Can I Love My Body And Still Want To Lose Weight? w/Amani Al-khatahtbeh

In this episode, Jess speaks publicly for the first time in a decade about a subject near and dear to her heart: body positivity in the context of weight loss. This episode tackles the question:

“Can you love your body while still desiring to lose weight?” 

Jess and her guest for this episode, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, have both experienced 100+ lb weight loss in their life. They know firsthand what it’s like to grapple with that question. They both share candidly about what life is like in a larger body and what happened when that weight started to drop (the answer may surprise you).

Amani’s not only a voice for body inclusivity for women around the world but at 25 years of age she’s also a “media titan” (according to the New York Times) and the founder and creator of muslimgirl.com. 

Amani started Muslim Girl as a blog when she was still in high school. After she couldn’t find any publications that spoke to her experience as a Muslim girl growing up in America, she decided to make her own. The blog has since taken off and become the first Muslim company on the Forbes 30 under 30 list, making Amani the first veiled woman to be listed.

Amani’s background is important because her experience growing up as a Muslim woman in America affected her weight, just as her weight affected her experience as a Muslim woman. This is an intersectional conversation that embraces the nuance inherent to the question of the episode. There’s so much more to health than weight, there’s so much more to weight than the way you look, and there’s so much more to this conversation that you’ll just have to hear for yourself!  

You can follow Amani @Amani on most platforms, and @xoamani on Twitter. Also, check out her book named by the same title as her blog: Muslim Girl.  

To learn how you can support the next generation to have a positive relationship with beauty, visit Dove.com/selfesteem for academically validated tools to help parents, teachers, and mentors tackle tough topics ranging from bullying and poor body image to discrimination.  

Please rate, review, subscribe and share Dominant Stories with everyone you know. 

If you want to learn more about Dominant Stories and how you can challenge and change them, visit jessweiner.com or follow Jess on Instagram @imjessweiner. 

You can also email us about your Dominant Stories and how you are changing them - [e-mail] or leave us a voicemail at 213 259 3033

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Shonda Rhimes and we're bringing you Dominant Stories, created
by Shawn Land Audio in partnership with the def Self
Steam Project. Once I was dropping a kind of way
that people were noticing that, I remember describing it as
feeling like declining a lioness, making her take up less space.

(00:22):
You know, now you're acceptable. Now we're gonna treat you,
you know, like like a feminine woman or a feminine
body because you're not so much in the way. Hey,
I'm Jess Weiner and this is Dominant Stories, the podcast
that helps us reclaim and rewrite the stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves, about our bodies, our beauty, our creativity,

(00:47):
and our identities. All Right, today's conversation is one that
I have been really waiting for and longing for. It's
one of the first comfort stations that actually came to
my mind when we created this podcast, and it's on
a topic that I really haven't explored very much publicly

(01:08):
for for well over a decade because it's so nuanced
and it's sometimes controversial, which I'll get into later, but
it just isn't often discussed, and that is this question,
can you love your body and still want to lose weight.
Does losing weight always mean that you're succumbing to some
external beauty pressure and doesn't mean that I don't love

(01:31):
my body or don't have high self esteem if I
have a desire to change my body. Are these two
thoughts mutually exclusive? I told you it was nuanced. So
for this incredible conversation, I am joined by Amani al Katabi,
who is an author and activist and a pioneer in
modern media representation. She's the founder and the editor in

(01:54):
chief of the award winning muslim Girl dot com, which
is a premier online platform for Muslim women's voices in
Western societies. Amani has been recognized everywhere by Forbes in
their thirty Under thirty list, making her the first veiled
Muslim woman to be honored in a media category, and
in Amany also became the first Muslim in US history

(02:17):
to run for Congress in New Jersey. She is a
true trailblazer. I've known her for a while and yet
I've never really had this type of personal conversation with Amany.
And let me tell you, she generously goes there with
me and shares about her relationship with her body, her identity,

(02:38):
and her significant weight loss. I cannot wait for you
to hear this convo. And as always, if you enjoy
the podcast, let me know about it. Let me know
what you think by subscribing writing review wherever you're listening
right now, are you ready, Let's dig in, Amani, Amani, Amani.

(03:05):
I have been looking forward to this conversation. I've been
looking forward to this conversation for weeks, so it's completely
my pleasure. Yeah, I'm so excited to be here with
you right now. So you know, as you've been listening
to the show, we often start talking about our childhood
selves on this show because so many of the dominant stories,
the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, kind of come

(03:27):
from our upbringings. And so I want to bring us
back to little Amani growing up in New Jersey to start,
and I want to talk a little bit about what
your childhood was like and what you remember hearing from
maybe your mom or other family members around appearance or
beauty or body image in particular. It's really interesting because

(03:50):
I can actually remember being hyper aware of my darker
features as earliest kindergarten. Really, it was when I was
in a classroom and my mo in his hometown in
New Jersey, and all the other girls were blonde, blue eyed,
fair skin that I realized, but I was different and
that I looked different. And in many ways I started

(04:13):
observing very early on at children do that I was
being treated differently than other girls. And a lot of
it also was tied into femininity and what the definition
of that is, what that looks like, how people perceive it.
The way that you treat a little girl based on
how big she is, or the way that she presents herself,
the way that she acts, the way that she behaves.

