E6 The Hump Day Hiatus with Melissa Toler
What a joy! I had such a fabulous time today chatting with Melissa about how dieting and diet culture requires us to abandon pieces of ourselves in order to perform or strive for impossible cultural standards of beauty, thinness and health.
Melissa is a speaker, writer, and educator. Her work encourages people to make the connection between our culture's oppressive beauty standards and our personal struggle with self-acceptance. She has written extensively on diet culture and the toll it takes on our lives and humanity. Her goal is to help people unlearn harmful messages and behaviors from years of chronic dieting.
It's so important that we all tap into our "common humanity", Melissa says, in order to create a world that values ALL bodies, not just those that are most privileged.
Much like her, I strive to create a world where all bodies are worthy, seen, and heard. This requires us to challenge everything! Our beliefs, biases, "truths", and values, and really look at how we are treating those around us, what we think about them, do we truly see the value in everyone? Are we contributing to others oppression and feeding into the hierarchies that perpetuate the inequality? These are hard questions, ones that I have started to look at and answer myself. These are the questions that are going to help shift the paradigms in this world that make us feel less than, that disconnect and other us from one another, these are the questions that are going to create a change.
Thanks so much for being with me today Melissa, I so appreciate you, your truth, and all the amazing work you are doing in the world to help people "Get Free".
You can find Melissa at www.melissatoler.com!
With Gratitude,
Dana