Move and Eat for Fun with Dr. Deb Burgard

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 would do. Back then,

I played with my food all the time. I love sticking my chubby little fingers into pitted black olives. One on each finger, and then I'd PLoP all ton of them into my mouth, so I looked like a gerbil and made my friend 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 iologically 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 US, 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 eighteen hundreds 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 form 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 digging. 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 is time to take back our appetites. Rebel eaters. We are stepping out of the shadows with our corn dogs held high because we know pleasure and play or why we're here floating around

on a tiny, perfect dirt ball in space. I'm Virgie Tobar and this is Rebel Eaters Club. I want you to meet a woman who has 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 doctor Deb Burgard. We are preparing the mochies. Yes, I want to describe the mochies here. So these are mild coffee flavor with jo centers. She's an eating disorder specialist and

a psychologist. The first time I ever saw Deb, she was shimmy 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. Yes, there's a little plastic access ticket access. It's really erotic. Okay, should we do it? Should we dive in? Mm hmmmm.

You're like the rice, rice, flower fur, and then the coffee, and then the caramel and the chewy there's like the dusting of the flower that gives it that m that one kind of sensation, and then the chewy yes 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. We would go out to get Howard Johnson's, you know, it was just a treat, like Howard Johnson of the hotels. Yea, oh my gosh. That was actually my first job too. I was like working behind the counter in Saint Louis, you know, at the Howard Johnson's. And anyway, so the coffee flavors evoked the hojo passed. I love that. And my grandmother who was brilliant, brilliant and pretty much hated people in general, but love me. Yeah, those are some of my favorite people too. Yeah. She

was really before her time. She played jazz piano and she always smoked like unfiltered striffields that would sort of hang off of under her of religion. Yes, And when she was in college, and she went to college at sixteen, she tried to sneak out all the time, this was like in the twenties and go down to Manhattan and listen to the jazz in Manhattan. And so she was just a rebel, you know. And she had told me

one time she wanted to be a psychologist. She wanted to study with Pavlov at Cornell whoa and her dad was kind of like, no, you're going to Connecticut College for Women proper, blah blah blah blah blah. So you come from a history of rebellious women, I guess I do. Deb came of age when fat activism was new. It got started officially in nineteen sixty nine with the establishment of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and Better

than Acceptance. Deb and the people she was working with, we're interested in how fat people could thrive, and that radical idea was the spark that took us from nineteen sixty nine to what we now call body positivity. I'm a psychologist and I have been doing that for quite a while, officially since the early nineties, but when I started was pretty active in second wave feminism in college

in the late seventies. 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 keeps no place on words, just like we dance. And I said, this is for women over two hundred pounds,

because again, let's not like beat around the bush. I want people who are in who are a higher weight to really get it that I'm not talking about you know, people who are you know, fussing about not being the media a 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 because my dissertation was like languishing. I had already

written a book called Great Shape with Pat Lyons. Yes, 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. You know, we talked in the book about there's not really you know, how important was to understand this is not an obligation of fat people, yes, but it's a right, like you should have gear the 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 the oppression at the same time that you're trying to live your life. Right. Yes, So that

class was awesome. Absolutely. I kind of want to go to your early days in becoming an eating disorder specialists. I'm so curious. Well, I did have a teenage a sort of stretch of six years or so from maybe thirteen to nineteen. My mom took me to wait Watchers at thirteen. I was trying to sort of, you know, do the dieting thing in the summer, you know, and so I think I wait cycle a fair bit. And I remember coming back to college and I had kind

of dissociated that summer. I mean, I just spent the summer lying out, you know, lying out in the sun and eating tuna from a cam yeah, with nothing. And I'm just kind of, you know, coming to in the fall as I'm walking back to my dorm and I'm thinking to 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? Yes, I don't feel like myself and I don't really know why I'm doing this.

You know. There was there was supposed to be this reason for me to be thinner, that it would give me something. But I was just so you know, lucky. I was at the college I wanted to be at. 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? Right? You know?

I felt powerful in other ways, right, 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, I had thought, oh my god, I'm gonna have to wait by a phone for a boy to call me, Like what the hell? You know. It was just kind of thinking, I can't win this game. I want to play a game that I can win, you know, like I don't want to. I don't can't win this game.

I'm never going to 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, you know, which kind of blew up finally, you know, and kind of like, no, this is the last vestige

of this thing. But it's just kind of not. 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. You know, I was worried about her.

She was really struggling at some points in time, and my mom had struggled so much weatherweight, and my dad's been had been a weight cycler and been so exposed to all that stuff in med school and and so I think I just I 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 want to look at desire and how do we how do we resist and how do we deal with violence about it? And how do we deal with you know, oppression around it, and how do we fight for our

our well being? You know? Yeah, And I guess my whole you know kind of coming of age was also the coming of age of the first stages of this field, which there's so much wrong with it. Absolutely, What are some of the major issues you see in the world at eating disorder treatment and diagnosis. Well, there's a real investment that a lot of the specialists in eating disorder have in making sure that anorexia is more of a purity standard of white supremacy than an actual disease, Like

that makes an actual disease category. Okay. 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 your plane and it's forty thousand feet and you lose an engine. Are you going to wait to say, oh, we should do something about that until you are almost you know, skinning the mountaintops, you know, like guys like,

