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SPEAKERS
Xand Van Tulleken, Rochelle Burgess, Stephanie Yeboah, Aaron Parkhurst
TRANSCRIPT
Xand Van Tulleken
Hello and welcome to season 2 of public health disrupted with me Xand Van Tulleken…
Rochelle Burgess
and me Rochelle Burgess. Xand is a doctor, writer & TV presenter, and I’m a community health psychologist and Associate Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Health.
Xand Van Tulleken
This podcast is about public health, but more importantly, it’s about the systems that need disrupting to make public health better. Join us each month as we challenge the status quo of the public health field, asking what needs to change, why and how to get there.
Rochelle Burgess
In today's episode, we're delving into body positivity, something I am horrible at. And as always, we'll be examining the intricacies of its relationship and impact on public health. We will be exploring what body positivity actually is maybe helping me get some where it came from and who it serves, as well as the extent to which body positivity could actually help us tackle the obesity crisis. So let me please introduce you to our amazing guests helping us explore this topic today.
We are delighted to welcome Stephanie Yeboah. Stephanie is an award winning content creator and she's a blogger, author, freelance writer and public speaker. A self confessed opinionated, fat babe Stephanie's body image and self love advocacy shines the spotlight not only on body positivity, and where it came from, but also the sliding scale of ways in which different demographics fit into it. Stephanie's advocacy within the body positivity and mental health and self love communities involves sharing her own challenges and traumas involving experiencing fatphobia bullying, self esteem and confidence issues. Further to these experiences and what we're hoping to learn more about today Stephanie also shares with her community the ways in which she's been able to turn these challenges around and encouraging others to do the same. In 2020, Stephanie released her debut nonfiction novel Fattily ever after a Fat Black Girls Guide to living life unapologetically, which became an Amazon bestseller in its first week of publication, indicating just how needed this book is.
Xand Van Tulleken
And we're also joined by Dr. Aaron Parkhurst lecturer at the Department of Anthropology here at UCL. Aaron is a medical anthropologist focusing on the dynamic human body as a nexus of social relations and social movements. His research focuses on the human body in places of medicine, sport, urban environments, outer space, and technological entanglement. And Aaron has developed a new bio social frameworks to understand and combat rates of chronic illness type two diabetes, obesity and heart disease in the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. He brings together these diverse strands in his current research on space medicine, life science, research and the human body aboard the International Space Station.
So Aaron, can we start with you? The phrase obesity crisis is in the news constantly, it has been the subject of literally hundreds of government policies over the last decade and even further back. Can we start here with what is the obesity crisis? Is this even a helpful way of thinking about health in the UK? Can you tell us a bit more about it? How did we get to where we are in the UK at the moment?
Aaron Parkhurst
Sure. I think in the last 15 years, we've seen a skyrocketing of of chronic illness and non communicable disease in this in this country. It's like public health officials to call it the biggest epidemic we've seen in this country in in 80 years, there is a public narrative on the behavioural and this aspect, that we're in the midst of this massive epidemic at the the narrative is that 80% of healthcare budgets go to treat advanced stages of non communicable conditions, the NHS Xand is in financial crisis 100% And that the solution is free. So the focus then is on the behavioural. But there's also a range of long held stereotypes on who is responsible for this behaviour. And for so many people, it's not useful simply to say that you need to focus on behaviour that you need to focus on diet and exercise. The conditions of urban life make this advice, while true, also intolerable. So the work I think that we are doing as anthropologists, medical anthropologists on chronic health is meant to challenge that. As an anthropologist, one of my disciplinary prerogatives, I suppose, is to think through those structures rather that permit and prohibit health seeking behaviours. What other disciplines also might call social determinants of health. And so we looked at quite a long a wide range of factors. When we think of registers of illness, especially non communicable diseases. We might look at the biological. We might look at kinship and genetics, we might look at evolutionary theory the idea that that that A fatness might be actually selected for through evolution, we might look at epigenetic causes more recently with new emerging sciences, we might look at the behavioural of course diet and exercise the ecological food availability and production, we might look at economics, economics, permit and prohibit health. And of course, social paradigms, which is where the anthropologist really comes in, which we can get into a bit. The point is, is that is to show that none of these conditions none of these these factors are worth considering as a standalone, they all they all intersect and complex in myriad ways. So that is the perspective we take to think about what's going on with with obesity in this in, in the UK at the moment.
