Hellbent on protecting their careers in eradicating fat people, a group of Australian obesity researchers have snaffled $600k in government funded research money for a global research ‘collaboration’ to ‘study’ how often their ineffective weight loss programs cause eating disorders. Join me and my absolutely appalled guest Chevese Turner as we unpack this extremely dark development in the eating disorder world. The weight loss industry must be PREVENTED from wreaking further havoc in people’s lives. Putting them in charge of studying eating disorder risk is like putting the gambling industry in charge of studying problem gambling. This episode will get your blood boiling!
Show Transcript
Welcome to all fired up. I’m Louise your host and this is the podcast where we talk all things anti diet. Has diet culture got you in a fit of rage is the injustice of the beauty ideal. Getting your knickers in a twist jdoes fit-spo make you want to spit-spo? Are you ready to hurl if you hear one more weight loss tip? Are you ready to be mad, loud and proud? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s get all fired up. Welcome back diet culture dropouts, thank you so much for continuing to listen to this awesome podcast. And if you are feeling really fired up and you would would like to help us spread the love, please go to Spotify, Apple podcasts or wherever you go. And leave us a lovely five star rating and review because the more of them we get, the more people will listen. And the more likely it is that we will topple diet culture for good. So I want to get started with today we’ve got such an unbelievable conversation with Chevese Turner. And we’re going to be ranting about the really sad state of affairs in our eating disorder community and its collusion with fat eradication and the erasure of the lived experience when it comes to eating disorders in larger body people. It is absolutely outrageous. Before we start, I want to give a shout out to the brand new UNTRAPPED Academy, the sponsor of the all fired up podcast. This is something I’m extremely proud of this project. It’s a very affordable membership subscription, which will bring people newspapers every month, a skills training session to help you bring anti diet ideas to life in your own day to day, plus a support group which I am running. There’s also this incredible Facebook community. And we’ve all been together since 2017. So there’s lots of people there who are really awesome and waiting to meet and support you. The untrapped Academy is for a lot of different people. So if you’ve just had struggles with food or body or moving, or if you just had a gap full of dieting, the untrapped Academy is built for you. If you’re new to anti dieting, and you’re not really sure what this is all about or whether or not it will fit you. But you’re looking for information, skills, training and some support we are for you. And of course if you have been doing this for years, that you love the sense of community and you want to keep up to date with all the different things that are always changing, then the untrapped Academy will suit you as well. So as I said, we’re a membership. We’ve got regular live talks from a variety of awesome speakers. We’ve got skills, training sessions and the support group. And we record everything. So we are home to an ever growing video library where everything is fat, positive, body positive and weight inclusive. And we are kicking things off. So I’ve uploaded our body talks, speakers. The body talks festival was an online celebration for international no diet day and we just had the most phenomenal lineup of speakers. So we had Dianne Bondy, Christy Harrison, Dr. Sabrina Strings, Ragen Chastain, Fi Sutherland, Sofie Hagen, Chrissy King, E-K Dauphin, Lacey Jade Christie, Ashlea Gillon, Dr. Fiona Willer and Megan Crabbe. I mean, what a lineup It was an absolute amazing event and all of their uplifting talks already in the untrapped resource library right now. I have also uploaded all of our May events. So we had Shane Jeffery, who is an anti diet dietitian, he was talking about the raves model, and then we had follow up skills training with Susan and Meg. Awesome, fierce anti diet dietitians. Now. The raves model is a really wonderful kind of back pocket starter pack really for anti dieting when Intuitive Eating might feel a bit overwhelming. Raves is just awesome. So Shane came in and talk to us about what the model is. And then Susan and Meg came in to do some really nifty skills training, getting everyone started. So those two recordings in the library right now. It was just so cool. The untrapped Academy is a really wonderful way to learn the skills of anti dieting in really digestible, easy to consume kind of snack sized pieces, and there’s so many wonderful teachers lined up. We are looking forward in May to welcoming Hillary and Dana from being there. Unknown Speaker 5:00 perished and they are going to be talking to us about our bodies story and how we can unlearn all of the harm of diet culture is going to be amazing. So if you are interested, I’d love to have