is that what you want? 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 does not 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 tend to 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 fed up. But there is a simple solution. Stop equip a low weight with wellness and if you're fat. Guess what you are? 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 going to talk more on that after

the break. 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 were dieting to achieve. And the

reason why is embedded in our DNA. People who are on the planet right now, at least if we look like let's take 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 two little fuel, right, because we're two out of three of us are maintaining these bigger bodies on the same basic intake, right, yes, And so these people, these one to three people, they think they're the norm, but maybe

their ancestry didn't include a bunch of famines, right or as many or whatever. They had some other thing that they were good at. You know, they had some other trait that they were good at that people survived, right, Like, this is why biological diversity is good in a species. We have 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 movement or something, those those things are kind of tossed off and like like, we don't need that anymore. What planet are you living on? Like this? You know, I

don't think that's true at all. Like we have this incredible uncertainty that we're we're looking at right now, and you know we're gonna I think we're gonna absolutely need

these capacities and they're not bugs, they are features. Yeah, yus, I mean that's the thing, right, Like, I think that this is extraordinary, that this is magic, right, it's it's it's it is, it's I just feel like there's such a simplification of what the magic stuff that our bodies really do, like the amount of strategies that our bodies have for all this stuff and what we really don't

know 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 because they're just almost gone from from this disease, and you know that could be somebody in a higher way too, could be anywhere along the on 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. Do you see dieting as intel like whatever the average American considers a regular 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 restriction behavior? I think of it as a trained behavior that is a response to the accusation that you have been sinful in your eating. It goes back to the

religious idea. I think, 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, Yes, and it hits people differently based on your privilege. You are the first person who taught me that our relationship to food is metaphorical. 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, an ideal of whiteness. But it was also in many ways an attempt to gain control over my experience of abuse. Because the mean, the fat phobes around me were saying, I will stop abusing you, and in fact, I mean most of them were straight boys, right, I will not only will I stop abusing you, I will then proceed to try to have sex with you.

If you just stop being fat, I'll value you. Yes, And 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 from men. And for a lot of feminine people who are fat,

that lesson comes together. There's sort of like one trauma and it explains I mean, it 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, Oh, but to kind of like get back to this right, like, you know, there's no way that what I ate 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. Oh so, oh, 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, when you have less privilege, Yeah, you have to do it, right, I

feel like you have to do it. I talked 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? Yes, 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 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 fems, and they 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 hearkening back to my own path. Yes, on some level, you know, it's the it's the connection with your actual magic in your ancestry, right, It's totally it's not a version of it. That's been fed through white supremacy and burped out on the other side. Right when you are at these crises moments of divesting and kind of going I'm not really going to do this, yes, because I'm not going to do this. I don't want

to fucking do this. Yes, 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 my awareness and myself and 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?

Right about this? Yes, I mean to go back to the concept of 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 poopoo garbage and like your's like really traggy, but you're giving up all the what the poop poo garbage represents, which is acceptance and and everybody I really believed of that, Like we all like and I think about you know, I have this relationship to my biological family, for instance, where I'm 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 wherever we grow up, we have that relationship on some level to our culture. And 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, Like, my dad has a really violent pass 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 die culture, and it was like dancing in the streets, and you know, it was just a very celebratory and then the sobering reality kind of a few years in where I'm like, oh wow, that was a

big decision. And I think one of the reasons that there's such a giant schism right now is because you know, 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 and 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, to the what it was before and m 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've what you're thinking is actually harming me, you know, Yes, I mean this is brave territory, yes, um. And I think that's that's what gives me some kind of hope, you know, because I see people doing it, you know, 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? How would people like, I mean, I guess like 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 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 we're in these bodies. Part of this opportunity to be in this space suit

that is a human body. Yes, is the experience that we have of something that's not you you're going to take into your body, Yes, and it's going to become part of you. Yeah. And that's just just so intimate, right, and it's so and it's so amazing that we do it with each other. Yes, StEB, it's been so amazing talking to you. Thank you. I've been so good. Thanks for I think about my good friend's son, Atticus. I remember going out with the two of them when Addie

was one year old. We were out shopping for incense and rose courts, 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.

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 consent it to us at Rebel Eaters Club at gmail dot com or leave us a voicemail at eight six two two three one five three eight six and your story could make it onto the show. That number is eight six two two three one five three eight six. When you're done, don't forget to give yourself the merit badge you earned, the move and eat for Fun badge. You can print

it out on our website, reb Eatersclub dot com. Then go find the Rebel Eaters Club Spotify playlist and show us your happy food dance. Tag us on social with hashtag Rebel Eaters Club All one word, or tag us at Transmitter Pods. Next week, we're talking to chef Fresh Roversant about how food is a connector not just to ourselves,

but to our communities, to the earth, and to our ancestors. Oh, these foods are good, and these foods are bad, and often in the bad category falls these culturally significant foods from me that my parents and grandparents and ancestors have grown up eating and brought over and how colonization and all of that has like ripped that apart. Rebel Eaters Club is an original podcast from Transmitter Media, the podcast company that's a perfect byte. I'm Virgie Tovar. The show

is produced by See Roberts and Jordan Bailey. Our editor is Sarah Knicks. Greta Cohen is our executive producer. Our theme song is by Dara Hirsch. Please head to your favorite podcast app and give us a review. It will help us grow the club. See you next week.