Xand Van Tulleken
What you're suggesting is we are living in a health crisis that is generated by a crisis of many, many complex aspects of modern life, or at least it doesn't have to be modern life. But but but aspects of the way we live so that people are so constrained that the option to take control of their health in any way they might want to those options are very, very limited for them.
Aaron Parkhurst
I agree. Yes, I worked on a Lancet Commission with on culture and health. And one of the side projects we did off of this Lancet Commission was to do research on on health seeking behaviours and the gaps that we found in health seeking behaviours and various neighbourhoods in London. And so one of the women we spoke to was the Somali woman who, well, it was a it was a general community in South London, which had was labelled as non compliant at high rates of obesity, but also growing rates of type two diabetes. And the clinics had labelled them as non compliant because they had higher rates than other members of that community who were going to the same clinic, maybe less likely to bring themselves or their, or their, or their children into their three month consultations. They cared very, very deeply about their children's health, health. And one scenario, the mother was, you know, she had five children, she, she worked and sweated, you know, get devoted her life and her body to feeding her children. She worked at a local grocery store, and she worked six days a week, one of the other children was cooking most of the dinners. She knew what exactly what she needed to do, in order to, to change her her diet and to provide exercise, but it's not. It just wasn't possible. This story is not unique at all, you know, it's this is what we call about social determinants of health. So, it isn't helpful to tell this will be your being noncompliant. You need to start caring about your body, you need to participate in these health seeking behaviours, when it isn't possible.
Rochelle Burgess
Can I jump in there? because I think there's lot there's something really interesting, I think that's happening here around this notion of power. I just would love to hear stephs thoughts on power, because I think body positivity, I have always thought of it as something that is born out of a rejection of power or the power have other ideas over you. But I don't know if that's right, because as I said in the beginning, my amount of body positivity is probably in the negatives. So I want to hear the expert talk a little bit about it. And yeah, so Steph, what do you what are your thoughts on this this idea?
Stephanie Yeboah
I think it's a really interesting one, because with body positivity in and of itself. I mean, I could there's like a whole section of you know, the fact that now, the current iteration of what body positivity is at the moment is rooted in a lot of power, which is why a lot of the advocates and activists within the body positive community at the moment have kind of rejected the current state of what body positivity is at the moment. But with regards to power and obesity, I think one of these when it comes to the ways in which doctors diagnose and treat, you know, plus sized patients, I do think it's rooted in a lot of economic power. A lot of classism I think is also entrenched in there as well. So things like fruits and vegetables and things like that can be a lot more expensive than for instance, you know, the countless amount of chicken and chip shops that we see on the street where they're selling high calorie foods for 99p two pounds. So, you know, when I was growing up, going to the chicken and chip shop was like an every day kind of thing that everybody did after school, because a lot of working class parents, you know, they'll be working until six 7pm. So kids would have to, we would have to kind of find something for us to eat after after going to school. Whereas, you know, in comparison to perhaps some, either lower middle class, upper middle class families where the kids would, you know, come home from school would have a full meal and things like that. So I do think sort of taking into a class thing that's taken into account things like class and accessibility, when it comes to the types of foods that we're able to get is definitely a big factor when it comes to power. I think another thing as well, and, and it's an interesting one, because I feel like every few years, this subject that I'm about to speak about comes up, and people agree and then that, you know, there's this discourse on it, and then it kind of just floats away into the background after a while. And that is BMI.