(04:35):
Can you talk a little bit about what you notice,
what you picked up on as a little kid when
you say he treated differently, Do you have some memories
around that. Actually, there's an experience from my childhood that
I only recently started refamiliarizing myself with because they didn't
realize that carried so much trauma in it. I actually
was suspended for the first time in my life when

(04:56):
I was in elementary school and I was less than
ten years old at the time. I had gotten into
a fight with one of my classmates, as children often do,
and I had said something to the effect of, oh,
I want to kill you, and the teachers and the
principles really reacted extremely harshly to that. It wasn't until

(05:19):
my adult years that I realized that children of color
received discipline at a much higher rate than their white
counterparts do. But it was traumatizing because that day was
our school play and I had been selected to be
the stage director of our school play, so I was

(05:39):
in charge of painting all of the back drops. I
was tirelessly working on them for months. For a seven
eight nine year old, it was my entire life, and
I was so proud of it. I was telling my
parents about every day after school. I could not wait
until the school place and they could see my hard work.
And I got pulled into the principal's office because of
this comment that I made, and the principle unilaterally decided

(06:01):
to suspend me. There's a condition of that suspension. I
was not able to attend the school play that evening,
and I didn't realize the impact but that had on
me at that age, you know, like my backdrops were
still used in the school play, and actually then after
the school play was over, they hung them in our
school library for years. So imagine the torture of also

(06:24):
going to the school library every day and seeing your work,
and then I never got to enjoy, you know, the
fruits of my labor, and I didn't realize that it
kind of sent me that message very early on, like
you are worthless. We just want what you could produce,
that my labor is worth more than me as a person.
And of course we know as women of color, that's
an ongoing issue for so many of us, that feeling

(06:46):
of being disposable, of being used for what we're worth
and never being given the credit for it. We see
a lot of studies talking about the adultification of black girls,
of girls of color in schools, the punishment much more severe,
as you mentioned, And so I think about that as
the backdrop of how you, as a young girl, are
developing and growing and seeing your place in the world.

(07:09):
What were the conversations like for you at home with
female family members or all family members around beauty, identity,
body image like? Was that even something that was being
talked about at home? It was. I mean, I was
always an overweight child, like for as long as I
can remember, and so even from my earliest years, the

(07:31):
word diet became indoctrinated into my vocabulary. You need to diet,
you need to limit what you eat. Not until recently,
probably in the past year, did I reacquaint myself with
the definition of an eating disorder, because growing up my
entire life, it was always this assumption that only skinny
girls had eating disorders, and I didn't realize that actually

(07:52):
I had been existing with and surviving eating disorders for
my entire life. And coming from an immigrant family, you know,
I'm a first generation American, I don't think that my
family really had the knowledge of nutrition or even self
care because our entire lives were about survival. So healthy

(08:12):
eating was seen as a luxury, right, barely something that
we could even afford, you know, organic foods or fresh
foods and things like that, you know, So it wasn't
even like I had the resources at my disposal that
early on to be able to adjust and create a
healthy relationship with food. And that wasn't even my family's fault.
They don't blame them for that. It was just the unfortunately,

(08:33):
you know, the circumstances and the lack of privilege that
we had to live with, right, And where was the
mindset around like, oh, you have to diet coming from
for me? I'll share it was my mother. I went
on my first diet with my mother when I was eleven.
My mother went on her first diet when she was five,
also child of immigrants, and that was the way they were,

(08:55):
I think, exerting some control, some care, some protection in
because they knew that being fat in this culture was
not a positive thing, especially for women. And then I
think when I became around the same age that my
mom was, dieting was just something I fell into with her.
It was like she dieted, I dieted. That's what just
was passed down. So I'm curious if that's something you

(09:17):
also experienced. I actually never thought about it until you
just asked me that question. But the first thing that
I just remembered was that my dad would tell me
very early on. My father um would say, one day,
you're going to be up for a job against a skinnier,
better looking woman, and she's gonna get it, and you're

(09:39):
gonna realize how important it is for you to look
the right way for whatever it is you're going for.
Now that I think back to, it's like, wow, you
know that was kind of, like you said, in a way,
a form of protection that my dad felt like he
was instilling in me. It's like, we're already up against
so much. You're already gonna have to work twice ten.

(10:00):
It's as hard as your white counterparts. So this is
something that you have to do so that you don't
miss out even more. Whether or not that's a healthy
message to give too little girls. Unfortunately, that is the
experience for a lot of people of color, and that
is something that my parents, as immigrants, worried about. For me, yes,
I can absolutely relate to that. I think there were

(10:21):
lots of influencing factors that create these pressures. I think
for us when it comes to appearance, and obviously for me,
I'm a kid who grew up in the eighties. I've
talked about that a lot on the show. TV was
really important in my life as a kid growing up.
I'm curious the role media played for you and Monty,
you know, growing up. How did you relate to it?
Were you ever aware of not seeing little girls like

(10:44):
you on American television? In particular, for me, growing up
my entire life, I've never seen a reflection of myself
in the media around me. That is what inspired me
to create Muslim Girl, because there weren't girls that I
could connect with. And I was always obsessed with magazines,
the fashion mag that would rip pages out put them

(11:05):
up on my bedroom walls. And the girls I always
aspired to look like look the same. They were tall, waify,
childlike figures, fair skinned, light hair, light features. Obviously, that
just propelled the eating disorders even more and also maximize

(11:26):
the issues that I had with my self esteem. I mean, already,
it's hard enough growing up in a postminal leve in
America as a young Muslim girl, and the messaging that
we get about who Muslim woman are, how we're voiceless,
how we're oppressed, how we're too dis empowered to speak
for ourselves. That's Western media telling us that. And then
on top of that, that's not what we're putting in

(11:46):
our magazines. People that look like you do not belong here. Actually,
the first time that I landed in Team Vogue magazine
and the print issue, that was the moment where I
was like, oh my god, you know, there's gonna be
little girls that actually can rip a page out of
a magazine of a girl that looks like them, And
that was something that I never had growing up. I

(12:09):
totally get that and I think when we disappear people
from mainstream media advertising, the power of being excluded lives
inside of us for so long. But I want to
go a little bit deeper into what you just said,
because I know you've talked about it as a defining
major moment of your life, and that is around nine eleven.

