The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom - Hardcover

King, Chrissy

 
9780593187043: The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593187040 ISBN 13: 9780593187043
Verlag: Tiny Reparations Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

From author and wellness personality Chrissy King, an exciting, genre-redefining narrative mix of memoir, inspiration, and activities and prompts, with timely messages about social and racial justice and how the world needs to move beyond body positivity to something even more exciting and revolutionary: body liberation.

When Chrissy King first joined a gym, she had one goal in mind: to “get skinny.” In pursuit of this goal, she fell into the all-too-common cycle of “not enough-ness”; no matter what she achieved, there was always something she felt she needed to change about her body, her appearance, herself. This made her realize the most liberating truth of all: She was not the problem. Diet and fitness industries rooted in white supremacy were the problem; Eurocentric and carefully manufactured beauty standards were the problem; discourses telling her that her happiness was directly tied to her physical appearance were the problem. So she created an actionable method to redefine the relationship we have with our bodies, thereby achieving a sense of self-worth that is completely separate from how we look.

The Body Liberation Project is about finding actual freedom in our bodies by discovering strength and aspects of fitness, movement, and eating that work for YOU. It’s about realizing that the goal is not to look at our bodies and love everything we see; it’s to understand that at our essence we are so much more than our bodies. But it’s also about recognizing the harsh realities that prohibit people in marginalized bodies from being able to do so. Society constantly bombards those who fall outside Eurocentric standards of beauty (think Black, fat, trans, etc.) with the message that they are less attractive, and part of the journey toward body liberation is examining your own privilege, acknowledging the harm you may be causing others, and mourning your old ideas about what a body “should” look like.

Recognizing that none of us are free until all of us are, Chrissy King shares the wisdom, the tools, and the inspiration to motivate readers to find body liberation and, even more important, to pass it on.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chrissy King is a writer, speaker, former strength coach, and educator with a passion for creating a diverse and inclusive wellness industry. She empowers individuals to stop shrinking, start taking up space, and use their energy to create their specific magic in the world. With degrees in social justice and sociology from Marquette University, Chrissy merges her passion for social justice with her passion for fitness to empower members of the wellness industry to create spaces that allow individuals from all backgrounds to feel seen, welcome, affirmed, and celebrated.

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Chapter 1

Understanding the Basic Concepts:
Body Positivity vs.
Body Neutrality vs.
Body Liberation

I have to be honest with you. Talking about diet culture and the intersection of white supremacy-it's really not a simple topic to address. I want to lead with this statement because, to put it mildly, sometimes people get upset when I voice my views. We are going to talk about a lot of things in this book-privilege, white fragility, and racism, among other things-while we talk about body liberation. In my opinion, we can't talk about liberation without discussing those topics. So if you're a member of the dominant group (i.e., if you're white), I want you to buckle up and get comfortable with the feeling of being uncomfortable.

My brilliant friend Shirin Eskandani once said, "Discomfort is where the growth is, it is where the medicine is, it is where the liberation is." And she's right, y'all. Probably a decade ago, maybe a little more, I stepped into a gym for the first time in my adult life with a singular goal, MAKE ME SKINNY, as I've already shared. Literally, that's what I told my first-ever trainer: I need to be skinny. I was going for the whole model look, you know? I envisioned the end product to be something like Naomi Campbell or Tyra Banks perhaps. You get the vibe. But anyway, before I hired my actual trainer, I did a free session with a male trainer. It was a promotional thing offered by the gym to encourage people to sign up with trainers. Because I went on to get certified and become a trainer myself, I can now confidently say that this man was an awful trainer. Not like he suggested bad exercises or didn't know anything about fitness. No, like he tried to kill me in my free session. I'm serious, y'all. Imagine a novice coming into the gym, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with false hopes of someday looking like Iman. I was clearly delusional. This man took me through the most intense and challenging workout of my entire life-think lots of jumping, lunging, every high-intensity movement you can imagine. It was my first day in the gym-why would he do that to me? In all fairness, the details are hazy. I don't even remember it all because I almost blacked out. Seriously, I'm not kidding or exaggerating. I started shaking intensely and getting extremely dizzy. So much so that they brought me sugar packets to eat immediately. It was horrible, and yet I still signed up for a trainer-not him, but still, I signed up. The pain of that initial workout didn't deter me enough to quit. Apparently, I'm a glutton for punishment. I later went on to fall in love with strength training and powerlifting, so it was all worth it, despite the rocky start.

