Food Psych #146: Binge Eating Recovery & Intuitive Exercise with Kristy Fassio

Kristy Fassio

Certified Body Trust Provider and Health at Every Size personal trainer Kristy Fassio joins us to talk about the restrict-binge cycle and binge eating disorder; how to make fitness work for people in larger bodies; why diet culture is The Life Thief and how it steals our power, freedom, and joy; how restriction feeds into emotional eating; and so much more! Plus, Christy answers a listener question about how to refute arguments in favor of a particular diet.

Kristy Fassio is a mom, AFAA certified personal trainer, and a certified Body Trust Provider. When she’s not planning her next Disney vacation, she can be found working on her Masters in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, tending to the small menagerie of animals that live on her 10 acres, telling women their bodies are not broken or driving her kids to dance lessons. She believes movement should be joyful, life should be lived wholeheartedly, and that self-care is inescapable. Find her online at KristyFassio.com.

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We Discuss:

  • Kristy’s relationship with food growing up, including how the messages around food began to change during puberty

  • How Kristy’s larger body size affected her perception of movement, food, and body image

  • Kristy’s experience with the restrict-binge cycle and binge eating disorder

  • How diet culture tricks us into thinking our hunger and fullness cues are broken

  • The power and love in asking for what we need

  • Kristy’s discovery of other people who struggled with emotional and binge eating, and how helpful it was in her recovery process

  • Kristy’s journey from hitting diet rock bottom, to discovering intuitive eating and eventually coming to a place of body acceptance

  • Dismantling weight bias and embracing a Health at Every Size paradigm in our professional lives

  • How diet culture normalizes disordered eating

  • Welcoming movement and food back into our life in a way that’s nourishing rather than punishing

  • How to make fitness work for people in larger bodies, and how ableism seeps into movement practices

  • Kristy’s process of shifting her exercise classes to a more inclusive experience

  • How people connect and bond over diet talk and food restriction

  • Why diet culture is The Life Thief, and how it steals our power, freedom, and joy

  • Kristy’s journey to embrace a social justice lens on body and food, fat activism, Health at Every Size, and fat liberation

  • The value and power in community and in being seen

  • Kristy’s career change from movement work to therapy, and the work she wants to do in the binge eating disorder community and fat advocacy

  • The need to break down our own fatphobic beliefs within the eating disorder field and outside of it

  • How restriction feeds into emotional eating

  • Embracing the fact that recovery is a flexible and effortful process, and that every day won’t feel perfect

  • Raising kids in a fat-positive, anti-diet environment

 

Resources Mentioned

Some of the links below are affiliate links. Affiliates or not, we only recommend products and services that align with our values.

 

Listener Question of the Week

What’s the deal with intermittent fasting? Is intermittent fasting an intuitive choice, or is it a gateway to disordered eating? What’s the research in support of intermittent fasting?

(Resources Mentioned: *Trigger warning, mention of weight/calorie numbers and specific dieting behaviors* Intermittent fasting interventions for treatment of overweight and obesity in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift)

 
Christy Harrison Admin Christy Harrison Adminbinge eating disorder, binge eating, recovery, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders, intuitive exercise, joyful movement, health at every size, healthism, fat positive, anti-diet, fatphobia, medical fatphobia, social justice, fat activism, fat liberation, ableism, disordered eating, weight bias, body acceptance, emotional eating, binge restrict cycle, S518