(12:29):
You were nine years old, right when nine eleven happened,
and you were a Muslim family living in New Jersey,
and I know as a result, you've shared a lot
about the hardship, the bullying, the tormenting, the racism. You
said in an article a quote you said, as a child,
the systemic hatred of my religion made me feel like
I was an outsider in the only country I had

(12:50):
ever known. You talk a little bit about that, Yeah,
I mean that's the thing when we talk about also
just like body types and looking a certain way and
is socio political, you know, because it also tells us
who can be American. And for me, I was born
and raised in the United States. This is the only

(13:11):
home that I've ever known, and so the lack of
images of women that looked like me in the media
only served to further that sentiment that you don't belong here.
You're an outsider, You're not one of us. You can't
even begin to describe the impact that that has on
a young girl and her identity, on her self esteem
growing up, how that really defines her experience in life. Yeah,

(13:35):
I keep trying to imagine you as this nine year old,
as this ten year old, absorbing the collective fear and hatred.
And you said it has an impact on your identity
at such a young age. What messages did you create
or were coming to you around your sense of self
worth at that time? Because I'm also juxtaposing that to

(13:56):
the challenge you were having in school and then here
comes this national catastrophe moment where then now you're hyper targeted.
How does that land for you as a nine or
ten year old little girl. It was an elementary school
when I heard my first racial slur from a fellow classmate,
and that classmate was actually also of color. So it

(14:20):
was when I was in middle school that I started
to hide my religion from my peers. You know, when
they would ask me, I would say, oh, a Mediterranean,
you know, and I would hope that there was some
type of racial ambiguity where they might confuse me for
like a Latina girl or like some other you know,
minority and not an Arab or not a Muslim, and

(14:42):
that's a shame. You know. It felt like that much
pressure to avoid being treated differently that I had to
hide that part of myself. That was also something that
I had to deal with a lot growing up, was
people really putting old Muslims or old Arab girls and
one box of how they're supposed to look, you know,
but the dark features, the dark hare the the other ring.

(15:05):
That type of defining of our image also does a
lot to push that outside our feeling too certain groups
of people, you know. After I started wearing a hitge job,
which I chose to start wearing a HDGE job after
my first trip to the Middle East and seeing with
my own eyes what the reality was of my people
and how sharp of a contrast there was between the

(15:28):
reality and that image that we propagated in in our
media and the United States. I decided to wear the
HDGE job because to me, that was my public reclamation
of my identity. I wanted people to know before they
even knew my name, that I'm wearing this marker on
my head that yes, I'm almost some woman, and I
exist and I'm here, And to me, that was the

(15:50):
most powerful way that I could push back against the
issamophobia that was really claiming, you know, sucking the oxygen
out of my lungs for my entire life, was to
really claim that m hmm. Actually, now that we're we're
talking about it. When nine eleven happened, I had Muslim
relatives of mine visiting from the Middle East that very year.

(16:11):
It was their first time in the United States. It
was my grandmother and my aunt, and they both wore
very traditional Muslim attire, you know, they recovered head to toe,
and we went to a water park and my aunt
came with me and she went on a water slide,
still wearing her job and her full you know, Muslim covering,
and I was absolutely mortified. I was like, oh my god,

(16:34):
everyone's staring at us. They know that we're different, that
we don't belong here. You're making all these extra eyeballs
on us. And I remember I ran to my dad
after we went down the slide. I was like, Dad,
do you want to believe what my aunt just did?
And in that moment, my dad told me that's something
you should be proud of. Look at how pretty to
your aunt is that she's choosing to stay true to
who she is in spite of all this adversity. When

(16:57):
I decided to put on a scarf, I thought back
to that moment, having that example in my life at
that early age. That stuck with me. Yes, I got
a good idea. Let's take a moment to reach charge
and we'll be back in a flash. All right back

(17:24):
to the convo when you were thirteen you moved to Jordan's.
When you talk a little bit about that experience of
going from New Jersey to Jordan's and how that starts
to reshape and continue to redefine your sense of identity

(17:46):
and even beauty. The move from New Jersey, where I
was born and raised and lived my entire life to
smack dab in the middle of the Middle East for
the first time in my life, I can't understand the
culture shock that I felt. First of all, like you said,
I was thirteen years old. We all know that thirteen
is one of the hardest years and girls life, no

(18:10):
matter where you are, it is a rough year. You're
going through puberty, you're adjusting to all these changes, you're
trying to find yourself in the way that you can
express yourself and who you are. When I was going
to middle school in New Jersey, I had just started
learning to straighten my hair, my curly, wavy, thick Middle
Eastern hair started straightening it. I started putting on makeup

(18:31):
in the morning before I went to school. I started
dressing with the other girls, did putting on my lip
gloss and things like that. And then right as I
started to feel like all right, I was like getting
the hang of how to be a normal girl, I
was thrown into the Middle East, and in the Middle
East the culture shock that it brought on, where all
the girls were very covered up, just super differently, had

(18:53):
different values, different traditions than what I had grown up
within New Jersey. And I was also again very overweight,
and especially for Jordanian society, I was big, like there
were no sizes in the local market place and the
local stores that fit me at that time. Now the
plus size movement has grown just so full throttle, but

(19:16):
at that time, just going shopping with my relatives in
Jordan's it was a traumatic experience. I would just to
stay at home because I could never find anything that
fit me let alone, anything that felt loose or modest
enough to live up to the standard of the other
girls the way that they dressed at that time, and

(19:37):
it was really hard to adjust. It was really hard
to find myself and find my place, especially after I
started wearing the head scar how I wanted to wear
it to express my own personal style, it was extremely
limited by the sizes that were available to me. Also,
you know the box when I came back to the
United States, the box that people around we were trying
to place me in of what build Muslim girl could

(19:59):
do or what she should look like, how she should act.
But I think that going to Jordan was one of
the best experiences that my my parents ever gave me
because it did expose me to my culture and my background.
It really taught me to be proud of who I was.
It it instilled in me this new strength, you know,
having to navigate all those challenges. I really have to

(20:19):
dig deep, you know, and really understand what the value
was of having self work and not letting your outside
circumstances or whatever society you land yourself in to be
variable and dictating that for you. Yeah, And as you're
telling me and sharing more of your story. In this manner,
it makes full sense that as you return back to

