Yoga Journal, which is the long standing print magazine for yoga professionals, and the yoga community, is owned by the same parent company that publishes Clean Eating magazine. So there’s a lot of intersection in the writing and the journalists between them. And I find it very problematic. Extremely problematic. But that’s capitalism, right?
You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.
Today I’m chatting with Jessica Grosman! Jessica is an experienced anti-diet registered dietitian and certified Intuitive Eating counselor, weight inclusive health practitioner, and yoga teacher. She is on the faculty of Yoga for Eating Disorders, where she teaches the popular compassionate and mindful yin yoga series. And she’s a co-founder of Anti-Diet Culture Yoga, a platform with a mission to keep diet culture out of yoga spaces by providing training and educational opportunities for teachers.
So, as you can probably guess from her bio, Jessica and I are discussing the intersection of diet culture and yoga today. This was such a fascinating conversation for me, because I truly did not know the extent to which yoga has been colonized and appropriated by white people and diet culture. If you have a fraught relationship with yoga, or have had that over the years like I have, I think you will get a lot out of this one.
I do want to acknowledge that Jessica and I are two white, privileged ladies having this conversation. I’m very aware that in order to divest from yoga from diet culture and white supremacy more completely, we need to be learning this from people of color. We do shout out some of those voices towards the end of the episode. But I would love to know who else you are learning from—post suggestions in the comments so we can continue this conversation!
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.
Keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.
PS. Also hi new subscribers/listeners! I think a bunch of you found me through Julia Turshen’s podcast Keep Calm and Cook On. I have loved her entire series on Unapologetic Appetites and was delighted to join her for this conversation.
Post-Publication Note from Virginia: After this episode aired, a listener let us know that Jessica’s Instagram contains some old content that may be triggering to folks in eating disorder recovery. I don’t expect Burnt Toast Podcast guests to align with me on every single issue; I also don’t expect podcast guests to have lived their lives free from diet culture influences (if I did, I’d have no one to interview!). And I find tremendous value in the conversation we had on this episode. But I wanted to offer this word of caution for folks in the Burnt Toast community who are in recovery. Please take care of yourselves.
Episode 52 Transcript
Virginia
Hi, Jessica! Why don’t we start by having you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your work?
Jessica
My work is primarily patient-focused nutrition therapy, and I work to help individuals reestablish a comfortable connection with food and body most often after years of living and diet culture. I am a member of ASDAH, the Association of Size Diversity and Health and use HAES principles in my individualized care. I’m also a yoga teacher, as I mentioned, and really love bringing together all sorts of ways to help people feel comfortable in their body.
Virginia
I think you’re our first yoga teacher on the podcast and today that’s going to be our focus — this intersection of diet culture and yoga. I think for a lot of listeners, this probably isn’t breaking news. We’ve all kind of seen the Lululemon version of yoga, and the Gwyneth Paltrow / Goop version. I think a lot of us may assume that diet culture has been baked into yoga from the start. But is that true or do you see this as a more recent co-option of yoga?
Jessica
I want to start by asking you if you know what the word yoga means. So I want to spin this question back to you.
Virginia
I feel like I knew this when I did a lot more yoga, and now I’m going to fail this quiz.
Jessica
It’s okay! Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means “to yoke” or “to join.” So right there, the word yoga does not mean acrobatics, leggings, green juice, restrictive diets, or any other stereotype that has been portrayed in the media through diet culture. I want to acknowledge that right from the start that yoga has nothing to do with diet culture in its origin.
I’m going to give you a little history lesson here. There are eight limbs of yoga, with only one being the physical practice of yoga, the poses and postures that we see so often. In the classic, traditional sense, yoga really is about the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. The physical practice of yoga was developed to help rid the body of distractions, of impulses, to be able to sit and meditate. So if you think about kids in a classroom, we know that if we want kids to sit and concentrate, first we let them get all their energy out, and they run around on a playground have play time before they’re able to sit calmly and concentrate. Yoga, the physical practice of yoga, is in the same vein, to give the body time to rid itself of the distractions to be able to turn inward and sit and focus in meditation.