BMI is not an accurate form of diagnosing or, or, you know, signalling whether somebody is obese or not, because it doesn't take into account muscle mass race. It doesn't take into account so many different aspects of a person's being because the whole idea of BMI was based on European white men, it was not, they did not sort of do any tests on people who are you know, women, people from different ethnicities, it doesn't take into account muscle, it doesn't take into account, body fat content, bone density, body composition, and all of these kinds of things. And so when people are diagnosed as being obese, when they may technically not be, I do think that is something to explore. And I do think that there is, or there should be ways that we can sort of gauge these things using measurements that aren't or weren't created by, you know, I think the person that created BMI wasn't, you know, he was a mathematician or a statistician or something like that. And so I just, I think it's such a, it can be quite a damaging way to kind of tarnish people who may already feel a bit insecure about their bodies to say, Oh, you are, you know, obese.
Rochelle Burgess
You know, I'm so happy that you brought that up. It very interestingly that time epic narrative is what sort of brought us towards this episode isn’t it Xand,. So I was an obese pregnancy, I'm five foot three, and to have a but, but anyway, the midwife when she weighed me, she couldn't believe it, my weight. So she took me to three different scales to weigh me. Because she was like this must be wrong, this must be wrong, right. And I just was like by this point now I'm much older, like I was also almost a geriatric pregnancy so you know all these fun labels going around. So by that point I sort of created enough sort of like narrative and self esteem about this, that I was sort of anticipating this sort of, like weird dynamic that we were going to have, when she put me on the scale. I was just thinking about, like other women who would go through this and not have that sort of understanding also about the uselessness in my opinion of that particular metric. And so to sort of just be able to, like, leave that to the side and stuff. But it was just shocking. You know, like, it's just, I think it's a very unhelpful metric. Like, we must be able to do better than that.
Xand Van Tulleken
I find this conversation so fascinating, because of the four of us, I'm the one that was brainwashed into the process of going but BMI is science, that an obese Pregnancy is a is a phrase that would be appropriate to describe anybody. So in thinking about this episode, one of the things that I think we're so interested in, is how you resist those very, very common basic ideas that are grounded in it in a very particular sort of medical way of thinking. So there is, and Steph, I'd love to start with you. I think a lot of healthcare professionals who are trained like me with the kind of you know, but these are the numbers, these are the facts. Even if BMI was a really good measure that sort of didn't have the flaws you described, it's a very particular way of thinking about a human. You know, if you're working in a mining town where they were having to use toxic chemicals, and you put up signs saying, you know, the chemicals in this mind kill, it's like, well, that wouldn't be good for anyone's health. They're just stuck in the environment with all the chemicals in the same way sticking up that poster saying obesity kills, you just go well, hang on. This is an unavoidable consequence of the huge numbers of sort of lack of freedom and constraints that are imposed on people. So I'm, I'm really interested Steph, Can you just talk about how you resist that? Like, what does body positivity look like in the real world? How do you practice it? How does someone like me, go into the world and look at things differently? Talk about things differently? Right? differently? I don't know if this is too big of a menu to have, can you change my life? But can you talk a little bit about the movement and how it resists those simple discourses?
Stephanie Yeboah
Yeah definitely. So the whole thing was, I think with obesity, I think it's a lot more nuanced than people seem to think it is. I think people who, who have not lived in a plus sized body can sometimes have a view of it as Oh, it's just this person's fault. They are the reason that they look like that it's their fault. And that is where a lot of the shaming and the fatphobia comes from. Because there was this assumption that this person chose to look like this they have a lack of control, they have a lack of discipline, therefore we have every right to shame and to call people names and to you know, say all of these things and even the word obesity like for me it's such a heavy word that is rooted in so much shame in a way that other medical names for body types aren't so even calling you know, somebody's skinny or something like that. Policing fat bodies is so normalised in our society, people don't seem to realise the effect that it can have on somebody who was being hit with those words. And I think the huge overarching thing that that we seem to kind of miss out I think within the medical industry, when it comes to obesity fatness is mental health, so everybody is speaking about, you have to move more, you have to eat less, and all of these things, but nobody really speaks about the mental health implications. And why somebody might get to the size that they are, a lot of the time is due to bullying, a lot of the time it's due to depression, anxiety, emotional eating. I would get bullied for being bigger than I would eat more, because I just didn't really know how to process all of the depressed feelings and stuff. And I would