In this episode, we dig into two topics that can provoke feelings of shame: sex and food. But in Chana Porter’s speculative, fictional world, their roles are flipped — eating, not sex, is the cultural taboo. Mayo Clinic expert Dr. Lesley Williams joins us as we discuss disordered eating and the dynamics of restraint, pleasure, shame and desire. This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens.
In this episode, we dig into two topics that can provoke feelings of shame: sex and food. But in Chana Porter’s speculative, fictional world, their roles are flipped — eating, not sex, is the cultural taboo. Mayo Clinic expert Dr. Lesley Williams joins us as we discuss disordered eating and the dynamics of restraint, pleasure, shame and desire.
We talked with:
Chana Porter is an author, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls, trans, and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and is the author of the highly acclaimed novel “The Seep.” Her second novel, “The Thick and The Lean” is a 2024 finalist for the Lambda Literary award and was named the Best Science Fiction of the year by The Times of London.
Lesley Williams, M.D., is a family medicine physician with an expertise in eating disorders at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she resides with her husband and three children. She serves as the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer on the Academy of Eating Disorders Board of Directors. She is an advocate for health equity and inclusion and author of a children's book Free To Be Me celebrating size diversity.
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Dr. Denise Millstine:Welcome to the “Read. Talk. Grow.” podcast, where we explore women's health topics through books. In the same way that books can transport us to a different time, place or culture, “Read. Talk. Grow.” demonstrates how they can also give us a new appreciation for health experiences. Books can provide us understanding of health topics and provide a platform from which women's health can be discussed.
At “Read. Talk. Grow.,” we use books to learn about health conditions in the hopes that we can all lead happier, healthier lives. I'm your host, Dr. Denise Millstine. I'm an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic, where I practice women's health, internal medicine, and integrative medicine. I am always reading and I love discussing books with my patients, my friends, my professional colleagues, and now with you.
Our book today is “The Thick and the Lean” by Chana Porter. It's our first science fiction novel, and we're going to use “The Thick and the Lean” to discuss disordered eating, in this case as part of a dystopian culture with all of its pressures. I am so excited about my guest today. Chana Porter is an author, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and co-founder of the Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls, trans and non-binary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and is the author of the highly acclaimed novel, “The Seep.” Her second novel, “The Thick and the Lean” is a 2024 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was named the Best Science Fiction of the Year by The Times of London.
Chana, welcome to the show.
Chana Porter: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Our second guest is Dr. Lesley Williams, who's an assistant professor of family medicine at Mayo Clinic in Arizona, where she practices primary care with expertise in eating disorders. She serves as the diversity, equity and inclusion officer on the Academy for Eating Disorders Board of Directors. She is an advocate for health equity and inclusion and is the author of her own book, a children's book, “Free to Be Me,” celebrating size diversity. She lives in Arizona with her husband and three children.
Lesley, welcome to the show.
Dr. Lesley Williams: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited about our conversation today.
Dr. Denise Millstine: “The Thick and the Lean” is a novel, speculative fiction, but also fable and dystopian that follows two main protagonists whose lives are parallel and finally intersect. Our first is going to be the focus of the show, Beatrice. Beatrice was raised in the town of Seagate, which is dominated by a church and corporation that creates shame around eating, literally around chewing and enjoying food with a focus on weight control through various medical interventions and food replacements. Conversely, this is a world where sex is discussed and tolerated freely. So our listeners should consider this a warning as there is a lot of sex in this novel. Secretly, Beatrice cultivates a love of flavor and cooking, which then drives her from the town to the city, where she is eventually trained as a chef.
Chana, this is the most upside-down world I have ever seen, and yet it is clearly reflecting our reality back at us, except how we treat food is how this world treats sex. Where did you come up with this idea?
Chana Porter: Well, I think I thought I would maybe make a pithy little short — oh, and I just want to say to everybody at home that I am a person who stutters, so should you hear me repeat something, there's nothing wrong with your podcast.