Virginia
I love that framing and I’d never thought of it that way. And nothing you mentioned has to do with weight loss or changing your body size or shape. So when did the shift happened?
Jessica
So, yoga was brought to the west from southern Asia about 100 years ago—and notice I said Southern Asia and not India, because yoga’s inception was not just in the land that is currently India, but all throughout southern Asia. So we want to give respect and honor to those lineages. But it was brought to the West about 100 years ago by a Russian woman named Eugenia Peterson who later changed her name to Indra Devy. She was an actress and a spiritual seeker who traveled to India and became the first female student of Krishna Macharia, who was considered the father of modern yoga. He created the posture-based yoga practice, the physical yoga that was influenced by martial arts and wrestling and British calisthenics. Remember, this was in colonized, British-occupied India. And so Indra was able to bring her yoga studies to the west with her when South Asians were not able to come West due to the Immigration Act of 1924, which set quotas for immigration from “less desirable” countries. Indra came back to the west, came to Hollywood dressed in saris and was emulated by movie stars and Hollywood types seeking exotic practices from the East to keep themselves young and beautiful. This was the start of the modern wellness movement and with yoga at the core.
Virginia
She’s like a proto-Gwyneth Paltrow.
Jessica
Exactly. And you know, how ironic that she was on Gwyneth Paltrow land?
Virginia
So, the Western conception of yoga has always been more linked to diet culture. We wouldn’t have called it diet culture back then, but certainly this idea of the body and controlling the body.
Jessica
I would say so, especially in the yoga space that is full of white practitioners. I think South Asians in the West practicing yoga that are coming from that lineage, from their motherland, it’s a different type of practice. But the yoga of diet culture is very whitewashed.
Virginia
Let’s talk specifics about how that manifests. What are some of the most surprising ways you’ve seen diet culture infiltrate yoga?
Jessica
Yoga is part of wellness culture and wellness culture is that friendly guise of diet culture which is rooted in capitalism. Yoga in the West is rooted in capitalism. I can tell you that working as a yoga teacher, to earn a living as a yoga teacher is not sustainable in our capitalistic society. There’s just no way to go about doing that for most people, other than those elevated—and I’m going to use air quotes—“gurus” of yoga, the ones that we see in the ads for Lululemon and all of the other brands.
So yoga studios—we have yoga studios in the West, not so much in South Asia. But yoga studios in the West are for profit, and you can just look at what they sell beyond classes: The food, the drinks, the clothing, the apothecary items. This is all so steeped in diet culture. So before setting foot in a yoga studio, there’s this assumption that certain clothing is required to practice yoga, and that clothing is most often indicated for particular bodies. That keeps diversity out of yoga spaces. We don’t have to look too far to see that the ad campaigns for leggings, for activewear that is indicated for yoga practices, is usually on very small bodies.
Virginia
As you’re saying that, I’m just thinking I would feel weird going to a yoga class not wearing yoga pants. Like, we have this sense that you have to. But you also don’t have to. When I practice yoga at home, I often do it in just my pajama pants or any loose clothing. Why we have this idea that you have to wear this one type of pants to go to a yoga studio is fascinating.
Jessica
It’s all about that culture of fitting in and needing to feel like you’re worthy of being in that space.
Virginia
Yep, that makes sense. And yet the pants so rarely have pockets and are not efficient for many of my needs.
Jessica
Well, that’s why you need more of the swag to go along with them.
Virginia
Oh, of course.
Jessica
You need the correct bag to hold your yoga mat. And it has to be the correct yoga mat. And then the correct yoga bag, which has the pockets for this, that, and the other.
Virginia
There’s many more products we can buy.
Jessica
So yoga studios, right? They’re selling more than classes. They’re selling a lifestyle. And I can tell you that walking into many studios—and I have not been in many studios since the pandemic, that’s been the beauty of the pandemic for me is the ability to both practice and teach yoga from the comfort of my home which I think is very, very important. But yoga studios have to make a profit and they do this by selling more than classes, by selling more than experience. So there is the clothing, there is oftentimes food—and I can tell you that it’s not chips and candy that are sold in yoga studios. It’s whatever bar or superfood of the moment is capturing the attention of wellness culture. It’s specific filtered water and kombucha and all sorts of other foods and foodstuffs that really have nothing to do with yoga or wellbeing, but just offer that glimmer of hope that by being in the space, by drinking this liquid, eating this snack, you’ll become more than who you were when you walked in the door.