get even bigger, and I would get bullied for being even bigger. I think we really need to start incorporating mental health and how changing the framework of how people see bigger bodies. And by bigger bodies. I mean, like I even mean like somebody that's a size 14 or a 16 or whatever the case may be like it's it's, it's about changing how society views bodies that are not slim. And it's about speaking to somebody with kindness, and taking away the shame not making that person feel as if they are unworthy. And that was what the body positivity community was supposed to be about. So we're currently in our I want to say second or third wave of the body positivity movement. It was a movement that was predominantly spearheaded by black larger plus size women in both the states and in the UK. And it was a platform where women would upload photos, videos of them, like wearing really cool clothes, think pieces, but mostly images of women just learning how to love themselves in a world that constantly tells them that they're not good enough. So for the movement, it starts with self esteem, confidence and mental health. These are the three factors that I do feel are missing when it comes to, you know, trying to make somebody feel as if their bodies are worthy. So a lot of people tend to say that the body positivity movement is trying to promote obesity and things like that, which has never been the case it's promoting feeling happy and feeling confident in your skin and to take away that element of shame. Because fat phobia fat policing, fat shaming is so ingrained and normalised in our community, in westernised community by way of the media by way of how that people are portrayed in the news. It's a very dangerous form of prejudice, in my opinion. And so for the movement, it's all about radically and unapologetically trying to live your best life and trying to increase your confidence and just trying to normalise bodies that may not be a size six or a size eight and to say just because you are obese or just because you are fat, it doesn't mean that you have to hate yourself. It doesn't mean that you are unworthy of love. And so the movement is not to say put on weight, put on weight, you know, you'll look better, you'll look better, if you're a bigger, it's to say, if you are big, if you do have this body type, please don't hate yourself, like, try and increase your self esteem to try and increase your confidence and just know that you are an amazing, beautiful person. And that's basically that in a nutshell, that's kind of what the movement is supposed to be about.
Xand Van Tulleken
That's a very beautiful description of the movement, which I think I think it's a, it's difficult to describe sort of multiple waves of a complex social movement. The thing that's so striking in what you're saying is, like a lot of important social progress. The ask is so small, it's like, Could we just treat people with some dignity and respect? And could we not have prejudice and unkindness and these things? It's like, you're not you're not asking for anything too complicated. And it's kind of horrifying that you're having to articulate it in that way. But um, you describe that really, really well.
Rochelle Burgess
Anthropologists are trying to study sort of like what makes us sort of people and how we relate to each other in our social worlds. And I just, I just wondered if Aaron wanted to come in on that before we moved on to the next thing, because I dip my toe into anthropology and ethnography every now and then. And my feeling is, even though it seems like such a simple ask, it is like the actually the hardest ask, you know, like, the changing of the social norms and our patterns of engagement with each other is incredibly complex. So you know, Aaron, what, what are your thoughts on our ability to respond to
Aaron Parkhurst
I think there are structures in society that inform the way we, we approach the concept of health. And I think body positivity listening to Steph is is a useful tool to start to question these, these, these structures. You know, you spoke about bullying and mental health when we were doing our obesity studies trying to, to rethink the profiles of who we're actually speaking about, when we talk about obesity, these were some of the factors that we looked at. But more generally, sort of conditions of uncertainty that actually transformed the body in certain ways. It was economic mobility, that seemed to really inform rates of non communicable diseases. So, body positivity might be a really useful tool to say, you know, if we can talk about obesity, but the focus doesn't have to be on my body, the focus doesn't have to be a BMI, it doesn't have to be a number that says my body is pathological, that it's making society sick. Rather, body positivity might be a good tool to say there are structures in society that are making us that are making us sick. And we can reclaim our bodies back and really focus on some of these larger structures. And it doesn't have to be just in the clinic, it can be I mean, I've read Stephanie's work, you know, I've read some of your articles, when you're talking about gym memberships, and exercise classes. I do the same thing you see in the clinic, you see sort of neoliberal structures in the gym, more or less the general message, and same same message in different words of no pain, no gain type of thing. You know, and, and that's, that's not helpful, the walk in crawl out type of type of message that you have to be productive, that our bodies are the sites of success. And that is measured through through through BMI or other metrics. That the built environment of places where people should be seeking health and are seeking health are sort of counterintuitive to that.