(20:39):
the United States, you then have this calling to create
a community. When you were in high school, you started
Muslim Girl as a blog, which is then has grown
into a major outlet or resource of community for so
many Muslim women. Talk to me about that calling to
create that community and what was a purpose then. I
always to be honest with you that when I first

(21:02):
made the decision to start Muslim Girl, it was a
very selfish one. It was because I was experiencing so
much adversity in my everyday life as a teenage girl.
I was enduring such extreme bullying in my school in
my homogeneous hometown that I couldn't find spaces online that
could serve as a resource for me. At that time,

(21:24):
the only conversations that existed online for Muslim girls were
just so outdated and irrelevant to what I was experiencing
in my everyday life as first generation Muslim American girl.
And so because of the experiences I was having, because
I didn't really have anyone in my hometown from a
similar experience that I I can really connect with, I said

(21:46):
there had to be other girls among my generation experiencing
similar things, and maybe if I started a blog online,
we could all find each other come together and then
maybe for the first time in my life, I would
have some good friend in my corner. So yeah, in
that way, maybe we could have a support system, the sisterhood,
where we can reach out to each other for advice

(22:08):
of how to survive, how to deal with these issues,
and you know, just really build up our self esteem,
build up our relationship with our identities, which I always
say was an experience that was robbed of us after
that Eleventh happened. You know, it was really the media
trying to shove down our throats what our identities were.
I'm not really allowing us the freedom to define that
for ourselves. So that's really how some girls started. Yeah,

(22:30):
I mean, I think about the whole revolution of blogging
at the time in which you were blogging was to
make the unsaid spoken. I mean, the reason why blogs
were so powerful back then was we were coming online
to share the things you just didn't share in your
everyday life with people, and it in turn got folks
a chance to be seen and heard and understood. But

(22:52):
you know, your work, the money is so inherently intersectional.
The way that you talk about some of the added
layers to appearance and privilege is really important. And one
of the things that you've been very candid about is
how you also can come from a place of privilege
in terms of your appearance and being sort of what
you had said is quote an acceptable or token type

(23:14):
of Muslim woman. Will you talk a little bit about
that place of privilege in the way people think about
what Muslim women look like. I mean, first and foremost,
I'm a light skinned Arab woman. There's a lot of
privilege that comes with that. You know, there is unfortunately
still an exotification of what Muslim woman look like. And

(23:36):
I think that for those of us that have features
that kind of fit into that mold, it is easier
for us to navigate certain spaces, and it's it's frankly disgusting.
I do think that in many ways it is because
of my image and my voice that I have been
tokenized in certain spaces, And to be honest with you,

(23:59):
I've finessing it. You know. It's been like, all right,
if I'm gonna be used as a token in this space,
then how do I use that opportunity to blow the
door wide open so that other girls can come in
after me. That's always been kind of the thought process.
It's like, all right, you want maybe the token like
Muslim face and whatever an issue of you're doing, as
long as I get the microphone and I get to

(24:20):
speak whatever I want to speak. The way that I
have kind of dissected it and my mind is that,
you know, maybe like about two decades ago, we saw
that the black community was hyper tokenized and much of
the media that you consume, just that you talk about,
you know, we always have like the token black person
that was like the joker, like the comedic relief for yeah,

(24:43):
you know. And I always look towards the black community
and the black movement as kind of the guiding light
for where the Muslim community is headed. And so seeing
that type of progress that has happened for the black community,
it's where now it's not that it doesn't still happen,
actual we does, but it becomes so much more difficult
to joke and eyes a black persons in a certain

(25:05):
space because doors have been opening now for the community
for for people to really be able to get that
access based on their merit, you know, and the fact
that they frankly deserve it. And so it can't be
about individual success. It can't be about individual access. It
needs to be communal. It needs to be all of
us coming together to make that possible for all of us. Yes,

(25:29):
we're going to start to now turn the corner and
talk about the intersectionality of weight and identity. But the
reason I'm hoping that the folks that are following along
in this conversation recognize that when we talk about weight
and we talk about body shape and size, there is
so much more than just the physical circumference of our frames. Right,

(25:49):
our bodies are the vehicles in which we move through
this world, and they house all of who we are
and the things we we carry. Our experience is in
our bodies and they become a part not just of
our body image, but our self identity. And so when
we talk about weight and size, we are also talking

(26:10):
about the weight and the size of what people have
lived through in their life. And I want you to
take me to where you're at now in high school
and post high school as Muslim girl is growing, Like
where are you in your relationship to body image and
your weight? Because oftentimes our attempts at fixing quote unquote

(26:36):
our bodies or working on our bodies is also a
very white, patriarchal, capitalistic pursuit of assimilation, especially if you've
been indoctrinated to the diet industrial complex in North America
and Western markets. It's like it's sort of just you know,
beat into us that our bodies are works in progress.

(26:56):
If you can take me back to sort of now,
young woman Amani in this space, where are you in
this relationship to your body image and your weight? I mean,
before I even get into that, I want to say
spoiler alert that a hundred pounds down later, I still
was conditions. I feel like my body was a work
in progress. So now rewinding back to that sensitive time,

(27:19):
you can only imagine the level of absolute self loathing
that I had for myself. Like I hated myself, I
hated my body, I hated looking in the mirror. My
entire feeling of self worth was predicated on the fact
that I hated my body and how fat. It was,

(27:39):
the way society is set up. It it made me
really question is life even worth living if you're fat?
That's a heavy, heavy question to ask as a child,
as a girl child, you know, and you know at
that time. I can tell you that probably one of
the most torturous weeks of high school for me was
the week that it was a major headline on the

(28:03):
magazine covers that Beyonce was on the Cayenne pepper diet.
I remember that I lived off of that kyne pepper
drink until I was sick, until I was throwing it
up because I thought that was the solution. There were
days where I would hide in my bedroom all day,