So I've kind of been fascinated by that, how there's, like, language about purity culture, self-control and shame and pleasure, how those kind of back into one another with food and sex. Like, “I'm having a cheat day.” “Let's be so bad.” I was kind of thinking about that and thinking about when I was a teenager, how I have this, like, changing body with all of its appetites, and how the way that I felt like people wanted me to be, how very much so, I was supposed to be smaller. I was supposed to be sexy, but not sexual. And food and that desire were sort of in this knot. So I thought that I would write, I don't know, a 20-page, 30-page, very classic sci fi, what they call a taboo switch, which is that you take something that's very known on our planet, kind of like an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” and you flip it.
And so I kept pulling at what I thought was going to be this 30-page story, and it just, the knot got more and more tangled and I found that I could say things about particularly like ’90s diet culture, which I was very much brought up in. It just like became a way for me to think about and process being in a woman's body on our planet and all of that noise and all of that expectation put on me, kind of from like puberty plus.
So the book just grew and grew and grew and grew, and then it spiraled out into where does our food come from? Who grows it? What are the corporate choices of these food systems? How are they impacting my health as a teenager? Do these systems of power have anything to say to one another? So I started the book in I think it was 2016, and at the end of 2020 I was like, OK, this is a novel that had a lot for me to explore and like process from my own childhood.
Dr. Denise Millstine: That was such a fabulous answer. And for our listeners who don't know, at least my version of “The Thick and the Lean” is 372 pages, and I do a lot of audiobooks. I think it comes in around 14 hours. So this is no novella, nor could it possibly be and cover all the ground that you've just commented on and more. It's really a fabulous read.
Lesley, tell us your reaction to this world with its shame around eating and this taboo switch.
Dr. Lesley Williams: Well, it's really interesting because it definitely transported me back to the ’90s. I remember being like a pre-adolescent and feeling like there was just so much commentary with my mom and her friends about what they couldn't eat and how they needed to exercise. And that's really what even sparked my initial interest in, like, eating disorders. So it was really fascinating to me because it totally put me in that same mind frame. And I felt like even though it was familiar from my childhood, it also felt very much like where we're headed. You know, I really, when I was reading about the pills that everyone was taking to suppress their appetite, I couldn't help but think about, you know, our current Ozempic world and how it just felt like it was almost like a manifestation of that.
So it was really interesting because it definitely blended my childhood experience and my own search for personal growth and helping other women in terms of their relationship with food and their bodies. But then also, I felt like it was a little bit of a window to the future, you know, in terms of like, despite my best efforts and other people's best efforts, it still feels like we're in that culture of suppressing appetite and avoidance of food and that being kind of the gold standard in terms of worthiness and what everyone should be striving for. So it was kind of interesting because it's kind of the opposite of the work that I do from a size diversity, weight inclusive lens. So I really, really loved having an opportunity to kind of delve into those topics in a different way and, and think about them. It was awesome.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I appreciate that as well. One of the reasons this is our first speculative fiction is that on “Read. Talk. Grow.,” we've typically demonstrated health conditions in a very linear and direct way, and I feel like “The Thick and the Lean” is putting it out there for you to pause, consider, reflect, see how this world, which is a fantasy world, is actually pretty close to how we treat certain things in our modern culture.
Chana, can we talk about an early scene? So let me set this up for the readers, where Beatrice is on a teen retreat and she sneaks away during the time where the pastor has come in and said it was time for them to essentially have sex. He talks about outer sex and inner sex and gives them space to explore this aspect of their bodies. But Beatrice finds a young man and entices him to the kitchen, where she scandalously makes him a grilled cheese, and this in fact ends up getting them kicked out of the retreat, and even that young man and his family leave the community after this event. Can you talk about writing that scene and were you really thinking about our reality, how we maybe manage the shame around sex in young people, as well as commenting on controlling eating?