you come on board, we have a lot of, for the first 50 People who sign up for membership is just $1 for the first month, and then after that it’s 15 or $30 a month. And then once we hit the 50 founding members, the price is going to increase. But if you get in on the ground floor, so to speak, you always only pay $15 Just because it’s wonderful to have founding members and it’s wonderful to be able to run the academy, but I have literally only got, I think two places left. So I hope by the time this goes out that they’re still available, but if you go to untrapped.com.au you can find out more about the academy and hopefully if you think it’s gonna see you come on board and join us. Okay, let’s get on with the show. I’m so excited to introduce my guest today. I know it’s been me ranting on my own for a few weeks. Well here we have an actual guest, I am so pleased to welcome shrveys Turn up. She is an internationally recognized activist and advocate speaker, a policy influencer and basically a movement builder, who dedicates her ability to make significant social change on social justice issues around eating weight stigma and body size discrimination. She’s just incredible. Recently, she base has co founded the body Freedom Project, which is focused on improving the lives of people by ending body size, discrimination, harassment, bullying, and stigma through awareness, education and advocacy. She also founded the binge eating disorder Association, or beta in 2008. And managed a merger with beta with a National Eating Disorder Association, Neda in 2018, after a really successful 10 year period, which included her fighting to include binge eating disorder into the DSM five, which was published in 2013. So essentially, the inclusion of that in the DSM five meant that these eating disorder became quote, unquote, legitimate mental illness qualifying people for proper eating disorder treatment, because of beta and because of spaces insistence on highlighting, binge eating disorder, people struggling with literally the most common form of an eating disorder, and the most under diagnosed, finally had hope of recognition and care. She is the co author of a really wonderful book, which I highly recommend called binge eating disorder, the journey to recovery and beyond on she’s always contributing in our community. She’s always on podcast is in the media. She’s on Capitol Hill in the United States, and she was very heavily involved in a recent victory. In New York, of course, with weight discrimination has finally become illegal. She’s just an absolute powerhouse. She has a BA in Political Science from Temple University in Philadelphia. That expertise includes public policy, government relationships, nonprofit management, strategy, programming, communications and making change. She’s I mean, basically, there’s really nothing that shrveys cannot do. And I’m beyond honored to welcome her. Now, before we bring surveys in for this fascinating conversation, I want to give you all a heads up it is again, a triggering conversation, we’re going to be talking about eating disorders. And we’re going to be talking about really people being harmed by being forced to lose weight. And there’s quite a bit of discussion about weight loss. Again, there’s a few Oh words thrown in here. And we really are kind of highlighting a particularly painful and traumatizing area of eating disorder treatment, which is important to air because we all need to learn about it. But if you’re not okay, if you think that this is going to trigger you upset you please give this one a miss. But in the meantime, let’s welcome to face to face turnout. Welcome to all fired up. Thank you for being here. Hey, thank you for having me. So what is firing you out? Oh, I think I could go on for about a day or maybe a week. But I will say Unknown Speaker 9:30 that right now there’s a group called Edit. In your fine country of Australia. There are many, many obesity researchers who are part of this group and there are some US Space folks who are involved as well and they seem to want to erase the lived experience of fatness and eating disorders together and Unknown Speaker 10:00 And what that really means. And so I’ve just, I feel, I will say, honestly, I feel really betrayed by any of those people who are in the eating disorders community. And and I just I’m having to use all the tools that I have learned over the years in terms of the weight stigma trauma I’ve experienced and the really bad hair that I got in my eating disorder treatment, because these people epitomize all of that. So yeah, that’s one thing. Wow. Oh, oh, should face on behalf of Australia. I want to apologize to you. And I am having deep feeling I feel like this is going to be a very emotional conversation as well as justifiably outraged from a scientific perspective, but also, exactly that. This is traumatizing. What is happening in our eating disorders field, and it’s affecting many of us, including you, obviously. And I’m very sorry about that. But thank you for coming on and, and talking about it. So what the fact is the Edit