(28:23):
just running in place because they didn't feel comfortable running
outside and couldn't affordage the membership at that age running
in place to the point where I was so dehydrated
I thought I would get water poisoning because of how
much I was overcompensating for what my body was missing. Wow. Truly,
just like, not until this conversation that I really think

(28:44):
that deeply into it, But those are experiences that I
feel like I buried so deep for years because of
how painful they were and because of how triggering they
have been. Absolutely Oyo dieting was It wasn't even called
heyo dieting to me. That was just life. That was
my body. It was always me existing within this spectrum

(29:04):
that kept going back and forth of where I was
at with my eating. And I do have to say
too that a huge part of my childhood was the
fact that both of my parents had to work full
time jobs to provide for us to survive, and I
was babysitting my two baby brothers as early as elementary school.
I think that a lot of immigrant kids have had

(29:26):
a similar experience, especially for the girls that are like
the oldest and their family, the oldest sister. So I
was stuck at home eating whatever fast food or whatever,
you know, like the brownies, the little Debbie treats that
I had in the cupboard, the easy access kind of stuff.
It was no wonder that I was in the state
that I was in. And it's like, looking back now,

(29:46):
it's like, yeah, obviously that's why you weren't losing the weight,
you know. But it took a long time for me
to really correct that journey with my body and with
health that it wasn't about weight loss, It wasn't about that.
It was a about health and taking care of you
all right, you know the drill. It's that time. Oh

(30:22):
my gosh, I hope you're enjoying this as much as
I am. All right, let's dig back in. You know,
one of the reasons obviously we're having this conversation is
it's something near and dear to my personal experience as well.
I shared obviously going on my first diet when I
was eleven, not by choice, but by kind of family

(30:45):
history and ritual. And then for me, food and dieting
just became synonymous with girlhood. I didn't know a girl
that wasn't obsessed with weight or dieting. Food and of
itself was both a weapon and a reward for me,
and it kind of creates this very binary way that
you start to look at the world. Right when you're
dieting and you're doing and I'm doing air quotes now

(31:07):
doing good, you're good, and when you're not, you're bad.
And so worth and weight become really intertwined. And I
have been many different sized bodies in my life. I've
lived in many different sized bodies, but I absolutely, in
my maybe mid twenties to about mid thirties early forties,

(31:27):
put on a tremendous amount of weight on my body.
And a lot of that was insulation, a lot of
that was comfort, a lot of that was a deep
lack of self care. And I don't mean self care
and like I didn't know the things to do, because
that's a big misnomer, right of people who have been dieting,
who have carried way, who live in fat bodies. Trust me,
all we know how to diet, We know about food,

(31:49):
we know about calories and carbs and all those things,
probably in in super specific ways. But for me, what
I've untangled is what is weight and what is hell
for me? Because I think health and wellness can be
codified words of diet industry as well, if we don't
really define what that means. But one of the things

(32:10):
that I have been wrestling with a lot and why
I wanted to have this conversation with you, somebody else
who has released a lot of weight from your frame
as I have to. I've also had a hundred pound
weight loss in my life. Is I am actively wrestling
with and even talked to my corporate clients about this,
the notion that weight does not equal health. You cannot

(32:33):
tell somebody's health by looking at them on the outside.
And I'm curious what that statement means for you when
I say it, what you think about I mean, when
I was probably at my heaviest weight. When I was
in college, I remember having a physical exam where my
doctor told me that you have the ideal health profile

(32:55):
for a person of your age, and that to me
was very shocking. It's very eye opening because I even
made assumptions about my own self and about my own
health because of society's view of fat people, and also
the idea that, yeah, being thinner is being better, is
being healthier, when that's not always the case. Um you

(33:16):
had mentioned that you were gaining weight kind of like
to create that padding around yourself. Right after I got
arrested for the first time last year, I put on
a lot of weight. When I got arrested. It became
a global viral news story because a first class passenger

(33:37):
on my flight complained that I made him feel uncomfortable,
and as a result of that, I was unilaterally removed
from my flight and then handcuffed and arrested without any question,
without any reason. And that was a very traumatizing experience
for me. It was hard for me to reckon with
that because I felt like, even with that experience that

(33:58):
I had, still felt more privileged than my black counterparts
that sometimes don't get out of those situations alive. But
in the weeks that followed, I've secluded myself in my
apartment and I was packing on the weight because I
knew it felt like it was my body trying to
protect itself, trying to create some patting ground it. Even

(34:18):
when the very few moments when I left the house,
you know, just to like go get groceries, for example,
I would put layers and layers on top of my
body before I went out. You know, I put my
hitgeob on hood up jackets and jackets of layers, and
it was me trying to protect myself, to insulate myself.
And you really can't talk about our relationship with our
bodies without extracting that experience that minorities have to face,

(34:41):
especially vulnerable women of color that are on the receiving
end of adversity at that level, especially in this moment
of time in our country, my brown body was worth
getting thrown into a cell in a police station with
handcuffs thrown on it. It's like it almost reaffirmed to me, like, yeah,
this is all that you're worth. And a defining experience

(35:01):
of coming out of that depression that I fell into,
that trauma was re recognizing that I deserved better. That
my body was my vehicle in this world, and I
deserve to treat it better than the treatment that I
was giving it. I was putting absolute crop into my
body and really packing on the pounds as a results

(35:22):
of that. And again it is difficult to talk about
because that is not to say whatsoever that any individual
that carries weight, it's because they are less than anybody else,
or they feel like they're less than them or them
not worth worth better. But that was the way that
my body reacted to the trauma that it went through. Yes, well,
it reminds me of the story you told in the

(35:43):
beginning of being you know, kicked out of school and
the feeling of being a threat. You did document and
I encourage people who are listening and they can go
back into the archives of your social media. You documented
that experience for you publicly of the arrest and the
I would say, an assault from this person and this
airline in this industry. And I think what you talk

