we can more easily decide big decisions in our life step into our creativity, so that's what I hear like changed for you was like once you started to feel more at home inside of yourself, you got to look at your life and be like what's not working for me, and from a prefrontal cortex place make some changes and step into your creativity to like write two books and publish them.
Savala Nolan 37:42
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And it's not to say that you can't be creative when you were also dieting. None of this is as simple as one plus one equals two. But I think it's a really important question for women to ask themselves. It's like, what else could this energy be used for, and do I really want to be celebrated by a sick society? It's like, I don't know. On the one hand, when you're, when you're kind of at the normative center of a culture, yeah, that's where the goodies are. Generally speaking, the goodies that the culture provides are going to go most often to the people who are most compliant with the culture's dictates. Being on the margins of a culture, you don't get the same goodies from the culture, but I don't know that I want the goodies of this culture. I'm just not sure that I want them.
Stephanie Mara 37:42
Yeah, I love that you are naming that, because what it makes me think of is how much pressure so many, especially women, are feeling to go on like a GLP-1, but what you're pointing out is like, okay, if you walk that down the line, if it is not for a legitimate, like the creation of these medications was for diabetes management, like beyond that piece, that it's like, okay, what is that for, and is that really who you want to be receiving praise or acknowledgement from so I actually love that you're naming this, that if we take it one step further, it's like, well, what will this get me beyond a perceived internal sense of safety, and is that actually in alignment with, like, my morals or values as a person?
Savala Nolan 39:39
Yeah, and perceived is a big word there, because it's conditional, it's not unconditional. If you can find a way to be who you are, free from, or more free from the dictates of a culture, that authenticity of self that you will experience is not conditional, because it's authentic to yourself. It's the opposite of conditional. What you have to do to get the conditional approval, you got to keep doing it forever, or the approval goes away. When you're really rooted in yourself, that's just not a concern, and it's great, it's very liberating.
Stephanie Mara 40:25
Yeah, I even feel that sense of freedom as you're describing that, because the unconditional love that maybe that inner child is still looking for, that got put on that diet at such a young age, that it gets to come from yourself, because yeah, there's always this pressure that you even, you're referencing, of like, okay, so let's say you get to this quintessential place with your body of like the ideal body image that like some beauty culture has set for us, that you're still then, as you even described in your book, you're still then not feeling whole and complete and grounded and at home. There's always this looking over your shoulder, but what if? But what if my body changes again?
Savala Nolan 41:15
And it will, like, at a very minimum time will pass, and you will get older, God willing, you know, at a very minimum, at a very minimum, you will age, you will wrinkle, you will sag, you know, that's just the nature of the beast to require that external, I mean, external validation is such a trite way of putting it, but to have that be your main or even only source of a sense of worth and self is a very dangerous game, very dangerous game, because we simply don't live in a culture that cares really about that stuff. To the contrary, it's like GLP-1's, and you know, again, I'm talking about intentional weight loss, unrelated, you know, not diabetic, all that stuff. It's like they manufacture an insecurity because, of course, anti-fatness is manufactured, it's not innate to human beings, and then they pretend that they will resolve it for you right by offering you this drug. In reality, their business model requires your constant insecurity. They have no interest in resolving your insecurity, because if you stop being insecure, you'd stop taking the drug. They require you to be unstable and, like, not giving yourself what you need, the lie they sell is that you will no longer be insecure if you can get down to size whatever, but again, follow the thought that their interest is not you being secure, their interest is you being really insecure, so that you stay on the drug. The apps, like the dating apps, want you to meet your person. They don't make any money when you meet your person.
Stephanie Mara 43:12
Also true!
Savala Nolan 43:14
It's like it's the business model, so that you stay on that thing. They don't want you leaving. It's the same with the GLP-1's. They don't want you suddenly feeling secure, they want you insecure as hell. They're just saying this will fix everything for you, but that's not actually what they want.
Stephanie Mara 43:32
Yeah, and I appreciate you bringing that in, because it is kind of needing to sometimes take a pause and get curious about who benefits from my insecurity. Who benefits from me continuing to put myself down, or to think that something about my body, my wrinkles, my hair, my size needs to change. And it is an excellent point that it's like once you start to see that one, I can both feel in my body both the fear that that can bring, of like, but then what, like, we're talking about the unknown that you're stepping into, because if this has been like the blueprint your entire life, how terrorizing or terrifying that's going to be, but then also the like the freedom and the liberation and the excitement of like, oh my gosh, I can stop the construction, like I can just be like, hey everybody, get out of here, you're no longer welcome.
Savala Nolan 44:24
Get out! Exactly, get out and wipe up those boot prints when you go, that I love that you use the word blueprint, because one of the things that people often talk about in this sort of like liberation body liberation spaces is that like you do have some experience with what it was like before all of this started, if you can remember being a little kid, if you can remember being six years old and not having this hammer come down so hard quite yet. And for plenty of women it's probably not long after six years old that they start to have this awareness cultivated in them of size and but one of the tools that sort of people will try to give you is like you do have a somatic memory of this you did have some part of your life where you ate intuitively, and you weren't self-conscious, and you ran around in a diaper, and so I think that that is important for women also to remember, as somewhere in there, for most of us, there is another neural pathway, and in my case, you know, I don't remember ever not being on a diet ever, because I was three or four, but if I can do it, if I can do it, when I have no memory of ever feeling free and okay in my body, then I really believe anybody can, even if it takes 50 years, even if it's two steps forward one step back, which my own recovery sometimes is, you know, there's easier seasons and harder seasons and harder people to be around and easier people to be around, you know, and partial recovery like harm reduction is to be celebrated and sought too. I really believe that I really believe that, because what is the alternative? We're not gonna, it's not worth it unless we get 100%. I mean, I don't know anything in life that works that way, really. Maybe your kids, who you love 100% you know? But outside of that, it's like, no, we sometimes have to accept 60% victory, or whatever.
