Resilience, Respectability, and Restriction; Body Narratives of Black Women

with Jessica Wilson, MS, RD

Racial trauma informs the ways in which restrictive eating disorders present differently in Black women. Restrictive eating disorders often serve as survival strategies for Black women in ways that do not apply for their white peers, yet the same techniques and modalities used in treatment are thought to apply broadly. So often eating disorders are assessed and treated with the assumption that the negative ways that clients view their bodies are subjective, that it’s a result of poor body image. This is not so for Black women, who are told everyday that their bodies are “too much” for Western society and at the same time these clients are “not enough.”

(she/her)

Jessica Wilson, MS, RD

Jessica Wilson, MS, RDN,(she/her) is a clinical dietitian, consultant and author, whose experiences navigating the dietetic fields as a Black, queer dietitian have been featured on public radio shows and in print media, including the New York Times. She has written about nutrition for the Washington Post. Jessica has worked as a clinical dietitian since 2007 and is acutely aware of how both the public
health and medical framing of healthy eating and “obesity” has contributed to disordered eating and self blame. She speaks openly and candidly about the harm caused to our patients by designating individual identities as risk factors, rather than targeting the structural inequities and violence that marginalized individuals must endure. Her first book, about Black women with eating disorders, will be published by Hachette in February 2023.