collaboration and the these the eating disorders in weight related therapy, so it’s, that doesn’t actually even Bell edit, but that’s okay, let’s ignore that eating disorders in weight related therapy, they have their own nifty website, which seems to kind of be a group of mostly let’s face it, obesity, people who have come together in a calling a collaboration, yes. And what are they trying to do? They’re trying to gather data on what they’re calling white related therapy, which is what we know is like weight loss trials. Unknown Speaker 11:53 And they’re saying, bring us all of your data, like if you have run a weight loss trial, and if you’ve collected eating disorder measures in that trial, give us your data, give us access. So we can like use heaps of the money that we have from the NH and MRC to produce publications that will claim that being in quote unquote, obesity treatment, does not increase the risk of developing an eating disorder. So there’s definitely no agenda here. No agenda Unknown Speaker 12:29 summarily dismisses the lived experience, that people who are in strong recovery from eating disorders and remain in higher weight bodies, it just dismisses our lived experience. And it’s no, no, no, no, we’re going to show you that actually, it doesn’t cause harm. Even though most every person that you dog do, who has had this experience can give you a laundry list of harm. And I have had Unknown Speaker 13:11 bariatric surgery, I have gone to weight management programs, Unknown Speaker 13:19 four times formally to weight management programs. And each time my eating disorder got worse. With bariatric surgery. I was in art route, partly in recovery when I had that surgery. And it just wiped out any sort of Unknown Speaker 13:42 Yeah, connection I was really developing with my body and the my relationship with food was improving. And that just wiped all of that out. Of course it did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you have you have very personal lived experience multiple times of going into these weight loss environments. And not Unknown Speaker 14:07 not finding it. particularly helpful. I mean, it’s, it’s the antithesis, when, when we have an eating disorder, the desire and the pursuit for weight loss is at the heart of it. And that’s also addressing those concerns. And coming to a place of acceptance over trying to control the size of your body is supposed to be at the heart of recovery. And this stuff is sort of saying, well, that the Yes, that’s what we do if you’re thin, but if you happen to have exactly the same disorder and your body is larger, we are going to try and do the recovery but still focus you on losing weight. It’s just bullshit to be honest. It’s it is bullshit. And it sets up more weight cycles. They claim success in research that the timeline Unknown Speaker 15:00 And for success in weight studies, it’s very interesting success can come in six months, one year, two year. And that is considered a very successful timeline. I know for myself that I maintained my weight loss within those periods of time. Really it was, I mean, what I saw is that around the one year mark, I would start creeping up again. Yeah, that’s very not that’s very normal, we know that yet, between six months, or one year is when you hit the kind of bottom of where your body’s gonna let you get to, and then you’re gonna regain. And it’s not to do with anything that you’re doing wrong. This is a physiological response to restriction, starving yourself. Yeah, I mean, that’s my bouts of atypical anorexia came with weight management. And there were other times when it was self imposed. But those were times when I really went into the depths of some pretty dark places. And so these claims that people can be successful in putting their eating disorder behaviors aside, which I’m not sure how you do that when restriction is an eating disorder. Here. Yeah, and you have an eating disorder. But And interestingly enough, this their study, the meta analysis they did, they didn’t include restriction, they only included binge eating, because restriction is an eating disorder behavior. So I have to ignore that. Yeah, they have to ignore that. And that is, to me that says that they believe that fat people with eating disorders only binge and never restrict when we know those of us who have lived through it. Binge eating disorder is for the majority of people with that disorder, a restrictive eating disorder. We absolutely know that. And from your brilliant book, we know that. But yeah, it’s really Unknown Speaker 17:14 it’s sad. And I, I also find it interesting that now is the time, what is it about now that has made these people come together? And I have some suspicions? And I’m sure you do, as well. I do. I wanted to give a bit of backstory to this group in Australia, if that’s okay. Sure, yeah. And then maybe you can give me your backstory on what’s happening over there. And maybe we’ll piece it together a bit. But this edit collaboration, there’s a lot of faces in there that are familiar to me from So way back in in 2018, I was at an