Virginia
And they’re also selling restriction too, right? There’s often an emphasis on cutting out food groups. I’m hoping you can tease this out a little bit. I know being vegetarian is linked to some of the history of yoga, but cutting out sugar seems more of just a straight up diet culture intervention.
Jessica
So there are many different lineages of yoga. As I mentioned, yoga is not just based in the land that is currently referred to as India, but all over South Asia. And different lineages do have different traditions when it comes to food. There’s this assumption, though, that to practice yoga, to be a quote unquote “good yogi,” means that you are vegetarian, if not vegan, and that cannot be further from the truth. Really what we are looking for in a yoga experience is to feel well in your body. One of the ethical precepts of yoga is a Ahimsa and I’m sure a lot of people have heard this term Ahimsa, which means “no harm” and oftentimes gets co opted into meaning veganism as no harm, you’re not harming another living organism. But I like to turn back Ahimsa to no harm upon yourself. And really, when you’re not harming yourself, you’re loving yourself and taking care of yourself. The notion that to practice yoga means that you have to eat a certain way or not eat a certain way is completely false for the general population.
As I said, there are pockets of yoga lineages and people practicing yoga that do take a different stance, but for the general public that wants to bring yoga into their life, keep on eating whatever you want and feel well in your body.
Virginia
That’s a really powerful reframing because yes, I’ve gotten stuck on that ahimsa, do no harm piece. And I think that’s really useful to consider that we have to include ourselves in that doing of no harm.
I also want to circle back quickly to the guru concept that you touched on. I’m curious to hear more about to what extent the idea of a guru is important to what yoga was originally and how you see the guru concept working out today, because it seems like that’s often where a lot of the diet culture comes in, right? Because people in a studio or in a yoga community are so revering this one teacher to the point that there’s a lot of opportunities for harm.
Jessica
Correct. Yoga in its origin was taught from teacher to student, and there wasn’t a set number of hours that you study with your teacher and then are declared a yoga teacher. It was a lifelong relationship of learning and reciprocity between student and teacher, and continuous learning. We don’t see that sort of student teacher relationship in modern yoga in the West. There is more of that Guru culture where teachers are revered. They’re oftentimes put on a pedestal and whatever a teacher says is often taken as the right thing to do, the right way to be. That’s really dangerous because the scope of practice which is a set of rules and policies set forth by Yoga Alliance, the governing body of yoga teachers, does not include any talk of food, diet or nutrition. Yet we know that to be far from the truth, that is definitely an area that is abused by many teachers who share their thoughts, their opinions, their personal experiences as the way things should be done, on and off of the mat. And that’s where the danger comes in.
Virginia
I’m looking back on my own relationship with yoga over the years and so many workshops I went to with male gurus who were very hands on in their adjustments of the women who came in with the right Lululemon leggings. There’s just a whole whole lot going on there.
Jessica
Absolutely. I mean, I didn’t even touch on the hands-on adjustments. Partly from teaching outside of studios, in the online space, I think we’ve gotten away from adjustments a lot, because my students are on the other side of the screen. But that sort of abuse in teacher/student relationships definitely has been well documented. I think the more subtle abuse or harm is the teacher or the guru that inflicts on their students their own beliefs, opinions, and knowledge that isn’t their place to share.
Virginia
It can be hard when you’re seeking something from yoga, which a lot of people are. You’re in a vulnerable position, right? This person seems to have a lot of answers. They’re personifying this lifestyle that’s extremely seductive. And often you’re getting some real tangible benefits from the yoga practice. So it can get very murky and hard to sort out. Like, which aspect of what I’m doing in yoga, what’s coming from the breathing or the meditation or the physical work and what’s coming from now I’m doing this cleanse with 30 people in my studio?