Chana Porter: Yeah, I think that that scene and a lot of the like, Beatrice going to this city to find her people, that was a metaphor for me in a certain degree. I'm a queer person. I was brought up not seeing many other models just for what life could be. I like felt other people's desire reflected back at me and there wasn't a lot of space for me to be like, what am I actually attracted to?
So just the kind of teenage girl being brought up that her body should be, like, decorative rather than like something that I should take space to think about. Where are my natural appetites actually leading me towards? So there's definitely like a queerness metaphor happening. But I think too, on a very basic level, I was like a hungry person and it was not cute or cool to be dieting, but it was also not cute or cool to have your body change. So being caught in that push and pull, which I think is a recipe for binging or eating secretively.
So I was certainly doing a version of what I show Beatrice, which is that I would eat in a way that was like performative for other people. And then I would restrict when I was by myself, which is such a classic, like nothing's wrong, I can go out and I can have a grilled cheese with people and if it means that, then I have to like, be sick at home. There was a point where I was a teenager where basically I would get on the scale every single day, and if I wasn't under 120 pounds, I was like, people cannot see me. So there was a very powerful choice for me to be made where I was like, I can either be like an effective person in society with a life and a brain, which means like probably gaining 40 or 50 pounds, or I can be in the prison of my own perfected, you know, size two and make my entire life about that.
And thank God I decided not to only be decorative, but I like saying to like, you know, it's not like you can get sober from food. These are still like choices and like thoughts that I have to handle every single day. Even though it's been a long time since I've been a teenager. But part of writing this novel helps me understand the seepage of diet culture and all these things that we do, and all these choices that we make and the things that we model to our children.
To Lesley's point, when I came up with the yellow pill, I was really just trying to think of the most horrible thing that I thought would never happen. Like, I really thought that would never happen because I also, like I'm an avid home cook. I love to cook. I love to cook for myself. I love to feed people. Hosting a dinner party is like my favorite. It just gives me so much sensory, sensual pleasure to really nourish myself. And I'm not a doctor and I like to understand that other people have like been through things that I have not. So I can't speak to if this is a good medicine for certain people. But when I just think about a pill taking away food and pleasure, that to me was like the most dystopic thing that I could think of.
So it was wild that this, this book came out spring 2023, and that was when I was at Ozempic really started hitting the headlines. So I think I've responded to what you asked. I think the main core of that church scene is about, do you let other people tell you what you want, or do you go out and find it?
Dr. Denise Millstine: So I promise we're going to talk about the yellow pill, but I definitely want to hear from Lesley about the church scene and also the other ways that Chana answered that question.
Dr. Lesley Williams: Absolutely. Well, there were two things that immediately came to mind with the church scene. One is when I'm working with adolescents that struggle with disordered eating, how frequently when they're restricting, there's this bit of pride that the parents have, especially if the mom has struggled with her own eating issues and her daughter is, in her mind, achieving some level of success in terms of restriction, there's kind of a bit, there's just this undercurrent of pride that goes along with it. Until it gets to the point where they're really, really ill. Then maybe there's some concern, but then there's always this, “Help them, but don't help them so much that their weight goes above a certain comfort level.”
And what frequently happens with adolescents is that once they've been very restrictive, then that oftentimes sets them up for a vulnerability for binge eating. And that usually with parents that maybe have their own unresolved issues, that is the thing that will set off the alarm bells more so than the restriction, is that this intense fear of this lack of control with their eating, the potential for them to gain weight. So that was absolutely what came to mind with that scene with the parents, how, you know, sex was fine, but the eating wasn't OK, you know? And I just see that so much when working with parents. So that was definitely one of the things that it evoked for me.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I want to reflect on that a little bit because, Chana, I thought you did such a great job in the book of not making these people all evil who were conveying these messages. They really thought they were coming from the best place, and they were very loving to their daughter, even after she got in trouble for the grilled cheese, embracing her and wanting to help her be better.
