Episode 3: Move and Eat for Fun with Dr. Deb Burgard
Transcript:
VT: There is a cute ice cream shop across the street from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It’s called Tin Pot Creamery. The store is tiny, but when it comes to ice cream, it’s epic.
They’ve got flavors like blue jasmine tea, lemon cookie with rosemary, and hazelnut coffee orange. Yuuum. When I was there a few months ago, I was trying to decide. What should i get? A combination? A sundae? A whole tasting flight? It’s like the best kind of FOMO. And then… I noticed... my body was moving.
I was dancing - just a little dance, back and forth on my heels. I looked around because I was feeling a little embarrassed, and then I saw another woman… She was doing it too. I laughed and asked the cashier… do people always get wriggly at the counter?
“Oh yeah,” she said. “It’s called the ice cream dance.”
And then I remembered… being a kid in the summer, wearing my polka dot bathing suit, and the ice cream dances I’d do back then. I played with my food all the time. I loved sticking my chubby little fingers into pitted black olives - one on each finger. And then I’d plop all 10 of them into my mouth-- so I looked like a gerbil and made my friends laugh, and then I’d laugh, and then we’d start all over again. I had SO MUCH FUN playing with my food.
What happened to that? When did we all get the message that we had to stop turning our mashed potatoes into snowmen… or stop letting a fruit roll up turn our tongues bright red. Remember the surprise every time from Pop Rocks?
We are biologically designed to love eating. Pleasure is one of the ways our bodies tell us what they need to survive. It’s real, good, intimate information from our bodies... to our brains... through our excellent senses. Pleasure is powerful.
And because somewhere along the way, a lot of cultures decided that our bodies were bad… dangerous, threatening… evil… pleasure became bad too. Here in the U.S., it goes right back to the religious roots of this country, to a preoccupation with controlling and dominating people, production and land.
This stuff goes back to the 1800s with guys like Reverend Sylvester Graham… if that name sounds familiar it’s because of his connection to graham crackers. He was the leader of the Dietary Reform Movement - which believed that ...If you ignored your appetite for delicious and exciting food, you could learn to ignore other, more dangerous desires. Like sex. And independent thinking. I mean, this dude hated masturbation… to him, it was the thing that would lead to the deterioration of the NATION.
He thought pleasure was a gateway to rebellion. It had to be stopped. Basically he wanted to ban physical pleasure… He wanted to stop people from listening to the deep messages our bodies send about what they want and need.
And you can still see that legacy in every supermarket, with halos over diet foods and “guilt-free” labeling about which foods are safe for our souls.
But friends, it is time for rebellion. It’s time to take back our appetites. Rebel Eaters, we are stepping out of the shadows with our corndogs held high! Because we know pleasure - and play - are why we’re here floating around on a tiny perfect dirtball in space.
[4:14] I’m Virgie Tovar and this is Rebel Eaters Club.
I want you to meet a woman who's helped so many people get back in touch with that simple pleasure in the body that I had as a kid, that I had again at the ice cream shop... her name is Dr. Deb Burgard.
Deb Burgard: We are preparing the mochis. I want to describe the mochis here. These are mild coffee flavor with Dolce de Leche center.
VT: She is an eating disorder specialist and a psychologist. The first time I ever saw Deb, she was shimmying with a hula hoop around her waist. We were at a conference. And she was grinning wider than anyone else.
Deb loves to play with her food.
[5:15] DB: There's a little plastic and then you sort of pull down on to access, to get access. It’s really erotic.
VT: OK. Should we do it? Like the rice rice flour first. And then the coffee and then the caramel. chewy.
DB: And the chewy...There's like a dusting of a flower that gives it that that one kind of sensation and then the chewy part of it. And then the ice cream. And it's like all these different textures. And the coffee part of it is just so evocative for me. My grandmother used to love Howard Johnson's coffee ice cream, and it was like such a big deal. He would go out to get Howard Johnson's coffee ice cream That's a family. You know, it's just a treat.
VT: Like Howard Johnson of the hotel chains? Oh, my gosh.
DB: It's actually my first job, too. I was like working behind the counter in Saint Louis. You know, at the Howard Johnsons.
VT: Well, anyway, so the coffee flavor is evoke the HOJO past.