(36:06):
about with trauma a money is really important because again
when I said, our bodies carry with us the weight
of what we've lived through in our life, that is
what you are talking about. And I think the way
we process trauma oftentimes is to re harm ourselves as
a way to affirm our worthlessness, as a way to protect,

(36:27):
as a way to repeat patterns that feel familiar to us,
especially if they've been evident in our life for a
long time. And you're right, none of this is to
be a substitute for anybody's experience or a roadmap even
for what anybody should be doing. But what you make
me think about is the mixed messages we also get

(36:48):
to from the medical community. Because I was just going
to say, you know, I did not have health issues
physical health issues at higher weights in my life. I
think where I was most unwell was mentally. I think
that you carry a tremendous amount of burden and hiding
and self flagellation around. Can I love myself and be

(37:11):
in this body? And then I started to transition and
have a question, which is can I love myself and
want to shift what my body looks like? Is that
betraying somehow that self love? And you have been very
vocal and sharing a lot about your personal weight loss,
and you made a long and very important YouTube video

(37:32):
that you titled My Weight Lost Journey where you really
started to talk about this, and I wanted to play
a short clip for you, a clip that really stood
out for me as an example of the relationship between
our diet, mentality, and dominant stories and how they all
kind of can weave together. I think you expressed it
so well, so I want to go ahead and play
that clip for you. Now. My way was symptomatic of

(37:56):
much deeper issues with my self esteem, feelings of self
earth um like self pomiting beliefs I had about myself,
what I deserved, my capabilities. Everything that you just described
for me speaks to the literal digestion, and I used
that word purposefully. Of all the things you just told

(38:17):
me about, what does that bring up for you? You You know,
it reminds me of this instance when I was in
middle school. This was still like pre Hijab, pre Jordan's.
There was a time where I remember I was we
were in a group project and the seats at our
table were limited, and I was standing the entire time.

(38:39):
A lot of my counterprints were seated, and I felt
like I didn't deserve to literally sit at the table
with them. And then a seat opened up and I
still remained standing. I chose not to take that seat
and thinking about that it makes me think. You know,
the days where as I got older, where I would

(39:01):
be going out to eat with my girlfriends and one
of my girls has to be like super picky with
her eating, like please make sure there's no dairy, there's
no this, there's no that, I need this on the
side whatever. And then I would think to myself, Wow,
that sounds really good, that sounds really healthy, Like I
want to order that too, but then stopping myself because
I didn't feel like I was as good as her
and I didn't want to create a fuss. I didn't

(39:21):
deserve that extra attention on something I was putting into
my trash body that was unworthy of something good. Going
into it. The only reason why I lost weight, Exactly
as I said in that clip, the weight was symptomatic
of something much greater. It was once that switch clicked
inside of my head where I started telling myself you
were worthy of the best, Your body is worth the best,

(39:44):
you deserve the best, and starting to really condition myself
to not hold myself back, to not remain standing. When
I had the opportunity to take that seat, that was
the turning point for me. It was going on the
inside that changed every thing on the outside for me
for the first time in my whole life. Oh yeah,
I couldn't agree with you more. I think if you

(40:06):
know anybody out there who has chronically dealt with their weight,
has yo yo dieted, has been a part of our
diet industrial complex, you know there is a moment. I
often refrain from speaking about this because I don't want
it to sound too simplified, but I do think there
is a click that happens when somebody who has carried

(40:28):
weight on their body begins to release weight in a
way that feels measured and balanced and is an alignment
with a shift in the mindset and a challenging and
a changing of those dominant stories. The click that happens
is you just talked about that integration of shifting around
your worth and recognizing that you don't have to punish

(40:51):
your body, that you can work with your body. I mean,
I remember being a kid being like, well, I'm not
going to fall in love until I look a certain way.
I'm not going to experience success until I look a
certain way. And then you know, life has other plans.
I fell in love with my husband and my life
partner at a heavier body in my life. I experienced
success all the way through being various shaped and sized

(41:13):
bodies in my life. And I think sometimes when you
get a chance to recognize that these things that the
world has told you is only yours when you assimilate
or when you look like the ideal beauty standard, when
you begin to challenge that and really take care of
yourself a little differently, as I started to do, then
it kind of clicks, and the momentum is very interesting.

(41:34):
Isn't it a money? When the weight starts to come off?
Shonda Rhimes and I had this part of our conversation
where she also talked about the way the world reacts
differently to you, but how she started reacting differently to herself.
And I feel the same way, And I'm curious if
this is all making sense for you and how it
started to feel for you when the weight started to
be removed from your frame. It's happy for me to

(41:58):
talk about and I also use those words very deliberately.
One of the reasons why I also hesitate to talk
about these things is because I don't want it to
seem like, all right, if you're fat, it's because you
don't think that you're worth being skinny, because that's not
what it is at all. It really was a lifetime
of conditioning that I didn't deserve better the decisions that

(42:21):
I was making for myself. That we're adjacent to the
way I viewed my self worth that I found myself
in the situation that I was or the condition that
I was in. And I want to take that a
step further to say it also is super tied into
what our definitions of feminity are, right, you know, it's

(42:42):
this idea that in order to be feminine, you have
to be smaller, you have to take up less space
and quieter and be quieter, right, And that was actually
one of the first social media posts that I made
on mine once I was dropping a ton of way
and people were noticing that. I remember describing it as

(43:03):
feeling like decline a lioness, making her take up less space.
You know, now you're acceptable. Now we're gonna treat you,
you know, like like a feminine woman or a feminine
body because you're not so much in the way. And
that was something that I always was made to feel,
you know, like I said, being in that in that
kindergarten classroom with my other like white girl classmates or

(43:26):
a blonde, blue eyed and you know, just so petite
compared to me in my body shape. And then obviously
that then ties back into the sociopolitical aspect that we
were talking about, right, the racism of how we define
the way people look, what they're worth, is what their
places in our society when you look at it through