eating disorder conference in in Australia, and heard heard of this study called the Fast Track trial, which I don’t know why we were talking about it at an eating disorders conference. This was a, it was about to be run through one of the children’s hospitals here in Sydney. And it was planning to put adolescents in between the age of 12 and 17, on an intermittent fasting, sort of semi starvation or a regime for 12 months. And one of our eating disorders, researchers was actually involved in the fast track trial, when we heard about this, there was a whole group of people just horrified. But adolescents are particularly at risk, of course of developing an eating disorder. Intermittent fasting, like it’s such a restrictive level for such a long time, just seems like a really bad idea. Unknown Speaker 18:45 So it’s a very long story. But essentially, a protest against his trial began, there were a range of complaints lodged to the ethics committee that had approved the trial. Ultimately, the Ethics Committee rejected the concerns of the eating disorder community, I started a change.org petition saying stop the fast track time, I really felt like harm was gonna come to kids. 20,000 people across the world signed that petition. I don’t think there’s ever been a push back. So public. So our so much heartbreak came from people hearing about what this child was going to do. And of course, it still went ahead, unfortunately, but I don’t think the eating disorder was very popular after after this level of pushback. And I want to tell you this story. So because we knew the child was going ahead and because the the concerns that were being raised by the end decided community was really being dismissed by the team, who were sort of saying, you know, there’s a small risk, but don’t worry. So I bought the domain I noticed the domain name fast track trial.com.au was for sale. So I bought that and with Unknown Speaker 20:00 a whole group of people here in Australia and from around the world actually put up all kinds of information on this website, we were sharing with experience of people who had been harmed as adolescents in weight loss trials, we were talking about the sort of woeful efficacy data on behavioral weight loss interventions, and specifically fasting interventions. So talking about, you know, the particular psychological and physical consequences of restrictive dieting at this age, plus a lot of the lived experience stuff. So that that went up. The next thing I knew I was being pursued by the legal team at the hospital to get their website taken down. So they came after me big time. And it was months and months and very stressful, back and forth. And I had to sort of get lawyers involved and things like that. My lawyer didn’t think I had a chance in hell of winning against their massive, very well financed, and it was just a little old me versus them. At the end of the day, months later, the World Intellectual Property Organization ruled in my favor and the trial, the website is still up, which is, yeah, yeah, it was awful. And it still remains awful. But I do think that after, because we were getting a lot of media coverage as well, about the Fast Track trial here in Australia, they were very unhappy with the negative publicity around it. And I know that we had the Amsterdam, the Australian New Zealand association for eating disorders speak out against the trial, we had the Academy for eating disorders internationally, speak out about the trial and talk about the ethical concerns of doing this to children at that point, the eating disorder? Well, yeah, I was on the ad board at the time. And so just shared my lived experience with the rest of the board. And I think that helped them see that this was really not a good idea. It was a it was a really wonderful heartening response in the eating disorder world. But I do feel like since then, this team has suddenly upped their publications of deliberately kind of looking at this idea of proving that intentional weight loss does not cause eating disorders, and actually notice, so they’ve published two big analysis so far. One was in 2019, I think, and that was on whether or not adolescent weight loss causes eating disorders. And then in 2023, they’ve just done one on adult on the adult literature. And I noticed in the intro to that they said, concerns have been raised by some that this might be risky. And their reference to that was the Academy for eating disorders. statement about the Fast Track trial. Yeah. Yeah. So there. So there’s defensiveness here, rather than recalibrating, and being curious about what people who have lived through this are saying, who have lived through it as children, and I just, I’m very, very interested in their lack of curiosity. And the one too, when people are saying this is causing harm, the one to plow through and say, no, no, it’s not rather than then really listening to people and, and maybe even collaborating with people. And, and looking at how do we not do harm? Because we know there are ways there are ways not to do harm. So So yeah, it’s interesting, and