What I'm saying is that we have all done some hard things before. So like Shirin says, "If you can understand why the discomfort of a yoga pose is beneficial to your healing and growth, then you must understand that the discomfort of anti-racism work is one and the same." You can replace yoga with any difficult endeavor that you have done in your life. You dealt with the discomfort because you knew something beautiful was on the other side. The same applies as you read this book. If you find yourself feeling triggered or indignant at something I'm discussing, I'm going to politely request that you not be like Diane. Who is Diane, you ask? Diane is an angry person who sent me an email in response to an article I wrote. I really want to share the email with you verbatim because it's truly ludicrous, but apparently there are rules about these things and I guess I would need Diane's permission to share it. I feel very strongly that she would not in fact grant me permission, so I'll paraphrase it for you. It's truly a shame though, because the original email in its entirety is quite a gem.

Dear Miss King,

I have no choice but to email you about your hatred toward white women after receiving a text message about you. I'm going to be honest with you and your entire race, although I know you aren't ready for the truth. Your article is stupid and it's clear that you both hate white women and are jealous of them at the same time. You don't know anything about politics and no one cares what Black people think. Please get over your Black people victim sob story. Everyone is fed up with it, including the Blacks I know. It's clear you are jealous of white women and our beautiful glowing skin that you will never get to have. But you'll likely say I'm racist-LOLOLOLOL. In the future, you are going to be embarrassed of your conduct. Stop being stupid and find something of substance to write about.

Ciao, Diane

This is the watered-down version of the email, but alas, you get the gist of it. Ahh, Diane. Besides the fact that this email doesn't make sense in a lot of ways, it was also a complete waste of time. I don't reply to emails like this, y'all. So if you find yourself about to pull a Diane, dig out your journal and go "Dear Diary" style instead. Perhaps write out your feelings, and curiously and compassionately consider why you're feeling so triggered. But for the love of God, do not email me.

In the words of Layla Saad, "You cannot dismantle what you cannot see. You cannot challenge what you do not understand." As we work to dismantle diet culture and white supremacy in our lives, it can be an uncomfortable process. It's not warm and fuzzy work, and sometimes it has the potential to feel painful, disconcerting, and triggering. But we gotta face the facts, even when they're not pretty. It's all part of the process. When I first started powerlifting seriously, I developed a power phrase that I would repeat to myself before every heavy lift. "I can do hard things." That phrase served me in the gym and has since become a part of my practice anytime I'm doing something hard, in or out of the gym. I invite you to try it for yourself anytime you feel things getting hard. "I can do hard things." But honestly, if this book found its way to you, I trust that you're reading it because you are ready to embrace the body you have right now, and because you want liberation for yourself, and for all of us. Okay, so now that we got that out of the way, let's dive in.

While the words "body positivity," "body neutrality," and "body liberation" are often used interchangeably, in my opinion, they are quite different. It's wholly necessary that we understand the difference between these terms and truthfully interrogate the problems with some of these spaces.

If you do a simple Google search asking the question "What is body positivity?" you will get an array of answers, but most of them describe body positivity as a movement focused on empowering individuals to love and appreciate their bodies regardless of their size, shape, or weight. It preaches that all bodies are worthy of respect and love. If you look at the hashtag #BodyPositivity on Instagram, you will likely see a lot of women wearing swimsuits and discussing how much they love their bodies despite the fact that society has tried to tell them something was wrong with their bodies. You will probably also see a lot of messages about self-love mixed into the discussion.

While I think body positivity can be a good introduction to the concept of thinking about our bodies differently, I also believe that mainstream body positivity, now popular and trendy on social media outlets such as Instagram, can often prove to be a double-edged sword. Yes, in a lot of ways it can be helpful and has absolutely encouraged millions of people to feel better about their relationships with their bodies, but it's also been unintentionally harmful as well.

A lot of the messaging in the body positivity space encourages us to just love our bodies. If you have ever been on the receiving end of these messages, perhaps you found them frustrating. I know I did at times. If everyone else was capable of just donning...

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Verlag
Tiny Reparations Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593187040
ISBN 13 
9780593187043
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

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