DB: I love that my grandmother, who was brilliant. Brilliant and pretty much hated people in general, but loved me.
VT: Yeah. Those are some of my favorite people, too. Yeah.
DB: She was really before her time. She played jazz piano and she always smoked like unfiltered Chester Fields that would sort of hang off under her upper lip. And when she was in college, she went to college at 16. And she tried to sneak out all the time.
This was like in the 20s and go down to Manhattan and listen to the jazz in Manhattan. And so she was just a rebel, you know. she had told me one time she wanted to be a psychologist. She wanted to study with Pavlov at Cornell.
And her dad was kind of like, no, you're going to Connecticut College for women proper bla bla bla bla bla.
VT: So you come from a history of rebellious women.
DB: I guess I do.
[7:45] VT: Deb came of age when fat activism was new. It got started officially in 1969 with the establishment of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. And better than acceptance, Deb and the people she was working with were interested in how fat people could THRIVE. And THAT radical idea was the spark that took us from 1969 to what we now call Body Positivity.
DB: I'm a psychologist and I have been doing that for quite a while since the early... well, officially since the early 90s. But when I started, I kind of was pretty active in second wave feminism in college in the late 70s. And then when I came here to go to graduate school. I started teaching a dance class for fat women and I called it We Dance like nothing cutesy, no plays on words. Just We Dance. And I said, this is for women over 200 pounds because again, let's not, like beat around the bush.
I want people who are in who are higher weight to really get it. I'm not talking about, you know, people who are, you know, fussing about not being the media perfect, perfect body. Right. And we had like six or seven years run of this incredible community building. Fun, amazing thing. And I had to quit to write my dissertation cause my dissertation was like languishing.
I had already written a book called Great Shape with Pat Lyons. We were both really interested in what does it look like to provide access to physical activity that isn't, you know, kind of framed around weight loss. We talked in the book about how important it was to understand this is not an obligation of fat people. Yes. But it's a right. Like, you should have gear that works and fits and you should have environments that are free from weight stigma. And you should, you know, be able to not have to, you know, also struggle with oppression. At the same time that you're trying to live your life, right? So that class was awesome.
VT: Yeah, absolutely. I kind of want to go to your early days in becoming an eating disorder specialist. But I'm so curious.
DB: Well I did have a teenage as a sort of stretch of six years or so for maybe 13 to 19. My mom took me to Weight Watchers at 13. I was trying to sort of, you know, do the dieting thing in the summer, you know. And so I think I weight cycle a fair bit. And I remember coming back to college and I had a kind of dissociated that summer. I mean, I just spent the summer lying out, you know, laying out in the sun and eating tuna from a can. Nothing.
I'm just kind of, you know, coming to in the fall as I'm walking back to my dorm and I'm thinking I'm sort of feeling my hip bones, you know. And I'm thinking, what the fuck just happened? And I'm thinking, why is this a good thing?
I don't feel like myself. And I don't really know why I'm doing this. there was supposed to be this reason for me to be thinner than it would give me something. But I was just so, you know, lucky I was at the college I wanted to be. And I was involved with who I wanted to be involved with. I was like I was kind of like, I've got what I want. So what is this for? I've felt powerful in other ways.
I remember being in fifth grade and I had gone to a new school and there were girls like going steady with boys already, you know, and it was kind of like, oh, no, And I thought, oh, my God, I'm gonna have to wait by a phone for a boy to call me, like, oh, you know, I was just kind of thinking, I can't win this game. I want to play a game that I can't win.
You know, like I don't want to, I don't can't win this game. I'm never gonna be that girl. But there are things that I am really good at. And so I invested in those things, I think. And so this sort of dieting thing through my teens was sort of a, you know, kind of good, good faith effort to conform. Which kind of blew up finally. You know, I'm kind of no. This is the last vestige of this thing. and, you know, as my sister, you know, was coming along four years later and really doing more of the conventional stuff, you know, and sort of being successful at it, but also developing an eating disorder. You know, it was really weighing on me. I was worried about her. She was really struggling at some points in time. And my mom had struggled so much, and my dad had been a weight cycler and been so exposed to all that stuff in med school. And so I think I just ended up doing these intellectual searches that were really about what is the effect of the culture on our feelings about our bodies and our relationship with our bodies and our ability to take care of and be motivated to feel like nurturing ourselves.