And I suspect Lesley, the same is true with these parents who take pride in the weight control that young people have achieved, not even recognizing that this is feeding into the issue because they haven't seen that aspect of how it's continuing this damage, and that it's not OK to wait for somebody to be actually harmed for that to happen.
Would you just pause for a minute as well, Lesley, and talk about the phrase you used disordered eating versus eating disorder, because I think this is an important clarification for people who might have disordered eating that has not become an eating disorder.
Dr. Lesley Williams: Sure. So when we think about disordered eating and eating disorders, I kind of like to think of it as a spectrum. And so I think that right now we all live within the context of diet culture, right? It's everywhere around us. It's this idea, you know, as Chana even mentioned, of a cheat day or being good versus being bad. And so there are degrees of that where some of it is just part of like the water that we swim in every day, but then it can get to a point where it is starting to impact maybe how we feel about ourselves, our ability to go out and be social in the world because of fear of what I'm going to encounter in terms of having to eat in front of other people or temptations.
And then it can go all the way to where it's an actual eating disorder, where these behaviors around food are happening so frequently that it actually meets the criteria of a full on diagnosis. But I would venture to say that most women, especially in the United States of America, are probably somewhere on that spectrum just because of the culture that we live in. Even if you have a really, really healthy relationship with food in your body, it's almost like when you go out into the world that's seen as abnormal because there's so much conversation.
I was even reflecting to my husband when I was talking to him about this book, and I was like, I went out for lunch with friends, and there was so much conversation about what we can and can't eat, and a detox this, and another supplement that… It like it really overtakes a lot of the conversation, especially around meal time and in particular with women, to the point where if you're someone that's really comfortable and just says, hey, I pretty much have a good relationship with my body and what I eat, you seem like an anomaly or strange or somehow dampening the conversation when you try to shift gears. So it's very interesting.
So I will say that there is a spectrum, disordered eating is kind of the beginning of that and it can be challenging to tease apart because of how pervasive diet culture is within the world that we live in.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Thank you so much for that. And we are a women's health podcast, and you've very carefully talked about how this is so predominant among women. But clearly these issues can be faced by all people and like you said, the culture really is so pervasive.
Okay Chana, we need to talk about Stecopo, which is the corporation that creates what's called the yellow pill that Beatrice is advised to stop by a woman who's teaching her about food and cooking and giving her black-market access to cookbooks. So it's not only the yellow pill which will definitely dive into, but also these food replacements, tonics, vitamins. Can you talk about that corporation and its modern correlate?
Chana Porter: Well, as you said, I live in Los Angeles now, and there is just a lot of juices and smoothies and gels and pills. I was out to dinner at a red sauce Italian place, and I heard the couple next to me talking about how they get through their water diet by chewing the ice. I was like, you all should not be at an Italian restaurant with me right now. I'm trying to eat some like focaccia bread and you're talking about chewing ice cubes.
I started this book before I moved, back then I was still living in New York, and I've just been rather shaken by, and I'm, I can be very susceptible to it, to this idea that we all have of becoming our like, perfected selves and how if there's another juice cleanse or another smoothie cleanse or another tonic, or another laser treatment that can be visited upon us or finding the right supplement or sea moss gel.
I think that there's — and this is something that I'm sure that Lesley can speak to — I feel like there's overlap between this kind of Type-A high achieving person and then someone who can fall prey to this mentality. Because there's nothing outwardly bad about wanting to be the best version of yourself. But I think Stecopocame because I wanted to show by making women, but like to Denise's point, people feel like they need to constantly be improved, improved, improved, improved. Not only does it sap our power and makes us distracted, but also it makes a lot of profit. So this idea of we have to follow the money, and now we're in a reality where we're being told that we could take a shot, but we have to keep taking the shot for all time, which is also wild.
Yeah. So Stecopohas some Monsanto overtones, too, in terms of what they do with seed and production. So it was a very helpful, like frame for me to talk about how all of these things work together. And I've just been on and I like a big gut biome journey to understand what having these things that maybe did have Roundup or other sorts of chemicals, what that's done to my gut biome over time, getting that back into balance and then finding that, you know, I can eat a muffin or a croissant and like, the world does not fall down.