I think that people are protecting their fiefdoms. Unknown Speaker 23:50 fiefdoms? Unknown Speaker 23:53 Yeah, in their ability to be published, and obesity is, and I say that, in quotes, is a place where people are making careers and they’re not real concerned with with the harm that may be coming along with that. So that means that we have to fight harder. And as usual, those of us this is kind of a social justice thing that when you’ve experienced oppression and harm, which the fat community has, because we are constantly told where we’re, our bodies are not right, their disease, their you know, all of the things that we know, those people have to go out and fight this sort of nonsense, and then become traumatized all over again. So manual cycle of retraumatization over and over again and just trying to fight this stuff. Because at the end of the day, we just don’t want kids being hurt. I know Unknown Speaker 25:00 adults or adults or adults, but it’s so often starts in China, where it’s not just one time it’s this, because people will regain the weight. And this, this is interesting and that their entire collaboration assumes, is based on like a model of intervention that is woefully inadequate and like something that since the 1970s, we’ve been saying, Why are we still doing behavioral interventions, they do not work, they work temporarily, they cause metabolic damage, physiological damage and psychological harm. So that this is never addressed in all of these collaborations, they simply start everything with obesity is an epidemic of struggle, but they don’t kind of say also, like what we’re doing doesn’t really work. And it does, it does kind of have physiological impact that is completely ignored. They’re just going to focus in on the little kind of the question is about eating disorder risk in pretty much short term weight loss tiles, it’s, it’s such a, like you said, it’s just protecting a fiefdom protecting a very ineffective, useless, harmful paradigm. And now all of this money is being poured into the Edit collaboration, which is significant group of people. Right. Yeah. And could you speak to the the people who are collaborating with them? Who are, I think that I read on the web website that these are the people who are lived experience? Yeah, so this structure of edit, which should be kind of pronounced and or what is. Unknown Speaker 26:41 So there’s, there’s different tiers. There’s a study team, there’s a scientific advisory panel, and there’s what they call a stakeholder advisory panel. So the study team has 11 people, they’re very, very dietician, A, this is where Heba Chevelle, the the person who was really in charge of the fast track stuff, and they’re the meta analyses. So I’ve have seen anyone here, like they’re all sort of pro obesity, I guess. Yeah, very much. Then there’s the scientific advisory panel, there’s 12 of them, and I want to go back and talk about them. But then there’s the stakeholder advisory panel, there’s seven of them. I’m not laughing, I’m just kind of harsh, because leaved, there’s no lift experience of people who have been harmed as kids by behavioral weight loss. We have a group of people who are formerly fat, or there’s one person who’s had bypass, there’s one woman called Kelly Cooper, who presently works for the obesity collective and is a member of the weight issues network. So this is we’ve talked, I’ve talked about that on previous podcasts about how heavily anti fat that is, there is I can only say one person on this who has had an eating disorder. And she is definitely smaller, smaller bodied. Ted Kyle is here for some reason, said, Unknown Speaker 28:11 You know, he’s my friend head. Yes, I’ve known Ted, Unknown Speaker 28:17 probably going on 20 years, just from stomping around Capitol Hill in Washington, DC and getting to know the different obesity communities. And He’s a nice man. And we we see things very, very differently. And he is also very determined to show that obesity treatments do not cause any sort of eating disorder or disordered eating. And, and it’s interesting to me that he has been the, on the board of all of the obesity groups in the United States. They’re all funded by Pharma. And he’s a former pharma guy, he worked at GlaxoSmithKline, apparently, for years, and he has a worldview. I too, worked at in pharma for years, but I worked in oncology. And so I just said, I’ve never been involved in the weight loss area. And Unknown Speaker 29:22 I know he has the lived experience. To some extent, I don’t know his whole story. I know part of it just from a dinner we had together. And I think he just sees things in a certain way. And I think he feels my impression from some of his posts, his blogs and, and so forth. There’s a little edge to them when it comes to eating disorders. And I feel that he’s just angry to some extent that we are sort of putting a cog or a we’re stopping the progress by half Unknown Speaker 30:00 Wow, Jeanine drugs in the surgeries and so forth insane. There is this group of people, we believe that all people who are in higher weight bodies are being