Stephanie Mara 46:41
Yeah, I completely agree with that, and I always like to offer listeners a baby step, and I'm curious in this conversation, like you just offered one, but I'm curious in this conversation around, like, body liberation, ending the body project, is there a baby step you feel like was helpful to you, or those that you've communicated with, or that you have found, or seen, or experienced, that when someone is starting to go down these new paths, what might be helpful, or something they could start playing with themselves.
Savala Nolan 47:17
Yeah, I mean, I'll give two things. The first is like super practical, and that's just for the kind of intuitive eaters of the world, or potential intuitive eaters, is decanting your packaged foods into mason jars or something, so that the serving size is gone, the external serving size, maybe you want three crackers, maybe you want the whole box. I don't know, but like set yourself up for success when you're trying to tune into what your serving size is today at this moment. That was one thing I did, practically speaking, that was helpful. I continue to do, and I talked to my daughter about another thing. I think is an important action step, and you can do a very quick take on this, or you can do a super deep dive is to familiarize yourself with, you could describe it as the health at every size framework, or just decoupling health and thinness and disease and fatness, because they've really gotten conflated kind of on steroids in our culture, and fatness, health, disease, and thinness are four separate things that interact, but in very complex ways. So this sort of quick and dirty would be to Google something like health at every size, which is a framework for thinking about this, and then you could go from there. I think when I do a lot of, you know, when I do speaking about this, health is like the number one thing that comes up for people, but I want to be healthy, but I want to be healthy, you know, and there's lots to say about that, but this notion that health is thinness and fatness is sickness is false and needs to be deconstructed.
Stephanie Mara 49:25
Thank you so much for bringing that in. I'm glad that that kind of snuck in in our dialogue right at the end here, because it is a really, really, really important point to make. Like, you even put out a fantastic post the other day that was like, would you still be eating, moving, doing whatever you're doing if you learned that it didn't actually lead to health, and that actually stopping your keto diet, stopping your exercise routine, actually would lead to greater health, but it would make you gain weight, would you still be doing it? And it was such a fantastic post. Because I feel like it does make us pause and stop to really question why am I doing this, and if this is really about health, like you're naming, health is way more layered and nuanced and complicated than diet or wellness culture tries to make it out to be, so I appreciate you bringing that in, of we have to start uncoupling this whole idea that thinness equals health, or that, like, fatness equals sickness.
Savala Nolan 50:29
I happen to be one of those people who was very firmly in the camp that fatness is not a disease, in part because I know why it was declared a disease by the American Medical Association. I know that it was against the advice of its own committee studying the issue. The AMA constituted a committee to decide whether to declare fatness a disease. They were being lobbied to by pharmaceutical companies who were getting ready to push out the first wave of modern weight loss drugs, and their own committee said fatness is not a disease. There are no predictable outcomes with fatness. There are no ailments that fat people have that thin people don't have. It just doesn't meet the criteria. The pharma industry pushed back really hard, and they voted against their own committee. Yes, these things are being smushed together by forces that have an economic stake in them being smushed together, but that's to our detriment, and that sounds like a tin foil hat thing that I just said about the AMA and voting against, but it's not.
Stephanie Mara 51:37
There's literally no research, there is no research out there that, like, backs up, like, I've been reading the research that people in larger bodies experience certain ailments specifically because of their body shape and size. The research does not back that up.
Savala Nolan 51:56
It's just not there exactly. And there were tons of articles at the time when the AMA made that decision, saying, like, you know, saying, what are you doing? Your own doctor said don't do this for these reasons. So listeners could look into that too, if they're curious.
Stephanie Mara 52:11
Yeah, well, I love these baby steps, and they are really small, and yes, just coming back around, even to the idea of, like, a portion size is what your body needs.
Savala Nolan 52:26
Like, we're just gonna shoot from the free throw line. We don't have to do any fancy, you know, half court shots. Back to basics. I mean, I'm 10 years into this process, and I'm still learning, so there's no rush, there's no rush, and the process is its own incredible, incredible reward. I mean, not to be cheesy about it, but it's like if you're in a room that doesn't have enough oxygen, you're going to feel every percentage point of increased oxygen that comes into that space, you're going to breathe more easily, so every little bit helps.
Stephanie Mara 53:02
Oh my gosh. Well, I love the work that you are doing, and I loved this conversation. I'm curious, how listeners can keep in touch with you and everything you're doing, and your books.
Savala Nolan 53:15
If they like reading, they can definitely read Good Woman: A Reckoning. It came out in March, and it's taken the world by storm. They can also keep up with me on Instagram, that's where I probably most active on social media. It's just @savalanolan, and I, you know, write a Substack and have a website, all that stuff is just my name, so substack.savala.com you know, all that good stuff, and savalanolan.com and I, I love to talk to readers who are in book clubs. If any of your readers are in book clubs and want to do a Zoom or in-person convo, I absolutely adore doing that.
Stephanie Mara 53:54
Awesome. Well, I will put all of those links in the show notes. And just, thank you so much again for your passion and your wisdom, and this conversation, it just feels so important. I cannot wait for everyone to listen to this.
Savala Nolan 54:07
Thank you. And right back at you, because wisdom and passion are a powerful, wonderful combination, and I appreciate you so much, and the work that you're doing.
Stephanie Mara 54:17
Oh, thank you. Well, to everyone who is listening, if you have any insights from this episode, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime, and I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of the day. Bye!
Keep in touch with Savala:
Website: https://savalanolan.com/
Substack: https://savala.substack.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/savalanolan/