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From Body Bully to Body Ally
This is part two of my conversation with Ann Poirier, and it opens with a memory that made both of us wince: a girls' trip, a box of chocolates passed around the table, and Ann taking more than her share every single time it came back around, until the box was empty before it made it all the way around, and someone asked what happened to all the chocolates. She didn't admit it was her. She told me, hand to God, she physically could not stop herself. The desperation for one more hit outweighed the fear of getting caught.
That story is the doorway into the real subject of this episode: how the way we talk to ourselves about food and body gets passed down, generation to generation, usually without anyone meaning for it to happen at all.
Not a Fat Annie, Ann's second book, was written specifically about this generational thread. She told me it felt like it was written through her rather than by her, for the ten-year-old she used to be. The core idea: we watch how the generation before us treats food, weight, and their own bodies, assume that's simply how it's done, and repeat it, often on people who are watching us just as closely, without our knowledge.
Body bullying doesn't have to be loud to do damage. Ann talked about how a parent beating themselves up in the mirror, or throwing clothes on the floor in frustration, gets witnessed and absorbed by a child who has no idea they're learning a template for how to treat their own body someday. You don't have to say a critical word about your child's body to teach them body criticism. You just have to model it toward your own.
A useful marker of progress: noticing you've stopped hating yourself. Ann shared something a client once told her: "I realized I couldn't hate myself thin." That single sentence, Ann said, is often the real turning point in someone's work, not a lightning bolt of self-love, but simply noticing that the old strategy of self-hatred never once produced the outcome it promised.
On GLP-1 medications, her position has shifted, and she's honest about still working through it. Ann isn't anti-medication. She's watched it genuinely help people, including with things like A1C management. Her concern is specific: she doesn't want people using it purely to eat fewer M&Ms and call that recovery. Her stance now is to treat it as a tool that changes biology (quieting food noise, slowing digestion) while the actual behavioral and emotional work still has to happen underneath it. Because if someone ever stops the medication without that underlying work done, the old neural pathways are still sitting there, unchanged, waiting.
Intuitive eating only works once the water is clear. Ann described a memory of hiking Zion's slot canyons in freezing, muddy floodwater, unable to see her footing, forced to guess at every step. That's what trying to "intuitively eat" while still deep in ultra-processed food looks like: you can't feel your own true hunger signals clearly when the water's muddy. She traced this disconnection back further than most of us would think to look, to infancy, when a baby crying an hour before the "scheduled" feeding gets distracted instead of fed, or a toddler told to "run along" so as not to spoil dinner. Small, well-meant disruptions, repeated over years, that teach a person not to trust their own hunger signal in the first place.
A trick for telling true hunger from something else: if a chicken breast sounds genuinely appealing, you're probably hungry. If only cookies will do, you're probably feeling something else (boredom, stress, a need for stimulation) and it's worth pausing to ask which one before deciding what to do next.
Ultra-processed food is just "more steps." Ann borrowed a reframe from her training in precision nutrition: trace a food back to its origin and count the steps. A banana goes from tree to cart to store, a couple of steps. Banana bread goes through an entire manufacturing process, many more steps. Reframing "processed" as simply "more steps between the earth and your plate" gave her brain, and now mine, an easy filter to run almost anything through.
How to know if exercise has become compensation instead of care: Ann's marker is whether you're moving because you have to, because you should, or to earn or burn off food, versus moving because you want to preserve your independence, your mobility, your ability to keep up with your own life. She told a story about training specifically so she could keep up with her three-year-old grandson on a playground slide, going up the ladder and down the slide dozens of times in a row. That's exercise in service of joy. A bargaining mechanism tied to guilt is something else entirely.
A simple nightly practice worth adopting: before bed, name what your body did for you that day. Not what you ate, not what you weigh, what it did. Got you out of bed. Carried you through a hard conversation. Hugged someone you love. Ann does this. I've started doing it myself, most nights saying, quite literally, "good job today, you're doing okay," because grief and hard seasons deserve that same gentleness a body does.
If you take one thing from this conversation: the goal was never to arrive at total self-love and stay there permanently. It's to notice, one small moment at a time, when you're being your own bully instead of your own ally, and to choose the ally, even imperfectly, a little more often than you did last year.
You are not alone. Healing is possible. Your story matters.
You’re not broken, and you’re never alone. If you want ongoing encouragement, practical resources, or a supportive community of women walking this path, join my email list or grab our book, Real Food Recovery: If Food Isn’t the Answer, What’s the Question? And catch our weekly podcast here!
You are strong. You can do this. And we’ll walk it together.
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