I think that there's like a pretty simple food approach, that they do a lot better in a lot of other countries where you can eat flour and butter and sugar every day and not suffer terrible (consequences). But it feels particularly American about, one, this like all or nothing mentality and that we have to like (reinvent our diets). In like finding these drinks and these supplements, I really have like landed on the side of “cook stuff.” And I just kind of cook these like grains and meats and veggies. And it's been pretty great. I'm like, oh, maybe I can, like, eat birthday cake with my stuff.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Yeah, it's pretty shocking when you get away from processed foods and food-like substances and cook with real food, that you can even eat French fries. But those are supposed to be potatoes, oil, salt, right? And not all these extra additives that we tend to have in our food culture. Okay, Lesley, react to this. I see you frantically taking notes of the points you want to make.
Dr. Lesley Williams: Well, there was so much that came up for me, and I really love the kind of like the parallels with culture. I think even at one point in the book, there was even a mention of racism. Like this idea that like, there's these, these very divided cultures and how they experience food. And that was really striking for me, because I see that even with patients that I work with, like this idea that there are certain cultures that have more of a focus on, like food and eating and pleasure around food, and that there's often this pull of like acculturation to like, adopt what the predominant cultures, beliefs and ideals are around food and that experience around food.
So it's really, you know, quite interesting. I recently had a patient that I was seeing for eating disorders that is Greek Orthodox and so, so much of their religion and just her general social culture revolved around food. And there was a lot of fasting and restriction and things. And then that's often followed by this periods of like indulgence. And so it was really fascinating for me to think about that in the context of the book, and just how a lot of that experience is very culturally based and how there is the pull, as Chana talked about, when you're in a culture that's different than even what your internal voice is telling you. There's still that pull to adopt the way in which there having that relationship. And so, so yeah, I thought that was a really fascinating.
And oftentimes I think when I try to speak to medical communities or communities at large in terms of just like size diversity and weight inclusivity, I feel like that woman who was giving her the black market cooking books, you know, I mean, like, I feel like that what I'm saying, even though to me seems so completely logical in the context of a lot of places, like within medicine, even in general, it's like that, I seem like this voodoo princess that is talking about things that are so anti what the establishment has previously been pushing forward. So I definitely identified with that.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I want to make a comment about that. I know you have another point to make — that we just recently interviewed Susan Lieu, who wrote a memoir, “The Manicurist’s Daughter,” about her mother literally losing her life from complications of plastic surgery, which was driven by this beauty standard. But this tension between obtaining this perfection and then, in their case, everybody wanted to cook and they came together around food, but then they were so critical about how much you were eating. So I love your point that this is not unique to one part of culture. This is really pervasive to experience this tension. Go on to your next point.
Dr. Lesley Williams: You know I think those were the main things. I really also liked this parallel with restriction and avoidance of food and wealth. You know, there was that was a theme that was brought up in the book and I think we see that even now within our culture. What is it like? You can never be too thin or too rich or whatever, but it's kind of like that idea of if you are really achieving true success and if you want true wealth. And there's actually been a lot of studies to reflect the fact that there is a correlate with, you know, body size, particularly for women and their overall salary and how far they can achieve within their professional environment. So I thought that that was really an interesting point that was made, and that is that it is actually true within our culture. And so I really liked how that was brought up in the book and like to reflect upon that in terms of what we see in our day to day culture.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Well also, Chana in the book, wealth is definitely tied to expectations, but do you see some of the characters operate in the highest, wealthiest component of their city and they're the ones who are, quote, “cheating.” They don't chew, but they have these elaborate concoctions that they loosely defined as liquids so that they can eat and taste. I imagine that was intentional as well.
Chana Porter: Yeah, I really wanted to show religious hypocrisy and people at the top not taking what they're being served or allowing the dogma to, like, shift under to suit what they desired. Because I think I really wanted to show it as systems of control.
