Today Virginia is chatting with Brianna Campos. 

Bri is a licensed professional counselor and body image coach who works with folks recovering from eating disorders, and finding body acceptance through grief. You may know Bri from Instagram, or from her newsletter, Body Image with Bri.

Bri and I talk about why this concept of body grief is so important—and yet so often overlooked in this work. And she shares how doing her own body grief work has led her to have a happier relationship with her body and to start dating again—confidently and with a lot of joy as a superfat person. 

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CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Follow Virginia on Instagram, Follow Corinne  @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and subscribe to Big Undies.

Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. 

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!

I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is Brianna Campos.

Bri is a licensed professional counselor and body image coach who works with folks recovering from eating disorders, and finding body acceptance through grief. You may know Bri from Instagram, or from her newsletter, Body Image with Bri.

Bri and I talk about why this concept of body grief is so important—and yet so often overlooked in this work. And she shares how doing her own body grief work has led her to have a happier relationship with her body and to start dating again—confidently and with a lot of joy as a superfat person.

Bri is such a delight, and I learned so much from talking with her. You are going to love this episode!

If you find today’s episode valuable, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!

Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)

This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast! You’ll find all of the links aggregated here.

Episode 182 Transcript

Bri

My name is Bri. I am on Instagram as Body Image with Bri. I am a trained mental health counselor in the state of New Jersey, and I transitioned to body image coaching and education somewhere around 2018 or 2019. The way I work with folks in helping to make peace with your here and now body is through this concept of body grief.

Virginia

I think the whole idea of “body grief” is something that gets left out of a lot of the conversations around bodies, and fat liberation. So tell us how you use this phrase and why you think it’s so important to make space for this grief work?

Bri

I was working in eating disorder recovery. And it’s funny, because I was with clients, and thinking, “Huh, do I have an eating disorder? No, I can’t have an eating disorder, I’m fat!” And not using fat in a reclaimed way.

I started to notice, wow, what’s being prescribed as a person in a fat body is being diagnosed in a thin body as an eating disorder. That’s a quote from Deb Burgard, an eating disorder therapist and one of the founders of Health At Every Size. The dissonance for me was huge. Like, wow, so the only difference is because I exist in this body.

So when I’m telling these girls—I worked in a facility that was only girls— “we just have to accept your body,” and they had a hard time with it, and they lived in socially acceptable bodies, it dawned on me how much harder it’s going to be for me to accept my own body. I felt like that was the piece of the conversation that was getting left out. Acceptance doesn’t actually mean that you have to like it or love it. If you look at the stages of grief according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, acceptance is sort of the outcome. It’s not a destination.

But first we have this place of denial and bargaining—I see a lot of people who get stuck in this bargaining phase. Between the bargaining of “maybe I can still fix this” and “this is my body.” It’s “I don’t love that this is my body” and “this is where I’m at.” Most of us don’t want to enter that.

The working definition I have for body grief is: The distress associated with the perceived loss around body change.

The reason I make it such an expansive definition is because that works for people going through puberty. That works for people going through perimenopause and menopause, people who are aging. It works in alignment with gender dysphoria. It’s a change in one’s body that’s causing you distress because of what you will lose, or perceive yourself to lose.

Virginia

I’m interested that you say perceived loss, because there are tangible losses sometimes, with body changes. But also, sometimes, not. Or they aren’t the losses we expected.

Bri

Correct. That’s what makes this so tricky. We have systemic anti-fat bias that exists in the world. So as somebody in what I wou