harmed by these things. But people with eating disorders, there’s like there’s a extra layer or 20. Unknown Speaker 30:22 And below, he’s not happy about that. And he’s a marketing person. And so he really is interested in taking control of the narrative. Well, I mean, that’s what the Edit really is, isn’t me, it’s Unknown Speaker 30:38 just Unknown Speaker 30:40 a story. Let’s take the facts out of the story. Let’s take the people out of the story. And let’s just edit your truth to say what we want to say. The scientific advisory panel is is 12 people. Yeah, and mostly women tune in mostly white. They sit in, and there’s I can only say two people in there who have done work with eating disorders. Everyone else is anti fat. And one of the people of the very first person featured is Dr. Louise, that Professor Louise Bauer, who was the leader of the fast track trial. She’s very, very so so so so anti fat, and it’s actually the president of the World obesity Federation effect that is never disclosed and any of her right. Oh, actually, it is down on the Edit thing. It is it is admitted. So that’s fantastic. Funded by Nova Well, this is the same I’m sure they have other monies but Unknown Speaker 31:40 yeah, yes, well, the world obesity Federation, then number one funder is Novo Nordisk collect producing all of the weight loss drugs. The Edit collaboration website has frequently asked questions. One of the questions is how is the Edit collaboration funded? It says it’s funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council grant. So that’s government money, that what isn’t disclosed on this website anywhere? The high number of people on various boards and committees who have received money from pharmaceutical companies making weight loss drugs, in particular Novo Nordisk. So for example, Louise Bauer has received money from Novo Nordisk because she is not just a speaker for them, but an advisor for them. And there’s many other people in this group who have received money from Novo Nordisk and other farmers. Why isn’t that on the website? Well, I so my suspicion is I have heard of people with binge eating disorder being put on these weight loss medications, and the claim that the one to binge decreases. Unknown Speaker 32:58 Yeah, so I have a feeling that that is probably something they’re looking at. I don’t know if edit is but I’m sure Novo is intrigued by that, and I suspect we’ll see a study. I don’t know if you saw this but a researcher in Ireland actually public had a publish has a published study that claims that these medicate. novos medication actually decreases the incidence of cancer in obese people. There were like 23 people in the study or something that we also know it causes cancer. I mean, Unknown Speaker 33:44 I mean, it’s such a small, a small study, and I just, I just feel like it’s becoming the, the new this drug can do everything. It also feels like everything’s coming together, you know, Novo Nordisk, essentially taking over the market taking over all of the old model is kind of weight loss centers, like Weight Watchers, and gnome and stuff like that. So they’re coming in there. And then now if there, I just can’t get my head around it, but if we’re gonna get weight loss drugs into eating disorder treatment, and that’s going to be fully caused by collaborations like this. Yeah. I just have no words for how screwed up that is. Well, we know how this will go. Right. This is another cycle of weight loss interventions that seem to be almost miracle drugs. And full disclosure, I am on one of those drugs for diabetes, and I’m I’ve no shame in that. It does control my diabetes very well. I’m on the lowest dose and I haven’t lost weight. Unknown Speaker 35:00 Eat? Yeah, yeah, well, that’s okay. It’s a very good drug for diabetes, Unknown Speaker 35:05 drugs for diabetes, and I would never take that away from anybody. But I think that I think that these companies are getting themselves into a pretty risky, I just think down the road we’re going to see because I mean, it’s hard to trust, right? It’s very difficult as people who have been harmed by previous drugs and previous interventions to trust that there’s something a, that can actually allow the body to lose weight and not harm it and be that you want to lose weight. You know, like, Yeah, I mean, the debt at the lowest dose, it has interrupted my appetite. And I’ve had to kind of go shift to really making sure that I’m getting my three meals and two snacks a day in, and I have to kind of rely more on mechanical eating than paper Unknown Speaker 36:08 rather than intuitive, which is probably why I haven’t lost weight, because I’m not allowing the drug to ruin my relationship with food again. Yeah, no, but that takes a lot of I mean, I have enough recovery that I can do that. Yeah. But there are going to be people out there who don’t who are like, this is great. And in the meantime, they’re not getting the nutrition they need, they’re going to have long term problems because of that. So I guess we just have to wait and see for their paper to come out on how these weight