This week I have an epic and inspiring mega-rant for you, with Dani Galvin, eating disorder survivor, insta influencer and fat activist from @iamdaniadriana. Dani is unapologetically HAPPY and embracing life, and because she dares to do all of this in a larger body, she’s a troll magnet. Trolling on the internet sucks, but trolling fat people for simply existing takes things to a new low. Join us for an awesome and fierce conversation about why the world needs fat activists, the psychology of troll mentality, what it’s like to have an eating disorder when you’re fat, and much, much more!   Show Notes Dani has had a gutful of trolls on her Insta account, who on a daily basis harass and threaten her via DM and public posts on her Insta account. The aim of trolling isn’t debate or healthy criticism – it’s bullying, and they want to scare people off the internet. Dani’s convinced that the trolls have some deep seated psychological issues. Happy people just don’t feel compelled to bully strangers on the internet. Dani believes that forgiveness is a powerful tool – it helps her to let go of the impact. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t speak out against it! Places such as Reddit are dark holes where the hatred is real. Dani gets a lot of DM’s with links to Reddit, which is always bad. Or messages from people accusing her of promoting obesity. These people aren’t even reading her captions, they just look at her body at make judgements. It pisses them off that Dani exists and doesn’t feel ashamed of her body. She’s had trolls say things such as they ‘wouldn’t even rape her’. As if rape is a privilege? Trolling like this reveals the multiple levels of hatred and misogyny underpinning this kind of behaviour. This is not normal. Louise used to work with sex offenders in gaol, and agrees with Dani that threats of sexual or other violence is all about control – not sex. It’s using sex as a weapon to intimidate and exert power and control over women. Louise’s hat is off to all fat activists on SM! This message is so needed, but to think about how dangerous it is because of the constant trolling – it’s another level of trauma. It doesn’t bother Dani as much anymore. She’s had so many micro aggressions against her body in the real world, that online doesn’t matter. It worries Dani that the level of aggression towards people like Dani will scare other people in larger bodies away from fat activism or even just being ‘out and fat’. It’s a huge process to wake up from diet culture, to reject the idea that something is wrong with you or your body, and to stand against diet culture. It takes a long time, and everyone ends up in different places. Not everyone will end up being a fat activist! It’s ok for people in the body positivity process to be in different places. We’re all different and we need to respect that difference of experience. We need to think of the concept of psychological diversity as well as body diversity! To get over the trauma of diet culture, we all need to go through the stages of grief in order to let it go. This can take time, and it’s not easy. Regardless of how far you move away from diet culture, it’s not realistic to wake up every day loving your body! It’s not about loving your appearance. It’s about finding peace and acceptance. It’s about honouring and riding the tough stuff. And the reason you feel like this isn’t your fault – it was taught to you by diet culture. The default is diet culture, and it’s easy to be performative in that. It’s harder to stand up and cognitively and emotionally work through this shit. Dani has been in LOTS of therapy, and has done a lot of work to get where she is now. She didn’t wake up one day glowing with body love. Many of us are expected to be ‘performative’ in diet culture, by which Dani means we are expected to perform certain social rituals to meet social norms. Such as, taking part in body shaming when we’re with a group of women, or taking part in conversations which encourage food