Inherited Body Shame, Disordered Eating, and Learning to Stop Fighting a Body You Were Always Going to Have with Kate Zigrang

Kate Zigrang is an advocate, entrepreneur, impact investor, and the founder of Viva Voce — a size-inclusive fashion marketplace and community rooted in body justice. But before we get to what she's built, we go back to where it all started.

In this first part of a two-episode conversation, Kate takes us through her personal history with her body — from watching her mom navigate the world in a larger body and absorbing the shame that surrounded her, to puberty changing her own body in ways she wasn't prepared for, to a disordered relationship with food that developed in her late teens and went unnamed for years. We also get into her OCD diagnosis at 31 — more than a decade after onset — and what it meant to finally have language for what her brain had been doing all along.

This is a conversation about the things diet culture teaches us before we're old enough to question them, and what it actually takes to unlearn them.

We talk about:

*Growing up watching her mom be treated as a problem to be fixed, and inheriting that shame before she had words for it

*How her body changed at puberty while she was already carrying that inherited weight

*The food rules in her home growing up, the restriction and binge cycle they created, and how it planted seeds for a disordered relationship with food

*Moving away from home at 21, marriage, pregnancy, and her body changing again in ways that felt out of her control

*The wellness journey — naturopathic doctors, juice cleanses, a month-long juice fast, and crying in the shower

*Getting an OCD diagnosis at 31 and finally understanding what her brain had been doing since she was a teenager

*A doctor who told her, simply, that she was healthy — and how much that cracked open

*Finding Maintenance Phase, Aubrey Gordon, and Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, and what it meant to finally have the research match what she'd lived