Xand Van Tulleken
I'm curious, Steph, how do you resist becoming a very negative movement, everything you've said is is positive is kind is generous, is inspiring. And you're not focused on you know, these corporations, these politicians, you know, these people are killing us. And this is, you know, you know, people's bodies are not just not just a weight, but all aspects of our health are almost entirely manifestations, the environment we live in, rather than the choices that, you know, we don't really have freedom of choice at all, very, very few people have that. So how do you resist becoming an angry movement? And is it even appropriate to become an angry movement? And what what moment should you be demanding? Change? Should you be insisting upon identifying the really the sort of the bad guys, the bad actors, the real sources of harm?
Stephanie Yeboah
So it's interesting that you asked that question because the current wave of the body positive movement, some could actually say that it is quite problematic, though, as much as I talk a lot about body positivity. And as much as it was a movement in the beginning, that was really a movement for larger fat people to feel it was a safe space for larger fat people to come into these communities, make friends, share each other's stories, share things like you know where you can buy these plus size clothes or where you can buy you know, wide fit shoes, all of these things that we don't have as much access to that is how the movement started. However, in around 2014, slash 2015, we started to see the body positive movement pick up prominence in the mainstream. So a movement that once was really out Only quite underground, it was on things like Tumblr, it was like Facebook groups, and then it moved on to Instagram, once Instagram began to pick up popularity, sort of 2014 15. And through the use of influencers and models and things like that, so plus size influences, what we started to see was a shift in the ways in which body positivity was being promoted. So, in the beginning, it was for bodies that didn't carry as much social privilege as everyone else. So a lot of disabled bodies, a lot of plus sized bodies, who were, you know, people who are probably 1819 2020 ones don't 22, you know, on the larger scale of being plus size. And as soon as we get to this, this forefront where the news and the media started reporting on all this, this new movement, where people are, you know, teaching others to love themselves, there was a very quick radical shift in the types of bodies that started to become promoted. And we saw this happen quite radically within fashion, first and foremost. So we had a lot of fashion brands, hop on the body positive train, they started to create plus size clothing in their mainstream brands. However, the models that they used the spokesmodels, the activists and the advocates for the plus size, community started getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller, more hourglass shaped, mid size bodies. So the more prominence the body positivity community picked up, the smaller the people in that community, okay, with regards to visibility, so you stopped seeing influences and models and things who were like a size 22, size 24, size 26. And you started seeing women who were chubby, at best, so hourglass shaped, and in our, in our community, we call them acceptable fat, or like, you know, the kind of fat where it's like, they're not really going to get harassed, or they're not going to get, you know, they still reap a lot of the benefits of being on the smaller side of fat. So, you know, you're sort of hourglass shaped, still sexually attractive to the public type bodies, and the bodies that weren't seen as attractive enough, we're kind of marginalised. And yeah, we just became completely invisible. And so it developed a bit of a schism within the body positive community with a lot of people on the higher end of being fat, now developing a kind of subset community, which was the radical fat acceptance movement. And so that is where I kind of more aligned with now. And that it moves, that movement is a lot more, as it says in the word radical. So we're very much trying to, you know, push the scope of what we feel we deserve from society. Fat people doing things that smaller people can do is now seen as a radical act, because people expect us to shy away or to be insecure, or to not want to show up or to be you know, to be quite quiet. And within the fat acceptance communities and somebody positive aspects. Our way of being radical, our way of being noncompliant, so to speak, is to show up and be even bolder to take up space to be louder. And to say, we deserve to do all of the normal things that everybody else in normal bodies can do and not be made to feel bad for doing that.
