Ditching Diet Culture At School -- Cait O’Connor

Fat Joy with Sophia Apostol

Diet culture and anti-fatness are very present in our schools, from being designed into the curriculum to showing up in the teacher’s lunchroom. Cait O-Connor (she/her) began her own fat liberation journey in her early 20s and quickly brought anti-diet principles into her classrooms. Cait shares how students have responded to her anti-fat lessons and how parents and teachers can support kids further.

Cait O’Connor is a national award-winning middle school English teacher from New York, and the creator of #DitchingDietCultureAtSchool. She is passionate about mental health advocacy, peer work, and eating disorder recovery, and she has written for publications such as Edutopia, English Journal, Language Arts, and is featured in chapter 10 of Virginia Sole-Smith’s book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.

Mentioned in this episode: Ditching Diet Culture at School digital resource library, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, Harvard Implicit Association test (choose Weight IAT), What’s Eating Us, and The Fat Joke poem by Rachel Wiley.

Please connect with Cait through Instagram and Twitter.

This episode’s poem is called “How to Triumph Like a Girl” by Ada Limon.

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