Jessica
Exactly, exactly. It gets blurry, as you said, and I think it’s important for anyone that is currently practicing yoga or looking to begin a yoga practice to really examine their intention for being in a space or for being in the presence of a particular teacher.
Virginia
Yeah, let’s talk more about that. There’s obviously so much that’s great about yoga and making yoga more accessible for all bodies is so important. So how can we think about separating yoga from diet culture? How do you start to suss out where a studio falls in all of this? And how do you figure out what to wear if you don’t want to wear skinny yoga pants?
Jessica
You never need to wear skinny yoga pants. The most important thing from the start is to be comfortable. So skinny yoga pants aren’t comfortable for you, then that’s not what you should be wearing. But I think the most important thing from the start is to read class descriptions. If you’re looking for a yoga class, read class descriptions. There should not be any promise of changing a body or any regimented requirements for diet involved, right?
Along the lines of diet, culture and wellness culture and its roots in white supremacy and patriarchy, we have to look at classes and specifically about levels of classes and saying that a class is advanced and has advanced poses is not a place that welcomes everyone, right? If you go to a class and feel like you’re being told to just rest while everyone else is doing some fancy shape pose, then that class is not for you, and that class shouldn’t be taught that way, either. We have autonomy as yoga students to practice the way we want to in our body, our bodies are unique and individual and have unique capabilities that change from day to day. So there is no one pose or practice is more advanced than another. It’s learning how to honor your body and its unique abilities from day to day, from moment to moment.
Virginia
I certainly have had and I’m sure many people listening have had that feeling of failure, when you’re told, “okay, you can just go into child’s pose now,” and that feels very stigmatizing. I think a lot of teachers mean it kindly. I think they mean, like, listen to your body and take your time and whatever. But if you’re the one person in the room, and especially if you’re in a bigger body than everybody else, it doesn’t feel kind.
Jessica
I also pay attention to the languaging used by the teacher and the languaging used within a yoga studio. You want language to be qualitative, and not descriptive. Descriptive language can be inappropriate and stigmatizing. So for example, if a teacher says, “place your hands on your fleshy thighs” versus “place your hands on your upper legs,” there’s a big difference right there. “Rest your hands on your abdomen” versus “rest your hands on your soft belly.” Well, it just isn’t comfortable, right?
This is something that’s very nuanced. My experience in teaching yoga for eating disorders and those suffering from eating disorders—that’s very trauma informed work—really informs the language that I use. But I think it’s something that all yoga teachers need to have exposure to and be taught the nuance of qualitative and descriptive languaging. Because there is something very uncomfortable about being told to put your hands on your fleshy thighs, on your soft belly.
(Note from Virginia: Obviously fleshy thighs and soft bellies are not inherently bad! Jessica is referencing how these descriptions can feel not great when used by thin teachers, in a diet culture context.)
Virginia
I had a yoga teacher once who taught triangle pose by telling us to imagine our body between two panes of glass. It took me years to even recognize how stigmatizing that was because I don’t want my round body flattened between two panes of glass. That’s not a helpful note. I don’t really want anyone’s body being flattened between two panes of glass. That sounds painful. It’s an incredibly anti-fat image.
Jessica
I couldn’t agree more. I want to point out that yoga is an embodied practice. So that means listening to your body’s cues and messages and trusting yourself and your instincts. So, if you don’t feel comfortable in a space, if you don’t feel comfortable in the presence of a teacher, if it’s online or in person, trust your body. Trust your nervous system, if you have that awareness because it’s very hard to have an embodied practice and embodied experience in a body that is heightened and on alert and not relaxed and not comfortable.
Jessica
So in terms of where diet culture comes in to yoga, and especially in social media, at this point, Yoga Journal, which is the long standing print magazine for yoga professionals, and the yoga community, has a large online presence. And it is owned by the same parent company that publishes Clean Eating magazine. There’s a lot of intersection in the writing and the journalists between Yoga Journal and Clean Eating. I find it very problematic. Extremely problematic. But that’s capitalism, right?