loss drugs do not cause eating disorders, because I’m sure that that’s a very friendly relationship between the two of them. Yeah. Do you know any of the people on the scientific advisory panel? I know, Denise will fee which I’m not sure if she’s on that panel or the other one. And there is yeah, she’s on the scientific advisory panel. Okay. Yeah. I got. I mean, I don’t know her. Well, I have spoke with and met Denise a couple times. Very lovely lady. She did a lot of research on binge eating disorder. And that’s how I knew her from my days with the binge eating disorder Association. But more recently, it there’s an interesting thru line here that I’m thinking about. Denise, I know, has been working with the AAP on their pediatric, I guess they call it their pediatric obesity program. It’s a behavioral weight loss program for children to and up. Okay. So, and I also know that nietos chat box, our chat thing, but that they’re using Unknown Speaker 38:00 came out of her lab, Ellen. Gerald, I believe is her name is the research in Denise’s lab to develop the body image program that ni does is now using. And unfortunately, there’s been some problems with it giving people with eating disorders, weight loss advice, and that sort of thing. So it’s currently offline. So I know that Denise’s lab is focused on eating disorders and obesity research. But so she’s the director of the Center for Healthy weight and wellness. There you go. Yeah, that’s a clue. I just, I mean, everything you just said. It’s just Unknown Speaker 38:45 there’s a storyline. There’s a chatbot. I mean, I have so many feelings about Nida. That’s the National Eating Disorder organization in the States, who are one off, who mean, my understanding is that they set all of their helpline staff and then they replaced it with a chatbot. So people with eating disorders would be interacting with a bot instead of a human. I had thoughts about that. Because, I mean, why do you sack his staff at so many things anyway. But now hearing that not only is there a bot, but the bot is telling people how to eat healthily and lose weight. This is where we end up right. This is where like, this is two different things that need to be kept away from each other. And the obesity stuff needs to be set on fire and put into the past, which we’ve been saying for decades. Very long time. Yeah. But when we try and this is the theme of the eating disorders world at the moment, which makes me want to scream is that somehow we can have eating disorders treatment peacefully coexisting with trying to shrink people. We can’t do that without causing harm. And this chat bot, which is now telling eating disorder patients to lose Unknown Speaker 40:00 Weight is a beautiful example of just how fucked up this can get, and how much we just need to kind of stop the collaborations and start just burning down the entire idea of behavioral weight loss because it’s a nightmare. Yeah, the, the entire eating disorders community is infected. And I think when this all began, it was there was an underlying beginning understanding of anorexia nervosa, and then bulimia and, and those researchers, those early researchers also then started looking at weight. And, and so it all came together in these labs. But now we have such a better understanding of moving orders. And we know that there are people of all sizes that have all of the eating. Unknown Speaker 40:56 When you so here, we are stuck with all this weight management stuff that people have been doing, and now they’re trying to impose it on people with eating disorders. And I really honestly feel it’s partly just in saving their careers, and it’s a pot of money to go through. And, and I doubt that they think about it that way. I believe they truly think that they’re helping people in the long term. Unknown Speaker 41:25 Yeah, I do. I mean, I you have to think that otherwise. Right, right. Yeah. And they, they think that we are just radical and hard, kind of off our rockers and, and that sort of thing. And I don’t know, I just I’ve worked in all kinds of areas of policy and, and health care policy for oncology and so forth. And I’ve just never seen so much harm coming from the community itself around disorders that are so life threatening. Yeah, I you know, Unknown Speaker 42:06 it just, it’s really, really, Unknown Speaker 42:09 it’s terrible. It’s terrible. Yeah. It’s like an infection. That’s a good way of putting it because I, I really feel that they in for me to go to an eating disorders conference, I have to kind of put on armor, it doesn’t feel safe. