Episode 23 with Ragen Chastain
Weight Loss Companies Are 100% Lying To You
- with Ragen Chastain
Show Notes
We’re going full tinfoil hat in this two-part conversation with the brilliant Ragen Chastain (she/her).
In this first episode, Ragen shares the details of how Weight Watchers, Noom, and other companies that promise weight loss manipulate their ‘research’, accept conflict-of-interest funding from pharmaceutical companies, and unethically advise consumers on ‘health.’ This episode will make you furious and much more critical of ‘health’ information.
Ragen Chastain is a speaker, writer, researcher, Board Certified Patient Advocate, multi-certified health and fitness professional, and thought leader in weight science, weight stigma, health, and healthcare. Utilizing her background in research methods and statistics, Ragen has brought her signature mix of humor and hard facts to healthcare, corporate, conference, and college audiences from Kaiser Permanente and the Diabetes Education Specialists National Conference, to Amazon and Google, to Dartmouth, Cal Tech and canfitpro. Author of the Weight and Healthcare newsletter, the book Fat: The Owner's Manual, co-author of HAES Health Sheets, and editor of the anthology The Politics of Size, Ragen is frequently featured as an expert in print, radio, television, and documentary film. In her free time, Ragen is a national dance champion, triathlete, and marathoner who holds the Guinness World Record for Heaviest Woman to Complete a Marathon, and co-founded the Fit Fatties Facebook group which has over 11,000 members. Ragen lives in LA with her fiancée Julianne and their adorable dog.
We mention Sabrina Strings’ book, Fearing the Black Body: the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, and Da’Shaun Harrison’s book, Belly of the Beast: the Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness.
Connect with Ragen here:
Newsletter: www.WeightandHealthcare.com
Website: www.SizedForSuccess.com
Health Sheets: https://haeshealthsheets.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ragenchastain/
This episode’s poem is Remember by Joy Harjo.
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