Maybe this is a question that I'd like to pose to the two actual doctors that I'm getting to talk to. You know, we have a lot of food insecurity in our country. So is there something similar or like can you tell the like, metabolic things happening in someone's body, be it them restricting themselves or being restricted by outside circumstances and that controlling and that like bingeing cycle.
Dr. Denise Millstine: So undernourished because of situation versus undernourished as part of a drive that's part of disordered eating that's not related to food access or other medical conditions.
Chana Porter: Yes, exactly.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Lesley?
Dr. Lesley Williams: Well, I don't think that there's always a way to tell that just from, like, laboratory tests. It's more so like the history that you get from patients. And I will say that's definitely an emerging and an evolving area of eating disorder research, is just what we know about food insecurity.
I think in the past, so much of our conversation and research around eating disorders was more focused on that affluent young adolescent girl, and that was kind of the image that came to mind. But we recognize that eating disorders happen everywhere within our society, and those that struggle with food insecurity are in particular very vulnerable. Because you can imagine this idea of, I go from having access to having no access, and it's almost this drive to like when access is available, I need to eat as much as possible because I don't know when that availability is going to happen again. And so you'll see that oftentimes with children who maybe come from backgrounds where food is not consistent, it's very common among, you know, children that are neglected. And then just people that come from just backgrounds in general where food and access are not always available. So food insecurity is absolutely something that makes people vulnerable to disordered eating behaviors and something that more research is being done on how we can address that.
And that's why so much of this conversation around food and wellness needs to look at systemically, you know, what are we doing to make good food? As you chatted about earlier, you know, available to all people, that seems like a very basic right?
I talk about going to certain neighborhoods, and you hear about food deserts, where the available food is really unfortunately, that, you know, low cost, high processed, high fat content food that's available to certain populations because there isn't a push to make sure that there's more variety in terms of options available. So I definitely love that whole theme of like food insecurity.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I also see in my patients that there can be a tension and often it's an overlap of both. So take, for example, somebody who's in cancer treatment who loses weight. It's not uncommon for the feedback for that person to get you look great because you've lost weight. And that's our cultural standard. And many will say I was able to lose weight with my treatment and now we really hope to keep it off. And maybe they had weight to lose that was impacting their health, in which case that is a positive shift, not the way that anybody would choose to lose the weight. But I do think as health care professionals, we have to be aware of these overlaps where people can be getting messaging that can then take something that was happening and lead to an unhealthy form of disordered eating.
Dr. Lesley Williams: Absolutely. And that's part, you know, it speaks back to the diet culture. Is that the culture that we live in, it's like if someone loses weight, the knee jerk response is to congratulate them when there should be an inquiry.
You know, I had that own experience with my husband. He had a really severe illness, and he lost a considerable amount of weight. And wherever we went, people were just congratulating him. And he's like, well, actually I have a really rare severe illness that's making me very sick. And you internalize this idea that my body previously must have been wrong, right? Because now all of a sudden, people are praising me for my appearance when I didn't get that type of attention previously. So it's like an unwritten message that there was something wrong with you before. And that can also make you vulnerable to an eating disorder, to your point Denise, of like, well, now I need to keep it off because I don't want to regain the weight back and have people say negative things about my body. So it can be a very delicate balance.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I could talk to the two of you all day this has been such a great conversation. I want to mention two quotes from the book that stopped me in my tracks, and have you both reflect on them briefly before we end.
One of the most powerful lines in the book is when Beatrice is already in the city, training under her chef mentor, Margo. Beatrice eats soup, goes back for seconds, recognizes that she's starting to gain weight because she's actually eating, goes to the bathroom, and makes herself vomit. Margo hears this happen and is waiting for her, and when she comes out, what she says to her is, as long as you punish yourself for having a body, it doesn't matter where you go. You could fly to the moon and not be free. As long as you punish yourself for having a body. Can you both talk about that line?