And then when I was in grad school interviews, I remember them asking me, what do you want to do your research on? And I was saying, you know, women in our appetites, I want to do stuff on our appetites. I'm going to look at desire. And how do we resist? And how do we deal with violence about it? And how do we fight for our well-being? I guess my whole coming of age was also the coming of age of the first stages of this field, which, there’s so much wrong with it.
[14:02] VT: What are some of the major issues you see in the world at eating disorder, treatment and diagnosis?
DB: Well, there is a real investment that a lot of specialists and eating disorder have in making sure that anorexia is kind of more of a, you know, sort of purity standard of white supremacy than an actual disease like that makes an actual disease category.
DB: So one of the ways that that manifests is that you have to you know, a lot of people believe you have to be emaciated to be diagnosed with anorexia. And my analogy for that is always to have them think about, let's say you're a plane and it's 40000 feet and you lose an engine. Are you going to wait to say, oh, we should do something about that until you, you know, are almost, you know, skimming the mountaintops? You know, like like, is that what you want? ˛
[Interstitial music]
[15:07] VT: So here’s a fact: all sorts of people with all sorts of bodies can have eating disorders. But even in ED treatment, people get different treatments depending on the size of their bodies.
Your body experiences food restriction as a threat. It doesn’t like threats! After you stop restricting - whether it’s a diet you read about in a magazine or an ED - your body will do the magical healing work of gaining weight. This is called weight restoration. That’s when your body tries to get itself to a place where it feels safe and good again.
And that place - that weight - where it feels safe? It’s known as the “set point.” Set point is the weight range in which your body functions best. It’s why dieting, restriction and even surgical intervention don’t work long-term.
But in most ED recovery, doctors prescribe a weight for you, a kind of target weight, regardless of what your natural “set point” is. So that means the wisdom of your body can be at odds with what the doctor has deemed to be your target weight. And that is a problem.
When your set point is HIGHER than your doctor’s target weight? Then you will likely find yourself being encouraged to start restricting again--even though you’re in recovery for an eating disorder.
This is really backwards and really harmful. It reintroduces fatphobia when that’s a big part of what, in fact, a lot of people in ED recovery are trying to heal from.
So. Eff’d. Up.
But there is a simple solution: STOP EQUATING A LOW WEIGHT WITH WELLNESS.
If you’re fat, guess what? You’re not a failed thin person. You’re just a person whose body thrives at a bigger size. It can be as simple and neutral as that.
All of this to say... Dieting doesn’t work! Some of us are just bigger, and restricting food might make our bodies smaller for a period of time but by far most people who diet gain the weight back, because their bodies want to be bigger. Because embedded in some of our genes is the lesson that bigger bodies are more likely to survive. We’re gonna talk more on that, after the break.
[Interstitial music]
[19:16] VT: We’re back. Before the break, I was talking about how when most people diet, they gain the weight back because their bodies WANT to be the size they WERE, not the size they are dieting to achieve. And the reason why is embedded in our DNA.
DB: People who are on the planet right now, at least if we look at the United States as an example. Two out of three of us apparently had ancestry where people were able to be geniuses at making bodies out of too little fuel. Because we're two out of three of us are maintaining these bigger bodies on the same basic intake, right? And so these people, these one in three people, they think they're the norm, but maybe their ancestry didn't include a bunch of famines. Or as many or whatever or they had some other thing that they were good at. You know, they had some other trait that they were good at that helped people survive. Like, this is why biological diversity is good in a species with a lot of different challenges that we're facing. But, you know, when I think about how much the capacity to slow down your metabolism when you don't have enough food or get a lot to eat when you have access to food or store it instead of, you know, making it disappear in the form of heat or energy or movement or something. Those those things are kind of tossed off and like like we don't need that anymore.
That’s sort of, what planet are you living on? I don't think that's true at all.
We have this incredible uncertainty that we're looking at right now. And, you know, we're going to I think we're going to absolutely need these capacities. And they're not bugs. They are features.
VT: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing right. I think that this is extraordinary. This is magic, right?
DB: It is. I just feel like there's such a simplification of what the magic stuff that our bodies really do and how amazing it all is. And, you know, just trying to find a path, you know, for me, trying to find the path with somebody who's just, you know, got a little tiny ember in there because they're just almost gone from from this from this disease.
