Wednesday Jun 12, 2024

89. Fighting Weight Stigma and Advocating for Weight-Neutral Health with Ragen Chastain

Weight stigma is everywhere in our culture, we need to talk about it. Hosts Tara, Elizabeth and Maria are joined by thought leader Ragen Chastain.

Ragen Chastain is a speaker, writer, researcher, Board Certified Patient Advocate, multi-certified health and fitness professional, and thought leader in weight science, weight stigma, health, and healthcare. Utilizing her background in research methods and statistics, Ragen has brought her signature mix of humor and hard facts to healthcare, corporate, conference, and college audiences from Kaiser Permanente and the Nationwide Children's Hospital, to Amazon and Google, to Dartmouth, Cal Tech and the Yale School of Medicine. Author of the Weight and Healthcare newsletter, the book Fat: The Owner's Manual, co-author of HAES Health Sheets, and editor of the anthology The Politics of Size, Ragen is frequently featured as an expert in print, radio, television, and documentary film. In her free time, Ragen is a national dance champion, triathlete, and marathoner who holds the Guinness World Record for Heaviest Woman to Complete a Marathon. Ragen lives in Oregon with her fiancée Julianne and a rotating cast of foster dogs.

In this episode:

How and why Ragen started her advocacy journey into the weight stigma topic.
Important learnings about weight neutral body affirming care.
Research problems in the medical world
The way that the weight loss industry has woven itself into the healthcare system.
Things that are missing from health at all size conversion.
What is missing from the weight loss drug conversation.
Misinformation and fear mongering that happens around weight stigma
How the weight loss industry intertwined itself with the medial world
Weight neutral care for medical professionals due to weight stigma
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