5 Questions With Dana Sturtevant, Hilary Kinavey, and Sirius Bonner of The Body Trust Podcast and The Center for Body Trust

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing!

Welcome to another installment of the 5 Questions With… series.

If you’re a new reader (welcome!) this is a series where we learn a bit about experts in the field. Previous interviewees include Mikey Mercedes, Aaron Flores, Dr. Gregory Dodell, Lisa Du Breuil, Dr. Asher Larmie, members of Medical Students for Size Inclusivity, Chrissy King, Jessica Jones, Leslie Jordan Garcia, Dr. Mara Gordon, Dr. Whitney Trotter, Dr. Anna Whelan, Angela Goens, Dr. Maayan Simckes, Dr. Lesleigh Owen, and Dra. Mónica Peralta

Today I am excited and honored to share an interview with Dana Sturtevant, Hilary Kinavey, and Sirius Bonner of the Body Trust Podcast and the Center for Body Trust. (I’ll add that I was very honored to be a guest on the podcast recently to discuss GLP-1s, Weight Science, and Ethical Informed Consent.)

Left to right: Dana Sturtevant, Hilary Kinavey, Sirius Bonner

1. Tell us a bit about yourselves and your work.

We’re Dana Sturtevant, Hilary Kinavey, and Sirius Bonner, hosts of The Body Trust Podcast and part of the team at the Center for Body Trust. The Center was co-founded over twenty years ago by Dana and Hilary on the premise that the challenging relationship people have with their bodies is not their fault. It is a product of systems- white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy- that profit from keeping people, and particularly people in marginalized bodies, at war with themselves.

We offer therapy and group programs for people healing their relationships with food and their bodies. We train clinicians, dietitians, and other helping professionals in weight-inclusive, trauma-informed, and justice-centered care. We write, speak, podcast, and keep showing up in conversation with our community about what collective liberation actually looks like — in the body, in the exam room, and in the culture. Sirius’s social justice leadership keeps our analysis sharp and honest, weaving together body trust work with racial justice, reproductive justice, gender justice, and disability justice. None of these threads can be separated from one another.

2. How did you learn about the concept of weight-inclusive, body-affirming care?

We came to it through different doors, but the same dissonance. Dana came through clinical practice as a dietitian, watching a weight-centric model produce harm in real time and then finding Health at Every Size® and fat activism, which gave language to what she’d been observing for years. Hilary came through her work as a therapist, sitting with clients who had done everything the culture and the medical system asked of them, and never felt better. More ashamed. More fragmented. More estranged from their own experience. The question shifted from “how do we help people feel better” to “what if the framework itself is the problem?”

For Sirius, the path was more personal before it was professional. Living in a body that culture deems unacceptable, while organizing for justice across every other domain. The connections were always visible: diet culture is not a neutral wellness industry. It is a function of white supremacy, which has always located pathology in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and fat bodies. It is a function of capitalism, which requires an endless market of bodies convinced they are broken and in need of fixing. It is a function of patriarchy, which has long used women’s and femmes’ relationships with their bodies as a site of control.

What we found, across those different entry points, was not just a better clinical model. It was different ethics, one that asks us to take seriously what people already know in their bodies, and to name the systems that taught them not to trust themselves or their bodies.

3. How have you — and how do you — apply those concepts to your work?

Weight-inclusive care is the foundation at the Center for Body Trust, not a framework we layer on top of everything else. In our clinical and group work, the body is not the problem to be solved. We work with people to rebuild trust with themselves, their bodies, and with the full range of emotions that have long been managed through restriction, food, or relentless self-improvement. We also name clearly what created the rupture: a culture saturated in anti-fatness, anti-Blackness, ableism, and the constant commodification of human bodies.

In our professional training programs, we work with practitioners to examine their own internalized weight bias while understanding that none of us arrived here outside of these systems, and that doing this work with integrity requires an ongoing reckoning with that. We also name the structural forces at play: the healthcare system is not a neutral container. It is shaped by capitalism, by white supremacy, and by a history of using medicine as a tool of control over marginalized bodies. Individual provider change matters. It is not enough on its own.

The podcast is another place we apply these frameworks — in real time, in public, with each other. We talk about GLP-1 advertising and the era of emaciation. We talk about MAHA and soft eugenics. We talk about the ways beauty standards, diet culture, and political power are not separate phenomena. The body is a political site, and we treat it as one.

4. What’s one thing you wish people who are still working from a weight-focused paradigm could learn or know?

That weight stigma is not an unfortunate side effect of weight-focused care–it is the mechanism. And it does not exist outside of the larger systems that produced it. Anti-fat bias is deeply entangled with anti-Blackness. The pathologizing of fatness in Western medicine has roots in scientific racism, in the eugenics movement, in a long history of using body size as a proxy for moral worth, productivity, and social value. You cannot truly practice weight-inclusive care without reckoning with that history.

We’d also want to ask: who does the weight-focused paradigm serve? Because it is not primarily serving the people in exam rooms and therapy offices. Capitalism requires a perpetual market of people convinced their bodies need fixing and a trillion-dollar weight loss industry that resets every January is evidence that the model is working exactly as designed. The harm is not a bug. It is, at some level, the product.

The research on the harm of weight cycling, chronic dieting, and medical weight stigma has been robust for decades. The outcomes people hope to achieve through weight loss are frequently available through weight-neutral approaches that don’t require chronic restriction and self-surveillance. What changes when you measure the whole person — quality of life, relationship with food, psychological wellbeing, felt sense of safety in the body — is significant. We’d invite practitioners still working from a weight-focused lens to start measuring those things. And to be willing to let the answers change how they practice.

5. How and where can people find you and your work?

Our website is centerforbodytrust.com, the fullest picture of what we offer is there. For individuals, we have community courses including No More Weighting and the Body Trust School for Unlearning. For practitioners and organizations, we offer Groundwork Training, Body Trust Professional Certification, and organizational training. Our book, Reclaiming Body Trust, co-authored by Dana and Hilary, is available wherever books are sold and is probably the most complete articulation of our framework and why it matters.

The Body Trust Podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen — new episodes drop regularly and the full back catalog is there. Show notes, transcripts, and resources from every episode are at centerforbodytrust.com/podcast. We’re on Instagram at @center4bodytrust, and you can sign up for our newsletter here.

You can find Sirius’s work through her writing, facilitation, and consulting. She is the author of Freedom & Desire, a Substack exploring power, embodiment, culture, and collapse through a sharp, politically grounded lens. She offers Hourglass Sessions—strategy and divination-based readings that integrate astrology, tarot, and intuitive analysis in service of clarity and aligned decision-making—as well as select consulting and facilitation for individuals and organizations navigating complex change. She is also a co-host of The Body Trust Podcast and currently serves as Interim Executive Director at Call to Safety. Her work sits at the intersection of strategy, intuition, and lived experience, supporting people and systems to move with greater clarity, integrity, and depth. You can find Sirius on instagram @siriuswhileblack and on her website, siriusbonnerconsulting.com.

Bonus: Anything else you’d like to say?

Body distrust was not an accident. It was constructed deliberately, profitably, and along very clear lines of race, gender, size, and ability. White supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy did not leave the body alone. They made the body a project, a problem, a market. Understanding that is not a detour from healing - it is part of it.

And healing, at its best, becomes bigger than the individual. When you stop fighting your own body, you often find you have more energy to fight the systems that taught you to hustle. That’s what we’re building toward, not just personal peace, but collective liberation. Come find us.

Huge thanks to Dana, Hilary, and Sirius for the incredible work they do!

Liked the piece? Share the piece!

More research
The Research Post

More resources
The Resource Post

*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.