Xand Van Tulleken
Do either of you believe the body positivity movement could be used to help tackle the obesity crisis? After listening to both of you, it feels like that question is almost inappropriate, like the obesity crisis is still framing it in terms of this idea that the problem is people living with obesity or living with overweight. And really what is going on in this country is a massive health crisis, due to people being unable to make choices about the way they live, because of the hours that compelled to work because of inequality and extreme poverty, because of you know, currently, you know, energy inflation, all those things. Plus, like the legacies of racism of other discrimination, all sorts of intersectionalities that make many people's lives even more difficult. And so the idea of like, the obesity crisis, like why can't we make people thinner, it feels to me having listened to you, and inappropriate question now. But I do wonder if the body positivity movement might be able to address the wider health crisis, or maybe maybe even a crisis of sort of lack of freedom or lack of opportunity? Is that how you see it?
Stephanie Yeboah
One of the main things, I guess, that we try and do within the movement is to say, because autonomy is such an important thing within the movement, we don't want to tell people, you shouldn't lose weight, you should just be happy the way you are. That is one aspect of it. But we also try and promote if you do want to lose weight, that is absolutely fine. It's a judgement free zone, you shouldn't everybody is allowed body autonomy, but if you are going to lose weight and if you are doing something for your health, which is which is completely important. Please please please do not do it from a place of self hate. Because the way in which you will lose weight or the the, the way in which you will lose weight will not be the same as if you are trying to lose weight from a place of love. And again, I use myself as an example when I was younger I had I had really terrible eating disorder. It wasn't seen as an eating disorder because I was fat and eating disorders often framed around very slim white women. We don't really talk about eating disorders within the frame of plus size people having disorders so you know, it would be me not eating it would be me. Purging or I'm having liquid diets for months and months and months at a time. And when you're doing weight loss from a place of hate, you don't want to wake up every day and see that body. So you try and lose weight in the quickest way possible, you want the results sort of tomorrow. And in order to get those results tomorrow, people will tend to do very unhealthy ways of losing weight. So whether it's fasting or whether it is developing an eating disorder, people just want to wake up the next day and not see the weight. However, if you reframe your thinking, and think to yourself, Okay, I do want to lose weight, but I want to love my body during this process, then you won't care about how long it takes to lose the weight, because you know that you're doing it from a place of care, you know, that stable weight loss, and long lasting weight loss is something that is a lifestyle change, you have to love yourself through that process and treat your body with respect, instead of treating it with contempt. And instead of treating it as something that is despised and needs needs to get rid of. So for me, I think in terms of how we talk about weight loss and healthy eating and things like that, the way that you feel towards your body when you're losing weight will impact how you treat your body during that process. Yeah,
Xand Van Tulleken
yeah, that's amazing advice. That's really lovely.
Rochelle Burgess
Aaron, do you want to?
Aaron Parkhurst
Well, I’m not sure how to follow that. I mean, I, linguistic medical anthropologist completely agree, simply the ways in which we talk about our bodies, the metaphors we use to understand our bodies and the world around us shape, radically shaped our health, they shape, the way we approach health. And, of course, the language we use to describe anything. So to go back to Xand’s point about calling it the obesity epidemic is and I agree that obesity becomes a placeholder to think through what is was then framed as comorbidities for obesity. When we speak to health ministers in, in Parliament about event, a apply the aspects of the obesity research that we've we've done, they asked, well, what you know, what can we do to tackle this? You know, you tell them well, you know, adjust your foreign investment policy, and Mayfair, whatever, nobody can afford to live in London, if you can't afford to live where you work, you have to commute if you have to commute the average commutes like an hour and 20 minutes a day in London. Then, if you want to spend any time with your family, what's the first thing to go if you've got to over two hours of commuting every day? Is your own health seeking behaviours. There's no time to go to the gym. It takes 40 minutes to cook a healthy meal but that's actually a lot of time. So we say something silly like change your foreign investment policy in Mayfair, maybe we could all afford to live in London with you got all these empty apartments. Nobody wants to hear that. So from my angry perspective, that's the epidemic is the structures of of new liberalism and society and capitalism that prohibit any form of real health seeking behaviour. I truly believe that the diet and the exercise that will come if people could just walk to work or cycle to work even that would come on there's there's an element to that that would be a bit organic. There's a reason in the last 20 years that that the rates of chronic illness have skyrocketed among demographics that traditionally they hadn't. So I suppose body positivity, listening to the conversation and listening to stress narratives is is one way to take back our bodies and say stop focusing on my body and the way I look for you for public health and pathology. And instead, maybe it can be used as a tool to force people to think through those structures of society that prohibit health seeking behaviours.