Virginia
It sure is.
Jessica
The other very alarming situation that I’ve seen time and time again is this notion that some students, especially in a more active yoga class, will leave before savasana, before the end of class.
Savasana is this time to reconnect with the body, to integrate all of the practice into the body. Its definition is “corpse pose.” Not to be gruesome, but just laying on the back in stillness that is savasana. There are a number of people, as I said, especially in more active classes that will leave class before savasana because it’s not a calorie burning pose. They feel like they need to keep the body moving and active and that rest is for the weary. It’s very sad to me.
Virginia
I admit, savasana is the pose I often struggle with most, not because I want to burn calories but just because I’m, feeling like I need to get on with my day. But that’s also why it’s important, right? That’s what I need to be challenging. But yes, thinking of yoga as a workout, period, is so problematic. But certainly then thinking every minute of it has to be this really intense workout is that’s just straight up diet culture, for sure.
Jessica
Yoga as a workout is straight up diet culture, because as I said, at the beginning, yoga is for the purpose of being able to sit and meditate. One thing I didn’t say at the start is the way that I define yoga is the integration of body, mind, and breath in the present moment. So, Virginia, we’re practicing yoga right now. We are having this conversation. We’re here, we’re breathing. We’re present. We’re in the present moment. We are practicing yoga. We are not doing handstands and contorting our bodies.
Virginia
We are not, for people who can’t see us. Nobody’s in a headstand right now.
Jessica
Maybe when we’re done recording, I will go and get in that headstand. But for now…
Virginia
That’s such a more inclusive way to think about it because so many of the Yoga Journal cover poses are so inaccessible for bigger bodies. We should talk about that, too. I have a longtime hatred of shoulder stand because if you are a person with a stomach and large breasts, being in shoulder stand can feel like your body is suffocating you. It puts me immediately at war with my body when that’s not at all how I want to feel during a yoga practice. It always strikes me as a very male body designed pose. I don’t know if there are other examples like that you want to mention, in terms of getting away from this specific idea of doing yoga for certain bodies.
Jessica
I want to acknowledge that any body—any shape and size body—can be challenged by different yoga shapes, yoga poses. Someone in a thin privileged body may not have the ability to get into every shape and that is due to bone structure. Bone structure and the uniqueness of anybody’s bones and joints and tissues, regardless of their body size. So this assumption that you need to be in a smaller frame body, in a thin, privileged body to practice yoga is completely false. Just because you have a smaller body doesn’t mean that you’re able to do every shape either. So there are ways for every body, every single body shape and size, to get into nearly all of the shapes and postures and poses that are out there. I’ve done training on how to teach yoga for those that are bedbound, yoga for people in wheelchairs. There actually is bed yoga, which is so lovely and really beneficial for people that don’t have the ability to get out of bed, don’t have the ability to get out of a wheelchair or some other mobility device.
Virginia
As you’re saying this too, I’m realizing another way that the diet culture shows up is we so often think of modifications for poses as either failure or as a starting point and you have to progress beyond. Like, you have to eventually be able to do inversions in the middle of the room is always a big one that comes up in class. I have no interest in doing a headstand in the middle of the room. I want the wall there. I want to know that I’ve got that support. The idea that I’ve somehow never achieved a true headstand because I don’t feel safe doing it in the middle of a room is so frustrating. And there are so many examples of that.
Jessica
Using props, including the wall, the wall is the greatest of all props is not a sign of inadequacy, or of being a beginner being a failure. Oftentimes, and more often than not, the use of a prop can help you get further into a shape into an area of the body that you didn’t know you had access to.
Virginia
Who else do you love who’s fighting this diet culture definition of yoga? Who are you learning from? I would love to shout out some names.
Jessica
There are a lot of people bringing awareness to the origins and to the roots of yoga, the South Asian roots. Names like Susanna Barkataki. There’s two podcasters from the Yoga is Dead podcast, Jesal Parikh and Tejal Patel. Those three women in particular are bringing a lot of awareness of the roots of yoga and what has happened through colonization and cultural appropriation of yoga practices.