(43:47):
the definition of femininity, you can't do that without talking
about the close proximity to whiteness and with the way
that society treats us. You know, obviously as a thinner
Muslim woman, now I noticed that the world around me
sort of changing the way that it treated me. I
started to be treated as less of a threat, as
more accepted because of that. Let me ask you, did

(44:10):
you also wrestle with checking in with yourself about is
my pursuit of this body transformation? Is this conforming to
eurocentric beauty standards? Am I being super indoctrinated into like
this U S and Western focus view of beauty? Did
you wrestle with that and did you have those conversations
with your followers during that time? Yeah? Absolutely, I think

(44:31):
that was an ongoing fieme even within the Muslim community.
You know, there are a lot of expectations and a
lot of standards that I, in a larger body, felt
like I couldn't live up to. You know, Like one
thing that I spoke about quite frequently as a plus
sized girl not being able to find clothing big enough

(44:52):
to be loose fitting or modest on me. It was like,
because I was curvy, it was just innately sexualizing any
think that I put on my body anyway? And so
what did that mean for my hitge off? How can
I navigate being a build Muslim woman with the body
that I existed. It's been very troubling for me. It's
actually still a conversation that I'm navigating as we speak.

(45:15):
You know, Like suddenly because I could fit into different
sizes of clothing, I suddenly had access to different trends.
My style than was evolving and shifting. You know. Is
that because I was finally free to express myself the
way that I always wanted to, Or is that because
I was still sweeping into this conformity of like, all

(45:37):
right now you're smaller, all right now, this is what
you have to dress, This is the way you have
to present your body. It's still a conversation that I'm
figuring out right now. You know, I'm still in my twenties,
and this is something that I am trying to figure
out for the woman that I'm becoming, and for all
of the younger girls that follow me and that look
up to the journey that I've been sharing with them
and that my peers that Muslim girl have been on

(45:57):
as well. It does feel like a response ability to
be very conscientious of those things and not fall into
the trough, so to speak. I share that in so
many ways because I think as a public figure and
somebody who's been working in the body image and beauty
space for well over twenty five years, obviously, like you
can see my physical transformation publicly, I have images on

(46:19):
social media that you can go back and look in
timelines and know that I've lived in different bodies. I
shared some of this publicly in two thousand eleven, when
I started to go on this journey. I wrote a
story for Glamour magazine that, at the time, publicly and
in my world of body positivity and body image expertise,
was actually not taken very well. I think people had

(46:41):
a strong reaction to me as a woman living in
a fat body who talked about wanting to lose weight
off of my body and still loving my body, but
deepening how I love it and what that means to me.
There wasn't a conversation around that then, there wasn't a community,
there wasn't vernacular for us to use. It was super polarizing.
I was very isolated in that conversation. And that's why

(47:03):
in this conversation, I wanted us to have nuanced intersectionality
with religion and race and all of these areas, because
it is all of these things. In fact, the body
positive movement, which has now been co opted by white
mainstream media everywhere, was actually started in the sixties by black,
fat female activists as an exemplification of intersectional struggle, fighting

(47:27):
for the right to take up safe space and black
and fat bodies. And now it's become a very you know,
marketing term for us to talk about body love, and
there is so much more to it. So if I
have one wish going forward is that we really all
choose to deepen the conversation around this. But you know, look,

(47:47):
social media doesn't often allow for nuanced conversations, as you
well know, and I'm curious the money because you have
cultivated an incredible online audience, a global audience that is
is watching you and following you and challenging you and
supporting you as you go out in the world, whether
you're running for office or working to change culture within

(48:10):
brands and media. I want to talk a little bit
about the dynamic of nuance being lost in this conversation
around body and beauty, and how do you personally choose
to challenge that. The first thing that I was thinking
about when you said that was Sarah Bartman, whose big, black,
beautiful body was put on display like a freaking science experiment,

(48:34):
as has been the unfortunately, you know the experience of
many colonized bodies, especially black bodies, brown bodies that look
different than the white standard of how a body, especially
a woman's body should look, and how anything outside of
that ideal is alien to us and it's treated as such.

(48:57):
I insist on talking about it because, especially today with
our hyper sexualized society and also hyper superficial society, where
I have gotten the accusation many times that I've had
plastic surgery or lifeloception to look the way that I do,
which obviously there's nothing inherently wrong with any of those procedures,

(49:20):
but this has been at one percent, you know, natural
journey for me, a health journey for me, because it's
one that I insist started on the inside for me first,
and it's not about living up to an outer ideal
that society tries to impose on us. It really is

(49:40):
about turning inward and building up that self esteem from
the inside out. You know, part of the reason why
I was not only open to, but eager to have
this conversation with you on this podcast is because I
do think there needs to be more of a space
for us to talk about that nuance, especially for the
girls of color that are watching and listening then to
know that they deserve to know that. And it's not

(50:02):
an easy journey. It hasn't been one for neither myself
nor for you. It sounds like just I mean, for
a lot of us. You know that relationship with our
bodies does have a direct correlation with what we think
we're worth, what we think we deserve, and obviously we
know that that disproportionately impact girls of color more than
anybody that feeling that society really tries to instill in

(50:25):
us for what we deserve and what we're allowed to
ask for, what we're allowed to live up to, and
it's only by being transparent about those experiences that I
think we can really transform that so that hopefully the
next generation of girls growing up have I want to say,
an easier time managing it. To be honest, like as
sad as it is to say, I don't know if

(50:46):
it's gonna get easier with the way that things are
going with social media, but at least the way that
we are thinking about and talking about these issues I
think is really changing. I do too, and I think
you know, look, we will use social medi media to
have this nuanced conversation. I think because it's such a
visual medium. We're so drawn to extremes, right, and we
tend to really love before and after photos. We love

(51:09):
everything that sort of is an extreme binary difference that
we can see and look, there are some scientific reasons
our minds love to group in categories like that, and
we like to be able to point out those extreme measures.
But what I'm hoping people get from this conversation is
the nuance, the intersectionality, the journey, the imperfect journey of
how anybody gets there, and the reality is you could

