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Today I’m so excited to bring you an interview with Chrissy King. I’m a big fan and I recently had the honor of hearing her keynote address at the Renfrew Conference where she was spectacular!
1. Tell us a bit about yourself and your work
My name is Chrissy King. I'm a Brooklyn-based writer and speaker, and I'm the author of the Body Liberation Project. And the majority of the work I do is really around creating an anti-racist and inclusive wellness industry. So social justice is pretty much always at the core of the work I do. And I do a lot of work in the body liberation space through the lens of intersectionality.
2. How did learn about the concept of weight-neutral, body-affirming care?
Honestly, I learned about it through my own journey with body image. I was really deep into diet-culture and struggling with body image. And growing up even, I think I only thought of movement and exercise as a means to shrink my body. The idea of being weight neutral was a concept that was completely foreign to me because I was like, that's just not a thing. And so I remember after just being completely miserable in the dream body that I thought would make me happy, I was actually just so miserable, had a terrible relationship with body image, with food, with exercise, and I remember I read The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor. And that's really where I started to think about, oh, my body is more than just an ornament for decoration. But that also introduced me to just the idea of weight neutrality and also even the concept of weight stigma being a thing that exists in the world.
3. How have you/do you apply those concepts to your work?
I think for me, when I was learning about weight neutrality and thinking about bodies differently, at that time I was still a personal trainer and I was working with clients. And so I remember one of the first when I really, my mind was open to all of this and I started putting into practice for myself, I remember that one of the first things I did in terms of coaching clients in training was that I immediately switched, not immediately, but once I was doing it for myself, I didn't feel like it was in good conscience for me to be working with clients in terms and for intentional fat loss and weight loss. And so I think that was one of the major first things that I shifted for myself when I was still training was that I let everyone know I'm no longer taking on clients with the goal of intentional fat loss, which was really not revolutionary at all.
But also at the same time, in a lot of ways it was revolutionary at that time because no one was doing it. And I think that has informed all the work I do. I mean, everything we talk about in terms of body liberation is through the lens of anti-fat bias and weight neutrality because all bodies are inherently political. And this idea that we can approach our work without that lens to me just does not make sense. I don't think we can do work with clients if we're not taking a weight neutral approach because if we don't, we are absolutely causing harm to the people that we are working with.
4. What’s one thing that you wish people who are still working from a weight-focused paradigm could learn/know?
I mean, I think the one thing I want everyone to know is weight is not equal to health. And I think this is the narrative that is everywhere, that a smaller body equals healthy and being a larger body equals unhealthy. And that is untrue in every single principle. And I go back to when I was working with clients, especially in the fitness world, this idea that your body is your business card. And it's so ludicrous because I think of all the people I worked with that were in really super thin, lean bodies that by conventional standards of beauty would be considered fit or healthy and were not getting their periods. I had eating disorders, had all types of body issues and all kind of health issues, but because they were in a thin body, people assumed that they were healthy. And so I think we all have collectively so much unlearning to do and the idea that we can look at somebody's body and determine what their health is, and also along the same narrative is I think we have to really decolonize what that word health even means because what does it mean to be a healthy person?
5. How and where do we find you and your work?
Yes. I have a new Substack Newsletter here. I am on social media on Instagram and TikTok. My website is ChrissyKing.com and my book is called The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet-Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom. And it's available everywhere books are sold!
Bonus Question: Anything else you’d like to say
I just think the one thing I would say is through the same vein of working with a weight neutral approach, I think it's equally important for all of us to be on learning our own internalized white supremacy because that also impacts everything we do. And again, bodies are inherently political, and so we're talking about weight neutrality, of course that's super important, but it's also the issue of racism and homophobia and transphobia and all these intersecting systems of oppression that really impact the clients that we're working with or even ourselves. And so the work is always unlearning those biases and unlearning those systems of oppression.
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More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/
*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.
Love this and I am a big fan of Chrissy’s work!
Loved this. Her book is great!