I don’t see as much of the resistance to diet culture, because I see this is a little different from the fat positive or body positive movement within yoga. There is a small but mighty group of us registered dietitian and yoga teachers and a very small group that I know of that are in the anti-diet, weight inclusive space and practicing as Registered Dietitians as well as yoga teachers that are really trying to make sure that diet culture does not continue to bring harm or the harm of diet culture into the yoga space. One of my colleagues and I have started Anti-Diet Culture Yoga as a training platform for yoga teachers to help them decipher what is the true teachings of yoga versus what is the influence of diet culture.
Virginia
There are so many ways we need to rethink what modern yoga has become. It makes sense that not everybody is doing all of the work, because there’s so much work.
I’ll shout out a couple of people I love on Instagram who are doing yoga and fat bodies. Jessamyn Stanley has been a longtime go-to for me. I love her underbelly app videos. They were really a turning point for my yoga relationship, both in terms of being able to do yoga outside of a studio and do yoga with someone who wasn’t in a thin body. All of that was really liberating for me.
I also love @fringeish on Instagram. Shannon does a lot challenging people’s perceptions of what fat bodies can do with yoga, and creating safe spaces.
Dianne Bondy is another one I’ve learned a lot from. So they’re there. You’re right, there’s not nearly enough. Different people are working on different aspects of this, but it is encouraging to see this kind of small community of voices emerging.
Jessica
I also I want to give a shout out to accessible yoga, specifically to Jivana Heyman, who has done a tremendous amount for bringing yoga to all people and that recognition that any body and everybody, regardless of shape, size, color, ability, disability, so on and so forth, can practice yoga in a meaningful way. I also want to mention Yoga for Eating Disorders which is an online school that I’m on the faculty of.
One thing that we didn’t touch upon, which is a whole other conversation is that not all yoga is good yoga. Yoga and its intertwining with diet culture has been harmful and in the perpetuation of disordered eating and development of eating disorders. Not all yoga is good yoga for all bodies and for all people, especially those suffering with issues of disordered eating and eating disorders. At yoga for eating disorders we teach in a way that is safe is trauma-informed and is available to help heal the relationship with the body in a way that is neutral and supportive.
Virginia
It’s so important to have that safe space.
Butter For Your Burnt Toast
Virginia
Well, Jessica, we always wrap up, as you know, with our butter for burnt toast segment, so I would love to know what is your butter for us today?
Jessica
I’m so glad you asked! Because it’s summertime, and there’s nothing better in the summer than ice cream. And I’m talking about real ice cream. I’m not talking about Tasti D-lite. I’m a former New Yorker that thought that Tasti D-lite was a good thing. Now is the time on a beautiful sunny afternoon or a rainy afternoon like I have today here to go and enjoy a bowl of ice cream, cone of ice cream, whatever it may be. I just can’t think of anything better.
Virginia
It really is one of the most perfect things about summer.
I’m gonna do a plant recommendation for my plant obsessed listeners. My butter is the Great Umbrella Plant, Darmera Peltata. Okay, so Darmera looks like a giant rhubarb. It has a very round umbrella shaped leaf. It’s a garden plant, not a house plant. I should have started with that. It’s native to the Pacific Northwest but it grows really well in shade gardens if you have enough moisture. I’ve just put some in and they get huge and they put up these really pretty pink flowers in the spring. And then you get these giant leaves for the rest of the season. So if you’re looking for a good plant for a shade garden, check out Darmera. It’s like an alternative to a hosta but even more giant big leaves. Very cool.
All right. Well, thank you so much, Jessica, for being here! Where can we follow you and learn more about your work?
Jessica
You can find me at with health and gratitude which has all the information for how to work with me for nutrition therapy. I teach weekly online yin yoga classes which are accessible for everyone—there is no previous experience required. Links to my classes are at yoga for eating disorders. I have hundreds of recipes on my website, original recipes—I used to do work and recipe development and culinary education. So my website has lots of information regardless of what you’re looking for. There’s something for everyone.
Virginia
We will link to that. Thank you so much for being here!
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