Chana Porter: It gets me choked up. I mean, it's just I needed to write this as a way to travel back in time and talk to myself when I was a teenager, in my 20s, and then all the things that I did when I was grown and I should have known, and I called it a juice cleanse, and I called it a yoga retreat. But I was really just trying to get back to a size which I thought would make me successful. And what I now know, like, makes it so I can't be an effective writer, teacher, parent, lover. I could only really show up on this planet in my body if I fed it, and it seems like a very clear thing, but if you have to punish yourself for and enjoying this meal that somebody made to nourish you, you are like rejecting care.
So that part is just a very important part to me. And I think I had to write this novel through the, like, bizarro funhouse mirror of this other reality to speak to some very real things that happened to me. Where I felt like there was a stark choice of I can be a member of society, or I can only like, contribute my thinness.
Dr. Lesley Williams: That quote really brought up for me a theme that I felt throughout the book, was this idea of food equals freedom. And just it really made me reflect on, you know, if we were able to create a society where everyone was comfortable in their bodies and with what they ate, and we could take the amount of time, attention, thought, concern, that we currently pour into trying to make our bodies different, what a better world we could live in.
Like, I think we could like cure world hunger and cancer and so many other things. And that's honestly what brought me into this work, as I can remember as a young child, just thinking, why are we wasting so much energy talking about this? If we can just find that balance where we all feel comfortable and are in a good relationship with food and our bodies, like we could just spend that energy doing so many more things. And so that was just a continual theme that came up for me as I read the book. And definitely with that statement and with that quote, it just really brought it home. And so I just love us having a moment to look through this lens and then pause and think about how this can manifest in our own lives.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I love this idea of flipping from what you're giving up to what you're gaining by focusing on nourishing, enjoying food, eating, and community. A lot of the different things that have come up.
Okay, here's the second one that I just can't end the episode without reading this. So again, this is from Margo, who is the chef training Beatrice, and she says, “I was raised to be thin, so thin I could disappear. And if it made me sick, so be it. And if my bones grew brittle and weak, so be it. If my period stopped, so be it. If I died, I died living as I should. Quietly, politely. We're taught that the most important thing we can contribute to the world is our beauty, our thinness. This saps our energy, our brainpower, our internal fight as if our bodies are our enemies. We cannot take on the world, for we are too busy battling ourselves.”
Chana, I feel if our listeners need another reason to read this book, this quote sums it up. Do you agree?
Chana Porter: I am so, so grateful that I made something that it resonates with other people because I was really like writing it to myself.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I think there are a lot of people in the world that need to hear this message. Lesley.
Dr. Lesley Williams: Yes, I totally agree. And I loved that that quote as well, because it really feels like, you know, this obsession with what we can't eat in our bodies is like a distraction to keep us controlled. And that was reflected in that quote. And it just, you know, if we could use our power in some other way. And I do believe that because of the pervasiveness of this culture, there are so many women that feel that way.
I, on a regular basis, will have patients that tell me is “If I die in the quest for a thin body, at least I will die in that thin body and I will be laid to rest.” And that is so powerful for me to think that there's that much of a pull to achieve an ideal that someone else has put upon you. And this idea that if you achieve that, there's all of a sudden going to be rainbows and bunnies and this amazing world. When in fact it's like you're creating your own prison. And so I really felt that that quote kind of encapsulated that. And yeah, it's just I am looking forward to a future where maybe we can start to chip away at that and take our power and use it for, for something else.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I want to thank you both for being on “Read. Talk. Grow.” with me to talk about “The Thick and the Lean.” I am sure many of our listeners will go out and read it and learn these important lessons from it as well. Thank you.
Chana Porter: Thank you both so much.
Dr. Lesley Williams: Thank you so much.
Dr. Denise Millstine: “Read. Talk. Grow.” is a product of the Women's Health Center at Mayo Clinic. This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens. Our producer is Lisa Speckhard Pasque and our recording engineer is Rick Andresen.
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