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And that’s not how it should feel that not with colleagues who are trying to apparently help the same kind of staff. Where we’re at at the moment is, it’s just crazy like this, putting team obesity in charge of assess and funded by weight loss companies, putting them in charge of figuring out the harm that can come from weight loss interventions is like putting Jim Beam in charge of assessing whether alcohol use leads to alcohol. Is Unknown Speaker 43:01 anyone saying this? Why is it? Why are the government aged like the NH and MRC throwing money at them? Because Oh, my God, obesity and phobia? Yeah, unfortunately, we’re going to have to, we are going to have to suffer through this next cycle. And there’s going to be kids and adults that are hurt. And just like now on, I’m in all of these different groups, where people are talking about how their doctors consider them successes from bariatric surgery, and meanwhile, their lives are so small, because they’ve, they have so many problems physically now, that they, they really can’t function, their quality of life has decreased so much. And but they’re considered a success, because they lost a certain amount of weight. And these are the things that are just horrifying. And the stories are out there. And if if these researchers are not hearing these stories, they need to come to us and learn. Because and, and the ones who really care are the ones that are going to come to us and want to learn. And I’ve had I’ve had researchers do that there are people in the field who had changed and who were doing completely different things now in terms of their research around eating disorders, because they Unknown Speaker 44:29 and I think that’s wonderful, but when we get collaboration, I mean, this is a this is a collusion. This is a funded collusion is it nature’s editing the truth, and we just have to, we can’t give up on fighting against this, but it will continue weigh at the time that you and I are on this earth I am confident, but I see. I see the Gen Zers in the community who are in the fat community Unknown Speaker 45:00 Eat with eating disorders. And man they are. They are ready. Yeah, bring it. Yep. So I think this will continue. It will To be continued right? Unknown Speaker 45:15 In the main in the meantime, they should base I mean, everything that you’re doing, considering what you’ve been through, and you shouldn’t have to do any of this is a bit but what you are doing is extraordinary. And you are helping so many people by the pushback that you’re giving. And yeah, it’s, yeah. You can’t look away like, I’m too invested in this personally, and, and I just think about my kids, and maybe my grandkids. My kids, fortunately, haven’t had to experience anything like this. But I may have grandkids. I mean, I just it kills me to think of the kids sitting in those weight management programs. So that’s what yeah, be going. Yes, yes, I’m with May, I’ve, just before we recorded, I went and checked the Clinical Trial Registry for the fast track trial for an update. And they started recruiting in 2018. In February 2018. They wanted to get 186 Teenagers doing that horrible child, and they stopped recruiting in April 2022. So it took them a few years to recruit. And they have 146 kids, so they didn’t get the numbers that they clearly need to do any kind of statistical analyses. Yes, that’s an underpowered study. But I just like I’m feeling for every single 146 kids through COVID. The Lord, you know, many of their parents urge them to do it. And I mean, I’m sure some of them just were wanting to lose weight. And I understand that. But I mean, I remember being taken to the doctor, by my mom for the exact purpose of losing weight. So I’m sure there were some of them that were convinced by their parents. And that’s really sad, too. It is sad. It is sad. So we have some more people coming through that pipeline of harm, unfortunately. Yeah. So that’s why we keep doing it right for this kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I know you have a dinner to go to. So thank you so much. shamefaced, for coming to talk today about all of this. I totally fired up. Yeah. Thank you for doing this. The only the only way we get sunlight into this stuff is to sort of focus on it and talk about it. Yeah, absolutely. spread far and wide. Thanks for babies. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 47:47 Wow, what a conversation huh? I am deeply disturbed by the current climate of our eating disorder community and just incredibly grateful to Chu face and her team at the body equity Alliance. And look, just to everyone out there listening to this in the eating disorders community who are pushing back against what’s happening, just massive gratitude and the sense of camaraderie that we have. I really believe we can keep chipping away at this and we can append it even if it’s even if it is going to take time. This is a fight worth having. So thanks, everyone for listening and for being here today. If you would like to find surveys and follow her you can get on Instagram at surveys turn up and find out more follow her and see what else she is doing. We had a little throwaway comment in that chat about Tessa, the chat bot from NEDA, who has been apparently dishing out weight loss advice. Well, that got me fired up and next week, we are going to take a deeper dive into that whole mess. So I’ll see you then for for that conversation. It’s gonna be awesome. In the meantime, everyone take care trust your body, think critically push back against diet culture. untrap from the crap!
