Summer Series: Pro-Ageing, Befriending our Bodies and Body Liberation with Deb Benfield

Deb Benfield has helped hundreds of women heal their relationship with food, eating, and their bodies in her 35-year career as a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist specialising in preventing and treating disordered eating.

She bring her wisdom, passion, and lived experience to the intersection of pro-aging and body liberation, and her work is rooted in helping her clients shift their body relationship from their life’s project to their life’s partner, recognise internalised ageism and end it, and untangle from the diet/wellness culture mess.

Deb sees Midlife as a time of Emergence, so I knew she was my kind of people before we met for this interview. In this deep conversation, we cover:

• The hierarchy of bodies, and the system of oppression any “other’d” bodies live in (including anyone who is NOT slim, white, young and beautiful) and the damage this does to our relationship with our bodies as we age
• Deb’d beautiful description of what body liberation feels like to her, and the sense of freedom and expansiveness this has opened for her in midlife
• How to befriend out bodies and truly listen to their needs, needs which naturally change during transition points in life
• The incidence of eating disorder remission in perimenopausal women when normal and natural body changes trigger a need to try to control as a result of feeling more vulnerable and less safe
• The sea of ageism we are living in, the internal ageism inherent in the stories we have about what growing old means and a completely different way of framing age and ageing.
• Fascinating research on our attitude to aging and how this impacts our actual experience of ageing

Find Deb and the work she does in the world here 

Also mentioned in this episode:

Sonya Renee Taylor’s work and her book Your Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love 

Jane Fonda’s interview on Wiser than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss 

Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Ageing Determine How Long and Well You Live by Becca Levy 

Ageism Unmasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It by Tracey Gendron  

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