And, you know, that could be somebody in a higher way, too, right? Could be anywhere along the weight spectrum and trying to really help them feel like they deserve to be here. And they absolutely deserve to eat and they deserve to get fatter and they deserve to take up this space and they're precious.
[22:16] VT: Do you see dieting as, like whatever the average American considers a normal diet, do you see it as part of a spectrum of disordered eating? Do you see them as in different buckets or how do you conceptualize how do you conceptualize like restriction behavior?
DB: I think of it as a trained behavior that is a response to the accusation that you have been sinful in your eating. And it goes back to the religious idea you know, if you're fat and we don't like fat people, that means that you're not right with God. I think the roots of all of this are the same oppression. And it hits people differently based on your privilege.
VT: You are the first person who taught me that our relationship to food is metaphorical. Mm hmm. Like for me, I think about my history of dieting and restricting and attempting to starve myself was it was a lot of things. I mean, it was about trying to assimilate into an American ideal and an ideal of whiteness. But it was also in many ways an attempt to gain control over my experience of abuse, because the people, the fat phobes around me were saying, I will stop abusing you. In fact, I mean, most of them were straight boys, right? Not only will I stop using you, I will then proceed to try to have sex with you if you just stop being fat.
DB: I'll value you.
VT: I mean, I think there's kind of this is often something I talk about where people I mean, especially for me as like a fat girl being taught fat phobia. I was learning that not only was something was wrong with my body, but also that the best thing that I could possibly get would be sexual desire for men and for a lot of feminine people who are fat, that lesson comes together. They're sort of like one trauma. And it explains. I mean, certainly explains a lot of my sexual history because I literally felt no autonomy. Right. Like my understanding of safety was entirely tied up with masculine sexual approval. But anyway. To kind of like get back to this, like, you know, there is no way that what I eat was actually going to control my experience of abuse. And yet I truly believed that on some level. And so I'm curious if you can kind of talk about the functionality of our relationship to this thing that we all need that we engage with every single day.
DB: So you're just so smart. Just such a pleasure to talk to you.
They tell you what you're supposed to do and when you're when you have less power, when you're younger or when you have less privilege. Yeah. You have to do it right if you like. You have to do it.
I talk to people a lot about, you know, kind of, you know, you had to do this thing and now you have to show yourself that you can do the opposite. And what does it look like after you've convinced yourself of that? Like, what is it? What's next? You know, like, what is this really? That's the exciting thing to me, you know?
[25:23] VT: I think about for me, you know, that moment of transition from hating my body and all that stuff, it didn't feel viable to to hop over until I saw a femininity that really resonated with me. And that was when I was introduced to fat activism. And these were queer, fat, mostly women. Femmes.
And a lot of a lot of us are working class. And it's like that kind of bombastic over-the-top amazing femininity comes from the working class, comes from people of color. And so it was like this. Kind of thing where I was like, oh, I see myself in you and I can be this superlatively feminine person in my fat body, but it really was a harkening back to my own past on some level you know.
DB: It's the it's the connection with your actual magic in your ancestry. Right. It's not it's not it's not a version of it that's been fed through white supremacy and burped down on the other side.
So I think when you do it, when you when you are at these crises, moments of divesting and kind of going, I'm not really going into this. Yes. Because I'm not going to do this. I don't want to fucking do this. You you're sort of in a crisis because you're like, well, what am I gonna do? Like, what does this look like? Like, who am I? What do I pull forward in in my awareness, in myself, in my history and my culture and my traditions and the other people who I know in my community, what am I going to give energy to? What am I nurturing?
VT: I mean, to go back to to the concept of like leaving diet culture, which is major. Right. And I think like one of the conversations that's emerging more and more is really what are you giving up when you leave? Right. Because you're giving up suffering and poo poo garbage and like just like really trashy. But you're giving up all that what the poo poo garbage represents, which is acceptance. And I really believe, Deb, that like we all like and I think about, you know, I have this relationship to my biological family for instance. Like I know there's a lot of problems there. A lot, right? I know there's a lot of harm. And yet there's a part of me that will always want them to love me. There's a part of me that will always want their approval. And I think the truth is we as what wherever we grow up, we have that relationship on some level to our culture. So what does it look like to not only have the true sight of being like, wow, my dad is a horrible person.AKA America. My dad has a really violent past and I have hopes for him to recover. But I can't actively be like engaging in his delusions anymore.
