Wake Up Call: Your Body Was Never the Problem with Body Liberation Advocate Chrissy King

About this sermon

This is your wake up call: your body was never the problem. By midlife, so many women are exhausted—not just by life, but by decades of being told to manage, fix, discipline, and override our bodies. Wellness culture promised health and control. What it often delivered was shame, disconnection, and the quiet belief that rest, ease, and joy had to be earned. Today’s conversation invites us to wake up to something different. Chrissy King is a writer, educator, and body liberation advocate whose work exposes the harm baked into diet and fitness culture and offers a radically more honest path forward—one rooted in consent instead of control, trust instead of punishment, and listening instead of fixing. In this Wake Up Call episode, Chrissy helps us see what happens when we stop treating our bodies like projects and start treating them like partners—especially in midlife, when our bodies are changing and asking us to pay attention. Together, we unpack why rest is a biological need (not a reward), how listening to the body can become a practice of liberation, and what it looks like to move through the world with more compassion toward ourselves and others. This is a wake up call to the truth we’ve ignored for too long: the body knows. It knows when something isn’t working. It knows when we’re depleted. It knows what it needs next. And when we learn to trust that wisdom—not just individually, but collectively—we don’t just heal our relationship with our bodies. We change the story entirely. If your body has been tapping you on the shoulder, this episode is your invitation to listen. Thought-Provoking Quotes: “Society has conditioned women to put all of our value, effort, and energy into being the smallest version of ourselves possible. Then we have to spend the second half of our lives trying to unlearn that.” – Chrissy King “In ancient art, we see these big, beautiful bodies being immortalized and looked at as beautiful. So how did we get to this point where we’re demonizing people in larger bodies?” – Chrissy King “I think falling in love with yourself is the most beautiful love story of all time.” – Chrissy King “The focus can’t just be, do I feel good in my body? The focus has to be, is anybody in any body able to feel safe and respected and exist in their body free of harm?” – Chrissy King “I think we have to accept what our abilities are today, that what our bodies look like today is what they look like today—and tomorrow could be completely different. Bodies are designed to change.” – Chrissy King Tags: Wake Up Call, Body Image, Body Liberation, Midlife, Women’s Health, Diet Culture, Wellness Culture, Self-Trust, Mental Health, Feminism, Rest, Healing, Identity, Self-Compassion Resources Mentioned in This Episode: ➢ Awake: A Memoir by Jen Hatmaker - https://amzn.to/4qoLTnZ ➢ The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom by Chrissy King - https://amzn.to/49m6TWn ➢ The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renne Taylor - https://amzn.to/3YJyfQ9 ➢ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Dr. Sabrina Strings - https://amzn.to/49rmeoA ➢ White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo - https://amzn.to/3NyO75z ➢ Be The Bridge organization - https://bethebridge.com/ ➢ We Were Never Meant to Have Universal Healthcare by Dr. Jessica Knurick - https://drjessicaknurick.substack.com/p/we-were-never-meant-to-have-universal Guest’s Links: Website - https://chrissyking.com/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/iamchrissyking/ Twitter - https://x.com/iamchrissyking TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@iamchrissyking Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ChrissyKingFitness/ Substack - https://chrissyking.substack.com/ Connect with Jen! Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/ Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/ Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker Jen’s YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.