(51:32):
look at it before and after of me and know
nothing about what my journey was like, nothing just by
looking on the outside of a person um. This has
been my big question that I've been wrestling with the
money in my life and in my own reconciliation with
shifting body shape. And and I want to pose this
to you. Do you think that you can love your

(51:54):
body and still want to change it? I think that
you absolutely can love your body and still want to
change it, you know. I think that's the issue is
when we think about changing our bodies, we always think
about the superficial aspect of it. But for me also
a huge part of my health journey has been the

(52:14):
realization of gratitude that my body has protected me my
whole life. My body has served me my whole life.
My body is functioning, It has blessings and privileges that
many people don't get to enjoy in our lives, and
those things are so much more precious and more valuable
than this fluctuating scale that society tries to tell us

(52:37):
about what our bodies are worth based on what they
look like. For me, that wanting to change my body
has come from wanting to change it from the inside out,
wanting it to be the strongest it can be side note,
and large part of that it's been because of the
adversity that I've had to face, you know, especially during
the Trump years. I was like, Oh my God, I

(53:00):
don't know, God forbid when the moment will come where
I will be the on the receiving end of a
hate crime. I need my body to be strong in
order to protect myself it comes. And wanting to be
able to take care of our families. My parents are
getting older now, you know, wanting to be able to
provide for them to the best of my ability. Wanting
to be my healthiest self for my future children one day.

(53:24):
There's like so much more that goes into our relationship
with our bodies. I wanted to have this conversation with
you one because I know you, I love you. I
value the complexity of how you go there with me
on these topics and help unpack them for public education
and public understanding. I guess the last question that I have,
and it's something that endlessly fascinates me, and the answers is, Amani,

(53:47):
what part of your body could tell the story of
your life? My hands? Because I think that the way
that my body has responded to that trauma and to
these journeys has been to create and to build, to write.

(54:07):
So I think that my hands are probably, you know,
the best expressions of of what that experience has been like. Mhm.
I love it because I think about your hands being
the release of all this energy and experience and creativity
out in the world. I am endlessly grateful for this conversation.
I love you, I respect you, and I'm very grateful

(54:29):
for our time together today. Thank you so much for us,
and truly thank you for creating the space for us
to have conversations like this and to make me feel
so safe and even diving deep into these nuances in
a way that I haven't even given myself the time
or the space to do for myself. So really, thank
you for what you're doing. Got it. I feel so

(54:54):
grateful to have these conversations, and I feel even more
excited when I know that we're getting ready to release
them out in the world to you, and that they'll
be here in perpetuity for you to come back and
listen to whenever you need it. I knew a Money
was going to leave me with a lot to think about,
and she sure did. I think the big things that
are coming up for me is I'm so glad we
tackled the idea of intersectionality. Like you heard in a

(55:18):
Money story, you cannot separate out her experience as a
Muslim woman and her relationship to wait body image and identity,
all of the things that she had to carry and
experience in her life, the bullying, the racism, the Islamophobia.
I said this, and I mean it. Our bodies carry
with us the weight of what we've experienced, and her

(55:40):
experience has this incredible intersectionality of all of these moments
that make up what she thinks about herself and those
dominant stories. And I'm so glad we had a chance
to really unpack some of that together, because I hope
that we remember everybody's journey is unique. We don't all
share this journey in this area. And I really appreciated

(56:02):
that when a Money started talking about the weight loss
that she's been experiencing, and that it ultimately wasn't about
living up to society standards that were imposed on her,
especially sort of white, eurocentric beauty standards, but specifically was
a result of starting the journey from the inside out

(56:23):
and listen. I know sometimes that can sound trite and
so easy, but I'm also hoping that from the conversation
you realize there's been nothing easy about it in her life.
And again, having the respect and the compassion to hear
other people's journeys in this relationship is so nuanced and
important in answering that question that I asked in the beginning,
which is can you love your body and still want

(56:46):
to change it? And there is a lot of conversation
around health and weight, and I continue to think we
maintain a conflation between two ideas that our weight equals
our health. Somehow it's just category, really, isn't true. Health
is so many things beyond weight. You cannot tell the
health of somebody by looking at them on the outside.

(57:07):
Health is mental health and well being. There are so
many functions of health that go well beyond body shape
and size, and I think that's really important to consider
and remember, especially in a world where we have a
lot of visual imagery with social media that can compare
body shapes and sizes, or we still in our media

(57:27):
tend to push out unrealistic beauty standards, especially for girls
and young girls. So if as you're listening today, any
of this really spoke to you, and you're looking for
some more tools and resources to have this conversation with
a young person in your life. I would love to
guide you to a resource that I'm really proud of
that I helped to create. It is a conversation starter

(57:50):
to talk about body confidence with young people in your life.
You can go to Dove dot com backslash the Selfie Talk.
It will give you the tools that you need to
do some critical thinking about media and body image and
self esteem. And without a doubt, these are the conversations
we need to start having. If you're interested in learning

(58:10):
more about dominant stories and how to change them and
challenge them, I teach workshops and courses on this, and
you can sign up at Jess Weiner dot com or
you can follow me at I'm Jess Weiner on Instagram.
And as always, I love to hear from you, and
I love to hear about how you are looking at
and thinking about your dominant stories. So if you want to,
you can write me an email at podcast at dominant

(58:31):
stories dot com, or you can leave me a voicemail
at two on three f nine three oh three three.
Don't you worry if you didn't catch that info. I'll
make sure to put him in the show notes. Next week,
we are chatting with the incredible Stacy London. She was
the co host of the iconic show What Not To Wear,

(58:52):
and now she's in a new role as CEO of
State of Menopause, and we are tackling aging and how
to remove the shane that surrounds us at this stage
of our lives. Thank you so so much for tuning in.
Don't forget to write a review wherever you're listening. It
helps us out so much. And remember always learning, always growing.

(59:27):
Dominant Stories with Jess Winer is a production of Shonda
land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.