And then to sort of say, not only am I able to see that now, but I actively have to step back from him and I can't keep waiting on his approval. I remember the early days of leaving diet culture and it was like dancing in the streets. And, you know, it was a very celebratory. And then the sobering reality, kind of a few years in, I'm like, oh, wow. That was a big decision.
DB: And I think one of the reasons that there's such a giant schism right now is because, you know, there's a there's a bunch of other just perspectives and ways of being in the world that have come into the public square in such a beautiful and boisterous and magnificent, you know, kind of way, and the existing culture of, you know, middle-aged white guys, you know, is kind of kind of blown off the table. And then people feel like, you know, I have no place in this next thing or I have to fight for it to go back to this and to what it was before. And when we really we kind of think about that in sort of abstract terms, but in some weird way, I think we're talking about a desperate feeling of can I bridge the worlds with you? You know, can I bridge these worlds of who you are and who I am? Can you sort of stretch enough to know me, you know, and know the ways that I'm different from you and know the ways that I'm that what you're thinking is actually harming me, you know? Yeah. I mean, this is brave territory. And I think that's that's what gives me some kind of hope, you know, because I see people doing it.
[30:55] VT: Yes, absolutely. I guess this is a big one. if you could have a magic wand and fix some of the problems you see in your office out in the world with diet culture. What like what would you do with this wand? What would change? I mean to bring it back to food - how would people interact with food in this magical world where there aren't all of these intensely layered issues?
DB: We would play. And you know, we would have so much more room for the satisfying aspects of creating and nurturing each other. And being able to cherish that were in these bodies. Part of this opportunity to be in the space suit that is a human body is the experience that we have of, something that's not you. You're going to take into your body. And it's going to become part of you. And and that's just so intimate.And it's so amazing that we do it with each other.
VT: Yes. Deb, it's so amazing talking to you.
DB: It’s been so good. Thanks Virgie.
[Interstitial music]
[32:31] VT: I think about my good friend’s son, Atticus. I remember going out with the two of them when Atti was one year old. We were out shopping for incense and rose quartz.. As one does.. and he starts screaming at the top of his lungs. Turns out he was hungry. When we finally sat him down with a scrambled egg and buttery toast, he started bouncing in his high chair. He began to throw air kisses at everyone around him. That is how amazing it feels to feed our bodies. Eating gives us pleasure. It makes us dance in public.
Why wouldn’t we play with food? Why wouldn’t we celebrate the way it puts us around a table with the people we love most? It gives us LIFE.
So for this week’s journal prompt, I’m thinking of that image of Deb at the conference, hula hooping.
What if we all stopped thinking of food as diet? What if movement didn’t just mean exercise? What if food and movement were just things we do for pleasure? For FUN. What would look different in your life if FUN was the goal?
If you want to write down your thoughts, you can send it to us at rebeleatersclub@gmail.com, or leave us a voicemail at 862-231-5386 and your story could make it onto the show. That number is 862-231-5386.
When you’re done, don’t forget to give yourself the merit badge you earned: the MOVE & EAT FOR FUN badge. You can print it out on our website: RebelEatersClub.com. Then, go find the Rebel Eaters Club spotify playlist, and show us you’re happy food dance. Tag us on social with #RebelEatersClub, all one word. Or tag us @transmitterpods.
Next week, we’re talking to Chef Fresh Roberson about how food is a connector - not just to ourselves, but to our communities, to the earth, and to our ancestors.
Chef Fresh Roberson: These diets are like created around- around oh, these foods are good and these foods are bad. And often in the bad category falls these culturally significant foods for me, that I, that my parents and grandparents and ancestors have grown up eating and brought over. And how colonisation and all of that has like ripped that apart.
If you want to write down your thoughts, you can send it to us at rebeleatersclub@gmail.com, or leave us a voicemail at 862-231-5386 and your story could make it onto the show. 862-231-5386.
Rebel Eaters Club is an original podcast from Transmitter Media. I’m Virgie Tovar. The show is produced by Lacy Roberts and Jordan Bailey, with help from James T Green and Alex Sujong Laughlin. Our editor is Sara Nics. Gretta Cohn is our executive producer.