Rochelle Burgess
So at the end of every episode, guys, we ask all of our guests to think about a piece of art or music or poetry that has disrupted your thinking it can be beyond health, so anything in your life that that has disrupted your perspective and the way that you see the world. So let's ask Steph first.
Stephanie Yeboah
so for me, it was actually a piece of artwork that I saw when I was in the thick of sort of my self love movement and all my self love Journey should I say and I was, I was incredibly depressed and feeling low and everything and everywhere. And everybody around me was saying that it was wrong for me to exist in the body that I'm I'm in and, you know, was being gaslit a lot, and all of that kind of stuff. And I remember, I came across this piece of artwork by Henri Matisse. And it was just this artwork is like a scribble of like a plus size woman. And underneath it said, my curves are not crazy. And I remember just seeing that just being like, wow, like, it kind of instilled something in me to kind of it really did help change how I felt from that day on in my body, it was a small thing, but it really did kind of it really was the catalyst to kind of be like, wow, like seeing an objective piece of art from this artists that existed, you know, maybe hundreds of years ago, and even then him kind of capturing it as that he may have not even been talking about like, plus size bodies, but it was just I guess, because it was a like a plus size woman drawing and it had that underneath it kind of made me feel like okay, so I'm not I'm not crazy. I'm not, you know, I'm not delusional. I'm not all of these things that people seem to see me as like, I'm not crazy for existing in this body. And it was just such a beautiful piece of artwork for me. And, you know, years later, I ended up like buying a print of the painting and it's now kind of hanging up in my in my living room now. But yeah, that I think that painting for me, it was really one of the ones that really spearheaded a radical overhaul and how I saw my buddy.
Rochelle Burgess
That's fantastic thank you, Aaron, your turn
Aaron Parkhurst
I think the most powerful piece of music that I ever heard was quite literally powerful, physically powerful. I, I teach the anthropology of the body at UCL and I was this was about 10 years ago, I was trying to I was trying to design the module and think of how to teach this concept of phenomenology. This, this fight against Cartesian Dualism mind and body separation and actually, these abstract ways in which body and emotion are intimately linked. And I went to the Royal Albert Hall, and we heard Camille St. John's Organ symphony. And so it sounds a little bit pompous. But the organ at the Royal Albert Hall is extraordinary. I mean, absolutely extraordinary. It's got 1000s of pipes, and it's so huge, that when it opens and air starts passing through, you actually feel you feel the instrument because it changes the air pressure quite radically in the room and it vibrates all of your bones. So you feel it you almost feel the heart palpitation, a good two seconds before you hear the actual sound. And the reason why this is cool is because you know we're trying to have this fight against meaning necessarily for for art in the in phenomenology or, or sort of existential philosophy. And you look around the room and people are listening to this or they're listening to the way the London Symphony Orchestra plays Strauss also Sprouse, or thruster where they use that organ in this big booming note at the end of this famous opening bars, and people start crying. And you talk to them afterwards. And they don't know why it's not that reminded them of their childhood or had some sort of deep narrative or meaning for them. It's literally that visceral experience of the organ that that produces this emotion so it's a really great way to teach sometimes abstract ideas of, of an effect and the abstract linkages between body and emotion.
Rochelle Burgess
Well, thank you so much, guys. That was an amazing conversation. I, I loved every second of it
Xand Van Tulleken
Thank you both so much. Just so you just did this through beautifully. Thank you.
Rochelle Burgess
You've been listening to Public Health Disrupted. This episode was presented by me Rochelle Burgess and Xand Van Tulleken, produced by UCL Health of the Public and edited by Annabelle Buckland at Decibelle Creative. Our thanks again to today's amazing guests Stephanie Ebola, and Dr. Aaron Parkhurst.
Xand Van Tulleken
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