Shameless Leadership 711: Sarah Stevens: How to Talk to Your Kids About Bodies and Fatness
Sarah Stevens is a former healthcare executive turned writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. After leaving her career in corporate healthcare in 2016, she founded The Beautifull Project - a storytelling collective that has reached tens of thousands of women across the globe with its powerful message about learning to take up space. Today, Sarah helps other people tell their stories through Branded, by Sarah Stevens, a small business offering a full suite of marketing services. She also serves as the Community Impact Officer at The Project of The Quad Cities, a nonprofit that serves people living with HIV and the LGBTQ+ community. Sarah is a gifted storyteller with a skill for using her own story as a woman navigating the world in a fat body to invite her audience to encounter the parts of themselves they hide away from the world, the parts they believe to be “too much.” Addressing everything from “too-big” bodies to a fear of failure that cripples confidence, Sarah amplifies a message that moves beyond a body-positive sentiment and creates a movement that makes room for everybody to tell their truth and take up space. She draws out confidence and courage. She believes in being free and full. And she will make a believer out of you, too.
This is Sarah’s third time on the show. I invited her back after finding myself in a parenting conversation around body image that I was worried I totally screwed up. I reached out to Sarah and asked if she would be interested in hashing this topic out on the show and she immediately said yes. This is a really important conversation, as the pervasiveness of diet culture continues to be so insidious, oppressive, and ultimately deadly, in our culture.
Listen in to hear Sarah and I discuss:
- How my child casually throwing around words like “fat” and “chubby” threw me into a parenting tailspin
- How to check your own body image trauma when talking to your kids
- The importance of entering conversations with curiosity & compassion (vs lecturing and shaming)
- The truth about the insidiousness of current diet culture in spite of the fact that so many of us think we know better than to fall victim to it
- How to talk to your kids about fat without causing them to have an anti-fat bias (or “fatphobia”)
- The systemic oppression that is very present and real for people living in fat bodies
- How pushing kids to “make healthy choices” can be rooted in diet culture if we aren’t careful
- The importance of teaching kids to learn to trust their bodies - and how difficult this is if you don’t trust your own
Links mentioned:
- Join me for my 2023 Plan & Prep Pajama Party and save $50 with Early Bird Registration: shamelessmom.com/pajamaparty
- Connect with Sarah: thebeautifullproject.com
- Past SMA Interview with Sarah - Episode 571: How to Take Up Space and Love Yourself in the Process
- Past SMA Interview with Sarah - Episode 366: The Beautifull Project: The Truth About Fatness and Thin Allies
- Sarah on Facebook
- Sarah on Instagram: @thebeautifullproject and @seeing_sarah
- Sarah’s TED Talk: Stripped: The Art of Being Seen
- Sarah’s Podcast: Beauti: The Interviews
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